A common reason why more governments and enterprises around the world are moving to open source software is unhappiness, it was revealed during a panel discussion at the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco yesterday.
A common reason why more governments and enterprises around the world are moving to open source software is unhappiness, it was revealed during a panel discussion at the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco yesterday.
Being “unhappy” with the solution Microsoft provided me was the reason I switched. I am just more satisfied with my Linux box than I ever was with Windows (3.11 and up).
That is not to say that XP is a bad OS in any way. I believe it to be the best (with SP2) that Microsoft has yet released to the general consumer. But, like any personal choice, Linux suits me better.
Same can be said about ice cream flavors.
Every year for the past 10 years I get this itch to switch to something else than Windows. Not that I’m unhappy with it, just for the sake of change. Install the latest, most popular distro, tinker with it, then eventually, after a week, scrap it from my HD, and happily come back to Windows.
For some reasons Windows (and especially since 2K & XP) is everything I ever need, working as perfect as I need it.
It’s probably what *I*’m doing with it that I never real feel frustrated : lot of coding, either GUI softwares or cross compiling with game consoles for homebrew. Fair amount of gaming. A little productivity usage here and there. Web browsing. Basic web serving for personnal use.
So basically, never really hit any roadblocks since 2K.
Your mileage may vary.
Come over for gcc
.
Isn’t being unhappy with one product or brand why one usually switches to the other? However, to be unhappy with one product, it either has to really make one mad, or one has to see that another product has more advantages. These are the type of things that increase unhappiness over a product or brand. Unhappiness is the majority reason, at least in America, why people would switch from a product that they were already using.
My first computer was a Timex Sinclair ZX81. I’ve used Microsoft products since MS DOS with the purchase of my first IBM compatible PC.
About 9 years ago I learned of Linux and have since watched it grow. Now Ubuntu is my favorite Linux distro of choice. There comes a time in ones life where he/she welcomes change. For me that time is now.
However at the end of the day, I think will will always be working in a mixed environment. So having skills that extend beyond Windows will always be a good thing.
I am curious what the real reason Google used Linux for their products. From the sound of it it seems like they were just too stupid to develop a product to run on-top of a commercial OS.
> seems like they were just too stupid to develop a product to run on-top of a commercial OS.
Egads! You’re trolling, right?
Why should I pay $$$$ per server for a OS that I don’t have the source to and is so full of security holes that even the latest version will be broken into within minutes of being put on the Internet without a firewall? Now THAT would be stupid.
>Why should I pay $$$$ per server for a OS that I don’t have the source to and is so full of security holes that even the latest version will be broken into within minutes of being put on the Internet without a firewall? Now THAT would be stupid.
If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to call you stupid.
It would be sheer stupidity if you put online any computer/os combination without a firewall as protection.
I’m also going to call you stupid because you seem to think that companies like google do something that stupid.
For the rest… Remember that this “unhappiness” goes both ways. There are many cases out there where companies or others go FROM open source to closed source, because they are unhappy with the results of the open source they used. In some cases of Linux -> Windows transitions, that has been done because they find that running Windows ends up being cheaper than running Linux. That’s even without any special deals with Microsoft, and this is fact. In other cases, the open source vendors just can’t deliver what was promised (probably because noone felt like doing the work for free.)
I highly doubt that it was a matter of stupidity or of buggy software.
Seems to me that the biggest advantage of an Open Source OS to Google would be scalability and the license savaings by being freely used in their huge clusters.
BSD could have been used instead of Linux. There is no “magic” in Linux. It is just a tool that is very useful for a good number of jobs.
Why should I pay $$$$ per server for a OS that I don’t have the source to and is so full of security holes that even the latest version will be broken into within minutes of being put on the Internet without a firewall? Now THAT would be stupid.
