I kinda liked Halo's history debates, so I will try to copy his idea (only steal from the best) and start some debates regarding business and economy.

Let's start with something that most people can relate to. The stuff below is something that I have written for myself in preparation for a university exam. Let's discuss it, feel free to point out any issues you might disagree with.


Why open source will change the business world? Let me preface this that by open source changing the world I mean the open source model, characterized by the free exchange of information and global non-profit cooperation, and not just its current representation of linux geekdom.

In the current business world, more specifically international trade and the world of multinational enterprises (MNEs), information is king. The most precious assets a multinational enterprise possesses are its KBAs (Knowledge Based Assets).

KBAs encompass a wide range of things, from technology patents to management know-how, from marketing data to competition monitoring.


In the past decade we have witnessed the rise of a new kind of enterprise, the e-MNE. From Google to Ebay, a new breed of enterprises sprung out of nothing to conduct business taking advantage of the latest thing, the cyberspace. Their business is information and technology now is merely means to an end and not the goal itself.


This is what we call the “information age”.


The western civilization’s business evolution in the past century progressed from the production model through service model to the information model.

The reason for this is perhaps that global competition forced the west to seek new markets in order to gain comparative advantage to the rest of the world or to sustain growth.


Since these days the rest of the world is able to produce the same goods and services cheaper (or at least at the same price) the last bastion of western business’ comparative advantage is information or in other words, the above mentioned knowledge based assets.


This is when the inherited flaw of the information based business model comes into play. It is based on the vehicle we call Internet in order to function. A medium which while serves both the conventional multinational enterprises in their quest for information vital for global competition and e-MNEs to conduct business, it also allows the free flow of information for everyone (who is connected) on the planet.

The open source movement exploits the very nature of the Internet, information is shared with the rest of the world instantaneously. One could also point out that P2P music and movie piracy is also one of the side effects of the same issue.

It is easy to see why some information based enterprises are so hell-bent to protect their assets and try to force some sort of regulation on the very thing that that they exploit every day, the free flow of information.

What will be the next step of evolution of the western business world to stay competitive when the rest of the world catches up knowledge wise due to this free flow of information? What will be the new model?

I think the open source issue is already abating a bit. In the end, if everything were open source, the entire sector would crumble on itself. If all guys working on Mozilla didn't have day jobs, we'd never have seen it developed in the first place. They'd have been too busy working at Starbucks to pay rent.

The rabid open source advocates are like e-hippies. It won't last.

From a busines perspective, Open Source isn't attractive without SUPPORT.

We use a number of products that rely on open STANDARDS, but open SOURCE isn't a concern of ours.

Similarly, most open source products for the desktop still aren't ready for primetime. Check back in a few years. There are, however, countless tools for engineers where the open source product is BETTER than the commercial alternative, but, the impact on business for security analysts using Nessus isn't exactly making Cisco go broke.

Google has a deal with the Mozilla organization. Without the funding of Google, Mozilla would never be able to continue producing a browser like Firefox with the budget they were on before Google got involved. A corporation like Red Hat needs to support open-source software for it to be used in a commercial environment; no company would risk putting their assets and their business on the line without having someone to blame. Open-source software is free, and is generally do-it-yourself technology. You'll find a lot of teens and tweens and college students using it for the "hacker" appeal.

Companies like Red Hat and Novell bring open-source technology to the masses. Without Red Hat, Linux would never gain as much popularity as it has right now. Don't get me wrong: I like having free software. But the elitist attitude of some developers and unwillingness to fix bugs urgently (think FreeBSD) annoy me very much. Open-source software isn't as "open" as you think; there are usually closed circles who make decisions for the overall direction of a project.

Another concern of many companies is the stability and longevity of a project. More often than not, an open-source project dies when the lead developers bail out. This happened to me when I was using some obscure XML libraries for a project. After the third version, the developers abandoned the project, and I had to rewrite the entire project to use another set of libraries.

Firefox is nice, and so is Apache and the Linux kernel, but without the funding and support by commercial organizations, open-source would be nowhere near where it is today. IBM and HP support Apache (check their contributions page), and the Linux kernel is supported by Novell and so forth.

