I think the various BSDs are a better bet than Linux from a freedom viewpoint. The BSD license is considerably more 'free' than the GPL which linux and most linux software is licensed under. And the veneration of people like Richard Stallman by the OS/FS crowd is downright creepy, especially when he has a link on his website urging people to donate to that bastion of free speech and rational libertarianism, indymedia.

And it's why big business overwhelmingly rejects Linux for web servers.

For web servers? You jest! Over 60% of 'net connected machines are some flavor of *nix, including the open source flavors. Netcraft puts net servers at 63% Apache to Microsoft's 27% (and shrinking).

Now, the desktop is a different story.

Maybe you should stick to politics before you make an even greater fool of yourself.

I like Linux a great deal but the Open Software crowd has a brownshirt element that disturbs me greatly. Many seem anti-corporate and anti-profit.

Recently there were initiatives in the State of California to force the state to purchase only open source software. I can't see any libertarian joining that (even though coercing the State seems only fair).

Your post raises good points but the inner sanctum of the Linux movement is anti-competitive even if some of its concepts are liberal in nature.

The "Open Source" movement was never meant to generate any economic benefit. I think of it more as a distributed Anarchist Community".

Although I couldn't say if anyone at Microsoft or Oracle has access to all the source code floating around; it is highly unlikely.

Outside of the classroom, the only new learning experience a programmer is exposed to is connected to a particular piece of code he or she has been assigned. If the company runs a smooth operation, nothing new is learned. Experimenting is out of the question when you are on a production schedule.

Open Source gives the programmers something they would never get working for a for-profit enterprise. "THE BIG PICTURE".

Whether or not this fits in with Libertarian values is a moot point. It is a completely new way of veiwing the creation of new products. Granted that everything that comes out of the process will not have any direct economic value but the person comes out of the process enriched with new ideas and knowledge of how software developed.

Leave the marketing to the MBAs.

Mike Halbert

S. Weasel:

The study to which you refer takes into account of all web sites on the internet. I was referring to big business (specifically, Fortune 1000 companies), in which Apache (which runs on Linux and other operating systems) only has an 18% market share, compared with 21% for Netscape Enterprise and 54% for Microsoft IIS.

Alex

As S.Weasel and asm have already stated, your information regarding the use of Linux in big business is clearly flawed. Some small companies using Linux include : Yahoo, Intel, IBM, Dell, Netscape, HP + Compaq, Novel, Oracle, Nasa, SAP, Sony, Cisco, Siemens, Schlumberger, Merc Benz, DaimlerChrysler, Volvo, Ford, Boeing, Northrop, US Postal Service, Merrill Lynch, etc.

I suggest reading some up to date technology sites.

If that's true of Fortune 1000 companies, it's probably for reasons similar to the old notion that "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM."

Incidentally, I note that you've changed the article slightly since you began drawing fire. That makes me a bit uneasy, frankly.

I added two extra clauses to the end of the article, that's all. Nothing more will be changed.

The criticism that Open source software ... "rejects a key ingredient of the market economy: the entrepreneur."

...isn't a valid one from a libertarian point of view. We do not owe special favours to some class of entrepreneurs.

Let all models of software developement coexist and flourish - no authority should meddle with coercive measures and with a "I know best" attitude (like the proposed California regulation).

duberry:

I looked up the companies you listed using Netcraft.

Yahoo.com uses FreeBSD, Intel.com uses Microsoft, IBM.com uses Apache on AIX, Dell.com uses Microsoft, Netscape.com uses AOLServer on Solaris, HP.com uses Apache on HP-UX, Novell.com uses NetWare, Oracle uses Oracle software on Solaris, NASA doesn't come up, SAP.com uses Microsoft, Sony.com uses Apache on Solaris, Cisco.com uses CCO on Solaris, Siemens.com does indeed use Linux, schlumberger.com uses Netscape Enterprise on Solaris, Mercedes-benz.com uses Apache on Solaris, Daimlerchrysler.com uses Netscape Enterprise on Solaris, Volvo uses Apache Solaris, Ford.com uses Windows, Northrop (northgrum.com) doesn't come up, US Postal Service (usps.com) uses Netscape on Solaris, Merrill Lynch (ml.com) uses Microsoft.

(Note: Apache is an open source program, but runs on a variety of platforms, not just Linux.)

