Linux in Information Week

Mark Bickford writes "There's a nice column in Information Week titled "Linux Takes Shot at Making History." Refreshingly FUD-free, and the author is the Executive Editor of the magazine. Maybe a sign of some pro-Linux spin in '99? "

Freeware vs Free

[Zack]

Not a bad article, but it really didn't say much. The only problem I had with the article was the reference to Linux as freeware. There's a major difference between freeware and OSS and GPL. Mabye it's just me, but I don't see how understanding the differences could be too hard.

Although Linux costs nothing to use ("free beer") it's greatest strength is the open source and GPL licenses. I think this is a rather major point that tends to be glazed over and not mentioned in articles.

Not worthy of /.

[Alan]

I disagree. This is an article showing linux in a positive light in the news. If /. never posted anything that 'we' hadn't heard before about linux, there would hardly be any linux news at all!

Don't forget that not all /. readers are seasoned linux hackers. Some maybe be newbies, or people looking to run their business on linux, or people looking for something to invest in.

I find it curious...

[jd]

Last year, all the magazines touted Linux as having between 6-10 million users. Sales rose 212%. The magazines -STILL- say Linux has 6-10 million users.

Now, that's some interesting maths.

Definitely worthy

[marcus]

Any babe that can occupy an editorial spot on a technical trade rag is certainly worthy of (y)our attention.

There aren't enough of them around here in any shape or form.

When OSS doesn't work, why not?

[AMK]

Ah, this is a good topic!

One obvious course of failure is to argue endlessly on mailing lists and then not write any code, as Alan Cox pointed out in his "Town Council and the Bazaar" editorial on /.

A related failure is being too ambitious at the start, something I've noticed a lot in the Python community. Someone has a simple idea, and asks for suggestions; people then point out all sorts of special cases that should be handled (what if you're on Windows or Mac? what if you're building a really large system? what if ...). This makes the implementation job look so difficult and frightening, so no one does it.

OSS also needs to have the right architecture, I think. It has to be either small, or large but strongly modularized so people can contribute little things. For example, it's relatively easy to write a single device driver, Python extension, GIMP plug-in, or Emacs mode; let enough people nibble away for a few years, and you wind up with a very capable system. Something like Samba or Wine may be so monolithic and large, by the very nature of the problem being solved, that it's difficult for people to contribute. The initial Mozilla code was tangled, having many complex interdependencies between modules, but they've been successfully working on cleaning up the code base.

This may be another OSS benefit; to succeed, projects have to pay more attention to software engineering virtues such as modularity and clarity. Badly-structured commercial projects may just barrel ahead anyway, because they have outside forces pushing them onward; badly-structured OSS projects probably just die.

Offhand, I can't think of other OSS projects that have sputtered along, failed, or fallen into decay; can anyone think of more?

Linux already made history...

[cholko]

It has shown that open-source works. It also shows that something as complex as an Operating System can be created by people from all areas of the world.

The real test case for Linux is when MS emerges from the court case virtually unscathed. What happens then?

.

OSS *does* work

[Natedog]

You forget that over 3/4 of the worlds email is routed using sendmail (OSS) and that over 1/2 of the worlds web servers are powered with Apache (OSS). Hummm, I guess OSS is already winning as MS has been forced to adopt open protocals like TCP/IP and HTTP :)