As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Linux is actually more expensive to maintain than Windows. I'm almost convinced the developers of free software have purposely made setting up a Linux environment very difficult: job security. The requirements for hiring qualified people to administrate a Linux or BSD environment are very high, and so are their salaries. But Windows, on the other hand--any monkey can be trained to do common day-to-day tasks.

I use Gentoo and other free software on this server because I have the time and experience to run a Linux environment. But one of my employees have had a difficult time trying to do anything Linux, which is why I'm a Microsoft shop at work (Active Directory's ease of management, etc). But I do agree with one of the posters who say it's important to have an open standard, not so much open-source technology. Hell, a few open-source projects don't even have a standard. Look at BitTorrent for example. Every single damn implementation of BitTorrent has some quirks and differences.

Open-source, however, has changed the world. It's beautiful that you can find every component you need online (for free) to build a system to launch nuclear missiles. Open-source has forced Microsoft to compete. I love the fact that I don't have to worry about any licenses other than the GPL and its derivatives. But these open-source projects are only sustainable if they have a company vouching for its reliability, a company who will also be actively involved with bettering the software for general use.

I don't see Microsoft or open-source as necessarily better, but merely as competition. It's Microsoft versus every other organization (companies who support open-source) that competes with Microsoft (such as HP, Novell, Google, and so forth).

Open source uses the gift economy model, but fails to suffer the free rider problem due to the negligible incremental cost of replication.

I personally find it comical anyone would ever pay for software they didn't get the source to, particularly on a large scale, and that has nothing to do with free redistribution rights at all. I also think it's extremely funny that people are constantly trying to retrofit Industrial business models onto computer software and acting like it's an intrinsic property of software developement itself.

As long as there have been computers, there have been people giving away the tools to use them, just as long there as there have been gardnerers there has been an Old Farmer's Alamanac (or it's oral equivalent). The only reason anyone ever thought to make money off it had to do with redistribution costs that prohibited anyone from participating in the supply end of it. Thanks to networks, the redistribution costs of anything have so rapidly approached 0 that it seems any sort of classic publishing is doomed to extinction as people collectively realize that.

The current linux hype will likely eventually pass. But open source software goes far deeper than that, and is a fundamental tenet of the culture of computer science. Nearly every major new idea in computer science has first been made available in open source implementations, largely from academic institutions. The internet simply would not exist in its current form if people had tried to lock down TCP/IP into a sellable commodity. Hell, I'm still waiting for commercial systems to implement the transparent distributed computing model that was freely available in Sprite in like 1992 (I can see the ads for MS Distributed Blue Screen in 2015, trumpeting process migration technology from 1989). Can you imagine if CERN had tried to SELL http?



Linux is actually more expensive to maintain than Windows. I'm almost convinced the developers of free software have purposely made setting up a Linux environment very difficult: job security.

That's funny, I've always thought the exact same, but about the Windows and Oracle and SAP and Track type systems. But that really has nothing to do with the source to them being available or redistributable, and more to do with the intended audience. Unix software authors tend to know and like Unix, and write tools that fit their view of utility, which is going to be at odds with people that refuse to learn about it. On the other hand, many closed systems are so intentionally obscure and non-sensical so that you are locked into expensive support contracts. The Oracle DBA phenomenon sort of speaks for itself there.

All of the consideration for abandoned open source software apply about ten times worse to closed software as well. When HP bought Compaq who bought Digital, we had absolutely no choice but to start on a painful, moronic series of required ports and upgrades in which we have lost millions of dollars and have in many cases been left with systems less functional than what we were upgrading from. Had our primary operating platform been FreeBSD instead of Digital Tru64 (the people that named Ultrix hadn't been buried deep enough), we could have simply migrated off their platform forever. What's funny is that Microsoft has gradually done this to its own customers over and over again with (and this is only a single example) pointless Office remixes that have no functional benefit over prior versions but used incompatible file formats. I personally never needed a spreadsheet program more advanced that the absolutely archaic Lotus123 dinosaur my parents purchased for their PC-XT in the dark ages, but the only possible way to run that now would be on an open-source emulator.