Jacob:

I agree with you that all models of software writing should be permitted to freely exist and compete in a market. Unfortunately, a lot of the anti-capitalists are now pushing for a "right to information", i.e. that people have a right to other people's source code. I don't think that entrepreneurs should get special favours from government, but I do think they are useful to society. Without them, we would have a pretty awful society.

I never said that these companies were listed on Netcraft as using Linux. I said that they used Linux. Try a search with Google of corporate linux and see what you get. All the companies came from pages searched under Google.

Also just because the public site doesn't turn up as running Linux, doesn't mean they don't run Linux as web servers - ever heard of Intranets? Extranets maybe? Maybe a visit to the

And why not count some numbers for Slammer, Melissa and I Love You. I believe that Slammer actually knocked South Korea off of the internet for a while - top notch security!!

Try here for some more interesting figures of Linux website use.

I meant to say :

Maybe a visit to the webpages of IBM regarding Linux might help in your education.

duberry:

They are promoting it as a product. So?

Steve wrote: "I think the various BSDs are a better bet than Linux from a freedom viewpoint. The BSD license is considerably more 'free' than the GPL which linux and most linux software is licensed under. And the veneration of people like Richard Stallman by the OS/FS crowd is downright creepy, especially when he has a link on his website urging people to donate to that bastion of free speech and rational libertarianism, indymedia."

I agree with you entirely.

I have some serious doubts about both the accuracy and methodology of the report of 19K successful hacks into Linux servers and only 3.8K on Windows boxes. To the point:

1. The story is posted on a site that focuses on nothing but Windows. While the authors of the site claim occasional criticism of Microsoft, it's relative rare.

2. They discuss the mi2g study, but don't provide details or even a link.

3. As someone who uses both OSs in a production environment, I have one Windows box exposed to the net (not by my choice). Two firewalls and multiple web servers are Linux boxes. My guess is that you would find a similar proportion of Linux-to-Windows boxes exposed and "available" to hacking. I agree that the lack of standard security hardening leads to default setups with poor security. But, imagine for a moment what the numbers would be if all those Linux boxes were replaced with default loads of Windows. I believe the number of hacked systems would be staggering.

4. Reporting on hacks and security vulnurabilities occurs with greater frequency on Linux and other open source systems, and the fixes/solutions hit the 'net much faster as well. Microsoft can't afford to be seen as vulnurable, so the discovery of a hole may take weeks or months before its presence is known, usually only after a patch or fix has been built, tested, installed and regression tested in private, or the hole has already been exploited (i.e., Code Red). Open source hacks can't stay secret, and the fixes can appear in a matter of hours.

I run the network for a small government organization, and I'd put my Linux boxes, properly configured for their specific tasks, up against *any* Windows system. The secret to hack prevention: just alert system administration.

With regard to corporate use of linux, I would agree that for servers it is quite widespread. However, I doubt that these companies are rolling out Linux on the desktop. Duberry tries to bring up the SQL Slammer worm, but it is totally irrelevant to this discussion. That worm exploited a whole that had already had a patch issued for it by Microsoft, and if the SQL Server admins out there had pulled their fingers out it wouldn't be a problem.

The open source database du jour, mySQL, may be growing in popularity but in terms of features it is way behind MS SQL server (anyone whos's used MS SQL's admin tools will know what I mean). Also, my reading of the licensing of the libraries that provide the C API to mySQL is that any work that uses those libraries must also be covered by the GPL. Forcing developers to release their source is not libertarian or demonstrating an interest in freedom.

To me, the Free Software Foundation seems to be aimed at pushing socialist interpretations of IP and personal property, with the collective desires of the masses outweighing the rights of those who originated the code.

Addressing the title of the article, "Is 'Open Source' software a libertarian idea?", the only prominent libertarian member of the Open Source movement that I can think of is Eric S Raymond, and a quick search of Slashdot will reveal what the masses in the OS movement think of him.

Copyright law as it applies to software tends to be written to support the business models of the commercial software companies. The open source and free software movements like to write software under different models, and they are useful to have around at least partly because they demonstrate that other models are possible. Their presence reinforces the fact that people who write software should be able to choose the model under which their software is licensed. The law should be designed to make this choice as easy as possible. I see that freedom of choice as a pretty fundamental libertarian issue here.

It is also worth observing that the Free Software Foundation is not the "Open Source" movement, although there is lots of overlap. The term "Open Source" was coined in the first place because some people found the FSF's ideological purity too stifling and instead wanted to adopt a more pragmatic position.

