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Linux Software

IBM to Offer Linux Software 92

Posted by CmdrTaco from the the-giant-keeps-waking-up dept.
ChrisKo writes: "Article on how IBM is going to start offering software for Linux" Specifically DB2 and WebSphere. Talks about other Linux related stuff too, and says that Linux is the #2 OS. Not sure who's #1.
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IBM to Offer Linux Software More

IBM to Offer Linux Software

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  • If I want to run non-free software on my cluster, why am I running a free operating system on it? I very much doubt the majority of big bucks customers are running Linux on very high end systems.
  • Yes. Too many distros spoil the plot. I've seen customers stand in front of the shelves of CompUSA staring at the really few different versions of Windows and wonder what box the need to buy.

    Imagine what happens if they wander down the aisle and see all the different flavors of Linux. Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, Debian, Storm, Caldera...Customers have every reason to assume that each distribution is an entirely diffent OS, not just a thin sales-driven repackaging of the same batch of software.

    Freedom to choose is a valuable thing, but the multitude of Linux distributions is, I think, holding back penetration of the consumer market.

    Most folks find buying "computer stuff" a pretty scary experience, largely because they don't know anything about computers, don't want to know anything about computers, and -- importantly -- don't have the time to learn. That's lesson the Linux industry needs to learn from MS and Apple: How to sell a complex, fragile, high-maintenance system to people who expect it to mirror the simplicity of a televsion.

    Absent that, I fear Linux will continue to expand in the server market, but not into the consumer desktop market.

  • Although it does proudly state "Built on NT Technology" - or something along those lines.


    --

  • I'm sorry but Oracle is not GPL, regardless of whether it runs on Linux or not. It doesn't make a difference.

    Java is a language; and I'm confident that the GCJ will produce all we need to do Java on Linux.

    The GPL is the reason GNU and Linux were started. I'm not willing to go return to the starting point, where we will again experience the dislike for proprietary business practices, that made us walk away in the first place.
  • There's no such thing as "VM/VMS", IBM's product is VM, and Compaq owns VMS. VM is an operating system all unto itself. It comes with CP, the Control Program that provides virtualized images of system 390 architecture, and handles hardware interrupt conflicts. You logon to the "CP" prompt. The only "native" OS that runs on CP is CMS, Conversational Montitor System, formerly Cambridge Monitor System. Within CMS one can created/edit files. CP provides the transport mechanism between virtual machines, so put together you have what appears to be a LAN of independant machines, but within one physical box.

    In a way, "VM" doesn't exist because there is only CP + CMS.

    OS/390 = MVS, not VM. There are two very different operating systems.

    MVS can run native on S/390 hardware, or under VM in a virtual machine. So can Linux. VM normally adds a very trivial amount of overhead, less than 2 percent when running MVS. However, Linux tends to lock the CPU for many tasks, so Linux running native on S/390 is not the best environment. Running Linux under VM allows thousands (depending on model of S/390) of copies, so the "wasted" CPU time doesn't matter anymore as each CPU is only virtual anyway.

    Multiple instances of Linux running under VM on S/390 h/w communicating locally via "virtual" TCP/IP within direct memory transfer and transferring data between devices over ESCON (fibre optic) will take over the world!
  • err.. ok, maybe you got the point and you're just being sarcastic, but I'm gunna assume you're a simpleton. THAT WAS THE POINT! I'll explain this simply by quoting you:


    It should also be mentioned that [Microsoft] do what they do extremly well. [Constantly degrading the quality of software and encouraging people to expect an inferior product in a market dominated by a billionair tyrant.]
    Just because you don't like it (an neither do I, as it happens) doesn't make it worthless, and doesn't mean that nobody else likes it.


    For the parallel (one more time, lets see it) the BSB could be said to constantly lowering the bar on musical talent whilst encouraging other "boy bands" to be manufactured by music spin doctors in a continuing effort to suck the money out of the wallets of rich daddies with 14 year old girls.

    There's an irony here.. have you captured it yet?

  • its a major version change (1.x -> 2.x) so api-changes are normal, even in other apps/libraries. the kde sourcebase is huge, so nobody could expect it to be compatible to the 1.x libs.

    you can install the kde1-libs seperately to support kdevelop under KDE 2. if you dont want to, you have to wait for kdevelop 2.0. see kdevelop.org [kdevelop.org] for details

  • Re:Well, windows is... (Score:3)

    by StandardDeviant ( 122674 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @04:28AM (#570694) Homepage Journal

    Of course Windows is #1 on your HD! POS won't boot from anywhere else. ;-)


    --

  • theres a reason for the Enterprise in Enterprise Java Beans. java might be seen as a gambling-language for web-animation, but in reality it is widely used as a plattform for application-servers.

    heres why:

    • java is stable and you dont have to deal with memory management (garbage collection)
    • it has a powerful api-library, with classes, that solves a huge amount of problems.
    • the thread-framework is easy to use without a hassle, thus making developing of multithreaded applications really easy
    • the features for network-communication are unmatched by any other language.
    • it supports CORBA out of the box, making it easy to integrate java-apps into existing full blown enterprise solutions
    • it also has another easy to use remote-object implementation called RMI
    • the database support is excellent (JDBC)
    • java is so easy to code, you can implement a Software-Design in a fractional amount of time, compared to C++ for example
    • the strict object orientation of java makes it easy to use with CASE/RAD-Tools (Computer Aided Software Engineering / Rapid Application Development)
    • EJBs (Enterprise Java Beans) make java-apps support clusters and intelligent in use of database-connections, etc.

    IBM supports java-technologie a lot, because they are heavily enterprise oriented and Oracle for example integrated java into their DBMS (not the other way around!!!)

    if one argues, that java is slow and resource-consuming, be asured, that throwing hardware at a problem is the least expensive in real enterprise environments. saving time and money of expensive developers is much more substantial; you dont buy software off the shelve!

  • Yes, and so was Websphere. I thought this was another old article posting mistake until I saw the date on the announcement. Now I know it is just a marketing exercise, because this is OLD news.

  • Probably very true, but I suspect that what currently attracts typical Linux users may be lost if it does morph into something commercially viable in the desktop market.

    But if genuine Linux users don't care, why all the angst expressed here and elsewhere about Linux moving to the desktop? Some of it has more than a tinge of the same old pointless rancor that characterized much of the OS/2 vs Microsoft rants.

    Being a "supporter" of any OS makes about as much sense as being a supporter of one brand of microwave instead of another brand. Use what works for you. When your needs and desires change, move on.

  • I dont see one app I need to get my work done that I do not have in LINUX. It is the end product that matters not how you got there. What maybe hard for you might be second nature for me. Anything is easy if you know what you are doing.

    Prove to me or anyone with half a brain that you can do ANYTHING that someone with LINUX can not. Also I hope you have a recipt for all that crap you have. I would hate to see that BSA knock down your door and drag you away.

