Perhaps sun wants to go to the desktop with linux. This (buying staroffice) is a perfectly logical move. They _must_ fight microsoft where its strength are unless the don't want slowly loose marketshare to mssql. Don't laugh, many companies _will_ buy mssql for enterprise servers, ms wants to go there and they will get there. Give them two years of marketing (32 proc. for win2000 anybody?), and they will be there. If by than ms also still has _this_ kind of dominance in deskops and perhaps small servers and proprietary protocolls and UIs and can offer a really competing product - then say goodbye to sun.
Well, they could also just hire the developers (which they have before) to get the know-how, or buy a company which has analogous know-how. But the important thing is marketing, look at the comments in all the treads about xfs. How many people here are really in need of a journalling filesystem? How many people do even know what journalling is? There is this babbling about this cool sgi thing, which will now be available for linux too, yeah. Anyway, with or without source, Microsoft could get something which is _like_ xfs, the point is that they are not able to say: "Hey, we have xfs too, based on the original sources.". They will have at least to pretend they reengineered(sp?) it, and everyone will think this feature has the burden of being newly developed (esp. by Microsoft) from scratch. The shiny feature of using an established product is disappeared.
Ethan, I agree with most of what you say. But theres one problem in todays OS-industry. From my expirience the main point to get people to use linux or bsd is the superior stability. If a company (nowadays its MS, but it could have been i.e. ibm) has a defacto monopoly and a very strong public image, the only way to compete is in fact to be cheaper AND better. If one uses bsd-license, he gives away all his advantages but gains nothing when it comes to easily portable features like filesystems etc.. So, while I wish the BSD-people the very best, I believe in fact that in such wierd circumstances as todays IT-industrie, GPL is the way to go for many things.
You will have problems to sue someone when there are very critical areas. Think of a company writing software for nuclear power plants. When there is a "relatively" small failure, lets say 1.000.000 have to leave their homes for a while for security reasons, there are just some companies which could pay and stay in business. So - thats what insurance-companies are for already nowadays. This could be a great opportunity for a new kind of insurances, perfectly fitting to open source. A insurance-company takes some piece of open source software, reviews it (and the target hardware) and distributes it together with an insurance. Thats the same system as today, you have only eliminated the man in the middle, the software company (who needs them anyway?:>).
You could call this their first publicity stunt in this direction. AFAIK they have done a lot before for linux development, especially for the kernel itself too, which Justin forgot to cite for the press release. Just look at email adresse of at least one regular kernel-dev poster. I think they do as much as before and just call it now "SuSE Labs". This could be intended to just silence the dumb accusations about SuSE only ripping off linux.
It seems like you didn't get the whole story. This wasn't a kid that was using his student's home page for distributing the latest and greatest script kiddy warez. Ken did a lot of good and hard work (with a server like this, you probably have more to do to secure your site than the average web admin, esp. mass downloads and hacking attempts). He refused also to do banner ads to get some money (I never understood why...). Some time (a week?) ago he was _offered_ that harvard hosts his site - you don't get a url like packetstorm.harvard.edu just for asking or because you are a student. Again - they offered to host him, and if I were him I too would have had the impression they would know what they get. He has every right to complain....
don't be too disappointed, the guy who did the tests showed up on linux-kernel and asked for advice. It seemed clear (I saw some of the results, but I don't remember) that the mindcraft results are not completely wrong. OTOH he also didn't tune linux in every possible way and was told that, but then he didn't have the machines anymore.
I agree wholeheartly... And the government(s) of the world should be convinced that this (free software) is a good thing for the society. They can do some things to help such a fund. I.e. it could get a status where donation could be tax-free, judges could rule that condemned defendants have to pay their fee or part of it in such a fund etc... . An car manufacturer in europe was condemned to pay 100.000.000 EURO (I think) for unfair treatment of customers. Imagine microsoft "donating" 10 percent of a similar fee for this fund - that _would_ rule. I think _this_ is one of the most important investments for the future of open source, otherwise we'll see the suits coming. Open Source developers are very unarmed targets for corporations nowadays.
You better write to Fraunhoffer Institute. THEY own mp3, and if THEY decide "Hey, we have this new version of mp3 (respecting copy protection)", THEY can force everyone who uses THEIR codec to use the newer one in their next software. It's just a matter whether RIAA can convince them to do that
There's a common mistake around at techies and techie-companies (I count MS as a techie-company). The mistake is to belive that every company does think about IT a lot - this is wrong. Some IT's are in a horrible state. My company works for BIG companies and most of the people in the management haver NEVER heard anything about linux. There are just some pople in the IT department, but they have to buy what the managment tells them to. Often they themselves have no clue at all. And the managers often DON'T think about TOC, etc... So imagine the following dialog...
