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Killing Off Linux: It's All Academic
angelh writes "Here's a good article that I don't think we should ignore. It's about Microsoft's plan of attack against Linux... Make a better product? Of course not. Better marketing? Not this time. Looks like now they're getting serious about attacking UNIX/Linux at the root level... Check out the link for a good read..." The article is from Linux Journal. It's not new, and the thoughts in it aren't either, but it's well worth reading. Check out the bibliography at the bottom, too.
I work for the computing department of a small Massachusetts liberal-arts college. Now you mightn't think that a school of those characteristics would be a haven for Linux-based systems, but we are.
First off, all our central information services except the administrative databases (MacOS - FileMaker Pro), the library catalog (AIX), the voicemail system, and two legacy servers (one SunOS, one NT 3.51) run on Debian GNU/Linux systems. That includes mail, user accounts, DNS, Web service, Web proxy service, Web-based database applications, networked backup, file and print service (samba and netatalk), and routing / firewalling / network monitoring.
Further, we have an extensive Linux (and to a lesser extent BSD) subculture among our students. My boss teaches courses involving Linux, Perl, and other related Unixoid topics, and is in the process of building a CS curriculum on the basis of students' interest in Unix. Our computing staffing situation is dependent on student interest in Unix, as we tend to recruit from our own recent graduates.
We received last year an offer from Microsoft for cheap software in exchange for a mindshare monopoly. We seriously considered it -- for about five seconds. Then it went in the circular file. We may be liberal-arts flakes, but we're not idiots!
The University of Indiana cut a "deal" with Microsoft for $6 MILLION. With Linux, there's no deal, and even better, no COST. I don't understand how "cash-strapped" university computing departments can justify this logic: "We don't have the money, so we're giving Microsoft $6 million for something we could have gotten for free."
Intel tried to do the same thing to kill usage of the MacOS @ universities & colleges. In several cases (I think Yale was one of them, but I could be wrong), the plan met with initial success and then backfired (gave them mega-bad publicity _and_ the universities retracted their pro-Wintel policy). Hopefully the same kind of backfiring will occur this time.
It reminds me of the deals Coke gets with fast food chains and university cafeterias to only distribute Coke (and thus the university gets some kind of kick-back from Coke). Disgusting.
-cf
Balderdash. One of the key functions of a real university is to provide a forum for diverse opinions aka academic freedom. "The University is the Watchdog of Society" This is why we have the tenure system, for example. Without these sort of freedoms society as a whole becomes endangered from 'mob rule' and being perverted into a totally consumeristic way of life. When University administrators start cutting deals for specific teaching tools at the behest of commercial interests our society as a whole is in danger. Unfortunately in publicly funded universities this is often a real problem. What is REALLY alarming to me is that we see similar trends in secondary and primary schools; for example companies providing free visual aids in exchange for the school requiring the students to watch commercials for the companies goods and services. The is Very Very bad stuff.
I am really sickened by latter day 'free market' advocates that seem to have forgotten the history of the free market in the US. The free market brought us the Pinkerton's assassination of union organizers, the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire, J. P. Morgan trying to face down the President of the United States (thank God it was TR) on the imposition of controls on large scale monopolies, Upton Sinclair's expose of food adulteration, a variety of environmental disasters, Company Towns, you name it. The fact of the matter is that Free Enterprise has been tried in this country and it Just Does Not Work for the simple reason that what is good for a company is not necessarily always good for the society as a whole. If you don't believe me, get any decent text on micro economics and look up the term "external diseconomy".
So yes, it will work... then it will be a matter of internal politics to get it situation fixed, and depending on how deeply the hook is set before they try to start reeling in it may actually do some serious long term harm. But I predict there will be some havens of *nix scattered around and that this will only make them stronger, as more good people get forced out of the schools micros~1 takes over.
now they're considering switching back to Unix, because they lost a lot of companies looking to hire grads... seems they don't want Windows programmers.
Ironically, the biggest impediment to going back to Unix is that a few of the faculty don't know Unix and don't want to learn.
Go figure.
This is the same reason I am disgusted by what Bill Gates considers his contribuitions to "Charity". Giving MS software to elementary and secondary schools? It's worse than the whole IE integration thing.
Sure he gives out some software that costs him nothing but could have been sold for several thousand dollars. And in return he gets a generation of kids who've been force fed his applications since the first time they touch a keyboard. If they don't get exposed to anything else then why would they even want to think about anything but MS solutions.
Of course the one saving grace is that kids more and more are questioning what they learn in school and questioning the schools themselves. My only hope is that kids revolt and turn agains MS because it's "what they get in school".
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
Public universities and other governmental agencies should be forbidden from using any non-free software unless they can prove that there is no appropriate free software available for a particular application.
--
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The CS department is still going to be on all UNIX (SGI's and SUN's) And the servers are going to remain that way as well. Mainly HP-UX. Our News server runs off of a Linux box. The only NT servers we have are a print server (for printing quotas) and an exchange server.
As a consultant the majority of the questions I field are Microsoft related. Be it regarding PPP setup, or Office quirks. I have never fielded a question pertaining to UNIX/Linux. And if I field a Mac question it is usually about MS Office.
