Posted: 6/19/2005 11:06:29 AM EDT
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Intelligent Infrastructure Is Linux For Losers? Dan Lyons, 06.16.05 Forbes.com 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.'" De Raadt makes a rival open source operating system called OpenBSD. Unlike Linux, which is a clone of Unix, OpenBSD is based on an actual Unix variant called Berkeley Software Distribution. BSD powers two of the best operating systems in the world--Solaris from Sun Microsystems and OS X from Apple Computer. There are three open source flavors of BSD--FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, the one De Raadt develops, which is best-known for its security features. In a sort of hacker equivalent of the Ford-versus-Chevy rivalry, BSD guys make fun of Linux on message boards and Web sites, the gist being that BSD guys are a lot like Linux guys, except they have kissed girls. Sour grapes? Maybe. Linux is immensely more popular than all of the open source BSD versions. De Raadt says that's partly because Linux gets support from big hardware makers like Hewlett-Packard and IBM, which he says have turned Linux hackers into an unpaid workforce. "These companies used to have to pay to develop Unix. They had in-house engineers who wrote new features when customers wanted them. Now they just allow the user community to do their own little hacks and features, trying to get to the same functionality level, and they're just putting pennies into it," De Raadt says. De Raadt says his crack 60-person team of programmers, working in a tightly focused fashion and starting with a core of tried-and-true Unix, puts out better code than the slapdash Linux movement. "I think our code quality is higher, just because that's really a big focus for us," De Raadt says. "Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run." As for Linus Torvalds, who created Linux and oversees development, De Raadt says, "I don't know what his focus is at all anymore, but it isn't quality." Torvalds, via e-mail, says De Raadt is "difficult" and declined to comment further. De Raadt blames Linux's development structure, in which thousands of coders feed bits of code to "maintainers," who in turn pass pieces to Torvalds and a handful of top lieutenants. The involvement of big companies also creates problems, De Raadt says, since companies push their own agendas and end up squabbling--as happened recently when a Red Hat coder published an essay criticizing IBM's Linux programmers. There's also a difference in motivation. "Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix," De Raadt says. The irony, however, is that while noisy Linux fanatics make a great deal out of their hatred for Microsoft, De Raadt says their beloved program is starting to look a lot like what Microsoft puts out. "They have the same rapid development cycle, which leads to crap," he says. De Raadt says BSD could have become the world's most popular open source operating system, except that a lawsuit over BSD scared away developers, who went off to work on Linux and stayed there even after BSD was deemed legal. "It's really very sad," he says. "It is taking a long time for the Linux code base to get where BSD was ten years ago." Lok Technologies, a San Jose, Calif.-based maker of networking gear, started out using Linux in its equipment but switched to OpenBSD four years ago after company founder Simon Lok, who holds a doctorate in computer science, took a close look at the Linux source code. "You know what I found? Right in the kernel, in the heart of the operating system, I found a developer's comment that said, 'Does this belong here?' "Lok says. "What kind of confidence does that inspire? Right then I knew it was time to switch." www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616theo_print.html |
First off, Theo is an asshole of the highest order. Back when Sun4c's were finally getting available to those of us who couldn't afford to actually buy decent hardware, OBsd has some issues with the arch...it'd randomly wedge doign something stupid. Repeated calls for support/help from Theo and his dev team to fix it were eventually met with "we no longer support sun4c; fix it yourself if you're that militant about it". (paraphrasing) I won't get into all the other shit over the years I've seen come from him and his happy fun dev team. They make a drunk Mike Tyson look aggreable, even after you slash his tires. Second off:  He's bang-on about that drunk finn's idea of a kernel  Lemme put it another way...if I were given a choice; I had to pollute my hardware with either OpenBSD or any flavor of Linux, I'd take the hippie's implementation over that of the drunk finn. |
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Foremost, I disagree with the statement of losers and Linux. That is just plain stupid to make. However, I do believe that FreeBSD has picked up several advantages over Linux. These are: too much code in the kernel which is not well understood (including Linus), contributing now is difficult as there are too much hoops to go through, too often times a version is slower than the previous as there are no regression tests to help with improving performance, and the license is not as favorable for the embedded manufacturing industry. I run XP and Linux on my workstations and my one server, but I use FreeBSD in all my embedded applications. Tivo, Linksys, and others would have been better served going with a BSD derivative. Apple was smarter in that regards. |
