Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 19:12:26 -0800
From: Mark Kuharich <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: mark@xxxxxxxxxx
Organization: MRK International, L.P.
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To: theSoftwareView@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: thesoftwareview: Linux, open sorcery (preview)
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Gentle readers, here's a preview of the Linux treatise I'm working on
...
Please feel free to forward this newsletter to as many friends as
possible. I have a personal goal of reaching one million readers. I
can achieve it with your help.
"the Software View": Linux, open sorcery. (Part I)
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Now, dear readers, on with this week's episode of "the Software View"!
Linux is the fastest growing software operating environment in the
world, is loved by pony-tailed software developers world-wide, is free,
and best of all, it's open-source. No longer the rarefied operating
environment of Unix developers, it is making its way onto numerous
corporate networks. Many aspiring developers and Unix systems
administrators cut their teeth on Linux, taking advantage of bundled
software development tools, numerous well-written books, and fully
open-source software code. It's fast becoming the darling of networking
vendors and enterprise users alike, with a very devoted and
knowledgeable following. Tux, the Linux penguin mascot, has finally
waddled off its isolated iceberg into the waters of enterprise network
operating environment territory.
Although warmly embraced by its devotees, Linux has often gotten the
cold shoulder from the proprietary Microsoft Windows establishment. The
efforts of loyalists to get the word out about this versatile, flexible
- and undeniably economical - operating environment were once considered
a Linux lovefest thrown by fringe-element code junkies who occasionally
peered up from their workstations to flip through the latest issue of
"Pocket Protector Monthly". As this stereotype persisted, it pushed
Linux to the bottom of the pile when it came to mindshare among network
managers and information technology professionals who were becoming more
aware of the link between enterprise computing resources and business
issues.
Ann Harrison writes, "The open-source Unix look-alike was hatched a mere
eight years ago by an obscure, self-effacing twenty-one years old,
native of Finland, University of Helsinki graduate student named Linus
Torvalds. The thought that anything free could eventually have
commercial value might make skeptics smirk. We're so invested in the
party lines of behemoths like Microsoft, that many of us disregard
Linux, at least where serious work is concerned.
EYES WIDE OPEN
So many analogies and metaphors have been used to explain the success of
Linux. The following quote is attributed to Mohandas (or Mahatma)
Ghandi.
"First, they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win."
This Unix clone, a community product of software engineers, based upon
the work of Torvalds, has escaped its cage. Once prophesied by pundits
to be one more in the tragic line of superior technologies doomed to an
untimely demise (like AmigaDOS, the Next computer workstation line, and
IBM's OS/2), Linux has instead confounded its critics by establishing a
foothold on enterprise networks. While Linux was initially smuggled in
through the back door by rebellious engineers, it's now rapidly gaining
acceptance as an enterprise operating environment. According to DataPro
Information Services (Delran, New Jersey), the number of companies using
Linux grew by twenty-seven percent from 1996 to 1997. More and more
professionals plan on increasing the presence of Linux in their
enterprises.
WHY ASK WHY
Why? Because articles appeared in high-technology publications,
illuminating the attributes of Linux. It outperforms all other
operating environments, including Microsoft's Windows, when ranked by
customers according to interoperability, cost of ownership, price, and
availability. Indeed, DataPro's customer satisfaction poll of eight
hundred twenty-nine information systems managers in large organizations
showed Linux trouncing the likes of Open Server, UnixWare, AIX, NetWare,
and, yes, Windows.
Why do professionals choose Linux for their enterprises? Because Linux
is freeware and easily available on the Internet; it's easy to manage
and configure; it's a legendary stable operating environment; and it is
supported by a large user community; its excellent performance, it's
easy to work with, it runs on legacy computer hardware, and because its
source code is easily available. One of the reasons Linux has become so
popular is that no single vendor controls it.
THE LURE OF LINUX
Part of Linux's appeal is that you can make of it what you will. Savvy
users can download distributions of Linux from the Internet and tweak
them to their liking. They can also download modules and patches as
they become available and adjust them to their environment's needs.
Because the software source code is freely available, Linux has provided
flexibility for early adopters and others who know what they want in an
operating system. This is a libertarian approach to assembling a
workable operating system, as opposed to Microsoft, which commands by
fiat what your operating system will consist of and look like. Other
characteristics of the Linux operating system are prompting mainstream
enterprise users to take a closer look. For one thing, the price is
right - Linux is free.
Linux runs mission-critical software applications. In the corporate
world, the more popular applications include Web servers, databases,
business-process software, e-mail, and firewall services. Linux's
prevalence in science and academia is no surprise. But the operating
environment is also trusted on Internet service providers' servers. It
is embedded in firmware for industrial process control applications. It
is also a popular choice for corporate network services such as FTP and
proxy servers. Its use for DNS and DHCP is growing fast, and advances
in Linux's file-and-print support services have enabled moves into that
camp as well. With a multiport modem or serial card, Linux makes an
efficient and reliable PPP gateway for dial-up users. There isn't much
Linux can't do.
A Linux box is a quick, cheap way to get a company onto the Internet.
Products from both Caldera and Red Hat Software are ready to use barely
an hour after you open the box. If your needs are basic, just drop your
FTP and HTML content into the directories the installation process
creates for you, and you're ready for business.
SECURITY IN AN INSECURE WORLD
Linux, with built-in firewalls, proxies, and extensive logging, is more
secure than most operating systems' standard configurations. Linux
developers take security seriously and tend to issue fixes to security
problems within days of a report.
