by John Wolley, Linux Today Silicon Valley correspondent
Linux Counter-FUD Site is Launched
After many months of work, the ‘first installment’ of Linux Today’s
Linux Counter-FUD Site is
finally being launched. The site’s home page tells some of the
background of how and why we decided to do this–basically we
concluded that the most effective way to counter the FUD about
Linux in the mainstream press is by citing the articles in the
mainstream press. And it seemed like an obvious function for Linux
Today to perform, a way to ‘leverage’ our growing archive of Linux
news stories (the count passed 10k in early September). You can
read more about this on the site’s home page that’s linked
above–the exciting story in this announcement has less to do with
FUD than it has to do with what we discovered as we worked on
getting this site ready.
There’s a Bigger Story Here!
As we sifted through the news stories, sorting,
categorizing, and summarizing the material that best counters the
FUD, we were continually amazed by the ‘impact’ of the results that
we produced–what we were seeing was not just a solid counter
to the FUD about Linux, but solid evidence that the Linux march to
‘world domination’ is actually happening!
The Scale of the Change that Has to Happen for Linux to
Supplant Windows
People in the Linux community have been talking about ‘world
domination’ for some time now. The talk was probably started by
Torvalds himself, throwing out the phrase in a humorous
presentation–as he did in his keynote at the first LinuxWorld
Conference and Expo in San Jose, California, in March of 1999. Just
how seriously people take this, in what timeframe, is hard to
judge. But the magnitude of the change that would have to happen in
order for Linux to supplant Windows is one of those things that
leaves a writer groping for words that do it justice–‘staggering’,
‘mindboggling’, ‘unbelievable’ are in the ballpark. Laying out the
highlights of Microsoft’s market dominance is the only way to
really capture it?.
- A Lock on ‘90% of Computers on the Planet’:
Some flavor of Windows runs about 90% of all the computers on the
planet. The standard productivity applications for businesses
worldwide are Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint–and most large
corporations have major investments in customizations that would be
expensive to port if they considered switching. Microsoft Outlook
powers the email servers and clients for most of those businesses
using Microsoft Windows and Office. Windows NT now handles file and
print sharing in most of these same businesses. And for most,
Microsoft Back Office takes care of much of what remains. - Developer Tools: Microsoft ‘Visual’ developer
tools are used in a large proportion of application development, in
applications for both resale and for internal use. And the ‘tight
integration’ between all the Microsoft products makes it easy for
corporate IT departments to stitch together any and all of the
pieces to create large, complex systems with relatively little
effort. - Applications: The vast majority of application
programs that are available are available on Windows. Most
application programs are released first on Windows, then ported to
other platforms–if they are ported at all. Many internet browser
‘plug-ins’ are available only in Windows-specific versions. - Unix Under Siege: The only areas still holding
out against the Microsoft juggernaut are very high end servers and
engineering workstations that run Unix–and Microsoft has been
promising that NT 5, now renamed Windows 2000, will take away a big
chunk of that market.
So even if alternative technology somehow emerges, and is
clearly superior to a Microsoft product on all counts, the sheer
scale, scope, magnitude–whatever you choose to call it–of the
‘sea change’ that would have to take place for any
alternative to a Microsoft product to present a serious challenge
to this market dominance is absolutely ‘mindboggling’.
Even more so for Linux, when you consider that switching from
proprietary software to open source is a much bigger
change than just ‘switching vendors’: open source requires any
commercial vendor that wants to make money off of it to make big
changes in their business model, and it requires any corporate IT
department that adopts it to make big changes in the way they
deploy and support software.
But It Is Happening!
But guess what? This sea change to Linux is happening! And
it’s happening while Linux is not yet clearly superior to
Windows on all counts. A sea change of hard-to-believe proportions
has been underway since early ’99, when the number of commercial
vendors announcing support for Linux seemed to literally explode.
When the ‘Linux bandwagon’ first began to roll, the trade press
suggested, and many members of the Linux and open source
communities feared, that many of the early announcements
might turn out to be just ‘hype’, and much of the promised support
would never be delivered. Less than a year later, those fears can
be forgotten–a careful examination of the mainstream press paints
an extraordinary picture of the sea change that is already well
underway.
Yet It Is Easy to Miss
You can watch all the news go by each day and miss it–it’s worse
than ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’, it’s more like ‘not
even seeing the trees for all the twigs and branches’. You
can review the opinions of major analysts, columnists, and garden
variety ‘pundits’ and you won’t see it there. You can do a
lot of searching on ‘Linux’ and ‘open source’ in online
news sources and still not see it.
Our Counter-FUD Searching Dug It Out
If you do a careful series of searches on one very focused topic in
the Linux news, like we had to do to compile and summarize the
counter-FUD stories–topics like GUIs available for Linux, Linux
deployments in business, or what a single vendor like Computer
Associates is doing to promote Linux–and browse through the
articles published since early ’99, then you will realize that
what’s happening with Linux is huge, at least in that one
area–in that one area, you’ll see a really big tree growing.
Repeat that process on all the topics in the Linux news that you
can think of, and then consider all your findings together–only
then can you appreciate the magnitude of what’s happening–only
then does the ‘forest’ become clearly visible. (Actually, this was
much harder than it sounds–there are many topics, like ‘Linux
deployments in business’, that you just can’t get at through
searches; you have to watch all the news go by, day after day,
scanning just about every story and ‘harvesting’ the links and
quotes as you see them.)
Countering FUD Turns into Watching Linux ‘World
Domination’ Unfold
This is what we’re doing for you, for the Linux and open source
communities, for the mainstream press, for anyone who wants to take
the time to read what we’ve found and check out the original
articles whenever you want to dig deeper. We set out to simply
counter the Linux FUD that was, and still is, appearing in the
trade press. So, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, take a look
at this forest!–start your tour of Linux Today’s Linux Counter-FUD Site.
Note: Hopefully you will start to see
the ‘forest’ in this initial installment of the site. But it will
be much easier to see when the entire site is
published–watch the Linux Today
home page for announcements of subsequent installments. Our
plan is to roll out three additional installments, about two weeks
apart, which would complete the ‘first edition’ of the site by
mid-January, 2000.