I wouldn't be surprised if they came from Star Wars.
Actually, it came from Google. Sorta.
Apache Hadoop is an implementation of MapReduce that Google uses in their search engine. I believe the details were found in a paper Google released on it's implementation of MapReduce.
The claim was that there were no examples of people using open alternatives, which was false.
First, that's not what the Gartner guy said and the previous posters comment has to be taken in the context of what the Gartner guy said to be meaningful in this discussion. The summary is even misleading.
I know shooting off without RTFA is the norm around here, but that doesn't make it right. Here's the emails where that question was raised. (emphasis added)
Dear Mr. Silver, recently I attended a Gartner presentation in Brussels by Nikos Drakon on OSS. I told him that at the European Parliament we would be interested in visiting one or more sites where OSS workstations are implemented on a large scale. He was kind enough to send me your presentation titled "Client OS and Office: is Open Source in Your future?". I find this presentation brilliant, and very useful.
At the European Parliament we often receive questions from Members on "why have we not migrated our workstations to OSS?" and we are examining the possibilities. We definitely do not want to embark in a migration without having verified that others have done it successfully before us, and that the benefits would exceed the disadvantages. In this spirit, we would like to visit 2 or 3 successful sites, if any exist.
We have a base of 11.000 PC's (in the process of migrating from Win NT + Ofiice 97 to Win XP + Office 2003).
The question is: can you help me obtaining the name and e-mail or adress of a contact person in some of the main Organizations that have installed, and are working with, OSS workstations ? I am thinking of the Organizations you quote in your slide: -city of Munich -city of Bergen (N) -Allied Irish Bank -NSW RTA and others: -Bundestag (Germany) -Ville de Paris -etc. Regards Pietro Bianchessi
And the response the guy from Gartner gave was:
Dear Mr. Bianchessi,
Thank you for your inquiry on desktop Linux and open source office products.
The organizations I mentioned in my presentation are in their infancy, if that, in their open source desktop deployments. I have not spoken to any sizable deployments of Linux on the desktop and only one or two StarOffice deployments. Here is the status of the ones you mentioned.
-City of Munich â" in the planning phase -City of Bergen (N) â" this organization is not doing Linux desktop. I mentioned these people as an example of the Linux hype. There was an erroneous press report and since then the CIO has been trying to correct it, saying that they are doing servers, not Linux desktops. -Allied Irish Bank â" Sun and AIB put out a press release last year, but Sun informed me a few months ago that AIB was not doing reference calls. You can ask your Sun representatives to connect you with a reference. -NSW RTA â" This is another Sun reference, but they are only doing StarOffice, not Sun Java (Linux) Desktop. Again, Sun should be able to connect you.
I continue to work with my colleague, Andrea DiMaio, to find references at these and other government organizations. We will keep you in mind as we speak with other organizations that might be appropriate references and ask their permission to give you their contact information. Unless I hear otherwise, I will assume we are free to give them your information and ask them to contact you.
I would be happy to discuss your Linux desktop plans with you on an ongoing basis if you like and I believe Ms. Heyneman can help you arrange a call with me. I recently spoke with a large bank that had been seriously considering Linux for a large portion of their users but found that staying with Windows would be less expensive. There may be other benefits that government organizations have considered that companies cannot (like economic benefit) and we can discuss that, but I cannot share this organizationâ(TM)s name or contac
The Munich effort is a giant success for Open Source, specifically Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org. It is NOT a success for Linux with less than 1% of migrations to Linux on the desktop.
So the solution is to start even more Linux migration efforts so it becomes imposssible for them to beat Linux migration.
If you want to convince people to migrate to Linux, you need to show them successful examples. A 1% migration after 3-4 years is not a success.
Maybe there are some, but the Munich migration isn't one. If you want to show the guy was completely off base, you have to show successful Windows to Linux migrations for the type he was responding to that were completed before 2005 and can be classified as mature.
Well said. You do what's right even if it means it won't be easy. The good news is, we live in a country where the chances of being assassinated by government officials is not as great.
My opinion to the submitter...
Could mean some headaches, so prepare for them by consulting with an attorney.
More importantly, if this is something that the FBI or other agencies are going to be interested as you say, then why not go straight to them?
