Suse? Green stinks, and it's too European, too German.
Too European? For whom? Americans? Quel horreur! I think we can live with that. Linux is a European operating system, and now getting very popular in the rest of the world. Here in Europe we are more than happy to buy it from a European vendor, but more to the point it is a better product than Red Hat. If I wanted an inferior product just for the sheer thrill of buying from a US company, I'd buy Windows.
Argh! I would be pleased for SuSE to take over Caldera, but not vice-versa. The Caldera engineers might be fine people, but their CEO Ransom Love has a bad attitude to software freedom IMHO, and is not the man I would want at the wheel of any major Linux company, especially a European one.
A few choice bits of vintage RL:
Ransom thinks Linux is proprietary Ransom thinks Microsoft is right about the GPL
Merging with Mandrake is a ridiculous proposition and it's incredibly bad behaviour of a journalist (or someone acting in this role) to suggest something like this.
I submitted the story; timothy posted it. I certainly meant no harm to SuSE, nor was I attempting to act as a journalist (shudder). Rather, I would like to see a large, pan-European distro vendor which can compete effectively with Red Hat, offer large-scale retail supply and support of a superior product into North America, and maintain the lead in Europe that Mandrake and SuSE currently enjoy.
May I ask why a merger with Mandrake is a ridiculous proposition? As a SuSE employee you might know something I don't about the distros. Are you referring to a technical problem or a cultural one? Or both? Or something else?
> and corporations making money is good for everyone at the end of the day,
Good for many in the USA, yes. Not everyone in the USA. Certainly not everyone in the rest of the world.
> Without companies like Microsoft, AOL, Time-Warner and Cisco, do you really think we would be able to maintain the world dominating position we are presently in?
"We in the USA", you mean.
Do you understand now why European governments are investigating the security issues of using Microsoft software? Do you understand why Europeans don't always share your enthusiasm for Microsoft's dominance of the desktop market? Getting locked into a foreign country's product makes us dependent on that country, the way you're dependent on foreign oil. So there is much enthusiasm here for building Linux into a viable product on the desktop: much nicer than tearing the shit out of Alaska, don't you think?
> a hugely visible embodiment of the American Dream.
Well, I certainly agree with that. Microsoft is indeed the hugely visible embodiment of the American Dream: take other people's ideas, package and sell them well, buy the support of governments, viciously fight your competitors with lies, half-truths and innuendo, sew up the distribution channels, winner takes all, and fuck the losers.
Copyright Barons like Gracenote try this sort of happy horseshit all the time, thinking that if enough people jump ship to impact the business, they can always back off and look magnanimous. Well, I don't care whether Gracenote eventually stop attempting lawsuits like this or not: I'm just never going to use them again, period. I understand the arguments about rewarding good behavior. But I'm also aware that if companies fear permanent loss of business from backlash to practices like this, they're less likely to attempt it.
"There really ought to be a section of politically aware sites like/. devoted to upcoming events where people can participate. I know I'd be there sometimes.
So, how about it? How many people would like to see a calendar page about upcoming political events that have significance to us? What do you think? There's a large readership here, and if only a small percentage turn out...it could be noticed. But that's just my opinion. "
Here's one: the Independent Media Center. It's a global network of independent media groups, offering news and opinion on issues like this that the MegaMedia won't cover, including upcoming protest dates and eyewitness coverage of same. I give occasional tech assistance to the group that runs the London site.
(NB: our Philadelphia site uses Slash! I wouldn't mind if the London site used it too!)
</feeble-karma-hoovering-attempt>
We need more info on actions defending Free Speech, IMHO, and we'd be delighted to receive articles, essays, and dates on actions against Copyright Barons like the ones described in this article.
--
JDF
There's some interesting politics behind the video datablade. Media360 is now an Ascential Software product. It's a bundle consisting of Informix IDS and the necessary blades, plus a web front-end. So Ascential's basically selling a value-added app that runs only on Informix. None of the big media players that I'm aware of (CNN, BBC et al) actually use Media360: rather, they all have heavily customized systems based on IDS plus blades plus custom front-ends.
So IBM won't actually be buying Media360, they'll be buying what's installed at the big reference sites.
>Recently released numbers from IDC System Software Research show that "Linux growth in server OS share has been flat for two quarters, and Unix and Novell continue to fall.
And it appears that the other parts of Informix will be staying around as a seperate biz, so we should continue to see their support for OSS.
Informix Corporation owns Informix Software and Ascential Software. The software assets of Informix Software are being sold to IBM for cash, not shares. The Informix Corporation will be renamed Ascential Software, and will take up where its former second subsidiary left off. Informix Software will disappear into a legal entity on a shelf.
Ascential, formerly known as Ardent, has no history of involvement in Free or Open Source software: they're best known for their Extract-Transform-and-Load tool "DataStage". They also sell a few other software tools. But there will be no OSS support from Ascential. If any GPLing or open-sourcing is to happen with the database products, it will have to come from IBM, and I'm sorry to say that today's announcement tells us nothing new about that.
For starters, Informix owns the telecoms market: 8 out of 10 calls placed worldwide transact across an Informix DB.
Second, big chunks of the Time Series Analysis market: several large finance houses including Merrill-Lynch, Morgan-Stanley and Chase use Informix IDS to do speeds and volumes no one else can get near. When you're doing Time Series on trillions of stock ticks per day, that's important.
Third, video: CNN, BBC, RAI, Telecinco and others use IDS and the Video DataBlade for storing video objects in the DB. CNN saves around a million per year by doing real-time ingestion and indexing of video streams, saving them on manual keying of the metadata, and getting video out onto the editors' desktops within 2 seconds.
Fourth, Data Warehousing, esp. in retail: Informix Redbrick is designed for DW, not OLTP, and it shows in the performance. Redbrick also scales to multi-terabyte far more easily than most DBs (including Informix IDS).
Informix has a sizeable, loyal customer base of people that can't get what they need from Oracle or DB2.
IBM will take the IDS/Illustra code and use it to build the next gen of DB2 with improved Object Relational support, plus star-schema support for Data Warehousing, and ride on the revenue of the installed base while they wait for the oven to go "ding". The legacy products like C-ISAM can be maintained at very little expense, giving additional long-term cash cows: it's surprising how much of that is still out there, chuggin' away untended.
Finally, there's headcount: the acquisition will also go roughly halfway toward IBM's recruitment goals for the software business, in which they intend to be one of the 3 serious players in a few years' time.
Actually that's right: the big DW there uses Teradata. Teradata is another DB that's designed to scale up very high, unlike Oracle. But they use Informix Red Brick and Informix IDS for most of the other stuff, and have encountered problems when they've tried Oracle on the very big projects.
You *can* do multi-terabyte with Oracle, but it's not easy, and only makes sense if you're growing into that size from a long history of nice small Oracle DBs. In fact at over 800 gig is when you typically start to run into problems on Oracle. Informix IDS runs into trouble at around 500 or 600 gig. Informix Redbrick scales into multi-terabyte effortlessly, because it was designed for DW.
So for a new project which you know will be multi-terabyte from Day 1, Oracle is not the best choice.
Less effort + fewer DBAs = better price/perf. All businesses like to do things for best value, not just Walmart. I'm speaking of real businesses here, not pretend tech-boom startups of course...
The Reverand writes: "Honestly, the best DB's out their are Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL and DB2. None of these are cheap, sybase being the lowest cost. Oracle is still the highest quality over all of these."
You offer little evidence for this sweeping assertion, other than that you have got Oracle to work well at your clients. For real scalability, Oracle sucks.