MS-Guy: "Hello, today I want to tell you some bad facts about the Linux-OS." manager: "Ehm - Linux-OS?" MS-guy: "Yes, Linux, the so called free operating system.." manager: "Whaddaya mean, free?" MS-guy: "Yes, they say it's free, you can download it for free or buy for $1.99, but it's not free at all." manager: "You mean, no bucks for licenses?" MS-guy: "Yes, but it's not scalable, it's for small machines only - look, we have a benchmark on this 50000$ machine, and..." manager: "Small machines? You mean we needn't to buy another big server for Win 2000 as a webserver? And it's really free?" MS-guy: "Yes, but...."
[1 hour later, managers office, IT-guy is there]
manager: "Do you know linux, what is it? The MS-guy told me it's for free. Please find out some facts till tomorow." IT-guy: "well, eh, I'll see..."
You're absolutlely correct, but the scope of this report wasn't to test themselves. This shows one weakness of linux in this field. For instance go to spec.org and do a search for operating systems. Results: linux: 0 windows: 257 out of 2314 records.
>Under heavier loads, NT will crash:) Thats another point, _will_ it crash, are there hard facts? It should be simple, combine sql and iis for dynamic web-pages and fire up a hell of clients till it smokes. Why haven't I seen someone doing this tests. Is it true that under heavy loads the NT-"console" will become slow as hell and nearly freeze? Someone pointed out that this has something to do with the kernel scheduling...
Back to the numbers, I actually have seen some, but they wouldn't be considered as hard facts from everyone due to their origin: http://perl.apache.org/bench.txt.
I fully agree with you. Some people were bringung up some ha-howtos as proof for linux high availability, but you can't expect this study to rely on howtos found on the web. The only serious sources of information they will respect are (big) companies. But I expect ibm, compaq, hp not to give out numbers which proof enterprise-readiness of linux (if it exists, I don't know). This would render their own os's needless. We need companies like VAR, Redhead or Suse to give out _hard_ numbers and produce some missing tools. Who would like to put SAP's R3 on a system which is not respected as high end (yes it happened - NT - I know). By the way, are there any usable (non zdnet) benchmarks for linux+apache(modphp+modperl) versus nt+iis+asp+vb?
>Moderators should by default not be allowed to see who posted what. So that we don't have to trust them not to moderate up only their friends. Moderators should not be able to use threshold, sort by points and see the points at all, so that they attention is focused on the content of a message.
on Mr.Mettler. A huge threat(search for Author: lmettler@lamlaw.com, subject: Mettler and Open Source Security ), were REALLY (imho) competent people from comp.security.unix try to explain to him why they think he is wrong (watch out esp. for a kind of dialog between bruce barnett and him, this threat is long). He really doesn't get it. He would be able to get a stone mad at him.
Let me first express my deepest trust in the great moderators to score up my post to where it belongs....
But seriously: Is there some king of (slow) diffusion between moderators and non-moderators? I mean, some moderators will loose interest or change their job/get their first job/get a life:). There could be some kind of algorithm to
decide when a moderator should not be a moderator any more (no moderation has happenend for one month...)
to select new moderators from posters if the number of moderators has fallen below a given number (i.e. 400) or instantly after a moderator has been "degraded".
Wouldn't it help - in a more general way - to convince polititians that free software is in public interest. Imagine some of the United Nations institutions officialy acknowledging "Free Software is something that should be treated in a way (by state laws) that its special benefits for the society are considered". So copyright laws should state that someone violating copyrights with free software cannot be made to pay big bucks - even if he is ibm. He clearly should be stopped infringing this copyright, but thats another matter. There should be other ways to protect programmers of free software from being crunched in court by big companies like charities who help in paying lawyer costs (does something like that exist?). Companies like ibm etc. should be aware that donating for such things could do more for linux and gnu and free programming than investing in linux-companies (which is good too). I fear the day when some company goes to court and gets the judge to rule "ok, i don't know if they are right, but we stop distribution of the linux kernel until we get a final decision (which will be in two years)". OTOH, who will have the money to prosecute violation of the GPL, BSDL, LGPL?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps sun wants to go to the desktop with linux.
This (buying staroffice) is a perfectly logical
move. They _must_ fight microsoft where its
strength are unless the don't want slowly loose
marketshare to mssql.