Don't put something out on the internet because it's cool to do so. That's not the right way. Take it through the proper legal channels. Then if it doesn't go forward, you put it out in the wild.
You didn't give details, but it is possible that leaking the information could hinder any potential investigation that the FBI or whoever may need to conduct to get more evidence.
There is no contradiction between supporting both lack of censorship and also current libel laws. If your mind is boggling, I suggest it is because it is inadequate. The right to publish does not exclude the responsibility that then follows.
There are gray areas I hope.
Here's a hypothetical example and I used your link to bring it home. Lets say someone buys airtime for a commercial the premise of which is "Med in Heaven sells overpriced, rat infested fire traps". That not being the case (I hope), you gain an easy victory in court with your libel case.
Should the person be allowed to continue to air those same commercials after the case is over and your only remedy is to take him back to court? Or should the networks refuse to show those commercials?
A bunch of nuclear scientists migrating their unix workstations is not a good case study for migrating government office worker desktops from windows to linux, which is the context of this story.
The part that people take issue in the presentation is when the guy said there were no large scale linux desktop migrations he could refer to when he was asked. That was true. Looking at something doesn't mean you had a successful deployment.
I read the PDF, frankly, I think people are over reacting. The guy said a lot of positive things about linux and open source software and was pretty close with his predictions. There were some areas where he was wrong. I don't understand what all the whining is about.
As for Munich, do you really want to use that as an example? The project started planning around 2003-2004. The goal was to migrate 14,000 desktops and laptops to open source software. It seems like the Munich Linux migration hasn't been a huge success and there were a number of delays along the way. According to the timeline and references in the wikipedia entry, as of November 2008, only 1,200 of the 14,000 computers were migrated to Linux. The big win seems to be OpenOffice.org where 12,000 computers were migrated and 100% moving to Firefox and Thunderbird.
I don't think CERN has ever been big on using Windows on the desktop. After all, it was at CERN that the World Wide Web was created, on a Unix workstation.
Then CERN is not relevant in a story discussing a windows to linux and OSS office suite on the desktop.
High end unix workstations are not the same as typical office worker desktops.
I could return the compliment based on your arguments in favor of Microsoft
I'm not making arguments in favor of Microsoft, I'm making arguments in favor of IE not dieing which you don't seem to understand. It doesn't mean I'm trying to promote IE. I barely use it myself.
I don't drink starbucks coffee. I think it tastes like crap and is too expensive. I think the economic conditions are going to hurt them and they are likely to close more stores as a result. That doesn't mean I think they're going to completely disappear off the face of the planet, even if I think that wouldn't be such a bad thing.
The difference is you're coming across like a fanatic with unjustifiable predictions and it's that kind of crazy attitude that is prevalent in a lot of open source communities that undermines its acceptance. People should take a cue from the Apache foundation. They're probably the biggest reason open source software has spread and they don't go around sounding like uneducated prima donnas.
Stewart owned Cramer because Cramer made the mistake of fucking up in a domain that virtually everybody cares about, and most people know at least a little about.
Stewart owned Cramer because Cramer spilled the beans about how easy it is to manipulate the market and gave examples of things he would do as a hedge fund manager.
It was a video for thestreet.com or something like that. I guess back then he thought the internet was just full of investors and pedophiles and there would be some sort of honor among thieves and they wouldn't rat him out. But once the web was replaced by tubes, people that were afraid of spiders started joining the party.
There's some guy that puts videos collages of cramer on youtube showing how he completely backtracks what he says to make himself look good.
Can't believe that they keep him on the air. Anyone that listens to this guy must not watch the show regularly or have a very poor short term memory.
Since Sun has had mysql they've had a disasterous release, a mass exodus of their mysql developers, and at least three forks. If that is great management and strong leadership then I stand corrected.
MySQL AB was the reason that the release wasn't up to Monty's standards and they had done that in the past before Sun bought them. It wasn't Sun that made it that way.
One would have thought that MySQL AB (now the MySQL department at Sun) should have learned something from our too early release of MySQL 5.0 but unfortunately this is not the case.
So yeah, technically they are Sun employees now, but it was the former MySQL AB guys doing the same thing they did before that caused the release to be the way it was.
