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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.
The year of Linux on the desktop has arrived!
Just like 2013,...,1995 (when I first installed RedHat 2 from a CD)
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The natural problem is that open source has to constantly pose as emerging useful technology to match up against the marketing that closed source software uses. It's just framing yourself as a perpetual underdog.
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.
I'd rather say that we have arrived at the point where software is complicated enough that you will have to pay for a competent (!) admin if you want to get more than the basics done. The difference between CSS and OSS is in that respect that it's way easier to pose as a halfway credible so-so admin in a CSS world with its wizards and gadgets, its online help and example config files.
Competent OSS admins are rather rare. Because learning almost invariably means spending money and not just time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So they've succeeded - and matched Microsoft's incompetence. Isn't that what it takes to go mainstream?
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.
Microsoft has better documentation.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.