You said you find bugs and report them so they get integrated back into the kernel. Is that a specialty of OSS, or do you also get this with other proprietary products? Well you can find a bug in a proprietary OS - meaning you have a reproducable malfunction of the OS - but that's not the same as identifying the line of code that's causing the malfunction, changing the source code, testing that the change actually solves the problem correctly *in your environment* and then submitting the fix back to your supporting vendor.
No you certainly can't do that with a proprietary OS. The move to Linux on Wall Street was largely driven by the decisions of CTOs looking to reduce the bottom line by moving towards commodity hardware (as others have mentioned here), BUT all the geek engineers on Wall St. love the practical aspects of working in open source. Some of us love the philosophical aspects of open source too!
as in
-as easy to identify bugs
-no problem contacting the right people (developers)
-bugs getting fixed on a reasonable timescale
The article includes a lot of confusion and/or FUD about licensing.
"There's a great fear sometimes, that if I use open source, will I lose my intellectual property?" acknowledged Novell's Levy. Other panelists Randy Hergett, director of engineering for the Open Source and Linux Organizations at HP, and Marcus Rex, CTO at the Linux Foundation, sought to assuage those fears.
"The current license for Linux requires you give back any changes you make to the open source community, but there's no way anyone can require those assurances and there's no way we'd know," Rex said.
Someone needs to sit down with some of these people and explain to them what the GPL actually says. It doesn't require software written to run on Linux to be GPL'd. Even if you had some reason why you wanted to modify the Linux kernel itself (and why the hell would a Wall Street firm want to!?), you wouldn't need to GPL your modifications unless you were turning around and selling or distributing the modified version publicly.
I work in one of the top 5 Wall Street Firms. Linux is our default OS and represents about 85% of our server deployments. I can tell you that we absolutely do contribute kernel modifications back to the community - the main reason being that when we find kernel bugs (and we do) we need them integrated back into a vendor supported kernel before we'll even consider deploying them into production.
Slashdot Mirror
You can run ZFS on Linux via FUSE. This would probably achieve exactly what the OP is looking for. See http://zfs-fuse.net/
No you certainly can't do that with a proprietary OS. The move to Linux on Wall Street was largely driven by the decisions of CTOs looking to reduce the bottom line by moving towards commodity hardware (as others have mentioned here), BUT all the geek engineers on Wall St. love the practical aspects of working in open source. Some of us love the philosophical aspects of open source too! as in
-as easy to identify bugs
-no problem contacting the right people (developers)
-bugs getting fixed on a reasonable timescale
The article includes a lot of confusion and/or FUD about licensing.
Someone needs to sit down with some of these people and explain to them what the GPL actually says. It doesn't require software written to run on Linux to be GPL'd. Even if you had some reason why you wanted to modify the Linux kernel itself (and why the hell would a Wall Street firm want to!?), you wouldn't need to GPL your modifications unless you were turning around and selling or distributing the modified version publicly.
I work in one of the top 5 Wall Street Firms. Linux is our default OS and represents about 85% of our server deployments. I can tell you that we absolutely do contribute kernel modifications back to the community - the main reason being that when we find kernel bugs (and we do) we need them integrated back into a vendor supported kernel before we'll even consider deploying them into production.