Linux has been an overnight phenomenon, but it is yet to penetrate
the mission-critical market, says Danny Bradbury
Where did Linux come from?
Linux is an operating system
that was started 10 years ago by Finnish student Linus Torvalds a
university project. The system, which offers many of the same
features as the Unix OS, has now become a huge industry force. It
is developed under the GNU Public License - a software licence
designed to enable software to be distributed freely, which makes
source code openly available.
Can you explain Linux's fame?
The primary reason for
Linux's rise to fame is a combination of the open nature of the
code and the rising industry resentment of Microsoft. Microsoft's
dominance of the desktop with Windows was compounded during the
mid-to-late Nineties by the rising market share of its Windows NT
product on the server. This dominance, together with the
proprietary nature of Microsoft's code, has caused some vendors to
look for alternatives. Linux was the perfect option.
What are its target markets?
The Linux market breaks
down into three main areas. The server area is the main market for
the system, while the desktop and personal digital assistant (PDA)
sectors have proven to be auxiliary areas. Linux on the desktop has
been spectacularly unsuccessful, not surprising given that Unix on
the desktop has been a niche market at best. Corel, which did its
best to promote Linux on the desktop, has recently announced its
decision to sell off its Linux distribution operation, due to a low
takeup.
Linux also faces challenges on the PDA circuit. It's not
immediately clear why anyone would want to run Linux on such a
system, especially in a market that is already dominated by Palm,
with Microsoft's Windows CE in second place. One area where the
open source system could make the grade is in embedded systems,
where small-footprint systems are needed and where standard
graphical user interfaces aren't all that important.
What are its limitations?
One of the major problems for
Linux in the e-commerce sector is its immaturity. True, Windows NT
has been around for roughly the same amount of time (NT was
released in summer 1993, while Linux made its version 1.0 debut in
1994), but Microsoft has had a huge development drive behind it,
geared heavily towards the corporate market at the server level.
Linux has largely been developed by enthusiasts, who haven't always
been as focused on the corporate server market.
Consequently, implementations of Linux in transaction-based
e-commerce systems with custom application logic are relatively
scarce. Instead, Linux is mainly used in infrastructure systems
like email and static Web servers. Another problem is that Linux's
applications base has traditionally been much smaller than Windows
NT's, although this is now changing as more vendors pitch in with
product support.
Who are the major players?
The major companies in the
Linux market include Red Hat, VA Linux, Caldera and TurboLinux.
Most of these companies started out with basic Linux distributions,
making money out of support packages, but many are now expanding
into high-value areas. These include e-commerce application servers
and remote online administration.
Are Linux skills scarce?
For once, skills are not in
short supply. The great thing about Linux is that it's easy to get
hold of and relatively cheap. Not only that, its small footprint
means that it can be installed on low-specification PCs.
Consequently, it's easy to train in, and end-user experiences
suggest that it's cheaper to recruit Linux operators than systems
administrators for more established Unix systems such as
Solaris.
- www.searchenterpriselinux.com
Pick up a penguin: Linux 2.4
The Linux 2.4 system kernel was recently announced, after a long
wait. It offered some enhancements on the desktop, such as
increased peripheral support and support for the Firewire desktop
data transfer standard, but most of the new features were at the
server level, and aimed at corporate users. Examples include
support for more nodes in a clustered environment - the system is
now optimised for eight-way symmetric multiprocessing, with support
for up to 32 processors. It also has the ability to address up to
64Gb of memory, making it easy to run large, fast databases on
Linux systems. This brings Linux somewhat closer to the high-end,
mission-critical market, but it will still take end-users some time
to accept the system, and support has to be built into applications
to make the multiprocessor enhancements useful.