I have also seen plenty of businesses where Linux is used internally but is not used "officially". The IT department uses it for certain tasks because it gets the job done, even though they are not encouraged to use it. Linux hasn't evolved into anything that is terribly useful for non-techies on the desktop, but its back office role is considerable and this isn't going to change.

I sometimes have problems coping in my own mind with how open source software relates to libertarianism and capitalism. I'm a Linux advocate, I've used Linux and other open source software at home for a couple of years and I'll only ever use Windows at home if I'm going to play a Windows-only game, which I don't often do. However, I've donated money to some of the developers whose open source software I use which I believe makes up for me not having donated code to the projects.

I don't think open source software has a lack of "leadership" as you seem to believe it has, Alex. In the space of ten years, Linux has become a viable threat to Microsoft's dominance of the market and that's without any serious financial backing - until perhaps recently with firms like IBM getting behind Linux. I do not believe "big business overwhelmingly rejects Linux for web servers" - this sounds like Microsoft propaganda to me. As other commenters have already pointed out: Most of the Internet's webservers are not using Microsoft's IIS, for a variety of reasons. Samizdata.net isn't hosted on Windows or IIS - it's hosted on Linux! The notion that "Linux fails to offer user interface innovation" is completely false. Haven't you ever used KDE 3.1 or GNOME 2.2 for Linux? Both of these GUIs are just as easy to use as the Windows XP GUI but they're both more customisable and come with a whole load more useful tools and software packages than Windows XP or any other version of Microsoft Windows. Linux GUI innovation has on many occasions actually inspired the design of the latest Windows GUI!

If the study showing Linux servers are more likely to be broken into than Windows servers wasn't commissioned by Microsoft or another firm losing out to Linux then I'd explain its finding as follows: More people use Linux and Linux is much more configurable than Windows - initial secure set-up of a Linux webserver may take a a few more hours than initial set-up of a Windows IIS server but you'll save a lot more time in the long run because the system is more reliable and more secure - if Linux servers are being broken into so frequently it may be because the admins are not making the initial effort - with a Windows server you can make as much "initial effort" as you like and get nowhere - and you're forced to rely on Microsoft if a bug turns up, as they so often do.

Alex, may I suggest you come back and write this blog up again once you've worked as a network administrator using both Linux and Windows and once you've actually tried out the latest versions of KDE and/or GNOME - or at least looked into how open source development teams operate - you'll find that open source development doesn't lack "leadership" and open source software is often better quality than commercially produced software for a variety of reasons.

"the only prominent libertarian member of the Open Source movement that I can think of is Eric S Raymond, and a quick search of Slashdot will reveal what the masses in the OS movement think of him."

And since when did it matter what "the masses" think? Individuals exist and act, not masses. The more vocally strident may garner more public attention, but actions speak louder than words. And open source is simply that -- human action, in action. The various approaches to the issue "intellectual property" aside, even Richard Stallman thinks it's okay to sell software (although he still believes it immoral to keep the source secret), and it has been the conclusion of analysts on all sides of the debate that his General Public License itself relies upon existing copyright law and the fundamental idea of property rights in order to function. Finally, while it's silly to avoid using a tool because you don't like the attitudes or agree with the beliefs of others who also use it, it can't be denied that there has always been a strong libertarian undercurrent in the communities that open source springs from (just as it is present in nearly every cross section of humanity).

Stephen Hodgson wrote: "Haven't you ever used KDE 3.1 or GNOME 2.2 for Linux? Both of these GUIs are just as easy to use as the Windows XP GUI..."

I've RedHat Linux 9 installed on one computer, and Mandrake Linux 8 installed on another, and have used both KDE and GNOME. But if you think they are just as easy to use as Windows, I feel you may be deluded.

I agree with you that a large reason why Linux servers get hacked a lot is because users simply do not put the effort into setting them up properly, or don't understand how to. But, if as you conceed, Windows ones tend to work straight out of the box, isn't that a good thing?

"...a large reason why Linux servers get hacked a lot is because users simply do not put the effort into setting them up properly, or don't understand how to. But, if as you conceed, Windows ones tend to work straight out of the box, isn't that a good thing?"