Ask any Data Warehousing specialist who's tried to implement a multi-terabyte DW with Oracle: the fields are littered with the corpses of failed attempts using Oracle, since their one-size-fits-all OLTP architecture doesn't suit DW well at all. For example, Walmart's new joint-venture e-commerce business has its IT run by non-Walmart Oracleheads, who brought in Oracle to replace Informix for the project (Walmart itself uses Informix for everything), and as a result they were offline for a month, struggling to make it work. They refused to divulge specifics to the press, but we can take a rough guess.
Oracle trades mainly on its name and size, and buys key reference accounts like Amazon with free upfront licenses and consultancy. But it is far from being the best. It's just good enough, that's all.
Oracle and MS are often the default choice for the timid business, as Oracle and SQL Server DBAs are easier to find than DBAs for technically better DBs: ironic, as most Oracle projects that I've seen seem to require more DBAs than an equivalent DB2 or Informix implementation would have. This therefore becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
So please don't confuse popularity with quality. If PostgreSQL does catch up sufficiently on scalability, and offers better value than Oracle, people will start using it in droves, just as Apache beat the once-mighty Netscape Server.
The Reuters author appears to have got it slightly wrong. IBM have been shipping DB2 and several other applications for Linux for some time now. The real news is that IBM are now shipping and supporting it not only on Intel-based clusters, but also on multiple VM instances of Linux on big iron. Enterprise Linux Today explains it better here.
This is a follow-on from IBM's recent announcement of a significant win at Telia, the Swedish telecomms conpany. Telia tossed out a room full of Solaris servers (the exact number seems to vary between articles), and replaced it with one big fault-tolerant hunk of IBM, running multiple Linux VMs.
The term "VM" normally makes one think of Java, but IBM has been doing VMs for a long time. Their mainframe HW lets you runs multiple simultaneous instances of OS, each called a Virtual Machine. You can take down and restart VMs without affecting its neighbor VMs: very handy for 24x7 ops. Each VM gets a dedicated slice of storage and memory, but can share HW infrastructure like I/O.
Until now, you had to use IBM OSes to do this, e.g. VM/VMS, aka OS/390. Now you can do it on Linux. If I were an ISP/ASP, I would find this very interesting. Bravo Alan Cox for making this happen.
The Gnome Foundation oversees Gnome development, whereas the KDE League is a single point of contact for marketing: it exists to "provide financial, moral and promotional support to KDE", to quote the PR, and promises to leave development as a freely-coordinated effort of the developers. Both groups are useful entities IMO, although ISTM a bit ironic that the one with reportedly larger market share on the desktop is launching a marketing initiative.:) I am curious as to how the League was formed: were there elections, as for Gnome Foundation and FreeBSD Core Team? There is, unfortunately, no further info on the KDE League's website just yet.
Last year the chairman of Sega, Isao Okawa, stated publicly that they were not planning to stay in the harware business. So they have been more-or-less openly using the Dreamcast as a cash cow to fund a move into software, and this latest comes as no great surprise. I don't like to think of any hardware as disposable, and the 1999 announcement definitely kept me away from their gear.
I see: so you're saying that you deliberately linked to the WordPerfect page, and claimed WP's ranking was really the ranking for Corel Linux. But you didn't say that in your original post, did you?
You work for Corel, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Suse? Green stinks, and it's too European, too German.
Too European? For whom? Americans? Quel horreur! I think we can live with that. Linux is a European operating system, and now getting very popular in the rest of the world. Here in Europe we are more than happy to buy it from a European vendor, but more to the point it is a better product than Red Hat. If I wanted an inferior product just for the sheer thrill of buying from a US company, I'd buy Windows.
Argh! I would be pleased for SuSE to take over Caldera, but not vice-versa. The Caldera engineers might be fine people, but their CEO Ransom Love has a bad attitude to software freedom IMHO, and is not the man I would want at the wheel of any major Linux company, especially a European one.
A few choice bits of vintage RL:
Ransom thinks Linux is proprietary
Ransom thinks Microsoft is right about the GPL
Merging with Mandrake is a ridiculous proposition and it's incredibly bad behaviour of a journalist (or someone acting in this role) to suggest something like this.
