USA Today and NYT on Linux rising

prostoalex writes "USA Today notices significant rise of Linux in the high-end enterprise environment. Although it doesn't provide obligatory pretty pictures, the paper mentions the projects at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and NASA. Also if you've missed the New York Times Google article of the day, the expose on John Doerr from Valley's venerable KPCB talks about venture fund investing $12 million in LinuxCare. NYT quote: "That's a freight train I wouldn't want to get in front of," said Mr. Doerr, explaining the importance to having a stake in a Linux-based venture. "Probably get run over.''"

They already do!

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to walmart.com [walmart.com] and see pre-installed Linux machines with newbie distros! SuSE, Xandros, Linspire and Java Desktop.

Please also try KDE 3.2 and GNOME 2.6, you will be SHOCKED how EASY THEY ARE!

Re:Old! :)

[Anonytroll]

No, we say "Day/Month". In Germany we say "on 5th June". Of course I cannot speak for other countries/languages.

Re:Another Day...

[MoThugz]

If it was yet another "corporate desktop Linux" bullpaganda, I wouldn't have bothered clicking on the article link...

But FINALLY, it's an article about where Linux should be the OS of choice, and not where the desktop zealots think it should be.

You did RTFA before posting now, did you?

Re:begs the question ...

[nelsonal]

You were probably being facetous, but back in the day one of his first venture investments was in Compaq, which paid a dividend prior to their acquisition by HP. HP, of course pays a dividend as well. Pretty sad that you have to go back to his first venture investments (in 1980 to find a dividend paying company). Intuit could afford to and will likely begin to pay a dividend in the next few years.

Re: USA Today and NYT on Linux rising

[Otter]

However, $12 mil is too small in today's world. The LinuxCare website does not have any customer testimonials listed. Neither is the website itself too impressive - gives you the impression of a startup. Will it crawl, walk and run? Only time will tell.

LinuxCare has been around for five years, and Kleiner Perkins was involved from the begining. It's been through multiple rounds of scandal and executive reshuffling already. It wasn't clear whether the $12M and the freight train quote are recent or from 1999. My impression is that the first is ancient news and the second is new, but maybe not.

Didn't they already go bankrupt once?

[pridkett]

Correcty me if I'm wrong, but didn't linuxcare already go bankrupt (or nearly so) once during the DotCom flameout? I seem to recall them having an IPO planned and then canning the IPO and laying off a large portion of their staff in the same week. The only useful thing I remember from them was their bootable business card rescue CDs.

Heck, google doesn't even have a snapshot of text for linuxcare.com indicating it's been down for a while and was recently brought back up. In fact, the top hit for which there is a snippet is an article about linuxcare laying people off [oreillynet.com].

Seems like some people are getting a bit too excited about the Google IPO and thinking that once again companies with no real business plan can do IPOs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm sorry, but you're going to check your enthusiasm in favor or results for a little while at least.

Re:Freight train?

[Omega1045]

Check this out:

KC Article on Doerr [kansascity.com]

From the article: His investment into Google might qualify as the best venture investment ever made -- a huge return of roughly $3 billion, or 240 times the initial $12.5 million he invested.

I think it is Doerr, pronounce ka-ching.

um

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't let your fanboy-ism get in the way of the truth.
Read about those drivers on their Sourforge page:
http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/todo.php

The WEP code is unstable.
If WEP is enabled (CONFIG_IPW2100_WEP=y), it will eventually crash.
Occassionally[sic], packets start failing decryption.
Firmware restarts are still occuring too frequently.


WHOO!! Go open source111!!!

Re:Wow. what is Microsoft going to do?

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw that ad dude - they're comparing Linux running on the mainframe and saying it's cheaper if you have a pentium or something like that.

Re:Research lab != enterprise computing

[jedidiah]

Actually, an OLTP system is remarkably similar to number crunching with a Fortran MPP. Such a system is a large collection of small operations, many of which operate on discrete sets of data.

This is why real "high-end enterprise environments" that run such applications are deploying Linux clusters. Oracle is much better at scaling on multiple 8G systems than one 100G monster.

Other NASA uses of Linux

[acre]

At Johnson Space Center, the flight planning workstations are in the process of migrating from AIX to Red Hat.

The laptops on the spacestation that are used for command and control are also moving to Red Hat from Solaris.

Also there is a project in work to move the Mission Control Center workstations from Dec/Compaq/HP alphas runing True64 to a new platform. The two options under consideration are HP-UX and Red Hat.

Re:The best quote!

[iabervon]

That link says: "circa: In approximately; about: born circa 1900"

While not as common, "circa" is perfectly reasonable to apply to numbers.

Re:begs the question ...

[nelsonal]

They haven't needed cash to invest in growth for more than 15 years. Even if you subtract their stock repurchases (really an operating expense as that is pay for their programmers and management) they haven't needed as much cash as the business generates for more than 10 years. Also, their ability to produce additional cash through investments leaves something to be desired. Windows, Office, Server tools, and bonds are the only cash generating (over their lifetime) businesses they have. Guess what the only one that is getting additional funding is the bond business.