    Later
  • Did you consider PostgreSQL? [postgresql.org]. DB2's a fine database, I'm sure, but from your post it doesn't seem you are aware of alternatives to MySQL in the Open Source world... PostgreSQL 7 is a lot more fully featured than MySQL, and 7 is much faster than previous releases... faster than MySQL if certain benchmarks are to be believed. (I do not know, however I could understand if it scales better than MySQL...) For a little more info: Why OpenACS does not use MySQL [openacs.org].

    Note: above post is not meant as a flame towards MySQL, I am just trying to point out possible alternatives which may have been overlooked. Thank you.

    I'm surprised you are having so much trouble with Mozilla on a 650MHz Athlon. I run it on a 466MHz Celeron, 64MB RAM, and although it takes a bit more time than Netscape to load, its not unusuable.
  • for over a year.

    well, i'm not sure if they've been selling it b4, but it has been available for a while.


    ---
  • Actually, just for point of information, the worlds largest transactional RDBMs's are on DB2 on S/390 Parallel Sysplex. I'm talking many billions of rows, perhaps a couple billion online updates, and many hundreds of thousand ad-hoc queries in a given day, online 24x7.

    Many larger customers have DB2 skills. They also have needs for an RDBMS on other, smaller or distributed platforms. Why not leverage the skills they have by instlling DB2 on Linux servers? People end up being more expensive than the hardware or the software.
  • Customers running on high-end systems... No? Then why all the intrest for Linux on S/390? I'd think most would agree that large S/390s (and the new z/Series) would qualify as high-end systems, wouldn't you?
  • Close. The new offering, VIF (Virtual Image Facility) is basically CP-only, and runs virtualized images (all the hardware interrupts and such become virtualized... and you're right, only the CP runs "native" on the hardware) of Linux. VIF is for Linux only. No CMS. Customer gets to choose.

    Everyone seems to think that OS/390 is just a renaming of MVS...not quite so. It's all of the older MVS plus more than the Unix95 suite of APIs. (Yes, Virginia, you can run an ascii telnet session into a UNIX shell on OS/390. All APIs, be they the UNIX suite, or the traditional MVS suite are available to any application.) OS/390 is based on the rock-solid MVS baseline OS, though.

    There's another layering of resource partitioning though on S/390 (and now on the z/Series) besides VM and VIF. It's called PR/SM (Processor Resources / Systems Manager)... and it allows the logical partitioning (LPAR) of the entire system so that it can run multiple OS's at once. That means that in one LPAR, you could be running OS/390... in another VIF with Linux. These LPARs do NOT have to have physical processors dedicated to them... even a UNI processor can be LPAR'd. Loading between the LPARs can be done via wieghts (or in the z/Series by an extention of Workload Manager to the hardware layer.. making it much more dynamic than weighting.) This way, if at 2am, the Linux load is light... the OS/390 load can have ALL of the cycles... if the Linux load spikes, it gets what it needs (up to its weight)... so the potential exists to use all of the processor resource...all of the time. I know organizations that run their S/390s at 99% cpu busy on average for weeks at a time... and maintain interactive response times where they should be.

    Now, take all this and imagine an e-commerce scenario with Linux/Apache running the front end, and OS/390 with the transaction server and big, honking database on the backend... all on one footprint. That's where WAS and DB2 connectors on Linux/390 will really show their stuff!
  • There was a survey done a while back.. on Intel boxes. I wish I still had the link. :-(

    The test ran an MS C++ application, and a Java application that basically did the same thing. They also used various vendor JVMs.

    On a plain, single instance, the C++ ran faster. That's to be expected. Also, IBM's JVM was a bit slower than some of the others (but not _much_ slower... and clearly still within the running).

    When the number of threads/instances of the application ramped up, the IBM JVM kicked butt... even running faster than the MS C++ application.

    So, when you say that Java Sux... better be explicit! Generalizations are almost always incorrect.
  • Here's the DB2 story on Linux:
    • DB2 Version 5.2 was released as a beta only about two years ago.
    • DB2 Version 6.1 was released about six months after, as a fully supported commercial release.
    • DB2 Version 7.1 was released in June of this year. More stable. A DB2 on Linux HOWTO [linuxdoc.org] is available from the Linux Documentation Project [linuxdoc.org].
    • DB2 Version 7.2 is scheduled to be released next year, adding support for partitioned (clustered) databases. A beta version [ibm.com] of this support was released back in November.

    AFAIK, WebSphere was previously available on Linux, but it was really only the Apache-based webserver and application server that had been available. The e-commerce extensions had only been available on AIX, Solaris, and NT, until now. That's what the announcement is really about.

    I remember that Linux Journal was asked why they ran their server on NT, and their response was that they didn't have any out-of-the-box solution on Linux. I checked out WebSphere for Linux at that time, and they were right. Now, however, they've got no excuse... (you could say that they were just lazy before, but...)

  • further clarification - DB2 on Linux is also available running on Linux virtual machines running on S/390's. That and the DB2 for clustered databases on linux are both completely new.
    -aiabx

  • OS/2 warp [ibm.com] of course!

    sorry

  • It looks like Linux is doing pretty well on the server-side. Client-side mass popular may elude it for a while (quite a while), but at least it's continuing to build its strength on the server.

  • IBM and Linux (Score:4)

    by jdfox ( 74524 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @03:07AM (#570709)
    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 [eltoday.com].

    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.
  • If it's the general server market (e.g. Intel), then #1 is NT/W2K. If it's Linux 390, then #1 is OS/390.
  • The problem is we need commercial applications people are actually willing to purchase.

    What are you smoking dude? DB2 and WebSphere are both very heavily used by the Fortune 500 especially for legacy systems and mainframes. That IBM is releasing this for Linux only can be a good thing!

  • Sorry, but NT and Windows 2000 do not run on real computers like S/390. #1 has to be MVS or whatever IBM is calling it these days.
  • ... I have yet to see good commercial (shrinkwrapped?) applications that can help pursuade commercial vendors that Linux applications really can be profitable.

    I was at Fry's the other day and decided to pick up a boxed version of Oracle 8i for Linux. It's a Macmillan deal, and they throw in a book (11K pages worth) and free support (from Linuxcare, which I'm anxious to try for that reason alone). It looks pretty good, and was only US$99.00 (yeah, I know you can get it off the web site, but the package deal was pretty cool). I've been meaning to get familiar with Oracle, and replacing my MP3 server's MySQL database will do just that.

    Anyway, my point was that not only was it a shrinkwrapped Linux software purchase, but it was an impulse buy as well. It could also be argued that Oracle is "good commercial software". I know I probably ought to have my head examined for replacing MySQL on a low-load, home network machine with Oracle, but I'm a geek, so what can I say? It was fairly cheap, and I need to learn things anyway.

