Forbes Ventures Bold Predictions For IT, Linux 387
LinuxThis writes "Everyone's favorite, Daniel Lyons and other Forbes journalists have made some bold predictions about IT in 2004. Interesting quotes include 'Microsoft warms up to open source, and tries to make a buck off it', and the best, from our main man Daniel Lyons himself: 'The end of 'free'. Free didn't work for dotcom pet food stores, yet much of the rhetoric around technologies like Linux and voiceover-IP still involves this crazy notion that companies can make money by giving things away. They can't.' Even better, he suggests: 'SCO Group will settle its lawsuit against IBM. Both sides will declare victory. The Linux community will turn on IBM.' This is interesting considering his previous observations about OSS.."
Not Exactly (Score:3, Informative)
Morons (Score:5, Informative)
The shills at Forbes are so obsessed with money that they have no understanding at all of the technical aspects of SCO vs. IBM, and live in a reality distortion field. Remember the outrageous article that called linux users terrorists? And of course, the "Linux's hit men" article showed that the author is unable to perceive the difference between GPL and public domain. These people are mentally retarded, there's nothing else to describe them.
If they were dealing with an entity with lots of money they would likely have been sued for libel or whatever, but since its a community they can take their liberties with their "analysis" and "predictions". When I looked at Truman holding up a copy the Chicago Daily Tribune [uncp.edu] making fun of the analysts' predictions (in the recent cell phones article), I realized that this is perhaps what we need. And in fact, slashdot could be the ideal vehicle for that. What I mean is, if we had articles laughing at them and ridiculing them and exposing their idiocy every time one of their tech "predictions" went hopelessly wrong, and if some other news outlets picked up on it once in a while, then may be it would knock some sense into these morons' heads.
IBM, Linux (Score:3, Informative)
I disagree that IBM will settle with SCO. That prediction is just plain silly.
I do agree that the Linux community will turn against IBM, not not for any reason Lyons would be able to see from his relatively technology-free writing cubicle.
The Linux community will turn against IBM after the SCO dragon has been laid waste and after the community figures out IBM's model for making money from Linux. There aren't too many mysteries in the former, but the latter seems little understood. Yet.
IBM is making money right now from Linux, not by charging for Linux itself (although they slipped recently and wrote of "licensing Linux" in the same terms as their oldline OSs, a Marketing brain fart, no doubt) but by charging the user for permission to use the CPU.
How can this be? Don't you own the CPU?
Well, yes and no. If it's a traditional IBM PC or pre-pSeries RS/6000, yes, you own the CPU(s) and you can run any free software you can manage to load. If you look carefully, though, you will notice that such straightforward platform designs are disappearing from the IBM landscape.
The trick lies in the mainframe-izing of unix and Intel chips as they are packaged and offered by IBM, following a very old model that has served them well since the 1950s. Imagine a PC for which you have to pay an annual proprietary BIOS license and you'll begin to see how this works. Sure, load any OS you want, but you can't load and run it without the help of the BIOS, and the license fee you'll pay for permission (and software) with which to do that will be based on the OS you want to run. IBM is not going to allow itself to be trapped into competing in the commodity server box market.
In the 1950s, when punch card machines were all the rage, IBM didn't sell them to customers -- they rented them. Your punch card machines would be delivered chock full of features, mostly in the form of expensive relays hidden under the skirts, but the Customer Engineer would install and remove jumpers to disable any of the features you weren't paying to use. The profit margins were so high that even in those days of super-expensive hardware the fact of millions of disabled relays sitting unused in customer machines was a cost IBM was easily able to absorb.
The way this translated to IBM's mainframe scheme, which they are now moving to the "new" RS/6000 -- the pSeries platforms -- and others, including the Intel-based "z" machines, is to surround the processor(s) with a complex of hardware and software such that you can't gain access to the CPU(s) without licensed IBM software that is separate and distinct from the OS. What it boils down to is that yes, you can buy the CPU(s) but no, you don't have permission to use the CPU(s) without paying recurring license fees exclusive of whatever, if anything, the OS may cost.
Right now you can run Linux on monster S/390 mainframes, but not for free. In the S/390 world you have to pay for a license to use each processor in a S/390. How much you pay depends on the value IBM has placed on the use to which you want to put the processor. It might cost $250,000 to "open" a processor for MVS but only $125,000 to "open" the same processor for Linux. To the Linux community member unfamiliar with IBM's mainframe business model this may seem like cause to retch and reach for the barf bag, but for mainframe customers well-accustomed to paying Big Bucks to IBM for everything, including the time of day, it's an incredible bargain.
With the introduction of the pSeries platforms ("pSeries" is not just a new name for the RS/6000 line), IBM's mainframe business model has arrived in the PowerPC unix server world. Same for IBM's Intel-based "z" platforms. The older RS/6000s will be orphaned as IBM drops support for them
Re:Daniel Lyons is a -1, Troll (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.forbes.com/technology/enterprisetech/2
It was rather inflammatory.
SCO litigation - it's not just IBM (Score:3, Informative)
There's going to be a break in the case this month, though. The judge gave SCO 30 days to state exactly what the supposed "infringements" are. Those 30 days run out on January 12, 2004.