The problems Monty seems to have exist before Sun bought them. I remember rumors and news stories about spats with Mickos all th time. Monty created MySQL, then got VC money and didn't have the same amount of control he had. When Sun bought them, he was hoping things would change but they didn't.
Seems like if Monty wanted to be happy, he never should have received outside financing and accepted people he couldn't fire to the companies executive team. Unfortunately, you can be extremely rich or you can be extremely happy, you can't always be both.
What mass exodus? I've only read of maybe 3 people leaving.
I didn't think I needed to expand on Oracle since everyone is speculating about whether mysql even has a future.
Yes you do. Just because people are speculating about something doesn't make it reasonable. Oracle already owns InnoDB which is an important part of MySQL and hasn't used it to screw over MySQL. They also own Berkley DB and have said they will not kill MySQL.
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I wouldn't be surprised if they came from Star Wars.
Actually, it came from Google. Sorta.
Apache Hadoop is an implementation of MapReduce that Google uses in their search engine. I believe the details were found in a paper Google released on it's implementation of MapReduce.
This doesn't say anything if we don't know what kind of records were supposed to be sorted.
It's amazing what you can learn if you actually RTFA.
All of the sort benchmarks measure the time to sort different numbers of 100 byte records.
If that's not good enough for you, post your email address and maybe someone will be kind enough to send you the 100TB and 1PB data files they used.
So what about the French Police ?
The gartner guy made his statement in early 2005. At that time could you use the French police as an example that wasn't in it's infancy?
The Windows to Linux migration didn't even start until 2007.
Maybe they should talk to the "European Commission's Open Source Observatory", when they want information about deployments. DUH !
The domain name osor.eu wasn't even registered until 2006. DUH!
The claim was that there were no examples of people using open alternatives, which was false.
First, that's not what the Gartner guy said and the previous posters comment has to be taken in the context of what the Gartner guy said to be meaningful in this discussion. The summary is even misleading.
I know shooting off without RTFA is the norm around here, but that doesn't make it right. Here's the emails where that question was raised. (emphasis added)
Dear Mr. Silver,
recently I attended a Gartner presentation in Brussels by Nikos Drakon on OSS. I told him that at the European Parliament we would be interested in visiting one or more sites where OSS workstations are implemented on a large scale. He was kind enough to send me your presentation titled "Client OS and Office: is Open Source in Your future?". I find this presentation brilliant, and very useful.
At the European Parliament we often receive questions from Members on "why have we not migrated our workstations to OSS?" and we are examining the possibilities. We definitely do not want to embark in a migration without having verified that others have done it successfully before us, and that the benefits would exceed the disadvantages. In this spirit, we would like to visit 2 or 3 successful sites, if any exist.
We have a base of 11.000 PC's (in the process of migrating from Win NT + Ofiice 97 to Win XP +
Office 2003).
The question is: can you help me obtaining the name and e-mail or adress of a contact person
in some of the main Organizations that have installed, and are working with, OSS workstations ?
I am thinking of the Organizations you quote in your slide:
-city of Munich
-city of Bergen (N)
-Allied Irish Bank
-NSW RTA
and others:
-Bundestag (Germany)
-Ville de Paris
-etc.
Regards
Pietro Bianchessi
And the response the guy from Gartner gave was:
Dear Mr. Bianchessi,
Thank you for your inquiry on desktop Linux and open source office products.
The organizations I mentioned in my presentation are in their infancy, if that, in their open source desktop deployments. I have not spoken to any sizable deployments of Linux on the desktop and only one or two StarOffice deployments. Here is the status of the ones you mentioned.
-City of Munich â" in the planning phase
-City of Bergen (N) â" this organization is not doing Linux desktop. I mentioned these people as an example of the Linux hype. There was an erroneous press report and since then the CIO has been trying to correct it, saying that they are doing servers, not Linux desktops.
-Allied Irish Bank â" Sun and AIB put out a press release last year, but Sun informed me a few months ago that AIB was not doing reference calls. You can ask your Sun representatives to connect you with a reference.
-NSW RTA â" This is another Sun reference, but they are only doing StarOffice, not Sun Java (Linux)
Desktop. Again, Sun should be able to connect you.