    Actually, it was small-business sized cheap, come to think of it. Imagine a 15 employee company that can get their stuff on a Oracle DB running Linux for 100 bucks and the cost of hardware, with 90 days free support. If it was like $1000, I think they'd have a hard time making the sale, but a hundred dollars is petty cash sized.

    Have patience, the apps will come.

    -B

  • From what I've heard.. no. VMWare is a company that sells a product that runs on win32 and linux. You can download both off the net in evaluation version and then have the option to buy it. People who buy the win32 version make up most of their customer base. But obviously that isn't a good measure, there are more win32 users than linux users in the world.. however, per version of the product that is sold, a higher percentage of trail users turn into registered users on win32 than they do on linux. Could we put this down to the linux product sucking? No, actually the linux product is better! Their product depends on getting close to the kernel and that is a lot easier in linux (because it is open source) than in win32. There's even more legitimate reason to want to use the product under linux.. there's not that many people who want to run a virtualizer on win32. Apparently more poeple want to run win32 apps on linux, but they don't want to pay for it.

    But the phenomonon of not wanting to pay for software is not isolated to linux.. no way! My brother is a prototypical user of win32 and he just the other day went to the Microsoft web site looking for a copy of Office. No, I'm serious. When I asked him if he honestly thought he could download Office for free, he said yes. I asked him why he thought the software should be free and he pointed at Internet Explorer, Real Jukebox (and a wealth of other too numerous to mention) and said "why shouldn't it be free? Everything else is". He got very bored but I tried to explain to him that these were "loss leaders", they were giving away their product to get it into the hands of more people so they could dominate a market. I tried to convince him that some time in the future they will either sell you something related or up the price on their "giveaway". He still doesn't beleive me.
  • Here's what's keeping me in Windows for everyday work, and has relegated my Linux box to ssh-only:

    Graphical User Interface.

    You can talk all you want to about Gnome or KDE or Interface X - the fact of the matter is that the Windows interface is consistent. With the exception of some crappy freeware, if I open up an application, it will use the colors I've told it to use, the titlebar will look the same as all of the other windows, etc.

    From my (admittedly limited) experience with X and KDE (and Gnome, although I haven't used the latest and greatest), windows would open up with an apparently random window style. Some applications would decide they wanted to draw their own borders, some would use KDE's style. It was annoying as hell.

    Application support is becoming less and less of an issue as Wine comes toward completion, but to be honest, I'd rather use Windows with XWin32 to get a remote desktop on my Linux box, for those applications in Linux that I just have to have.

    If someone out there created a windowing system for Linux from scratch, ditching X, and made it completely consistent across the board, I would probably be more interested in using it. They could write an X server (client?) for it so they could run X applications during the transition.

    Without a One True Front End, Linux isn't going to get far into the houses of the Generic Public User. People crave consistency within their user interface. Microsoft understood this, and I think that's one of the main reasons they're on top of everything today. If Macs had had open architechure, they would have been unstoppable.

    --sjd;
  • I'm not sure how this is news, DB2 for linux has been out for years and Websphere for linux has been out since at least July when release 3.5 went out. Here is the link to the Websphere for Linux page- http://www-4.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/l inux_ae_v302.html

    Full disclosure: I work for IBM testing Websphere.
  • I believe that QT for Windows is actually built on top of MFC, so to use it you need to have VC++ as well.

  • So they're saying they basically stepped in Linux?

    Why those lousy............


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • and for real developers: java is THE language... combined with forte and an code-generating UML-modeler, nothing beats it...

    Are you high? "Real" developers use java? Since when?

  • ...Linux became the number two...

    Number two by what criterion? Second largest number of lines of source code? Number two revenue generator for its distributors? Number two in terms of user popularity, benchmark performance, shaded polygons per second in Half Life, one over the crash rate, votes in the congeniality category, what? Maybe the author means, used or at least installed on more computers than all others, except one? How are dual-boot systems counted, then? Should a server that's been on continuously for the last year get the same count as a laptop that's run once every two weeks? Heck, if you count by the reboots, you just know Win9x is the world champion forever and ever. Etc., etc., etc.

    Hey, what happened to Win95, Win 98, and WinME? It's maybe a good sign really that Reuters refuses to dignify these products by so much as including them in the general category of "operating systems." Though if I worked at MS, particularly in the department which has the Augean job of maintaining and extending that farrago of "legacy code," I might be a bit miffed at this slight. But whatever you choose to call them, last I heard, the Win9x branch has always sold a lot more copies than all the NTs put together. Particularly to home users; just try to get a PC with Win2K on it from most consumer outlets.

    ...behind Micorsoft [freeyellow.com] Corp.'s (MFST) competing NT and Windows 2000 operating systems...

    I suppose NT 4.0 competes with Windows 2000. For example, I actually bought a copy of Win2K with my motherboard, but I'm still using NT 4.0 because thus far I have had no need to change. Mod me down, pelt me with hostile email, I don't give a damn. I think NT 4, once you get it set up at first and so long as you don't mess with it (e.g. download the latest hi-performance video driver beta) is a really adequate desktop OS, could be better, lots better, but it does the job for me.

    This, by the way, is the true nightmare of software vendors. God forbid they should ever release a product that's really, really good. For if they do that, and they nearly wholly satisfy their happy customers, why will anyone ever upgrade later on?

    But at any rate I just know that the guy who wrote this piece for Reuters wasn't talking about NT 4.0 competing with Win2K; he was talking about (NT + W2K) competing with Linux. I think I know what he meant by context. Too bad that isn't what the writer said, though.

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • Interesting, even Torvalds says that Linux isn't for everyone.

  • No biggy. (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 09, 2000 @04:49AM (#570722)
    I have been excited for some time regarding IBM's interest in Linux, but from what I have seen IMB's involvement in Linux has been dismal at best. In fact one of the reasons I left my last job was because of IBM and Websphere. More about that later.

    IBM has been "releasing" products for Linux for a while and I have seen little that I consider beyond Alpha quality yet. Some examples the lvm port that was posted here a while back and Websphere.

    The lvm was exciting to me because I have felt for some time that Linux needed a more robust and flexable filesystem. I coadmined an AIX box that has lvm and it was too cool to be able to extend volumes that were running out of space at runtime without bringing down the system, yet the IBM lvm port for Linux does nothing as of yet (I guess this is subject to change). But what I downloaded you can create a filesystem and mount it, but could not even do a `ls' on the empty filesystem, nor put files on it. I forget the name for it but the distributed filesystem that IBM released recently is supposedly functional if you could get it to compile and had something much beyond gigabit lan adaptors.

    IBM apache. Unfortunately I never ran a diff on it but I have a feeling that there is no difference besides the packaging and saying that it is IBM apache.

