Nerds only might find this article interesting in which Jaron Lanier laments the fact that most of the open source effort has gone into making “another Unix”.
[And I might add not a very good one. Ever since the photo.net Oracle database was migrated from Sun Solaris to Dell/Linux the site has been very shaky. I’m not involved in running the site anymore but as I understand it one of the guys has essentially had to move into the colocation cage to keep poking at Linux. Maybe Linux really is secretly funded by Microsoft…]
“From 1994 to 1999, “Web browsers got really far,” Hertzfeld said. “Competition stopped and the innovation stopped,” he said.”
Hehe. I guess he has not tried Mozilla Firefox these days. Radial context menus (a la easyGestures) really take the cake.
Greenspun’s Eleventh Rule? “Any sufficiently wealthy retired nerd develops a love of airplanes, travel, and a sense of curmudgeonliness that can only come from the conviction that anyone still practicing his own profession must simply be too dense to see the inevitably approaching failure of their dreams.”
(cf. Greenspun’s Tenth Rule of Programming)
Of course, anyone who knows Philip or has read his books knows that his cynicism and disregard is really a request to be challenged and impressed. Sadly, I don’t think “Radical context menus” is a good enough answer in this case.
Ditto on Mozilla Firefox. Tons better than IE. I only just discovered the many available extensions for Firefox.
Open source is about retaining and building upon effort. No longer do we have to keep re-inventing the wheel, nor do we have to subscribe to annual updates to someone’s “wheel construction kit” software. The wheel is built. Download it from SourceForge, and get on with building your hot rod.
After you’ve finished your supercar, someone else can tweak it so that it drives itself and runs on tap water.
Not a very good troll. Maybe you should go practice at slashdot for a while. 🙂
Anybody know Greenspun’s first 9 laws? I’ve never been able to figure them out. (If you have #10, you have to have a first 9, right? Unless your numbering system is secretly funded by Microsoft … is Greenspun’s 2000th law next?)
I still don’t understand why anyone would host on Linux instead of one of the BSD’s unless there is some kind of service support contract tied into the choice. BTW, most of the stuff at my office is hosted on Windows 2000 and OS 9 (yikes!), but the stuff that has to run on a *nix is running on freeBSD with zero hassles.
I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your analysis, there, Philip.
Sure, Linux is imperfect. Neither Microsoft nor Sun has really achieved perfection either. Is Sun a little more stable? Sure. Microsoft is only in about the same league in any case. But the point to open source is that a foundation is being laid for great achievements that are not far off. And that foundation does not depend on Sun, Oracle, or Microsoft playing fair on any particular day. OK, maybe at the high levels of the enterprise Linux isn’t showtime. But it sure is for workgroup apps. This is where Microsoft was only a few years ago. Now the whole solution is being developed and it is quickly maturing. Will this solution kill off Sun and Microsoft? Probably not, and it would probably be unhealthy to do so in any case. But it just might keep them honest for a change and even in that small change you can see their fear. It’s all about freedom, baby, yeah!
Opensource looks much more successful when you realize its true purpose is to be a red herring which shifts the mainstream towards the Free Software movement. Then obviously a requirement is a stable, conservative system with a lot of apps. Not necessarily the sort of thing which inspires people to create beauty.
Anyway, Free Software is also useful for cutting-edge stuff which wouldn’t find a worthwhile market, or where the creators don’t have the temperament for business. The sort of skunkworks project that wouldn’t see the light of day at many insitutions. They’re unlikely to be as high-profile as gnu/Linux because they don’t always target a mainstream market. Perhaps they instead aim at domain specialists or computer savvy users.
I believe Rob Pike (of Unix) estimated that 90-95% of his new OS’s code is taken up by honoring externally imposed standards. And polishing an app for mainstream consumption is usually considered to be a multiple of the effort expended on straight coding.
I’m serious about the red herring part. That’s why so many canonical Opensource claims sound absurd. There are no armies of programmers who will write software gratis everytime you email a request to the internet. (An advocate literally claimed that in front of state legislators and I’m sure he believed it.) It’s not always better technically, though there are certain advantages (and disadvantages) to that development model. And yet Opensource and Free Software fight because they must; Malcolm X did the same thing to Martin Luther King. He denounced King, then later explained to King’s wife his belief that he could help King more by attacking rather than praising.
“Of course, anyone who knows Philip or has read his books knows that his cynicism and disregard is really a request to be challenged and impressed.”
Alas, I have not read Mr. Greenspun’s books. In fact, this was the first time that I have heard of him. But I hardly think that this disqualifies my comment. It was just that; a comment on the article posted, intended for Mr. Greenspun and for anyone else who read the piece. He may take it for what he may, and if he finds it of no value then perhaps someone else will.
Such is the nature of this Internet we have built.
Wow another trolling.
First off, blasting Linux because of Oracle performance seems to be a mighty stretch since in my experience, Oracle has proven to be a big giant piece of shit, a huge sinkhole of maintenance costs on a variety of UNIX platforms, be it AIX or HP or Linux. The Linux servers I’ve setup and maintained have been just as robust and reliable as the Sun, HP and AIX servers I’ve worked on. And those boxes were running enterprise applications with a lot more transaction volumes than the toy web site you refer to.
And why not Unix? It’s proven to be rock solid and plays well with others, in terms of networking, data sharing, etc….
In terms of browsers, while IE has been stagnant, other browsers like Mozilla, Firefox, Safari are far superior applications even if most folks haven’t discovered them yet.
Open source/free software has made big inroads into corporate and enterprise computing. 10 years ago it would have been unthinkable to see empowered decision makers choose to use free software offings. Now the use is prevalent and everything from MySQL, Apache, Tomcat, Request Tracker, or any number of enterprise applications are heavily used now, much to the chagrin of vendors like Oracle. Why? Mainly because of cost, but also because they work and much better to work with, on an overall basis.
I’m glad to see you enjoying retirement but I think you’re going to have to shelve the perspective pieces on computing technology. You seem to be totally out of touch with the state of things. Or at least just striving to be a good troll.
Naum, fwiw I just think of *nix as a 64-bit platform to run Oracle on. Mebbe I’m a little dense, but I think that *nix’s dependence on flat-files and interpreted scripts is straight outta the 70’s. The best thing about it is that I can strip out all the gizmos, lock out unnecesary access and not have to reboot at the drop of a hat. Can’t say that about win-stuff.
As far as linux goes, I’ve played with it and even run a little non-critical stuff on suse, but i’ve always been pretty happy with dgux(clariion), solaris and tru64 and I’ve never been given a really good reason to depend on a free os.
As far as a newer, niftier os goes… Why bother. Any attempt to accomodate existing standards and (god forbid) include web-server, database, application, etc… support would probably turn into a monolithic nightmare.
