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AT&T Chooses Ubuntu Linux Instead of Microsoft Windows (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: one of the largest cellular providers is the venerable AT&T. While it sells many Linux-powered Android devices, it is now embracing the open source kernel in a new way. You see, the company has partnered with Canonical to utilize Ubuntu for cloud, network, and enterprise applications. That's right, AT&T did not choose Microsoft's Windows when exploring options. Canonical will provide continued engineering support too.
It's for hosting services, not for client use. In the cloud, the competition is pretty even between everything that isn't based on Mac OS. Why does this decision surprise anyone?
Heck, it's one of the reasons Azure supports *nix etc. in the first place.
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To me it appears that Microsoft is no longer a trustworthy partner, in business or in the home.
Going back to its roots in Unix,
With what Microsoft has been doing in the consumer world with the Windows 10 installation nagging (~how many times do I have to tell Microsoft that I do not want to install Windows 10~) and the unwanted Windows 10 downloading, it is no surprise that AT&T is looking elsewhere for solutions.
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To me it appears that Microsoft is no longer a trustworthy partner, in business or in the home.
Umm, where have you been the past 30ish years?
Microsoft has NEVER been a "trusted partner" - "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run!" and all that.
AT&T Bell Labs invented Unix. Yeah, I know that's not quite the same AT&T as we see today (Bell Labs is part of Alcatel-Lucent-Nokia) but nonetheless today's AT&T is a direct descendant of the AT&T of the 1970s the developed Unix for it's own use. Heck, so they should be using Unix rather than Linux.. but they don't actually own it any more.
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Enterprise Linux is a different beast altogether from desktop Linux. When someone can pay for professional support, that's typically what they get. If you think Linux is inherently inconsistent and unstable, it shows your own lack of knowledge of the platform.
If and when open Linux development becomes chaotic AT&T can fork and maintain its own distro. Imagine, AT&T maintaining its own version of *nix? ;-)
birds of a feather flock together.. at&t and microsoft should be best buddies. both shit on their customers and customer data.
Wow! 2016 really is the year of Linux on the server stack!
Oh wait.....
How major is google? and some others...
Serenity now, insanity later.
A better headline might have been:
Canonical lands huge contract with AT&T
AT&T is a $200 billion organization, Canonical is about $10 billion. This deal might boost Canonical's revenue by 50%.
Also, it's a major credibility boost on Canonical's corporate resume. AT&T is a major, major company full of network experts, so it's a very significant endorsement of Canonical supporting large-scale applications. Consider Canonical trying to sell a new a customer, maybe Fisher Price or Nabisco:
Fisher Price: How do we have confidence that your team can support services at the scale Fisher Price needs?
Canonical rep: We run AT&T's systems, at the much larger scale they require.
> Canonical will provide continued engineering support too.
Looks like Canonical found its business model.
. The unprofessional nature of Windows, its poor quality and performance
FTFY.
That's what surprised me as well. Doesn't AT&T have any ownership of Unix anymore, or is it all gone to Lucent/USL/Bell Labs/SCO/Open Group/whatever? Also, GP mentioned that it's for hosting services, but for that, isn't it more of the establishment guys who are the real deal here - be it Red Hat, Suse, Debian, as opposed to Ubuntu? Looking at it any which way, AT&T made a strange decision, and the alternative was not Windows (Server), but something like either one of the old Unixes, like Solaris, or one of the established Linux distros, like Red Hat or Debian.
I think the bigger news is AT&T or anybody picking Canonical for their servers, instead of Red Hat or Debian
In telcos, Linux is the successor to Sun/Solaris. It's been happening for a while now, and it really sped up a lot when Oracle bought Sun. Windows was never a real option here.
Linux could be replaced with BSD and few would care or notice.
And that statement will hold only until you realize the plethora of architectures and devices the Linux kernel has been ported to, which can't really be said about the BSD kernel.
People who know anything are more expensive, the problem is that there are many people who claim to know windows but in reality know very little about it, and these people are the ones who have a constant struggle.. A lot of this is also down to MS' traditional marketing which claimed you didn't need expensive and well trained staff to run windows. That simply isn't true, incompetent staff can struggle along but they could with modern linux too if they wanted to, but the end result will never be any good...
When people claim to know linux, that usually means that they actually do - and this is why such people cost more.
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I supposed the important difference is called 'Support'.
Linux has for many years proven itself as a great Kernel and with good support of the GNU stuff it makes a great OS.
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I don't think the current AT&T is the same as the former AT&T. The current one is a merger between Cingular and SBC I'm pretty sure.
On Windows when you have some hardware trouble you can go to the Device Manager, whose GUI hasn't changed for 20 years.
Download CPU-Z and GPU-Z to get fine details on some of your hardware if you're curious (you can know about used and empty RAM slots without opening the machine)
Importantly, with any third party software tool you can view all temperatures and voltages reported by sensors, whereas linux will show you one to three temperatures and no voltage. This means you can't diagnose the PSU, although it was more important in the early 2000s when quality of PSU was much lower. (as a partial workaround you may stick a voltmeter into the 12V)
I know that Lowe's uses Linux on the desktop. Hell, the computer kiosk in the paint section usually has a not-too-well hidden keyboard nearby - press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and watch X close up, only to be quickly reopened to relaunch the Adobe Flash-based kiosk animation.
I've interviewed at Lowe's several times at different stores (for menial retail positions), and each time I made a point of asking the managers how many Windows machines they had on-site. The answer has never been more than "two".