Psychological barriers

Quicksearch

Disclaimer

The individual owning this blog works for Oracle in Germany. The opinions expressed here are his own, are not necessarily reviewed in advance by anyone but the individual author, and neither Oracle nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.

Navigation

< Brand Eins | links for 2007-01-08 >

Monday, January 8. 2007

Paul Murphy again, this time in Linux: no longer a winner?:

But what's scary for Linux is this: the applications and GNU components we think of as Linux don't depend on the Linux kernel - meaning that the only barriers to mass migration by Linux developers to Solaris or the BSDs are psychological.

The article perfectly describes my experience of the last year or so:

An increasing number of customers recognize that Linux alone is not a answer, it´s a technological answser. A possible answer, but maybe not the best one
Where is really the difference of a commercialized open source linux and a commercial open source unix? A long long time one of the unique selling point of Linux was "We are the good ones!" But now, not really a difference.
The psychological barrier is at first the fear of an obsolescence of knowledge.

And to make the usual bold statement to the end: Linux was an attempt for an standardized unix environment, and it will fail out of the same reasons like all attempts at the end. And it will have the same long life as all other unixes. But the nimbus to be one and only answer to all problems that the press gave Linux is gone.

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, Sun/Oracle at 14:41 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: linux

, opensource

, solaris

, sun

Related entries by tags:

View as PDF: This entry | This month | Full blog

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

I am not sure what to think of that. Basically, then and now I am convinced that GNU in many respects is the answer (politically, socially, technically) to a lot of questions arising with the so-called "information age", or, at least, it's sort of an idealistic approach of handling information, code, knowledge, an approach worth pursuing nevertheless.

Linux has given the GNU idea quite a bunch of popularity and also itself gained popularity due to the fact that GNU people by then still lacked a kernel really usable within a GPL environment. It seems this combination managed to grow a wider awareness of what OpenSource and/or Software Libre is about and finally also managed to make some major companies (IBM, SUN, ...) move in that very direction. If this is the role Linux is supposed to play in computing history - why not? Let's see which systems are to follow - Nexenta GNU/Solaris is an interesting approach as well, and, given that one day maybe the Solaris kernel might be available to that distribution in a consistent licensing way (i.o.w. under a GPL license, like Java), the kernel probably really doesn't matter that much anymore...

#1 kawazu (Homepage) on 2007-01-08 15:50 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_.
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry