InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
November 22, 1999
Linux Does ComdexBy Jason Levitt
The Linux Business Expo, a mini-Linux trade show housed within Comdex, took up almost all of the Las Vegas Hilton exhibition area and featured most of the big-name Linux distribution players, as well as a cross-section of application providers, support companies, and developer tool vendors. Linux creator Linus Torvalds joined the leaders of Microsoft, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and Xerox with his Comdex speech, a mere 24 hours after Bill Gates, as the fourth keynote speaker out of eight that week.
Linux is making headway in the enterprise, but all this seemed like overkill. Comdex has always been a desktop show, yet the Linux Business Expo was clearly focused on the server side, which is, in fact, the only serious market for Linux systems right now.
Even Corel, which announced the shipping of its own Linux distribution (linux.corel.com) aimed at desktop users, doesn't deliver a convincing client-side package, though the "Deluxe Edition," which costs $90 and is supposed to ship on November 30th, will come bundled with Corel's WordPerfect. Any serious business applications on Linux are a step in the right direction.
The Linux Myths
(Microsoft, by the way, was doing its best to push Windows 2000 Server as a scalable solution at Comdex. The Unisys press conference, held with partners Microsoft and Cisco on stage and other partners such as Intel, EMC, and StorageTek in attendance, touted the "Data Center for the Next Millennium," based on Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2000 DataCenter Server, and SQL Server. Running a huge, simulated E-commerce workload, Microsoft president Steve Ballmer gushed on stage about the robustness and scalability of the beta software. It was a lively bit of PR for Microsoft, but simulated workloads on beta software hardly qualify the operating system for deployment in the enterprise. Nevertheless, I really hope the Linux folks will conduct a similar technology deployment demonstration in the near future.)
In fact, the Microsoft essay leaves room for argument with many of its conclusions. Sure, Windows NT is faster than Linux in comparable benchmark scenarios. And NT offers mature features not yet part of the general Linux distribution, such as a journaled file system and support symmetrical multiprocessing support. But a rational conclusion is simply that Linux needs more time--the luxury of concentrating on a single hardware platform and millions of dollars to drive operating system development could speed things up.
In any case, I've found myself wanting to make my own conclusions, in contrast to the ones offered by Microsoft in the essay:
"Performance: Windows NT 4.0 outperforms Linux on common customer workloads. The Linux community claims to have improved performance and scalability in the latest versions of the Linux kernel (2.2), however it's clear that Linux remains inferior to the Windows NT 4.0 operating system."
"Inferior" is a strong word. "Slower" is more accurate. The limitations on maximum file system size and kernel innovations are an issue, but they aren't critical for all applications. For performance, the cited benchmarks, from PC Week and PC Magazine tests, back Microsoft up here. Of course, Microsoft did conveniently omit that the static Web-page performance test was about 30% faster on Solaris 7 under Sun Web Server than IIS on Windows NT 4.0 in the PC Magazine tests.
"Reliability: Linux needs real-world proof points rather than anecdotal stories. The Linux community likes to talk about Linux as a stable and reliable operating system, yet there are no real-world data or metrics and very limited customer evidence to back up these claims."
Microsoft has worked long and hard to shed the unreliable, unscalable, image that Windows NT 4.0 has lugged around for years. And while they've now convinced some major Web sites to use NT 4.0, it's not clear that scalability has been achieved through deployment of multiple boxes (horizontal scalability) rather than multiple CPUs (vertical scalability). In other words, if you throw enough hardware at NT 4.0, it scales. After Service Pack 4, NT 4.0 started to get more reliable, but who could forget those memory-leakage problems in the early days?
"Price: Free operating system does not mean low total cost of ownership. The Linux community will talk about the free or low-cost nature of Linux. It's important to understand that licensing cost is only a small part of the overall decision-making process for customers."
No argument here. But TCO can be measured in many ways. Again, the real answer here is that NT will come out on top in some scenarios, and Linux in others. I don't buy Microsoft's argument that Linux is so substantially harder to administer than Windows NT systems.
"Linux security model is weak. All systems are vulnerable to security issues, however it's important to note that Linux uses the same security model as the original Unix implementations--a model that was not designed from the ground up to be secure."
How do you compromise an operating system that was "designed" to be secure? Why not add downloadable ActiveX controls? Microsoft is on pretty shaky with this assertion. It's been blindsided by its share of security problems, and as the market leader in desktop operating systems, it should be doing better work with Windows security. As primarily a server platform, Linux is not nearly as vulnerable.
A New Book
Some points that Raymond hints at, but doesn't explain, are his "theory of media manipulation," which he applied in order to promote the open-source brand, and his co-opting of the "prestige media that services the Fortune 500." He points out that "co-opting the technical trade press is necessary but not sufficient; it's important essentially as a precondition for storming Wall Street itself through the elite mainstream media." An elaboration of these techniques would make a best seller at the next Comdex show. And, by the way, I'd like an advance copy.
mere five weeks after Microsoft published its "Linux Myths," the most public attempt so far to downplay the Linux hype machine by contrasting Windows NT with Linux, I found myself at the Windows-dominated 20th annual Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, walking through the biggest Linux PR coup so far.
I asked Torvalds about the "Linux Myths" essay at an informal Comdex press conference. Yes, he had read it, and he noted that Microsoft officials "were very careful to make sure it [the essay] was technically accurate." But he also pointed out how good Microsoft is at selling its products and technology.
The essay, after all, tries to make Linux appear unsuitable for corporate business use, while, at the same time, promoting Windows NT as the answer. With Linux's business presence growing, and with Microsoft likely to start decommissioning Windows NT Server in favor of Windows 2000 Server within a year, the "Linux Myths" essay is more about Windows NT spin than about a basis for IT decision-making.
"With all the recent attention around Linux as an operating system, it's important to step back from the hype and look at the reality. First, it's worth noting that Linux is a Unix-like operating system. Linux fundamentally relies on 30-year-old operating system technology and architecture. Linux was not designed from the ground up to support symmetrical multiprocessing, graphical user interfaces, asynchronous I/O, fine-grained security model, and many other important characteristics of a modern operating system. These architectural limitations mean that as customers look for a platform to cost effectively deploy scalable, secure, and robust applications, Linux simply cannot deliver on the hype."
It's easy enough to look at these conclusions to the essay's opening paragraph another way. Unix, and Unix-like operating systems, have benefited from 30 years of Unix systems research and optimization. What better operating system to deploy in the enterprise than one that is so well understood? One could also point out that Solaris, another operating system based on "30-year-old" technology, is routinely running SMP systems of 16 CPUs or greater. Where are the 32-way NT systems?
Copies of O'Reilly and Associates' just-released The Cathedral And The Bazaar (ISBN 1-56592-724-9), Eric S. Raymond's treatise on the open-source movement, were floating around the show floor at Comdex. The book is a collection of related essays about the open-source and free-software movement, most of which have appeared online over the years. Included is the seminal essay The Cathedral And The Bazaar, which contrasts, roughly, the Free Software Foundation's GNU efforts of the 1980s (the Cathedral approach) vs. the Linux approach (the Bazaar). The most interesting part of the book is Raymond's latest essay, "The Revenge Of The Hackers," where he describes how he and others marketed the "open-source" brand to the Fortune 500. One of their primary goals was to change the "strong association of the term 'free software' with hostility to intellectual property rights, communism, and other ideas hardly likely to endear it to an MIS manager." They developed the brand around the term open source, and, of course, the rest is recent, and fascinating, history.
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