Red Hat CEO: Open Source Goes Mainstream In 2014 65
ashshy (40594) writes Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst likes to post "state of the union" addresses at the end of every year. Last December, he said that open source innovation is going mainstream in 2014. In an interview with The Motley Fool, Whitehurst matches up his expectations against mid-year progress. Spoiler alert: It's mostly good news.
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Burma Shave?
heh, this isn't good news (Score:2)
I thought it was already mainstream. So this news means, it isn't.
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The natural problem is that open source has to constantly pose as emerging useful technology to match up against the marketing that closed source software uses. It's just framing yourself as a perpetual underdog.
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Your post makes me feel like this is a question for psychologists/sociologists. In-group knowledge and recruitment for esoteric social causes kinda thing. The simple pop-psych answer is that people like to see others agree with them.
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The man on the street doesn't care about open or closed source for two reasons:
1. He can't read code. Having the source code available is not really very important to him.
2. He doesn't understand the implications that copyright and patents have on software. If he knows anything about that matter at all, then that some companies sue the living crap out of people for copying software.
I wouldn't be too surprised if the average person regarded the CSS vs OSS debate to be about as important as the bickering betw
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The man on the street doesn't care about open or closed source for two reasons:
1. He can't read code. Having the source code available is not really very important to him.
2. He doesn't understand the implications that copyright and patents have on software. If he knows anything about that matter at all, then that some companies sue the living crap out of people for copying software.
I wouldn't be too surprised if the average person regarded the CSS vs OSS debate to be about as important as the bickering between two rivaling football teams or the discussion about whether having a dem or rep as prez is better.
The man on the street only knows open source as in "free beer". THAT, however, he can get excited about.
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But only since the makers of commercial software started to lock their products down and crack down on copying. The general sentiment before XP came along with mandatory registration was that Windows is free, only companies have to pay for it. And people went NUTS when they heard the price ("200 bucks? What for?").
MS succeeded in making people think that PCs "have to" come with Windows. Of course people started to expect Windows to be part of "the box".
So I guess we have to thank MS and the BSA for makin
Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
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Where. I don't see it.
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The year of Linux on the desktop has arrived!
No, no... It's projected to arrive tomorrow..
To quote an old adage... Tomorrow never comes.
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Informative)
The year of Linux on the desktop has arrived!
I know this was meant to be sarcastic, but it may be more true that you think.
I have been an avid Linux supporter for use on servers for a long time, however, I refused to use it as a desktop OS for a couple of reasons:
* There was no distro that I didn't have to open a shell for SOME reason -- to get something to work. I do systems administration for a living. I don't want to have to fucking tweak my box when I get home.
* It was butt ugly. That may seem like a poor reason to not use an OS, but it is my opinion and I am entitled to it. I refuse to use Windows 8.x primarily for this reason -- it is fucking hideous. Monochrome? Really Microsoft?
Both of those issues have now been addressed, and I am now completely MS free. I will be converting my parents, and my brother, and I will be spreading the word to my friends that aren't technically inclined.
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Re:Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)
If I had to open a shell for *any* reason -- even something trivially stupid, then I would immediately give up. If you had said 2012 or 2013, maybe. The last time I tried was in 2011 -- but 2004 -- LMAO! Linux distributions were most certainly NOT "load and go" back in 2004.
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I'm primarily an OSX user. I still have to open shell pretty regularly to fix things. In the dozen years I've been on OSX I doubt there has been a week I haven't had to be in shell for some reason. That's UNIX not just Linux.
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I use OSX at work, and I haven't *HAD* to open a shell for anything when it comes to day to day use. There are some things I find quicker to fix / install from the shell, but that is my choice -- I am not forced to. I have found the same to be true with Linux Mint.
If you look at my post history, up until recently I was a die-hard Windows fan when it came to my desktop OS. Even OSX is missing little things that Windows 7 has when it comes to window management. For example, Aero peek on the superbar. I didn't
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I like Windows 8. First version of Windows since 2000 that I've genuinely been enthusiastic about. Of course I use it on the right hardware not Windows 7 hardware. Anyway I wouldn't worry about Mint going to a Gnome 3 style interface. Mint came out of the backlash against that interface they may well be one of the last distributions to switch.
As for Linux on the desktop, yeah it is very usable. I think the lack of commercial desktop distributions has hurt quite a bit. Ubuntu plays the role that Debian
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Linux Mint 17 - Cinnamon with the non-free tools. Yea, it isn't completely F/OSS, but I am not a fanatic like some people.
It is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: "Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019."
I have installed it on HP desktops, and laptops (various models), and Dell desktops and laptops (various models), and everything has worked out of the box. Multi-monitor support rivals Win7 IMHO (this was one of my big beefs a few years ago). Now I could probably have just g
Also, people will start eating potatoes (Score:2)
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IBM, Oracle, Dell, Samsung, HTC, Motorola and pretty much every other big name in the industry
Plus, hell froze over in 2009 when Microsoft started contributing code to the Linux kernel.
2014 is the year of the Linux Desktop! (Score:4, Interesting)
Just like 2013,...,1995 (when I first installed RedHat 2 from a CD)
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Distinction - 2014 is the year of the Linux Post-Desktop Era...
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Knowing my luck it would be Red River...
2014 -- Year of Linux on the Desktop! (Score:1)
You read it here first!
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You read it here first!
