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Linux Software

Linux Howto by Gartner Group for Corporations 98

Posted by sengan from the where-do-they-get-their-numbers-from? dept.
Doug Moreen wrote in to tell us of this Gartner Group Howto: How and When to Adopt Linux in MSEs. While Linux support has been announced by major corporations, Gartner Group does not consider it sincere. Indeed they believe that real commercial Unix support levels for Linux will not be available before 2000 with a 0.8 probability. Furthermore they warn people away from Linux by stating that vendor interest is primarily opportunistic, support via the web/0800 numbers does not work for critical responses, etc. Kragen, are you ready to take them on ? ;-)
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Linux Howto by Gartner Group for Corporations More

Linux Howto by Gartner Group for Corporations

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  • I used to get a lot of their stuff when I was a big 6 consultant. Last year at this time, they were predicting that four Unixii would survive the long haul. Who made their list?
    • HP-UX
    • Solaris
    • Digital Unix
    • SCO
    Now keep in mind, this wasn't five years ago, this wasn't three years ago, this was LAST YEAR. I can well believe the first two; that's fine. This week we saw the re-branding of Digital Unix to a name that... hell, I can't even remember what it was, but it was an attempt to leverage 64-bit Unix in a brand name. And SCO - sorry, if they aren't dead yet, at best someone's on the intercom calling code blue.

    Linux wasn't even on their radar screens, and six months later MS themselves were saying that Linux was evidence that they had competition. You'd think someone getting big bucks for their crystal ball would have some idea of the biggest paradigm shift since the web. At that time it was like a tsunami about to hit the shore. But on Gartner - nothing. Gartner is standard safety-oriented corporate farina for their standard safety-oriented corporate customers. I pity the people who follow them like lapdogs.

  • The problem is that the QPL is *still* not compatible with the GPL. Therefore, linking KDE, which is covered by the GPL, with Qt, which is covered by the QPL, is a violation of the GPL. If a company were to do this, they could be sued by any of the people who have contributed GPLd code to KDE, or whose GPLd code KDE has taken (there is a lot of GPLd code from the GNU project in there...the Free Software Foundation suing a corporation over it is unlikely, but it's still a technical possibility).
  • than we do. We are Linux proponents; Gartner is the stiff-upper-lip type group. They don't just jump on every bandwagon that comes by you know. If Gartner says something then MSE's, MidSize Enterprizes as they call them, are likely to listen AND the message they are saying is not IF Linux will come into full use in corporate america but WHEN to implement.

    Try to see things from their perspective... If you do, you will probably notice the article as avocative. :)
  • And stop using TCWWW. It's http://slashdot.org, not http://www.slashdot.org

  • Actually, I think the Gartner report is pretty darn good. I don't see anywhere they are far off base.

    Keep in mind that 'serious' support is more than just announcing that you will support a product, it means committing a sizeable amount of resources to that support. Since companies are still feeling out the Linux market, it makes sense that they will not yet make the full-scale commitment that more conservative users would like to see.

    Gartner basically says "If you have the in-house talent, go for it. If you don't, hold back until things are a little more stable". Always good advice.

    - Ken
  • Well, I guess we're all "type A" users. :-)

    The bit about banning "code hacking" seems to be directed toward people who might customize the kernel or some other critical system program, but it's hard to tell from the context. I don't think they're advocating a general ban on programming!

    TedC

  • This seems to point right to the fears of techno-weak phb's and folks that are, uh, computer-challenged but have to use them at work. After reading the bottom line section, I really see this advice as something that clueless middlemanagers might buy into; it sounds so reasonable and, well, cautious. These Gartner folks do this sort of thing for money, for businesses, right? Nice racket. *shrug*
  • Well, this is confusing to me. We have a lot of mission-critical systems, and all the major vendors do their support this way:



    Digital(Compaq), SGI, IBM, HP, Sun (actually we use Polaris, and have a software support contract with sun), Network Appliance...