Windows servers work "straight out of the box" if you are willing to place a lower priority on security. Otherwise, they require just as much care and coddling as the free Unixes, and anecdotal evidence (real life experience) tends to support the contention that they require far more to achieve anywhere near similar reliability. And because security is a process, not a product, no hardware or software can ever protect a business from incompetent administrators.

Alex, whilst Windows servers may work "straight out of the box" in my experience they always require a much greater degree of maintenance than Linux or *BSD servers, which you can set up and configure properly in a couple of hours and then happily leave running for months without worrying about whether or not they're operating as they should be. Windows servers also tend to require much more expensive hardware to cope with the same demands as Linux and *BSD servers. I wouldn't dream of using Windows NT/2000 or Windows Server 2003 on a Cyrix 486 with 56MB RAM and a 1GB hard disk to provide a NAT box / Internet gateway for a LAN (1. Windows would either not work at all or would be terribly slow, 2. Windows would be quite unsecure and doesn't provide the same high quality features as Linux and BSD) - but OpenBSD is more than capable of providing NAT and a firewall on this hardware and I'm sure Linux would work equally well. I don't believe it's worth the initial time saved in setting up a Windows server in the long run because you're going to have to perform a lot of maintenance and there's a much greater chance that the server will be broken into or taken offline or hijacked by an Internet worm which preys on vulnerable Microsoft software - if the server's connected to the Internet, of course.

Alex, I think Red Hat Linux 9 with KDE 3.1 probably goes a long way towards providing the ease of set-up and ease of everyday use that Windows XP is often said to provide. Admittedly, there are quite a few things wrong with Red Hat 9 and it's possibly the most bloated Linux distribution I've ever seen but with even a few basic configuration changes Red Hat 9 makes for a great desktop OS. I don't believe it's unfair to expect users to have to do a bit of tweaking of any OS in order to get optimal performance from it - Windows users often need to disable unnecessary Microsoft bloat, install better hardware drivers and download hundreds of megabytes worth of updates from Windows Update after installing a new version of Windows - or after having reinstalled Windows because the cause of a strange problem couldn't be tracked down. Two of the key problems with Red Hat Linux 9 from a home/desktop user's point of view are probably Red Hat's decision to rip out MP3 support and provide a kernel which doesn't include support for NTFS partitions - although both of them problems are easily overcome with a bit of reading on the Internet and a couple of small downloads. You might like to try Mandrake 9.0 or Mandrake 9.1 which are both pretty good desktop OSs and feel a little less bloated than Red Hat 9. I do not believe I am deluded in thinking KDE 3.1 and GNOME 2.2 offer the same usability as the Windows XP GUI - although GNOME is certainly lacking applications and it's not as configurable as KDE.

However, where Microsoft and Apple have the advantage is that they can decide a big picture idea and implement it across all their products. They can decide a standard style for the user interface and have all their products follow that.

As can KDE and Gnome. The advantage that Microsoft and Apple have is that they don't have competing styles in their domains. (Microsoft Office offers competing styles, and Apple has a competing "brushed metal" style, but these are slight variations rather than the large differences between KDE and Gnome.)

Open source's lack of a bit of leadership is what fails it.

Open source certainly has "a bit" of leadership. The two open source projects I've followed (Mozilla, the linux kernel) have hiarchies of programmers making design decisions. Where leadership is lacking is integrating the various parts into a complete operating system. I am a happy user of Debian, but in user-friendliness and in coherency it doesn't compete with windows and likely never will.

That may be why [...] Linux fails to offer user interface innovation,

The Galeon browser has a settings menu for often changed preferences, and an "Open whole folder in tabs" for bookmark folders. The kate text editor offers a file browing pane to quickly switch between and open files. Motif library (I think) menus can be "torn off" and become windows. The Sawfish window manager has viewports, and any window can be set to be "on top" of other windows. Mozilla allows user interfaces to be specified by a markup language. Linux software does offer innovative and excellent user interfaces, unfortunately there are also many poor user interfaces to suffer through.

This is a weakness of open source: many of the user interfaces are significantly harder to use than proprietary counterparts. Open source programs do seem to be aimed more at the coders than "users", although there are many well-designed easy to use open-source programs.

While I wouldn't call open-source a libertarian idea, i don't see why it would be objectionable to libertarians (open-source zealots are another matter). Open source and free market software can complement each other and provide a better software world for users and businesses. Entrepreneurs can write commercial software for linux, and there is a wealth of open-source software avaliable for windows. (One of the windows boxes I use has a bourne-again shell with many of the gnu command line utilities.) Unfortunately, many open-source libraries are unavaliable to proprietary programs, but some are.

