I just found the ZDNet article "EDS: Linux is insecure, unscalable" via slashdot. It's funny. But I wasn't sure how to title this blog entry:
- "Four Year Old Rhetoric"
- "Those that don't pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it"
- "It didn't stop us choosing UNIX when *I* worked at EDS"
The thing that is stunning is the level of tired vapid vendor rhetoric here. Are we surprised at the opinions of an alliance that contains Sun (really Solaris is better than any Linux), Microsoft (Windows Über Alles), and Oracle (Pay no attention to the MySQL behind the curtain) — probably not.
The interesting bit for me comes from personal history. I was at EDS in the late eighties. Our core team knew more about VAX/VMS than many places. (We weren't learning much at DECUS any more.) We worshipped at the Wall of Orange. And we were very tired of the DEC sales team trying to push us up the hardware life cycle to support their market capitalization, and the licensing arguments when we tried to use cheaper memory, or disks-other-than-Digital-disks.
Almost any vendor's "UNIX" in 1990 was less secure, less scalable, less robust than ANY other mini-computer of it's time, and especially VMS. But every vendor had one. And so as much as we thought VMS was an incredibly engineering friendly product that we knew inside out, and the obvious deficiencies in the UNIX systems of the day, we started writing new applications on UNIX systems, and migrating other applications over, using the [then] new POSIX.1 and ISO/ANSI C standards. We didn't actually care about Digital's market cap. They unfortunately didn't care about our systems problems. They made the mistake of forgetting that as customers, it was our money, and that they weren't "special", even if they had superior technology to sell.
A lot of people don't realize that the POSIX Wars weren't about standardizing UNIX. It was standardizing the mini-computer. Customers like choice. And as Christensen points out, when a market begins to be over-served by the dominant vendor, the call for standards happens to encourage implementation choice.
Update: Always good to see confusion reign supreme in a large organization. Here's EDS stating how great Linux is as well, both on its own site and in the news from Australia.
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