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Is Linux At the End of Its Life Cycle?
Glyn Moody writes "That's what Nikolai Pryanishnikov, president of Microsoft Russia, seems to think. Quoted in the context of continuing questions about Russia's plans to create its own national operating system based on GNU/Linux, Pryanishnikov said [via Google Translate]: 'We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle.' An off-the-cuff comment, or something more?"
Linux reboots you.
This just in, WIndows person says non-windows product will fail! Gets frontpage on slashdot!
is at the end of its life cycle
That's not a bad thing. In a lot of the classic software development models, the "end" state of a software's life cycle was operations and maintenance (O&M). Which is to say you have no new requirements having fulfilled all the basic requirements. It's bad if you constantly need new features but sometimes it can be an indication that the software is mature or near complete. At this point the customer only ever pays you money to put it back into development or fix/improve something small.
I would agree that the 2.6 kernel series is very robust and something we will most likely use for quite sometime. But I would always shy from ever saying that an operating system has all the major features it could ever need. I mean, I know a lot of clients that are committed to some version of the 2.6 kernel in their server rooms and would only ever update if there was a necessary security flaw or performance feature that they could not live without. For a lot of them, Linux has provided all the web server or database hosting features they would ever need and the product of "Linux" is indeed in the final phase of its life cycle. The vast majority of their patches are to Apache, Postgres, etc.
My work here is dung.
Well, the president of Microsoft Russia should be a reliable, trustworthy source for this kind of analysis, right? Right?
Lifecycle ENDS YOU!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle."
could also be:
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is deprecated"
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is obsolete"
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is old fashioned"
Does anyone have the exact translation for what the guy really meant or just a Google translation.
Also, of course it's off-the-cuff. A Microsoft guy saying nothing more than "Linux is [i]x[/i]" with nothing more to back up the statement or shed more light on it.
This is news?
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
but I... cant... help... falling in love with gnu!
By your logic, marketshare % == hacking attempts %. You do realize that many servers run Linux right? According to Forrester Research 48% of businesses surveyed used OSS. If Linux represents even half of that then at least 24% of businesses use Linux. That would mean 24% of all exploits would have to be targetting Linux. Funny I don't see 24% of botnets being written for Linux. The vast, vast majority are written for Windows.
Also hackers do it for the glory or for money. If they are after money, then they would target financial institutions. Also they attack the weakest point. So far hackers target customers of these institution who use Windows, not the servers themselves that use Linux or Unix or whatever. Maybe because Linux servers are harder to compromise than Windows desktops?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Most of these Microsoft people believe their own FUD. They'll argue that the sun is the moon to discredit alternatives. One of the best that I've heard from someone I used to think highly of is that "Windows has far more security mechanisms in place than Unix"
I think that part of the driving force for the attitude among Microsoft enthusiasts is that they are scared of change. They are happy in their safe little world (safe, in terms of job security etc.) and it makes them angry that better systems exist and people are taking an interest in them.
Note that I'm an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Solitaire Engineer) but please don't hold that against me :-)
Umm.. no.
Windows NT was released in 1993, 2 years before Windows 9x. So it's not really possible for it to have been a port of 9x. In reality, the guys that wrote the 9x UI were NT guys who were on loan to the 9x team. They had intended to write the UI for NT (then code named Cairo) but 9x got higher priority due to the need to bridge the dos/nt barrier with app and driver compatibility.
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FUD spreads Microsoft Russian (aka MSSR) exec.
I think I know why MSSR is depicting Linux as a end of line OS: I hear MS has a beta of an operating system, has been in the works for a loong time (beta 1.0 came shortly after the first Mac). One of these days it will be good for release. Possibly.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Yuri: what's the difference between microsoft and russia?
Sasha: One's a ruthless totalitarian empire bent on world domination, with millions of informers, riddled with organized crime.
The other's a computer company.
In the PWN2OWN competition in 2008, attackers were able to crack the OSX and Vista laptops, but no one succeeded in breaking into the Ubuntu machine. There weren't any Linux targets in 2009 or 2010 (it looks like the focus shifted more toward web browser vulnerabilities anyhow).
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Nah, I just think it is just the way they see things in Microsoft. When an OS is stable and works reliably, then it is at the end of its life cycle (like Windows XP).