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Fujitsu Moves Towards Linux
Bernard writes "According to the announcement on the TeamWARE web site: Fujitsu corporation is taking a strategic step towards the next generation platform offerings. Mr. Maeyama, the President of Fujitsu Software Operations, says that "Fujitsu believes that new operating environments, in personal computing especially the emerging Linux alternative, is today a viable solution platform for many customers. Providing software on Linux is therefore a logical step." Note: TeamWARE is part of Fujitsu and has interesting groupware and workflow products. The first announce is about the port of their groupware (Office 5.3) to Linux. "
offering Linux on their Lifebooks would be a better statement. Having the application suite available is a good initial step. Why not bundle it onto the hardware?
Another megacorp gets "a position" on Linux. Real commitment required! Bleh.
Having teamed up with Siemens who was one of the first companies to implement SAP on linux, this seems a fairly straightforwards and logical evolution , I guess
I hope Office (aka Steam) Power stays on the DRS6000 :) I remember that you could only send email to an internet address if you set up about three screens (per address!) of settings first.
An ex-ICLer
-- Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
They are licencees of Solaris from Sun, so what are they going to do on that front?
I have connections with Application Software Technologies (www.aztechcon.com), whose Embedded Systems Group in Green Bay, WI writes the innards to Fujitsu's cell phones. They are looking at all kinds of nifty ways to embed Linux, to do things like play MP3s, do e-mail, read Slashdot *g* from your cell phone. Just ideas being bounced around, but pretty neat anyway.
No sig.
As should be expected these days, there were, there are, and there will be a lot of news like this, about companies adopting Linux, porting their software to Linux, etc.. The question is, are they merely riding the hype or do they really see the value of Linux?
I mean, I've nothing against companies adopting Linux just because it's the "hot thing" right now. But I question where they are really going to support Open Source software, which is what Linux is really about. Seems that with all the media attention Linux is getting, people see Linux as some kind of "hero" system in a David vs. Goliath battle against MS. But how many understand Open Source, the very reason Linux exists?
Perhaps RMS was right when he insisted on the name "GNU/Linux" as opposed to merely "Linux". I personally have always felt that RMS is a little too fanatical and nitpicky about small issues like this, but with the current trend that companies adopting Linux suddenly become "heroic" and admired by all (esp. by people like the Slashdotters), I'm beginning to think that RMS has a very good point in insisting on the name "GNU/Linux". Linux in itself means little -- it's the process behind it, ie., Open Source, that makes it so successful. Indeed, if you want to reap the benefits of Linux as a stable, robust system, doesn't that also mean that your tools and apps have to be robust and stable too? But if so, isn't Open Source the way to achieve robustness and stability in the applications that you run on your Linux kernel?
This may sound too purist, but think about this: isn't the reason we despise MS because of their lousy products? But why don't their products "make it"? It's not a question of "we hate MS therefore let's use Open-Source", but isn't the whole reason MS products suck due to the fact that their development is closed? (Besides their goal to becoming the only software company, that is). And isn't the reason that Linux is so good because it's developed in an Open Source model? Linux is good not because it's Linux nor because the genius Linus wrote it. It's good because it's Open Source.
Now back to my point: I have nothing against companies developing proprietary solutions for Linux. That is good to get Linux into the mainstream. However, keep in mind that for a normal user, she doesn't care if the kernel doesn't crash no matter what; if her proprietary apps continually crash and screw up her report/homework/whatever, that's bad. Worse if she's running an X server that locks up. To her, that is equivalent to a system crash, even if the kernel is still running. One bad component in the system ruins the entire image of "stable and robust" for the average user. Companies to adopt Open Source, and not merely ride on Linux hype. IMHO, a company that decides to try the Open Source model of software development ought to be bigger news than if a company merely announces, "we're porting such and such proprietary software to Linux".
Alright. Enough of this rant. :-)
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
maybe their very cool laptops 'll come with
linux preinstalled soon.
Make it so. (works in Star Trek!)
And, from what I understood from the FAQ, the Linux version is only the server portion of the software. Client software will only run on Windows.
It'd be nice to see client software being also ported to Linux. Of course I can always have any POP3/IMAP client to read my messages, but at least with GroupWise I don't have near as much funcionality with that setup than what I have with the full Windows client.
In the computer/telephone market worldwide (the last time I looked) IBM and Fujitsu compete for the top spots in telephony (IBM ROLM) and computers.
/. user, the software they are offering doesn't seem to bring much to the table. There already is email, calandar, documentation storage methods, and discussion forums (news...etc)
Fujitsu is trying to make sure its 'lotus notes-esque' runs on almost everywhere. Good for them, but will they go ALL the way and be sure the code will run on ANY machine that can run Linux Binaries?
For the average
If Fujitsu or IBM want to make a splash in open source, they should support telephony under Open Sourced Unixes. There is a market void in this catagory, just waiting for someone to fill it with some quality software/hardware.
Even if it is not useful software for 'most of us', the more software that can run in a Linux Binary executable format, the more ALL the machines that can run Linux binaries benefit.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Are they not also a vendor of plug compatible mainframes? Of which there is soon to be a Linux port that runs on the "bare iron" which is to say, without IBM licensed software.
If anyone from Fujitsu is listening: I'll buy your compiler suite in an instant, if you'll give me support for OpenMP!.
I do met and air quality modeling, have dual-processor RH6 desk-side boxes both at home and at the office, and
- need
the parallel for development work (final production tends to be on O2000's and the like)."My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I suspect Teamware Office is a tough sell at the moment, what with no PDA synchronization. Show me an IT manager with a decent budget and I'll show you the Palm cradle in their office. And an IT manager's not going to buy a group calendaring/mail/planning system they can't sync to their Palm.
At the very least, they ought to license Starfish's web-to-Palm sync software for Win32, though between the Java conduit SDK and an XML parser, cross-platform sync for web and client/server alike shouldn't be that hard for these web-groupware vendors to do.
I've had too damned many denial-of-service attacks disguised as Javascript pages, and I'm sick of $%(*&$! idiots who won't talk with me otherwise!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
At our department, the only reason NT's are still on every desktop is TeamWare. All the work are done on Unix (Sun) boxes and 99% of the complaints are because of the NT. TeamWare manages to provide more than its fair share of the problems: we've found it to be slow, unreliable, resource heavy and complicated. And that's only the "client" side. The server operations (like mail) seem to be even worse.
I very strongly suspect, that changing the platform will not make users any happier. Atleast in a very large network, TeamWare is lousy. Try it if its free, but don't pay for it.
- mipe -
I guess the Linux OS is a little easier to obtain than the old IBM OS ;-)