Mad Penguin has published a short review of the Penguicon 4.0 convention and has an interview with Chris DiBona of Google. When asked what percentage of people at Google use Linux, he replied: “Probably way more than half. I don’t know the exact ratios though. All the developers use it and most of the engineers and sysadmins.”
When asked what percentage of people at Google use Linux, he replied: “Probably way more than half. I don’t know the exact ratios though. All the developers use it and most of the engineers and sysadmins.”
When your infrastructure is based on linux chances are good you will be using linux. I wouldn’t have expected him to say anything different. Only 2 departments that probably don’t use it are finance department and the windows applications development department. The rest are all all engineers either working with the servers and hardware or developers doing the web based applications.
It’s the geek factor being displayed here ‘cos most of the people that work in Google are developers…
If that’s the case then why is Google Desktop, Google Earth, Picasa etc. Windows only at the moment?
Well, maybe it’s because 95% of the world still uses computers with WindowsOS… Not sure, though…
With the release of SUSE 10.1 that will soon change. Windows will have the marketshare of IRIX when Novell is done with Microsoft.
You keep telling yourself that bud. When it comes to alternative OSes, at least people have actually heard of Apple. Most people think Linux is a laundry detergent. Nobody, other than a geek, is going to download their OS off of the internet, and people aren’t going to buy SuSE when they already have a working windows installation and SuSE won’t run all (or most) of the software they have purchased for Windows.
By the time SuSE 10.2, 10.3, 11.0 are all released, Novell will maybe have increased Linux’s market share for consumers a percent or two. The consumer market simply doesn’t want Linux.
And by the way, I run Linux (as well as OS X), and have tried to get people to use it. They hate it. The very second I tell them to drop to the command line, they want it removed from their computer. The second I tell them to use OpenOffice or else buy Crossover Office, they hate it. With OS X and Windows, you don’t have to use the command line, and MS Office is native on both.
Edited 2006-05-11 18:26
Well then people need to quit crying about Windows viruses if they are ignorant enough to keep using the OS even when they know the dangers. Windows is a security risk, you cant secure it. Its not going to get better. Only a fool would think Windows Vista will change that.
Edited 2006-05-11 23:35
Exactly my thought, since I just installed Google Desktop yesterday.
“All the developers use it”
but not _exclusively_, so he might be still right 😉
Do you think developers use Google Desktop? GD is a purely desktop/enduser thing.
If a google developer wants search on his linux desktop he can well use beagle. Works better than GD anyway.
Developers do not “use” Google Desktop, they “develope” Google Desktop. Duh!
And you can well do it on a devel-machine remotely (with rdesktop), and still use your comfortable linux desktop.
Even if all the developers for the windows applications used windows, they’d still be a vast minority of the developers in Google. Most of the development is for internal use, obviously.
The code that runs the searches, the portal, gmail, maps, and so on… not to mention all the code needed to manage all that thousands of machines in the goo-cluster, to ensure they run well, and so on.
All google’s (server) machines are linux ones, so obviously most of the developers use that.
If Chris is against DRM he needs to quit supporting and working for a company that uses DRM.
really new stuff man ;-D
…called FLOSS Weekly, part of the TWiT network:
http://www.twit.tv/
This week he interviews Miguel de Icaza. The one with the Firefox guy (Goodger? don’t remember the name) was nice too.