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Linux Howto by Gartner Group for Corporations
Doug Moreen wrote
in to tell us of this
Gartner Group Howto: How and When to Adopt Linux in MSEs.
While Linux support has been announced by major corporations,
Gartner Group does not consider it sincere. Indeed they
believe that real commercial Unix support levels for Linux
will not be available before 2000 with a 0.8 probability.
Furthermore they warn people away from Linux by stating that
vendor interest is primarily opportunistic, support via the
web/0800 numbers does not work for critical responses, etc.
Kragen, are you ready to take them on ? ;-)
They've been wrong so many times before, it's not even funny.
Anyone who actually pays for their information is a fool.
It couldn't be that Linux lacks a deep pockets
vendor to pay them to produce favorable research
reports could it?
When they say "vendor support is opportunistic"
what they are actually saying is that they don't
know the meaning of the word "opportunistic".
But in general, this seems like a clear assessment
of the situation. Linux is -not- ready to be
used by risc-averse customers. Not at all.
I don't mind losing days of work to NFS bugs, but
I would mind if my bank did.
Wait a couple of years seems like excellent advice.
Gartner seems to be about 6 months behind, but changes in accurate increments.
Remember when linux wasn't even a blip on their screen? I do.
This is one of the most positive Gartner group
reports I have read!! Gartner normally take the
least optimistic angle on anything. The report only tells people with little idea about unix to wait a while. (A few weeks perhaps?) For others they suggest giving linux a try, not bad really.
Let's me say one thing. The Gartner Group sucks ass. They don't have a fucking clue. These morons charged us $24,000 for their proposals, and analysis of the telecommunications market, only to completely miss xDSL, and everything else important.
I'm convince they are a bunch of fucking Microsoft patsies. Someone, prove me wrong please. And you can have the $24,000 check we sent them.
I work at a market research and analysis firm, and trust me, unless you want to completely blow off the advise that from a number large number of people who have been studying the market for quite awhile....pay some attention to what is being said. If "world domination" is a goal, than penetration of the corporate market is vitally necessary. Corporations do not work in rational manners.....us geeks may know that email and newsgroup support is usually far better than what is obtained through regular corporate support channels, hell, I've worked in corp. support, it sucked, but that is not an issue. Companies want someone accountable for the systems in place and someone who will take responsibility when shit goes wrong....they want their hand held. Linux cannot succeed on a large scale in the corporation untill this is provided, it will be hidden in the basements by the geeks. Of course, this is exactly what companies like Redhat are planning to do, however they are unproven in providing true corporate support....most of the support they are providing is 800 and email type support, which corps will not accept for mission critical functions. Gartner is not saying that Linux has no chance.....its just saying be carefull with support. If we recall, this is actually quite abit more positive than what they said about Win2000. And the possibility that these large companies like Oracle or IBM are jumping on the Linux bandwagon for purely opportunistic reasons is entirely possible, they have yet to prove their commnetment to the OSS model, theyve just talked alot.
Granted, this is only relevent if one wants Linux to become a major player in the OS market....if one is, like many Linux geeks I know, content to let linux be a geek toy than this is all irrelevent and we dont have to deal with corporate idosyncricies.....
Oh, and from my experiences, those numbers provided are completely bogus.....whenever you see analysis like this ignore the numbers and focus on the gist of what is being said...it is analysis and is subjective and depended on the person doing it....you dont have to agree, but pay some attention, there is usually some good points.
If you define "real commercial Unix support levels" as an order-of-magnitude better level of support than what is available now, than to say that there is an 80% chance that will not happen in the next ten months is not a particularly impressive prediction. (Heck, it's pretty impressive that there's a 20% chance that will happen.)
Also, while support is important, it's one part of a continuum that includes such considerations as reliability. If your car blows up every time you pull it out of the garage, you'll want a dealer on every street corner; if not, not.
Then what is? They're locked out of most other Unicies just because so few platforms run CISC these days.
I realize I will the subject of enormous amount of venomous spew, but Gartner really nailed it. There is no fud in this report. There may be slight _inaccuracies_ , but no fud.
Bear in mind that Gartner is in the prognostication business, always a risky endeavor. What I find most encouraging is that the report actually RECOMMENDS the appropriate class of user to follow links recognized as authoritative in the free software world. Which like it or not, seems to include
And yes, I did read they recommend a "no-hacking" policy. This is not fud. They are simply confusing "hacking" in a general sense with "kernel hacking". If Gartner continues in the direction it has been going, I predict (0.7 probability) that they will refine this recommendation to exclude _kernel" hacking, which is reasonable in a general sense (i.e., the obvious exceptions will be reading Gartner for technical advice). After all, one of the strongest points of free software is the ability to refine code to one's needs and tastes.
Allright, go for it. I have my asbestos undies on, and I am headed to my favorite greek cafe for lunch, so nothing any of you can say will ruin my day!
--mtngrown
"Avoid using Linux as an enterprise desktop GUI until standards develop, such as the GNOME project."
uh KDE hello???
This is not a bad article. It is a major improvement from not too long ago when the Gartner group was claiming that Linux doesn't scale and lacks cross platform capability. They're suggesting that competent organizations give it a try. Risk averse and non-Unix skilled organizations should -wait-. They are not saying -avoid- Linux at all.
Will
A measly $20,000 is nothing for real support, and the Gartner group is right that Linux support for mission critical applications isn't there yet. You're still talking pretty much about 800-number support. A mission critical service isn't going to accept that. When Georgia Tech had problems with their Sun servers a while back Sun Microsystems sent several designers out and they spent a while sleeping on cots in the machine room and hacking around until they fixed the problem. The eventual fix was to include parts of the telnet deamon in the kernel to speed up access. Note I'm saying that a major vendor rewrote the kernel, on the spot, in a huge hurry, as part of the support agreement.
Sure when people have problems with Linux code it often gets fixed really quickly because of mailing lists and personal pride and such, but risk-averse corporations don't have anyone they can pay through the nose for a guarantee that it will get fixed really quickly, and until they do they're going to stay away from Linux.
...As they have no clue what they are doing.
Everyone in here thinks they are swift enough to just junp in and hack the kernel - chances are, maybe 1 in 1000 slashdot readers can even understand the kernel code, let alone hack it.
If you are using linux at work and hacking the kernel, you are wasting your time and your company's money - most likely you're just doing it for kicks instead of doing it for a real reason.
