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Linux Advocacy Hurts
sundae writes "For those who are into Linux advocacy,
check
this little piece from WinInfo before you
pointlessly brand any critizism as FUD, then attack the
author and everything else related. This article criticize the
way many pro-Linux sites, such as /., only whine about how
the Mindcraft study was funded by Microsoft and ignored the
fact that the study actually *did* happen. "
My opinion is that the Mindcraft study is completely invalidated
by using an optimized Windows box and a vanilla Linux box. Its
that simple. I'm kinda bummed that this article fails to
mention this, instead implying that the Mindcraft test
was reasonable. But don't miss the point- we're our own
worst enemy. I got CC'd on a lot of criticism of
this report, some of you guys did an excellent job
of fairly ripping the report to shreads. Others... well...
didn't.
When I heard that NT spanked Linux in there testsi was perplexed. When I read on LWN how they could have had the Linux box run faster I felt better, but not good.
;) ).
When Mindcraft reported that the reason they didn't tune the Linux box was due to lack of tuning information on our part, I was willing to help. (I don't care how they asked RedHat, any inquery into the newsgroups would have been welcome and dumped them with tons of useful information but maybe they knew that already
But now after hearing that I'm mad. There will only be satisfaction after reproducing the NT box *exactly*, installing Linux (I don't think newly coded drivers are unfair, its after all GPL's strength and selling point. Just call it "Tuning" like any company willing to spend that much money on a machine would like to do.) Anyway, install and tune linux on that box and show a marked improvement.
It will show...
1) Linux is more tunable/customizable
2) Linux is faster
and most importanlty...
3) Linux *LIVES*
I really take offence when they attack the community, let alone Linux. The community has always been the most important aspect of Linux. When I started out I was a punk-arrogant college kid who believed there was a better way than MS. When my college buddy showed me that his program code (nearly identical to mine) ran three times as fast on Linux I gave it a look.
But what kept me in was the community. The Linux community has always believed in bettering the individual user/programmer and invests knowledge and time in them. The knowledge and training I recieved from news groups (which looking back I'm embarrased at how idiotic my origional questions were, but they treated me politely and helped me out in any case) would have cost me $2,500+ in MSCE and CNE training.
Much of which Microsoft keeps out of the knowledge base to "encourage" one to get that training. Or rather they assume you've taken that training to understand what is in the knowledge base. (Yes I've used it, and its no better than deja-news in useability.)
Linux has always been interested in individual needs, from my mother (who just uses e-mail and word processing) to my brother ready to port EDA tools to Linux.
I really think its time to show that once again to the world. If anyone knows of a place working on reproducing these tests I'd love to send help, info, and if they are reputable enough even money.
The discussion on Slashdot and LWN was great now I'm ready for the slam-dunk proof.
In the movie 'Tora-Tora-Tora', after bombing Perl-Harbor the Japanese Admiral was asked why he wasn't happy after such a success. He repied someting like "I'm only afriad we have woken up a sleeping giant." I hope the community is awake now.
^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
There is a critical flaw in Mr. Thurrott's comparison of Linux advocacy and the advocacy of systems such as the Amiga and OS/2.
Both OS/2 and Amiga were dependent upon commercial success in order to remain useful for their users. Without commercial success, a proprietary system will fail to propagate; it will not be marketed or advertised; it will no longer be upgraded; most of its application development will cease; and, as the rest of the industry moves on as usual, it will fall behind technologically. (This last is true even if at its birth it was technologically superior to more commercially successful systems.) In short, it will not remain useful for the majority of its advocates, because they are dependent on circumstances outside their control for its viability.
Linux-based systems are not limited in this way. The vast, vast bulk of Linux's growth has not been due to commercial marketing. Because of the nature of free software, it is not dependent on any company's profit in order to keep being maintained and upgraded. Commercial success can be a benefit to Linux (though it can also be a peril -- see my post here) but commercial failure can never kill Linux.
How does this change the meaning of advocacy? In the case of a proprietary system (and this applies as strongly to the MacOS, which I favor, as to Amiga or OS/2) a significant portion of the advocate's motivation is to prevent his/her own investment in his/her favored system. This investment is not merely the amount of money the advocate has spent on software and equipment; his/her training and expertise as well as other forms of psychological investment (pride, for instance) also form important parts of it.
In psychology and sociology there is a concept known as cognitive dissonance. When a person has a large psychological investment in an idea or movement, that person does not want to see that idea disproven, or that movement fail, because it would mean that all his/her efforts and strivings for that idea or movement become worthless. The advocate's thinking is altered (not to say "blurred") by his/her interests. This is not a mental disorder; it is a part of our everyday thinking. We do not want our projects to fail because it would mean our effort has been wasted -- and so we work harder. We do not want our children to become drug addicts and criminals because it would mean that the love and care with which we have treated them has come to naught -- and so we love and care all the more, and teach all the better.
The advocate of Linux-based systems is not in this position. Linux cannot become wasted effort, because it is free. When we advocate Linux, we are doing it perhaps out of generosity (Let the rest of the world experience such a good system as I use!), perhaps out of abhorrence for lesser systems (Windows is so awful! Let's get rid of it!), or perhaps just out of desire to see our own work be more widely used (See what a good kernel patch I made!) -- but it is not out of fear that all our efforts will be wasted.
The proprietary-system advocate, on the other hand, is in a position even worse than that suggested above: Not only does s/he have to fear that his/her investments will be wasted, but because the system s/he favors is strictly under someone else's control -- that of its owner -- the advocate has very little influence over whether it succeeds or fails. The programmer of Windows applications may desire Windows to maintain its dominance on the desktop, but s/he can do little to ensure this. The Amiga users could do nothing to stop Commodore's mismanagement, and cannot guarantee that AmigaOS's present owners will do better.
Proprietary-system advocates can do three things: they can hope; they can beta-test; and they can raise a fuss. Open-system advocates can do so much more, that there's really no comparison.
One thing that ticks me off lately about both Microsoft and Linux advocates is that both sides tend to get caught up in mere exchanges of insults instead of exchanges of facts. Even Linus gets caught up in this. When a Microsoft employee brought up the MindCraft study last Wednesday at an AIIM convention discussion, Linus (who hadn't seen the study, apparently) resorted to mouthing the party line and hurling a minor insult at WinNT. This is great for us Linux advocates; it makes us feel better; but in a room full of pointy haired bosses who don't know the technical facts, it makes us look like losers.
(NB: Linus did manage to save himself later on by telling the story of how he and other Linux geeks debugged the Linux-driven OCR-based mail sorters used by the US Post Office. This may have changed a lot of the bosses' minds. "Wow! The Post Office might stink, but Linux can handle that kind of task day in day out?")
I love insulting Microsoft. I really do. But when it comes to presenting Linux, or other alternative technologies, to someone who doesn't know a pointer from a packet, what wins the day is fact, presented in a clear and unambiguous manner. Microsoft knows this, and knows that presenting crummy facts (eg: the Mindcraft study) wins when concrete facts (eg: the post office uses Linux for OCR mail sorting) are absent.
Finding God in a Dog
I know that a lot of /. readers are not programmer types but are users and sysadmins of Linux systems. But these are the very people who have the skills and the ability to set up benchmarks. They may not be able to contribute to an open source software project by contributing code. But they could build a benchmark testbed and produce a comprehensive set of Linux benchmarks that would be VERY newsworthy.
Linux runs on many different CPUs. It supports many types of hardware such as network cards, SCSI host adapters, RAID controllers etc. All of these things affect performance and little hard data is available about the performance of systems using various hardware combinations.
And a nice spin-off from a benchmarking project like this would be the availability of a guide to tuning Linux for optimum performance. But first, we have to figure out just what configurations are optimum.
--
Michael Dillon - E-mail: michael@memra.com
Michael Dillon - E-mail: michael@memra.com
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