To keep stock prices high, SCO need to keep the press releases going. Nothing they say will surprise me now. If they said that the Linux kernel was actually given Darl by grey-green aliens with full distribution rights (and rights on derivative works), I wouldn't be surprised...
The issue at hand are the two remaining package systems, which might be technically sound and quite useable, but they still won't have allot of use. Who here has ever heard of SLP and PKG packages? And even then, who here knows of any major applications which distribute their software using those package systems? Sure, SLP and PKG might be a dream to use, but without any actual packages to install, they're (possibly sadly?) not really of any value.
What about other Netscape ^H^H^H iPlanet ^H^H^H^ SunONE products? We use iPlanet 4 and, granted, it's a bit crufty and rough round the egdges, they happily squirt out gigabytes of static content every day (app servers handle all the dynamic stuff)- and our web servers are never under any load.
Also, granted, the naming schemes are inconsistent in iPlanet software. I've worked with only one product that was worse. But the iPlanet directory server is also reputed (sorry, no real experience of it) to be pretty solid - any geeks care to comment on that or any other bits of the iPlanet line?
And again, granted, iPlanet is at the bottom of the Netcraft charts, but the product itself can still take a pounding...
Amen. I used Windows for a long time (I started out my real geek career fixing broken Windows installs and installing Trumpet Winsock onto win3.1), and I still end up using it (haven't yet got Netbackup admin tools or PCVS (ewww) going on Linux workstation at work). I will probably end up rebooting into Windows for the first time in a few weeks tomorrow and of course will notice several things:
I'll be able to fire up evil applications like Notes (don't go there),aim client without any difference.
There will be a basic consistency in the apps I run (your basic corporate desktop)
I'll be able to run more of the apps that I am forced to use for work - the above mentioned, GUI Perforce client (which works great with the Windows GVim, I must say), etc.
However I'll also notice:
I have never been happy with any Windows SSH implementation - putty, F-secure etc, all reek compared to the linux ssh
I'll start spending some time fighting my desktop again rather than doing it
that I am rebooting into Linux as soon as I can...
Anyway, basic marketing premise is keeping an eye on the competition. I'm sure there's some Linux distros under the microscope at Redmond...
We also have similarly equipt sun servers (that suffer from an even higher load). We're talking about 17 SUN 4500's, the ONLY failure over the last four years was due to a fiber controller failing, it was a dual controller, but a firmware mismatch caused the 2nd controller to not come on line properly. 1 outage and it was our fault anyway, if we had upgraded the firmware like we're supposed to it would have never happened.
I used to notice that lots of people had a "little engine that could" Mac story - that SE/30 that kept in ticking years after the end of it's useful life. There are also LETC stories about Sun sparc 20's and their ilk chugging away without interruption as well.
These guys at least did know how to build great hardware.
Buying broadband is interesting and all that, but what about sharing it? When neighbors get together and link up with wireless and a hub, it's usually to avoid paying for another connection. What if both have a connection, and you have software that can join them together? Then you can get a nice doubling of speed. My neighbor can use my bandwidth when I'm not using it, and vice versa.
I would have done this with a neighbouring company, but all the interested parties left both companies:)
We wanted to each set up a squid cache so we could exchange cached objects between the caches. That way you don't have to be concerned about routing issues, or get pissy at the guys next door for using your bandwidth and theirs downloading binaries from usenet.
If we had tech-savvy neighbours where we are now, I'd still consider it.
"X company are dead cos they dont do linux/wintel".
I have to agree. Every Slashdot post about Sun generates a fair number of "Sun is dying" messages. Yes, Linux on x86 is making some of their past offerings in the blade server market look a bit sad.
This is why they released their own Linux/x86 system. This is the second time Sun have released an x86 based server. This time it just might work.
Besides, Sun have a lot of diverse products - let's not forget that. Granted, the future of computing may not include some of these, but I think they are aware of that.
But even ignoring my uncalled-for snide remark, keeping the "free software" kiddies from sucking up all of the bandwidth is worth $20. Having downloads stall or crawl down at a glacially slow pace is a much worse impediment than paying $20. Amazingly, the $20 fee actually dissuades many of the "ISO collectors" that prowl the net.
I can't help thinking how things might have gone if Mandrake charged a token download fee rather than have the MandrakeClub with it's constantly updating mirror list.