I'd advise you to hack the kernel on a machine you don't care about - in most cases anyone reading this is more likely to screw it up than improve it.
The problem isn't that THEY don't get it; the problem is that so many people HERE don't get it...
If you think corporations are getting their panties in a wad because Linux is open source (oops! Sorry... That's "OpenSource(TM)"), you have it all wrong. They don't care a lick if the software is free or not; these guys are RICH, and throwing 6 figure sums at a problem is a drop in the bucket for them. They DO care if the software is good, and in the case of Linux it is not only good, it is superior to what they're running now (read: MS stuff). These guys want something that works, something that's stable, something that's supportable, and they have wads of cash to throw at whoever can deliver this. They don't want to risk having a bleeding edge kernel patch bring down an essential server, and they DEFINITELY don't want an important support question go out to a mail list just to have nobody answer. They want guarantees, and they're willing to pay for it. The day that every single question sent to every single mail list or newsgroup is answered is the day they'll probably shut up about the free Internet-based support...
Kernel hacking is NOT something they want to screw around with. You can't just insert yourself in their position; just because you like hacking at things doesn't mean the guys who have 1,000 systems hanging off of mission-critical Linux servers will too.
Maybe when you have a small set of Linux servers that serve hundreds of users simultaneously in a scenario where minutes of downtime == $thousands lost, you'll see where they're coming from.
Hacking is out of the question...
There advice sounds a lot like what my Dad might say. People who don't know about power tools probably shouldn't play with chain-saws. Linux is a powerful tool, but it is a tool and therefore indiscriminate (a saw will cut you leg as easily as a log).
Most middle managers want to take the janitor, give him a $500 PC and call him an 'administrator' at minimum wage. MS has tried to supply tools (NT) that will make this happen (and we see how well they're doing). Companies that do not want to invest in someone with skills and knowledge should not be playing with Linux. It takes more than know where the reset button is.
PS. Did anyone notice that one of the suggested inroads of Linux is to replace 'unreliable Windows' machines?
The writing is on the wall. Whether one likes the situation or not, Gnome will prevail simply because of licensing issues. No, Gnome is not as complete as KDE yet. Yet. It will eventually be, and the licensing issues will tip the hat in its favor.
Ceteris paribus, what would drive a person to use KDE over Gnome? Nothing. But, all things being equal, there will be plenty of good reasons to use Gnome over KDE. I use Gnome currently, and wish it were as stable as KDE yet know it is not -- but I have faith, and believe in Free Software, and thus I use Gnome.
I don't think KDE users or developers are idiots. Please don't misunderstand me. I just wish they would admit to the licensing issues and do something about it (i.e., finish Harmony). The QPL is not good enough. Free Software forever!
I too have quite often found Linux newsgroup support to far exceed the quality and competence of MS tech support. But (for those needing thir "hand held") what would be wrong with a company whose sole purpose is to provide support for Linux. I'm talking about on-site/1-800/email/newsgroup, hardware/OS/apps/network/desktop whatever you need (for a price) kind of support. Services could be resold by RedHat etc as part of a "corporate" package or purchased directly. It would promote the corporate-friendly Linux image and by employing those with some of the upcoming Linux certifications, would encourage knowledgeable support staff thereby further promoting Linux as a viable OS, not just a hackers playtoy.
They are WAAAAAY too late.
This stuff is for the CIO morons at the top of the tree that think they're in control.
I work for a VERY large multinational corporation that you've all heard of and Linux is EVERYWHERE. It's all over the place.
There are unix admins all over the place so Linux is no surprise to them.
Thing is, the upper management don't know anything about it. They just see cheap PC purchases (probably think it's Windows going on the boxes).
This wait and see bullshit from Gartner is just SOOOOO late it's funny.
The Gartner Group regularly pulls number out of their arse, claiming they have statustical relevance.
Well, they do, but only to them.
Seriously, these guys are regularly WAY wrong. Unfortunately, MIS goons love reading stuff like that, and taking it for gospel.
HarryZ
The report read like a well thought-out response to the sort of gung-ho Pro-Linux chatter you read on Slashdot. (You think industry analysts *don't* read slashdot?)
Basically the report is a dead on in this respect. The typical "facts" you read here (support via dejanews, Compaq & Dell sell linux, admin is not that hard, etc.) are only true if you've got a head on you shoulders and you're able and willing to learn. Unfortunately, most PC-class servers are run by people who don't and can't.
Gartner sells their reports to IS management, who knows that their body shop NT admins are a bunch of fuck-up tools. They know this because users call them everyday to tell them. But they also know that senior management hasn't given them the money to do it right. The only thing the report really says is that Linux isn't all of a sudden a magic solution that does something for nothing -- there's still a few missing pieces before another 'rip and replace' exercise might be possible.
From what I've read of Gartner, they're researching trends that happened five years ago. They also seem to be more interested in setting trends than reporting on them.
I'll pass on anything they have to say, thanks.
Now if you'll excuse me, my manager just instructed me to write a linux driver for our product and port it to every linux platform we can get our hands on.
KDE is shipping and being used on millions of
computers (Caldera, Mandrake, SUSE).
GNOME on the other hand is lead by a bunch of
immature religious zealots who won't release
a stable 1.0 product that is of any use to
businesses. Take your Gnome Panel for example,
why do business need to run something with 100x100
images. GNOME 1.0 will be pure garbage from
a stability and functionality standpoint.
GNOME 1.2 might actually be usable.
If the law (in this case, status quo for corporation's handling of IT support)
is wrong (unreliable 800 numbers that typically involve multiple hours on hold
before a human tech is reached, then only to get canned answers from a database),
then the law should be changed.
Maybe Joe Sysadmin of MidSizedBiz Inc. doesn't see it as such now, but what about
when the traditional support method becomes a detracting factor, and non-
traditional methods become more effective. Consider the growth rate of software
today, think for a moment at how large software packages are becoming
'feature laiden' and buggy all at once. When your operating system gets
to the point its crashing once a week, or once a day because of the massive
amount of bugs that were added along with the latest features, dailup support
that leaves you sitting on hold for hours at a time at 135$ an incident,
doesn't cut it for a MSE (and would probably show up on even a large scale
enterprise level buissness' accouting radar after prolonged periods).
But then, maybe my initial argument was baseless...
this type of support could be 'right', if the system is stable and requires
very rarely a need for any support at all.
We replaced our non-mission critical SQL SERVER
6.5 database server with MySQL and Linux.
