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Free Software; Closest to Freedom
GNU/Linux, when it first appeared in 1991, didn't even make a dent in the outside world -- in fact, no one in the mainstream press hardly knew of its existence until about 1996 or 1997. I should know, I was among the first to report about it. It has "clawed" its way to the position it is at today. There has been no dip in popularity, except for a business perception around the 2001 crash, when (momentarily) some wall-street types (with understandable good reason) lumped Linux companies into the same boat with dot-coms. You put out a statement in your article: "So, what went wrong with Linux?". Where does this come from? What market indicator are you pointing at that supposes, even remotely, that "something is going wrong or has gone wrong with Linux." The predictions of the community? Come on! Compare the "predictions of the community" with all of the hype that Scott McNeally spouts anytime he gets in front of the press. As for the kernel appearing "late", kernels appear when they appear. The ones that are in place now are pretty good. Good enough for most enterprise operations, as a matter of fact. As for the portability -- nothing beats Net-BSD for portability. Nothing. To which I would add "So?" We were talking about enterprise-class stuff after all weren't we? I hardly know anyone in enterprise class operations that's spending time attempting to compile kernels for exotic hardware so they can bring up web or application services. I don't see the point, in other words, you're trying to make about portability. I do see that GNU/Linux works pretty darn well on a host of platforms -- Motorola, AMD, Intel, IBM mainframes, embedded processors -- far more than Solaris (2 -- Intel, partially supported, and Sparc). As for your "most important question" for corporate America, and support. How about IBM or HP? What about RedHat? What about Novell? at least you have a choice. Compare that to support for Solaris (from one vendor), or Windows (from one vendor). Your arguments about the stock price of Linux companies don't hold water in the support arena, and yes, I'm talking from experience at enterprise-class companies that are using, today, right now, Linux. While high, high end benchmark data may not be achievable with an off the box Intel server, medium range servers are easily, bang for the buck, flattened squarely. In other words, Linux on the commodity Intel hardware of today has a price point that's extremely hard to beat. Sun knows this. I'm sure it keeps the up late at night, wondering what they're going to do to be relevant tomorrow. Corporate America, in other words, is embracing Linux. Speaking to your rambling tirade about SunONE (you have the name wrong, by the way, they renamed it last year to Sun Java something something -- I can't keep track). I'd like to personally explain my experiences with iPlanet, excuse me SunONE, or whatever it's called this minute. The software has it's place, but the support from Sun, from my experience, is abysmal. I honestly haven't had worse experiences in enterprise settings than Suns' support for iPlanet. Linux maps to Solaris, Apache maps to iPlanet and the rest is self-explanatory -- my experience talking here. I'd rather have Apache any day than iPlanet (or whatever you're going to call SunONE). My experience has also been that Solaris admins have very little trouble transitioning to Linux. iPlanet does run on Linux, but why you'd want to use it will likely depend upon your application. Will that application run on Apache? If so, again, in my humble opinion, you'd be out of your mind to use iPlanet instead. iPlanet locks you to Solaris -- yes, you can run it at some incredible license fee on HP-UX, AIX, Linux and Lord knows what else -- but why? To get Suns' support for it? Where does this statement have any backing in reality:
As for your description of a corporation relying upon RedHat engineers and TurboLinux, what's your point? Corporations hire and train (and re-train) people all the time. If the corporate standard is one flavor of Linux, getting someone who is fully trained (or even partially experienced) with another Linux distribution is a painless proposition. This is from my experience -- very little differences exist between distributions. Oh, you can make mountains out of mole-hills here, but the real differences come when you take someone with a Windows mind-set and put them in a Unix/Linux world. There you have some problems. Things to clarify please:
Best of luck!
Paul Ferris is a Linux professional with over 5 years of Linux experience in enterprise-class environments. His opinions are his, and his alone. |
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Comments (21)
1 earlier comment in the full thread.
In the spirit of joining in, your mothers all program in Visual Basic. And like it.
Dave
Just a little perspective for the road...
"The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." -from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863
-Tool
Although I doubt very much that his mother is a VB programmer -- is she?!? I was guessing QBASIC or possibly mainframe assembler...
-FeriCyde
You generalist hackers are all alike. You crouch in the dust of your classrooms, nothing but glow of the battery-backup exit lights and the smell of moldy chalk to guide your way. You thought you'd lump me and the Tool into the same general class of slacker, and get away with it didn't you? But you can't do that -- I'm on to you now. Soon others like me will follow (if there are others like me, that is -- I'm not like the tool -- got it?!?!) and we'll squash you and your kind. You won't be able to enter feedback on the site without a general insult filter flagging the comment and asking you to be more specific about who you're flaming.