    Typically you get some commitment, like 4 or 8 hour response time, on hardware and/or software. I don't see why linux should be any different, or why Compaq, HP or any of the others would change their mode of support for linux. In fact, I'd be surprised if they didn't simply integrate linux into their current support infrastructures -- it would be wasteful and difficult to track trouble tickets otherwise.

  • If Ga. Tech (or anyone else) wants to pay me what they paid to Sun, I'll gladly make Linux kernel mods to suit their needs!

    That's the great thing about Linux and support. Because the source is available to everyone, it is possable to hire a really good programmer to provide such needed services. With other vendors, it's them or nothing. For $20,000, you could probably retain a really good Linux person to provide fast response on an as needed basis. And since $20,000 would probably mean a lot more to that person than it does for Sun or SGI, they would be strongly motivated to provide prompt service.

    $20,000 may not be a lot to SGI, but for 2 servers, it is a great deal of money. As support goes, I'm sure that for a few hundred million dollars, even M$ might become responsive to my needs.

    I think the biggest misunderstanding about Linux support is based in casting Linux into a proprietary system. The reason you must hire a large corperation to support Solaris, IRIX or NT is that nobody else has (or can afford to license) the source code in order to do the sort of support you're talking about. Linux support contractors do not have that problem.

  • As far as I'm concerned, that Gartner article is about dead on target. I'd have to say the majority of Linux users that read Slashdot are quite capable of deploying Linux in their enterprises. But, the majority of IT departments in corporations don't have a majority of Slashdot readers. What I'm getting at is that despite the fact that Gartner is often far behind and wrong, their reports carry some weight with the pointy haired people.

    And if you will note, they predict (easy to do when it already happens) that Linux will take off with a 70 to 80 percent certainty. Thats not bad at all.

    A personal anecdote - I've been looking for a UNIX sysadmin job in Pennsylvania, especially in the Pittsburgh area. Haven't found much of anything and absolutely nothing about Linux. I'm hedging my bets on Linux and in my book, when there are Linux jobs posted for Pennsylvania, I'll know that Linux is here to stay. Amish country isn't exactly Silicon Valley (but we run Linux in our school district!)

    The temp agencies I talked to are getting a smattering of request for Linux but not the kind you'd expect for something that has already arrived. Just a little more patience - my prediction is that within the year, Linux jobs will be the most prevalent of the various UNIX jobs available.

  • Ok, GG told us not to install Windows 2000 until it had been out for over a year because it would be too unstable, right? Now they're telling you not to install Linux because ISVs might not be genuine. So what *are* we supposed to install? By their reasoning everything sucks so we shouldn't install anything - just sit around and wait until something comes along which they decide is alright...

    Sure, I can understand management being interested in GG's opinions (amongst many others...) but actually listening to them??
  • Actually, I think you'd be surprised at how many suits are very much against the notion of "rigid corporate thinking". I believe that some of them just follow the Gartner Group because they're tech-illiterate and Gartner has great brand-recognition.

    Of course, the *quality* of Gartner group, is imho, on a downward spiral, similar to that of Dataguess ..err.. Dataquest (which has been tarnished since 1995 when they predicted 150 million copies of Win95 would be sold in 5 months... uhm, get a calculator out next time, boys - that extra "0" fugged you up).

    Other "advice houses" like GIGA and IDC are usually more reliable, but as with all statistics & probability, the truth isn't always what the numbers make it out to be.

  • Because it's installation procedures are far more of a pain than Red Hat's. Debian's number of programs to chose from is great but the installation program is just awful. I'd easily take Red hat or Slackware on ease of install.
  • "vendor support is opportunistic" *means* that a FREE os with robust attributes seems like a way to undercut the competition. OSS could, in a way be the indian programming contingient come home to roost, if you know what I mean. THEY don't pay anybody, but THEY acquire a huge market thru the commoditisation of a solid os. We win, in the long haul, but THEY may try to derail the train sometime down the road, to their own benefit, in the short haul. WE, however, must stay focussed on RMS's so-far validated truth that free information WORKS.
    GET IT?