I submitted the story; timothy posted it. I certainly meant no harm to SuSE, nor was I attempting to act as a journalist (shudder). Rather, I would like to see a large, pan-European distro vendor which can compete effectively with Red Hat, offer large-scale retail supply and support of a superior product into North America, and maintain the lead in Europe that Mandrake and SuSE currently enjoy.
May I ask why a merger with Mandrake is a ridiculous proposition? As a SuSE employee you might know something I don't about the distros. Are you referring to a technical problem or a cultural one? Or both? Or something else?
>Quite simply, we live in a capitalist system
"We in the USA", you mean.
> and corporations making money is good for everyone at the end of the day,
Good for many in the USA, yes. Not everyone in the USA. Certainly not everyone in the rest of the world.
> Without companies like Microsoft, AOL, Time-Warner and Cisco, do you really think we would be able to maintain the world dominating position we are presently in?
"We in the USA", you mean.
Do you understand now why European governments are investigating the security issues of using Microsoft software? Do you understand why Europeans don't always share your enthusiasm for Microsoft's dominance of the desktop market? Getting locked into a foreign country's product makes us dependent on that country, the way you're dependent on foreign oil. So there is much enthusiasm here for building Linux into a viable product on the desktop: much nicer than tearing the shit out of Alaska, don't you think?
> a hugely visible embodiment of the American Dream.
Well, I certainly agree with that. Microsoft is indeed the hugely visible embodiment of the American Dream: take other people's ideas, package and sell them well, buy the support of governments, viciously fight your competitors with lies, half-truths and innuendo, sew up the distribution channels, winner takes all, and fuck the losers.
Copyright Barons like Gracenote try this sort of happy horseshit all the time, thinking that if enough people jump ship to impact the business, they can always back off and look magnanimous. Well, I don't care whether Gracenote eventually stop attempting lawsuits like this or not: I'm just never going to use them again, period. I understand the arguments about rewarding good behavior. But I'm also aware that if companies fear permanent loss of business from backlash to practices like this, they're less likely to attempt it.
--
JDF
"There really ought to be a section of politically aware sites like /. devoted to upcoming events where people can participate. I know I'd be there sometimes.
So, how about it? How many people would like to see a calendar page about upcoming political events that have significance to us? What do you think? There's a large readership here, and if only a small percentage turn out...it could be noticed. But that's just my opinion. "
Here's one: the Independent Media Center. It's a global network of independent media groups, offering news and opinion on issues like this that the MegaMedia won't cover, including upcoming protest dates and eyewitness coverage of same. I give occasional tech assistance to the group that runs the London site.
(NB: our Philadelphia site uses Slash! I wouldn't mind if the London site used it too!)
</feeble-karma-hoovering-attempt>
We need more info on actions defending Free Speech, IMHO, and we'd be delighted to receive articles, essays, and dates on actions against Copyright Barons like the ones described in this article.
--
JDF
>Standing behind a product is the seminal moral responsibility of any manufacturer, both in terms of what's smart and what's right.
:-)
You mean "the fundamental moral responsibility", right?
Standing behind a product seminally is illegal in 5 US states.
There's some interesting politics behind the video datablade. Media360 is now an Ascential Software product. It's a bundle consisting of Informix IDS and the necessary blades, plus a web front-end. So Ascential's basically selling a value-added app that runs only on Informix. None of the big media players that I'm aware of (CNN, BBC et al) actually use Media360: rather, they all have heavily customized systems based on IDS plus blades plus custom front-ends.
So IBM won't actually be buying Media360, they'll be buying what's installed at the big reference sites.
>Recently released numbers from IDC System Software Research show that "Linux growth in server OS share has been flat for two quarters, and Unix and Novell continue to fall.
- 00 4-06-PS-SM
Well according to:
http://eltoday.com/article.php3?ltsn=2001-04-23
...IDC are now predicting huge revenues for Linux. No mention of BSD in there, I'm sorry to say.