    Websphere. Beware!!!!! 1st off Websphere is not a product like I thougth for months, but rather a suite of incompatable products. There is the Websphere Commerse product and the Websphere Java product. I was sent by my company out of town to help install a new website that had the Webshere java product as the backend. IBM representatives were there in full force to "help" with this installation, yet they were not familiar with Websphere. After leaving from being out of town for 10 days, I could not see a "Hello World!" servlet that I wrote from the web. After ariving home I was informed that the /..../temp/... directory under websphere was where the *.properties files actually belonged (not documented) and not in the /.../properties/... directory. I have never heard of any product that put essential configuration in a directory called temp before. And this is version 3.5! Also I read some info on websphere and found that it shines in being able to put out 30-60 (dont remember) pages per second over the web. Which is the same as ASP, PHP, mod_perl, etc. Another gripe was that websphere had to be configured via a java gui, so remote administration was going to be a bitch. Java is slow as molasis, but remotely displaying a java application 3 to 400 miles to my box over the net was not my idea of fun. I hated doing that 1 mile with a motif app. Whats more funny is going to IBM's websphere site and look at their "Case Studies". I saw 0 examples of working java Websphere products, the closest was a .jsp page that said come back later. I cannot comment on the commerse suite because I got out of dodge before being inundated with it. However, it is just a cgi-bin app, and not any kind of embeded technology.

    Don't get me wrong. I like IBM hardware and AIX. These are some of the best things I have used, but this new stuff is sketchy at best. Side note, the webserver frontends to this project were IBM netfinities running Linux on 4 way 700Mhz Zeon processors with an IBM caching SCSI3 raid controller and SCSI 3 drives. These computers were the fastest that I have EVER touched. Kernel compilation took about 45 secs and I think the bottleneck was the display scrolling, not the CPUs.

    YAAC
  • Ugh. I go off on Gnome and they port it to Windows. Yipe!

  • IBM [ibm.com] claims that AIX is in fact the number 1 os, according to an add in the issue of WebTechniques [webtechniques.com] I got today! (pg. 15). Its for the "new" pSeries 640 [ibm.com] Unix Rack Servers (for thoes of you who wont read the magazine any quicker than you will follow a link!)

    The fine print in the add goes on to say:

    Rated #1 Unix operating system: D.H. Brown Operating System Scorecard, 3/24/2000.

  • If not having to pay for an operating system is important, why would you pay for software that is already available for operating systems you can pay for?

    I work for an IBM business partner that develops e-commerce solutions using Websphere and DB2. It doesn't look like we're going to change this platform anytime soon, if ever (esp. since WS 5 should kick ass). Right now we deploy on AIX and (bleh... customers shouldn't be allowed to choose) Windows NT. We use Linux for our nameservers and intranet machine, as well as mail host and miscellaneous web server. There are several of us who use Linux as our workstation OS, instead of that icky Win2k. A lot of us are much more comfortable and powerful on Linux than AIX, and if WS was available for it, we would adopt the OS much more than we already have.

    In addition to the development and systems staff adopting it more, we'd also see a lot more customers using Linux. Right now, they buy their machine, OS, and e-commerce site through us. Recently, we've had a lot of customers that choose NT over AIX because they don't want to shell out the $$ for an AIX license. I don't actually know what one costs, but I've checked with my friend in systems and he says that it's significantly more. This is a perfect case where the company would be a linux user, but only because of the cost, not because of the open source factor. They would save money, by not paying for any OS, let alone AIX, and we would save tons in systems support (NT has a tendency to give us significantly more problems than AIX or linux).

    --Dave

    A penguin a day keeps Dr. Watson away!

  • Actually, the article, if you read down a bit further, says "...Last year Linux became the number two computer operating system behind Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) competing NT and Windows 2000 operating systems, according to International Data Corp. ..." It was right there. I am not sure what anyone is saying about the article not naming who number one was, but you probably didn't follow the link.
  • This Linux user did.
    We bought Estinc's rather excellent BRU backup software, for our servers.Estinc also have a GPL-ed utility called CRU; with this, and a tape-drive that supports OBDC (One Button Disaster Recovery, mostly a HP's thing), you can actually boot from the tape-drive, and restore the entire server, partitions and everything, in one go.
    Nice, and it works too.

    I am not a consultant anymore, but believe me, there is a potentiel huge Linux market in the small buisness area (on the serverside). But a killer app is missing; accounting software. Acc. software is the life and blood of SB's.
    Acc. standards vary from country to country, is slightly boring, and therefore an unlikely project for the general OSS community.
    A good piece of Linux Acc. software, with windows clients, would be a serious thing.

    Next; Something to replace MS-Exchange; Those PHB's and their secretaries, _wants_ MS-Outlook, but they don't give a damn about the serverside.
    I know, HP's OpenMail, but it is bloody expensive.

    Then; Something to replace MS-Outlook

    Finally; World domination (at least among Small Buisnesses)

    A good mixture of OSS, and old fashionend pay-ware, would really be a boon for SB's; they cannot afford good IT-staff, or retain them, if they got them. But they can out-source the difficult IT-stuf, like designing the network, securety, server upgrading, and retained controll over the simple, everyday tasks, like adding new users (with a nice WebMin interface), checking the backup-log etc.
    The buisness people are freed up to do, what they do best, and the IT-people likewise.

    Linux is extremely nice to administrate remotly (by SSH and by the nature of the CLI), something I would have really, really liked, when I was a NT-consultant. (I know VNC for NT, cool, but Linux+SSH is way cooler).

    The counsulting firm I worked for, was MS-centristic. But if Linux could offer them, what their costumer wanted, they would switch.

  • Tivoli Systems, an IBM company, sells Linux versions of some of its enterprise management products.

    The funny thing is, I was working in for Tivoli in the support department when the initial port to Linux was performed, by a support engineer. Unfortunately, it wasn't me; I didn't know enough perl at the time.

    Many of Tivoli's methods were (are?) perl scripts; The rest of it is all in the same source tree, so there's a common codebase for all flavors of Tivoli. I don't know if any boxes have been dropped (I kind of doubt it) but Tivoli used to support something like forty flavors of unix if you counted major versions on all the different platforms; Solaris, SunOS, Pyramid, Convex, HP, AIX, OS/2, NT, et cetera.

    Anyway, the initial port to Linux took about two weeks, and all Managed Node functionality (IE, the ORB, and the basic framework methods) was done at that time. It actually grew out of an exercise to better understand the code to complete a port to OS/2 or something.

    So everyone say thanks to Mike P. who actually did the initial port, and who believed in Linux enough to push corporate to do something with it.