Anyway, I am glad to see that Solaris x86 is out there and getting exposure on slash. I still think it's a bloody good operating system once you get some gnu software onto it.
But didn't Microsoft own a version of Unix at some point? I seem to recall the vendor name on a Unix box that used to run the call managment server at my work was Microsoft.
Xenix. M$ used to be a *nix vendor. They own some copyrights/patents on it as well - so SCO had to pay royalties to M$, as I recall.
I found a copy of SCO Xenix in a surplus electronics store. For 15 bucks (NZ). The TCP/IP drivers (yes, sold seperately) cost $1300!
Agreed this is a start, but the problem isn't holding onto something, try going down the road holding the phone up to your ear. For the most part, people only have/need one hand on the wheel anyway.
People only have one hand on the wheel. Some people need two on the wheel anyhow. In countries like the UK where i live, there are lots of people who drive cars with a manual transmission and talk on mobile phone at the same time. Doh.
Heck, I used to be one of them - I used to drive a 3-cylinder 800cc suzuki car that meant I had to change gear every other second and talk on the phone. That was dumb.
The dangerous part is the lack of concentration....
Bingo. Every time I drive up the motorway I turn into Victor Meldrew at the way people drive, but it's now commonplace to see someone driving with left hand, talking on phone with right hand, and changing lanes without really looking where they are going.
I wish there were a website where you could report people as habitual dangerous drivers. It's scary when somebody overtakes you and you can see that they ddn't even glance over their shoulder to check the blind spot in their car because they were on the phone/stupid...
So "quibbling" over a flavor of *nix, particularly when it comes down to "Sun" vs "Redhat/SuSE/Mandrake/Debian" is quite productive. It sparks the curiousity of the party on the other side, and raises the liklihood that that person might try, like, switch, and strengthen the userbase of the *nix you know and love.
Quibbling in this instance is good - it's good to see the differences (e.g. SVR4 pkgadd vs rpm vs apt etc.).
On the whole, it's best for all *nix users if people find the *nix that suits them - I have very hazy recollections from marketing school along those lines - the more differentiation there is, the bigger the market is, etc.
However, I didn't finish the course because I discovered the internet that summer, so what do I know anyway?:)
Personally, I think the role of sysadmin suffers from having so many different facets: supporting people/applications, installing software, adding/removing users, deploying applications/troubleshooting/dealing with security etc.
Because most people can do some of these things, they can end up doing sysadmin work. Does that make someone a sysadmin? I have interviewed for sysadmin roles before and always been amazed at the people who have used an application, or watched and install, and then applied for the sysadmin job. It's not enough.
The problem is, lots of people doing this kind of work without the training and experience (and often, no mentor either - nontechnical boss) give the profession a bad name - hence the whole BOFH subculture.
This link describes some of the issues related to this job that isn't very mature at all...
I download the isos, so I felt compelled to join the club when they announced it. Seems fair. I bought my dad a copy of Mandrake 7.2 once, but I never bought my own boxed product.
I'll renew the club membership when asked.
It would be a shame if Mandrake were to go out of business. 9.0 is proof that you can get by without Windows if you want to. It's been good for promoring Linux on the desktop because people know that it is (I know it's not perfect) easy to install and get up and running with.
There are so many distros out there, from single-floppy toys to DVD-sized that compete for a user's attention that it's nice to have a poster child distro or two (eg Red Hat or Mandrake). One of those poster child distros going down the toilet will send the wrong message to lots of those people that might otherwise start looking at alternatives to Windows (especially with the new licensing).
I hope the Mandrake guys are reading this discussion in Paris and taking on board some of the constructive criticism - I think they probably could do more to help themselves.
There's one big thing, I think, that will prevent this from happening: the GPL. Any company that does any proprietary work on Linux will be forced to give its source code away to anybody who asks for it, making it impossible for that company to have a competitive edge in the marketplace. That takes the wind out of the old business plan.
As the post above says, Apple took BSD and made it a core part of their business.
Will we see more distros based on BSD? Will someone make a Big Push to get it on the desktop?
I'd rather use that than Windows. Still don't know if I'd want to pay:)
Linux has been edging into the low-to-mid end market, even stealing Sun's thunder with Oracle buy-in. Sun is being squeezed in the middle, and must decide whether they want to focus on the high-end enterprise, or the middle tier web/app/database servers.
yes and no. Oracle and Solaris/sparc still make for very large database servers - and you get support for it - at a cost of course.