We replaced our NT Proxy Server (a true piece
shit package) with Linux masqing.
Neither of these machines have crashed.
We had never heard of Linux until 8 months ago.
just not accurate...
;)
Gartner has some catching up to do. I think what they really mean, whether they know it or not, is to not allow hacking on company wide, mission critical code, like the kernel. Which is sensible advice. This is equivalent to barring windows users from installing their own software on company machines, to prevent dll debacles. Of course, this hasn't stopped windows users from doing just that...
By the way, the dll problem is an excellent fud rebuttal for just this "hacking" issue.
Millions of people are using KDE today. Millions
more will use it as it is shipped on Caldera,
Mandrake, SUSE, etc.
Gnome on the other hand has fallen victim to
its immature religious zealot developers (only
program in C). Its 100x100 panel isnt going to
be needed in any businees that I know. When
Red Hat wakes up and fires the current GNOME
development staff, the product might go somewhere.
Why is it that dumb-ass consultants have to insist that everyone act as dumb as possible around technology
Gartner caters to those who are going to be dumb around technology no matter what. It makes their customers feel good when Gartner tells them that they should do what they were going to do anyway.
These guys are a bunch of clowns, anyways. Their reports are full of so much bullshit - the PHBs take them seriously, however.
;>
They charge a lot of their useless advice, however.
I think you are correct.
They are, as far as I can tell, warning companies not to insert their own custom changes to vital parts of the system.
I suppose there is an old fart working at GG that remembers the time when source code was available for mainframe OS'en. Many companies applied their homebrewn patches and fixes. Many got burned by it because they ended up with an undocumented and unsupported mess.
There is one important difference between OSS and the old mainframes, and I'm not sure if GG has quite grasped the importance of this difference. With OSS you can feed your changes back to the main distribution - and if they make sense, they'll show up in the next official version. The old mainframes were "source available" only. Accepting patches from customers was the exception, not the rule.
I think the GG report is good. Very good.
They recommend that "Type C" users wait a couple of years. These are the guys that need things running 24/7. They need support contracts that say: "when it breaks, you send your top five programmers here at once, and they stay until it is fixed.". What the GG report is saying is that this kind of support isn't available for Linux yet.
"Type B" are told to make sure they have someone to ask for help if the need should arise.
"Type A" is green lights all the way.
The slashdotters that think this is negative, ought to read what GG wrote about Windows 2000. :)
The truth is that organizations like Gartner and all the others that produce reports and articles that caution corporations about OSS support issues do so primarily because they have not yet figured out how to make money from recommending OSS.
The issue is that OSS advocates reject the old-world style of support and would prefer to fix things themselves. This leaves alot less room for consultants and other suits to find places to make money providing support and recommendations. (Same for managers looking for gains in their position -- hiring a consultant to work out some really sticky problem creating a crisis is alot more glamourous than having a staff member that hacks the code to avoid the crisis.)
Consultants provide their support by "working with the vendor", "making recommendations to the staff" , writing "a detailed analysis of the issue", etc. They don't really do much technical work of their own. This is why OSS is a problem for them -- because the products are open, the solutions are also open and it quickly becomes transparent how little value they actually provide.
If the goal of the OSS community is to be embraced by suit-wearing corporations and organizations such as gartner, the OSS community must think like these people and give them a way to profit from OSS, as distasteful as it must be.
However, my personal bias is that proponents of OSS should rejoice in this rejection by the corporate cultures of yesterday. It is validation that what you are doing is the proper way to the future. Don't fight Microsoft. Don't fight to push OSS into corporations that don't want it. Start new companies that embrace OSS. Not just within the technology fields but within all industries. The corporations that can't keep their computer systems running because it's infested with OSS-fearing consultants will eventually fall to their more efficient OSS-embracing competitors. Don't have a short-term goal of proving the old-world wrong. Have a goal of working to a prosperous future, and let the old-world find out it is wrong long after you have surpassed them. Use their stupidity to your advantage, don't squander it in attempts to change their minds.
(In ending, I want to apologize for a generalization of consultants. I'm speaking of consultants that wear suits, quote from gartner reports, and are the heroes of managers looking to further their career. There's many other types of consultants out there that perform useful functions in society. It's just that the ones doing a good job do their job and go away, they don't sit around spewing FUD to help propogate the current world order from which they profit.)
Sorry for being an AC, but posting what you believe in often has a way of coming back to hurt you.
Funny, I doubt Douglas Adams or Pterry Pratchett is published by ORA.. Shame though, as I don't get 20% discount on their books..
Believe it or not, there's an awful lot more to Linux than the kernel.. And an awful lot more bugs are _not_ in the kernel than _are_ in it.. There's _lots_ of OSS that could use more eyes and fingers..
Funny, I like installing redhat and building other apps from source.. I use redhat largely out of habit, and also out of a desire to conserve mirror disk..
Maybe if I can swing a new RAID..
Sorry Trep, but this is just not fair.
You know very well that things aren't that easy with the GPL...
As even RMS has acknowledged, GPL'd code written specifically for the use with Qt has the 'implicit consent' of the author and is therefore no problem (legally) and has never been.
there is a lot of GPLd code from the GNU project in there
This is wrong. There is only very little GPL code from authors outside the KDE team in KDE, and only a small part of GPL'd code is actually part of the GNU project.
If you know about such code, please report it e.g. to the kde mailing list and we can ask the respective author for permission, if you feel better then.
Legally, this is also not a problem, if you consider Qt a system lib. Debian couldn't do that due to their DFSG with the old Qt license, so they didn't distribute it. (The QPL would allow Qt to get into Debian as a system lib).
Then again, even the compatibility issue with the GPL is highly unclear. Several European lawyers have apparently stated that the GPL is e.g. incompatible with the X license.
Know what I mean?
Avus
Read the KDE-Free Qt license. If QT goes tries to go proprietary it automatically reverts to a Artistic license. It's all signed and legal
Geez, it seems more people are coding for KDE now than ever were, and it is gaing a huge user base... We better stop now that you proclaimed that it's dying...
mosfet@jorsm.com
If you want to do serious Gnome coding you *have* to use C. gtk-- and all the other bindings blow.
It's funny. The Gnome developers made a big deal about how easily Gnome can be binded to other languages since it only uses C, then made such bindings unusable.
I think the single greatest threat to the continued evolution of Linux would be for it to become a "mainstream" OS. If Linux maintains a large enough "market share" to sustain itself, mainly the small server market, and appeals to the "rest of us" who love computing, that will be best.
