| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | On Fri, Nov 24, 2023 at 12:19 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk < | talk@gtalug.org> wrote: | | It seems to me that Linux has won and been commoditized on the server side. | > No high-level discussion needs to address this. Several distros are good | > enough and almost interchangeable in abilities. | > | | Agreed. | | The whole CentOS/Rocky/Alma/Oracle/SUSE/RHEL dustup has brought some | instability to the realm (and for those of us old enough, bears remarkable | resemblance of the old SysV/OSF1 wars). Ditto some of the jerk moves | Canonical seems to be doing to leverage the Ubuntu base. But I think that | these instabilities will settle down, even if they only evolve into | stalemates. | | On the PC side, if you don't wish to demand a dedicated machine, you | > have to fit into what the market has. | > 1. Windows of various vintages | > 2. MacOS. | > 99. Linux. | > | | People want virtual dedicated desktops, for something other than UI | testing? Uh, OK. | Where do Chromebooks fit into this? I was talking about an application publisher. If they want to run on the user's existing PC... | Old Unicorns came from different times. 25 years ago, it wasn't obvious | > that Linux would be where it is (and isn't). | > | | Speak for yourself. 🙂 | | I was kinda certain that Linux would overtake Unix early in its life; that | feeling was confirmed when the first Beowulf clusters came online and DEC | imploded in the late 90s, and fully cemented when Oracle bought Sun less | than a decade later. The increasing commoditization of PC components | combined with the neverending balkanization of Unix hardware increasingly | made the progression to dominance inevitable, the main issue was how long | it would take. 25 years ago, it was clear Unix was not much of a contender. And Windows NT looked like a winner. You could choose to build a Unicorn on Windows in the cloud. I think you'd be nuts to use Windows now. | Netflix uses NetBSD for at least some stuff. Making a decision like that | > today would take serious conviction. | > | | BSD is still a good choice for some, so long as they're OK with | self-support. It failed to get Linux's mindshare for two unrelated reasons: So you are agreeing, right? | - They got caught up in their own little petty Unix wars in the 90s, | just when the world was looking for some platform stability (that Microsoft | and Apple were providing on desktops). Going with one Linux distro over | another, especially on the server side, was far less of a critical decision | than choosing Open- or Net- or FreeBSD. | | - Also, the GPL enabled big vendors to contribute code without a | competitor being able to take it and re-lock it proprietary, as Apple | famously did to BSD-licensed code in Project Darwin. The GPL enabled the | old Ray Noorda philosophy of "co-opetition" which BSD could never match | | | | > | Does anyone on the list actually know (as in personal experience) | > | whether/which (or even if) most tech unicorns are Linux based or with a | > | Linux origin story? | > | > That may be interesting history but I doubt that it is worth consideration | > for a new business. | > | | Agreed. Linux is infrastructure, not a factor in whether an effort gets | funded or expands. Or even work. In other words, it isn't an innovation any longer. | More interesting is to figure out how to use the cloud without being tied | > to a particular vendor. | > | | Both the choice of OS and where hosted is infrastructure, operational | issues, and rarely part of a startup's pitch. If there is a privacy or | security component to the proposal's added value the hosting may be a | factor (ie, not hosted in a Five Eyes country) but I think even that is | less of a factor with revelations that much claimed protection is an | illusion | <https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/08/08/protonmail-fbi-search-led-to-a-suspect-threatening-a-2020-election-official/> | . Yeah, I was grasping at straws. There is room for innovation in infrastructure but it is hard to become a unicorn there since the area is mostly occupied by giants: - Amazon - Microsoft - Google - Oracle... Being cloud platform agnostic is smart. How you do it isn't something I know much about. I vaguely remember that Netflix can switch platforms. (The few tech people that I know of there are fairly impressive.) That's probably very useful when negotiating with their cloud providers. --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk