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Red Hat CEO: Open Source Goes Mainstream In 2014
ashshy (40594) writes Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst likes to post "state of the union" addresses at the end of every year. Last December, he said that open source innovation is going mainstream in 2014. In an interview with The Motley Fool, Whitehurst matches up his expectations against mid-year progress. Spoiler alert: It's mostly good news.
I thought it was already mainstream. So this news means, it isn't.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
The year of Linux on the desktop has arrived!
Open Source has been mainstream for quite some time. I'm not sure how you can claim that something that has had the support of IBM, Oracle, Dell, Samsung, HTC, Motorola and pretty much every other big name in the industry for at least 5 years can "go mainstream" this year.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Just like 2013,...,1995 (when I first installed RedHat 2 from a CD)
Best Slashdot Co
It's mainly vaporware
can I connect my tricked out Real Doll with USB to activate its electronic functions? (mouth, anus, vagina, hand clapping labia which plays midi files)
You read it here first!
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Except there is no regression testing in the open source community and so we get buggy after buggy patches and this circle of life never ends. And nobody bothered to replace the alsa and pulseaudio bloatware crap that pops your ears when listening to audio. The majority of open source software may be free but fall short from their counterparts and they miss a lot of rich features that exists in proprietary software. Inkscape, gimp, blender, libreoffice, etc... won't replace coreldraw, photoshop, maya or 3d studio max, office 2007->2013.
and look at all the ui's kde, gnome, cinnamon, etc... all buggy and cumbersome to use. The old start menu navigation type of way is ancient and crap.
Some commenters say that Linux and Open Source have been mainstream tools for a while. That's true -- in the tech world. Whitehurst mentions this, then goes on to explain that more traditional industries are accepting FOSS now. Things like railroads and power utilities, where open source remained a scary, newfangled, and unproven security hole as recently as last year.
RTFA, please.
#o#
O Moo.
I would say that RedHat did a lot with RHEL 7, which, though not without issues, has added a lot of functionality:
1: systemd is a decent boot mechanism. On a SSD-based machine, RHEL 7 will boot to a graphical login screen in five seconds, due to firing off daemons asynchronously.
2: firewallD is of some benefit, but it adds the concept of zones, similar to how Windows works, which does help integrate Linux machines in a MS environment (where one has public, private, and domain networks.)
3: Docker and containers are going to be a big thing going forward. This is similar to BSD jails, Solaris containers, or AIX WPARs, and provide decent package isolation without the need for a hypervisor.
4: It looks like with the latest version of the Linux kernel released this week, that btrfs is stable enough for prime time. RHEL7 allows for a btrfs install. It may not have the bells and whistles of ZFS, but it is a step in the right direction, and files can be checked (and possibly repaired) for bit rot with a find and a btrfs scrub.
5: The ability to use SSD as a "landing zone" for writes, then move those to a lower tier of disk.
None of these features are revolutionary... but they do bring RedHat and its downstreams (CentOS) on par with AIX, Windows, and Solaris for enterprise level features.
So, I can see that RedHat's future looks rosy, especially when it comes to virtualization and having a competitor in the enterprise to VMWare. VMWare still is top dog, but competition is always good.
"Given a sufficient amount of time all software either becomes free open source software or goes extinct."
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'd given this some thought since the FOSS docs discussion at the beginning of the week, and I think that we're already post-FOSS.
FOSS' heyday was in the nineties. GNU modelled its documentation on BSD, which in turn modeled its documentation on commercial UNIX. Through the nineties developers and those that maintained distributions honored this, continuing to write their documentation like the UNIX world did, and it was easy (relatively speaking) to make the software do everything that it could do and everything that the user or sysadmin wanted it to do within those capabilities.
Unfortunately 20 years out, rot has set-in. Projects and distributions are no longer thoroughly documented. The barrier to entry or to re-entry with anything more than using the default setup from the distribution is very, very high, much moreso than even the days when one had to do a lot more by hand.
We're not emerging-FOSS, were already post-FOSS, at least for as long as the crappy state of sysadmin and end-user documentation is concerned, as less and less individuals will be able to make new software do what they need or want it to do. If the software won't cooperate, then commercial software suddenly becomes more attractive.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Burma Shave?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I remember long ago being able to walk into Fry's Electronics and buy RedHat releases as boxed software sitting on the shelf right next to Windows. Even Corel got into the desktop Linux market (in 1999), once again with boxed software you could walk into the store to buy. If anything, Linux has declined in the mass market. I do not know of a single store where I can walk in and buy a boxed package of a current distro, or a computer with Linux pre-installed (not including Android/Chrome devices).
Is 2014 a FOSS year? Sure! It might only be 1% more than 2013, but its nibbling away at the competition. Is it the desktop? Maybe incrementally more than last year, but just parts of a percent. Will it ever be more than just that? Yes, certainly. The truth is that most people are moving their personal desktop to a device that they take with them: phone/tablet. Is it FOSS? Mostly. Apple has about 17% of that market. Microsoft has about 0.0001% of that market. Some will say "Samsung just barely edged out Apple, ...so thats all the competition" Except that that is a lie, and there is more. Samsung is the biggest of the Android vendors. They don't mention Sony or LG or ASUS or ACER or HTC or Motorola or any other Android vendor. Android really has about 85% of that market, and while the window manager is by Google et. al., the underlying operating system is Linux. Likewise Chromebooks are selling huge. Laptops still sell, but if you don't need it, then why. Especially if you connect from anywhere to a cloud based service, a full blown laptop is overkill (and a security problem). So is 2014 a FOSS year? Yes. As more companies move to the cloud, clients get thinner and cheaper. You don't need helpdesks or client support when the client is chrome to cloud. You save on people, licenses, security, etc. Paying more is just silly.
Why is Red Hat outsourcing more of it's infrastructure to vendors using proprietary software?
I know, I'm stuck in the old days where I like to print boarding passes, hotel receipts, parking passes, or scan and keep digital copies of my documents.
However, I recently took a (relatively) old computer (from 2012) and put Debian on it. Things more or less worked. Occasionally, I had to go down to the shell, but nothing that was too infuriating or difficult. Then one day I decided I wanted to (gasp!) use my wireless Epson printer with my Debian OS. It was like pulling my teeth out without anesthesia. CUPS is a piece of crap that is determined to waste people's time. I spent almost an entire day trying to follow various manuals, start print servers, open the configuration page in my browser, install GUI tools, and in general wonder why I signed up for this.
After giving up for the day, I went to bed, woke up the next morning, installed Windows 8 (I get it for free) on a separate partition, booted in, and in 5 minutes I printed out some tax forms and scanned a copy of my W2 for my records (this all took a little over an hour since I started the OS installation - even though I wasn't waiting at my desk constantly).
I guess when you can have your secretary print everything for you, then easy printing isn't really required before considering yourself going mainstream. I started out using my Windows just for printing, then slowly got tired of switching constantly. I started to do more and more in Windows (Quicken, Scrivener) even when there were Linux alternatives. Now I hardly boot into Linux.