If the "suits" take over Linux, it's over. We will have become Microsoft. This notion that the "winnier" is he who has his OS on every desk is bogus. The business community and most of the public are numb to esthetic values(so are many "geeks") as well as the joys and profound philosophical aspects of cumputing. Thats why we don't all use Lisp machines and "Tinkey Winkey" and "Monica" are the public figures of the day instead of Kurt Godel and Burtrand Russel.
Heads up here, the report is dated 25 Jan 99....says everything to me.
Please, please, when advocating Gnome, stick to the facts at least. Gnome isn't so crappy anymore that it needs such FUD tactics to survive.
might suddenly require me to pay TrollTech money
You NEVER, I repeat NEVER have to pay money as a user or distributor.
When your app is free software you'll NEVER pay anything either.
Both is assured by the KDE Free Qt Foundation, which is a binding contract for TrollTech.
Qt 2.0 (under QPL) IS Free Software, according to RMS and the FSF. You can download a beta version of it now from troll.no.
Qt 2.0 has theme support, which is IMHO vastly superior and more flexible than Gtk's current one (which is more a quick-and-dirty hack, and will likely be improved in future versions)
Once again: With Qt 2.0, it's time to rethink your positions and to focus on technical issues.
There is an overiding theme here: GG appears to try and cater to those who want to always to things the easy way, and the easy way does not necessilarily solve problems. In fact I would argue that letting someone make all of the decisions for you (as I call the easy way) is foolish. This is why MS is an issue, they want to dumb up (notice I would liken this to numbing up your gumbs before you have a bogus procedure done at the dentist) the user so that they can rule and to a large degree make the market space! And this they call innovation; you know I do not know one not one product which MS has ever innovated or written for themselves, please tell me if anyone has an idea of this product, because I would sincerly like to know about it.
Regarding the question of hacking on mission critical servers, well it is generally not a good thing to do. A good sysadmin/consultant will typically have a series of machines (sometimes a series of 1) which are used solely for developement purposes. That is what I have build at the company which I work for, a development box which is used only to do things like try out new software before it enters production, or try out new kernel releases, etc. This is just good practice no matter the platform. However, there is a sorry theme which seems to recur often in the realm of MS: NT does not scale. So even if one wants to do the "right easy thing" (note the quotes) and implement a "scaleable" NT solution for something, there is a hidden cost on the back end: lack of scaleability and the duh factor when it comes to support by MS for some scaleable solution X. So what I am getting at is that even if there are production and development server's the supposed easy way will blow up in your face after a long stint at testing a MS originated solution.
Regarding the statement that GG stated there would be only four real *NIXes available in the not too distant future: where is AIX? There are several awards which AIX has recieved recently, and from an administrator's and support engineering perspective: out of the box there are only two OSes that I would rather support, and the other is Linux (note I do not mean second I mean from this perspective these two are on par). People can argue that, ah the threads implementation in AIX is slow, or the expense for this kind of server is too great, or who runs AIX anyway. Question, has anyone out there tried to debug a SUN machine during boot (albeit until recently) if it fails? I know in a pinch I would rather an AIX machine with all of its well documented and supported LED system codes available for all to see. As far a linux goes, it is intuitive and simple to support, nuf said.
So, I guess what I am getting at is let people look at GG reports and let us continue on in creating scaleable solutions which cost less on two fronts: initial cost of ownership and lower recurring support costs! And after a while the definition of the "easy way" may include things like reboustness (from a control systems perspective), reliabliity, and total cost of ownership.
Mike Hay
Constultant and Systems Administrator
Intvenio Technoligies Corporation
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Adding telnet to the kenel seems pretty dumb to me. Solaris is supposed to be up 99.999...% of the time. Hacking some stuff in won't help them achieve that. They'd be better off going there and finding out what the problem is and then taking a month to solve it reliably.
Haven't heard a joke this good in days.
Thanks!
All talk, no game. This is one place to which I would definitely not go for technical assistance or source code modifications.
Hey Slashdot, once again FUD presented as fact. I thought it was the job of editors here to present such articles as FUD, or at least not to affirm them and then leave it up to others to respond. The impression given to many readers here is that these articles are factual.
Day after day, now, Slashdot has been doing Microsoft's job of presenting FUD as fact. I read the article - there were a few valid points but basically just more of the no support FUD and no Desktop FUD. I know the Gartner group is not especially pro MS, but they are pro IT as usual. After all, they make money telling corporations what they want to hear and reaffirming the commercial support infrastructure that provides a good living for quite a few over paid consulting firms. Jesus, there would be thousands of quite knowledgeable Linux sysadmins quite happy to do the work of providing "support" for commercial Linux installations for much less than these monkeys are getting for commercial unixes and NT, if they really want support.
Although I've done that somewhat, it is mostly pointless to respond to such articles in detail as this just gives them credibility. Shame on you, Slashdot, for repeatedly, every day now for the last week, giving fud credibility and wide exposure to hundreds of thousands of people who visit your site - who are not necessarily sold on Linux just yet.
I hope Kragan has better things to do than to waste his time refuting these features. Slashdot editors could do that up front with intelligent leadins to these stories - or better, publish fewer of them.
The general trend I have seen in the IT field is that managers fear that which they do not understand, especially when their mission critical system runs on an OS which they have no direct support of internally. I am a Linux guy first and foremost, but I find myself doing web/database development and systems setup and administration on an increasing number of NT networks as time progresses. I come across systems and tell the client "You could save $[x] and gain [y] functionality by migrating or adding Linux to your business process." Invariably they tell me one of the following:
The bottom line isn't what kind of support is availably via the web or Usenet, but what kind of guarantee I can get from somebody. You are never going to change an IT managers perception of Linux as a hackers OS until somebody can provide long-term corporate level support similar to what you get from SCO or SUN or any of the other big-boys.
You are right, there aren't many Linux users in the IT world, but we are out there and I for one want to see more of us, and the only way to do that is to get IT managers comfortable with the level of support available, in all other respects Linux speaks for itself.
- HP-UX
- Solaris
- Digital Unix
- SCO
Now keep in mind, this wasn't five years ago, this wasn't three years ago, this was LAST YEAR. I can well believe the first two; that's fine. This week we saw the re-branding of Digital Unix to a name that... hell, I can't even remember what it was, but it was an attempt to leverage 64-bit Unix in a brand name. And SCO - sorry, if they aren't dead yet, at best someone's on the intercom calling code blue.Linux wasn't even on their radar screens, and six months later MS themselves were saying that Linux was evidence that they had competition. You'd think someone getting big bucks for their crystal ball would have some idea of the biggest paradigm shift since the web. At that time it was like a tsunami about to hit the shore. But on Gartner - nothing. Gartner is standard safety-oriented corporate farina for their standard safety-oriented corporate customers. I pity the people who follow them like lapdogs.
The problem is that the QPL is *still* not compatible with the GPL. Therefore, linking KDE, which is covered by the GPL, with Qt, which is covered by the QPL, is a violation of the GPL. If a company were to do this, they could be sued by any of the people who have contributed GPLd code to KDE, or whose GPLd code KDE has taken (there is a lot of GPLd code from the GNU project in there...the Free Software Foundation suing a corporation over it is unlikely, but it's still a technical possibility).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
than we do. We are Linux proponents; Gartner is the stiff-upper-lip type group. They don't just jump on every bandwagon that comes by you know. If Gartner says something then MSE's, MidSize Enterprizes as they call them, are likely to listen AND the message they are saying is not IF Linux will come into full use in corporate america but WHEN to implement.
:)
Try to see things from their perspective... If you do, you will probably notice the article as avocative.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
And stop using TCWWW. It's http://slashdot.org, not http://www.slashdot.org
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Actually, I think the Gartner report is pretty darn good. I don't see anywhere they are far off base.
Keep in mind that 'serious' support is more than just announcing that you will support a product, it means committing a sizeable amount of resources to that support. Since companies are still feeling out the Linux market, it makes sense that they will not yet make the full-scale commitment that more conservative users would like to see.
Gartner basically says "If you have the in-house talent, go for it. If you don't, hold back until things are a little more stable". Always good advice.
- Ken
The bit about banning "code hacking" seems to be directed toward people who might customize the kernel or some other critical system program, but it's hard to tell from the context. I don't think they're advocating a general ban on programming!
TedC
This seems to point right to the fears of techno-weak phb's and folks that are, uh, computer-challenged but have to use them at work. After reading the bottom line section, I really see this advice as something that clueless middlemanagers might buy into; it sounds so reasonable and, well, cautious. These Gartner folks do this sort of thing for money, for businesses, right? Nice racket. *shrug*
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
Digital(Compaq), SGI, IBM, HP, Sun (actually we use Polaris, and have a software support contract with sun), Network Appliance...
Typically you get some commitment, like 4 or 8 hour response time, on hardware and/or software. I don't see why linux should be any different, or why Compaq, HP or any of the others would change their mode of support for linux. In fact, I'd be surprised if they didn't simply integrate linux into their current support infrastructures -- it would be wasteful and difficult to track trouble tickets otherwise.
If Ga. Tech (or anyone else) wants to pay me what they paid to Sun, I'll gladly make Linux kernel mods to suit their needs!
That's the great thing about Linux and support. Because the source is available to everyone, it is possable to hire a really good programmer to provide such needed services. With other vendors, it's them or nothing. For $20,000, you could probably retain a really good Linux person to provide fast response on an as needed basis. And since $20,000 would probably mean a lot more to that person than it does for Sun or SGI, they would be strongly motivated to provide prompt service.
$20,000 may not be a lot to SGI, but for 2 servers, it is a great deal of money. As support goes, I'm sure that for a few hundred million dollars, even M$ might become responsive to my needs.
I think the biggest misunderstanding about Linux support is based in casting Linux into a proprietary system. The reason you must hire a large corperation to support Solaris, IRIX or NT is that nobody else has (or can afford to license) the source code in order to do the sort of support you're talking about. Linux support contractors do not have that problem.
And if you will note, they predict (easy to do when it already happens) that Linux will take off with a 70 to 80 percent certainty. Thats not bad at all.
A personal anecdote - I've been looking for a UNIX sysadmin job in Pennsylvania, especially in the Pittsburgh area. Haven't found much of anything and absolutely nothing about Linux. I'm hedging my bets on Linux and in my book, when there are Linux jobs posted for Pennsylvania, I'll know that Linux is here to stay. Amish country isn't exactly Silicon Valley (but we run Linux in our school district!)
The temp agencies I talked to are getting a smattering of request for Linux but not the kind you'd expect for something that has already arrived. Just a little more patience - my prediction is that within the year, Linux jobs will be the most prevalent of the various UNIX jobs available.
Ok, GG told us not to install Windows 2000 until it had been out for over a year because it would be too unstable, right? Now they're telling you not to install Linux because ISVs might not be genuine. So what *are* we supposed to install? By their reasoning everything sucks so we shouldn't install anything - just sit around and wait until something comes along which they decide is alright...
Sure, I can understand management being interested in GG's opinions (amongst many others...) but actually listening to them??
Actually, I think you'd be surprised at how many suits are very much against the notion of "rigid corporate thinking". I believe that some of them just follow the Gartner Group because they're tech-illiterate and Gartner has great brand-recognition.
..err.. Dataquest (which has been tarnished since 1995 when they predicted 150 million copies of Win95 would be sold in 5 months... uhm, get a calculator out next time, boys - that extra "0" fugged you up).
Of course, the *quality* of Gartner group, is imho, on a downward spiral, similar to that of Dataguess
Other "advice houses" like GIGA and IDC are usually more reliable, but as with all statistics & probability, the truth isn't always what the numbers make it out to be.
-Stu
Because it's installation procedures are far more of a pain than Red Hat's. Debian's number of programs to chose from is great but the installation program is just awful. I'd easily take Red hat or Slackware on ease of install.
"vendor support is opportunistic" *means* that a FREE os with robust attributes seems like a way to undercut the competition. OSS could, in a way be the indian programming contingient come home to roost, if you know what I mean. THEY don't pay anybody, but THEY acquire a huge market thru the commoditisation of a solid os. We win, in the long haul, but THEY may try to derail the train sometime down the road, to their own benefit, in the short haul. WE, however, must stay focussed on RMS's so-far validated truth that free information WORKS.
GET IT?
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
I would hate to think that just because the main-stream press seems to think that Red Hat IS Linux that "all paths lead to Red Hat". IMHO, Debian is a much more elegant and well-thought-out distribution, whereas Red Hat seems to be targeted more towards "scoobies" (local jargon for "idiots").
/etc/ppp/options file in Red Hat is just four bytes long, containing only the word "lock". The Debian one has just about every option known to man with full comments, but only the basic necessities have been enabled. This says to me that Debian have put a lot of effort into it, whereas, Red Hat are more interested in shipping another version out the door!
The default
Red Hat? Thanks, but no thanks!
*sigh*. They mentioned KDE and not GNOME earlier in the article. They were using both as representative examples of Unix GUIs. They didn't even mention GNUStep, anyone want to flame them for that?
Some days...
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Ech. I still don't see why Debian, which has the simplest, most robust, most *brainless* software installation of any linux distro (that I have tried), gets lumped in with Slackware as a "Techie-only" distro. Being a techie myself, I can't comment on Debian's friendliness ;); my impression, though, is that while I spent a few more hours than RedHat users that I know installing my base system, I spend an order of magnitude less time trying to keep it up to date and working.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
to put things in perspective they've been telling people to not touch W2K until 2001.
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
We (my company) has a $20,000 full care support contract with SGI for 2 of our servers (before the linux junkies at the office got a hold of the P.O. process ;) ) and I can get faster support from emailing a mailing list or IRC than I can by calling SGI. And the linux support is usually right as opposed to the SGI support.
"They fear what they do not understand."
What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
He may be our asshole (and no worse than any other), but he's still an asshole. (See the Skeleton Closet for more info. I don't necessarily agree with them; they're just convenient.)
Chomsky's OK though (and he's right more often than we would want him to be).
I do like the steps that they give to evaluating Linux. It gives a careful approach that should let someone LEARN the capabilities of Linux without killing themselvs and jumping into a new environment without thinkin!
May not be perfect, but it is a start!
And not even redefining "hacking" to mean "kernel hacking"
Do you really want your system running a modified version of say, sendmail? Are you prepared to invest the time in merging in vendor changes to your private code tree? There are significant costs associated with running modified code on critical systems.
If your modification would have enough general intrest, you can submit it back to the main tree. However, it's quite likely that you will need to support it yourself then for a period of time.
Have you budgeted the man-hours for that?
I have custom versions of a few servers... and even if a CVS merge shows up clean, you may still end up tromping on something. It takes time. And, in the case of yet another security hole, it could mean downtime while you sync your code in.
--Dan
So, can you post some proof of this instead of your cowardly assertions?
I didn't think the "research note" was so bad - certainly nothing like that festering plate of dung by Ted Lewis that was dumped on this site a couple of days ago. If nothing else, the note articluates arguments that we're likely to hear from management in future months as Linux springs up in more and more server rooms and LAN closets. The note doesn't say "never use Linux," it just says "be careful of x,y, and z when you do." If we're prepared to put those fears to rest by addressing them, instead of just beating them down as FUD, the bosses will be more likely to get - in PHB lingo - a "warm fuzzy" feeling about Linux.
The 3 big cautions in the note are related to technical expertise requirements, support contracts, and code hacking. Of these requirements, the first two represent real opportunities for anyone with Linux experience, and for entrepreneurs who want to make money while spreading open source software around. As for the 3rd requirement, I think that long-term policies in this area are going to be more complex than "discourage or ban outright," but code hackers need to realize that in enterprise systems, any changes to the code should be thoroughly tested and documented - a very expensive process that most companies would like to engage in as little as possible.
Industry research firms like Gartner are - without any exceptions that I know of - either playing serious catch-up with Linux (and OSS in general) - or still in denial about the whole thing. This note shows Gartner lumbering into catch-up mode, though their hindquarters may still be stuck in the bog of denial.
I don't want to have all these great "free" programs linked to a non-free library that might suddenly require me to pay TrollTech money. Then, we're right back in the crappy situation that forced the creation of LessTif.
I'm not opposed to Qt's feature set, or the fact that it's in C++ (which I consider an advantage, to be honest), or anything technical about it, although I do like GTK+'s structure and theme handling much better. What I do oppose about Qt is the license. I will not develop for, nor will I support or advocate, a toolkit that is not Free Software, and for VERY practical reasons!
We've been down this path once before, people; let's not do it again...
Kyle
--
Kyle R. Rose, MIT LCS
[ home ]
I vote for Kragen as the slashdot equivalent of Ralph Nader. Or is Ralph Nader the slashdot equivalent of Ralph Nader already?
It's so confusing.
Where does Noam Chomsky fit in?
I didn't understand until their guidelines for getting started with Linux, where they recommend starting with servers on otherwise-unused about-to-be-junked machines. This report includes DESKTOP usage -- not just servers. This strikes me as a major sea change in the industry, even allowing for how much I would pay for their reports. Very positive from the desktop point of view.
--
Infuriate left and right
I think it's more a commentary on the people who seem to use/advocate it most. I know that if I had to concisely describe Debian, I would describe it as a technically-focused distribution -- i.e. the goal is to do things right, not necessarily to do them in the flashiest or most bleeding-edge-trendy way. I think the sheer number of packages and the (relative) lack of advertising and marketing budget add to this effect. I would guess the other reason is the usual corporate fear -- "there's no company behind Debian" -- and this isn't a bad thing, because (with 0.9 probability :) there will be one eventually, at least in a support role. Support for Debian is great and is largely unnecessary -- but as can be seen from the Gartner report, that's not going to sway many PHBs.
No enterprise support? Please tell me that the Gartner Group is not doing the Hit-and-Run Style of journalism.... or perhaps this is the beginning or the great MS payoff....they realize that the "Let's us OSS as our scapegoat" thing got out of hand now they can't control it. It's gotten to large... Hell my company has 24-7 support both for OEMS and End users.... these people are really clueless...
Nick
LSG
One of the points I made was that M$ would gear up the media to say "Linux is good (condescendingly) and it rivals NT4.0 but it's nothing compared to Windows 2000 After all we've included all the meaningless buzzwords that make CIOs cream their jeans like intuitiveness, interoperability, discoverability...etc. Of course accountability will not be included in this release. (If you want that...buy Linux)"
Let me call a spade a spade. I'm a CEO of a Linux based business that is really doing well. Not because of moronic license agreements, but because we actually give good SERVICE and SUPPORT.
Question... How many companies bring lawsuits against software companies? Not as many as you'd think. With the thousands upon thousands of companies out there maybe a few hundred ever take civil action. And even fewer sue M$. If M$ products are so well supported then how come they are reluctant to give OEMs the refunds that customers have been demanding? If you read the EULA it reads in many ways like a disclaimer for the GPL especially the parts about "No fitness for particular purpose etc." If Microsoft Products are so damn well supported how come they have to reorganize the entire company to be able to deal with customers?
If Microsoft products are so well supported how come calling their so-called support lines yield the automaton response of "Did you reboot?"
That's not the answer corporate IT customers want to hear. They want to deal with intelligent, experienced people who actually stand behind their product. One client of whom we had the pleasure of replacing his NT Server, MS Application Server, MS Back Office, and MS SQL server and MS-Exchange Server with 2 Linux boxes, complained that one MS Support engineer said he should not rely on MS-Exchange server to allow good internet email access but should buy MS-Proxy Server instead.
With over 700 NT server replaced by Linux and over 300 Windows clients replaced the resounding message I hear form IT managers isn't one of disatisfaction but more often than not it's "Wow Linux can do that also?"
In the real world, not one made up by the ZD-Nets and the Pollsters of Gartner Group, and not one made up by hapless wanna-be journalists who just didn't make the grade, IT managers want professionals, not the 18 year old kid at SoftBank for their customer support. Did I mention that SoftBank owns ZD-Net and Softbank provides tech-support for much of M$ product line.....
Reality is a BitchX huh Gartner?
Nick
LSG
KDE is an excellent desktop. Gnome is not as far developed as KDE but is progressing nicely.
My company supports both and as long as Troll supports the QPL license then everyting is fine.
However, I don't know what would stop Troll from writing the next improvement to the API and saying now it's back to our old license....
A safer bet would be to hedge on GNOME and GTK but hey...Red Hat announced they were having both KDE and GNOME on 6.0 tonight so what the heck...
Nick
LSG
....For Linux compatability.
I agree. Microsoft is NOT Linux compliant.
So I can not bet my job on it.
Cheers,
Nick
LSG
They released a report a few months ago about not adopting NT5/Windows2k for several months or something after it came out. Everyone was screaming "See, told you so". Now its all "Shut up you jerks". And they way I read the report, it seemed to say "don't use Linux unless you know what you are doing". The same could be said for NT, Macs, BeOS, NeXT, C64, CP/M... the whole thing just smacks of "duh..." since PHB's will use whatever ZDNet tells them to. After all: beige has the most RAM.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
It didn't say what those nice people should adopt.
If I were type C risk as they seem to be interpreting it, I'd put an IBM mainframe terminal on everyone's desk. It's solid, it keeps running even if you drop it, and it won't crash. I wouldn't even dream of adapting Windows!
D
have you ever dealt with one of those in house response techs? They are the stupidist people on the planet. Every Compaq moron I saw come into a customers site had screwed up the system so bad that after 20 minutes he grabs the box and says, "I'll get this back in a week or so" they have NEVER EVER fixed a problem on site. For a test, I with the owners permission disabed a pc by unseating the ram, the tech didnt even check the ram and said we have to take this in.. I said can I look? he said yeah, I reseated the ram and it booted.. the tech said, "Wow you should work for us" HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA never in a million years.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
MSE best practices would entail putting in place practices to discourage, if not ban, code hacking when using Linux.
Now, what's wrong with this picture? Code hacking is the primary driver behind the acceptance and growth of the Linux marketplace. Why is it that dumb-ass consultants have to insist that everyone act as dumb as possible around technology - especially technology that is strategic to the function of your organization?
Right, I just answered my own question (it's so we always have to hire dumb-ass consultants).
-- ultra1
Absolutely. Speaking as a dumb-ass consultant, I find it encouraging for GG to spread the gospel of "don't-trust-your-people" - leads to more F-500 consulting jobs for me! Who said there was no fud in this!
The folks who take GG seriously are people who are too dumb to figure it out for themselves or notice. GG caters to paternalistic MIS groups, is subject to Sturgeon's law, and caveats everything to death. I'm sure GG means well, but it's still the road to hell....
I use Gartner, Foresters and Burton to help me select computer functionality of my company.
...and who do I sue if things go wrong?
Note I said "help".
I also use Slashdot, Economist, WSJ, Industry Standard, Byte (that was), conference information, O'Reilly and whatever else I can lay my hands on.
Gartner is an interesting one. Their Symposium is worth attending - the information is very helpful...but...
They are very conservative and cannot be relied upon to recognise the breaking wave. Their coverage of Open Source in General and Linux in particular has been weak. They have represented a credible independence from what I term the BOHICA boys who greet Microsoft pronouncements with obsequious handwringing, but their caution in describing OSS when weighed against the blare of publicity from Redmond is unhelpful.
Many corporate managers, mine included are pissing in their pants when faced with this cheaper, more-reliable, better-throughput operating system than NT. It brings a real world of decision to their door. Do they want to save money? Do they trust their own staff?
Well, of course...what about support?
They obviously haven't hung on a line waiting for service themselves...nor have they ever sued any vendors. The technique is for managers to push the problems down to the technicians (that's why we earn the big bucks) and to hob-nob with the pretty sales-people. Those lunches are so much fun.
The problem with Gartner and Linux is that Gartner is about commerce...and Linux...and all of Open Source just doesn't seem commercial.
The message will get through, but don't rely on Gartner...as someone said, they just contribute to FUD.
Buzz Lightyear
>and I can get faster support from emailing a >mailing list or IRC
That's true.. there's always some 15 year old
kid waiting to help in an emergency..
That said, hold your fire!
Linux will never be supported in the same way as, say, HP-UX. Why? Well, it's not controlled by a large company, with a constant, stable and immutable product. The source-code is free to tweak by mom&pop shops, so no one in their right mind would offer commercial level support to it.
But, the fact that Linux is open significantly reduces the need for commercial level support. Compatibility with products is a matter of time and need, not politics and back-room handshakes.
Problems are solved in a distributed fashion, with enthusiasm and good-will.
Linux represents all that is best in the Darwinian evolution of software. Corporate mentality can not fathom this, and neither can the Gartner Group. They need guarantees, and someone to sue if it breaks. Linux just doesn't break. And you can say that with more than a 0.8 probablility.
Someone needs to 'splain it to them in terms like that IBM commercial. For every Linux server you set up, you will save $20,000/year in support...
Support is free, fast and accurate. Everyone knows that contributing to it makes the penguin evolve faster and better; everyone benefits from solving each other's problems. So much so, that Tux will be the first penguin to actually take off.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
For the Gartner group this is praise indeed for Linux. This is the group that tells you that if you buy a stamp you have to allow at least a million dollars in support costs to get it stuck on an envelope.
I know support costs are far higher that purchase costs, but some of the figures they quote are ludicrous. I think they include the total salary of a computer's user as part of its support costs.
They are right on the mark about opportunistic support, though. I wouldn't trust any of the major vendors who recently announced support for Linux to follow through.
Until there is an army of people with something like the (pathetic but recognised) MCSE certificate to wave at the non-technical, the non-technical have no support. You can get lots of rapid useful feedback for Linux technical problems, but you need some technical competance to make use of it. Most MCSEs may be able to do little more than get NT installed and staggering along, poorly configured, but that represents an insurmountable hurdle for most people. There aren't enough Unix support people around to switch to Linux support. This is an area where quality may be less important than quantity.
If Sun and IBM Unixes were to become more like Linux (and Linux more like there unixes) and *nix were to 'merge' into a more unified standard *nix. If they were all open source, then both Sun and IBM would benifit from open source.
1) a unified Unix would stand a chance of gaining markek share agains M$
2) less ports (if any) between *nixes
3) large compoanies could concentrate on the customer support end and less on the OS side (not none, just less like RH) making the OS easier to use, install, and maybe even more apps... (hey IBM where is that lotus notes client for Linux???.. where is that speach software?? ) (hey sun wher eis that Java??? for linux )
J
Only 'flamers' flame!
They at least got the url of debian right (debian.org) unlike Ted Lewis, he of the ACID TEST fame (debian.COM)
A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
KDE is not dying-it just released a new version...
About the QT stuff, you assumptions are out of date, since the next version will be ok-check out the SuSE or KDE sites for this & cease & desist from spreading out-dated & ergo wrong information.
Also, the paradox in public prophesy, is that it tends to self-fullfilling prophesy; which then becomes one reason why they get it right. Isn't this how these organizations make money?
Anyhow, they have mis-read the scene & their info is outdated & wrong. Ha, ha, ha...
Will, that be one egg or two, on your face???
:-)
Let me chime in here. Most of the comments and virtually all of the report seems to miss a major point of why a corporation would want to install Linux in the first place.
That point is that with Linux, control of system support returns to the company, versus the hand wringing that goes on with every little burp and twitch of WinNT.
All of the big hitters (Gartner, Ernst & Young, Anderson Consulting, etc. downplay Linux because of the lack of "corporate support."
The buggy nature of virtually every early version of Microsoft OS and development system have allowed many of the major consulting firms to leach major bucks out of the big companies with trainees just out of college but that sound like they really understand Microsoft's wares.
Which doesn't even count the major bucks which alot of VARS or former VARS like me paid to Microsoft for support subscriptions that proved essentially worthless because the low quality of the support staff at MS. Usually by the time MS support came up with the answer, I had discovered it myself, or dumped the product.
Consider that for the same cost of all the client OS charges and support contracts currently paid out to MS and consulting organizations to individiuals who JUST SUPPORT MS OS's (not counting development) any major corporation could hire 5-10 true Linux wizards, arrange them in a "think tank" type workgroup, and have superior systems level support. One criticism of this concept which I have heard put out by a consulting company is what if one of the "gurus" leaves? Hire another highly qualified Linux person to keep the team functioning. Versus the consulting companies who constantly ship new people in and out.
I challenge Gartner or anyone else prove that the cost of supporting Linux in house is higher than what Microsoft and minions are currently milking the Fortune 1000 for.
To be honest 'though, I'm lucky. I work in a mostly Microsoft free shop.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
for this article, though its all opinion and largely unsubstantiated to the public (because the linked proofs are $pay$ links) . The MS FUD parade will be pointing to this article for _years_.
-- Perl Hack, Web Hack, SQL Hack, Guitar Hack
Most of the advice in this article is sound enough, if you consider its intended audience. Windows is still their client platform of choice. But I do think that they committed a grievous sin of omission by failing to discuss scenarios in which Linux can replace Windows servers right now. With the proper network configuration and disaster planning, their customer service remarks are moot.
I just want to comment on two other things:
while PC server vendors are seriously considering a Linux strategy, fears of cannibalizing their own Unix strategies and concerns about the chaotic nature of the market will limit their sincerity to opportunistic sales
This is absolutely true. Nobody expects major resources from IBM, Sun, or SGI to go into Linux development; they are merely making a virtue out of a necessity, and that's what will dictate the extent of their commitment to Linux. If they don't provide Linux support for their hardware, someone else will. Any development they contribute will most likely be funded by a customer who requests it.
emulation a poor substitute for Microsoft compatibility.
This is one reason why Linux supporters need to keep pushing Java, or a substitute for it, as hard as they can; it does as much damage to the "Linux is not good enough for the desktop" problem as supporting GNOME and KDE does. In a post-scarcity world, which we are very much on the brink of, the difference between native opcodes and Java's bytecode will no longer be significant. And it will run on Linux and Win2000 equally well. So much for having to play catch-up with emulating Microsoft's latest API's. And so much for Microsoft incompatibility.
It *would* be excellent advice if there was a usable choice today. I don't know what banks use. But what we use, NT, isn't something you could stick with unitil the problem is solved. It IS the problem.
The only reason for the post was to inform the the linux community /. readers would view this article. /., though I wish they
about how management pukes see their operating systems. Like all points of
view, it is incomplete and flawed. I thought that their comments were pretty
positive for that type of review. Probably if the Gartner group would give a
totally 100% go ahead it would mean that Linux was obsolete and ready for
the junk heap. This is sort of how you can view some news organizations.
They are almost as out of sync with the real world as clothing stores. Here,
in Montana, where I live, the clothing stores are starting to get in their
summer stock. Here outside my house, I have a half a foot of snow on the
ground. I've heard that if you get your photograph on the front page of Time
magazine then it means that your fame is pretty much over. This is how I
look at this kind of viewpoint. They, the news orgs aren't quite ready for
the change, which means for the real world, that it really is time.
I sent this article to a friend who I have been trying to get to use LInux
for about 2 years, and when he saw this article, he said that this made him
think that he was ready to try it right now. He used to be a corporate puke
himself, so he knows how to interpret these kind of articles. I was really
interested in seeing exactly how the
Apparently not too many corporate types post to
would, it would improve the balance of views.
Anyway
thanks for your comments
Doug Moreen
Silicon Mountain Technologies
VAR. for Windows, Linux, Mac Be machines
dogem@initco.net