Linux Five Years Away From Mainstream

wellington wrote to mention a ZDNet blurb about a Gartner group study. Gartner indicates that 'mainstream' use of open source in IT environments may be 5 years away. From the article: "Gartner's latest Linux 'hype cycle' report shows that open source is halfway to maturity but warns the biggest test will be whether it can demonstrate the necessary performance and security to function as a data centre server for mission-critical applications. Leading-edge businesses are generally still in the early stages of Linux deployments but Gartner expects increased commercialisation and improved storage and systems management for the operating system by the end of 2005, with Linux being used primarily for WebSphere and infrastructure applications on mainframes and web services on blades and racks."

Gartner is apparently...

[Anonymous Coward]

...5 years behind the times.

Huh??

[Pizentios]

That's odd, i already run mission critical apps on linux! In fact, we only have one windows server, and it's getting phased out next month.

Grain of salt

[scronline]

Anything Gartner says about Windows and Linux has to be taken with a grain of salt. A very large grain at that. How can you trust anything that a company that's been paid by Microsoft once to say anything realistic about a Microsoft competitor? I mean, if linux isn't "mature" why is it already in so many networks? I don't know a single ISP that doesn't have atleast ONE linux server. Even those ISPs that are Windows based still has atleast one linux box somewhere. For that matter, why are so many Unix boxes being replaced with Linux? I personally have replaced 2 Windows servers for clients with Linux in the past 6 months. My ISP, though small, has moved from 12 Windows servers to 4 Linux boxes and 1 Windows. But of course it's not stable enough to handle the work? I was getting hacked on a monthly basis with the Windows NT servers. And the remaining server got nailed by the zotob virus even though I had applied the patch. But THIS is ready for the mainstream datacenter? I mean, c'mon. If it wasn't ready there wouldn't be so many Linux servers out there. What all of these "reports" fail to be able to take into consideration is all the White boxes out there. Or for that matter all the servers people have purchased with Windows or without OS all together that get wiped out and have Linux installed. I, for one, have gotten really tired of this kind of BS "news" since it's always putting Linux capabilities down, or DRASTICALLY misreported numbers. I mean.... http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_surve y.html [netcraft.com] Most servers running apache are Linux. Just kind of tired of this misinformation.

Wrong article title

[Decaff]

In spite of the title, the article does not state 'Linux Five Years Away From Mainstream'. In states that 'Linux is five years away from mainstream use in Enterprise IT infrastructures. This is all about high-end data-centre stuff - a niche use. This article is confusing a very specialised use of Linux with it's general use as, for example, a mid-range server where it has proved it's successfulness for years. There is further confusion where the article mentions that 'many are re-evaluating Linux use' (many turns out to be 5 CIOs out of a panel of 12).

I don't know whether this article is deliberate FUD, or just a confused mess. I suspect the latter.

Major player on the Desktop

[hummassa]

Depending on whom you ask, Linux is already a major player in the desktop.
It au pair with OSX in raw number of desktops installed in a lot of places, and was pushed in a lot of countries to the desktop. Ubuntu Hoary / Fedora Core are every bit as easy to install than W2k/XP, and work equally well. Choose your desktop environment for your users and you're set.

Re:Nuclear Fusion

[zootm]

Out of general curiosity, were there any positive responses to your article? Have any people offered to start projects and help implement some of your proposed changes?

I'm not an experienced developer in "low-level" languages like C or C++, but I'd like to help out wherever I can. I know the GNOME Storage project is working on some things similar to some of your suggestions, but otherwise I liked your article and I've got a strong inclination to help out with any projects like this, so it'd be useful to know where I can help...

Re:Nuclear Fusion

[LWATCDR]

"Linux is complicated."
Windows is complicated. Why do I have to spend hours helping telling people to install Adware and spybot?
Why do have spend time fixing busted registry entries?

Linux on my Tivo just works. Linux on my router at home just works. No mucking about with service packs or any of that junk.
Good grief too much choice in Software? I thought that is why people like Windows. There are a lot more than 4 word processors for Windows and frankly a lot more than 13 ways to do the same thing.
If you want to tell someone to just get the "Home" version of Linux then tell them to pick up Linspire. If they want a free version and they can read then Ubuntu is great. The only thing I find lacking is you have to jump through some hoops to get all the multimedia stuff because of twisted copyright laws in the US.
BTW I would love it if Ubuntu would have a for pay version with all that in it already. It it was say $10 or $12 I would buy it to give to friends and family.

Re:Nuclear Fusion

[piquadratCH]

Why can't there be a Linux distribution that is changed to meet commercial desires?

RHEL? [redhat.com]

Why can't there be a Linux distribution that is changed to meet home user desires?

Ubuntu? [ubuntulinux.org]

Not a military term

[BeanThere]

"Mission Critical" is not a military term:

mission critical [answers.com] "Vital to the operation of the organization. The term is very popular for describing the applications required to run the day-to-day business."

It may once have been a military term, but its usage has long ago become more generalised, so that usage is now strictly a part of the etymology i.e. history of the phrase. Language changes, and the correct version of a word is the one in use today.

Re:Nuclear Fusion

[jacksonj04]

Wrong. There are people who would much rather use a more secure OS than Windows, and know about Linux, but really just cannot be bothered working around some of the more ass-backwards systems. I can do things in Windows within minutes that take a good half hour on Linux. Now, I agree with the practice improving speed but some things just do not work between distros, whereas Windows does.

Personal choice would make a difference when both are truly as easy to use as each other. Until then, it's too much effort for entrenched users to switch (although it is slowly getting better).

At the moment the desktop lineup is OS X, Windows, Linux. For servers it is Linux, Windows, OS X.

Demonstrate performance and security?

[qualico]

"warns the biggest test will be whether it can demonstrate the necessary performance and security to function as a data centre server for mission-critical applications."

That statement has to be coming from the completely clueless.

I'd say that this happened 5 years AGO:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/09/05/septe mber_2005_web_server_survey.html [netcraft.com]

Re:Finally! *My* chance to be an angry Lunix zealo

[kbielefe]

No Quicktime or WMV plugin means a lot of websites like CNN and Yahoo don't really work well.

I think it's important to distinguish between no Quicktime or WMV plugin and no easy to install on Ubuntu Quicktime or WMV plugin. CNN works great for me using mplayer-plugin on my Gentoo systems, thank you very much, and just required a USE flag setting if I remember right. Getting it to work on most other distros I have tried, however, can be quite an experience, but it is still possible. And I believe it works out of the box on commercial, desktop-oriented distros like Linspire.