It seems disingenous to use something you got for free as an example of why you can't depend on an entire software culture when the same has been true of more companies than stars in the sky. I'm sure a lot of people were real happy with their Novell systems in the late 90s too :> My employer uses some FORTRAN libraries older than the half the posters here that are absolutely unavailable from any other vendor and if that company decides it's no longer in their interest to sell it, we're in a pretty pickle.

Hell, the "legacy" meme that's been going around since the 90s is a great example. Here you have commercial vendors trying to drill into management consciousness that any system older than about 5 years is dangerously unsupportable and needs to be totally replaced by a new, untested, system that will probably require man-years of time to get working as well as the current one. And by that time, it'll probably be "legacy" too.

On the other hand, many closed systems are so intentionally obscure and non-sensical so that you are locked into expensive support contracts.As opposed to open systems so obscure and non-sensical with NO support, because the people who wrote it eventually moved out of their parent's basement?

Oracle might cost an arm and a leg, and it might take some well-compensated DBAs to keep it running, but when mess hits the fan, there's a guy sitting at a phone at Oracle who is RESPONSIBLE for providing us support -- not a webpage with part-time developers, but a company waiting with an army of support. Expensive, but worth it.

For me, my little team webserver runs Apache on SUSE. For our enterprise, they're IIS on Windows.

The timing of this post is interesting. Cisco's firewall source code was stolen by some Swedish teenager (who's currently being held and questioned). I don't see how Cisco's executives should be so worried about their source code, seeing that there are open-source implementations of firewalls. If it's really worth the price difference, then the leak of the source code should not cost their customers their estimated "billions of dollars of damages."

I like Apache more than IIS, and that's because Apache is tested and has been around much longer. Microsoft's biggest bane is that they try to stuff all kinds of neat features with IIS and Internet Explorer (and often is the case that they'll deviate from the standard). Apache has several full-time developers funded largely by corporations and personal contributions.

I have to disagree with you, Max, for enterprise software. I think Apache software is definitely enterprise-quality. Look at Tomcat, for example. J2EE is what many companies are using, and I see a lot more Apache Tomcat/JBoss implementations than I do with IIS .NET, BEA WebLogic, Macromedia JRun, or IBM WebSphere in the enterprise (especially with banks and insurance companies). And there are people who provide support contracts for Apache and Tomcat, such as Covalent (http://www.covalent.com/) (many Apache developers work for this company). Apache has a few offices in the U.S, and they are widely sponsored by many corporations (notably IBM). They have a board and a very good development structure. (50% of Fortune 500 companies run Apache HTTP/Tomcat; 70% of Fortune 100 run Apache HTTP/Tomcat.)

The truth is that open-source projects that have suceeded have gradually transformed into commercial products: Red Hat, Linux kernel, Apache, Tomcat, and so forth. Google runs on hundreds of Red Hat systems. The Linux kernel group has its own funding from corporations who have benefited from open-source software. Firefox is getting sponsorship from Google (and it is widely speculated that there will be a GBrowser). When an open-source software has companies who vouch for its development, offer support contracts for it, then that's a sign of sucess.

But man, MySQL is fscking annoying. I would choose DB2 or Oracle (yes, I know 10-40k) or even Microsoft SQL Server any day over MySQL, for the fact that there are so many things it doesn't support (they didn't add Unicode support and subqueries until the last version).

I think you misunderstand me. I don't think that Apache isn't enterprise worthy. I'm only suggesting that it makes for a nice platform for my simple needs (PHP support, and easy implementation of a MySQL backend), where a Microsoft solution would be overkill. I'm not getting a SQL licence for my team's message board :)

That said, IIS *is* enterprise worthy as well, and it's what our enterprise uses. [And it's where I diverge from them...]

Hehe, Microsoft must be responding to antitrust sanctions. Never would I imagine that they release the source code to Windows or their other products under the auspices of the "Shared Source Initiative." Or they could just be responding to the growing pressures of open-source competition. Here's the link (http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/default.mspx).

As opposed to open systems so obscure and non-sensical with NO support, because the people who wrote it eventually moved out of their parent's basement?


There's a strawman worthy of NAG, should have thrown in some LOELZ F4GG0T for emphasis.