And it appears that the other parts of Informix will be staying around as a seperate biz, so we should continue to see their support for OSS.
Informix Corporation owns Informix Software and Ascential Software. The software assets of Informix Software are being sold to IBM for cash, not shares. The Informix Corporation will be renamed Ascential Software, and will take up where its former second subsidiary left off. Informix Software will disappear into a legal entity on a shelf.
Ascential, formerly known as Ardent, has no history of involvement in Free or Open Source software: they're best known for their Extract-Transform-and-Load tool "DataStage". They also sell a few other software tools. But there will be no OSS support from Ascential. If any GPLing or open-sourcing is to happen with the database products, it will have to come from IBM, and I'm sorry to say that today's announcement tells us nothing new about that.
For starters, Informix owns the telecoms market: 8 out of 10 calls placed worldwide transact across an Informix DB.
Second, big chunks of the Time Series Analysis market: several large finance houses including Merrill-Lynch, Morgan-Stanley and Chase use Informix IDS to do speeds and volumes no one else can get near. When you're doing Time Series on trillions of stock ticks per day, that's important.
Third, video: CNN, BBC, RAI, Telecinco and others use IDS and the Video DataBlade for storing video objects in the DB. CNN saves around a million per year by doing real-time ingestion and indexing of video streams, saving them on manual keying of the metadata, and getting video out onto the editors' desktops within 2 seconds.
Fourth, Data Warehousing, esp. in retail: Informix Redbrick is designed for DW, not OLTP, and it shows in the performance. Redbrick also scales to multi-terabyte far more easily than most DBs (including Informix IDS).
Informix has a sizeable, loyal customer base of people that can't get what they need from Oracle or DB2.
IBM will take the IDS/Illustra code and use it to build the next gen of DB2 with improved Object Relational support, plus star-schema support for Data Warehousing, and ride on the revenue of the installed base while they wait for the oven to go "ding". The legacy products like C-ISAM can be maintained at very little expense, giving additional long-term cash cows: it's surprising how much of that is still out there, chuggin' away untended.
Finally, there's headcount: the acquisition will also go roughly halfway toward IBM's recruitment goals for the software business, in which they intend to be one of the 3 serious players in a few years' time.
And no, I no longer work for Informix.
Actually that's right: the big DW there uses Teradata. Teradata is another DB that's designed to scale up very high, unlike Oracle. But they use Informix Red Brick and Informix IDS for most of the other stuff, and have encountered problems when they've tried Oracle on the very big projects.
You *can* do multi-terabyte with Oracle, but it's not easy, and only makes sense if you're growing into that size from a long history of nice small Oracle DBs. In fact at over 800 gig is when you typically start to run into problems on Oracle. Informix IDS runs into trouble at around 500 or 600 gig. Informix Redbrick scales into multi-terabyte effortlessly, because it was designed for DW.
So for a new project which you know will be multi-terabyte from Day 1, Oracle is not the best choice.
Less effort + fewer DBAs = better price/perf. All businesses like to do things for best value, not just Walmart. I'm speaking of real businesses here, not pretend tech-boom startups of course...
The Reverand writes: "Honestly, the best DB's out their are Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL and DB2. None of these are cheap, sybase being the lowest cost. Oracle is still the highest quality over all of these."
You offer little evidence for this sweeping assertion, other than that you have got Oracle to work well at your clients. For real scalability, Oracle sucks.
Ask any Data Warehousing specialist who's tried to implement a multi-terabyte DW with Oracle: the fields are littered with the corpses of failed attempts using Oracle, since their one-size-fits-all OLTP architecture doesn't suit DW well at all. For example, Walmart's new joint-venture e-commerce business has its IT run by non-Walmart Oracleheads, who brought in Oracle to replace Informix for the project (Walmart itself uses Informix for everything), and as a result they were offline for a month, struggling to make it work. They refused to divulge specifics to the press, but we can take a rough guess.