You assume i am talking about windows..i am not. Ask yourself what possibly would Google need with the operating system source? What product or technology do they have that would require a rewrite of a portion of an OS? Doesn’t make sense. I think they needed a throw away OS for a throw away product so they used Linux.
http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html
We have designed and implemented the Google File System, a scalable distributed file system for large distributed data-intensive applications. It provides fault tolerance while running on inexpensive commodity hardware, and it delivers high aggregate performance to a large number of clients.
While sharing many of the same goals as previous distributed file systems, our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and technological environment, both current and anticipated, that reflect a marked departure from some earlier file system assumptions. This has led us to reexamine traditional choices and explore radically different design points.
The file system has successfully met our storage needs. It is widely deployed within Google as the storage platform for the generation and processing of data used by our service as well as research and development efforts that require large data sets. The largest cluster to date provides hundreds of terabytes of storage across thousands of disks on over a thousand machines, and it is concurrently accessed by hundreds of clients.
Read the whole paper by the way. Here’s one excerpt towards the end:
Despite occasional problems, the availability of Linux code
has helped us time and again to explore and understand
system behavior. When appropriate, we improve the kernel
and share the changes with the open source community.
a freind of mine worked in several UK government jobs – and in all of them he recounted the frustration and pain caused by proprietary software that was buggy, not functioning as required, or simply broken, and very very expensive – with no easy fix to the problems – leaving entire departments at the mercy of companies with little incentive to fix the issues.
i mention the very expensive software – people spend money on it – then there is a pressure NOT to choose an alternative system – “you’ve spent money on it – you have to use it now .. “
Then I remembered why I started using Linux, FreeBSD and OSX in the first place: Because I was unhappy with Windows 9x and NT.
I stick with Linux, FreeBSD and OSX now, even though Windows has gotten better, first with Windows 2000 and now with XP and 2003 Server Edition, because I prefer the Unix way.
I’m helping to manage a computer lab/cyber caf for a community organization. Every week there’s something going absurdly wrong with the machines, which are running the MS Win98 OS.
In a sane and rational world, we would be using the best software we could to run the best hardware we could afford.
Frustration levels with the substandard Microsoft software – stupidities like MS Windows asking for the floppy on shutdown, when nobody’s used the floppy during the entire session, MS Word asking – repeatedly – for the floppy when it hasn’t been used during the current session; and MS hallmarks like the ease with which malware gets installed – have almost driven us to Linux as the standard, while everybody advises new users to use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, because with Firefox you don’t need to bolt the stable door after the horse has bolted, because it gets bolted before the horse tries to bolt.
“A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark
Close your mouth and open up your heart and baby satisfy me
Satisfy me baby”
Are you listening, Microsoft?
I’ve had more fun with *nix than I ever had with any incarnation of Microsoft Windows.
I’ll NEVER use another Microsoft product again, ever. This includes their software and hardware products. I refuse to support their philosophies.
due to unhappiness and boredom with WindowsXP and I had gotten the urge to learn a *NIX like OS contribute to Linux in some way. The unhappiness may have been arounf even with earlier version Windows but I actually enjoy using Linux more than Windows and ended up freeing my harddrive of a Windows partition entirely.
Has anyone tried the new “critical software update” process that Microsoft has put in place? Updayes are advertised as ‘critical’ and without them your computer is susceptible to attack from the Internet. Fine! I’ll get them. Then you are asked to allow a new version of the up-date software to be downloaded and installed – that’s Ok as its happened several times in the past. Then the new update software starts a ‘verification process’ which uploads approx. 50K of data from YOUR computer to Microsoft’s computer. This is necesary I am told so that Microsoft can tailor future upgrades to suit my personal PC – how are they going to do that? Some of the data they took is encrypted – what’s in that data? Can I have access to this data? – probably not!
Talk about ‘big brother’, ‘1984’, ‘privacy concerns’ and ‘good customer focus’ all rolled-in together.
No wonder people don’t like Microsoft and are moving to Linux.
Microsoft are (for now at least) in a monopoly supplier position for me as a customer and I have no choice other than to take this behaviour. Its time for Governments to step in an regulate this repugnant behaviour.
Regards,
Peter