Malek's Moorish Tales

I think I have posted sometime ago on how much I love Algiers, and on how hard it is for me to get there ...

Well, once again, it was really complexe and time consuming to get there for my office launch speeches.

First, the visa took a long time (More than a week, until I had to cancel the procedure at the Algerian consulat in Casablanca, and use another invitation for a conference of Arab investors, and get my visa through the ambassy in Rabat on Friday afternoon).

Then, there was no direct or reasonable flight that could get me to Algiers in time for my first presentation saturday afternoon, so I had to go through Paris where I had to change airports and spend the night, before taking an early morning from Paris to Algiers.

Once there, at the Sheraton hotel, I learned that a customer can't check in before 3pm (I had to be on stage at 2:30pm, having spent the night awake to be sure I don't miss my flight, still wearing my clothes from the day before, and having not had my shower ...).

There were a couple more incidents in Algiers I will relate on a separate entry.

My return flight on Monday was even more amazing : I didn't know I had to register my luggage 90 minutes before the flight, and when I got to the airport around 10:40am, Check in was closed... There was this friendly gentleman at the Air France check-in area that helped get in touch with the escale chief, who in turn was very friendly, and got me on a flight to marseille, assuring me that I will find a hostess waiting for me upon arrival at Marseille with my boarding card for Paris ... Off course, she wasn't there, and I had to go back and forth between terminals before I got the issue resolved (less than 10 minutes before departure), and got on that flight to Paris. There were no further incident on the Paris - Casablanca flight. I finally got home at 11:30pm ... It would have taken me less time to get from Casablanca to Chicago or Dallas ...

Off course Linux is not a viable choice for desktop (even Red Hat says so), but is it for servers ?

A few untrue perceptions (Secure, free, fast ...) about Linux and its value for the entreprise lead many people to think so. Here is my two cents :

1- Linux is secure :

• take a look at http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/
• As of  8/1/03, the vulnerabilities discovered on the various OSs for 2003 numbered as follows :

OpenBSD	8
Trustix	18
EnGarde	20
Microsoft(Windows all versions)	26
SuSE	32
Sun	41
Mandrake	82
RedHat	82
Debian	139

2- Linux is free :

• Is it really free ? the cost of ownership of a software is never just the cost of the licencing. It includes deployment, maintenance, and operation. this would at least make Linux not really much cheaper than commercial OSs.
• In a server environment, especially in the entreprise, servers are not independent stand-alone machines, they have to fit in Kerberos realms, use LDAP, which are never out-of the box features on a Linux, and usually would become : go get the download, then spend a good portion of your time (never free in the entreprise) making it work, at your own risks for later maintenance and support ...
• The cost of the Application Servers, Transactional Monitors, Middleware and Message Brokers make any difference in the OS costs insignificant.
• Do we really want a free OS : the binding relation between a vendor and the entreprise is that of customer and vendor, ie: the lincence purchase. If there is no such relation between them, there could not be a binding guarantee on the quality of the software, or that of fixing up any problems that might arise later. It was not hard for Red Hat to simply say they will stop producing, supporting or patching Red Hat Linux. It was so easy for them to say so because their product was free. Do we want to base our system on an OS than can just decide someday to vanish ?

3 - Linux is Fast :

• If Linux can be a performant solution for appliances, it certainly looses of its perf attractiveness when there are serious applications on top of it. The OS is much lighter than Windows for example, but as one starts adding the necessary modules such as LDAP, Kerberos, Transactional monitor, Web Services, Message Broker, ...etc., its performance is much more linked to the performance of the applications server used. To compare for example the perf between Linux and Windows, one should compare a WebSphere over Linux, or WebLogic over Linux, with a Windows 2003. Then Linux is no longer performant.

4- Linux is there to last :

• Although I never like making "propheties", I will still venture with a sentence that might seem full of pretention and irrationality : Linux will not last much longer. What I mean is basically that it will not continue evolving as open source. There will be quite a few commercial product based on Linux, but they will have a very hard time competing, and keeping out of trouble, among all the copyright violations that made up Linux in the first place. When I look at the Red Hat Licence pricing (on average 3 times more expensive than Windows if we allow a version of Windows to be used for three years).
• There cannot be a business model based of free products. Therefore, either the products becomes paying, or it vanishes from the marketplace. There can be community software that is open source and free, but it will never be interesting for the entreprise to use such an unsupported, loosely tested software...

Off course Linux is not a viable choice for desktop (even Red Hat says so), but is it for servers ?

A few untrue perceptions (Secure, free, fast ...) about Linux and its value for the entreprise lead many people to think so. Here is my two cents :

1- Linux is secure :

• take a look at http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/
• As of  8/1/03, the vulnerabilities discovered on the various OSs for 2003 numbered as follows :

OpenBSD	8
Trustix	18
EnGarde	20
Microsoft(Windows all versions)	26
SuSE	32
Sun	41
Mandrake	82
RedHat	82
Debian	139

2- Linux is free :

• Is it really free ? the cost of ownership of a software is never just the cost of the licencing. It includes deployment, maintenance, and operation. this would at least make Linux not really much cheaper than commercial OSs.
• In a server environment, especially in the entreprise, servers are not independent stand-alone machines, they have to fit in Kerberos realms, use LDAP, which are never out-of the box features on a Linux, and usually would become : go get the download, then spend a good portion of your time (never free in the entreprise) making it work, at your own risks for later maintenance and support ...
• The cost of the Application Servers, Transactional Monitors, Middleware and Message Brokers make any difference in the OS costs insignificant.
• Do we really want a free OS : the binding relation between a vendor and the entreprise is that of customer and vendor, ie: the lincence purchase. If there is no such relation between them, there could not be a binding guarantee on the quality of the software, or that of fixing up any problems that might arise later. It was not hard for Red Hat to simply say they will stop producing, supporting or patching Red Hat Linux. It was so easy for them to say so because their product was free. Do we want to base our system on an OS than can just decide someday to vanish ?

3 - Linux is Fast :

• If Linux can be a performant solution for appliances, it certainly looses of its perf attractiveness when there are serious applications on top of it. The OS is much lighter than Windows for example, but as one starts adding the necessary modules such as LDAP, Kerberos, Transactional monitor, Web Services, Message Broker, ...etc., its performance is much more linked to the performance of the applications server used. To compare for example the perf between Linux and Windows, one should compare a WebSphere over Linux, or WebLogic over Linux, with a Windows 2003. Then Linux is no longer performant.

4- Linux is there to last :

• Although I never like making "propheties", I will still venture with a sentence that might seem full of pretention and irrationality : Linux will not last much longer. What I mean is basically that it will not continue evolving as open source. There will be quite a few commercial product based on Linux, but they will have a very hard time competing, and keeping out of trouble, among all the copyright violations that made up Linux in the first place. When I look at the Red Hat Licence pricing (on average 3 times more expensive than Windows if we allow a version of Windows to be used for three years).
• There cannot be a business model based of free products. Therefore, either the products becomes paying, or it vanishes from the marketplace. There can be community software that is open source and free, but it will never be interesting for the entreprise to use such an unsupported, loosely tested software...