My experiences trying to leverage the power of Linux in the enterprise

From: Dr. Abraham Weiss PhD (dj28_at_myway.com)
Date: 12/06/03 

Date: 5 Dec 2003 19:01:09 -0800

I used to work as a consultant for a Fortune 500 company (more than
10,000 employees). As an expert in the field of IT consulting, I think
I can shed a little light on the current climate of the open source
community, and Linux in particular. The main reason that open source
software, and Linux in particular, is failing is due to the underlying
immaturity of the technology and the perception of the viral GNU
license.

I know that the above statements are strong, but I have hard facts to
back it up with. At the Fortune 500 company that I worked for, we
wanted to leverage the power of Linux and associated open source
technologies to benefit our server pool. The perception that Linux is
"free" was too much to ignore. I recommended to the company that we
use the newest version of Linux, version 9.0. My expectations were
high that it would outperform our current solution at the time,
Windows2000, which was doing an absolutely superb job (and still is!)
serving as web, DNS, and FTP servers.

I felt that I was up to the job to convert the entire server pool to
the Linux technology. I had several years experience programming VB,
C#, ASP, and .NET Framework at the kernel level. I didn't use C,
because contrary to popular belief, ASP and VB can go just as low
level as C can, and the latest .NET VB compiler produces code that is
more portable and faster than C. I took it upon myself to configure
and compile all of the necessary shareware versions of software that
we needed, including sendmail, apache, and BIND. I even used the
latest version of gcc (3.1) to increase the execution time of the
binaries. After a long chain of events, the results of the system were
less than impressive..

The first bombshell to hit my project was that my client found out
from another consultant that the GNU community has close ties to
former communist leaders. Furthermore, he found out that the 'x' in
Linux was a tribute to the former Communist philosopher, Karl Marx,
whose name also ends in 'x'. The next bombshell to hit my project was
the absolutely horrible performance. I knew from the beginning that
Linux wasn't ready for the desktop, but I had always been told by my
colleagues that it was better suited for a "server". As soon as I
replaced all of the Windows2000 servers with Linux servers, the Linux
servers immediately went into swap. Furthermore, almost all of the
machines were quad-processor x86 servers. We had no idea that Linux
had such awful SMP support. After less than 1 day in service, I was
constantly having to restart servers, because for some reason, many of
the servers were experiencing kernel panics caused by mod_perl
crashing apache! The hardship did not end there! Apparently, the
version of BIND installed on the server pool was remotely exploitable.
Soon after we found that out, a new worm was remotely infecting all of
our servers! We were not expecting this, because our IIS servers
running
on Windows2000 had never experienced a worm attack. Microsoft has
always provided us with patches in the unlikely event that an exploit
was found. It took us hundreds of man-hours just to disinfect our
Linux servers! After just 48 hours of operating Linux servers in our
server pool, we had exhausted our budget for the entire year! It was
costing us approximately 75% more to run Linux than Windows2000.

Needless to say, I will not be recommending Linux to any of my Fortune
500 clients. In the beginning, we thought that since Linux was such
"old" technology, it would be more mature than anything on the market.
We also found out the hard way that rag-tag volunteer efforts
responsible for Apache and BIND simply are not able to compete with
the professional operations of Microsoft. I guess the old saying is
true; "You get what you pay for!" Needless to say, I will be using
Microsoft's "shared license" solution for my enterprise clients,
rather than the communist GNU license.

As it stands now, I do believe Linux has some practical uses. I think
it will be useful in a University setting for first year computer
science students to compile their "Hello World!" programs on (provided
that gcc won't kernel panic the machine). Simply put, Linux just
doesn't handle the rigors of a real-world work environment.

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