From today, Linux devotees will gather in New York
for this week's LinuxWorld Expo. Companies both large and small
will unwrap products and strategies spanning the breadth of the
computing industry. Everyone there will have a steady focus on
establishing a loftier presence in the enterprise.
With Version 2.6 of the Linux kernel now in the hands of
developers, many top-tier suppliers are expected to outline their
upcoming plans to ship exploitive versions of Linux and
Linux-compatible applications later this year aimed at the upper
echelons of corporate computing.
Version 2.6 offers significantly improved support for systems
with multiple processors, making it a more intimidating competitor
to both Windows- and Unix-based mid-range servers.
"We are looking at this as a major release that will go a long
way towards helping us determine how much investment we should be
looking to make over the next year or two in mission-critical
servers. We have a lot of older Unix- and Windows-based systems we
will be needing to replace over that time," said Don Frechette, a
purchasing agent at a large bank based in New York City.
Oracle executives will stress the increasing importance of Linux
as a development platform, and the open source environment will
soon become the company's primary development environment for
future versions of its suite of applications as well as for its
Oracle 10g database.
"Linux is moving to be our base development platform. It has
already become our base development platform for our apps suite and
it will be our base platform once 10g goes out the door," said Dave
Dargo, vice president at Oracle's Linux Program Office.
The company will also offer updates on its Developer's Release
of Oracle 10g. The product, which is laced with a number of grid
capabilities, is causing some corporate developers to think more
seriously about accelerating proposed grid projects in their
shops.
"Some users are getting a little more aggressive with grid
implementations based around 10g. We are seeing more of that among
larger IT companies and we expect the smaller ones to follow. Their
acceptance of grid is tracking the way Linux did when it first came
out," Dargo said.
Dargo added that Linux is better enabling the company to
standardise all of the key building blocks needed to create grids,
most notably perhaps, is grid management software that will be part
and parcel of Oracle 10g. he believed this increased
standardisation can only serve to reduce costs.
"The grid management software we can standardise around Linux
allows users to retain their existing Unix skill set but now apply
that to the Intel instruction set in their family of processors,"
Dargo said.
Next week, Oracle will throw its support behind IBM's Power line
of chip, which fuels IBM's pSeries and iSeries servers, which both
run Linux. The company already supports the chips used in IBM's
zSeries of mainframes as well as the company's Intel-based
xSeries.
Computer Associates International, which has had an increasingly
strong presence at LinuxWorld the past few years, will show an even
stronger strategic commitment by declaring the industry is now in
the midst of the "Linux generation". One company executive even
went so far to say that Linux is now in its evolution where the IBM
PC was circa 1984.
"We believe are now at the point where the PC was after Acorn
was introduced when it then exploded into a revolution. We will
show how Linux is now expanding the entire interaction market,"
said Sam Greenblatt, senior vice president and chief architect of
CA's Linux Technology Group.
In his LinuxWorld keynote, Greenblatt will announce strategic
support of Looking Glass, a next-generation graphical interface for
Linux first introduced by Sun Microsystems last year. The
Java-based interface, which shares some graphical similarities with
Apple's graphical interface, allows users to view objects
transparently as well as in three dimensions.
Greenblatt believes the widespread adoption of Looking Glass by
the Linux development community is mandatory if Linux is to be more
competitive with Windows XP, adding that the interface will be at
the centere of all its Linux-based desktop products.
"It is a multi-dimensional, multi-modal interface that enables
users to interact with objects that is not possible with the
current paradigm. This is what is absolutely required in order to
take us into the next generation," Greenblatt said.
Both IBM and Microsoft will roll out software and technical
support programs at the show this week in the hope of luring
corporate and third-party developers either towards or away from
Linux.
IBM's offering, appropriately called the Microsoft
NT-to-Linux-Migration Program, will be available largely through
its business partners. It will offer developers tools and training
classes to help wean developers off NT and over to Linux. IBM
executives believe the program's introduction is well-timed given
that Microsoft has announced it will discontinue the availability
of NT by the end of the year.
"There are millions of users still using NT but technical fixes
go away at the end of this year. If they are going to get off NT
they will need help figuring out the hard decisions about what new
hardware and applications to buy. We also see this as a major
opportunity for our business partners," said Adam Jollans, Linux
strategy manager in IBM's Software Group.
Meanwhile Microsoft will debut Version 3.5 of its Windows
Services for Unix. The new release has added support for
multithreading Unix applications as well as for clustering. As an
added incentive Microsoft, for the first time, will make the
software free of charge. Previously the company charged $99.
Other features include a series of enhanced cross-platform tools
for better blending Windows and Unix-based environments, an
improved Unix command line administration capabilities, and the
ability to extend Unix applications out to work more smoothly with
Microsoft's .net Web Services-oriented environment.
"For Unix users who like what they see in the Windows
applications portfolio, this might be a good way to preserve
existing [Unix] apps where they need to. It is not like someone
will rip out a Unix environment just because Unix Services for
Windows is available. In most shops that have either Windows or
Unix, the other environments are there side by side," said Al
Gillen, research director for System Software at IDC.
Tadpole Computer will take the wraps off Talin, a line of
higher-performance notebooks. The series of Linux-based systems is
addressing demands among existing customers for an enterprise-class
mobile system to replace older Windows-based desktop systems. The
system will ship bundled with Sun's Java Desktop System.
MySQL AB, a producer of an open-source database, and Zend
Technologies, a strong supporter of the PHP scripting engine, will
announce a strategic relationship aimed at enhancing the
integration of their respective products. Both companies believe
this integration will make it easier for users and developers to
integrate a range of different database functions into their web
infrastructure.
The companies each estimate there have been some 10 million
websites built using open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and
PHP).
Lindows.com will do its part to help Linux take root on
corporate desktops, introducing a business version of its flagship
product, called LindowsOS Professional. One goal of the product is
to make it easier for those users who exchange data have multiple
computers at work and home.
Linux World Expo runs 21-23 January.
Ed Scannell writes for InfoWorld