Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

I'm with Richard Stallman. One can hope the good developers will avoid United Linux as they would avoid a bad disease.

Steven R. Bryant
Network Manager
Henderson, Daily, Withrow & DeVoe
bryant@hdlegal.com

Having been in the heat of the Unix revolution, I've long laughed at Linux open source, viewing it as a weak echo of the open-systems movement of 20 years ago. With the shelves filling up with competing distributions, the natural next step in following the Unix debacle is to start a war over unifying Linux. Wake me when the war is over--if there is anything left of the Linux dream then.

I have long felt that platform software is not a product so much as it is a service. The value is not in the source code but in the support. No software platform is worth paying for without the R&D behind it to ensure future success. No one wants to invest time and energy learning to program yet another soon-to-be-forgotten platform.

Linux, thus, has a very tenuous hold on value. Only to the degree that Linux evolves does it have value, and if it evolves it risks breaking the very stability and compatibility that a unified Linux aims to achieve! Certainly, Microsoft has followed every fad in programming over the past decade, "innovating" far too much. But the bulk of Linux is right where I left Unix a decade ago. All that volunteer R&D has succeeded in duplicating in open source what we had, but that is far from being enough to succeed over the next decade.

I am afraid there is no easy path to success for members of the Linux community. If they want to have the impact of a Microsoft, they will have to sell their souls to a CEO as paranoid, single-minded, motivated and cutthroat as Bill Gates--if they can find one. And then, if they show glimmers of success, they will have to keep Bill from buying them!

We definitely need a standard platform that hits the right balance between stability and innovation. We need to break the grip of "closed" software for security and reliability reasons. But at the moment I see no leaders appearing with the mix of technology and market insight necessary to bring Linux out of the "also ran" category.

Charles W. Flink
AT&T Labs (retired)
cwf@att.net

Not Hype, Baloney!
I just read Dave Molta's May 27, 2002 column, "Cutting Through Wireless Hype". Why didn't he just come out and say it? Wireless is slow!

I run a microbe of an IT outsourcing company in Hawaii. Our client networks don't exceed 50 nodes, but nevertheless each day I field questions about wireless. The talkers' game is to save on the cost of installing copper or fiber; my time is wasted dispelling the hype they've come to believe will let them all work on the beach or swagger into a conference room brandishing that new super slim Vaio. My spiel has become routine.

Me: "It takes about five seconds to save that Photoshop file to the server, and about three seconds to retrieve those PDFs from the mail server, right?"

Them: "Uh-uh"

Me: "Why would you want to make all that take 10 times longer?"

Them: "Huh?"

Forget cutting through hype. What case can be made for wireless at all? The premise is a myth promoted by an industry that can't cut it in the fixed-cabling world.

But to be fair, let's say that someday 802.x can push a 10-GB file in less than a second. Is everybody going to work on just a PDA, without their sticky notes, pen cups, tape dispensers, staplers and pictures of their spouses within arm's reach?

The wireless industry forgets that workers need to make nests so the eight-hour grind feels a bit homier. Managers need those workers to stay put and do their jobs. An Ethernet jack is already the perfect complement to the ways of a real work force.

Yeah, there are exceptions: the supervisor on the factory floor, the sales rep in the field and the tech in the trenches. Inevitably, they save all their data until they can get back to their desks, where they know their workstations have fast, reliable connections with mapped server drives logged on since the beginning of the week.

I have one customer who enjoys wireless. He writes legal briefs on his Apple iBook and uploads them to the office server via an Apple Airport, all while sitting by his pool in Kailua. It would be a perfect picture if it weren't for the extension cord running across the deck.

Kent Roller
President
Island Network Solutions
kent@islandnetworksolutions.com

Dave Molta responds: I always tell people that if you can do it with cable, you're better off. There's no question that lots of people and organizations are just wowed by wireless technology. However, when mobility is an important element of an organization's business processes, wireless makes economic sense. And you don't always need 100 Mbps of bandwidth to get work done. The irony of your letter is that wireless networking got started in Hawaii, with Alohanet.