  • I would hate to think that just because the main-stream press seems to think that Red Hat IS Linux that "all paths lead to Red Hat". IMHO, Debian is a much more elegant and well-thought-out distribution, whereas Red Hat seems to be targeted more towards "scoobies" (local jargon for "idiots").

    The default /etc/ppp/options file in Red Hat is just four bytes long, containing only the word "lock". The Debian one has just about every option known to man with full comments, but only the basic necessities have been enabled. This says to me that Debian have put a lot of effort into it, whereas, Red Hat are more interested in shipping another version out the door!

    Red Hat? Thanks, but no thanks!
  • *sigh*. They mentioned KDE and not GNOME earlier in the article. They were using both as representative examples of Unix GUIs. They didn't even mention GNUStep, anyone want to flame them for that?

    Some days...

    Daniel
  • Ech. I still don't see why Debian, which has the simplest, most robust, most *brainless* software installation of any linux distro (that I have tried), gets lumped in with Slackware as a "Techie-only" distro. Being a techie myself, I can't comment on Debian's friendliness ;); my impression, though, is that while I spent a few more hours than RedHat users that I know installing my base system, I spend an order of magnitude less time trying to keep it up to date and working.

    Daniel
  • to put things in perspective they've been telling people to not touch W2K until 2001.
  • We (my company) has a $20,000 full care support contract with SGI for 2 of our servers (before the linux junkies at the office got a hold of the P.O. process ;) ) and I can get faster support from emailing a mailing list or IRC than I can by calling SGI. And the linux support is usually right as opposed to the SGI support.

    "They fear what they do not understand."
  • He may be our asshole (and no worse than any other), but he's still an asshole. (See the Skeleton Closet [realchange.org] for more info. I don't necessarily agree with them; they're just convenient.)

    Chomsky's OK though (and he's right more often than we would want him to be).
  • I do like the steps that they give to evaluating Linux. It gives a careful approach that should let someone LEARN the capabilities of Linux without killing themselvs and jumping into a new environment without thinkin!

    May not be perfect, but it is a start!
  • Re: the "No hacking"... thats not entirely a bad idea.

    And not even redefining "hacking" to mean "kernel hacking"

    Do you really want your system running a modified version of say, sendmail? Are you prepared to invest the time in merging in vendor changes to your private code tree? There are significant costs associated with running modified code on critical systems.

    If your modification would have enough general intrest, you can submit it back to the main tree. However, it's quite likely that you will need to support it yourself then for a period of time.

    Have you budgeted the man-hours for that?

    I have custom versions of a few servers... and even if a CVS merge shows up clean, you may still end up tromping on something. It takes time. And, in the case of yet another security hole, it could mean downtime while you sync your code in.

    --Dan

  • So, can you post some proof of this instead of your cowardly assertions?
  • I didn't think the "research note" was so bad - certainly nothing like that festering plate of dung by Ted Lewis that was dumped on this site [slashdot.org] a couple of days ago. If nothing else, the note articluates arguments that we're likely to hear from management in future months as Linux springs up in more and more server rooms and LAN closets. The note doesn't say "never use Linux," it just says "be careful of x,y, and z when you do." If we're prepared to put those fears to rest by addressing them, instead of just beating them down as FUD, the bosses will be more likely to get - in PHB lingo - a "warm fuzzy" feeling about Linux.

    The 3 big cautions in the note are related to technical expertise requirements, support contracts, and code hacking. Of these requirements, the first two represent real opportunities for anyone with Linux experience, and for entrepreneurs who want to make money while spreading open source software around. As for the 3rd requirement, I think that long-term policies in this area are going to be more complex than "discourage or ban outright," but code hackers need to realize that in enterprise systems, any changes to the code should be thoroughly tested and documented - a very expensive process that most companies would like to engage in as little as possible.

    Industry research firms like Gartner are - without any exceptions that I know of - either playing serious catch-up with Linux (and OSS in general) - or still in denial about the whole thing. This note shows Gartner lumbering into catch-up mode, though their hindquarters may still be stuck in the bog of denial.
  • I don't want to have all these great "free" programs linked to a non-free library that might suddenly require me to pay TrollTech money. Then, we're right back in the crappy situation that forced the creation of LessTif.

