With of course, Linux and Solaris both open source software:)

Perhaps I should state my interests. I'm not Linux zealot. I'm more of a devil's advocate. I'm using Windows XP Professional, which I'm dual-booting with Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition. I'm applying to be a Microsoft Student Ambassador at my local university, and I also am starting up a small business installing Linux on less-than-new computers.

I don't think Microsoft need to be scared about the current market slice of Linux. They need to be scared over the market *growth* of Linux. After all, it's really been since about 1999 when Linux has taken off.

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Regards,
Waylon Kenning.

Check out my blog at http://spaces.msn.com/WaylonKenning/

outsider17 wrote:

3) Governments. Governments like to save dollars. It's debatable whether the savings from lower software costs match the increases costs from retraining of staff, but Brazil and the like are willing to try it. Also there's been concern about open document formats, vs. Office 12's XML format which isn't open (and fair enough).

You couldnt be more mistaken. I live in Brazil and what I see is goverment migrating FROM Linux TO Windows and not the other way around. Many companies are doing the same because linux simply cant handle when it comes to high availability.

outsider17 wrote:

4) Google. Google aren't a bunch of kids. Google aren't a bunch of older crazy fanatics. If you haven't heard, Google have the most popular search at the moment, running on a whole bunch of Linux servers. They're also offering 2.6GB of email storage (I can send you and invite if you want), and are developing some pretty cool things, like Google Talk and Google Desktop Search.

Didnt you notice that Google pages are aspx?? They run Windows servers and NOT Linux servers.

For my message about what operating system Google uses, see this page - http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3487041 or here's a quote

To deal with the more than 10 billion Web pages and tens of terabytes of information on Google's servers, the company combines cheap machines with plenty of redundancy, Hoelzle said. Its commodity servers cost around $1,000 apiece, and Google's architecture places them into interconnected nodes.

All machines run on a stripped-down Linux kernel. The distribution is Red Hat, but Hoelzle said Google doesn't use much of the distro. Moreover, Google has created its own patches for things that haven't been fixed in the original kernel.

---

Regards,
Waylon Kenning.

Check out my blog at http://spaces.msn.com/WaylonKenning/

Very interesting a site running on a linux server telling that google also runs on a linux server. Have you ever heard about orkut (www.orkut.com)? Its owner is also google and if they think linux is so better why on earth are they using .net for its development? Shouldnt they be using LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP)???

Werent you talking about free software?? Red hat is paid software, the free version is Fedora.

outsider17 wrote:

1) Webhosts. Apache has 70% of the server market last time I checked (http://news.netcraft.com/).

It's statistics by domain, not by servers. So these 70% - are home pages ("this is my photo, this is a photo of my dog") on free (or cheap) hosting - where one server with Apache may have thousands of domains.

outsider17 wrote:

I'm not Linux zealot. ... I also am starting up a small business installing Linux on less-than-new computers.

Interesting!

Me? I am not Batman but I love to fight penguins... :D

On every Open Source forum I see many posts about weaknesses of Windows and how Linux is much better (where Linux = good example for Open Source).Let's talk little in oposite direction...

First of all, it is impossible to compare  different operating systems architectures: Windows, Linux, MacOS, etc. Why Windows "is more vulnerable"? Simply, because there are much more people who use Windows (more than 90%), so it is natural that they discover more bugs. Linux has also many defects (for example, why common user can have temporary root privilegies if he launch some of the system processes), as it have some advantages. One of the greatest antivirus experts in world, Kaspersky, said that Linux is more vulnerable.

What is bad in Linux security? Exactly the fact that you have open source of program code, so you can scroll free throw it and see some mistakes if you are expert. In closed source, you have to use reverse engineering techniques to get source from binary file, if you wan't to find some vulnerability. But the catch is, that when you decompile/dissasemble binary file to source, that is not same code of author, it is only approximately same, but in open source it is 100% original code. So, it is much easier to find a bug... Take a look at phpBB2 forums, they are exploited every second week....

Also, there is bad hardware compatibility for Linux. You need loose lot of precious time to setup some simple things like scanner, web camera, modem, printer. It is bad support for new technologies ( when usb 2.0 standard was invented, he was available in Windows about half year or a year before than in most of Linux distributions). What for I need operating systems if I can't quickly make it work efficiently with my hardware? (I'm talking from the view of common user)

Also there is bad project management in develloping small open source applications (this is not case with Linux kernel, KDE, Appache, etc. don't missunderstand me). Simple, you have very, very  large number of people which are working, and some of them are not much experienced (what can't happen in Microsoft for example), so you can't coordinate that efficiently and there must be many bad lines of code, it's obvious. 

 

Paleo wrote:

Didnt you notice that Google pages are aspx?? They run Windows servers and NOT Linux servers.

Waylon is right here: Google is famous for their huge cluster of  Linux servers they use to make their search service so fast.