So you make your own conclusion. As it stands, schools are really cheap. They are going to go with the most economically sound setup. And do to the maintenance variable, that setup is UNIX for servers.
by a university's choice to go MS -- it doesn't seem like they provide any solutions "big enough iron" so to speak.
... but the all-solid-state stuff probably wasn't)
Here at CMU (which is not that big a university, ~6000 undergrads) we run a massive distributed filesytem, afs, which is commercially available and was developed in part here (if we reimplemented the "andrew" system today it would probably be around CODA, which is Free iirc). The distributed fileservers have always been Solaris (and also a bit of HP-UX), and I'm not aware you could replace them with NT if you wanted to. AFS is supported by a a wide variety of clients: NT, Linux (and the other Unices), Mac.
The individual departments are not likely to give up their own special types of computers -- Design and Art want their SGIs, many of the professors (and students) use Macs, and the geeks all use Linux and Solaris. What solution based on NT can serve all those clients, for a system with tens of thousands of total users?
I just don't see any other way to run a computing environment the size of a university other than Kerberos and heavy-duty distributed fs stuff. Perhaps I'm missing something?
I certainly don't believe MS could provide anything like CMU's reliability. I've been here over a year now. Once or twice the routing has broken for a few minutes, and once the university blew a power feed and everything on the other side of the street shut down for a day (actually a lot of it was running on backup
Here is the problem - Very few in the tech industry cares about Microsoft.... why? because it's a moneymaker - and that's all it is. Microsoft is setting themselves up for defeat in this arena why?
Colleges don't want to spend money, and they haven't for years --- Do you think that Berkley pays for BSD? or that the UW pays for Linux etc.? They have a very long standing relationship with Unix -- the entire infastructure is built upon it... why would they for a couple of small products have to hire MCSE's (think about it folks -- they will need to do this the Microsoft way) when they have a whole bunch of Computer Sci students that can admin. the IT infastructure for pennies on the dollar, or free?
This one is a good idea by Microsoft, but I honestly think that they better watch another commercial competitor -- yes Apple. Apple (from what I hear) is going to be striking some major deals with public schools and colleges using their normal client software and their (BSDish) MacosX The end thing here is that Microsoft (still) does not have a good server OS, and until Linux becomes more 'user friendly' most home users or clients are not going to want to use it... I made the switch years ago to Linux, and I have seen amazing improvements but -- they are meeting head on ... who will win?
Well in this scenario Think of the nightmare of trying to get this approved just to begin with -- First this deal is going to have to be approved by the head of the IT/CS department, then the students (who would have to learn a whole different OS to keep their jobs) and finally - the budget committe or otherwise accounting (once they see what an MCSE goes for they will simply put a denied stamp on it). -- Some small colleges will go to this, the larger ones for example UW, Berkley, and CMU will not.
What do you think?
As an Indiana U journalism/computer science major, I've got to add that there was protest here when the big Microsoft deal went down. Ol' Billy came to give a speech here shortly after that and there were protesters outside Assembly Hall and fliers denouncing the deal.
Here's the problem, though, joe average student doesn't care. Joe average student doesn't even know that OSes besides Microsoft Windows exist. When I need to print something, I always go to a Mac lab, because there's never a line. And forget about Linux, because right now the learning curve is way beyond most students.
Here's the good news: The people who care about Linux are the people who code, right? Every CS professor I've had at IU hates Microsoft as much as the next geek. Furthermore, most of my classes so far have been java based. Also, as far as I know, 90% of the servers here are unix-based. I think there's a few NT file servers. _shrug_ We get our email with Pine like everybody else.
The fact that students can get Microsoft software freely and easily on campus is a bit of a problem, though. When I first learned about Linux last year and searched around for a distro on CD, I couldn't find one. LUGs out there that are concerned with advocacy need to burn distros and advertise a quick and easy way to pick them up.
...and it's scary. Quite a few students were allready aware of M$'s buyouts of various departments:
Student Computing Services and the Business departments get to offer MSCE for a grand total of about $3000 (wait! that's an $8000 discount compared to other places! gee i wonder how much they're actually getting charged?)
The college of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is rumored to get anything they want from M$, but I really don't know much about that.
Several other departments spurradically get software gifts from M$. Two years ago a department got over 50 license packs of both Windows 95 and Office 97. This year they're getting around 20 copies of Office 2K and 5 for NT Server.
There are a couple of effects of this upgrade.
O2K = hardware upgrade. I personally think it's insane to install it on anything with less than 64MB & W98 and difficult to install on something with less than 128MB. Furthermore O2K nixes full backwards compatability with Schedule+, which quite a few people in one department use. The only way to share scedules then is to get a funky M$ "postoffice" mail server ($$). Fortunately there was a way to reinstall Schedule+.
So the department suddenly has $10,000 of justifyable need for upgrades because they're trying to install O2K on 20 P100's with 32MB and need a new M$ postoffice to share schedules.
For me to endorse this is suicidal. My payroll budget is stripped and helping them utalize these wonderful new gifts from M$ would put me out of work, unless they can get more funding from the University when enrollment is going down.