    I'm not opposed to Qt's feature set, or the fact that it's in C++ (which I consider an advantage, to be honest), or anything technical about it, although I do like GTK+'s structure and theme handling much better. What I do oppose about Qt is the license. I will not develop for, nor will I support or advocate, a toolkit that is not Free Software, and for VERY practical reasons!

    We've been down this path once before, people; let's not do it again...

    Kyle
    --
    Kyle R. Rose, MIT LCS
  • I vote for Kragen as the slashdot equivalent of Ralph Nader. Or is Ralph Nader the slashdot equivalent of Ralph Nader already?

    It's so confusing.

    Where does Noam Chomsky fit in?
  • I didn't understand until their guidelines for getting started with Linux, where they recommend starting with servers on otherwise-unused about-to-be-junked machines. This report includes DESKTOP usage -- not just servers. This strikes me as a major sea change in the industry, even allowing for how much I would pay for their reports. Very positive from the desktop point of view.

    --
  • I think it's more a commentary on the people who seem to use/advocate it most. I know that if I had to concisely describe Debian, I would describe it as a technically-focused distribution -- i.e. the goal is to do things right, not necessarily to do them in the flashiest or most bleeding-edge-trendy way. I think the sheer number of packages and the (relative) lack of advertising and marketing budget add to this effect. I would guess the other reason is the usual corporate fear -- "there's no company behind Debian" -- and this isn't a bad thing, because (with 0.9 probability :) there will be one eventually, at least in a support role. Support for Debian is great and is largely unnecessary -- but as can be seen from the Gartner report, that's not going to sway many PHBs.
  • No enterprise support? Please tell me that the Gartner Group is not doing the Hit-and-Run Style of journalism.... or perhaps this is the beginning or the great MS payoff....they realize that the "Let's us OSS as our scapegoat" thing got out of hand now they can't control it. It's gotten to large... Hell my company has 24-7 support both for OEMS and End users.... these people are really clueless...


    Nick
    LSG

  • One of the points I made was that M$ would gear up the media to say "Linux is good (condescendingly) and it rivals NT4.0 but it's nothing compared to Windows 2000 After all we've included all the meaningless buzzwords that make CIOs cream their jeans like intuitiveness, interoperability, discoverability...etc. Of course accountability will not be included in this release. (If you want that...buy Linux)"

    Let me call a spade a spade. I'm a CEO of a Linux based business that is really doing well. Not because of moronic license agreements, but because we actually give good SERVICE and SUPPORT.
    Question... How many companies bring lawsuits against software companies? Not as many as you'd think. With the thousands upon thousands of companies out there maybe a few hundred ever take civil action. And even fewer sue M$. If M$ products are so well supported then how come they are reluctant to give OEMs the refunds that customers have been demanding? If you read the EULA it reads in many ways like a disclaimer for the GPL especially the parts about "No fitness for particular purpose etc." If Microsoft Products are so damn well supported how come they have to reorganize the entire company to be able to deal with customers?
    If Microsoft products are so well supported how come calling their so-called support lines yield the automaton response of "Did you reboot?"
    That's not the answer corporate IT customers want to hear. They want to deal with intelligent, experienced people who actually stand behind their product. One client of whom we had the pleasure of replacing his NT Server, MS Application Server, MS Back Office, and MS SQL server and MS-Exchange Server with 2 Linux boxes, complained that one MS Support engineer said he should not rely on MS-Exchange server to allow good internet email access but should buy MS-Proxy Server instead.

    With over 700 NT server replaced by Linux and over 300 Windows clients replaced the resounding message I hear form IT managers isn't one of disatisfaction but more often than not it's "Wow Linux can do that also?"

    In the real world, not one made up by the ZD-Nets and the Pollsters of Gartner Group, and not one made up by hapless wanna-be journalists who just didn't make the grade, IT managers want professionals, not the 18 year old kid at SoftBank for their customer support. Did I mention that SoftBank owns ZD-Net and Softbank provides tech-support for much of M$ product line.....