Then, THEN, we'll see what kind of generalization you can make! HA! Then, we'll all gather-round and do a group hug (but not before the Tool and I have exchanged the morning insult -- tradition is tradition, after all).
--FeriCyde
While my mother may be old enough to be a QBasic coder (is that what you'd be called if you "wrote" QBasic code?), she certainly couldn't possibly be as old as you! I'm taking sides with tuxchick now - you ain't got nothin' on us - our java apps will easily outperform any shell script you can throw at it (or at least consume all available system resources so your scripts _can't_ run).
Oh, and I always thought that your traditional morning insult had something to do with a mirror - my additional insults were just ancillary code on the heap.
... All in good fun :-)
-Tool
http://standardout.com/~dave/insultomatic.php
dave
"...so I wrote a tool to make the job easier."
Have at it, FerriCyan. But I'll get you next time!
-Tool
Damn near pissed myself the first time I ran it ...
Thanks! --FeriCyde
A perfectly good Ferris-bashing takes place and I am nowhere to be found.
Damn it, guys!!!
Who forgot to notify me?
Dave -- It's you site. Don't you feel any sense of responsibility?
And Mr. Tool -- Oh, never mind. Your mother probably DOES program in VB.
TuxChick will be forgiven this time, on the basis of here newbiehood.
As for the inestimable Mr. Ferris:
Paul, Paul, Paul, if that is your real name...
--FeriCyde
wait a minute, why do I really care about this ridiculous post?
ughh... need more sleep and less time in front of Sun servers.
-Tool
P.S. i hate you.
I think I'm getting into this.
They have done a fine job without me. It's just the lack of .... provenance.
Tuxchick is getting a little scary, though.
For the record, my momma doesn't compile twice, but my eyes are getting so bad that I may come down with mono so that I can C#.
I wouldn't want anyone calling my Mom a VB programmer. She'd be crushed!
Shameless Geek
Pauly boy, you were far too kind in your article. Good Gosh, Ghosh got it gosh-darned wrong!
I am, in fact, impressed by the obvious effort applied to avoiding any kind of sensible analysis. According the bio lines, Ghosh is a student, so there remains hope of enlightenment.
Like you and El Tool-o, I have also done a lot of work with Linux and Solaris (not to mention AIX, HP-UX and FreeBSD), and have seen/instigated multiple corporate linux deployments.
Allow me, however, to go a little further back in time, to my days as a capacity planner very large mainframe data-centers. I was doing that around the time that IBM discovered multi-processing. That was also the time that mainframe software companies began looking for new and inventive ways to license their software: by processor, by mip, by whatever.
What a pain it became to manage a center when you needed to keep not only capacity, but licenses that could run on the boxes you needed (including backup mode) without eating up the profits.
One very big benefit of free software -- though not generally appreciated until an organization gets a little experience with the concept -- is the ability to configure your systems according to the things you need to do, and not to match up with your licensing.
For example:
When you have to pay a Windows license and assorted others for every box you put up, fewer more expensive boxes look pretty good. When the software's free, you might instead save money using more cheaper boxes to get the same reliability, a la Google.
The thing is: wrangling license provisions should not determine how you set up your data center (or computer room, closet, coffee table, whatever).
I promise not to call your mother a VB programmer.
I've seen a fair hunk of VB code.
I tend not to call anybody producing that stuff a programmer.
Thanks. I feel better now. I wouldn't want anyone to think my mother had a case of VB.
It's a whole lot easier when someone can say "let's jut build a test server and see what happens when we *blah* (swap out that version of php and put in the latest), without worry of what you're going to do if you decide to keep the test server, pay for another license and so on.
And then finally you get into the ugliness that Microsoft got into with their licensing. God forbid that you realize that you bought a copy of Windows 98 with your old gateway, and you can just go down to the store and buy a brand spanking new piece of hardware and load the software you bought (OH wait! You only rented it for the duration of that PC!) on a new piece of hardware.
This is on a much smaller scale per incedent -- but when you add up everyone in America that's had to repurchase the software they already own, it scales rather nicely into some serious cash.
Ask Toadie to give you the skinny sometime :)
--FeriCyde
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:)
--FeriCyde