Most people have much better experiences with Linux than you. I work at a company where we manage a cluster of Solaris servers (V880 database and Netra webservers) as well as 2 clusters of Linux servers. The Linux boxes have always been more stable and less trouble.
Maybe you are running Linux on a Dell PowerEdge 2650? There are legendary hardware problems with that platform.
I use GNU/Linux every day at work and at home. I must admit that Mr. Greenspun is right. I’ll keep on using it because of ethical considerations but for some applications GNU/Linux is “just another UNIX”, and not a better one at that.
The open source movement is not a license to choose the wrong OS for the job. If your GNU/Linux installation is “shaky” you can either join the open source effort and fix it or switch to another OS that is more stable for your application.
So it boils down to A) Use it and live with the drawbacks. B) Use it and give away free your time to improve it (my personal choice). C) Use something else.
That statement is easy to make for people who have spent every day of their lives at rich universities or MegaCorp, inc.
Guan, Photo.net is actualy running on a Dell 6650. Not sure if that is legendary as well. From what Brian is saying, it is likely all down to hardware problems, and it certainly sounds that way. A hardware RAID array corrupting half the disks? I can’t see how Linux would be able to be responsible for that.
So what your post should really say is that Dell has spent the last x years trying to build “another hardware platform”.
And if there is anything criticaly wrong with Photo.net is the architecture, “let the database do everything” was cute in 1996 or even in the controled, rich, enviroment of corporate intranets. Heck, with a good caching strtegy built in from the core and photos just being files in the pageroot of the webserver, it would still be running on just that 450. And whose bright idea was that architecture again?
Its sort of funny because the source article echos Philip’s comments – its just some more rich old programmers whining about the good old days.
Isn’t that a Greenspun law – something about programmers not being good predictors of the future?
Not to mention that the biggest most innovative piece of software out of the big companies in recent years has been what? Oh – another Unix (OSX).
As someone else suggested, the real innovation is that you do not have to be a big university or big company to afford Unix. In my very first Unix job I had to sneak manuals out of the office to read at home, because a full set of manuals cost $3 grand. If you wanted to read source code – well hopefully you worked for AT&T. And frankly things would be exactly the same way now if it hadn’t been for open source.
And you should really look at how much open source code is in your beloved solaris. Commercial unixes have also benefitted from open source.
Why was all the effort to build “another unix” even taken up?. An OS is the basis for using a computer. If that is not free, any open source initiative will be crippled. Who are these panelist to even comment on the direction of the open source movement?. For me its my personal choice to work on something and develop it , Similarly its the choice of the linux developers to develop it. Commenting on their effort in my opinion will be dumb.
> Why was all the effort to build “another unix” even taken up?.
When Torvalds started working on Linux he was not aware about the freeBSD project (Berkley started about the same time). He admits wholeheartedly that if he knew about BSD he would have worked *with* them and not try to duplicate the effort. The end result is that Linux has been built from the ground up and it does share the code base with other unixes (all others based, I think, on the original Bell Labs Unix source, more or less). Linux is not unix but it behaves like one, and with the 2.6 kernel it is starting to look more and more like a mature OS.
“Ever since the photo.net Oracle database was migrated from Sun Solaris to Dell/Linux the site has been very shaky.”
Well, google seems to be running OK on linux. Maybe Linux isn’t the problem.
Err — what’s the difference between “Free Software” (as understood by FSF) and “Open Source” (as understood by OSI)?
I thought they were pretty much the same thing? Anyone care to enlighten me?
I think Philip is full of shit. Whatever photo.net is running on now it is certainly faster and better than what it was running on back in the day of Philip and his escapades at arsdigita. Sun’s hardware lost a lot of reliability to dell/intel back in ’01, same for solaris to linux. That’s why some of the most demanding customers of sun, wall street banks, have been throwing away sun for dell/hp with linux on them. As for oracle, it keeps on bloating, but there were never any serious performance issues for it between sun and dell platforms. Philip just likes to bitch from time to time.
Philip, keep dissing Linux and open source too for that matter. The less hype, the better it gets. The more hype, the more crazy crap like SCO is pulling starts to happen. I, for one, would like to run something that works, that’s open and that not every billionaire in the tech industry has targeted for destruction.
Leave me and my Linux (and OpenBSD, I use that too: works great) alone and in peace. I just want to get my work done.
Dominik, Free Software emphasizes freedom for people. They claim:
– People should have access to details of software which increasingly controls their lives.
– Enforcement of software intellectual property leads to a Soviet-style police state.
– GPL uses software copyright to undermine proprietary software IP.
—-
Opensource claims:
– Better technically (at least compared to average proprietary companies)
– Cheaper for companies to produce, since development is distributed
– Cheaper for users
– Anti monopolistic
—-
So Free Software concentrates on freedom, while Opensource is about getting good stuff. The reason this distinction is important to make, even if you disagree with these philosophies, is because often non-free software is more convenient. You will be disappointed if you download some random piece of free software and expect it to always be better than a non-free equivalent. However, what it does buy you is the ability to pay anyone skilled enough to fix the software your organization depends upon.
Keep in mind I’m not advocating anything. The economics is a bit muddy to me (who has a crystal ball?) and I’m not certain if it’s sustainable to the exclusion of all proprietary software. But I think it’s important to know about even if you disagree with it.
I’m TERRIBLY sorry, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a collection of half-wits who think they know something in one place.
Hate to single one or two out, when so many off-base memes are being spouted.
“First off, blasting Linux because of Oracle performance seems to be a mighty stretch since in my experience, Oracle has proven to be a big giant piece of shit, a huge sinkhole of maintenance costs on a variety of UNIX platforms, be it AIX or HP or Linux.”
That’s what I’ve gathered also, as is both Unix and Linux.
“The Linux servers I’ve setup and maintained have been just as robust and reliable as the Sun, HP and AIX servers I’ve worked on. And those boxes were running enterprise applications with a lot more transaction volumes than the toy web site you refer to.”
Your ignorance is your bliss. Everything ESR said in Chapter 1 of his new book on “The Unix ‘Cult’-ure” could be said double for CPF.
“As far as a newer, niftier os goes… Why bother. Any attempt to accomodate existing standards and (god forbid) include web-server, database, application, etc… support would probably turn into a monolithic nightmare.”
That’s why it’s better to run something that’s BEEN DOING THIS VERY STUFF SUCCESSFULLY for two-and-a-half decades and actually IS rock-solid. And yeah, a 400 did the “web-server” stuff when it was called Novell, Co-operative Processing and Client-Server and all that same stuff.