    Reality is a BitchX huh Gartner?

    Nick
    LSG

  • KDE is an excellent desktop. Gnome is not as far developed as KDE but is progressing nicely.
    My company supports both and as long as Troll supports the QPL license then everyting is fine.
    However, I don't know what would stop Troll from writing the next improvement to the API and saying now it's back to our old license....

    A safer bet would be to hedge on GNOME and GTK but hey...Red Hat announced they were having both KDE and GNOME on 6.0 tonight so what the heck...

    Nick
    LSG

  • ....For Linux compatability.

    I agree. Microsoft is NOT Linux compliant.
    So I can not bet my job on it.

    Cheers,
    Nick
    LSG
  • They released a report a few months ago about not adopting NT5/Windows2k for several months or something after it came out. Everyone was screaming "See, told you so". Now its all "Shut up you jerks". And they way I read the report, it seemed to say "don't use Linux unless you know what you are doing". The same could be said for NT, Macs, BeOS, NeXT, C64, CP/M... the whole thing just smacks of "duh..." since PHB's will use whatever ZDNet tells them to. After all: beige has the most RAM.
  • It didn't say what those nice people should adopt.

    If I were type C risk as they seem to be interpreting it, I'd put an IBM mainframe terminal on everyone's desk. It's solid, it keeps running even if you drop it, and it won't crash. I wouldn't even dream of adapting Windows!

    D
  • have you ever dealt with one of those in house response techs? They are the stupidist people on the planet. Every Compaq moron I saw come into a customers site had screwed up the system so bad that after 20 minutes he grabs the box and says, "I'll get this back in a week or so" they have NEVER EVER fixed a problem on site. For a test, I with the owners permission disabed a pc by unseating the ram, the tech didnt even check the ram and said we have to take this in.. I said can I look? he said yeah, I reseated the ram and it booted.. the tech said, "Wow you should work for us" HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA never in a million years.
  • And I quote:

    MSE best practices would entail putting in place practices to discourage, if not ban, code hacking when using Linux.

    Now, what's wrong with this picture? Code hacking is the primary driver behind the acceptance and growth of the Linux marketplace. Why is it that dumb-ass consultants have to insist that everyone act as dumb as possible around technology - especially technology that is strategic to the function of your organization?

    Right, I just answered my own question (it's so we always have to hire dumb-ass consultants).

  • Absolutely. Speaking as a dumb-ass consultant, I find it encouraging for GG to spread the gospel of "don't-trust-your-people" - leads to more F-500 consulting jobs for me! Who said there was no fud in this!

    The folks who take GG seriously are people who are too dumb to figure it out for themselves or notice. GG caters to paternalistic MIS groups, is subject to Sturgeon's law, and caveats everything to death. I'm sure GG means well, but it's still the road to hell....
  • I use Gartner, Foresters and Burton to help me select computer functionality of my company.

    Note I said "help".

    I also use Slashdot, Economist, WSJ, Industry Standard, Byte (that was), conference information, O'Reilly and whatever else I can lay my hands on.

    Gartner is an interesting one. Their Symposium is worth attending - the information is very helpful...but...

    They are very conservative and cannot be relied upon to recognise the breaking wave. Their coverage of Open Source in General and Linux in particular has been weak. They have represented a credible independence from what I term the BOHICA boys who greet Microsoft pronouncements with obsequious handwringing, but their caution in describing OSS when weighed against the blare of publicity from Redmond is unhelpful.

    Many corporate managers, mine included are pissing in their pants when faced with this cheaper, more-reliable, better-throughput operating system than NT. It brings a real world of decision to their door. Do they want to save money? Do they trust their own staff?

    Well, of course...what about support? ...and who do I sue if things go wrong?

    They obviously haven't hung on a line waiting for service themselves...nor have they ever sued any vendors. The technique is for managers to push the problems down to the technicians (that's why we earn the big bucks) and to hob-nob with the pretty sales-people. Those lunches are so much fun.