Oracle trades mainly on its name and size, and buys key reference accounts like Amazon with free upfront licenses and consultancy. But it is far from being the best. It's just good enough, that's all.
Oracle and MS are often the default choice for the timid business, as Oracle and SQL Server DBAs are easier to find than DBAs for technically better DBs: ironic, as most Oracle projects that I've seen seem to require more DBAs than an equivalent DB2 or Informix implementation would have. This therefore becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
So please don't confuse popularity with quality. If PostgreSQL does catch up sufficiently on scalability, and offers better value than Oracle, people will start using it in droves, just as Apache beat the once-mighty Netscape Server.
> It gets 100 miles per gallon and the exhaust smells like McDonald's fries.
Actually it's the other way 'round: McDonald's fries smell like Harley exhaust.
>informative???
:-)
>these moderators have just had their credibility smashed over the head with a rotten potato...
Poor guy. The only time he's ever managed to be modded above a 1 was when he asked to be modded down.
...and I'm looking at one right now.
Happy 2001/04/01.
That should have read "VM/CMS". Typo, sorry.
The Reuters author appears to have got it slightly wrong. IBM have been shipping DB2 and several other applications for Linux for some time now. The real news is that IBM are now shipping and supporting it not only on Intel-based clusters, but also on multiple VM instances of Linux on big iron. Enterprise Linux Today explains it better here.
This is a follow-on from IBM's recent announcement of a significant win at Telia, the Swedish telecomms conpany. Telia tossed out a room full of Solaris servers (the exact number seems to vary between articles), and replaced it with one big fault-tolerant hunk of IBM, running multiple Linux VMs.
The term "VM" normally makes one think of Java, but IBM has been doing VMs for a long time. Their mainframe HW lets you runs multiple simultaneous instances of OS, each called a Virtual Machine. You can take down and restart VMs without affecting its neighbor VMs: very handy for 24x7 ops. Each VM gets a dedicated slice of storage and memory, but can share HW infrastructure like I/O.
Until now, you had to use IBM OSes to do this, e.g. VM/VMS, aka OS/390. Now you can do it on Linux. If I were an ISP/ASP, I would find this very interesting. Bravo Alan Cox for making this happen.
Fuck it. Here it is in plain text:
p lanner/ExhibitorDetail.CFM?ID=1276
http://myplanner.key3media.com/comdex/fall2000/
Grr. Sorry, posted as plain text. Trying again... a href="http://myplanner.key3media.com/comdex/fall20 00/planner/ExhibitorDetail.CFM?ID=1276"& gt; http://myplanner.key3media.com/comdex/fall2000/pla nner/ExhibitorDetail.CFM?ID=1276/a&g t;
Here they are:
0 00/planner/ExhibitorDetail.CFM?ID=1276"& gt; http://myplanner.key3media.com/comdex/fall2000/pla nner/ExhibitorDetail.CFM?ID=1276/a&g t;
a href="http://myplanner.key3media.com/comdex/fall2
The Gnome Foundation oversees Gnome development, whereas the KDE League is a single point of contact for marketing: it exists to "provide financial, moral and promotional support to KDE", to quote the PR, and promises to leave development as a freely-coordinated effort of the developers. Both groups are useful entities IMO, although ISTM a bit ironic that the one with reportedly larger market share on the desktop is launching a marketing initiative. :) I am curious as to how the League was formed: were there elections, as for Gnome Foundation and FreeBSD Core Team? There is, unfortunately, no further info on the KDE League's website just yet.
Last year the chairman of Sega, Isao Okawa, stated publicly that they were not planning to stay in the harware business. So they have been more-or-less openly using the Dreamcast as a cash cow to fund a move into software, and this latest comes as no great surprise. I don't like to think of any hardware as disposable, and the 1999 announcement definitely kept me away from their gear.
I see: so you're saying that you deliberately linked to the WordPerfect page, and claimed WP's ranking was really the ranking for Corel Linux. But you didn't say that in your original post, did you?
You work for Corel, right?