The vast majority of open systems are written at universities, research institutes, or companies. Yes, all of it will eventually go unsupported when the original authors move on, stop needing the tool, or simply don't have the time to continue working. That is fundamentally different from BogoCorp deciding it is no longer economically viable for it to support Ultimate Middleware 5000 exactly how?

Oh, I know a difference. The open source software is still out there for you or someone else to continue work on, instead of locked away in clearing house' vault of IP in hopes it can one day be sold off to IBM while you claw at the contract boilerplate that says "Sucks to be you!" in more verbose latin-ese.

Ironically, the only organizations safe from that have so much money flying around that they could have likely developed the damn thing in house cheaper. But then again, that's why I think it's so wrong that software source code isn't included with the purchase, even if the license stipulates you can't redistribute or disclose it.

I think the open source issue is already abating a bit. In the end, if everything were open source, the entire sector would crumble on itself. If all guys working on Mozilla didn't have day jobs, we'd never have seen it developed in the first place. They'd have been too busy working at Starbucks to pay rent.

The rabid open source advocates are like e-hippies. It won't last.Hey, what's so bad about being an e-hippy? :devil

Malse, I agree with you on certain points. You are right that if a corporation decides to drop support for a product, usually the company who has made a heavy investment in that technology is in for a lot of fun. But most of the time there's an escape route, in which the company EOLing the product gives adequate time for the change (such as Microsoft forcing customers to move from NT to 2003 Server) and open-sources the product (Sun Microsystems and Netscape do this, for example). If there are significant changes from version to version, they will keep the customer informed. They'll even sell that division off rather than kill it, which is the case 99.9% of the time.

A company supporting a software will give you advance notice that you're going to be screwed, but at least if you have a contract with them, they will help you into a less-screwed position (such as migration or upgrading). Open-source projects without support contracts don't have this sort of backing (however useless or helpful it is).

I'll concede, however, that companies can abuse this position by raising price of their products, change licensing agreements, and do all that fun jazz. I think we all remember the chaos that ensued after Microsoft's new licensing program too vividly, or when Red Hat decided it was time to make some real money by EOL-ing the Red Hat OS and selling the "Enterprise" edition. A friend of mines who works in IT for Homestore.com got burned pretty badly when they switched over to Peoplesoft. Peoplesoft decided to charge all sorts of migration fees. I don't even want to know how Oracle is raping them right now.

However, I agree, Malse, that the open-source arena is wonderful if a piece of software is going to rot in an IP vault. If it can't be sold, why wait for the software to become useless and rot? This is the best use of open-source technology. Products have literally been salvaged through this process. If someone decides to pickup the product and continue development, then open source has suceeded in its mission.

I would like to see more companies share their source. Not necessarily "open source" products, but allow customers to give input and see the source code.

Well, I didn't intend this discussion to go into the direction of "which is better open or closed source" really. That has been beaten to death more ways than the number of the stars on the night sky....

However Malse got my point:

The only reason anyone ever thought to make money off it had to do with redistribution costs that prohibited anyone from participating in the supply end of it. Thanks to networks, the redistribution costs of anything have so rapidly approached 0 that it seems any sort of classic publishing is doomed to extinction as people collectively realize that.

The current linux hype will likely eventually pass. But open source software goes far deeper than that, and is a fundamental tenet of the culture of computer science. Nearly every major new idea in computer science has first been made available in open source implementations, largely from academic institutions.


The fundamental question here that hasn't been answered is, how will the free flow of knowledge impact the advantage that the western business has over the rest of the world.

But open source software goes far deeper than that, and is a fundamental tenet of the culture of computer science. Nearly every major new idea in computer science has first been made available in open source implementations, largely from academic institutions.
I don't think that's really any different than any other commercial industry. Educational institutions have long been the backbone of companies' medical and scientific research. Where do you think the majority of their research funding comes from? It sure isn't Mozilla or Apache. It's the companies that take the ideas researched and develop them to the next level.

Companies take those good ideas, make them a reality, and then market them to normal people. That's capitalism.

To most of you posting on this thread, the open source issue seems somehow different. That's because you have the skills and knowhow to take the result of an open source software project and put it to real use. You will always be in the minority though.

The plans for mass produced vehicles are open source too, but you don't see me building a Corvette in my garage. The plans for every building in town are open source, but you don't see me out back building a copy of the Governor's mansion.

To the real world, open/closed source is meaningless. The application and marketing of a good idea is what makes the difference between it being Beta or VHS.




By the way, how many of us would be able to send an email to our parents today if they had to learn to use ELM or Pine to do it, versus using Outlook Express?

Where do you think the majority of their research funding comes from?

Federal grants, endowments, and non-specific donations from companies. Thanks for piping up with that corporate fellatio though. Have a smiley :> !


To the real world, open/closed source is meaningless. The application and marketing of a good idea is what makes the difference between it being Beta or VHS.

You realize Beta failed primarily because Sony kept BETA closed while Matsushita sold VHS to every Tom, Dick, and Xinghao manufacturer out here, resulting in a much larger market? And once again you are refering to things with real-world capital outlays that do not exist for purely information?


To most of you posting on this thread, the open source issue seems somehow different. That's because you have the skills and knowhow to take the result of an open source software project and put it to real use.

Anyone can work on software. You do not need a 4 billion dollar plant in New Jersey to make it. You do not need a 50-state distribution system and cargo freighters to take it overseas. You do not have to box it up and have Best Buy stock it 50 to a shelf. That's currently where most people's exposure to it is because it's the distribution system of the industrial world that existed in the early 1980s before it was possible to ship data anywhere, near instantly.

I don't build my own car because it takes tools I don't have, facilities I don't have, and parts only economical to work with if purchased or made in bulk. Nor do I have the team of people required to put it together in under a year. The same applies to a house, but there is a funny collolary there. There are projects like Habitat for Humanity that do, in fact, build "open source" houses for the poor. It speaks to history, when entire towns would get together for house-raisings for new families, communities coming together to create something they need. Sort of like communities of programmers getting together to make the tools they need, only now their ad-hoc little community can share that with a much larger community.

And oddly I know quite a few people with no programming experience at all that prefer Elm, a result of one those ad-hoc communities.

It just occured to me that the vitriol against open source isn't simply derogatory memes filtering around the watercooler culture. I think it takes us back to an earlier time in Western society, a more agrarian rural life dominated by local community and not capitalism, and some people see that as a fundamental threat. I'll have to think on that a while.

Interesting. This whole discussion is outside of my realm of expertise, but it raises an intriguing question. If we are to use the example of agrarian versus industrial society to frame this discussion, how, then, does the 'tragedy of the commons' apply to a non-physical (and arguably non-limited) shared resource? Industrialization eventually forced the capitulation of subsistance culture because the pastures and prairies were fenced, thus conveniently also providing a source of starving labor for the new factories. If a programmer has no cattle to graze, as it were, how will the virtual prairies be fenced?

Regards,
Nydia

Yes, all of it will eventually go unsupported when the original authors move on, stop needing the tool, or simply don't have the time to continue working. That is fundamentally different from BogoCorp deciding it is no longer economically viable for it to support Ultimate Middleware 5000 exactly how? At the moment, I can purchase a support contract for Ultimate Middleware 5000, but with the exception of a few high profile FOSS products, I don't have that luxury elsewhere.

Sure, Novel will sell me SUSE support, and I can buy RedHat support, and I can buy support for a few other platforms, and I can probably buy "real" MySQL support, but, the list tapers off fast.

It all goes back to why people PAY for Oracle and SQL instead of Postgre and MySQL.

Should be interesting to note that the next version of Netware is focused completely on offering Netware services through Linux (Novell just announced End-of-life plans for Netware 6.0). What's the current outlook for organizations using Netware, Palimax? I don't work so much in the frontline of IT, but rather as a programmer and engineer.

Click here (http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/demo/index.html) to see Novell's propaganda of their Netware-SUSE frankenstein. They claim to solve all the problems that Palimax stated about enterprise use of open-source software. Open-source does have a future, but it will be harder to see the distinction between "free" and "commercial." This Open Enterprise Server costs around $4,000. Those companies who offer "open-source" software are starting to use it more as catch-phrase than really understanding the true impact of what "open-source" is.

Novell's actions most likely represent the future of open source. It's about support and add-ons, not the original software.

