
Wal-Mart Proves Open Source Is Big Business - kungfudoi
http://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2016/07/26/wal-mart-proves-open-source-is-big-business/
======
tonmoy
> The poster child for open source is Linux, a software operating system that
> holds roughly 25-30% of the server market share against formidable
> competitors like Microsoft

I would sure like to see some citation on that claim, to me it feels like it
could be much higher!

~~~
superuser2
Warning: anecdata.

Nearly every traditional small/medium business with Windows machines has an
onsite domain controller and Exchange server. Any store with computer cash
registers probably has a Windows server in the back that they're talking to.
Ditto for card access control systems, parking garage gates, some elevators,
some HVAC systems. Every doctor's office, chain retail store, car dealership,
and cube farm is likely serviced by at least one Windows server (and also
likely a Cisco PBX running IOS).

Linux is dominant for web backends in tech companies, and has some penetration
among large non-tech enterprises for Java apps, but there is really a
staggering amount of Windows out there in the non-tech world, and Linux is not
the default server platforms often as you'd think. (Plus enterprises may be
less hip to virtualization, and run larger server counts for similar
workloads).

Rust belt cities have vibrant Windows Server consulting/service ecosystems
that spend a few service hours a month on a given small business. Those
companies have maybe one or two techs who did a little bit of Linux once.

~~~
tracker1
There's also a surprising number of C#/.Net application deployments for
internal usage and Windows is the default deployment strategy for most of
them. Even well outside the rustbelt. Phoenix, for example, often has more
.Net than Java dev going on.

------
adrianratnapala
I had thought that having superior IT infrastructure was one of the things
that propelled Wal-Mart to success when it was not yet a giant.

I suppose, open-sourcing their stuff back then would have benefited the
competition more than Wal-Mart. It might still do that today -- but now that
it is a giant, they expect the resulting loss in market share to be tiny.

~~~
fweespeech
> I had thought that having superior IT infrastructure was one of the things
> that propelled Wal-Mart to success when it was not yet a giant.

Tbh, of the two companies I know of that deal with Walmart IT...100% of the
people in those two companies think Walmart IT is pretty inept and opaque.

~~~
kminehart
I live in Bentonville and I can tell you it's a mess. They switch IT
contractors every few years because each one agrees to more than it can handle
to get the contract.

Just recently, like 2012-2013, NCR had it. CompuCom made a killer deal which
they couldn't actually afford and cut a lot of corners and provided shitty
service because they didn't hire enough competent staff.

CompuCom lost the contract to NCR again, so everyone in CompuCom got laid off.
Now since Toshiba bought out IBM's "Retail Store Point-of-Sale Solutions
Business", they also hired on their own support team, a lot of them were
previous CompuCom employees. There's layers and layers and layers of tech
support and bureaucracy, it's amazing anything ever gets fixed.

Their inhouse service, "Information Service Desk", or "ISD" is full of people
here on H1B visas, shoulder to shoulder in a huge building called the "David
Glass Technology Center". There are no cubicles, just long rows of tiny tiny
desks.

It's a damn terrifying sight.

~~~
earlz
I have a CS friend who just recently got hired for walmart (not sure on
terminology, but he does some analytics stuff). Your account sounds pretty
accurate to what he described, but add in a dollop of basically every
technology that's ever existed and was ever popular at any point. He's been
there a short time and already had to look into systems running on cobol,
hadoop, oracle database, SQL Server, MySQL, Firebase, C, C++... Pretty much
they hire contractors to implement any new project, and then hire H1-Bs to
maintain it afterwards. He said his job is mostly managing H1-Bs, rather than
actually writing code.

~~~
kminehart
At Toshiba I dealt with Java, C, and CBASIC. I've heard Cobol nightmares
though.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBASIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBASIC)

------
doctorpangloss
Which of the following is from Walmart's open source software's website, and
which is from Silicon Valley?

