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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.
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.
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.
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.