Heh. This piece seems to teeter on the brink of noticing the way that network effects generate market failure in the case of software, but then scarpers in case someone draws attention to it :)

It should also be said that there's stacks of commercial code out there which depends on open source libraries and utilities released under Apache-style licenses. The cost of closed-source software would be way higher without this free infrastructure being in place, since the wheel would have to be continually reinvented by every market participant. (See the Jakarta Project fr'instance.)

Linux is more likely to get hacked than Windows? Are you on crack? Although windows only makes up about 30% of all webservers worldwide, it is that poor excuse for an operating system that has the dubious distinction of being the most hacked system.

You shouldn't use a Microsoft sock-puppet to get security information.

I've been involved with open source software (OS SW) for several years. The article assumes that OS SW is primarily an economic phenomena. Its not, or at least it wasn't originally and while the big boys have piled in recently, the original motivations still persist.

People work on OS SW for similar reasons people write and post at Samizdata - its fun, they are interested, they communicate with like-minded people, and they feel they are helping to achieve something worthwhile.

Linux and Apache have shown there is commercial potential in OS SW and big companies like IBM are putting their paid programmers to work on OS SW projects. A major motivation is that SW shows an extreme economies of scale effect. Once you become a leader in a market you become almost unstoppable and end-up dominating the market. So the big boys see OS SW as a way of getting 'thought leaders' behind products that then become competative weapons against their competitors. Microsoft being the primary target, although there are others.

If you looking for an historical analogy then OS SW has similarities to 19th century (and earlier) science where talented and motivated unpaid amateurs did most of the work.

Stallman (the glorious leader of the Free Software Foundation) believes that I am wrong to write software and then try to sell it for as much as I can make for it.

I think he is wrong to wear open toed sandals with socks.

Given that Linux is still in a rapid-growth uptake phase, the fact that big buisnesses have not switched to it as a web server platform yet is uttlerly meaningless. The number of PCs running under a Microsoft OS as severs or serious workstations in 1990 in Fortune 1000 companies was negligible compared to the number of DEC minicomputers in those roles.

The PC, being made by dozens of clone shops with no central organizers, was a laughably unsophisticated, insecure, unreliable architecture completely useless for serious workstation or server roles. And the lack of a central authority able to make architecture decisions doomed it to always be so.

Or, at least, that's what DEC fans would have told you, nine years after the introduction of the IBM PC and MS-DOS. Thirteen years later, DEC survives only as a small division inside Hewlett-Packard, while Microsoft's founder is the richest man on Earth.

Nine years after Linux 1.0 was released -- is today.

Knoppix is a bootable CD distro that has all the apps you need installed, and the gui done right. The Desktop is getting closer!

I much prefer BSD licenses to the GPL, if I spend my blood, sweat and tears on something, and some mega-corp decides they wanna buy it and fork a closed source version, well, I'd be all happy about that, Stallman seems to forget that you can't eat principles, and he lives off of the public teat.

Nuff said.

Alex Singleton writes:

The problem with open source is that it largely rejects a key ingredient of the market economy: the entrepreneur

At first glance it does sometimes appear there's no entrepreneurship surrounding Open Source. But if you dig in a little further, it abounds in plenty just under the surface. However the economic model is different. The money is not made in "the product" (i.e. the software), it is made in the services supplied around the product. Imagine a market in which the cars are given away, but the manufacturers clean up on servicing, petrol, retread tyres, spare parts, taxi drivers, driving instructors, car alarm systems, sports kit upgrades, air conditioning add-ons, and the whole panoply of car-related services. And remember with software, the steel, or code, is virtually free. The only cost is its placement in the programmatic design and test process. If the servicing revenue can then outweigh this design cost, you're onto an economic winner.