Don't laugh, many companies _will_ buy mssql
for enterprise servers, ms wants to go there
and they will get there. Give them two years of
marketing (32 proc. for win2000 anybody?),
and they will be there.
If by than ms also still has _this_ kind of
dominance in deskops and perhaps small servers
and proprietary protocolls and UIs and can offer a really competing product - then say goodbye to sun.
Well, they could also just hire the developers (which they have before) to get the know-how, or buy a company which has analogous know-how.
But the important thing is marketing, look at the comments in all the treads about xfs. How many people here are really in need of a journalling filesystem? How many people do even know what journalling is? There is this babbling about this cool sgi thing, which will now be available for linux too, yeah.
Anyway, with or without source, Microsoft could get something which is _like_ xfs, the point is that they are not able to say: "Hey, we have xfs too, based on the original sources.".
They will have at least to pretend they reengineered(sp?) it, and everyone will think this feature has the burden of being newly developed (esp. by Microsoft) from scratch. The shiny feature of using an established product is disappeared.
Ethan,
I agree with most of what you say. But theres one
problem in todays OS-industry. From my expirience
the main point to get people to use linux or bsd
is the superior stability. If a company (nowadays
its MS, but it could have been i.e. ibm) has a
defacto monopoly and a very strong public image,
the only way to compete is in fact to be cheaper AND better.
If one uses bsd-license, he gives away
all his advantages but gains nothing when it comes
to easily portable features like filesystems etc..
So, while I wish the BSD-people the very best, I
believe in fact that in such wierd circumstances
as todays IT-industrie, GPL is the way to go for
many things.
You will have problems to sue someone when there are very critical areas. :>).
Think of a company writing software for nuclear power plants. When there is a "relatively" small failure, lets say 1.000.000 have to leave their homes for a while for security reasons, there are just some companies which could pay and stay in business.
So - thats what insurance-companies are for already nowadays.
This could be a great opportunity for a new kind of insurances, perfectly fitting to open source.
A insurance-company takes some piece of open source software, reviews it (and the target hardware) and distributes it together with an insurance.
Thats the same system as today, you have only eliminated the man in the middle, the software company (who needs them anyway?
lets not get to paranoid, but look at TummyX's posts in his userinfo...
this link is fucking funny, hey /., what about
featuring this under humor topic
You could call this their first publicity stunt in this direction.
AFAIK they have done a lot before for linux development, especially for the kernel itself too, which Justin forgot to cite for the press release. Just look at email adresse of at least one regular kernel-dev poster.
I think they do as much as before and just call it now "SuSE Labs". This could be intended to just silence the dumb accusations about SuSE only ripping off linux.
this stuff was on ken's side BEFORE harvard offered to host it.
Read my post above, this was _not_ "joe students" webpage, harvard wanted the server...
It seems like you didn't get the whole story.
This wasn't a kid that was using his student's home page for distributing the latest and greatest script kiddy warez.
Ken did a lot of good and hard work (with a server like this, you probably have more to do to secure your site than the average web admin, esp. mass downloads and hacking attempts).
He refused also to do banner ads to get some money (I never understood why...).
Some time (a week?) ago he was _offered_ that harvard hosts his site - you don't get a url like packetstorm.harvard.edu just for asking or because you are a student.
Again - they offered to host him, and if I were him I too would have had the impression they would know what they get.
He has every right to complain....
don't be too disappointed, the guy who did the tests showed up on linux-kernel and asked for advice.
It seemed clear (I saw some of the results, but I don't remember) that the mindcraft results are not completely wrong. OTOH he also didn't tune linux in every possible way and was told that, but then he didn't have the machines anymore.
I agree wholeheartly...
And the government(s) of the world should be convinced that this (free software) is a good thing for the society. They can do some things to help such a fund. I.e. it could get a status where donation could be tax-free, judges could rule that condemned defendants have to pay their fee or part of it in such a fund etc... .
An car manufacturer in europe was condemned to pay 100.000.000 EURO (I think) for unfair treatment of customers. Imagine microsoft "donating" 10 percent of a similar fee for this fund - that _would_ rule.
I think _this_ is one of the most important investments for the future of open source, otherwise we'll see the suits coming.
Open Source developers are very unarmed targets for corporations nowadays.
You better write to Fraunhoffer Institute.
THEY own mp3, and if THEY decide "Hey, we have this new version of mp3 (respecting copy protection)", THEY can force everyone who uses THEIR codec to use the newer one in their next software.
It's just a matter whether RIAA can convince them to do that
There's a common mistake around at techies and techie-companies (I count MS as a techie-company).
..." ...."
