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Re: Things heat up -> RE: Your article about Linux (fwd)



On Fri, 25 Apr 1997, Stas Bekman wrote:

> I think I'm getting threated !!!

to put it in a mild tone, you were pretty agressive in your reply. I
commented the article myself to him, and I was pretty angry myself, but
what you did is considdered as a real flame for an Englishman I suppose...

Forwarding my contribution (no need to bomb the guy any further people,
I'm sure he got dozens of letters by now)

----------Forward-------------
From: ira@scso.com
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 1997 10:13:58 +0300 (IDT)
From: Ira Abramov <ira@scso.com>
To:   an77@dial.pipex.com
Subject: feedback on article from April 20th: Linux = Antichrist?


Dear Mr. Hewson,

The URL of your article was sent to me by a friend. I would like to
comment about a few small disturbing sentences.

The Internet was born more-or-less with the invention of TCP-IP. IP was in
turn born in Berkley, on their famous BSD Unix platform. I would hardly
call the Unix family an "old Computer Donkey" since it is still the
operating system of choice for many Intranets, and I believe for over 60%
of the servers on the Internet.

Repeat: the operating system choice for SERVERS.
I don't read the magazine in question, I have no idea what drove them to
give Linux away as a "fun app", because it isn't. Linux is a very strong
and stable Network operating system. Like Latin it's hard to learn but
will do everything for you if you need and more... It is definitely NOT
for the average home user, or even the average power user, not as a
desktop workstation anyway.

As for achieving things "the long way around", liking it and hating
Microsoft for it, I'm sorry to put it this way, but "you got it all
wrong". Microsoft is a company with good ideas, AMAZING marketing people
but a lot of problems with bug fixing, security bugs included. Unix came
before it with smarter file systems and smarter memory management, yet
Microsoft did not use the 25 YO knowledge of the UNIX experts and built
their own systems. Resault: win95 has to be rebooted once a day on a
heavily worked machine like mine to free the buffers, NT servers have to
be rebooted once a month because the memory gets fragmented. comparing to
Netware or Unix servers of any kind (Linux included) that I have installed
or managed along the years, which could reach 10-18 months (!) between
reboots, and even those were mainly for hardware upgrades and not system
failures.
As for doing things the long way around, That conclusion can't be more
wrong. Unix systems come with many tools DOS systems dream of! For text
manipulating, task manipulating and amazingly powerfull yet elegant
commandline options, this has always been the operating system of my
choice. I agree though that for Multimedia and as a GUI, I still use win95
too.

This "geek flavour of the month" OS, has been around for 3-4 years as a
fully working OS, and as a well recognizable legitimate server platform
for the last two years since the big bang on the Internet. Mid-sized
organizations use it as a database server, file server, dial-up, web and
more, almost every MIS dept. manager has heard about it by now, entire
Internet Service providers are building their business around it. 
Estimates set the installed base of Linux machines in the world at up to 5
million (!!). I think it deserves more respect from a technical reporter
of such an esteemed publication such as yours, instead of calling it "a
nasty freak show from hell".

One thing I am willing to admit. Linux sites on the WWW do tend to give
the average surfer a feeling that a bunch of highly unorganized weirdos
from around the world built this to get back at Gates' empire of doom.
Trueth is, the gang of weirdos is there, it is VERY organized in parts and
unorganized in others, one fact is undenyable: they wrote an A-Z operating
system, which is something Microsft has not reached yet. I have an NT
server here and I can tell you: it's a lot less busy than my Linux
Internet server (I'm a provider myself) but it crashes many times, and
runs generally unstable. In my line of work as an on-site consultant and
administrator (among my customers: the Israeli ministry of Education, the
Jerusalem municipality, the Hebrew University and the Knesset), I deal
daily with many technologies and topologies for networks, and I have yet
to find Linux' equal in versatility and stability, especially outside of
the Unix world. 

The fact it is freeware does not mean technology inferiority, it means
more people in the world review the sources, fix bugs faster, add features
with better implementation. tHe people who develop Linux are many times
programmers and system administrators who find certain features lacking in
expensive commercial flavours of Unix. Sometimes cutting edge programming
concepts Sun and IBM are afraid to implement in their products can be
implemented and made to work faster only on such platforms. Among the
companies that have contributed to Linux are Netscape, Sun, NASA, Caldera,
quite a few Universities' Computers personel and even Novell. NASA
actually ran tests on board their shuttles managed from laptops running
Linux! 

I hope this letter somehow does some justice to Linux, I hope your next
article about it will be examining it from the Network administration
angle, and not the end user's.

Respectfully,
	Ira Abramov

   -------------------------------------------------------------
   Ira Abramov          <ira@scso.com>        Scalable Solutions
   POBox 3600, Jerusalem 91035, Israel       Tel (972)2-642-6822
   See Also: http://www.linux.org.il








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