Iow, the OS you wish Linux turned into existed, almost entirely, when it was designed in late 70’s. Benefitted, no doubt, and stood on the shoulders of earlier OS efforts. Not to slight those, but to point out that you folks who don’t know iSeries don’t know SOA whatsoever. (SOA being state-of-art, as opposed to “Service Oriented Architecture”, the new buzzmeme for modern advanced client server.)
Call it a troll or a harsh education, whichever’s yer pick.
😀
>>> I sit corrected, as I hadn’t seen the last post yet.
“Dominik, Free Software emphasizes freedom for people. They claim:”
>>> Let me explain one basic fact that seems to have eluded you entirely, Mr. Gabbour: There is one hailstorm of a difference, generally, between hyperbolic “claims” and Reality.
>>> Your points on Free Software illustrate the difference, handily.
——————————————————————————–
Opensource claims:
– Better technically (at least compared to average proprietary companies)
>> False claim. You’ve never seen what IS actually REAL GOOD technically, so the fault is not yours.
– Cheaper for companies to produce, since development is distributed
>> False claim. Companies PAY for people to “volunteer” their time, in large part. So the OSI is CO-OPTING budgets of companies, which makes the approach QUITE EXPENSIVE. Luckily the “bean counters” don’t know that.. yet.
– Cheaper for users
>> False claim. IBM is spending $200,000,000 re-training their workforce to use Linux. While I actually LAUD the effort, as there are many GOOD facets to it.. that still works out to 2000 bucks a head.
– Anti monopolistic
>> False claim. Based on GPL which is ENTIRELY monopolisitic. Just a replacement of one monopoly with another, if you’ll observe a little closely.
——————————————————————————–
<snip some bullcrap throughout>
The reason this distinction is important to make, even if you disagree with these philosophies, is because often non-free software is more convenient.
>>> And how do you beat the convenience of “free”, exactly. So the actual fact is that free software is “more convenient” because people are generally short-sited and cheap.
However, what it does buy you is the ability to pay anyone skilled enough to fix the software your organization depends upon.
>>> Your joking, right? Most of the software I’ve dealt with in 25 of so years has come with source. Didn’t require the GPL, btw.
Keep in mind I’m not advocating anything. The economics is a bit muddy to me (who has a crystal ball?) and I’m not certain if it’s sustainable to the exclusion of all proprietary software. But I think it’s important to know about even if you disagree with it. ”
>>> Well, don’t feel bad on that score. Nobody’s quite figured out that all this “free” software is is a ponzi scheme. According to the OSI “methodology”, you’re supposed to make money selling coffee cups and T-shirts.
>>> Dunno how sales of coffee cups and T-shirts is doing for developers in your neck-a-thuh-woods, but it’s been pretty slim pickin’s around here. Oh yeah.. the other way was widgets.
>>> Surprisingly, going back to the days of VB 1.0, there were and ARE absolutely TONS of widget makers out there, and they’re not all GPL’d in the VB (and I assume, now, .NET) world.
>>> Go figure. I thought the ONLY way that COULD be done was through FSF *EQ OSI “Open” source.
>>> Btw, for “not advocating” something, Mr. Gabbour, you seem to be presenting a wildly optimistic one-sided view of “Open” Source and so-called “free” source… I believe that’s because you have apparently not learned that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Pseudo-constitutional issues like “freedom” and “democracy” have no bearing on coding 99.999999% of all programs, btw, unless you imagine they do. All that to say, I really AGREE that “it’s important to know about”.. ESPECIALLY if you ESPOUSE all the FSF=OSI (almost-entirely-false) marketing claims.
Hi, JayT. If you’re going to attack me personally, could you please do it well? 😉 You’re across the board, claiming I like Opensource and who knows what else. However, I believe that Microsoft led the last price revolution, with enormous success in bringing low cost computing to the world, in the midst of a savagely cutthroat industry. I was very careful not to mention my private thoughts on the matter.
If you could argue better, that would help me by bringing me to question my assumptions. As it stands, you’re just some guy scared to even use his real name. Stand behind your words, it will make them better.
(Incidentally, maybe you’re right I don’t know what “REAL GOOD” technology means. I can only imagine lisp systems. Can you kindly tell me what’s better?)
A longer article on the same deal over at Salon if you can endure the brief multi-panel flash ad flip show…
In other tidbits, Simonyi says he will provide Fred Brooks “silver bullet” and surprisingly these programming giants were unaware that Linux was the itch of a young Finnish kid that wanted to network his machine.
To the individual that termed me a “half-wit” for stating my belief that Oracle was a “giant piece of shit”, whatever, you’re entitled to your perspective. But I’ve developed and supported a variety of large, enterprise database applications that process millions of transactions and store volume at multi-terabyte levels. Perhaps if the TCO of Oracle was more in alignment with the quality of the product, I would not have this view. But my own empirical experience in the matter displays otherwise.
Oh, and thread on /. asking Why Programming Still Stinks? where I spotted the reference to this article…
I do feel sorry for Brian.
I too tried installing Oracle 9iR2 on RHEL 3 and it just doesn’t work out-of-the-box; you need patches and you need a support contract to be able to get those patches. From my point of view, I think that looks pretty bad on Oracle’s part. How come installing Apache, PostgreSQL or PHP all require something like “./config; make; make install” while Oracle requires a complete song and dance?
Also, I believe heat generated by the extra equipment has been determined as a very likely cause of the failures. I’m not at all convinced that stuffing that same cabinet with a bunch of Sun hardware would not have caused such problems.
However, Philip is right: the old Sun was having problems keeping up with the increased workload, but it didn’t quit.
The only good thing with Oracle is that because there is a version for every major OS, you can move up in the OS foodchain without having to redo your databases, at least in theory. I have had the disgrace of programming with Oracle back ends on and off for the last 5 years and all I get is misery and heartburn.
On the other hand, every single minute I have spent with MS SQL Server 7 and 2000 has been mostly pleasant. I got bit by the slammer worm but that was out of stupidity on my part, I was building a new server and I had done all the patches for the OS itself and forgot to patch SQL Server before turning on the service, something I am used to do without even thinking about it. Programming it is incredibly easy and the management tools are very intuitive and not resource hogs. I even remember Oracle DBAs using SQL Server’s data transformation services (DTS) utility to move data between two remote Oracle servers!
The management tools thing has been a problem for myself and pretty much every web developer I know that programs for either SQL Server of Oracle. With Oracle we just threw the towel with SQL+, until we found out about a wonderful company called Benthic (http://www.benthicsoftware.com/) that makes a set of incredibly inexpensive graphical management tools for Oracle that mimic the functionality that you would expect in SQL Server’s Enterprise Manager and the Query Analyzer. Earlier this week I discovered a company (http://aquafold.com) that makes similar tools for OS X, which made me the happiest guy in the company because it means I could finally deal with SQL Server from my Powerbook without having to use a remote desktop session with the server itself.
