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Bashing MS 'Like Kicking a Puppy,' Says Jim Zemlin
jbrodkin writes "Two decades after Linus Torvalds developed his famous operating system kernel, the battle between Linux and Microsoft is over and Linux has won, says Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer, Linux has outpaced Microsoft in nearly every market, including server-side computing and mobile, Zemlin claims. 'I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore,' Zemlin said. 'They used to be our big rival, but now it's kind of like kicking a puppy.' From Android and the Amazon Kindle to embedded devices, consumer electronics and the world's largest websites and supercomputers, 'Linux has come to dominate almost every category of computing, with the exception of the desktop,' Zemlin argues as Linux approaches its 20th anniversary."
You can say that Linux has won when it hasn't beaten Microsoft in the market that makes it Microsoft. The only thing that Linux has won really in the desktop market is its right to exist. We fought long and hard to try to keep the desktop an open environment and competition going. I'm not talking about Linux vs. Windows really though, I'm talking about Open Source vs. Proprietary. But as long as salesmen breath, the battle to keep formats open will wage on. The new battle is how to deal with things like app stores.
So 2011 will be the year of the Linux desktop, right?
Linux has gained recognition. It's something that IT managers won't usually dismiss immediately. Sure, that's important, but the average user out there still doesn't know that Linux exists, let alone what it is. There's a long road ahead of us, even longer than the path we've just traveled. Wear good shoes.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
This being /., it looks like we're in for a whole lot of puppy-kicking.
"Director of foundation says his foundation is doing very well. More at 11."
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
But MS is still really big in the server market. Yes, Linux is big in webserver market. However that isn't the only server market out there.
Where MS is really big server (and desktop) wise is enterprise servers. Active Directory really works well and a lot of companies use it. No, OpenLDAP is NOT "just as good" or any of that jazz. I'm not saying AD is the One True Way(tm) but it is good and there's a reason a lot of companies like it.
This "Linux has beaten MS," crap is just that: crap. Linux is doing well and that is wonderful. However it hasn't "won" by any measure. Rather they are finding different markets. Linux is not popular on the desktop and it does not seem to be headed there. However embedded it has really found its niche and has become extremely popular.
Neither has won, neither has lost, they both continue to exist alongside one another.
'Linux has come to dominate almost every category of computing, with the exception of the desktop' The desktop still dominates every other category of computing combined. Zemlin's statement that Linux has won is disingenuous.
The XBOX 360 begs to differ. Where exactly is the open source video game console that is dominating the home market? Linux and FOSS more broadly has done some incredible things, but let's be real.
More like kicking an old, weak, sick, blind-in-one-eye, arthritic dog...
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
Windows Server may not be as dominate as Linux but it certainly is not dead. They compete in every server category and have decent market share while it is not dominate like desktops it is still a multi-billion dollar business that is certainly successful. Active Directory, SQL Server, ASP.Net, IIS these are all major products that run on WIndows Server, you can find thousands of jobs on any major job search engine. I think it is a mistake to say MS only has desktop operating systems, it is clearly still a player in the server market.
Linux has had the technical capability for grabbing a significant foothold in the consumer desktop market for a while now. However, as long as companies continue pushing Windows-only hardware and the communities that actually continue encouraging the dichotomies that exist amongst them (like with the UI, the one thing that should be a unified effort), Linux will continue fighting an uphill battle. It also doesn't help that Windows is so much easier to deploy and administer company-wide than Linux is.
I was somewhat gratified to see this. I've been feeling somewhat guilty about my growing tendency to feel sort of sorry for MS lately. See, I didn't even type "M$" like I certainly would have a few years ago. What with all the i-things and the Desktop is dead and we'll do everything on a little hand-sized touch-screen now they seem to be moving from the Great Defective Monster to simply Irrelevant. Rather than kicking a puppy, it's like kicking your grandfather. He can't remember who you are, but he's kind of upset by it.
There is more net profit for the manufacturer in a smartphone than a desktop, and they move more units too. So the desktop is king of what, exactly?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
...right after the world ends in 2012.
Citation required.
The problem with giving the desktop market to Microsoft means that corporations are stuck with a Microsoft-heavy server environment too and it's hard to move to other server platforms.
