Interesting News this week

Some interesting Linux news items have caught my attention the past week or so.

Suse is set to roll Sun Microsystems’ Grid Engine as a standard componenet of its Professional Edition. The Grid engine is designed to create a networked distributed computing environment. It’s been interesting to see the rise of distributed computing over the past few years. Though distributed computing capabilities have, in theory, been available for many years, mainstream interest really seems to have started with the SETI@Home project. The primary market for the Grid Engine seems to be in the arenas of scientific research, financial services, and other processor-intensive specialty areas. Harnessing and sharing the power of multiple computers can, by and large, reduce problem-solving time. It’s good to see Suse including this package for the Linux world.

Despite the fact that a firm release date for Lindows seems to fade in the rear view mirror with each passing day, Michael Robertson, Lindows’ CEO, continues to throw pebbles at Microsoft. In his latest “Michael’s Minutes” missive, he’s in classic form. In six paragraphs, he attempts to explain why Lindows is the OS of the future by comparing the Lindows vision to that of Microsoft. Personally, I’d much rather hear about the features of the OS than to feel as if I’m being cajoled to make an OS decision I’ve already made.

That aside, I still have two fairly grave reservations about Lindows. The first is the intermingling of Windows and Linux. At some level it seems like pouring mustard into your margarita. I’m not convinced that adding Windows functionality to Linux is, in fact, an improvement to Linux. I’m afraid that what you’ll end up with is a product that doesn’t accurately reflect the strenths of either OS - something that looks like a margarita but tastes much worse and causes indigestion to boot.

The “Insider Release” of Lindows has been so well guarded that virtually no one I’ve spoken with has seen it. I could easily be wrong about the mustard margarita. In fact, I’d love to be wrong in this case. However, given the pace of development and the secrecy with which Lindows has locked down the actual product, there’s no meaningful way to judge the merits of the OS. We have to rely, instead, on Michael Robertson’s thin rhetoric; “Lindows is good because Microsoft is bad.” It is, ultimately, the antithesis of the open source philosophy to rely strictly on someone’s opinion of a product, especially one in which they have a financial stake. We Linux users are tinkerers at our core, capable of judging the merits of our OS only by opening it up and putting it to tests that are meaningful to us. One has to wonder if the secrecy surrounding the Insider Edition of Lindows is a taste of things to come. It occurs to me that combining this OS lockbox with the pay Lindows model looks much more like a Windows strategy than something from the open source world. And it raises troubling questions. What will be the nature of the licensing on any final Lindows product? Will the core code follow open source licensing? Will users pay for updates and new releases?

While I’d certainly like to see Lindows succeed, there are still too many unknowns for any level of comfort.

Tony
Steidler-Dennison