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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
You read it here first!
Last December,
No, no I didn't (ok, actually, yes I did. But I could've heard it eight months ago)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
You read it here first!
Last December,
No, no I didn't (ok, actually, yes I did. But I could've heard it eight months ago)
More like 180 months ago.
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
What MIDI would that be? "Lover's Theme" from Delusions of Grandeur?
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.
Knowing my luck it would be Red River...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is, the "can't someone else do it" attitude falls short when the answer is "you have what you need to improve it"...
If something bothers you about OSS, go ahead and change it. At least that's what I do. If it doesn't bother me enough to change it, I guess enduring it can't be that bad.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Burma Shave?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
What's a desktop?
Have gnu, will travel.
It was broadband that killed that. The software (those distros, anyway) was free anyway unless you wanted support. As soon as it was easier and cheaper to download at home, that's what people did.
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.
And I could grow my own food, too...
Most people don't have the skills to change OSS code. I enjoy photography and, like many photographers, use Photoshop. For most of the photographers I know, just using Photoshop is enough of a technical challenge - suggesting they make code changes to the Gimp to make it do what they need would be like telling them to design and build a car from scratch rather than buy one from Ford.
I am a programmer, and I daresay if I really, really wanted to I could contribute, but to do so I'd be spending most of my free time on getting tools to work rather than using tools I've bought to do the things I actually want to do.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.