Re: why reliable linux hasn't gained more market share?
On Sat, 20 Jul 2024 15:27:17 -0400
gene heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> wrote:
>
> And even you Hans, leave out the major, all encompassing, reason for
> the lack of market share, which is that most business that have a
> computerized system to run things also value what their MBA says.
> And since there is no one to sue to cover their personal butt in case
> the system goes south like cloudflare has in the last 3 days, M$ &
> cloudflare are a brick and morter legal target they can sic the legal
> team onto.
>
> Their is essentially no one in the linux arena to sue if things go
> south, so it doesn't take more than an eighth grade education to see
> why they won't ever recommend linux no matter how superior it may be
> at the end of a P&L report. They have to have someone to sue. Bill
> Shakespear said it best when he wrote "first, we kill all the
> lawyers." But MBA's had not yet crawled out of the slime schools yet,
> so he can't be blamed for not including MBA's when he wrote that
> famous phrase.
> >
>
It's a little bit more subtle than that. Debian offers exactly the same
software warranty as MS or CloudStrike i.e. zilch. Larger businesses
generally buy service contracts from middlemen, who are the ones who
get sued. And so they should be if they have not provided, as part of
their contract, quick and reliable recovery systems, and immediate
response to emergency calls.
Overnight full backups would have solved this problem, and it would
never have arisen if the system admins had disabled automatic updates
and waited the customary few days before applying them manually, to see
how many people screamed on the day of release. Quite a few, in this
case.
I think that thought of legal action is fairly low on the list of
someone bleeding a million pounds for every hour that their system is
down, who primarily want immediate and effective help to get running
again. When the dust settles, the company accountants will go looking
for someone to blame.
It is indeed backup when things go bad that Open Source software is
definitely lacking, but it's the overall system administration and fast
response time that is the problem, not the software itself, which never
carries warranty no matter how much has been paid for it. If a business
chooses Linux for its IT work, it must do so via a Linux service
business that will provide the necessary service level agreement, but
that is exactly the same position that Windows users are in.
MS, if you have done no more than buy a server OS and install it
yourself, will provide free, best efforts telephone/email help if a
server is down. But that's generally not going to be enough to get
running quickly, especially if you've been skimping on backups.
The biggest problem that Linux (and Mac systems) has is that people are
programmed early. Windows computers are used in schools and most
universities. Computer software training courses are based on Windows.
And so on. In the early 1990s, BBC Micros were being replaced in UK
schools, mostly with early IBM compatible PCs running Windows 3. In
vain did Acorn try to sell them Archimedes computers (running on ARM2
or ARM3, by the way). "But when they leave school, they will need to be
familiar with Windows", said the education authorities. Of course, when
the pupils left school, what they needed to be familiar with was Windows
95, which bore a much closer resemblance to RiscOS on the 32-bit
Archimedes than it did to Windows 3.
About 8 years ago I assisted a team of Japanese engineers to do some
retrofit work on a number of already-delivered trains. The train
operating system was Linux, not Debian, and they were a bit secretive
about it, but I think it was Fedora. They were amazed to find I was
running Linux on my netbook, and said they had never seen Linux used on
a workstation. These were fairly bright people, not all young, working
for a large company.
--
Joe
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