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SCO's Michels Blasts 'Punk Kids' Linux
assimilated writes "In the April 26th issue of Computerworld, president and CEO of SCO made a few well-put comments about the Linux "religion". I think he was right on. A legitimate vendor speaks out...
Read the article to get fussy. " Hehe-I had no idea I was working for the Catholic Church. Does that mean I can't get married after all?
It seems very few people have a real handle on just why there is such a high level of emotion about Linux.
It is not because Linux is so good terchnically. (It is. It is just that 'technically good' is not something most folks get all excited about.) The real issue is that OS's, and other software infrastructure, has become far to fundamental in our lives to be left in the control of special interests, be they corporate or government. And those corporations and agencies have been all to fast and willing to abuse that control.
It is a social reaction to take back control of a very important facet of our lives.
And about THAT, we can indeed get very emotional, and with good cause.
The 2.0 kernel has real reentrancy problems. Essentailly, everything was under a single kernel lock. 2.1.x/2.2.x is much more fine grained (subsystem locks). Discussion for 2.3.x includes removing the big kernel lock alltogether.
In practice, Linux manages to outperform supposedly more scalable OSes on a regular basis. Conclusion, more fine-grained locking is a win, but so far, the overall efficiency of the kernel has overcome the problem.
...involved one Compaq (yeah, yeah, I know... wasn't *my* choice) server, and SCO kept rebooting in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, also, in a so-called "server" edition, you had to buy the TCP/IP stack.... separately??!!?!?! How the hell am I supposed to run a "server" with no networking, huh?
These words from the guy at SCO are the last gasp of the dying. I don't know *anyone* who likes SCO. Not nobody nowhere.
-- adr
Well.. I hope I won't be flamed for this, but he has a point (where's the fire extinguisher?)
There are many people that treat linux like it was sacred, and doesn't have any flaws.
F.ex. when the mindcraft test was released, many people instantly denied it.
The mindcraft test is a bad example, but what about the process/thread test where it was shown that WindowsNT actually handled forking and threading faster than linux (I'm sorry I don't have a reference, but I read about it in an LJ issue once). In this case it required a quick fix, but nevertheless it illustrates my point.
Linux is not perfect, and we have to accept that, but many refuse to.
I feel that there is a group of people that claim linux is the best and the only operatingsystem to use, but we have to keep objective and keep our minds open for other possibilities, or we will become known as short sighted nerds and hackers.
vr
Mr. Michel does an interesting spin on the issue of Linux and responsibility. He doesn't say that Linux is or is not reliable. Instead he just describes the heavy resources that a corporation needs to use to test reliability. This is intended to lead you to believe that Linux has no testing because the community doesn't have a centralized lab with technicians sweating away hours over structured tests. He doesn't even make passing reference to the varied, real world, applied testing that comes from millions of users' experience.
What would you trust? Millions of users' real world experience vs. thousands of hours from a few (maybe few dozen) technicians with constructed tests. Isn't real world experience the final testing ground for commercial software today? Or are patches and service packs and incremental releases frequently released because commercial vendors didn't want to ship a fully tested product to begin with?
mikeraz
There's more to it than this.
I am not surprised at this reaction from the CEO of SCO, lets face it SCO have more to lose than Microsoft with the ascension of Linux.
/only/ market. Every Linux box installed here is almost certainly one SCO license and hence revenue taken away from SCO.
Look at the market that SCO aim at, low end x86 based UNIX servers. Things like branch servers etc. This is exactly the market that Linux has been penetrating so well recently.
The reason SCO are reacting so violently is that this is their
It really isn't a surprise that SCO would want to spread more FUD about Linux than even Microsoft. After all, Microsoft have a load of other revenue streams that aren't affected by Linux whereas SCO hasn't
Joe_90
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