At a large company, when a production service goes down and mgmt says "call the vendor and kill them, then get them on site NOW" you can't say "I'll post on a message board, we might get an answer in 3 hours."

As for Nydia, I had no idea wtf she said. HEh.

I work for the 4th largest printer in the world with roughly 2 billion in sales yearly..what do we use? WinXP-Server2003-lots of MS products.

If the shit hits the fan you need someones ass to chew out. No future for Open source products here. However I'll take what I can get my hands on around home.

Federal grants, endowments, and non-specific donations from companies. Thanks for piping up with that corporate fellatio though. Have a smiley :> !
The new student center or history building at a public school is probably mostly government funded, but not the research programs. I'm speaking from experience. I worked at the Georgia Tech Research Institute for awhile when I was in school. Except for DoD funded projects, which I never knew anything about other than that they were DoD projects (had to have clearance), everything was funded by companies like HP, Microsoft, and GE.

We got class credit working on projects "suggested" by the investors. Grad students worked on larger stuff, again funded and directed by investors. Even professors would work on research that ultimately benefited the R&D divisions of our benefactors. It would get them tenure a lot sooner than teaching well.

Here's a quote from the Tech page (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/external/iptest1.html) about the benefits of becoming an "industrial partner": "Invitation to provide innovative project ideas to our Student Design Class. Moving idea to implementation."

A friend of mine that went to MIT at the same time I went to Tech told me it works exactly the same way there too. I'm sure not every po-dunk community college has Sun coming in to fund their research, but I guarantee you that the majority of significant educational research work has been funded by corporate interests and will benefit them exclusively.

I know people who prefer to use EMACS piped into mail to write their email, but that's not really the point. They wouldn't have many people to send that email to if it weren't for closed source companies like AOL and Microsoft who pushed email to a mass audience. If it weren't for them, we'd probably still be using bang-path type email addresses!

Until Linus Torvalds shows up on my doorstep to build the latest Linux kernel for me, the Habitat for Humanity analogy doesn't really make sense.

Here's another example. Anyone with a screwdriver can easily build their own computer cheaper than they can buy a preassembled one, given a little bit of time. Yet, Michael Dell is one of the top 20 richest men in the world.

No future for Open source products here.

Good point - let me add a few things.

On the desktop, IMO, Windows will be king for a long time. It's just too easy. I mean, I know a bit of Linux/unix, and I still use Windows as my main machine. It's what I know.

That being said, things can change on the server side precisely because there isn't such a huge monopoly. The trend toward cheapest-Windows-support-people-possible AND Windows certifications means, IMO, it's not really gonna happen on the corporate desktop. However, unix people on the server side are more interested in this type of thing. LOTS of unix stuff runs on Linux without change. Server guys here are discovering that Clearcase, for instance, doesn't necessarily need Sun hardware like they thought it did. One mgmt discovers how cheap a cabinet full of 1u Dell boxes running Linux and serving as a test environment is, their eyes start to open.

I think THAT is where you're gonna see it start. Years from now, the desktop might catch up.

Linux has a future because lots of companies still run IBM zSeries mainframes or Solaris or SCO for whatever reason (e.g. Bank of America, DaimlerChrysler, et al). A lot of these companies have already heavily invested in their infrastructure, and switching over to a new operating system like Windows Server 2003 would be prohibitively expensive.

GNU/Linux has a very similar environment to Solaris and SCO, and it's not as big as a leap as it is to jump to Windows 2003.

It's hard to say that Linux is truly just a hobbyist kernel. It's being developed by thousands of companies and developers who still need a *NIX operating system.

A reminder: the original *nix implementation was AT&T's.

To tell the truth, I don't get the whole "linux will change the world" argument. Look, SOMEONE will make money off of it. If it's not though licenses, it'll be through support or something. You'll still need apps. I don't see engineering/manufacturing apps going open source. So you're still gonna have corporations selling licenses/support/apps/whatever to other corporations.

Mirdorr, a lot of engineering apps are written in house at labs and corporations. The fact is that some of these companies have bought SGI workstations that run IRIX or LINUX, and they need to find a way to save their investment. Our EDFA controller software is written for IRIX. We would have a hard time trying to port the drivers over to Windows. It would literally cost us 100k.

