The true value of Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Dec 8, 2002 20:26 UTC (Sun) by dang (subscriber, #310) [Link]

Not worth the read. The Meta group takes linux to task for not supporting journaled file systems or clustering, which renders their insight pretty much worthless.

Posted Dec 8, 2002 20:42 UTC (Sun) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

This is yet another ball of slime with a misleading title about the value of linux. The article contains a number of factual errors about linux, as well as unfounded and ridiculous assertions about the reliability of ms windows.

They also show the bizzarre tendency to group ms windows with commercial unix when comparing to linux - this is incredibly clueless, since linux and other unix variants, commercial and otherwise, share a common ancestry, while ms windows, a pc operating system, differes violently from the unix design and culture.

The article can be summed up as follows:

"Linux is not reliable like ms windows"
"Linux has no journaling file system or clustering capability"
"Linux deployments are merely a temper tantrum aimed at microsoft"
"Linux license is zero, but it's more expensive to run than ms windows"

Outrageous nonsense and little else - why give them the page hits.

Posted Dec 8, 2002 20:51 UTC (Sun) by NerdlyMcGeek (guest, #8453) [Link]

The author of this feeble minded drivel is less than a sure waste of skin.

Posted Dec 8, 2002 22:35 UTC (Sun) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

This article seems to me somewhat more reasonable than it might be. It says that license cost
is not a significant portion of TCO in the Linux vs. Windows comparison for business machines.
This is certainly true; even if your hardware costs are reduced by using commodity hardware,
you have to go with gratis-license software for a lot of other parts of the system before the
OS costs become significant. Deploying Oracle and Weblogic on Linux is not really cheaper than
deploying them on Windows, except that Windows, unlike Linux, squanders the power/price of
commodity hardware.

It says not to switch to Linux for high-end systems until 2005, which is probably when the
current set of changes for high-end systems will actually be getting into conservative
distributions.

My only real complaint about it is that it seems to think that Windows clustering is an
important feature rather than an attempt to deal with stability problems. Linux clustering is
targetted more at total power and hardware fault-tolerance, which is sensible; software faults
are notoriously hard to handle with redundancy, since, if one copy crashes, all of the
identical ones probably will, too. Again, the serious high-availability hardware support is
new.

Overall, I agree with the main point of the article: Linux is better than Windows and, except
for obscure hardware, commercial UNIX, not because it has no license costs, but because it is
more efficient, more stable, and more capable for many tasks. For those tasks where Linux
support is not yet in place or mature, wait a few years.

Posted Dec 9, 2002 0:15 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

For me, the true value of [GNU/]Linux is Freedom.

Who here installed a Unix or MS operating system from a free CD they
got with a magazine?
Who has found a feature interesting and decided to read the code?

Given a copy to a friend/family member?
Installed it in work without having to ask a manager for money?
Learned good programming practices from reading the code?
Printed the Free manuals?
Recompiled an app or the kernel for practical reasons (or just because)?

The GPL and other Free licenses are the difference between "Linux"
and most other OSs.

Ciaran O'Riordan

Posted Dec 9, 2002 7:03 UTC (Mon) by kwr2k (guest, #7944) [Link]

Guys, guys, guys! ZDNet is a sponsored portal from M$ (surprise!!). Every article on this site is a sugar-coated tablet aimed to numb the effect linux is beginning to have on the end-user...

Posted Dec 9, 2002 18:28 UTC (Mon) by Medievalist (guest, #8395) [Link]

From the article:

For example, Linux requires more staffing resources and effort to match the reliability, availability, and scalability of high-end Unix and Windows XP or Windows 2000 servers.

And yet those crazy executives were able to reduce technical staff 20% over three years when we switched to linux. If I show them this article, will they hire some more staff? That'd be cool, I have friends out of work since the Bush economic miracle is working so effectively.

Users must purchase high-availability add-ons (e.g., clustering partitioning and journaled file systems)...

Well, I guess I must have purchased heartbeat, drbd, and ext3 (the industry standard for high availability) in my sleep then, since I certainly don't remember doing it.

...and support from third parties,

I need support for operating systems that don't go down? Holy crap, I had no idea! I had thought Red Hat Network, which costs dramatically less than Microsoft support, to be more than sufficient.

...which increases cost and complexity.

Gee, that $600,000 yearly decrease in costs must be imaginary.

I thought the corporate accountants had no imagination, silly me!