    The problem with Gartner and Linux is that Gartner is about commerce...and Linux...and all of Open Source just doesn't seem commercial.

    The message will get through, but don't rely on Gartner...as someone said, they just contribute to FUD.


  • >and I can get faster support from emailing a >mailing list or IRC

    That's true.. there's always some 15 year old
    kid waiting to help in an emergency..
  • That said, hold your fire!

    Linux will never be supported in the same way as, say, HP-UX. Why? Well, it's not controlled by a large company, with a constant, stable and immutable product. The source-code is free to tweak by mom&pop shops, so no one in their right mind would offer commercial level support to it.

    But, the fact that Linux is open significantly reduces the need for commercial level support. Compatibility with products is a matter of time and need, not politics and back-room handshakes.
    Problems are solved in a distributed fashion, with enthusiasm and good-will.

    Linux represents all that is best in the Darwinian evolution of software. Corporate mentality can not fathom this, and neither can the Gartner Group. They need guarantees, and someone to sue if it breaks. Linux just doesn't break. And you can say that with more than a 0.8 probablility.

    Someone needs to 'splain it to them in terms like that IBM commercial. For every Linux server you set up, you will save $20,000/year in support...

    Support is free, fast and accurate. Everyone knows that contributing to it makes the penguin evolve faster and better; everyone benefits from solving each other's problems. So much so, that Tux will be the first penguin to actually take off.
  • For the Gartner group this is praise indeed for Linux. This is the group that tells you that if you buy a stamp you have to allow at least a million dollars in support costs to get it stuck on an envelope.

    I know support costs are far higher that purchase costs, but some of the figures they quote are ludicrous. I think they include the total salary of a computer's user as part of its support costs.

    They are right on the mark about opportunistic support, though. I wouldn't trust any of the major vendors who recently announced support for Linux to follow through.

    Until there is an army of people with something like the (pathetic but recognised) MCSE certificate to wave at the non-technical, the non-technical have no support. You can get lots of rapid useful feedback for Linux technical problems, but you need some technical competance to make use of it. Most MCSEs may be able to do little more than get NT installed and staggering along, poorly configured, but that represents an insurmountable hurdle for most people. There aren't enough Unix support people around to switch to Linux support. This is an area where quality may be less important than quantity.


  • If Sun and IBM Unixes were to become more like Linux (and Linux more like there unixes) and *nix were to 'merge' into a more unified standard *nix. If they were all open source, then both Sun and IBM would benifit from open source.

    1) a unified Unix would stand a chance of gaining markek share agains M$

    2) less ports (if any) between *nixes

    3) large compoanies could concentrate on the customer support end and less on the OS side (not none, just less like RH) making the OS easier to use, install, and maybe even more apps... (hey IBM where is that lotus notes client for Linux???.. where is that speach software?? ) (hey sun wher eis that Java??? for linux )

    J
  • They at least got the url of debian right (debian.org) unlike Ted Lewis, he of the ACID TEST fame (debian.COM)
  • KDE is not dying-it just released a new version...

    About the QT stuff, you assumptions are out of date, since the next version will be ok-check out the SuSE or KDE sites for this & cease & desist from spreading out-dated & ergo wrong information.

    Also, the paradox in public prophesy, is that it tends to self-fullfilling prophesy; which then becomes one reason why they get it right. Isn't this how these organizations make money?

    Anyhow, they have mis-read the scene & their info is outdated & wrong. Ha, ha, ha...

    Will, that be one egg or two, on your face???

    :-)
  • Let me chime in here. Most of the comments and virtually all of the report seems to miss a major point of why a corporation would want to install Linux in the first place.

    That point is that with Linux, control of system support returns to the company, versus the hand wringing that goes on with every little burp and twitch of WinNT.

    All of the big hitters (Gartner, Ernst & Young, Anderson Consulting, etc. downplay Linux because of the lack of "corporate support."

    The buggy nature of virtually every early version of Microsoft OS and development system have allowed many of the major consulting firms to leach major bucks out of the big companies with trainees just out of college but that sound like they really understand Microsoft's wares.

