Re: Linux and the Enterprise (WinNT)

[mike <roscoe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yeah, and by all accounts, Prof. Tannenbaum is still in a snit.
Apparently, he's one of the creators
of minix, and the differences in kernel design
don't sit well with him. He reportedly claims he would have flunked him
had  Linus done the deed as a class project.
(trivial expansion on trivia)
-Mike List

On Fri, 30 Apr 1999, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> >Thanks for the reference, Bob. This was a very objective-sounding article,
> >polite and thoughtful. I'm sure that despite the usual jerking of knees and
> >cries of fudd, Linus, Alan and many others will choose to "treat it like a
> >challenge!"
> We shall see. This is phrased as if it's a serious issue; I'd like to see 
> what the kernel korps has to say. As I wrote earlier, this is the same general
> kind of discussion as the microkernel vs. monolithic kernel usiness. Linus
> seems to be very much a
gainst microkernels, and he makes a good case for it
> in his section of "Open Sources", and there is an email thread between LT and 
> a CS professor/microkernel advocate in the appendix.  Books usually don't
> get published with email threads, much less one that's seven years old... so 
> imagine that the debate was interesting, to say the least.
> 
> >linuxtoday.com has a follow-up from the author, at
> >http://linuxtoday.com/stories/5499.html
> 
> >where he takes pains to point out that he likes Linux, is trying to help it
> >by pointing out its weaknesses so that they can be remedied, and concludes
> >with a warning not to trust *any* so-called "independent testers" -- at least
> >ones that don't use industry-accepted benchmarks and aren't audited by the
> >consortiums who spec those benchmarks.
> I read this one carefully, and like many sequels, it's not quite as good as
> the first one (one goat to another: "The book was better than the movie"
> sorry); The pro-NT bias shows more in this article.
> 
> It is interesting how Russinovich pits Linux "against" other UNIX systems and
> NT. Since the commericial UNIX vendors have not unified UNIX at all, the pro-
> cess of elimination leaves NT and Linux as the only other alternatives, and
> Linux is "knocked out" of a "serious competitive position" by a number of 
> engineering suppositions, which are not backed up by benchmarks. This borders 
> on FUD. Sorry, I liked the original better.
> 
> A few things to keep in mind here:
> 
> 1. The real world is such that only a TINY percentage of the market actually 
>    effected by theses arguments in EITHER article, even if the engineering 
>    claims are borne out by performance.
> 
> 2. By the time the technology base involves a lot more than that, the 
>    software layer will be different than the one we're looking at now.
>    Windows 2000 will be out, and progress will be made on evolving Linux
>    SMP features and performance, if needed. The two year horizon is a 
>    very long time in this business.
> 
> 3. Sheer server count (and therefore market/mind- share) go with numbers,
>    and there are clearly more departmental/group servers than "Enterprise
>    level" systems, at least according to the definitions. Is Russinovich
>    therefore abandoning that whole class of systems to Linux?
> 
> 4. Other issues are not brought up here, such as stability and reliability
>    on anything BUT "Enterprise-Level" servers.
> 
> Russinovich closed by blasting independent testing labs, and a lot of what
> he says here is silly. The ONLY thing labs have to trade on is their integrity.
> I do agree that labs often cannot (either due to financial or skill limita-
> tions) "max out" all of the products they test, but this also rarely hap-
> pens in the real world. One leaves this section of the article, and the 
> sequel in general, with the feeling that one has been whined at. Nonetheless,
> I reccomend you read this article too, and decide for yourself.
> 
>                                                            ---> RGB <---
>