Of course, Oracle eventually came out with a Java-based GUI but it was horribly bloated and would suck the life out of any PC that we tried to run it on. I have not tried to use it for about a year so I don’t know if it has been improved, but as it was back then it was nearly useless to us.
I still have a lot of respect for the Oracle RDBMS itself, if you are running the next eBay or Amazon, this is probably what you want to use. If you are building something smaller then I would go with SQL Server.
While we are bashing Oracle: My experience is that is can probably work very well. If you have a _very_ good DBA and give it lots of hints. I haven’t seen work well yet.
My first real project in 1999 was an ISP portal running Vignette (yech!) 4.2 on an 2x 300MHz E450 with a Sybase 11.5 backend. I had toyed with Sybase 11.0.3.3 on Linux (ran straight out of the box, no patching needed, as does 12.5 which I recently installed!) before and was quite happy to run it on this production system as well. Other than instalation by a professional DBA, who did no more tuning than upping the ammount of memory it would use and move the temp DB off the master volume, I developed and ran it all on my own. Soon this portal took 250.000 page views a day with out breaking into a sweat.
Now fast forward to 2001. Again a Vignette portal project (much bigger, though not in pageviews, but in functionality, developers, budget and hardware) but with Oracle 8i (8.1.6, IIRC), again running on big Sun boxes. All the database work was done by 2(!) full-time DBAs and this was the slowest I have ever seen a database go. What’s more, on Sybase I just created an index that made sense and it would use it. Not so on Oracle, explicit index hints were needed to make a query go from 3 seconds to 50ms. How can oracle’s optimizer miss something like that? And that was with up to date statistics. And then there were things like it doing a carthesian join on thousands of rows when the join clauses were fine. (they worked fine on the dev and staging server) Desperate, I tried everything. Eventualy I took out one of the tables and did a subquery instead for that part of the join and it was fine. Again: major stuff-up for Oracle.
But that server (8 CPU, 8GB!) is still slow as hell. People from Oracle have been called in and they found nothing wrong, the performance was as expected.
Needless to say I have lost almost all faith in Oracle. Unless forced to, I wouldn’t use it for anything.
I have also used MS SQL, and like it, great datbase, excelent tools and almost admin-free. Too bad I don’t like running services on Windows…
Postgres 7.4 rocks. Very, very, fast (although you have to coach the optimizer a bit as well) and so far reliable. I haven’t put too much strain on it yet, though. But I would use it for any web project.
“To the individual that termed me a “half-wit” for stating my belief that Oracle was a “giant piece of shit”, whatever, you’re entitled to your perspective. But I’ve developed and supported a variety of large, enterprise database applications that process millions of transactions and store volume at multi-terabyte levels. Perhaps if the TCO of Oracle was more in alignment with the quality of the product, I would not have this view. But my own empirical experience in the matter displays otherwise.”
I’m sorry I wasn’t clear. I was trying to say I actually AGREE on these points.
It was these comments which were half-witted:
“And why not Unix? It’s proven to be rock solid and plays well with others, in terms of networking, data sharing, etc….”
You define “rock solid” pretty loosely, Naum.
“Now the use is prevalent and everything from MySQL, Apache, Tomcat, Request Tracker, or any number of enterprise applications are heavily used now, much to the chagrin of vendors like Oracle. Why? Mainly because of cost…”
Exactly, if you do not consider TCO. Once TCO is figured in, *nix and LAMP and all that starts becoming pretty daggone expensive to upkeep.
Sarcasm(*ON)
But who worries about TCO, when it’s all “free” and all about “empowering” and “freedom” to boot!!
Sarcasm(*OFF)
“…because they work and much better to work with, on an overall basis.”
“Much better” is pretty loosely defined, as well.
“You seem to be totally out of touch with the state of things.”
That was my point about your views, Naum. Do you even know what CPF and an i400 is?!?
If not, then you would be totally out of touch with the state of the art, which is the exact point which you were claiming about Mr. Greenspun. That’s what made the points you attempted to make somewhat “half-witted”.
As I said, there were so many I apologize for singling a few out.
Btw, I’m not hard of hearing, Naum!!
At this point, Andy Hertzfeld, who has devoted himself in recent years to open-source projects like Eazel and Chandler,
Ah, a totally unbiased opinion coming, I’m sure…;-D
spoke up for the maligned legions of Linux-heads. “It’s because they want people to use the stuff!”
Mr. Hertzfeld, for all his unbelievable contributions to the field, apparently missed the recent memo by Mr. Raymonds, on that FACTS OF THE MATTER about how “Open” Source “fools” have developed a mostly-UNusable UI.
His comment underscored something that’s frequently misunderstood about the open-source approach, which is often wrongly stereotyped as loopily communal and out-of-touch with business reality.
Ah, I guess not the opinion was slightly biased after-all…;-D
And being SO out-of-touch in developing crappy UI very precisely shows HOW “out-of-touch with business reality” the “Open” Source loopily communal approach IS, in actual fact.
There’s an essential pragmatism to the notion that programmers work best when they can share, and learn from, one another’s work.
Ya know, thaz something I learned about 20 years ago. I went from my first job, a 1-man-child shop, into larger shops.
Funny that was so readily apparent to me, so many years before “Open” Source.
(But how could that BE…?!?…;-)
After all, every other field of human endeavor works that way.
Oh, mebbe that wuz it…;-D
?
“Hi, JayT. If you’re going to attack me personally, could you please do it well? ;)”
I was “attacking” your ignorance and your stupidity, Mr. Gabbour. If I didn’t do a good job, perhaps it was partially not my fault. You can thank me later, btw…;-D
“You’re across the board, claiming I like Opensource and who knows what else. However, I believe that Microsoft led the last price revolution, with enormous success in bringing low cost computing to the world, in the midst of a savagely cutthroat industry. I was very careful not to mention my private thoughts on the matter.”
That’s why I commented on what you posted, rather than you personally. You apparently took it otherWise.
<snip crap>
“(Incidentally, maybe you’re right I don’t know what “REAL GOOD” technology means. I can only imagine lisp systems. Can you kindly tell me what’s better?)”
There’s no “maybe” about it, and I did. I’d imagine a 400 runs Lisp, but dunno. It runs 5L in a few months, so I’d guess it will if it doesn’t already.
(Might not be apparent, as the reader supplies the “tone of voice” I use, but…) Don’t claim I know everything, btw, but know what I do know pretty well.
I’m the CTO of bizrate.com. This is not to brag but to hopefully put a little weight behind my comments.
I’ve read through all the comments posted above, read the Salon article, and here are my 2 cents:
– Free Software is not about building revolutionary products. It’s about building products that can be used in revolutionary ways. Being able to freely change what you don’t like about a piece of software leads to massive cost savings. JayT, this is what you miss in your statements that costs are huge. I agree that overall it may well cost MORE to build the core of a piece of open source/free software, but it costs SIGNIFICANTLY LESS to implement as soon as the implementation is non-trivial, i.e. when the implementation is in a heavily inter-related system. So is Microsoft Office not good? It’s awesome. And it integrates very easily, so this is not where F/OSS can shine. I am using Open Office, but it’s not something I’d want to tweak, so I don’t get much value out of that piece of F/OSS. The value there is price and avoidance of vendor lock-in, but that’s isn’t as great as the value you get out of Apache, where you can tweak everything to your heart’s content.
– Regarding Linux reliability. Mr. Greenspun seems to have made a joking poke at Linux that was blown out of proportion. In my experience, Linux is significantly more reliable than Windows. BSD used to be even more reliable than Linux, but is not as extensible and lacks some nimbleness. Kernel 2.4 mostly erased the BSD lead, and kernel 2.6 should be even better. But if there’s something you can do in BSD, there should be no reason not to do it on that platform. At BizRate we exclusively run GNU/Linux on all our outwards-facing servers. Now Sun Solaris is a very interesting cookie. Again in my experience, Solaris is probably the most reliable of all. I think that there are 2 reasons for that: First, Sun’s 2 decades of experience with the same codebase, and second, Sun’s control over the hardware that is running Solaris. This is vindicated by how unreliable Solaris on Intel is (do not touch Solaris on Intel). Solaris on Sun hardware is VERY reliable but NOT fast. It is akin to a long-distance runner, who can run a marathon without breaking a sweat. But don’t ask it to sprint, because while owning the hardware is a boon for Sun’s reliablilty, it is its achilles’ heel for speed: Sparc processors are horrendously slow.
As an example, consider Sybase IQ Multiplex, an excellent columnar database engine. Running in on Intel/Linux vs. Sparc/Solaris gives you 7x ROI. You can buy a twice-faster Intel box for almost 4x less than a Sun box.
– Regarding the Oracle discussion… I am not a big fan of Oracle for a few reasons, the biggest being its pricing which I found rather insulting to the end user (that was a few years ago, Oracle’s felt the pressure since). We ended up using both Oracle and Sybase ASE (as well as a sprinkling of SQL Server and MySQL for other jobs), and we found out that Oracle indeed needs a lot more handholding (install, tuning and day-to-day management), can be significantly slower, and only really shines in larger data warehousing applications. In a nutshell, my experience agrees with others’ comments above. And where is Oracle’s columnar database product? Something like KX Systems’ KDB or Sybase IQ Multiplex? Those engines will be standard parts of any larger company’s toolchest.
– And finally Gary says “Mebbe I’m a little dense, but I think that *nix’s dependence on flat-files and interpreted scripts is straight outta the 70’s.” This is one of the least understood strengths of *nix. The biggest mistakes of the GUI systems from the 80s and 90s were in fact not having effective command-line scripting systems and creating dozens of binary file formats for configuration information (except for the windows .ini format). You can now see both Microsoft and Apple turn around and build or use once again command-line scripting systems based on the good old *nix foundation.
Also at BizRate we are now massively reverting to flat files and deprecating most of our general purpose database systems which are much too slow. As soon as you need all the speed you can get, it quickly dawns on you that the standard database systems (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Sybase, etc…) are just GENERAL PURPOSE storage and retrieval engines. As such, they can NEVER be faster than optimized storage and retrieval engines built specifically for your needs. Again, assuming that you value speed so highly that it’ll be worth your building a customized engine, you’ll be blown away by what the newer processors can do, and you’ll see possibly 100x improvements.
I’ll stop rambling now, assuming someone actually read through all this.
The system cut off my post above.. reposting…
I’m the CTO of bizrate.com. This is not to brag but to hopefully put a little weight behind my comments.
I’ve read through all the comments posted above, read the Salon article, and here are my 2 cents:
– Free Software is not about building revolutionary products. It’s about building products that can be used in revolutionary ways. Being able to freely change what you don’t like about a piece of software leads to massive cost savings. JayT, this is what you miss in your statements that costs are huge. I agree that overall it may well cost MORE to build the core of a piece of open source/free software, but it costs SIGNIFICANTLY LESS to implement as soon as the implementation is non-trivial, i.e. when the implementation is in a heavily inter-related system. So is Microsoft Office not good? It’s awesome. And it integrates very easily, so this is not where F/OSS can shine. I am using Open Office, but it’s not something I’d want to tweak, so I don’t get much value out of that piece of F/OSS. The value there is price and avoidance of vendor lock-in, but that’s isn’t as great as the value you get out of Apache, where you can tweak everything to your heart’s content.
– Regarding Linux reliability. Mr. Greenspun seems to have made a joking poke at Linux that was blown out of proportion. In my experience, Linux is significantly more reliable than Windows. BSD used to be even more reliable than Linux, but is not as extensible and lacks some nimbleness. Kernel 2.4 mostly erased the BSD lead, and kernel 2.6 should be even better. But if there’s something you can do in BSD, there should be no reason not to do it on that platform. At BizRate we exclusively run GNU/Linux on all our outwards-facing servers. Now Sun Solaris is a very interesting cookie. Again in my experience, Solaris is probably the most reliable of all. I think that there are 2 reasons for that: First, Sun’s 2 decades of experience with the same codebase, and second, Sun’s control over the hardware that is running Solaris. This is vindicated by how unreliable Solaris on Intel is (do not touch Solaris on Intel). Solaris on Sun hardware is VERY reliable but NOT fast. It is akin to a long-distance runner, who can run a marathon without breaking a sweat. But don’t ask it to sprint, because while owning the hardware is a boon for Sun’s reliablilty, it is its achilles’ heel for speed: Sparc processors are horrendously slow.
As an example, consider Sybase IQ Multiplex, an excellent columnar database engine. Running in on Intel/Linux vs. Sparc/Solaris gives you 7x ROI. You can buy a twice-faster Intel box for almost 4x less than a Sun box.
– Regarding the Oracle discussion… I am not a big fan of Oracle for a few reasons, the biggest being its pricing which I found rather insulting to the end user (that was a few years ago, Oracle’s felt the pressure since). We ended up using both Oracle and Sybase ASE (as well as a sprinkling of SQL Server and MySQL for other jobs), and we found out that Oracle indeed needs a lot more handholding (install, tuning and day-to-day management), can be significantly slower, and only really shines in larger data warehousing applications. In a nutshell, my experience agrees with others’ comments above. And where is Oracle’s columnar database product? Something like KX Systems’ KDB or Sybase IQ Multiplex? Those engines will be standard parts of any larger company’s toolchest.
– And finally Gary says “Mebbe I’m a little dense, but I think that *nix’s dependence on flat-files and interpreted scripts is straight outta the 70’s.” This is one of the least understood strengths of *nix. The biggest mistakes of the GUI systems from the 80s and 90s were in fact not having effective command-line scripting systems and creating dozens of binary file formats for configuration information (except for the windows .ini format). You can now see both Microsoft and Apple turn around and build or use once again command-line scripting systems based on the good old *nix foundation.
Also at BizRate we are now massively reverting to flat files and deprecating most of our general purpose database systems which are much too slow. As soon as you need all the speed you can get, it quickly dawns on you that the standard database systems (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Sybase, etc…) are just GENERAL PURPOSE storage and retrieval engines. As such, they can NEVER be faster than optimized storage and retrieval engines built specifically for your needs. Again, assuming that you value speed so highly that it’ll be worth your building a customized engine, you’ll be blown away by what the newer processors can do, and you’ll see possibly 100x improvements.
I’ll stop rambling now, assuming someone actually read through all this.
Oooops. Errata:
There are reports that IBM will announce in a month or two that CPF will run 5L natively in addition to running AIX binaries, as it currently does.
Mr. Asseily,
I thought I recalled your name from the SM Community, which I infested briefly a couple/3 years back…;-D
I read every word with great interest (prior to fact-checking the above, btw). I just don’t happen to have the same experience in these regards:
“- Free Software is not about building revolutionary products. It’s about building products that can be used in revolutionary ways.”
I’m sorry, but today my tolerance for old lame meme’s is running low. And, in almost each and every case, whenEVER I see folks heading towards “revolutionary”, (in IT or anywhere else,) I see them re-inventing the wheel, and generally doing it poorly. It stands to reason, right?
“Being able to freely change what you don’t like about a piece of software leads to massive cost savings.”
Not always, as you yourself note in what follows.
“JayT, this is what you miss in your statements that costs are huge. I agree that overall it may well cost MORE to build the core of a piece of open source/free software,
Then WHY market it as “free”, in the first place?!? (Rhetorical question, obviously. Because stupid people actually believe there is such-a thing as a free lunch.)
..but it costs SIGNIFICANTLY LESS to implement as soon as the implementation is non-trivial, i.e. when the implementation is in a heavily inter-related system. …but that’s isn’t as great as the value you get out of Apache, where you can tweak everything to your heart’s content.”
Firstly, this would contradict the errant meme because MOST businesses do not have the LUXURY and HIGH-MARGINS to economically support a bunch of dweebs tweaking OS components to their “heart’s content”.
And secondly, or redundantly or whatever.. That is the PROBLEM. Company’s are getting bled dry by geeks/dweebs/nerds/whazthediff who wanna play like they are systems programmers. VERY expensive meme, that one, and many of these guys are NOT very GOOD systems programmers, at that. Total Cost of Ownership-Wise, those expenses add up, even if they are just buried or hidden in IT budgets… It still adds up to expensive.
“- Regarding Linux reliability. Mr. Greenspun seems to have made a joking poke at Linux that was blown out of proportion.
Quite the contrary. It was never blown INTO the proportion it deserved:
“as I understand it one of the guys has essentially had to move into the colocation cage to keep poking at Linux.”
Yeah, those server farms are so CHEAP, unless you add the cost of an increasing (and increasingly expensive) head-count. Which most IT managers DON’T ACCURATELY KNOW, let alone figure in. And then they really don’t have adequate figures to do a COMPARISON against, other than what they’ve seen or heard of Windows shops.
“In my experience, Linux is significantly more reliable than Windows.”
And how does it compare to OS/400??? It doesn’t. How much time, just for one single for-instance, does the paid staff spend keeping up on security updates?? Can either of these OSs verifiably claim they have NEVER had a virus in 25 years experience??? I’ve never heard the claim. Dunno about Solaris, (my bad,) but never heard it has never had a virus.
“Again, assuming that you value speed so highly that it’ll be worth your building a customized engine, …”
See, that’s a very valid point.
But one that doesn’t generalize very well to very many businesses a-TALL. How many can afford staff to custom-develop OS components??
Well all too many do, but they can’t afford it like BizRate can. (Or they’re affording it by shipping jobs from America and Europe elsewhere, but thaz a whole ‘nuther story I don’t have time ta-get into.)
>>That was my point about your views, Naum. Do you even know what CPF and an i400 is?!?
Yes I do, but it’s not germane to the subject matter here. So you’re an IBM fanboi … is all you’ve displayed.
But I will say flat out IMV that Linux is superior to OS/400 in overall terms of TCO … IBM support is very expensive, I’d rather pay to keep a talented staff aboard and let them hack away on the open source stuff then shell out big bucks to IBM consultants and all the exorbitant licensing fees.
Of course, it doesn’t matter what I think or what you think. Fact is that the free software/open source stuff is becoming much more prevalent as corporate entities are seeing that it makes no sense to plunk down big money when there are free alternatives that are just as good or good enough.
You’ve been in this industry for 20 years JayT, and the best you know is an IBM server? 5L seems to only scale up to 32 processors. In comparison, the CM-2 could ship with 64,000. Not bad for something people like Feynman and Hillis happily worked on. Sure, it went bankrupt after 11 years, after the supercomputer market collapse, but I’m sure a grizzled old veteran like you is used to that. I always have to go back in time to learn about computing.
You can do better than that, please try again.
Sure, I could be less ignorant and stupid as you claim, I notice it often… but that would mean being only as smart as you. ;P
Naum, when you did your comparison of Linux and how superior the TCO is to OS/400, did you spec out Linux on the 400? The iSeries won best-of-show there 2 years ago.
And btw, Naum, IF you actually did some research in this, did you scope out Linux native on an LPAR, or was that Linux running on a 400 PC co-processor?? And finally btw, if the latter, was that internally connected on the system bus, or external via HSL… I’d be curious as to some of the details of this comparison, as I actually WOULD like to learn some more on this stuff.
And, when you say “I’d rather pay to keep a talented staff aboard and let them hack away on the open source stuff then shell out big bucks to IBM consultants and all the exorbitant licensing fees” I’m with ya there. However, the question is to how much you can fork out the nose on talented staff for most businesses I’m familiar with, which are not largely able to pay ANY money for IBM consultants. You must be in a lucky situation where you work, to have that kind of money.
First of all, Mr. Gabbour, when it comes to stupidity we may very well be a close match, but when it comes to ignorance I’m afraid you still have me beat by a long mile. There’s been bazillions of companies that produced great tech that didn’t survive in the market very long. Yeah, I’ve seen most-a the flashy products come and go.