  • Re:Do Linux users buy software? (Score:3)

    by crucini ( 98210 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @10:34AM (#570729)
    You make a good point, but you're wrong about QCad. It's a FPOS. It doesn't come near AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is considered low-end in the CAD world. I still get high blood pressure thinking about the five hours I spent trying to get QCad to do something useful. You have to click on some stupid icon for every single action. AutoCAD has an excellent command shell that enables fast, efficient drafting. Also, QCad lacks a lot of the object snap modes that are critical to drafting. Much as I hate Autodesk, if they ever port AutoCAD to linux, and the result is not too Windows-infested, I'll probably buy it.
    So is this an anomaly? No - the OSS world understands two kinds of apps:
    • Consumer apps - stuff that runs on a Windows desktop
    • Enterprise apps - stuff that runs on Unix servers.

    • It doesn't understand professional workstation apps. Thus we get QCad, which is a caricature of a CAD program. There's a lot of room for commercial software there.
  • From the article:

    Last year Linux became the number two computer operating system behind Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) competing NT and Windows 2000 operating systems, according to International Data Corp.

    I'm all for more choices in the OS marketplace, but this statement is quite vague and misleading. It needs to be qualified. It doesn't break it down by server (which is what this article focuses on) and desktop. It also doesn't discuss the methodology for coming to this conclusion. Knowing whether it is market share or installed base makes a huge difference.

    But say something enough and people will apparently believe it and use it in their conversations, regardless of whether it really means what they think it means.

    - Scott

    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • I've never paid for Linux software. I don't think I've paid for any software since I started using Linux regularly.

    Compare that to the typical Windows user:
    "I've never paid for Windows software. I don't think I've paid for any software since I started using Windows regularly."

    The differences, of course, are that they're breaking the law and have more selection. ;-)
  • I'm surprised you are having so much trouble with Mozilla on a 650MHz Athlon. I run it on a 466MHz Celeron, 64MB RAM, and although it takes a bit more time than Netscape to load, its not unusuable.
    Let's just say that currently my top two favourite browsers are w3m (text based) and Opera (which I use at work on W2k). Both of these two are fast and stable, and I like their basic user interface principles. Mozilla, however isn't currently very stable (since I tried to use it last) nor it is particulary fast. Well, it can display pages fast enough, but seem to be rather sluggish when creating new windows (which I use a lot). And to top it all, I'm not quite sure I like the direction they are taking the UI.

    Actually, I'm currently using Mozilla 0.6 and it seems somewhat better that the last nightly build I tried. Now if I could only get used to some of the user interface perver^H^H^H^H^H^Hfeatures I might finally start using it insted of NS4.7X as my graphical Linux browser...

  • IBM-DOS of course.
  • and says that Linux is the #2 OS

    Remember this saying: "First the worst, Second the best"

    Need I say more.


    "Rock over London, Rock on Chicago.
    Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions"

  • OS/2!

    :)

    I just installed os/2 on an old computer, and it's pretty cool. I think if IBM had kept it up, it would be a major competitor in the OS market. Anyways, I'll still be sticking with linux.

    -MSD.dyndns.org [sjs.org]
  • Only NT and Win2K? I would have thought Win9x would outnumber NT and 2K.

  • Not sure who's #1. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now if that isn't anti-MS self-delusionment I dont know what is
  • There are already free databases, application servers and image manipulation tools under Linux. Since Linux users know of the advantages of free software, there will be no strong demand for any propriety applications unless it is something that doesn't have a free equivilent.

    • Last year Linux became the number two computer operating system behind Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) competing NT and Windows 2000 operating systems, according to International Data Corp.

    Maybe Slashdot should just stop posting links to the articles entirely. Nobody reads them anyway.

  • I recall DB2 being available already in some form or was that just the announcement a while ago??

    Moz.

  • Re:You really aren't sure who's #1? (Score:3)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Saturday December 09, 2000 @03:34AM (#570742) Homepage Journal
    well MSFT is definitely the #1 by sales alone.. but maybe we should mention that The Backstreet Boys can make the same claim.
  • I've never paid for Linux software. I don't think I've paid for any software since I started using Linux regularly.

    The main advantages of Linux are that it can be obtained gratis and is open source. While people don't find both of these important, one or the other usually comes into play.

    If having an Open Source OS is important, why would there be a demand for closed source software that you can already obtain for closed source operating systems?

    If not having to pay for an operating system is important, why would you pay for software that is already available for operating systems you can pay for?

  • If having an Open Source OS is important, why would there be a demand for closed source software that you can already obtain for closed source operating systems?

    If not having to pay for an operating system is important, why would you pay for software that is already available for operating systems you can pay for?


    Your two main sentences succinctly state why propriatary software companies will find a viable market in Linux difficult to sustain, as recent events with Adobe and Quake prove.

    There may be exceptions.


    I use MoneyDance. It is a very adaquate replacement for Quicken. Even it Quicken released a native Linux version I doubt I would purchase it.

    I have always downloaded and installed the latest version of XEphem. It is free, even though the author has sold it to a for-profit company. I am on the verge of deciding to buy the $79 CDROM version because taking 16+ days to download the 800MB of celestial data would be a waste of my ADSL and my time.

    I purchased WP8 on CD to get the 800 page manual and the additional fonts, pics, etc... It is still the best WP for Linux, until KWord become stable and full featured. (I purchased that bloated WINE port of WPO200 but demanded and received my money back. Had it been a native Linux binary I would still be using it, and who knows for how long.)

    I purchased Applix because I thought it would be a viable office suit. I was wrong. That $99 was wasted. KOffice and SO5.2 (and it's OS children) will make it virtually impossible for any commercial office suite to succeede in Linux.

    I have Blender (and purchased the Manual!) but when I want to do graphic work I use GIMP. It interfaces to my Mustek scanner. Blender is awesome, but I am not a graphic design artist.

    I'm still waiting for a good street atlas program. I would pay for a Linux version (not a java or WINE port) what I paid for my Win95 versions, even though map fragments are easily availabe on the web.

    I had purchased every version of MathCad through 7.0. Since moving to Linux I have ceased upgrading it. On Linux MuPAD is ok, for a text version, but I really miss the graphical MathCad and would pay for a native Linux version of it, but not a java or WINE port.

    I think propriatary software will eventually become successful in the Linux arena, but it won't by competing against the major software catagories exemplified by SO & KOffice, Konqueror & KMail, QCad, Gimp, KDevelop, etc... Those areas will forever belong to Open Source Software. Once they completely stablize we will forever be free of those insane incompatibilities between versions of the same document format, aka wordXXX.

    However, we haven't seen the last of the propriatary wars. Closed software houses will use "intellectual property" patents and copyrights, with lizard lawyers and big bucks overpowering poor users, to protect 'their rights' by attempting to hamstring Open Source development. That tactic will become less effective, even with a compliant and psychophant USPTO, as prior art and the absurdity of many of the cliams are given the full spot light.

