[Moving rapidly away from LKM] (Was: Re: [OT] New Anti-Terrorism Law makes "hacking" punishable by life in)

["Henning P. Schmiedehausen" <mailgate@hometree.net>]

Helge Hafting <helgehaf@idb.hist.no> writes:

>And the one to blame here isn't the virus writer.  The ones to blame
>are:
>1. Whoever decided to install that vulnerable software.

"The ones to blame are not the people that build the bombs. The ones
to blame are the people that live in normal houses with normal locks
or even let their doors open instead of living in fortified bunkers
and shoot everyone on sight".

Come on. I may not know what's right, but I know this can't be it.

The blame is on both sides. On the people that write the stuff and the
ones that are not able to install the most basic defenses on their
business critical systems.

>   This one isn't popular because it is someone inside the company. 

I don't think so. I'd say 6 of 10 systems in larger companies are
installed either by the vendor via their own "consulting branch" or by
a "vendor certified partner" or by a hired consulting branch. Most of
the bigger companies have _enough_ to do with just keeping this stuff
running. Or they even hire outside resources to run their stuff.

[...Your argumentation goes downhill from here...]

Fact is: Most companies don't install IIS just because they're
Microsoft slaves. They install it, because another 3rd party
application that depends on yet another application that needs another
piece of software to run is only available on (you may already have
guessed it) WIN32. OLE, Visual Basic and all the heavily glued
together windows stuff. That is what drags people to the WIN32.
And once you're here, you use IIS. Not Apache. Not iPlanet.

Not just the "nice icons to click" that most of the clueless here seem
to think.

Try to set up an Oracle development shop in an "all Solaris, all
Linux" environment. You can't get 99% of the frontends for your
platform? Too bad. Others do and they're working faster than you."

Try that with Intershop. With Cache. Other Borland stuff. SAP R/3. You
get all the backends for Linux. The frontends?

Even Java development is easier with WIN32 (though JBuilder and
NetBeans run quite usable under Linux). But the native SUN JDK runs
faster on Win32 than on their own Sparc platform. Than on Linux. Why?
Because Sun throws all of its engineering efforts into WIN32 and not
into Sparc?

I know all about the "ok, let's use Linux in our back office and WIN32
just on the desktops" mentality. But you might not understand that
companies then have to hire not just one but two people. One to admin
the desktops, one for the back ends. In times when getting a single
clueful individual is hard to do. And budget cuts say "we get _one_
admin. Not two."

So you go for an uniform solution to the problem. Use one platform for
everything. Linux loses in such shops every time.

When companies like IBM, Oracle and SAP spell "commitment to Linux" as
"we port _everything not just our servers to Linux", then Linux get a
chance here. I don't see this.

And what has all of this to do with Linux kernel? 

	Regards
		Henning




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Dipl.-Inf. (Univ.) Henning P. Schmiedehausen       -- Geschaeftsfuehrer
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