MATlab is available on *NIX platforms. So is Maple. Labview as well.

I work for a fiber optics company. We use IRIX and Solaris so much that it would be impossible for us to port everything to Windows.

Sure, but - no offense - so what? You are an exception. The vast majority of corporations and individuals too run off the shelf software (including engineering apps). So if you want to "change the world" you've got to change the off-the-shelf world.

I mean, Sun is great; not just great, but historic. But destroying Sun or watching HP-UX go down the tubes doesn't change that much. The unix world has always been somewhat fragmented.

Vast majority? How about 80% of the Fortune 500 companies that do engineering still rely on Solaris, IRX, or some sort of BSD/SCO? We're not going to throw $150 million to port all our apps to Windows.

The biggest application vendor for circuit-board design software is National Instrument's LabView. Their software is available for Linux, IRIX, Solaris, and BSD.

Dude. No one is suggesting you port to windows. Obviously, you never would.

I guess maybe I'm in a minority - I don't think moving existing *nix servers from one type of *nix to another is "changing the world."


How about 80% of the Fortune 500 companies

Good number, but I doubt it tells the real story. Fortune 500 companies are all big enough that the majority of people at the company would be non-engineering type people. So I'd bet a total-desktop count would reflect a reliance on Windoze.

I can see a market for desktop apps such as accounting, word processing, etc all under a Microsoft shop, but for companies with legacy and engineering apps, we can't just make the giant leap. SGI was one of the first to adopt 64-bit standards with IRIX.

Our manufacturing plant in Chengdu runs an in-house OS based on *NIX implementations.

I'm not dissing Microsoft. I think they've done some great things and not-so-great things. But it's not for everyone. Microsoft has made history for desktops and general file servers/email. I use Windows whenever I can because it's so damn easy to use. Hell, our entire accounting department uses Windows. And so does our marketing, with the occasional Mac.

Mirdorr, you were talking about engineering apps. Don't try to change it now by saying desktop apps. Desktop apps are a completely different issue.

Dude. I used engineering apps as an example; not only that, but as an example on the server side.

I did not say desktop apps. I said desktop count. THe total user machines running in a company.

Interesting. This whole discussion is outside of my realm of expertise, but it raises an intriguing question. If we are to use the example of agrarian versus industrial society to frame this discussion, how, then, does the 'tragedy of the commons' apply to a non-physical (and arguably non-limited) shared resource? Industrialization eventually forced the capitulation of subsistance culture because the pastures and prairies were fenced, thus conveniently also providing a source of starving labor for the new factories. If a programmer has no cattle to graze, as it were, how will the virtual prairies be fenced?

Regards,
Nydia

Eh, that parallel is pure genius really.

One might be tempted to say that intellectual property (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property) rights are the fences, however enforcement of IP rights do not seem to be as straight forward as of private property...

I'm way too tired to comment further on this intelligently this evening (indeed, I'm not sure I did the first time ;) ), but, considering the current debate going on in here about the 'feasibility' of using open source software on a large scale, thought this article from the UK might be of interest (gogo SuicideGirls linked articles):

http://www.firstnews.com.ua/en/techno/techno.html?id=47332

The notion in the public sector to go open source is partly about breaking dependency and not just about cost really.

I can see a point in backing local business by buying linux support from them rather than giving the same cash to a MNE (Microsoft in this case).

Good number, but I doubt it tells the real story. Fortune 500 companies are all big enough that the majority of people at the company would be non-engineering type people. So I'd bet a total-desktop count would reflect a reliance on Windoze

I work for a large company that runs a mixed environment- and we are all on Windows XP desktops. However, our R&D and Production databases all run on Sun hardware. Hell, I think we might even have a Cray sitting down the hall. Without provoking an argument about the relative reliability of the systems, I'd bet that we're not in the minority in this.

Kinda funny:

http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2005-05-18/news/feature.html?src=default_rss

If you don't want to read the whole article, it is about a proposed regulation in the US, that would require foreign students at US universities to apply for export licenses in order to use certain technologies in class rooms.

What's the next step? Might be logical to simply forbid Iranian (or insert any other not-so-friendly nation) students from applying to nuclear engineering courses or whatever if you follow this line of thought.