I’m no expert on 5L, in case I wasn’t clear. But I do know a 400, and with (what?) 16 processors it was able to smoke all the other’s in VolanoMark (Java) Benchmark a few years back. Tops… Iow, it’s not HOW MANY processors you have or HOW MANY GHz you have, right? It’s what you can do with them. And haven’t kept up on the feeds and speeds, but there are plenty of (slightly-unsubstantiated) rumors that IBM will NOT PUBLISH the full stats on a 400, because it makes their high-end mainframes that cost 10X as much look pretty wobbly.
And you mistake me entirely, fool, because I’m not smart and have only a high-school degree at that… I’m just old and grizzled, so happened to see so much of this so-called “revolutionary new Great THINGS!” come out a decade or two back and fail. However, being old and grizzled allows me to see the reality of things better, and not be so EASILY impressed by the flash and sizzle that most are.
OTOH, in the late 80’s or early 90’s I had my IBM CE (Customer Engineer, the hardware gearheads) give me a call. Said my hard drive was a li’l flakey, but percentages were that it wouldn’t be going down any time soon, so we could schedule a replacement at my convenience. (That was old days, prior to hot-swap.) I’d seen the message on QSYSOPR *MSGQ, so wasn’t surprised by that, but I’d only HEARD-a folks getting called by their CE’s like this, prior to that.
Iow, I’m not smart so much as I’ve been lucky to be working on (a LOTta aspects of) “tomorrow’s technology” a decade ago.
Any-a y’all heard of Grid or Autonomous Computing and all that…?? No, I don’t claim to have INVENTED it, just worked on it’s precursors for many-a year.
Finally, Mr. Gabbour, I’m sorry but I haven’t heard-a F & H so plead ignorant. (Ah well.) But I’ve worked on 400’s in companies from measely $10M to Fortune-30, and recall how (at one time anyway) Allstate bought 10,000 of ’em to put in their offices with NO staff whatsover to hand-hold them… I’m afraid neither you nor anyone else is gonna be able to do better than that, as far as versatility and reliability and cost-effective… If you stick to facts rather than anecdotal evidence that primarily jes goes ta-show the exception-to-the-rule.
JayT:
The main reason F/OSS software is written when something already exists to do the job is not to create a revolution, but to simply allow the software to be used by everyone, and potentially by people who will tweak it to use it in unforseen ways. The software is not revolutionary, it’s the license to use it that is.
And I did feel the revolution, not being old enough to have enjoyed the free exchange of ideas in the software industry of the 60s and 70s (those were the true revolutionary times). 8 years ago when we started BizRate, I had to cobble together a number of proprietary solutions, thanks to some really useful scripting environments on the macintosh (Userland Frontier being the main one). When we switched to Linux in 97, it changed everything. This doesn’t mean that I couldn’t do it with other hardware/software at the time, but Linux made it simple and easy. Finally I could use the software that other people had made in ways that they never expected, but were great for ME. That’s the beauty of F/OSS.
You then state: “Then WHY market it as “free”, in the first place?”
Free software is not “free” as in costing nothing. It is “free” as in allowing you the freedom to do anything with it. Free Software is costly. Everything is. You have to install it. You have to maintain it. In the case of Free Software you may even need to modify it. You also may need support. Nowhere does it say that Free Software costs nothing to use. Only the most clueless computing newbie would think that.
But I stand by my statement that while F/OSS costs money to install and tweak properly, in most cases the TCO is massively lower than closed-source proprietary implementations. You of all people should know, with your experience, that the secret of a good implementation is in the details. With F/OSS software, you not only know what you’re getting ahead of time, if you hit a snag you can get rid of it. With non-F/OSS you’re totally out of luck and at the mercy of the vendor, and it makes the implementation failure risk dramatically higher.
There’s a simple example to illustrate this point: you’re tasked to implement a system. You go to F/OSS software that may have 90% of the functionality, You implement a pilot, you cost out the remaining 10%, then you say to your manager: “ok, I can guarantee 100% successful implementation for price $P1 and time T1”. Now assume you go for a proprietary solution. Assuming the vendor doesn’t lie about the functionality in his software, and you manage to suck out of him a free or cheap pilot, you may expect to get 100% of the functionality. The only thing you can tell your manager is: “I think this will work, and I’m 90% confident that we’ll have a successful implementation (barring unforseen problems in the details), and it will cost $P2 and should take T2 time”.
Well, the more complex the system to build, and the more external dependencies with other existing system, the worse off you will be with a proprietary solution. Your confidence level will drop, and your implementation will be a lot more likely to fail. And that is the true cost of proprietary closed-source software.
Then you want to compare Linux to OS/400. OS/400 is a great OS. I’ve barely used it but I have a lot of respect for it. Now find me the staff to build software on top of it.
What is rather amazing is how much people talk about Linux needing less handholding than Windows (or the contrary depending on the interest group), but no one really asking companies: How many servers do you maintain for each OS, and what FTEs (people) do you assign to them?
I only know from my own experience, and I can safely say that I have about 1 FTE per 100 high-performance Linux servers. This includes setup, monitoring, maintenance, networking, work on the co-location facility, UPSes, etc… What is your experience with Linux? Windows? OS/400? (by the way, Solaris is even better than Linux on the FTEs, but it’s a “cheat” because we use Sun support on those, so overall it’s about a wash)
Next, you say: “How many can afford staff to custom-develop OS components??”
Well, anybody who needs something that can’t be done, or can only be done at other prohibitive cost. Think of F/OSS simply as the opportunity cost when you are pricing some proprietary solution: how much would it cost me if I got some F/OSS and customized it? That’s all you need to do.
As I said above, you’re going to pay for what functionality you need, either by buying it or by making it. If you’re lucky, someone has already built all the functionality you need in a F/OSS package, and you won’t have to make it. In most cases, you’ll probably have to do 20% of the work, 80% of it being already available.
BizRate can “afford” staff to custom-develop OS components because we found out that there’s a lot of value in the software we’re creating. Many more companies should think about it and look at what value they can create internally by building what they truly need, not by compromising and patching together existing off-the-shelf components.
The thread here has diverted from the gist of the article and I guess my thoughts on the article weren’t lucidly represented. I just found it astonishing that these respected programmers (and including Philip’s commentary) “can’t see the forest for the trees”… …bemoaning the fact that F/OSS is primarily a re-incantation of UNIX (with a Windows GUI on top…) while remaining totally oblivious to a revolution that is occurring because of F/OSS. Disentangled from the vagaries of contemporary day-to-day computing, they drone on for a “sliver bullet” or some evolutionary breakthrough that flies in the face of the mountainous base of existing software and hardware, that increasingly inhibits the onset of any new radical transformations in the field.