The mistake is to belive that every company does think about IT a lot - this is wrong. Some IT's are in a horrible state.
My company works for BIG companies and most of the people in the management haver NEVER heard anything about linux. There are just some pople in the IT department, but they have to buy what the managment tells them to. Often they themselves have no clue at all.
And the managers often DON'T think about TOC, etc...
So imagine the following dialog...
MS-Guy: "Hello, today I want to tell you some bad facts about the Linux-OS."
manager: "Ehm - Linux-OS?"
MS-guy: "Yes, Linux, the so called free operating system.."
manager: "Whaddaya mean, free?"
MS-guy: "Yes, they say it's free, you can download it for free or buy for $1.99, but it's not free at all."
manager: "You mean, no bucks for licenses?"
MS-guy: "Yes, but it's not scalable, it's for small machines only - look, we have a benchmark on this 50000$ machine, and
manager: "Small machines? You mean we needn't to buy another big server for Win 2000 as a webserver? And it's really free?"
MS-guy: "Yes, but
[1 hour later, managers office, IT-guy is there]
manager: "Do you know linux, what is it? The MS-guy told me it's for free. Please find out some facts till tomorow."
IT-guy: "well, eh, I'll see..."
You're absolutlely correct, but the scope of this report wasn't to test themselves.
This shows one weakness of linux in this field. For instance go to spec.org and do a search for operating systems.
Results:
linux: 0
windows: 257
out of 2314 records.
>Under heavier loads, NT will crash :)
Thats another point, _will_ it crash, are there hard facts?
It should be simple, combine sql and iis for dynamic web-pages and fire up a hell of clients till it smokes. Why haven't I seen someone doing this tests.
Is it true that under heavy loads the NT-"console" will become slow as hell and nearly freeze? Someone pointed out that this has something to do with the kernel scheduling...
Back to the numbers, I actually have seen some, but they wouldn't be considered as hard facts from everyone due to their origin: http://perl.apache.org/bench.txt.
I fully agree with you. Some people were bringung up some ha-howtos as proof for linux high availability, but you can't expect this study to rely on howtos found on the web. The only serious sources of information they will respect are (big) companies. But I expect ibm, compaq, hp not to give out numbers which proof enterprise-readiness of linux (if it exists, I don't know).
This would render their own os's needless. We need companies like VAR, Redhead or Suse to give out _hard_ numbers and produce some missing tools.
Who would like to put SAP's R3 on a system which is not respected as high end (yes it happened - NT - I know).
By the way, are there any usable (non zdnet) benchmarks for linux+apache(modphp+modperl) versus
nt+iis+asp+vb?
>Moderators should by default not be allowed to see who posted what. So that we don't have to trust them not to moderate up only their friends.
Moderators should not be able to use threshold, sort by points and see the points at all, so that they attention is focused on the content of a message.
on Mr.Mettler. A huge threat(search for Author: lmettler@lamlaw.com, subject: Mettler and Open Source Security ), were REALLY (imho) competent people from comp.security.unix try to explain to him why they think he is wrong (watch out esp. for a kind of dialog between bruce barnett and him, this threat is long). He really doesn't get it. He would be able to get a stone mad at him.
great moderators to score up my post to
where it belongs....
But seriously:
Is there some king of (slow) diffusion between
moderators and non-moderators?
I mean, some moderators will loose interest
or change their job/get their first job/get a life
There could be some kind of algorithm to
decide when a moderator should not be a moderator any more (no moderation has happenend for one month...)
to select new moderators from posters if the number of moderators has fallen below a given number (i.e. 400) or instantly after a moderator has been "degraded".
Wouldn't it help - in a more general way - to
convince polititians that free software is
in public interest.
Imagine some of the United Nations institutions
officialy acknowledging
"Free Software is something that should be
treated in a way (by state laws) that its special
benefits for the society are considered".
So copyright laws should state that someone
violating copyrights with free software
cannot be made to pay big bucks - even
if he is ibm. He clearly should be stopped
infringing this copyright, but thats another
matter.
There should be other ways to protect programmers
of free software from being crunched in court by
big companies like charities who help in paying
lawyer costs (does something like that exist?).
Companies like ibm etc. should be aware that
donating for such things could do more for linux
and gnu and free programming than investing in
linux-companies (which is good too).
I fear the day when some company goes to court
and gets the judge to rule "ok, i don't know
if they are right, but we stop distribution of
the linux kernel until we get a final decision
(which will be in two years)".
OTOH, who will have the money to prosecute
violation of the GPL, BSDL, LGPL?