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If you could see the code comments that Microsoft programmers make in the Windows kernel and other source, I'll bet you'd have the same or worse comments to make about Windows. If you could see the comments made by engineers designing the engine in your car, you'd probably feel the same way. "Do you think this will work, John? I don't know, Bill, let's build it and run it through some tests. Looks good enough to me." Jim |
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BAWAHAHAHAHAHHA! I LOVE it. Why will corporate America never adopt Linux? Because there's nobody there to stand and be responsible for it when something goes wrong. Support comes from a bunch of discussion boards, and if you buy professional support, expect to pay MORE for it than a basic Microsoft Windows server license. Of course, technodweeb Linux dorks cannot recognize the financial implications of such things as TCO, and only look at the surface price tag. Nothing is for FREE, you get what you pay for. LINUX/OPEN SOURCE = SOCIALIZM |
The open source alone alows you to modify unencrypted software when you encounter a problem |
 Do you rebuild your own engines, too? Change your own brakes? How about changing your shocks when it's time? New muffler/exhaust? I mean, you can modify your car when you encounter a problem. Are you REALLY going to tie a multi-million/billion dollar company to ONE PERSON who made a kernel hack to fix a stupid problem that some dope-smoking 15 year old introduced into an ethernet driver? And when that person decides to leave for greener pastures, and you lose support for it? If you're that ignorant man, good luck with your field...and let me know what field that is, so I can avoid it like a leper losing body parts. I've been doing this since the early 90's...sure, linux was fun when I got my hands on it in the pre99 days, it was a diversion, it opened things up. I liked NetBSD more, personally, but linux had some fun things, like better graphics. Then I figured out not long afterwards there's no way it'd ever make inroads in the professional world because it's _too_ open, _too_ free. Whole trees of source can be fucked up by some kid who thinks he knows better than everyone else. God forbid someone vital to the project, who was doing it as a hobby, decides to take a few years off and get a girlfriend or something. Not to mention the spin-up time someone new would have to go through to fill in that person shoes, as that person undoubtedly used uber-ninja hacks and other non-standard linux shite to get the thing to work. You know why Sun and Microsoft and HP will never go away? Because right now, if I have a major problem, I can call Sun or Microsoft or HP and say "Hey! This thing fucked up! Fix it!"...and they will. They will make a patch, QA it, test it, and release it to us...if they haven't already fixed it themselves, and just haven't released it due to the rarity of the problem (had that happen on a couple MS and Sun things in the past). I don't have to worry about catching them on the day their ethernet driver person is in the office. I don't have to worry about calling some random call center for Redhat or something with a kernel or driver bug, only to find out they can't help me with that because...well, they didn't write it, and I need to post to a freaking usenet group or forum somewhere and pray the guy who wrote the software, tunes in. I'm an admin, not a programmer. It's one thing to know the rudimentary of things and be able to tell the developer it's a problem in the SCSI subsystem somewhere. It's another to need to become an expert in memory management and SCSI internals to fix some lame-ass i/o cache bug. I don't have the time for that. In my world, time is money, and the more stuff I can push off onto the proper support staff at the vendor, the better off the world is. |
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Theo is an asshole canadian, but I like him sometimes, and this time I have to whole heartedly agree with everything he says. You cannot argue with this quote.
I learned this in the late 90's and thus why *BSD is the opensource OS's that I choose. |
this you can not dispute |
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When I need a new AR part I do not order a forging and spend the next couple of months doing the final filing and fitting. That would be a lot of work for just a magazine catch. I'd rather buy a finished product. I also use Firefox as my main browser because it is easier to do more than with IE. For the same reason I use Microsoft Windows. It does more and I can actually use it without having a 600 page manual sitting next to the keyboard. Linux is a OS that was never finished and you can't finish it at home. You have to type in long commands out of a library of user manuals just to do simple things Grandma does on Windows with the click of a button. Linux is to Windows what a flicklock is to an M4. 
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I make a very good living off of Linux ... although I admit, I have to play with Solaris alot too. Linux is great if you have the expertise around ... people that just shrug it off usually know nothing about it, and usually have a laughable understanding of systems anyways ... |
Eh wot? I haven't had to do a single recompile or kernel patch in the last five years. Linux runs fine on my system, no problems whatsoever, no glitches, no gaping security flaws. Unlike a certain Redmond-based operating system company's products I could name. And yeah, I'm stuck running Windoze sometimes too. BFHD. If you evaluate all of your products so carefully, I sure don't want to buy your company's stuff, waaaah. You probably figure, "hey, that vendor's receptionist is really hot, and I can always call her for 'support' if I want it -- maybe she can 'fit me in'!" Neener-neener.