I've written two books for O'Reilly on combining Open Source software with the fiercely commercial Oracle database (Oracle and Open Source and Perl for Oracle DBAs). Others have spoken of Eric S. Raymond, a personal hero of mine who helped motivate and encourage me several times, but just from personal experience, here's how I've made entrepreneurial money from Open Source: Royalties from the two books (not much, as most books like these don't sell like Stephen King blockbusters, but enough to justify the effort) Training courses - I run four different training courses for Learning Tree on Perl, Advanced Perl, MySQL and Technical Writing For my day-job (such that it is IR35-inflicted Britain), the two books above make it far easier to gain consultancy contracts, particularly in areas combining Perl with Oracle Admittedly, this doesn't put me in the Rockefeller stakes, but I'm trying Ringo, I'm trying real hard! $-)

And there are several Rockefellers in Open Source. There's Mr Raymond himself, with his strong connection with VA Linux systems, Tim O'Reilly, with his superb book publishing company (surely a contender for the brown nose awards? :-), and Linus Torvalds, who will almost certainly become a millionaire+ with his work for Transmeta Corp. Plus, there are many other authors who've written definitive texts on various subjects (Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk etc), which do sell in Stephen King type quantities. Many more minor players, such as myself, are also engaged on various training, teaching and speaking assignments, which keep the wolf from the door, as well as straight income from programming consultancy, which is enhanced by the reputations gained from Open Source work. And it is "reputation" which is important in Open Source as an alternative conceptual sort of "income". Maximum respect. Maximum income from books, speaking and training. Everyone wins, even when software is given away. For more on this, see any of the seminal works by Mr Raymond.

The closest analogy may come from other "software" based industries, such as the movie industry (I'm stretching it a little, but hey, it's only Monday! :)

An actor may gain a $10 million dollar fee for doing "Rubbish Film, Version III". But his income is stuck. If he wants to get this up to $15 million dollars, he needs to do an "Art" film for $1 million dollars, to "enhance" his reputation, with a film which does well at Cannes (or gain maximum respect from the critics). He can then do "Rubbish Film, Version IV", for the aforementioned $15 million dollars. It's all about reputation, in Open Source, and star quality. How you get it is by giving away superb software (or making great films), which is cheap for the initial book presentation (or box-office price of a movie release), and which is then easily downloadable (or is viewed by most people on "free" terrestrial television). Okay, I won't stretch this analogy any more, as the rubber's about to go! 8-)

Unfortunately, there are many of the Left who are attracted to Open Source, as they see it as a "collective good". You'll frequently come across terms like "The Collective", or "We the Programmers", or other such phrases, particularly from the European Open Source-heads, and the Richard Stallmanites - and having been on the end of a Richard Stallman email conversation, I know of what I speak. When I was halfway in my journey from socialism to capitalism, and still had one foot in this camp, I even wrote an article trying to suggest to Oracle Corporation that the benefits of making Oracle itself go Open Source, could be weighed against staying proprietary ( Oracle & Open Source: Gazing at the Crystal Ball). I don't look back at this article with great pride, as it has many flaws originating from my socialist dark half, but the main point is still worth considering for Oracle Corp., and even now they use Tcl, Apache, and many other parts of the Open Source movement within their products. But noisy though the Open Source "Collectives" are, the driving forces of Open Source are still mainly American (or have at least moved to California), and libertarian. And it must be remembered that Mr Stallman is opposed to Open Source, as "Open Source" itself was always an attempt to embed "free" software into capitalism.

I think the link arises because I think there is some kind of philosophical connection between Open Source and libertarianism. I wrote about this in another promotional article for my second book, postulating a semantic link between the central tenets of Perl philosophy and the cardinal aspects of Ayn Rand's Objectivism (The Fusion of Perl and Oracle). This article failed to take account of Oracle Corporation's move to get involved with the American government's plans to track individuals, for which it rightly received a healthy bout of criticism, but I reckon once again its main point stands, that Open Source and libertarianism are instinctive bedfellows.

They could both only have come from America.

It's just that's there's more than one way to make a buck, or a pound, and it don't necessarily have to be straight up front for a box of product. Even die-hard capitalists often give away products, in order to hook the buyers in other more lucrative areas. For example, Oracle Corporation virtually give away their product to Linux developers, so that business users will then later pay the licensing costs. It simply makes good business sense.

Oh, and BTW, in case I haven't linked to it enough yet, this post was sponsored by Perl for Oracle DBAs. A fine book, at a fine price! $-)

I may not be a great entrepreneur, and the above paragraph may be a little clumsy, but what the heck. It may sell an extra copy, and help pay for my son's state-free education! :-)

Rgds, AndyD

One other thing I neglected to mention in my earlier post:

One of the arguments here appears to be the socialist/collective nature of open source, especially that espoused by Richard Stallman.

