That's an interesting perspecive - we'll see how it plays out.

Best Regards -Foredecker

Sure - if the first order criteria is going to a private cloud from a public cloud. But cost, reliability, features, operations (and likely others) will all be factors here. All the public cloud providers will compete with Canonical by saying

"Dont go private! We can provid you with cloud services more effecitcly, just as securetly, at better scale, and for less costs than you can do it yourselves!".

They may not always be right - but that is how they will complete.

Moreover, Microsoft will complete directly with Canonical here. Going head to head with Microsoft in an established market is often (not always) very difficult to do profitably. Weve made it very clear that we are going for the brass ring with both cloud services and cloud products.

Im not at all suggesting they will fail - bit it will be a tough slog for them - they will continue to set fire to money the whole road to profitability (if they ever get there). Its intersting that Canonical chose this space to compete profitably. The ROI seems very low here...

-Foredecker

Lots of people like to claim that "Free is a business model". In one sense I agree: Giving away some things for free so you can make money other ways can work. But free by itself is not a business model.

This is what Canonical has decided. After 5 years of trying to be successful in giving a way a free client operating system, they have decided to stop lighting money on fire and do something to make a profit.

I love this quote from the article:

"For the first five years of the companys life, it wasnt set up to make money," Asay said. "The company was set up to make a fantastic Linux distribution and other tools around it and get it out there and get people using it. That was the focus."

Thats now changing at Canonical as the emphasis is now shifting to generating revenues.

"Weve achieved a significant amount of traction within an important constituency -- that is the developers and system administrators of the world," Asay said. "As we build tools that appeal to them I think they will pay us money."

TThe cynic in me - or as some would likely claim, the Microsoftie in me - sees that their path for the last five years has been a failure. They produced a client OS that is considered one of the best Linux client distributions. But beyond that - no success.

I suggest they will not be very successful here: For cloud computing - the value is not in the operating system itself, but in the cloud systems ability to scale economically: keeping operational costs super low.

It will be difficult for them to compete with Microsoft. We really do know how to run massive data centers at scale. More over, we eat our own dogfood and have a world class team of developers building our cloud products. Just how is canonical going to get this experience? They are very unlikely to go build a big data center.

They also will be competing with Google, IBM and Amazon (among others). These guys dont sell software with which to build a could, but they sell cloud services.

My predictions have nothing to do with the goodness of Linux - it is a very good OS and the people that build it are every bit as good as people at Microsoft, Google, Sun, Oracle and others. The challenges Canonical faces are operational, and business related.

Larry is the CEO of a public company. Save as Eric Schmidt, Steve Ballmer and Samuel J. Palmisano.

Complaining that all these guys think about is money, money, money and NOTHING else is like complaining that all a tiger things about is meat.

I appreciate open source - really I do. (but I dont like RMS and his ilk). But really, just stop complaining that companies are evil or bad becuase they are working to make a profit. Thats the entire purpose of corporations. That motive will always win out.

Companies can do things that are good. The big ones employ lots of people: providing jobs is a good thing. Many companies pay tons of taxes. Some companies give away large amounts of Money to charity. Did you know that Microsoft matches every single dollar up to $12K that employees give? Microsoft has given away well over a billion dollars this way.

So stop, just stop complaining that making a profit is evil. I dont know how you make a living, but odds are its from a company, a person, or even your own self making a profit.

FOSS is awesome, but its simply a business model - its not a righteous cause or the answer to some evil or injustice. Its just not. FOSS proponents are using one of the most powerful capitalistic tools - giving stuff away for free to sell services. Its a business: its a bit different than Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Google.

Most open source is developed by people working on it full time. They must be paid. That money must come from somewhere - it just doesnt come from selling software as a product.

Regarding the open source code Oracle now owns after buying the failed Sun: Its Oracles - they can legally and morally do what every they want with it. You have zero room to complain...

Why are you complaining about this? Its open source right? Cant you just get the code, compile it and ship it? Isnt that was one of the big benefits of open source? Nobody can keep it from you - you can just fix any-ole bug, change it, add value to it, and ship it your self... right? What are you waiting for?