Last December,
No, no I didn't (ok, actually, yes I did. But I could've heard it eight months ago)
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You read it here first!
Last December,
No, no I didn't (ok, actually, yes I did. But I could've heard it eight months ago)
More like 180 months ago.
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What's a desktop?
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The problem is, the "can't someone else do it" attitude falls short when the answer is "you have what you need to improve it"...
If something bothers you about OSS, go ahead and change it. At least that's what I do. If it doesn't bother me enough to change it, I guess enduring it can't be that bad.
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And I could grow my own food, too...
Most people don't have the skills to change OSS code. I enjoy photography and, like many photographers, use Photoshop. For most of the photographers I know, just using Photoshop is enough of a technical challenge - suggesting they make code changes to the Gimp to make it do what they need would be like telling them to design and build a car from scratch rather than buy one from Ford.
I am a programmer, and I daresay if I really, really wanted to I could contribute, but to
Mainstream ain't what it used to be (Score:2)
Some commenters say that Linux and Open Source have been mainstream tools for a while. That's true -- in the tech world. Whitehurst mentions this, then goes on to explain that more traditional industries are accepting FOSS now. Things like railroads and power utilities, where open source remained a scary, newfangled, and unproven security hole as recently as last year.
RTFA, please.
RedHat did a lot with RH7 (Score:5, Informative)
I would say that RedHat did a lot with RHEL 7, which, though not without issues, has added a lot of functionality:
1: systemd is a decent boot mechanism. On a SSD-based machine, RHEL 7 will boot to a graphical login screen in five seconds, due to firing off daemons asynchronously.
2: firewallD is of some benefit, but it adds the concept of zones, similar to how Windows works, which does help integrate Linux machines in a MS environment (where one has public, private, and domain networks.)
3: Docker and containers are going to be a big thing going forward. This is similar to BSD jails, Solaris containers, or AIX WPARs, and provide decent package isolation without the need for a hypervisor.
4: It looks like with the latest version of the Linux kernel released this week, that btrfs is stable enough for prime time. RHEL7 allows for a btrfs install. It may not have the bells and whistles of ZFS, but it is a step in the right direction, and files can be checked (and possibly repaired) for bit rot with a find and a btrfs scrub.
5: The ability to use SSD as a "landing zone" for writes, then move those to a lower tier of disk.
None of these features are revolutionary... but they do bring RedHat and its downstreams (CentOS) on par with AIX, Windows, and Solaris for enterprise level features.
So, I can see that RedHat's future looks rosy, especially when it comes to virtualization and having a competitor in the enterprise to VMWare. VMWare still is top dog, but competition is always good.
Richdales Laws (Score:2)
"Given a sufficient amount of time all software either becomes free open source software or goes extinct."
We're already post-FOSS (Score:2, Interesting)
FOSS' heyday was in the nineties. GNU modelled its documentation on BSD, which in turn modeled its documentation on commercial UNIX. Through the nineties developers and those that maintained distributions honored this, continuing to write their documentation like the UNIX world did, and it was easy (relatively speaking) to make the software do everything that it could do and
Re:We're already post-FOSS (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd rather say that we have arrived at the point where software is complicated enough that you will have to pay for a competent (!) admin if you want to get more than the basics done. The difference between CSS and OSS is in that respect that it's way easier to pose as a halfway credible so-so admin in a CSS world with its wizards and gadgets, its online help and example config files.
Competent OSS admins are rather rare. Because learning almost invariably means spending money and not just time.
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So they've succeeded - and matched Microsoft's incompetence. Isn't that what it takes to go mainstream?
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As someone who was using Linux since 1995. No it isn't moreso. Things are much much better then times when standard Linux documentation talked about recompiling the kernel to load up particular features or getting X to run at all was a challenge. Yes configuration is annoying but nowhere near what it was then.
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It was broadband that killed that. The software (those distros, anyway) was free anyway unless you wanted support. As soon as it was easier and cheaper to download at home, that's what people did.
Umm... Printers? (Score:3)
I know, I'm stuck in the old days where I like to print boarding passes, hotel receipts, parking passes, or scan and keep digital copies of my documents.
However, I recently took a (relatively) old computer (from 2012) and put Debian on it. Things more or less worked. Occasionally, I had to go down to the shell, but nothing that was too infuriating or difficult. Then one day I decided I wanted to (gasp!) use my wireless Epson printer with my Debian OS. It was like pulling my teeth out without anesthesia. CUPS is a piece of crap that is determined to waste people's time. I spent almost an entire day trying to follow various manuals, start print servers, open the configuration page in my browser, install GUI tools, and in general wonder why I signed up for this.
After giving up for the day, I went to bed, woke up the next morning, installed Windows 8 (I get it for free) on a separate partition, booted in, and in 5 minutes I printed out some tax forms and scanned a copy of my W2 for my records (this all took a little over an hour since I started the OS installation - even though I wasn't waiting at my desk constantly).
I guess when you can have your secretary print everything for you, then easy printing isn't really required before considering yourself going mainstream. I started out using my Windows just for printing, then slowly got tired of switching constantly. I started to do more and more in Windows (Quicken, Scrivener) even when there were Linux alternatives. Now I hardly boot into Linux.
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Printing works fine if you use a printer with a standard print language like PCL, Postscript, LPDS... Really that's sort of a BS issue. Don't buy Linux incompatible hardware to run Linux.