I wonder how long untill some SCS person complains about how slow Netware is making all the machines (and it does with Win95/98)... and M$ steps up, provides the software. Then suddently SCS spends a bit on hardware and M$ certification courses are required for your job growth in a career that will rarely break $15/hour & never pay overtime (state law that no student can work more than 40/week - i think).
...of course Gateway is pleased as peaches. They've just about got exclusivity for new system purchasing.
It really hurts to be "#1 most wired public school"... now WSU's gotta live up to it.
Fortunatly Linux provides a wonderful alternative to M$'s domination plan. This year almost every system that I've seen in EECS that was running some proprietary UNIX has moved to Linux (Redhat, none the less Linux). CS students are starting out on Linux, and Junior/Senior level students learn assembly by programming for the Unix system. This year the LUG at WSU has a regular gang of 15 to 20 and growing. All calculus students are forced to do "Mathematica" labs, on RH 5.2 boxes. Linux was covered once in the campus paper, and I'm hearing rumors about a few grad students working on cluster computing (Beowulf?!) for analyzing scientific data. Finally Unix System administrating has been taught 2 semesters straight and is getting a lot of attention from MIS majors.
crazy place to go to school, that's for sure...
No, I'm not making this up. I know a few CS professors and researchers at the local universities that have these machines. Although they've thought about replacing the OS, the risk is too high. The threat is that all the machines would be taken away and that's significant value to the university.
This gets Microsoft two big advantages. First, cutting edge research gets developed on their OS. Other OSes may get supported on other boxes, but that's more effort. At least Microsoft is sure the software works on their system. Unix development becomes the second choice.
Second, and more indirect, is that these professors starting using Microsoft as their primary OS. The universities typically don't give the professors multiple machines. So, this influence propigates through the rest of the department and to the students.
Most of the professors realize they are being used, and try to work around it as much as possible, but with research money and resource being scarce, they have to use the machines the best they can.
- |Daryll
Like MIT, Stanford's CS department has a new
Gates building.
As at MIT, there are no production Windows NT
Servers in the Gates building.
However, the Graduate School of Business (both
Stanford's and MIT's) is heavily Microsoft-biased.
Everyone *must* have a computer in the GSB NT
Domain.
It's a good strategy -- people who don't know any
better assume that the best and brightest MIT and
Stanford CS students have some relationship with
Microsoft, and the future PHBs who will eventually
make the real decisions get indoctrinated.
Incidentally, behind the scenes, the Stanford
GSB's entire infrastructure relies on two HP
Vectras running ISC DHCPd. They were literally
about to be thrown away because they weren't
powerful enough to run NT anymore. Despite
three months of effort by full-time Microsoft
employees with the personal attention of Steve
Ballmer (Stanford GSB alum), the high-end HP
servers donated to the GSB could not be made to
run Microsoft's DHCP server reliably. According
to nmap, the primary server is still running the
kernel I installed in December 1997. It's not
unlikely that they haven't been rebooted since I
left Stanford 18 months ago.
My new job is more fun.
Brandeis is small enough to lie below Microsoft's
radar. For the most part, we get to make decisions
based on merit. This means Linux, BSD, or OpenVMS
on the server end, Windows NT on administrative
desktops, and a mix of about 77% Win95/98, 22%
MacOS, and 1% other in the dorms.
Everyone's paychecks come from Oracle for Linux --
pressure to move to Linux came from NT sysadmins
unsatisfied with the reliability of Oracle on NT.
Student records still live in 20-year-old software
on the VAX (*probably* y2k compliant) because no
off-the-shelf solution does everything the old
COBOL hacks do.
To add to the earlier comment about Penn State and Microsoft, here is the campus newspaper's story:
Microsoft joining Penn State family
The most frighting comment has to be this one:
Steve Stigers (junior-political science) said he thinks the contract probably won't make much of a difference. "Microsoft's the only software that's readily available anyway," he said.
Finkployd
It'll be a long time - 3-5 years, before Microsoft starts to reap any rewards from this tactic. But they will reap the rewards. The best time to stop this strategy is now - at the beginning. Not four years down the road when we can all see first-hand the results of a unix-deprived IT community.
--
- The server is not interesting. No one cares what operating system the server is running. The server is NOT run by the scientific staff, therefore it is irrelevant.
- The client is not interesting. The client is used for low-brow stuff like e-mail and TeXifying documents. Since e-mail programs and TeX are available for any OS, it is utterly irrelevant.
So then what IS important? Is there anything else except for clients and servers?Strange enough, there is. It is the very small category of computers that are used for Real Work. I mean the computers which are performing the Important Computation, which are running the Experimental Operating System, or the computer cluster running PVM which is doing the new Parallel Algorithm.
That's only a very small part of all the computer systems, but that's the part that actually matters. And nowadays, if it is not running a home-brewn OS, it is increasingly often running Linux.
This small percentage of computers on which real research is done isn't likely to show up in the statistics. However, this is the most important part. It's the part on which people are actually trained.
OK, my 0.05$...