If you want to see how Linux and open source in general are affecting the IT marketplace, just spend a few bucks and attend the next available Linuxworld Expo. (I don't know if they hold them anywhere in Europe, but we have two in the US each year, one in San Francisco in August and one in New York in January).

As with other similar events, there's always an exposition floor for vendors to display their wares. For years, the floor was small and modest, and it was easy to find the small startups and "free" software organizations and user groups, as they dominated. In recent years, however, the expo floor has become largely corporate. I usually attend New York, and this year, the monster displays were from IBM, HP, Sun, and Computer Associates. About another hundered companies and groups had smaller set ups (including Andy Duncan's publisher O'Reilly, which has a very popular booth), and the EFF, FSF and smaller organizations now occupy the smallest portions of the floor. The keynote speakers are not the leaders of the open source movement, although they maintain an important presence at the events. Your keynotes are heads of HP and Dell and other big companies.

(By the way, one other company had a small, but well-noticed booth at the NYC Linuxworld: Microsoft. They were marketing their Unix Tools for Windows, and their staff wore tee-shirts that said Let's Talk. Think they don't feel a threat?)

There's a lot of corporate interest in Linux as an alternative to Windows and even other Unixes (Sun, HP and IBM already market their own versions of Unix...yet they pour millions into Linux).

The key here is that there is nothing wrong with making a profit on open source. I agree that the GPL has some requirements that make it difficult to incoporate for some, but this apparently hasn't bothered these big boys. The reason is that because, even with the collective foundation of OSS, you can still change it, add to it, tweak it, and even brand it...as long as you make the original source available for free along with your changes.

Though there are many of us out there who don't mind downloading and hacking at Linux and other OSS products, many large organizations don't, and that's the market for an IBM server running Linux. That organization cares less about being able to see the source and more about the stability and functionality of the product. That's the IBM/HP/Sun/etc market.

Some excellent reads, upstream.

I get that we're undergoing -worldwide- a paradigm shift or two, with open-source software part of that, and alternate distributive systems for indie musicians another part of that, and revamping of the copyright laws/concepts another part of that, and distributed on-line ad hoc work-teams part of that...

The original question was about 'server security' and its been my experience that the ongoing process of setting up, monitoring, tweaking, upgrading and refining GOES better with xx-IX (AIX, Unix, Linux, etc) than under any Windows server configuration. Windows has some serious holes in it, which Apache alone can't plug. Windows running on a Linux kernal can be a reasonably stable and secure setup.

But bear in mind that there are tradeoffs all the way up or down any 'security' scale; measured in intrusiveness, absolute impenetrability vs usability, accessibility, accountability and several other pertinent considerations that escape my fatigue-sodden brain at this late moment.

So. In summary, I'm voting for open-minded examination of Linux AND evolving WinServer configs... day by day, they grow...

Small Eye Opener, that...

I'm an embedded systems programmer. I have both used linux for profit and contributed to its development... at the same time. It provides a wonderful base for development. Open source software cut my total project cost by about 50%.

Most of the people aided by my contribution were not competitors in any way. My contributions might have aided competitors by a few hundred dollars. All in all, that seems like a good deal and significant competitive advantage.

Painting the entire Open Source community with the Richard Stallman brush is totally unwarranted, and is a distressingly collectivist attitude to see on Samizdata.

There is absolutley *nothing* in the GPL which forbids selling GPLed software for money. The only hard requirements of the GPL are that the source code of the software must be made available if the software is distributed, and that any software that incorporates GPLed code must itself be GPLed. People whine about the second requirement a lot, which amazes me, because it boils down to complaining that one can't take someone elses work and present it as one's own. Boo hoo hoo. Don't like it? Then write your own code, babies.

Stick to politics. Your analysis is flawed and uneducated.

Our company runs on Linux. Our firewalls, web servers, mail servers, database servers, telephony systems. file servers (except for one, due to a screw-up with a vendor) run Linux. Two thirds of our technical staff run Linux on the desktop. (But none of the non-technical staff.)

Not because we agree with Stallman's politics; I think he's a loon.

Because it doesn't suck.

I put Linux in place, it works, it stays working, without any intervention.

The reason big business doesn't use Linux more widely is that in big businesses, such decisions aren't made by the people who know what they are doing, but several layers up the hierachy. The managers recognise "IBM" and "Microsoft" and "Oracle" and go with those names even when it's clearly a wrong decision on technical grounds.