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

From: Diogenes (diogenes_at_Laertius.gr)
Date: 12/06/03 

Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2003 02:56:42 GMT

Dr. Abraham Weiss PhD wrote:
> 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.

 You're an honest man. I can tell. 

-- 
Diogenes Laertius