The areas in which Linux excels are performance and breadth of
services. For example, Linux enabled me to bring some older legacy
systems back into service. In a lab test, I loaded Caldera and Red Hat
onto several machines, but I let Red Hat stay on a 133-MHz Dell Pentium
system that had been idle for more than a year. Performance was very
good, and it made a sidelined system (this system could never have run
today's resource-hungry Microsoft Windows) useful again. Even if your
system is old, Linux is forgiving.
As for hardware, there isn't much you need to run Linux. Whatever
system you've got lying around will likely suffice. Part of the beauty
of Linux is its small footprint compared with other operating systems.
You can run it on that old 80386 you've got stashed in the back room, or
on the latest high-end computer microprocessor.
Linux has proved to scale remarkably well. The kernel is tiny (it still
fits on a single 3 1/2-inch floppy disk), the most widely used device
drivers have been streamlined from years of tuning by top-notch software
developers, and the network services conform to the latest standards,
often outperforming their bloated commercial counterparts.
Let's face it: new networking standards are set on Unix, and Linux is
closer to that line than Microsoft's Windows. For example, networking
standards tend to materialize as software first in Berkeley System
Distribution (BSD) Unix, which, like Linux, is primarily supported by a
network of independent software developers. New BSD networking code is
rapidly ported to Linux. But even proprietary standards such as SMB,
NFS and IPX, which were invented by commercial developers, are
painstakingly reverse-engineered and brought to Linux. In my tests, I
achieved perfectly acceptable performance running SMB, NFS, Web, e-mail,
domain naming, DHCP, and dial-up services on the aforementioned Pentium
133-MHz with 64 Mb of RAM. Linux's services have always performed
adequately.
APACHE ON A WARPATH
In the all-important area of Web services, Linux does itself proud. The
open-source Apache Web server is the number one server on the Internet,
according to a Web server survey conducted by Netcraft, a consulting
firm in Bath, England. Apache is fast, easy to set up, and does
everything you need a Web server to do. And it's still free.
Today's Linux supports multi-processor servers, and you can network it
with existing Windows, NetWare, and Macintosh workstations as both a
client and a server. Perhaps you haven't seen the new window managers
(software incorporated into graphical user interfaces that adorns a
window with menus, buttons, and scroll bars) and the free X-Window
server, which runs on the new Matrox Millennium G200 card (a high-speed
computer board with three-dimensional graphics capabilities and a
128-bit Dual-Bus graphics chip). Almost every element of Linux has
changed significantly since 1997. Today's Linux is easier to learn,
install, and manage than previous versions. Recent distributions,
especially those from Red Hat Software and Caldera, set up many parts of
the system for you.
OF MICE AND MINIX
The story of Linux really begins in June 1979 at the Usenix meeting in
Toronto, according to Peter Salus, editorial director at Specialized
Systems Consultants, Incorporated in Seattle, which publishes the "Linux
Journal". "The lawyer from AT&T Corporation got up and announced the
new pricing structure for AT&T Unix System V," Salus said. "The
discounted educational fee was $7,500, and the full commercial fee was
$40,000 per central processing unit. You can imagine what the feeling
among the guys there was." One of those guys was Andrew Tanenbaum, a
professor at a university in Amsterdam. "He couldn't ask a free
university to pay that kind of money, but he wanted his students to work
with Unix," Salus said. So Tanenbaum wrote Minix, a smaller version of
Unix that would run on a minimally configured desktop system. Torvalds
began using Minix after becoming frustrated with getting computer time
on the university's Digital Equipment Corporation MicroVAX
minicomputer. But while it was a great teaching tool, Minix really
wasn't a fully functioning operating system. It's what Torvalds did in
response that was extraordinary. "He was interested in trying to see
how an operating system worked by writing one, just as one would learn
to ride a bicycle by falling off one. The result was an operating
system software kernel that contained the basic Unix components -
task-switching, a file system and device drivers. In other words, Linux
version 0.02.
Linux may have remained in that early state if it weren't for the
Internet, because it was the Internet that got the word out so quickly.
Soon after Torvalds mentioned his development to the Minix newsgroup, it
was arranged so that Linux would be available to anyone who wanted to
download it, for free, over the Internet. Linux was licensed under the
Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License (GPL), meaning
that anyone could sell, copy and change the source code, as long as they
allowed others to do the same.
Since any programmer in the world can access the original source code,
Linux has undergone more scrutiny and improvements than any other
software in the world. In 1994, Linux version 1.0 was released as a
full-fledged operating system that included the Linux software kernel,
networking support, hundreds of utility programs, development software
tools and more. Today, Version 2.0 offers 64-bit processing, symmetric
multiprocessing and advanced networking capabilities.
According to Dataquest, a market research firm in San Jose, California
(in the United States of America) the number of companies using Linux
grew twenty-seven percent in 1998, and a well-reasoned count of users is
fourteen million. In a recent survey of 788 large, small and
medium-size organizations in the United States and Canada by
International Data Corporation (IDC) in Framingham, Massachussets,
thirteen percent of respondents said they use Linux. It seems obvious
that millions of users around the world are sending a message that Linux
is a serious platform for serious business.
"Linux is a competitor to Microsoft's Windows and Unix for some server
applications," says Dan Kusnetzky, program director for IDC's Operating
Environments and Serverware research programs. Major vendors like
Oracle Corporation and Netscape Communications Corporation have
announced their support, and commercial applications are on the
increase. Vendors like Red Hat Software Incorporated and Caldera
Systems Incorporated sell versions of Linux that include support.
To be continued ...
Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich
*** THESOFTWAREVIEW post by: Mark Kuharich <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>
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