I continue to work with my colleague, Andrea DiMaio, to find references at these and other
government organizations. We will keep you in mind as we speak with other organizations that might
be appropriate references and ask their permission to give you their contact information. Unless I hear otherwise, I will assume we are free to give them your information and ask them to contact you.
I would be happy to discuss your Linux desktop plans with you on an ongoing basis if you like and I believe Ms. Heyneman can help you arrange a call with me. I recently spoke with a large bank that
had been seriously considering Linux for a large portion of their users but found that staying with
Windows would be less expensive. There may be other benefits that government organizations have
considered that companies cannot (like economic benefit) and we can discuss that, but I cannot share this organizationâ(TM)s name or contac
The point is that Munich is a gigantic success
The Munich effort is a giant success for Open Source, specifically Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org. It is NOT a success for Linux with less than 1% of migrations to Linux on the desktop.
So the solution is to start even more Linux migration efforts so it becomes imposssible for them to beat Linux migration.
If you want to convince people to migrate to Linux, you need to show them successful examples. A 1% migration after 3-4 years is not a success.
Maybe there are some, but the Munich migration isn't one. If you want to show the guy was completely off base, you have to show successful Windows to Linux migrations for the type he was responding to that were completed before 2005 and can be classified as mature.
I imagine you'd get an injunction against that action this time
That's my point. The injunction is essentially censoring the individual. In the situation I described, I don't think it's a bad thing.
My point was that censorship is not a completely separate from supporting current libel laws, as the original poster suggested.
OK, so buy a domain from an offshore registrar. Better yet, have someone offshore buy it from an offshore registrar.
Their offshore is our shore. Doh!
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way
just post as a comment. Slashdot would never remove content...
Never say never.
I think other registrars can see that info as well.
How appropriate considering the other story today.
Well said. You do what's right even if it means it won't be easy. The good news is, we live in a country where the chances of being assassinated by government officials is not as great.
My opinion to the submitter...
Could mean some headaches, so prepare for them by consulting with an attorney.
More importantly, if this is something that the FBI or other agencies are going to be interested as you say, then why not go straight to them?
Don't put something out on the internet because it's cool to do so. That's not the right way. Take it through the proper legal channels. Then if it doesn't go forward, you put it out in the wild.
You didn't give details, but it is possible that leaking the information could hinder any potential investigation that the FBI or whoever may need to conduct to get more evidence.
There is no contradiction between supporting both lack of censorship and also current libel laws. If your mind is boggling, I suggest it is because it is inadequate. The right to publish does not exclude the responsibility that then follows.
There are gray areas I hope.
Here's a hypothetical example and I used your link to bring it home. Lets say someone buys airtime for a commercial the premise of which is "Med in Heaven sells overpriced, rat infested fire traps". That not being the case (I hope), you gain an easy victory in court with your libel case.
Should the person be allowed to continue to air those same commercials after the case is over and your only remedy is to take him back to court? Or should the networks refuse to show those commercials?
The part about migration is only mentioned in your post.
And in the PDF in this story which is the context of this discussion.
That's besides the point.
A bunch of nuclear scientists migrating their unix workstations is not a good case study for migrating government office worker desktops from windows to linux, which is the context of this story.
Try searching for OpenOffice jobs.
What does OpenOffice have to do with this thread regarding linux desktop deployments?
OpenOffice is not Linux and it can run on other platforms.
Having migrated only 1,200 out of 14,000 computers to linux by 2008 doesn't seem like a great example.
The part that people take issue in the presentation is when the guy said there were no large scale linux desktop migrations he could refer to when he was asked. That was true. Looking at something doesn't mean you had a successful deployment.
I read the PDF, frankly, I think people are over reacting. The guy said a lot of positive things about linux and open source software and was pretty close with his predictions. There were some areas where he was wrong. I don't understand what all the whining is about.
As for Munich, do you really want to use that as an example? The project started planning around 2003-2004. The goal was to migrate 14,000 desktops and laptops to open source software. It seems like the Munich Linux migration hasn't been a huge success and there were a number of delays along the way. According to the timeline and references in the wikipedia entry, as of November 2008, only 1,200 of the 14,000 computers were migrated to Linux. The big win seems to be OpenOffice.org where 12,000 computers were migrated and 100% moving to Firefox and Thunderbird.