"Hello, Bill? Yes, I know what time it is. I'm sorry it's 5am in Medina. It's Ed, Bill. Remember me? Comdex 1998? The Olympic Gardens second-floor male strippers lounge? The guy who brought the toothless goat. Look, can you head in and tell your guys to fix tha... hello? Bill? Hello???" A research fellow at a place I used to work ran into a bug in WinNT a few years ago. His son actually worked for MS tech support at the time. He asked his son to see what he could do, and the kid told him "not much". The kid explained the tech support priority system to his father, basically that the more people who have the problem, the greater the odds that Microsoft will deign to think about looking into it, and so at a CS class the prof was teaching, he gave the students an assignment: call Microsoft and tell them they're encountering the bug. About two weeks later, the kid called hsi father and told him, "hey, Dad, you know that bug you were complaining about? Man, everyone is hitting it!"  Your scenario only works if it's a common-enough problem to warrant them bothering. If it isn't, you might get it in 2008 when they release their next OS. With Linux, if you have a problem, which is a lot rarer than on Microsoft's garbage, you have the opportunity to dig into it yourself, or to find out who maintains that section and ask him, or to ask anyone else on the planet to look into it. You're not stuck sending your hermetically-sealed box off to Bangalore, India to get it fixed. A good read on the theory and practice of the open-source system is here: www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html |
man, give me that number for microsoft. my system's running kinda slow.
go ahead and admit it, you've never dealt with red hat enterprise. those guys are freakin incredible. they know more than anyone i've ever met. |
Forging/Casting/Milling/Manual work comparable to typing and using a brain?
No, I'm not since I don't have a multi billion budget behind me... I only have my workroom within the garage which funds my own personal knowledge. I don't use my computer skills for profit, just extra time when I'm not on ARFCOM or at the range. Been doing it since I was 5.
Well, I'll stick with my Human Resources, you stick with your tech-support stilted billion dollar budget.
With a billion dollar budget, one would think employees know everything to know about the project. I'm sure people at Redhat can do without when a team player leaves. I mean, RedHat hasn't caved.
Well, I'm stumped. I've never had the chance to hire a new employee that didn't need to be shown the ropes to procedures at a company.
Because people like you look for easier solutions at any cost but your own labor.
While you are on the hold line, I'll be rewriting a configuration to change and fix my problem. Have fun talking to Indians!
Shucks, my Cisco routers are great with Linux, no integration problems at all, and oh yea, 3com has amazing drivers as well. Most companies DO support their products, unless you have homebrewed an ethernet card.
Well, he isn't a programmer, he is an admin. Open source just might not be for you then, since you have plenty of time for tech support, you could better spend it fixing your own problem... I mean, since time is money. I think the manufacturer support is great... when there is hardware failure. You are an admin, you do it for a living, that's fine. Google really isn't worried about their systems downing because Joe Blow took vacation, they support themselves! Maybe your company should salary people like me to fix problems like this. After all, the programmer who designed a system, gave the admin a job. Return the favor. Don't tread on me because I prefer something that doesn't cost me 10k/license because I do my own private systems for my own research. After all, you sure as hell would replace the bolt carrier in your ar15 if it cracked. I'll put different code in when it doesn't work. /usr/bin/w4klrout |
Slowness is an indication of either shitty sysadmin, or a slow machine...not a bug
Actually, for about 6 months in 1998...I was Redhat Support. Not %100 sure what the deal was between my consulting company and redhat (and I seem to recall they had their own support soon after we stopped), but I was getting phone calls, mostly about redhat/alpha. What a piece of shit. |
Not even close to my experience with Microsoft. I called them about a filesystem bug. I had to fork over the $250 for the support call as we didn't have a support contract with them at the time. I went from tier 1 to tier 3 support in less than 20 minutes. I spent a week playing tag with an engineer at Microsoft. I was able to replicate the blue screen at will, and told them how to do it. The engineer I spoke to was pretty amazed I was able to do it how I was (basically, massive file creation...thousands of files at once, with some conditions, would cause a panic.) 10 days after the incident was opened, I received a beta patch. The engineer said that he just compiled it on his box and it ran, and worked, and it should work for us for now..and when the official patch gets released, I'll find a copy of it in my email. True to his word...it made it out in the next service pack, and I had it well before then. How may people here have actually called Microsoft? I'm guessing...none. |
I have. Microsoft is very good for support I'll admit. But can you see why, the largest software firm on the planet, they must make support for the mass of consumers, so they figure, lets make it quality so they spend less time on our phone lines and cost us less money. But then again, my awesome experiences with Microsoft are heightened because of my MSDN status... |
Er...yah, I'd consider spending hours typing, debugging, and fixing someone else's fuckup "manual work". Same with changing brake pads, changing tires, or bleeding brake lines. Programming is manual work, just like gardening. It may pay better, but it's a lot more mentally draining.