  • Yes, I received a CD with DB2 from IBM more than a year ago.

    // Klaus
    --

  • The news is DB2 and Websphere for Linux on S/390.
  • Indeed - I don't want to replace open source stuff from GNU with commercial products - I already have those commercial products by the tonne - I just want to replace the OS underneath with something more stable than NT Server - so I want Linux versions.

    We have recently *bought*:-

    RedHat Enterprise (optimised for Oracle 8i) - $2000

    Oracle 8i for Linux - cost $40,000+ (depends on CPU(s) size)

    Oracle Internet Application Server for Linux - actually this IS open source (Apache, Apache JServ) but tweaked by Oracle with the addition of SSL, and their own dispatcher code.

    We have had IBM in to pitch us WebSphere too, and Its great they are producing it for Linux - its just a pity its a collection of 32 re-hashed barely related products.

    We do also have IBM MQseries for Linux (which is now a WebSphere labelled product)for talking to those old steam driven 390's. - cost $7000

    It's neither cost nor some highly principled concept of open source niceness that drives these decisions for me - it is purely performance and reliability. The alternative is to get something like Solaris running on Sparc servers - but I have to say I am always underwhelmed by the primitive crap that you get from Sun for 10 times the money you can spend on modern Intel/PCI based boxes with decent RAID controllers. Sun may have a decent storage platform, but their servers suck the big one - but now I can get Solaris reliability and *better* performance for less money by using Linux on Intel iron - *but* only if the apps exist!

    I wait for the day when I dont have to run *any* mission critical processes on Windows - which is a daft idea in this day and age.
  • On the surface, one would think this is a good thing, and im confident it will be. However, I have friends in retail, who laugh when I tell them what OS I use. Their reason is this, when Linux came out, it was considered the latest and greatest, suddenly the big retailers started stocking linux and some games/apps for the platform, but when the sales werent as good as expected, they turned their backs on it thinking it was all hype. Of course no one bought from the shops! for starters its double the price as online retailers such as www.everythinglinux.com.au here in Australia, and secondly, most of it could be downloaded for free.

    However, this is high end commercial software for use in a corporate Environment. Companies are going to be happier paying for software from a big name such as IBM, than free software from freshmeat.net, because of the illusion that paying for it means its better quality and theres more support, this may or may not be true, however, the thing is, that it could go either way, companies might adopt linux because of the support from big names, or they might just stick with because they see no reason to switch, despite the support from big blue and others.If the latter happens, then sales for IBM's linux software will dwindle, and people will automatically think that Linux isnt up to the task because the sales show it

  • you might be right, that there are many apps, that are not equivalent to their windows counterparts, but that they are not worth using is crearly wrong. there exists a statement, that things can be _good enough_. some examples:

    konqueror vs. ie 5.5: surely ie 5.5 is the best browser out there, but i use konqueror for my everyday-work and have nearly no reason to change to another browser. and if i need to, i use mozilla .6

    staroffice vs. office2000: hmm.. thats a difficult one, because i think staroffice is better than office2000. at least the word-processing part...

    kdevelop/gcc vs. vc++ 6: i must really say, that it is hard to code powerfull readable code in vc++ if you once get used to the signals/slot mechanism in QT. and kdevelop is a solid easy to use ide, so i really dont bother about vc++. i would buy a QT-License, if i would need to code windows-apps. and for real developers: java is THE language... combined with forte and an code-generating UML-modeler, nothing beats it... but go for RAM in _huge_ amounts.

    gimp vs. adobe photoshop: hmm.. i like gimp, its excellent for screen-design, but it really has no chance compared to photoshop... btw. tried out version 6 ? its stunning... but if you need a pixel-based image-editor/processor, gimp is surely _good enough_

    after all it depends, what you need your PC for. i am a developer/webdesigner, so linux has all i need. and there must be some others like me, because the linux-community today is huge...

    but this article wasnt about the desktop, so this arguments wont count anyway. there are completely different prequisites. total cost of ownership is the buzzword no1 in this area. if you can get professional support for your system and the software, no OS can beat linux/bsd in this. only if major players offer commercial server-side products including support on linux, it can overcome the mid-server hurd.

    and thats, what ibm does. they want linux to be no1, because of their EBM philosophy - Everything But Microsoft...

  • If having an Open Source OS is important, why would there be a demand for closed source software that you can already obtain for closed source operating systems?
    Good question. Let me try to explain. You're thinking of the OS as the 'mothership' and the applications as little plugins. To understand big database planning, turn that around. The first question is, what RDBMS? Oracle/DB2/Sybase/whatever. Unfortunately there are no Free RDBMS's in that league yet. If you pick DB2, the next question is, 'what platform?'
    Each platform will have a different combination of acquisition cost, cost/transaction, uptime, security, etc. The RDBMS vendor will usually have a bias - Oracle develops on Suns, so Sun is ahead of the pack if you're using Oracle.
    I don't know much about IBM's offerings, but I think the obvious platform for DB2 is AIX. You would expect that IBM would put more energy into making DB2 work smoothly on AIX than on Sun/Solaris.
    Now, IBM announces that they're supporting DB2 on some kind of Intel/Linux platform. Yes, they released the software a long time ago. But this might be a move towards seriously promoting and supporting the DB2/Linux/Intel combination.
    So to answer your question: this is not a case of a software vendor pitching their product at Linux users (who care about open source). This is a case of IBM telling their DB2 customers that they now have the option of using Linux servers.
  • The diskless workstation point is VERY valid. Too bad the parent will stay at 1. :-(

    The trick is to have the varied PC software base on the 390. And that trick won't be easy and won't happen soon. Why? Look at how hard it is to get vendors to move off of shrink-wrapped X86 compatible binaries. Windows NT (mips/alpha/ppc) and how many shrink-wrapped non X86 Linux programs are there? (few to none)
  • That should have read "VM/CMS". Typo, sorry.
  • If not having to pay for an operating system is important, why would you pay for software that is already available for operating systems you can pay for?
    Because the reason you are using a free operating system is because it is best for the purpose, not because it is free?

    I use Linux at home and so far free (as in beer) software has been enough for my purposes. I will buy Opera if they get it stable before Mozilla is usable on 650MHz Athlon ;-). I would also buy games if they would release something I want to play (Alpha Centauri could be the first if they would release it).

    However, at work we are just moving from MySQL to DB2 on our Linux server. MySQL is not up to the task, and it is much cheaper (not to mention faster) to purchase a license of DB2 than use the engineering hours either to tweak MySQL or our application to work around the limitations. (And then possibly have it fail when our customers are using it thus earning us bad reputation.)

    I still wouldn't install DB2 for my own computer, even when the personal edition is downloadable for free.

  • The trick is to have the varied PC software base on the 390.