I don't think CERN has ever been big on using Windows on the desktop. After all, it was at CERN that the World Wide Web was created, on a Unix workstation.
Then CERN is not relevant in a story discussing a windows to linux and OSS office suite on the desktop.
High end unix workstations are not the same as typical office worker desktops.
You are correct. A core difference being that in 2005, SuSE Linux was a better respected distribution (based out of Germany, ffs) than it is now.
You know the Germans always make good stuff.
How large is CERN and were they using linux on their desktops before this study was published?
I could return the compliment based on your arguments in favor of Microsoft
I'm not making arguments in favor of Microsoft, I'm making arguments in favor of IE not dieing which you don't seem to understand. It doesn't mean I'm trying to promote IE. I barely use it myself.
I don't drink starbucks coffee. I think it tastes like crap and is too expensive. I think the economic conditions are going to hurt them and they are likely to close more stores as a result. That doesn't mean I think they're going to completely disappear off the face of the planet, even if I think that wouldn't be such a bad thing.
The difference is you're coming across like a fanatic with unjustifiable predictions and it's that kind of crazy attitude that is prevalent in a lot of open source communities that undermines its acceptance. People should take a cue from the Apache foundation. They're probably the biggest reason open source software has spread and they don't go around sounding like uneducated prima donnas.
I'm not saying you're wrong but you haven't refuted the claim regarding large desktop deployments in the EU.
Here's one that is large but probably hasn't been deployed and isn't in the EU.
Also, since the study is 5 years old, you would need to find references of large desktop deployments in the EU that are at least that old.
is LHC running Windows?
Do they have a large deployment of Linux desktops? Sounds like they're just using it for their grid.
Actually, I suspect that 2 of them are no longer my girlfriends because I stopped answering the phone when they called.
Oh, so you defend your use of a stereo type by promoting another stereotype that women like to talk on the phone way too much? :)
Stewart owned Cramer because Cramer made the mistake of fucking up in a domain that virtually everybody cares about, and most people know at least a little about.
Stewart owned Cramer because Cramer spilled the beans about how easy it is to manipulate the market and gave examples of things he would do as a hedge fund manager.
It was a video for thestreet.com or something like that. I guess back then he thought the internet was just full of investors and pedophiles and there would be some sort of honor among thieves and they wouldn't rat him out. But once the web was replaced by tubes, people that were afraid of spiders started joining the party.
There's some guy that puts videos collages of cramer on youtube showing how he completely backtracks what he says to make himself look good.
Can't believe that they keep him on the air. Anyone that listens to this guy must not watch the show regularly or have a very poor short term memory.
Since Sun has had mysql they've had a disasterous release, a mass exodus of their mysql developers, and at least three forks. If that is great management and strong leadership then I stand corrected.
Have you ever read Monty's blog?
MySQL AB was the reason that the release wasn't up to Monty's standards and they had done that in the past before Sun bought them. It wasn't Sun that made it that way.
One would have thought that MySQL AB (now the MySQL department at Sun) should have learned something from our too early release of MySQL 5.0 but unfortunately this is not the case.
So yeah, technically they are Sun employees now, but it was the former MySQL AB guys doing the same thing they did before that caused the release to be the way it was.
The problems Monty seems to have exist before Sun bought them. I remember rumors and news stories about spats with Mickos all th time. Monty created MySQL, then got VC money and didn't have the same amount of control he had. When Sun bought them, he was hoping things would change but they didn't.
Seems like if Monty wanted to be happy, he never should have received outside financing and accepted people he couldn't fire to the companies executive team. Unfortunately, you can be extremely rich or you can be extremely happy, you can't always be both.
What mass exodus? I've only read of maybe 3 people leaving.
I didn't think I needed to expand on Oracle since everyone is speculating about whether mysql even has a future.
Yes you do. Just because people are speculating about something doesn't make it reasonable. Oracle already owns InnoDB which is an important part of MySQL and hasn't used it to screw over MySQL. They also own Berkley DB and have said they will not kill MySQL.