In Linux we trust?

Software Magazine, Sept, 1998 by Ann Harrison

Randy Kessell, manager of technical analysis for a Southwestern Bell operation center, notes that because Linux allows his company to do more remote network administration and software loads than was possible with either Microsoft or NetWare products, it has driven down their network management costs. He adds that his company is thinking about replacing their NT network server with Linux. "Our preliminary tests show that the Linux solution is outrunning the NT solution," says Kessell. "It's much faster."

Of course, not everybody sees it that way. "The bad news about open source is that it requires you to make a lot of difficult decisions," says Walter Nelson, vice president of software engineering and product management at Fair, Isaac and Co. Inc. The San Rafael, Calif.-based company develops financial applications for Chase Manhattan and the top 20 banks in North America, but it has no plans for Linux. Nelson agrees that open source software offers flexibility, but says it requires more sophisticated IS capabilities than many businesses can support. "It means that you are using a wide range of multi-vendor components to try and construct your system," says Nelson. He says IT expenses are driving managers toward NT solutions that are integrated, work smoothly off the shelf and into which components can be added over time. "That kind of under-the-hood engineering ii not what banks want to get involved with. What they want are functions that they can implement and maintain easily."

Overcoming NT Simplicity

While developers like Nelson are uneasy about the Linux learning curve, Linux supporters say they will overcome the attraction of NT's simplicity by selling its reliability. Ben Wittard, who is using Linux to run 90 print servers worldwide for Cisco Systems, says his managers are beginning to notice that his system has had no downtime for years. "Linux is an incredibly robust, very usable operating system," says Wittard. "It was incredibly cheap and very effective for our needs."

Linux advocates point to the relative stability of open source workhorses like TCP/IP, DNS, and Peri, which keep the Web running more smoothly than any commercial equivalent. They note that 80% of all Internet E-mail is routed by an OSS called Sendmail. As more businesses start to depend on the Web, they argue that access to source code becomes more significant to programmers and Web site operators.

As the complexity of software increases, OSS allows the number of people analyzing these programs to increase proportionately. Critics of proprietary software charge that as these programs get bigger, the relatively small number of in-house and beta testers means that more bugs will slip through. In the open source model, says Raymond, the large number of co-developers means there's a greater chance of catching problems, even in complex systems. With enough eyeballs, he says, all bugs are shallow. Boeing's Devereaux notes, for example, that if he has a problem with the way an optimization works under a compiler, sending the problem to Sun may or may not elicit a response. "But if I put it out as a problem report onto GNU or a newsgroup," he says, "I could have a fix to that within days."