This question is ask as if Java is somehow imporant in and of itself. It isnt. Neither is perl, or PHP, Phython or gasp - C++ or even C. Throw C#, F# and VB into that group as well.

These are tools. We (as in devleopers) should simply use the right tool for the job. If thats Java - then okey-dokey. If its C#, then groovy, if its C++ then thats ok to. Hey, I still use assembly language for a few things.

Do real engineering work folks! Pick the right tools for the job based on the business and technical requirements.

-Foredecker

Right! I had momentarily forgotten. That just leaves AMD.

Yes - it takes about two years (or more) to go from a white board to first silicon. Until I worked at Microsoft, I worked at hardware and silicon companies. But remember, the competition to Intel, AMD and NVIDIA will be other silicon companies - not software companies. The new compitetion will have the same constraints. This is also a small industry - its very difficult to do someting both major and new in secret. When I was at AMD, we knew about Transmeta's plans when they were still in stealth mode. It wasn't because of anything nefarious - the community is small and leaky. -Foredecker

The intial Larrabee product was canceled. Intel had to re-trench on the graphics plans. Again. They are a smart company, but they have struggled to get off the ground in the graphics area. Im assuming they will someday be successful. But today isnt that day.

-Foredecker

That is what Transmeta thought. Intel proved more agile than they predicted. AMD, Intel and NVIDIA can move faster than people think. i suggest that it is their market to loose, not others to win. -Foredecker

You can always spot a sensationalist post when part of it predicts or asks who will go out of business. Or what thing will disappear.

For example, in his post, ScuttleMonkey asks this:

...Or, will we have a newcomer that usurps the throne and puts everyone else out of business?

NNote, the post is a good one - Im not being critical. But change in the tech industry rarely result in big companies going out of business - if they do, it takes a long time. I think sun is the canonical example here. It took a long time for them to die - even after many, many missteps. Sun faded away not because of competition or some gaming changing technology, but simply because they made bad (or some would say awful) decisions. Same for Transmeta.

People have been predicting the death of this or that forever. As you might imaging, my favorite one is predicting Microsofts death. Thats being going on for a long, long time. The last I checked, we are still quite healthy.

Personally, I dont see Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA ding any time soon. Note, AMD came close this last year, but they have had several near death experiences over the years. (I worked there for several years...).

Intel, AMD and NVIDIA fundamental business is turning sand into money. This was a famous quote by Jerry Sanders the found of AMD. Im paraphrasing, but it was long the idea at AMD that it didnt matter what came out of the fabs as long as the fabs were busy. Even though AMD and NVIDIA no longer own fabs, this is still their business model (more or less).

I think its interesting how a couple of posters have talked about ARM - remember, AMD and NVIDIA can jump on the ARM bandwagon at any time. Intel already is an ARM licensee. Like AMD, they are in the business of turning sand into money - they can and will change their manufacturing mix to maintain profitability.

I also dont see the GPU going away either. GPUs are freakishly good at what they do. By good - I mean better than anything else. Intel flubbed it badly with Larabee. A general purpose core simply isnt going to do what very carefully designed silicon can do. This has been proven time and time again.

Domain specific silicon will always be cheaper, better performing and more power efficient in most areas than a general purpose gizmo. Note, this doesnt mean I dislike general purpose gizmos (like processors) - I believe that the best system designs have a mix of both - suited to the purpose at hand.

-Foredecker

Of course - but they are usually not "pinned out" on comerical devices. I've had a pile of these gizmos and only one had a RS232 port.

There is actualy an old protocol (Cannot find the RFC) for ad hoc IP address assgiment. There is also universal plug and play. Both would work just fine here. Two devices could also simply communite with a simple protocol righ ton top of the MAC layer. Like many other things, people were doing this stuff 15 years ago.

Not much really - it only takes a very minimal stack to do simple things like TFTP or Telnet. Back in the mid 90's We used do to do this on '186 class stems in a few k of code. Its also easy to do a very simple low level UDP based thing - that that would be a bit proprietary.

I agree that serial ports are useful. What I'm suggesting is that the best alternative is Ethernet, not USB.