Posted on 06/19/2005 6:41:20 AM PDT by Willie Green
NEW YORK - Theo de Raadt is a pioneer of the open source software movement and a huge proponent of free software. But he is no fan of the open source Linux operating system.
"It's terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Nope, sales of Netware are probably bringing in 20+ times what any sales of Linux are bringing in. No wonder, you yourself are looking for a free download, right?
Last dog and pony show I was at from Novell said they had enough money on hand to last several years at their current burn rate.
They do have lots of cash, mostly thanks to lawsuits against Microsoft. Doesn't mean they're going to throw that all away if Linux isn't a viable business model.
I thought you were Mr. buy American? You want Novell to go out of business because they sell Linux?
I don't want them to go out of business, what I want to happen is what Jack Messman the CEO said might happen - for them to declare Linux as a non-viable business. They could be getting close, based on his recent conference call after reporting their latest loss.
Sounds like a time bomb.
Here's a recent report:
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2005/06/06/story4.html?from_rss=1
Total Novell revenue, $297 million.
Total Linux revenue, $8 million.
Net result, $16 million loss.
Or even worse -- Amish.
I wonder if he owns any MSFT stocks or he is about to recommend some new OS in which he's invested serious resources.
Which is saying what, not much. How many companies are actually looking at Netware VS Windows? Probably only companies that already have Netware. Just this last three weeks I was contacted by three companies that want to migrate from Netware to Microsoft Windows 2003.
So what happens if they declare Linux non-viable? They don't exactly have a lot of products to sell.
Why would he do that? He has his own O/S already.
Such is life when free software comes to town. All the minor players will probably be destroyed before it's over.
Yes, that is definitely one of its strong points and it is extremely popular for large-scale enterprise database systems. Linux scales well to very large hardware, has strong support for high-performance and scalable filesystems (XFS,LVM2,etc), and is well-supported by the vendors of the kind of hardware you use for large enterprise databases.
For big Oracle or Postgres installations, Linux will stay up and perform very well for as long as the hardware does. I've never had Linux fail on database servers, and many of the ones I deal with have been operating non-stop for a couple years. Solaris is another good OS choice for a database server, but it has fallen out of favor because Sparc hardware is a performance dog.
"Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix," De Raadt says.
This guy has got at least one thing exactly right.
I see no need for it either. It's just a foreign fake of what we already had here in America well before it ever arrived.
OpenBSD is a great niche product: it does not run on newer hardware as well as FreeBSD or linux. FreeBSD also tends to trail linux when it comes to driver availablity.
Use what works for you.
What? free software didn't lead to Novell's downfall and you know it. Novell sat fat and happy with their over 80% market share while Microsoft slowly evolved NT into the great product it is today.
Novell arrogantly kept using IPX while the world went IP. Sure, you could use IP for Netware but who wanted to have a DSS farm? By the time NCP talked natively over IP, it was way too late.
Let's not even talk about multi processor support. Novell did Novell in.
Unless that's Microsoft, like 70% of us buy on our new servers, right? Then you're apparently deserving of unending scorn and ridicule.
Novell hurt itself, but Netware is still bringing in good money, much more than Suse Linux is bringing in for them. Shouldn't be surprising, since the stated goal of open source is to "commoditize" the O/S market, and push proprietary vendors "up the stack". Novell better move up the stack unless they think they can compete on O/S terms with Linux, like Unix and Windows will continue to do.
Nope - MS Servers have their place. If they do what you want for the best price, use them.
That's a far cry from your usual smears. Will it last till the next thread I wonder.
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