Simonyi looks like he’s trying to reinvent CASE tools. Yeah, maybe he should stick to formulating a new and improved variable naming notation…
Back to the F/OSS significance – maybe it’s because I’m an old-school programmer that came late to the *nix party (around 1997 or so). For many years I worked on Burroughs, DEC and MVS systems. There was no sharing of code going on – in fact, I was lucky to get access the manuals for such systems. The first university I attended got in big trouble for making copies of the VAX manuals. And learning how to write good code, IMV, comes from reading manuals (not some other goober’s perspective on how to do things) or better yet, pouring your eyes over someone else’s code. Yeah, those of you whose UNIX background go far back, I can see how F/OSS appears to be an inferior reincarnation. But you’re not focusing on the big picture – the acceptance and widespread dissemination of F/OSS into mainstream commercial and personal computing realm.
* 10 years ago, it would be unthinkable for most Fortune 500 firms to adopt F/OSS or anything that wasn’t supplied by IBM or MS or other software vendor like Computer Associates or Serena or $insertVendorName. Unless it was a shop-brewed deal, but by this time, most programmer staffs had been slashed enough to curtail such undertakings.
* Even recent as 3 years ago I came into an AIX shop that at first, strictly forbid me from writing any Perl as they had an official policy against using F/OSS. But by the end of a year stint there, substantial portions of the systems were rewritten in Perl by me.
* Now I have a position where I travel even more and have witnessed how ubiquitous F/OSS is and how many shops have little proprietary software and nearly ALL F/OSS. Not 100% but the trend is definitely happening for the reason I stated above – mostly cost.
* F/OSS is in large part responsible for the explosion in web sites (some may discount this event as not a positive thing …). Most folks arn’t going to plug their own server in or even opt for leasing their own connected server – they’re going to go virtual host and for a cheap fee, they’ll be served with LAMP. Just take a look at the Apache dominance of the web server realm. Linux may be a bit role player on the desktop but it’s becoming king in the web server market, at least on a personal/non-profit level and even on an enterprise level for many companies.
* It’s going to play a role in the coming years on the lines of DRM and so called “trusted” computing. An alternative to the locked down platforms that new Windows platforms appear to be headed.
* Finally, the most critical aspect and the item here that eclipses all others – the immense power of “code sharing” on a global level. Basically, all have the tools at their disposal to become extraordinary programmers. Not just coders who toil for Microsoft or for blessed individuals who somehow got the access to expensive computing resources. Anyone, if so motivated, can view the code and get their fingers dirty…
JayT, as far as numbers and benchmarks go, whatever. Your quoted numbers, no doubt, are accurate. But that still doesn’t mean squat – tests can be fudged to show anything. The only relevance is how it affects the systems that I’m running. Another anecdote to end my blurb here – at a previous employer, relayed to me by friends still holding positions there, heavy IBM shop that I supported an application handling millions of transactions and terabytes of database storage has moved from MVS to Linux on OS390. CPU utilization (which for this application system, is heavily monitored and critical) has skyrocketed, and performance has declined. Does that mean MVS > Linux on OS390? Or is it just the unique set of factors there on that implementation? Or supposing it is much better, is it less costly? Or maybe it is, but IBM wants the client to ante up more money to compensate for their assuming more support in a capacity that they understand not… … many, many variables, cannot just give me a benchmark and tell me A is better than B…
I’ll be unable to reply in detail, but would briefly make these points:
“Nowhere does it say that Free Software costs nothing to use. Only the most clueless computing newbie would think that.”
Apparently not:
“* Now I have a position where I travel even more and have witnessed how ubiquitous F/OSS is and how many shops have little proprietary software and nearly ALL F/OSS. Not 100% but the trend is definitely happening for the reason I stated above – mostly cost.”
“And learning how to write good code, IMV, comes from reading manuals (not some other goober’s perspective on how to do things) or better yet, pouring your eyes over someone else’s code.”
As I said above, I can’t possibly agree more, and is how I’ve learned programming. I took courses in local Community College (didn’t get degree because of required Speech class), read manuals and looked at others code. That was in mid to late 70’s, so excuse me if I point how ludicrous it is to imply, let alone state, that F/OSS is of any significance whatsoever in this.
“Yeah, those of you whose UNIX background go far back, I can see how F/OSS appears to be an inferior reincarnation.”
Which it is.
“But you’re not focusing on the big picture – ”
I happen to be a “big picture” guy, Naum. You ain’t gettin it a bit. For example:
“Your quoted numbers, no doubt, are accurate. But that still doesn’t mean squat – tests can be fudged to show anything. … Does that mean MVS > Linux on OS390? Or is it just the unique set of factors there on that implementation? Or supposing it is much better, is it less costly? Or maybe it is, … … many, many variables, cannot just give me a benchmark and tell me A is better than B… ”
Well, anybody that makes a judgment just based on “the speeds and feeds” is a fool, no doubt, but people are swayed by funny things. People get corn-fused, and make judgments about technology that represent their political views, rather than what is most effective for the enterprise, quite frequently. Poop happens. And since every entity IS unique, it’s real easy to work backwards from conclusion to fact: “Well, in OUR org, THIS gear works THE BEST ’cause [fill in the meme].”
“What is rather amazing is how much people talk about Linux needing less handholding than Windows (or the contrary depending on the interest group), but no one really asking companies: How many servers do you maintain for each OS, and what FTEs (people) do you assign to them?”
Even more incredible is how much people talk about how many servers they can run, rather than how few to do the same amount of work. Bowoggles the imagination.
And Henri, if you can consistently say this on ANY gear “ok, I can guarantee 100% successful implementation for price $P1 and time T1″… well, I’m sorry if I’m skeptical. (A Teacher got me some work while I was a student, so..) I’ve been doing this stuff professionally since about ’77 and I’ve never guaranteed successful implementation of any project of any size. Smaller stuff, yeah… In spite of this lack, I’ve done a fair number of large and small projects, btw.
Mebbe laterzzzzz…:-D
I would point the finger at DELL before linux. Linux 2.6 kernel is rock solid. Dell servers? Issues – many issues. We manage 200 of them. and about 40 Compaq and 100 IBM.
I’ll take a Compaq (DEC) over a Dell any day. Unfortunately they cost significantly more.
i have the new unix in mt mac computer , i can tell to all microsoft fan – linux is alaive
Oracle sucks major horse ass no matter which platform it’s used on. There’s a reason the story of the emperor’s new clothes exists….
A new article by Jaron Lanier on the same topic summarizing his new book.
“You are not a gadget”.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646402192953052.html
Some excerpts:
“There’s a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn’t proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe’s Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth.”
“The “open” paradigm rests on the assumption that the way to get ahead is to give away your brain’s work—your music, writing, computer code and so on—and earn kudos instead of money. You are then supposedly compensated because your occasional dollop of online recognition will help you get some kind of less cerebral work that can earn money. For instance, maybe you can sell custom branded T-shirts.”