    Which doesn't even count the major bucks which alot of VARS or former VARS like me paid to Microsoft for support subscriptions that proved essentially worthless because the low quality of the support staff at MS. Usually by the time MS support came up with the answer, I had discovered it myself, or dumped the product.

    Consider that for the same cost of all the client OS charges and support contracts currently paid out to MS and consulting organizations to individiuals who JUST SUPPORT MS OS's (not counting development) any major corporation could hire 5-10 true Linux wizards, arrange them in a "think tank" type workgroup, and have superior systems level support. One criticism of this concept which I have heard put out by a consulting company is what if one of the "gurus" leaves? Hire another highly qualified Linux person to keep the team functioning. Versus the consulting companies who constantly ship new people in and out.

    I challenge Gartner or anyone else prove that the cost of supporting Linux in house is higher than what Microsoft and minions are currently milking the Fortune 1000 for.

    To be honest 'though, I'm lucky. I work in a mostly Microsoft free shop.
  • for this article, though its all opinion and largely unsubstantiated to the public (because the linked proofs are $pay$ links) . The MS FUD parade will be pointing to this article for _years_.
  • Most of the advice in this article is sound enough, if you consider its intended audience. Windows is still their client platform of choice. But I do think that they committed a grievous sin of omission by failing to discuss scenarios in which Linux can replace Windows servers right now. With the proper network configuration and disaster planning, their customer service remarks are moot.

    I just want to comment on two other things:

    while PC server vendors are seriously considering a Linux strategy, fears of cannibalizing their own Unix strategies and concerns about the chaotic nature of the market will limit their sincerity to opportunistic sales

    This is absolutely true. Nobody expects major resources from IBM, Sun, or SGI to go into Linux development; they are merely making a virtue out of a necessity, and that's what will dictate the extent of their commitment to Linux. If they don't provide Linux support for their hardware, someone else will. Any development they contribute will most likely be funded by a customer who requests it.


    emulation a poor substitute for Microsoft compatibility.

    This is one reason why Linux supporters need to keep pushing Java, or a substitute for it, as hard as they can; it does as much damage to the "Linux is not good enough for the desktop" problem as supporting GNOME and KDE does. In a post-scarcity world, which we are very much on the brink of, the difference between native opcodes and Java's bytecode will no longer be significant. And it will run on Linux and Win2000 equally well. So much for having to play catch-up with emulating Microsoft's latest API's. And so much for Microsoft incompatibility.

  • close (Score:1)

    by JimH ( 17600 )
    It *would* be excellent advice if there was a usable choice today. I don't know what banks use. But what we use, NT, isn't something you could stick with unitil the problem is solved. It IS the problem.
  • The only reason for the post was to inform the the linux community
    about how management pukes see their operating systems. Like all points of
    view, it is incomplete and flawed. I thought that their comments were pretty
    positive for that type of review. Probably if the Gartner group would give a
    totally 100% go ahead it would mean that Linux was obsolete and ready for
    the junk heap. This is sort of how you can view some news organizations.
    They are almost as out of sync with the real world as clothing stores. Here,
    in Montana, where I live, the clothing stores are starting to get in their
    summer stock. Here outside my house, I have a half a foot of snow on the
    ground. I've heard that if you get your photograph on the front page of Time
    magazine then it means that your fame is pretty much over. This is how I
    look at this kind of viewpoint. They, the news orgs aren't quite ready for
    the change, which means for the real world, that it really is time.
    I sent this article to a friend who I have been trying to get to use LInux
    for about 2 years, and when he saw this article, he said that this made him
    think that he was ready to try it right now. He used to be a corporate puke
    himself, so he knows how to interpret these kind of articles. I was really
    interested in seeing exactly how the /. readers would view this article.
    Apparently not too many corporate types post to /., though I wish they
    would, it would improve the balance of views.

    Anyway
    thanks for your comments
    Doug Moreen
    Silicon Mountain Technologies
    VAR. for Windows, Linux, Mac Be machines
    dogem@initco.net

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