Which means...your qualifications to speak as far as a professional environment are none. You're some random joe home hobbiest; not someone who's livelyhood hinges on computers and the operating systems they run. My first pc was a trash-80. Been doing this since I was 5, too, from a hobby standpoint, thanks.
Ugh, HR...they could fuck up cold water. With one or two exceptions, I've yet to meet a competent HR drone...no offense, but I haven't really seen any stellar HR people who wouldn't fire someone for wearing the wrong tie to work.
No, billion dollar business. Not budget. Of course Redhat hasen't caved; guillible fools actually pay for it..and a lot more than they pay for comparable Sun and Microsoft products, amortized over a 5 year span.
DEFINITILY not a computer person in any professional capacity, then. There are no two shops alike, ever, at all, even if the same person ran them both at some time. Even the world's best systems administrator/manager will take a minimum of a couple months to get up to any kind of a speed where they could be relied upon to take care of any issue that might crop up from swapping tapes to hardware replacement to password propogation..without supervision or help doing so.
Nope. Because it's cheaper, and takes less time. Cost-effective, I believe the phrase is. I can devote a team of programmers to fix a silly little bug in threading on a multi-processor box, which takes time and money...or I can call Sun/Microsoft, explain the problem to them, and in 2 weeks while my work progresses (albeit working around the bug), they will present me the fix.
Never spoken to an Indian with regard to tech shit in my life. At least, not an Indian that was not based and located here in the US. (calling back 10 minutes after I hung up and getting some guy with a Chicago accent so thick it required a Chicago-to-English translator was needed. I'd say that's a pretty good indication it was here. Noi self-respecting Chicagoan would go to a land where they couldn't get brats or pizza.)
What does a router, which runs it's own operating system as well as it's own hardware platform, have to do with an ethernet driver on a PC? Oh, and read some of the license agreements sometime for the drivers. They're pretty much universally unsupported by the manufacturer. You need to hit usenet or some other public forum for support. Thanks, try again.
Who said anything about tech support? I said administration.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha Quite frankly, you have little to no clue about how things work int he real world with regards to massive installations, sorry. You have your garage installation, and it's just you. You don't support multiple hardware platforms, you probably don't have much more than a router to play with some basic LAN stuff and/or switching, and would twitch when someone tells you that today, you get to support Citrix between London and Chicago...and every single little bit of copper between the client and the farm on the back end. Support themselves? WTH you been smoking? Nothing supports itself. Admins, like I, support them. I've yet to run into a machine that can patch itself properly, swap out it's own failed hard drive, swap out it's own tapes, replace faulty processors, memory modules, or ethernet modules.
OF course you prefer that; it's just you. When you look at over 5000 people spread across the country, and then notice that operations in London, Australia, and the Pacific rim are picking up...hey, a $10,000 site license is so indescribibly inexpensive it's not even funny. Hell, you get tempted to buy three of them, just in case the paperwork on one of them gets lost and you get called on it. Always have at least one spare of everything. You just made my whole point for me. For a 10-30 person shop, you MIGHT be able to get away with running some slack-ass operating system and supporting it all in-house. I mean, really, what could you be doing in such a small shop? Probably not something horribly time-sensitive. You probably don't have more than the number of people in servers; certainly not more than 5-10 more than the number of employees, and that's being extremely charitable. I'm thinking more like 2-3 servers for 30 people, including spreading some of the load out between different boxes; a home directory server, mail services, and everything else on the 3rd box. When you have more than a thousand people? The model is so entirely different it's not even funny. You may as well be comparing an old Schwinn to a Ferrari. Totally different. |
Ditto. MCSE+I, MCSD, MCP here. BUT... I am also Oracle OCP... so I am not JUST a MS lover. |
Not even. Last year, I made the strategic decision to take all of our Oracle server farm to a RedHat Linux cluster. This 'cheap' open source stuff was all the rage... mmmkay... Oracle was trumpeting its praises. So... we got some RedHat installs. Then when it came time to implement clustering (generally a good idea for data warehouse environments), RedHat came along and sprang the little joke on us that they had bought up the project that implemented clustering within the Linux core kernel, and taken it off the open source scene. It was still 'free' from them, but in order to obtain it to do a compile of the kernel.... get this.... ....are you ready for the punch line??? ...we had to buy mandatory support agreements from RedHat. How much were these mandatory support agreements to get the undocumented, undisclosed clustering support? The same price as a MS Windows 2K Advanced Server license.... due and payable annually. Not one time as a license. My CEO went ballistic. We bought it because it was already so deep, but I shall nary again deal with such dishonest people. |
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