    Couldn't you run the PC software under VMWare on Linux on VM on the 390? A scheme like that would have real benefits for big organizations. You could 'reimage' the virtual PC after each user session, so it never has time to get corrupted. You could control and count the number of copies of software to ensure license compliance. You could have a daemon that nukes the virtual PC at the first sign of an email virus.
    Alternately, you could run the PC software under VMWare on the diskless workstation, and still get the same benefits (with more work).
  • He hits the "Y" key and ten minutes later he can do his accounts.
    I still remember how surprised I was when I first encountered RPMs. I skimmed the huge man page, and figured out that I needed to type "rpm -i foo.rpm". I expected this to inititate some huge nerve-wracking process, with questions or dialog boxes or something. Anyhow, I hit 'enter' and half a second later my shell prompt was back. Something must have gone wrong. I typed the first few characters of the program name and hit 'tab' and it completed!
    Software that hasn't been RPM'd yet is probably too immature for newbies to be messing with.
    ...defrag once a month, update your virus defs once a week, clean up your filesystem to leave yourself plenty of drivespace.
    Sounds like Windows. I don't do any of this stuff on any Unix box. OK, I keep half an eye on disk space, and I do update internet-connected machines for security reasons.
    At any large site there are machines which have been completely forgotten by the sysadmin staff because they just work. Then one day you get mail from root@neptune - "/tmp is at 80%" - and you wonder "do we really have a host named neptune? And where is it?"
    I agree with your overall point, though. Windows infantilizes users by promising to take care of everything, a promise that can't really be kept.
  • This is true from a UNIX/Linux perspective technically....however, from a market share perspective....it's NT/W2K still as #1....esp in OS and server HW revenue. Linux has a ways to go vs. NT/W2K in share and vs. AIX technically.
  • Quake3, very good example. Very few actually paid for the Linux version qauek3. They went out and bought the Windows version, and just used the Linux binary and there Windows CD. MANY did this. I have a couple theories why people did this: They also used windows and wanted to make sure that it would work in Windows. They also wanted instant gratification and wanted to purchase it in a store. I honestly dont know, But I do know that that kind of consumer activity seriously hurts Linux, Because those sales are needed. How many people actually use the Linux version, and how many actually paid for the version really doesnt matter, but profit matters, at least to commercial applications

    Photoshop: The reason why i stated photoshop was that I know MANY graphics artists who want Linux, however *NEED* photoshop, and while I personally dont use photoshop but use gimp instead, Photoshop can do stuff Gimp still cant do (although, im sure given enough time, will be able to) and that is why i felt photoshop could be a good example. Maybe not the best example, but a good one IMHO.
  • Tivoli Systems, an IBM company, sells Linux versions of some of its enterprise management products. From what I have heard and read in their press releases, the plan is to extend their Linux offerings to include more of Tivoli's products. Tivoli has some great software that helps make a sysadmin's job much easier.

    Do a search for Linux at www.tivoli.com [tivoli.com] to learn more about Tivoli's Linux offerings.

    In the interests of full disclosure, I will add that I do own IBM stock, and I work for IBM.

  • "NT and Windows 2000 operating systems"

    NT and Windows 2000.

    Operating systems.

    Call me insane, but by my team of mathematical geniuses have worked long and hard, and have disclosed that, by their calculations, this would put Linux in at #3. I will admit, however, that these numbers have not yet been certified, and we are awaiting a manual recount of the actual number of operating systems.

  • You are missing a point. There are many companies wishing to migrate their application, developed on top of commercial software platforms, to Linux.

    It's far more cheaper to them to use the same development framework/libraries for Linux than migrating to a new one, i.e. a DB2 application to Postgress. No company will do that!!!

    --ricardo

  • I sort of have to agree here: Linux is useful, damned useful (as I discovered yesterday, when I finally started learning C - having a compiler more or less as standard is useful) and there are lots of cool things you can do with it.

    I digress. Anyway any system must have a good software base available for it to be attractive to users. Linux does but much of it is available only online in the form of source which has to be linked and compiled. Your average user or business dude wants to pick up a CD or a pile of disks, insert the first one and see a prompt saying "Do you want to install foo?". He hits the "Y" key and ten minutes later he can do his accounts. Wanting people to change their ways is no good. It does not work. People who do not understand computers are unlikely to change, or at least, not easily.

    People are shy of operating systems where you actually have to know anything about the computer to operate it. As I put it to a friend who was asking about Linux, "For someone who knows what they are doing Linux is incredibly powerful and useful but for a windows user it can be a frustrating experience."

    This ties in with the whole problem of people using computers in the first place: getting them to realise that a computer system, rather like a car, needs maintenance - defrag once a month, update your virus defs once a week, clean up your filesystem to leave yourself plenty of drivespace. I pointed this out to a great but thoroughly pointy-hair'd friend once about his company laptop, the response: "Oh we have techies to do that for us." *screams in anguish*

    Unfortunately this is a very common idea - that computers will look after themselves and never go wrong. Like when my father recently had problems with his PC, "Isn't it supposed to do this for me, it's Windows." "Oh yes, we know, it's Windows." Elgon

  • And there I was, thinking that the comment was a joke... :-)

    Cheers,

    Tim
  • As far as I know my retirement portfolio doesn't include IBM stock. I leave those decisions to the portfolio manager.

    But, IBM strategy of making Linux the OS on its mainframes will, IMO, bring it back into the workplace with a vengence. Considering the hardware and licensing cost of installing and supporting 500 PC workstations and 30+ Novell and Windows servers, along with the large support staff, you aren't far from an IBM mainframe running virtual linux into diskless workstations.

    One company I am very familiar with spent over 1.5 million dollars to upgrade from Win3.11 to Win95. There's been no real improvement in speed or efficiency. From the user's view point a 486DX120 running Borland's office suit on Win3.11 appears just as fast as WP Office 9 does on a 450MHz Pentium PC with 128 MB of Ram running Win98SE. The bloat and bugs of Win98SE has successfully nullified the speed and power of the newer PCs. Why did they upgrade? The software companies weren't going to continue support for the older versions of the software.
    You can't purchase FoxPro 3.5 or VFP 3.0 and M$ won't support them. Same with the other software by other houses. A pox on all their houses.
    For 1.5 Million they could have had a real powerhouse with blazing speed on both ends of the network cable running GPL's software into a state of the art DB2 database and keeping in communication with via Lotus Notes. (Hopefully, IBM will release the Linux client soon. :)

  • Re:Do Linux users buy software? (Score:3)

    by CaseyB ( 1105 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @04:09AM (#570764)
    If having an Open Source OS is important, why would there be a demand for closed source software that you can already obtain for closed source operating systems?

    This assumes that Linux's only value is in the fact that it's open source.

    There are some people that believe it's simply a better OS, open source or otherwise.

