Well, in general terms I agree with the tone of the article and many of its claims: I helped start a couple of $soft Gold partners. Now, as far as making a choice as to which OS - dialtone - we use to host our application stack ... The decision is made based upon a full financial risk model. In this regard $soft loses big time. Linux is a great OS. $soft is too - mainly due to its integrate product suite. However every financial model of cost that we have made has pointed to $soft being the most costly alternative. I really could care less which system we use: We just need to get our requirements me t at the lowest cost point - which includes go forward risk.
I'm planning to get another computer for non-trading use and I will go for Linux for sure. I'm okay with XP but I would like to have alternatives and I'm willing to learn. My trading machine only runs 3 softwares beyond the OS: EXCEL, IB and a charting program(non-java) Does Linus offer good charting programs supported by major data venders? Does Linux based spreadsheet replacements function as good as M$ EXCEL? If I can get good enough softwares on the above areas I will consider switching to Linux on my trading PC.
We use OpenOffice - it is included in the Fedora Core distribution and its "Calc" is very similar to Excel; if you intend to automate it there are differences though. IB runs on Linux - with Java properly installed whcih is a bit trickier but can be done without too much trouble. Your custom charting app may be an issue. Give yourself some time: If you arenot Unix Literate it will take a bit of time to get used to the differences ...
The competition between Linux and M$ is more of business model than technology. I still don't quite understand how the Linux world works. With so many developers making contributions, how can they get coordinated? For Linux fans, can you prove Linux's open source approach is better than the traditional corporate M$?
Cant prove anything ... for us Linux and its associated application stack is much cheaper to administer and maintain - licenses are free - and the software is at least of equal quality and by our measure, is of higher quality. Like Steve Balmer once said when he raised prices "...some companies just dont need our products..." Exactly.
Cool, Here you go again with your "proving". You didn't come back yet with your "solid arguments" questions regarding M$ the of a few days ago. High time you bring us some real meat on the table. A lot of the guys here have been doing their best to help you along a bit. Like to know how Ballmer thinks about Linux? http://linuxtoday.com/it_management/2005092501026OPBZ Cool's business models: http://linuxtoday.com/it_management/2005092501026OPBZ On how Cool's hated Open Sourcers avoid M$'s predicament: http://linuxtoday.com/developer/2005092302726OPDT Catch up Cool, or you may be one of the last few true believers!
I never think M$ is tenically superior, nor do I hate open source. It's a suite of small projects vs. one big platform. I'd like to see more discussion on pros and cons of each model. I only have a couple desktops, no server OS. I'll stay with M$ until Linux gains a significant share on desktops.
Some of them are not so small eg the X11 server. Something like 15 million lines of code. Not only runs on Linux, but virtually all Unices, Windows, MAC, OS/2 and others. And not only x86 but also PPC, SPARC and others. Supports sqillions of video cards unlike MS where the card vendors write the drivers. OpenOffice.org is not exactly small either. Neither is the C/C++ complier gcc, or the Linux kernel for that matter. These are really big software projects made even bigger by their cross platform support. I don't think you'll find size of development project a distingushing factor.
Thanks for the info. Could you tell me how the development of these big open source projects are managed and how the developers are paid?
Hi CoolTrader, If you are truly serious about getting in deeper on this, start with: http://www.linux.org also: http://www.debian.org/doc/ http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml These are not the best introductory sources but give you some idea of the extent of practical systems.