Once you include Active Directory, print servers, fileservers, sharepoint, system center, exchange, sql server and other support servers to run it all, a mid-sized company might have 20 or more servers just to run their Microsoft infrastructure. (many of those applications *could* run on Linux, but MS products integrate together and have interdependencies that make it hard to break loose)
So since they are already paying for Windows Admins to run their Windows infrastructure, when it comes time to add a web or application server, the easy choice is to go with MS -- licensing doesn't cost much more on top of their existing MS licensing costs and they already have Windows expertise in house.
I think the argument is that the "year of x on the desktop" isn't important, since the "year of the desktop" is over. Who care if Windows wins in a market that doesn't matter anymore? Linux wins everywhere else.
Of course.. I think the "desktops are so last year" thing is just a fad, but we'll see.
I'm confused. Why would you say something like that if you want to discourage kicking puppies? Kittens aren't good for anything that cobras can't do better and with less feeding and poop cleaning.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It seems that where Linux has succeeded is where Linux is completely hidden behind the scenes, as far as the consumer is concerned. Even in the case of Android, with a stock device, it would be utterly impossible to know it was running Linux. In fact, there's an entire Java layer between the user and Linux. My point is that Linux, the brand, has failed when it comes to the masses. In other words, Linux has done well where companies can take their time and make an informed decision about which OS they wish to embed in their hardware. That is where Linux has succeeded, and a big part of that is simply that Linux is stable, supports ubiquitous hardware, and is free. But as far as end consumers choosing Linux, that hasn't happened yet.
Better known as 318230.
Well put. They're dominant on the desktop and they own office productivity. They're strong in the server market and they're strong in the gaming market. I'd guess they're not doing too shabby with set-top devices (all uverse devices is quite big in itself). And let's be realistic, you can't count them out of the 10,000 other markets they have their fingers in. They have a certain history of throwing money at some things until they win (xbox, anyone?).
That's hardly a sad-little-puppy situation.
This is just an absurd conversation that has gone on far too long.
The way of measuring your own success should not be dependant on somebody else's market share, or even relative to it. It should be based on your own mission and your own goals. There's plenty of market for everyone in the world to be successful if they want it badly enough. Linux is certainly doing well, and revenues and profits at Microsoft seem healthy as well -- so I don't get this obession with MS.
I don't get the obsession with stamping out proprietary software either. It's a choice that some companies make for their business model, and a choice that some customers make for their software (not choosing proprietary so much as choosing software that is proprietary because it meets their needs). It's a proven and successful business model too -- just like FOSS. You can have failures/successes in FOSS and you can have that with proprietary software as well. People just seem to be on the lookout for something to get inflamed about all the time. Absolutely nothing of interesting here.
You guys bitch and moan when some Microsoft shill pumps up Microsoft; well, this is some Linux shill pumping up Linux. I don't give this guy any more credence then I would Steve Ballmer.
Whatever happened for using the best tool for the job? I am happy to deploy Apache webservers when I'm running some Java stuff, just as happily as I deploy IIS servers for .NET stuff.
The problem is with this guy, and legions of others, is that they look at using one versus another as important. Enterprises don't. They look at what they want to accomplish, look at the TCO, look at how long it takes to get there, and make a decision. Yea, for enterprise deployment of things that means they run Windows, Active Directory, and related print/file/etc services. Linux might be out there as a fileshare or FTP or something, but it's used strategically.
In terms of the consumer device area well, Linux is free and having a bajillion shitty devices doesn't mean that it has "won". Look at the problems on Android right now. Granted, Windows Phone isn't doing well either but there are distinct benefits with going with one over the other. I'll let the consumer decide. And what's really winning? Apple, as closed source and proprietary a company as you can get.
So seriously if you are comparing Linux and Windows and hoping that one "wins", you can probably bet that you'll never be in the position to influence the decision. As I said, enterprises choose what makes sense, and they don't give a shit if it's closed, open, proprietary, etc... they have dollars on the line, and time counts heartily.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
The point is that the world of things that compute is vastly more than just the single desktop you've got sitting in front of your face right now. Sure, in your perspective that's all you really can see everyday in the traditional definition of "computer", but there are vast arrays of networks and electronic devices and things you never ever consider the programming and workings of that you rely on every single day; and while they might have a plethora of different brandnames associated with them, behind the scenes is good ol' linux doing its stuff.
Sometimes it's more than enough to control everything *except* the most visible sector of a particular market, and honestly, it's probably better to be the invisible winner.
[citation needed]
For future reference, son. Now get off my lawn!
Free Martian Whores!
Retired IT, worked heavily with Linux including desktop. Me personally these days I run MS because I like it! No, Linux has not won.
But MS is still really big in the server market. Yes, Linux is big in webserver market. However that isn't the only server market out there. Where MS is really big server (and desktop) wise is enterprise servers.
Linux really beat the traditional unix vendors (Sun, SGI, SCO, etc) not so much Microsoft. Both Linux and Microsoft went after the traditional unix vendor's market and as you point out both got their piece of the pie. Its natural that Linux did well given that the market was already unix based. What is more remarkable is that Microsoft has been as successful as it is, when fighting on unix home turf Linux had the advantage.
"With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer, Linux has outpaced Microsoft in nearly every market, including server-side computing and mobile, Zemlin claims. 'I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore,' Zemlin said. 'They used to be our big rival, but now it's kind of like kicking a puppy.'", says Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.
I'm sorry, but I like Linux and hate Microsoft, yet I still can't stomach this marketing'esque spew of BS. If Microsoft said the reverse of this this topic would hit 500+ comments.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
oh wait, my indexed retirement mutual funds contain MSFT...
is that like kicking myself in the nutz?
There is roughly zero overlap between top500 and the server market. Servers tend to be an I/O bound workload, whereas HPC is mostly about core performance. Over half of shipped servers come with Windows, mostly workgroup or application servers.
... in the last 3 large organizations I've worked for (which have all been VERY linux-friendly), the midrange space (which, globally, is substantially larger than the supercomputer space as requiring such a fleet is a necessity for any large organization nowadays irrespective of industry or specialized number-crunching needs)...
[a] The windows admin team was as large as the linux/UNIX team.
[b] 66% of the server (1000's of servers) fleet was NT-based. This Linux-Windows spread is governed by commercial vendor support matrixes, in some casses vendor software performance, and nearly always bottom lines (with per-project varying results), not a pro-/anti- open-source religion, so there's a sweet spot it's gravitating to that's neither 100/0 or 0/100.
[c] Specialist-quality in Windows-land (where the specialists are paid in the ballparks that we linux mob expect to be paid), they know their shit. They can script as well as we do, they understand LDAP, DNS, mail and file servers, they know their hardware, they know their comms, they can troubleshoot well and will pull a packet sniffer as quickly as we do, and they think the same (bad) things we do of ye olde server apps that run with a GUI in a logged-in console that needs to be checked every morning, they understand and can implement security on their platform, and if you throw something like ESX 3.x their way (with an underlying linux OS to manage the host) they don't shit a brick, they sit with the doco and figure the thing out. In my experience, with a pay-bracket as a basis for comparison, they're competent.
[d] The OS platform itself, from a driving-forward maintained-project perspective, is alive and kicking - Server 2008 introduced clustering (from having spent nearly a year with pacemaker on SLES11 in the last place I worked, I daresay MS's in-OS clustering offering may very well be better than Novell's half-baked offering), an infiniband stack, etc etc.
If you work in any reasonably-large organization (think any big retail brand in any industry you care to mention) Microsoft is anything BUT "a puppy", even if in some smaller shops, specifically the subset of which have ready access to lots of cheap linux/unix admin capability (universities, technology startups that employ coders, websites and misc other IT companies a-la ISP's come to mind), windows is very visibly absent. I daresay that between companies that sell credit-rating services, shampoo, shelf-space in a supermarket, banking, camper-vans, insurance, auditing services or batteries (and everything in between) these are a small minority. The rest hire PM's, a wintel team, a UNIX team, a dba team, a comms team and a SAN team, and rely heavily on supported vendor software.
I daresay MS get amply compensated for every one of those server licenses they sell.
May the fan-boy mod-me-down commence ;)
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Please ignore Kinect, because it would ruin Microsoft bashing. It's a rather inconvienient disruptive advancement and has gone on to break records for sales of any consumer electronics ever.
/. groupthink.
But we'll leave that out because it kind of implies that while we've all been distracted by shiny multitouch gadgets and cloud computing Microsofts just taken a huge leap a ahead of everyone else.
This will create cognative dissonance in the
No one dare suggest Microsoft is losing the smartphone/tablet/desktop wars to Apple and Linux because they were busy slaughtering Nintendo and Sony.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
The "religious fundamentalism" you deride is responsible for developing the system that millions are using on desktops, media boxes, phones, etc., for free. The only reason people work for free is when they are working for an ideal.
As far as your specific concern about video drivers, Ubuntu doesn't (and can't) distribute nVidia's proprietary graphics driver. But downloading and enabling it is as easy as clicking System> Administration> Hardware Drivers.
The last time I checked, fundamentalist preachers don't have "click here for a keg" signs in their churches.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Really !? Because I see it more akin to taking back the neighborhood by standing up to your local crime boss who killed the puppy to make a point...
"while Microsoft has sold 300 million Windows 7 licenses and reported record second-quarter revenue of nearly $20 billion, Zemlin said Linux people aren't giving up on the desktop market just yet" link
The desktop is totally owned by MS. Whenever anything innovative appears it invariably pops up in the next version of Windows and given away, in the process sucking the lifeblood out of whatever third party company MS has decided to eliminate off its Desktop. You notice that where Open Source or other non_windows systems have made advances is where Microsoft hasn't managed to achieve an effective monopoly similar to the Microsoft desktop monoculture .. er ... ecosystem.
I dunno about that. While there is truth to what you say, the Linux desktop has been getting worse these last couple of years. And I'm saying that as an oldtimer who switched their primary desktop from WfW 3.11 to Yggdrasil. I don't have too many hardware problems because I have been making every purchase decision based on Linux suitability for several hardware refreshes.... until my Thinkpad stopped undocking with a kernel update back on F12 and I have been stuck there since after reverting. But F15 appears to finally solve that based on trying the F15 Alpha live disc.
Pulseaudio comes in for a lot of the flaming, and rightfully so. Just when things were looking good, Vista was a disaster from Hell and we could have taken significant marketshare away, every major distro adopted PulseAudio two years before it was ready for primetime and made it such that I couldn't recommend Linux to a new user because I *KNEW* I'd be spending hours handholding them with sound problems on top of the normal teething problems of installing Linux on random Windows hardware. On days when I'm extra cynical I wonder if Pottering isn't on Microsoft's payroll, sent as an agent of chaos to exploit the one weakness in the Open Source development process, obsession with half broken shiny bits. I do know he almost singlehandedly saved Microsoft from their Vista mistake even if by accident.
But we can't stop there. The mindless churning in the *Kits, *Managers, etc. as they blindly scurried up blind alley after blind alley before finally settling on the current arrangement made almost all documentation useless other than the source code for whatever version was on your machine that day. For years. And today you still can't find a dead tree from O'Reilly applicable to any of the current Linux desktops.
Or worse, you can't find a solid book to recommend to a programmer wanting to learn to write for the Linux desktop. One that will teach the current best practices to get a working GNOME or KDE app up while using all of the core technologies to have an app that responds to all of the themes, internationalization, accessability, system tray widgets, etc. made available by the desktop environment. In any programming language, but since we are discussing a new programmer lets prefer something easier than C/C++. Better, something a university could teach from instead of being forced to teach C# or Java on Windows. Why doesn't something like that exist? Because nobody qualified to write such a book is stupid enough to do it knowing it will be obsolete before it sees print. And we wonder why C#/Java is so popular in education when, as any Linux user is quick to point out, Linux is Free and comes with a full suite of programming tools.
Democrat delenda est
I dumped Microsoft software 3 years ago because I became fed up with having to go home fixing Windows, when that's all I did at work. And boy am I glad I did. Microsoft software is garbage, and the way that they keep customers dependent on them is just appalling. Unfortunately, vendors are so locked in to Windows, that a majority of your top quality software is in Windows. But, software in Linux is also very very good, and is slowly but surely replacing proprietary software. Everybody just needs to bit the bullet and make the switch to Linux and open source. It is good stuff, and very very reliable as well as free as in freedom, not to mention the price is always right at $0.