Comments on: Why Larry loves Linux (and he's not alone)

By: Bill, Sarasota, FL

Bill, Sarasota, FL — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 14:54:27 +0000

Larry better like open source. Anyone who has ever seen his "iEnterprise" package for Windows vomits! Imagine in his iProcurement, none of the windows expand for fields!! Thats right, if your words or account numbers are too large, you have to enter the fields and scroll right to see the rest of the information. It is absolute garbage that governments and companies are being tricked into buying. Its a pathetic Windows front end on the obiously old, tired, antique Oracle DOS database. Heck, MS Office did more for data entry ten years ago than this Oracle garbage does now.

By: Stormy, OpenLogic, Berthoud, CO

Stormy, OpenLogic, Berthoud, CO — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:58:17 +0000

The article talks about companies making money from open source and all the examples are companies using pre-existing open source. There are also a lot of companies making money because they open sourced something. Like MySQL.

By: Steve, Hollywood, CA

Steve, Hollywood, CA — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 13:58:13 +0000

The author's claim that the IDC report states Windows server growth is outpacing Linux is factually wrong. The IDC report states Windows revenue is outpacing Linux revnue. Remember, Linux costs less (sometime free depending on your version) so that makes sense. I do like the author's point of the article though. From Jon Fortt: The IDC report is about growth rates, which appeared to slow for Linux in 2006. It doesn't particularly matter whether you're measuring growth using units or revenues, the overall point holds. I'll personally want to see more data before coming to conclusions about a Windows surge/Linux slowdown, but IDC's data is what it is.

By: Jim, Boulder, CO

Jim, Boulder, CO — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:44:07 +0000

OpenSolaris needs to be included in articles like this. http://opensolaris.org

By: Richard, CA

Richard, CA — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:53:21 +0000

To the guys claiming OS X itself is open source just because Darwin is, I'd like to point out that Microsoft includes some technologies in Windows that are open source too, but that hardly makes Windows itself open source. The only way an operating system can be called "open source" is if anyone can take the publically available source code, recompile it, and use it to run the same applications as could be run from the "official" version. Neither OS X nor Windows pass this most basic test.

By: Marc , Santa Clara, CA

Marc , Santa Clara, CA — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:33:30 +0000

It seems these is some confusion around "open source" here. Is the operating system for MacOSX based on open source software: yes. Is the operating system for MacOSX open source: no.

Not all the open source licenses are viral and place an obligation to keep the code as open source when used in a project.

By: Michael Brown, Baltimore, MD

Michael Brown, Baltimore, MD — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:18:12 +0000

Apple darwin though IS NOT Apple OS X or the iPhone OS. All open source Darwin Apple OS ended in 2006.

By: Jalesh Dikshit, Sunnyvale, CA

Jalesh Dikshit, Sunnyvale, CA — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:58:14 +0000

One more variant of Unix. Microsoft Windows SDK has serious documentation problems makes it useless. Latest version of SQLServer has copied all the features of Oracle including snapshots and connect by prior. Oracle can come up with new HTML (HTML6?), just implement SQL*Forms 3.0 with a new mime type, the .inp file show both HTML and JavaScript (event triggers).

By: Chris, San Carlos California

Chris, San Carlos California — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:15:27 +0000

"From Jon Fortt: Are you really arguing with my statement that OS X isn’t an open-source operating system? "

Given the way you wrote your article, yes – your conclusion is arguable. The article points out that Oracle has had success by integrating open source software into it's business. Then, the last paragraph offers Apple as a counter example – even though Apple has had success by integrating open source software into it's business.

You need a better example. pretty silly.

By: drpooville

drpooville — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:08:28 +0000

FYI, Oracle's great Linux operating system, let's not forget, is a near exact copy (minus the trademarked images, etc) of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux.

You should have done the piece on Red Hat, not Oracle. And please, update your information to reflect the facts.