Sun has also made inroads into Linux, releasing it's own distribution (I know it's a rebadged redhat, but it's a start - and Sun's tech support will support both their linux distribution and Solaris directly).
Apart from the machines having a US keyboard and driving everybody crazy with unfamiliar key mappings, the CDE interface disturbed some of the less unix-savvy students.
After using KDE for a few months myself, I found CDE quite annoying as well.
Thankfully the machines had the Gnome 1.4 eval that comes with Solaris 8, and I was able to get most everything I wanted out of it - apart from Vim:)
What I liked about BBSes was that some of them had FidoNet. It took a couple of days to email my then girlfriend who had gasp, (this was in 1994) a real internet account at the local university and get a reply, but it was free.
Locally, IBM sponsored getting the fidonet traffic to the rest of the fido network.
Is it a fair analogy to now substitude 802.11 packets for Fidonet messages?
I run a couple of x86 machines with Solaris 8 - a DNS server and a machine that runs things like analog for web stat processing/internal websites (things like Wiki, misc stuff really).
It was a minor nuisance to install the RAID driver for a Compaq DL-380, but once I found the Solaris drivers (yes, they existed!), it was just like installing on a sparc machine.
It was even easier to take a discarded workstation and turn it into a temporary DNS server. No real cross-platform issues - additional software came from sunfreeware or was compiled from source.
It was also funny seeing people trying to run i386 binaries on sparc servers or vice versa - you do need to make sure that you keep compiled code in a distinct place.
Unless I need to compile code, I generally don't notice the difference - which I would have if I had installed a BSD or Linux on them.
Slashdot Mirror
To keep stock prices high, SCO need to keep the press releases going. Nothing they say will surprise me now. If they said that the Linux kernel was actually given Darl by grey-green aliens with full distribution rights (and rights on derivative works), I wouldn't be surprised...
Solaris uses .pkg packages. Have a look at http://www.sunfreeware.com for a few examples.
Also, granted, the naming schemes are inconsistent in iPlanet software. I've worked with only one product that was worse. But the iPlanet directory server is also reputed (sorry, no real experience of it) to be pretty solid - any geeks care to comment on that or any other bits of the iPlanet line? And again, granted, iPlanet is at the bottom of the Netcraft charts, but the product itself can still take a pounding ...
I'll be able to fire up evil applications like Notes (don't go there),aim client without any difference.
There will be a basic consistency in the apps I run (your basic corporate desktop)
I'll be able to run more of the apps that I am forced to use for work - the above mentioned, GUI Perforce client (which works great with the Windows GVim, I must say), etc.
However I'll also notice:
I have never been happy with any Windows SSH implementation - putty, F-secure etc, all reek compared to the linux ssh
I'll start spending some time fighting my desktop again rather than doing it
that I am rebooting into Linux as soon as I can...
Anyway, basic marketing premise is keeping an eye on the competition. I'm sure there's some Linux distros under the microscope at Redmond ...
I used to notice that lots of people had a "little engine that could" Mac story - that SE/30 that kept in ticking years after the end of it's useful life. There are also LETC stories about Sun sparc 20's and their ilk chugging away without interruption as well.
These guys at least did know how to build great hardware.
I would have done this with a neighbouring company, but all the interested parties left both companies :)
We wanted to each set up a squid cache so we could exchange cached objects between the caches. That way you don't have to be concerned about routing issues, or get pissy at the guys next door for using your bandwidth and theirs downloading binaries from usenet.
If we had tech-savvy neighbours where we are now, I'd still consider it.
I have to agree. Every Slashdot post about Sun generates a fair number of "Sun is dying" messages. Yes, Linux on x86 is making some of their past offerings in the blade server market look a bit sad.
This is why they released their own Linux/x86 system. This is the second time Sun have released an x86 based server. This time it just might work.
Besides, Sun have a lot of diverse products - let's not forget that. Granted, the future of computing may not include some of these, but I think they are aware of that.
I can't help thinking how things might have gone if Mandrake charged a token download fee rather than have the MandrakeClub with it's constantly updating mirror list.
Anyway, I am glad to see that Solaris x86 is out there and getting exposure on slash. I still think it's a bloody good operating system once you get some gnu software onto it.
GNU/Solaris, anyone? :)
Xenix. M$ used to be a *nix vendor. They own some copyrights/patents on it as well - so SCO had to pay royalties to M$, as I recall.
I found a copy of SCO Xenix in a surplus electronics store. For 15 bucks (NZ). The TCP/IP drivers (yes, sold seperately) cost $1300!
People only have one hand on the wheel. Some people need two on the wheel anyhow. In countries like the UK where i live, there are lots of people who drive cars with a manual transmission and talk on mobile phone at the same time. Doh.
Heck, I used to be one of them - I used to drive a 3-cylinder 800cc suzuki car that meant I had to change gear every other second and talk on the phone. That was dumb.
The dangerous part is the lack of concentration. ...
Bingo. Every time I drive up the motorway I turn into Victor Meldrew at the way people drive, but it's now commonplace to see someone driving with left hand, talking on phone with right hand, and changing lanes without really looking where they are going.
I wish there were a website where you could report people as habitual dangerous drivers. It's scary when somebody overtakes you and you can see that they ddn't even glance over their shoulder to check the blind spot in their car because they were on the phone/stupid...
Quibbling in this instance is good - it's good to see the differences (e.g. SVR4 pkgadd vs rpm vs apt etc.).
On the whole, it's best for all *nix users if people find the *nix that suits them - I have very hazy recollections from marketing school along those lines - the more differentiation there is, the bigger the market is, etc.
However, I didn't finish the course because I discovered the internet that summer, so what do I know anyway? :)
Because most people can do some of these things, they can end up doing sysadmin work. Does that make someone a sysadmin? I have interviewed for sysadmin roles before and always been amazed at the people who have used an application, or watched and install, and then applied for the sysadmin job. It's not enough.
The problem is, lots of people doing this kind of work without the training and experience (and often, no mentor either - nontechnical boss) give the profession a bad name - hence the whole BOFH subculture.
This link describes some of the issues related to this job that isn't very mature at all ...
I'll renew the club membership when asked.
It would be a shame if Mandrake were to go out of business. 9.0 is proof that you can get by without Windows if you want to. It's been good for promoring Linux on the desktop because people know that it is (I know it's not perfect) easy to install and get up and running with.
There are so many distros out there, from single-floppy toys to DVD-sized that compete for a user's attention that it's nice to have a poster child distro or two (eg Red Hat or Mandrake). One of those poster child distros going down the toilet will send the wrong message to lots of those people that might otherwise start looking at alternatives to Windows (especially with the new licensing).
I hope the Mandrake guys are reading this discussion in Paris and taking on board some of the constructive criticism - I think they probably could do more to help themselves.
As the post above says, Apple took BSD and made it a core part of their business.
Will we see more distros based on BSD? Will someone make a Big Push to get it on the desktop?
I'd rather use that than Windows. Still don't know if I'd want to pay :)
yes and no. Oracle and Solaris/sparc still make for very large database servers - and you get support for it - at a cost of course. Sun has also made inroads into Linux, releasing it's own distribution (I know it's a rebadged redhat, but it's a start - and Sun's tech support will support both their linux distribution and Solaris directly).
AIX has it's association with Websphere and DB2.
Sun has it's association with iPlanet.
Apart from the machines having a US keyboard and driving everybody crazy with unfamiliar key mappings, the CDE interface disturbed some of the less unix-savvy students.
After using KDE for a few months myself, I found CDE quite annoying as well.
Thankfully the machines had the Gnome 1.4 eval that comes with Solaris 8, and I was able to get most everything I wanted out of it - apart from Vim :)
Locally, IBM sponsored getting the fidonet traffic to the rest of the fido network.
Is it a fair analogy to now substitude 802.11 packets for Fidonet messages?
It was a minor nuisance to install the RAID driver for a Compaq DL-380, but once I found the Solaris drivers (yes, they existed!), it was just like installing on a sparc machine.
It was even easier to take a discarded workstation and turn it into a temporary DNS server. No real cross-platform issues - additional software came from sunfreeware or was compiled from source.
It was also funny seeing people trying to run i386 binaries on sparc servers or vice versa - you do need to make sure that you keep compiled code in a distinct place.
Unless I need to compile code, I generally don't notice the difference - which I would have if I had installed a BSD or Linux on them.