As for Orkut, it's just one example. Google bought Orkut sometime ago. Of course, there is no sense in rebuilding the service "just because of .aspx".

kambodza wrote:

On every Open Source forum I see many posts about weaknesses of Windows and how Linux is much better (where Linux = good example for Open Source).Let's talk little in oposite direction... First of all, it is impossible to compare  different operating systems architectures: Windows, Linux, MacOS, etc. Why Windows "is more vulnerable"? Simply, because there are much more people who use Windows (more than 90%), so it is natural that they discover more bugs. Linux has also many defects (for example, why common user can have temporary root privilegies if he launch some of the system processes), as it have some advantages. One of the greatest antivirus experts in world, Kaspersky, said that Linux is more vulnerable.

Well, I don't agree at all with this:
--A normal Windows user founds a bug? Are you sure? I have always thought that the bugs where found by hackers/crackers in Windows (yeah, Sasser was made by a common-windows user, who found "a bug")...and where should a common-Windows-user post his bug (I don't complete trust the automatic version of Windows XP...I prefer a big forum, with experts, where I woulb be able to write all the process which determined a bug...
--Well, common users somehow can have root privilegies. Wow. Don't you think that happens also in Windows somehow, but you cannot see it? Let's talk a reboot without root privilegies, or accessing System API's... 

kambodza wrote:

What is bad in Linux security? Exactly the fact that you have open source of program code, so you can scroll free throw it and see some mistakes if you are expert. In closed source, you have to use reverse engineering techniques to get source from binary file, if you wan't to find some vulnerability. But the catch is, that when you decompile/dissasemble binary file to source, that is not same code of author, it is only approximately same, but in open source it is 100% original code. So, it is much easier to find a bug... Take a look at phpBB2 forums, they are exploited every second week....

But with Open Source you can fix more easily a problem: more people know the code, and there are the chances that more people can find the bug in lesser time...with closed source? If it happens to be no documentation? If the experts aren't at the moment available?...not an happy situation :))

kambodza wrote:

Also, there is bad hardware compatibility for Linux. You need loose lot of precious time to setup some simple things like scanner, web camera, modem, printer. It is bad support for new technologies ( when usb 2.0 standard was invented, he was available in Windows about half year or a year before than in most of Linux distributions). What for I need operating systems if I can't quickly make it work efficiently with my hardware? (I'm talking from the view of common user)

...never had any problem with ALL, *ALL* of my hardware :), and I never spent more than 10 minutes in searching with google/Linux sites in order to find a solution...and I'm talking about Gentoo, and not a Mandriva, that's got a guided installation like windows ;))

kambodza wrote:

Also there is bad project management in develloping small open source applications (this is not case with Linux kernel, KDE, Appache, etc. don't missunderstand me). Simple, you have very, very  large number of people which are working, and some of them are not much experienced (what can't happen in Microsoft for example), so you can't coordinate that efficiently and there must be many bad lines of code, it's obvious.

Are you completely sure about this? Don't you think that the testing with Open Source is more common and easy to do?
Think about it: Sourceforge.net, you can access all the Open Source projects, choose one and download the latest version that you can find on the CVS. You can try it, and see if it works. You can just write a post in the forum telling "Hey, program X fails to load module Y. My machine is Z, and..."...do you think that happens to Windows? Do you think there are more people testing Windows Vista or the latest Kernel of Linux? I made only an example, but this happens for ALL the programs...OpenSource programs are just better tested...

Another thing is documentation: closed source programs usually have _VERY_BAD_ documentation...have you ever tried developing a plugin for Outlook?
I did...and the documentation is totally a mess.
Have you ever tried to develop a program to set a Label to an AppointmentItem in Outlook?
I've to translate this horrible code into C#, in order to make it work with my plugin:
http://www.outlookcode.com/codedetail.aspx?id=139
(I'm thinking that Outlook's developer had been drinking to much beer ;)))

BTW, do you know what's my plugin, http://sourceforge.net/projects/remotecalendars ? Do you know what is an iCalendar? Did you know that iCalendar (RFC 2445, you can find it on the IETF site) was wrote by two person: a Lotus and a *****WINDOWS***** developer...

So Windows sets a standard...and it doesn't use it? (Try to Goooooogle Outlook and iCalendar, and you'll see what I mean).

Instead, you can find a program, version 0.2, OpenSource, that use this standard...Sunbird...oh, I forgot KOrganizer...maybe there are other...

I hust wrote this to tell you the _biggest_ problem of the closed source, like windows...how are they doing with standards? Open Source programs usually respect much more standards...

BTW...I think you're asking yourself why I did an OpenSource plugin for Outlook...well, I had to do it to get my degree :)...but after I graduated, I decided to publish it as Open Source project...and you can see (by simply going to that site) how much that program has grown with the free contribute of people: it's getting better & better day by day...

Please don't kill OpenSource if you haven't tried to develop an OpenSource project...I wasn't so fanatic, and I didn't understand my friends who kept talking about "OpenSource!!"OpenSource!!"OpenSource!!..."
But now I understand them :)

LastHope