  • In a related article in slashdot [slashdot.org] concerning id software stop supporting Linux's software as there are multiple versions and everchanging kernel.

    id's worrying is not coming out of air. The challenge is how to support multiple version of LInux? Take a look at the sucess of Oracle.

    Oracle, the most popular enterprise scale database system, has migrated to Linux months ago. The secret is to use Java in its core part. It's embedded language, stored procedure is in Java, installation process reply on Java, and EJB is an integrated part of its database system

    The advantage of using Java is that it is not bound to a particular OS. It makes portability easier and could save a lot of cost in the long run.

    For example, in Oracle's documentation said that the only Linux supported is Redhat. However, I found no problem in running 8i under other distro. like Debian.

    IBM is the largest employer of Java(surprse, not SUN). Though I don't see DB2 is in any way buy on Java like Oracle does, but I've no doubt in the futher IBM will migrate more of their products with Java.

    At this point Linux zealog is about to start to flame, saying Java suck, slow and closed source, etc. I don't understand why Linux community hate Java that much. Whenever I talked about Java in #debain/irc.debian.org I got flamed, and recieved standard response 'Java sux'. They then started comparison with C, C++, CL, Smalltalk...

    Oracle's story tells us Java is actually helping Linux to gain enterprise and business support. Sadly, due to the strong resistance from Linux community, Java's progress in Linux is very slow. Java is still the slowest when run on Linux compare with other OS.

  • The Linux crowd will invariably prefer the GPL alternatives, even if the proprietary version has more whistles and bells. The hardcore Linux users will even refuse to use the proprietary versions.
    I'm afraid IBM will be disappointed.

    Sales will be moot, and criticism rather vocal.

    You cannot deny the fact that Stallman has raised a number of valid issues concerning proprietary software.

    If IBM wants to "sell software", that is, make software available under typical proprietary license conditions, I guess they should offer it on AIX, Solaris, SCO, HP/UX, or other proprietary Unix.

    I don't think that the Linux community would or should consider the fact as a loss, that proprietary software is not available on a GPL OS.

    I think it's even better that way.
  • I think my post implies that DB2 and Websphere aren't available for linux, which isn't true. DB2 and Websphere are both available for linux, but they're not the latest versions.

    --Dave
  • Built on New Technology Technology?

    For your information, friend, "NT" stands for "No Titties". This was a reaction against the Titty Virus of 1992, which took advantage of certain weaknesses in the non-blocking disk I/O in Windows® 3.1. This virus corrupted the MBR and then caused the user's terminal to be foully flooded with a barrage of bouncing breasts, luciously lactating and perniciously prompting mass masturbation. "NT" was a bold proclamation that we had overcome these design issues and were ready to take on take on the enterprise computing market -- a market we practically created, I might add. So please, friend, kill yourself in a timely manner, to save we loyal Slashdot readers the horror of reading another of your idiotic posts. Thank you.

    I guess they can't write english any better than they can write C++.
    Who are you to criticize, friend? Only God can judge, and being God, I judge you to be a moron.


    See you in hell,
    Bill Fuckin' Gates®.
  • My CD for DB2 Universal Database Enterprise Edition Version 6.1 for Linux has a copyright of 1999 on it. Learn more about the latest version at http://www-4.ibm.com/software/data/db2/linux/. Better yet, get the beta code for the latest version from http://www-4.ibm.com/software/data/db2/linux/eeebe ta/.
  • As for the Java threads, unfortunatly Linux seems to spawn a 'process' for every thread. It's a pretty stupid complaint to make regarding Java. Unfortunatly using these 'light' processes under Linux, is the only way to scale your apps under linux in an MP system efficciently. Maybe someone out there with better Linux kernel knowlege can explain....

    As for the database support, any database should work. The limiting factor is mainly the quality of the JDBC drivers. So in reality, since many JDBC drivers are not 100% compliant (miss a feature or two here or there), Websphere is very sensitive to the JDBC driver version. I've set this up with InstantDB (just for the config info), DB2, and Oracle. I'm sure by now, many more JDBC drivers must be up to par. Also note that the JDBC 2.0 specification added many new features which websphere takes advantage of.
  • The challenge is how to support multiple version of LInux? Take a look at the sucess of Oracle.

    It's not so difficult. We've been supporting DB2 on multiple distros for awhile now. One of our docs folks also wrote a great HOWTO.

    IBM is the largest employer of Java(surprse, not SUN). Though I don't see DB2 is in any way buy on Java like Oracle does, but I've no doubt in the futher IBM will migrate more of their products with Java.

    I don't know on what basis you make this assertion. We (IBM DB2) had support for Java SPs and UDFs _long_ before Oracle. Most of our tools are all written in Java. This means that I can run the Control Center and look at (for instance) the visual explain of plans with exactly the same interface whether I'm on Win32 or AIX or Linux.

    As somebody else said, the real story is that we IBM will be supporting DB2 and Websphere on Linux on the S/390. Now that's huge ..

  • Although Linux is becoming an increasingly popular platform to support, its not IBM's priority. They do Windows, Aix, Solaris, AS400 in that order, and then they'll port it to linux if its easy enough.
  • I think they are being ranked my dollars generated rather then the number of machines it is installed on. Although, even by that standard the NT/2K platform might still reign considering the fuck tons of desktops in most offices.
  • They've had products aimed at linux out for some time ... specifically DB2 and websphere.. I seem to recall since ver 3.05 Cheers
  • Win2K *is* the latest incarnation of NT, they just removed the "NT" from the title.
  • Anyone I know that does graphics does it on a MAC. If you are trying to convert the marketing types, they (as a group) aren't tech savvy enought to move from Windows to Linux, as new things scare them.

    I bears repeating, if the Linux community would unify and create a single platform (say BSD) and work on making that one distro as bad ass as possible it might have a chance of making a dent in the desktop market. Most people have never seen linux, let alone used it. The people that do have a clue aren't sure which distro to use, since there are at least 20 out there.

    One of the things I like about linux is the al a carte use of RPMS (I use Mandrake) and the fact that updates and system changes don't require rebooting.

  • If that's not denial, I don't know what is.

  • Re:non-free software (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 09, 2000 @02:55AM (#570778)
    That's not the only point he missed. He seems to think there are free databases, app servers and image manipulation tools under linux that are worth using.

    Bah. Get a grip.

    Here's the contents of my start menu on W2K:

    American McGee's Alice(TM)
    Age of Empires II
    Office 2000
    IE 5.5
    VC++ 6
    Macromedia DreamWeaver
    XMLSpy
    Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator
    Fractal Design Painter
    Kai's Power Tools
    Visio 2000
    3D Studio Max

    That is all the major apps I have on my W2K partition and Linux has NOTHING to compete with them. (Please dont mention gimp. As big an accomplishment as it is, in a marketplace with photoshop, the gimp is worth more than anyone pays for.)

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