> Revolutionize the way you report bugs on your mobile platform

> Deploying paxos algorithms for consensus protocols

> Software defined radio for cloud computing

> Accelerating product delivery in the digital economy through continuous
> application lifecycle management

> Scalable, fault tolerant, distributed databases with ACID transactions

~~~
abritinthebay
I mean... Walmart Labs IS part of the valley (ok, Brisbane south of SF, but
still), so...

------
deepuj
> "The poster child for open source is Linux, a software operating system that
> holds roughly 25-30% of the server market share"

That doesn't sound right? I'd assume it is way higher.

~~~
learc83
I thought the same thing. A quick google search shows a pretty large variation
in reported statistics depending on what's being sampled.

W3Techs checks the top 10 million sites on the internet and they report
something close to 1/3 Windows, 1/3 Linux, and 1/3 unknown Unix. My guess is
that a fairly large chunk of unknown Unix is Linux.

W3Cook checks the top 1 million sites, and they report 2% Windows and 98%
Unix.

~~~
superuser2
That's websites.

Basically every brick-and-mortar business with more than a couple of computers
has a Windows Sever domain controller and Exchange server in a closet
somewhere. It does not generally host the website.

------
walmartianthrow
Misleading content about One Ops.

> Why give away something that you created yourself that gives your company an
> advantage?

One Ops was an acquisition. They didn't create it. It's incredibly bad. But
don't take my word for it, check out the nightmare of an entire platform built
on chef cookbooks on GitHub. My biggest complaint isn't even code quality. It
just doesn't work. Almost every single action fails and requires manual
intervention.

Walmart has ideas that look good on paper, and horrible execution. I'm sure
that the idea of a "cloud agnostic tool for building auto scaling self healing
clusters" sounded great. In practice it seems to offer about 10% of open stack
features. When it works.

~~~
DanielDent
To be fair, OpenStack doesn't exactly have a reputation of "just working".
It's really more a framework for building infrastructure. That's why there are
entire consultancies and OS distributions to help people successfully deploy
OpenStack.

------
Fuxy
Add blocker naggware... sigh oh well I'm no reading that.

~~~
larrik
I'm about to the point that I may just start flagging all NYT/Forbes/WSJ
articles.

~~~
detaro
given that the mods have multiple times said that paywalled articles are ok,
don't expect that to do much

~~~
Fuxy
Nothing against paywall articles everybody is allowed to make money however
they like I would like the option to filter them out though.

If I can prevent them from showing up in my list I'm ok with it.

~~~
krapp
>If I can prevent them from showing up in my list I'm ok with it.

Hacker News supports hiding stories now, so you're free to filter as you like.

~~~
Fuxy
Is there an option to hide pay walled stories because I don't see it.

Can you tell me where it is?

~~~
krapp
The option to hide paywalled stories is the same as with any other story - if
you see a story you want to hide, click the 'hide' link.

It's literally no more work than flagging it (which is an abuse of flagging
rights), and less work than complaining about it (which is off-topic ranting.)

~~~
Fuxy
You do realize that completely defeats the prosperous of what I'm asking for
right?

A setting that would hide every pay-walled article would avoid me ranting on
it because I never see it.

On the other hand in your situation I seed the article title get intrigued
click on it get pay-walled and then I get pissed off and hide it.

The purpose or hiding it is to avoid aggravation not hiding it for the sake of
hiding it.

~~~
krapp
>On the other hand in your situation I seed the article title get intrigued
click on it get pay-walled and then I get pissed off and hide it.

Yes. Because paywalled articles aren't off topic here (as has already been
established by the staff), but rage-posting about them is.

I suspect many of the people who do post indignant comments about paywalls are
aware an article is paywalled to begin with, as the usual suspect domains and
sites are well known.

If it happens that you didn't know, now you're aware that Forbes uses
paywalls, so it should be easy for you to simply choose to never click on a
link from Forbes on Hacker News again.

The correct solution is to either hide the article or ignore it - or, indeed,
to click on it, see that it's paywalled, and then hide it or ignore it.

The topic of this thread is "Wal-Mart Proves Open Source Is Big Business" not
"Fuxy is triggered by advertising." If you refuse to engage with the article
on any meaningful level, then don't engage with the thread, it's that simple.

