Partisans Offer Varied Views Of Linux's Future

Devon Null devnull at butcherfamily.com
Wed Jan 31 02:17:32 EST 2001


Partisans Offer Varied Views Of Linux's Future
by Anne Zieger (01/15/01; 9:00 a.m. ET)
<http://www.PlanetIT.com/docs/PIT20010116S0010>

Given its dramatic momentum, Linux seems all but certain to play a role in
corporate life. Despite its high profile, however, Linux remains a minority
OS, and it's still not clear just what will have to happen before Linux
becomes a corporate mainstay. 

Some observers predict that Linux will have to become a popular corporate
desktop system before it can truly begin to hit its stride. Others suggest
that Linux may succeed just as well by proving itself outside the corporate
environment entirely, demonstrating its stability in such alternative uses
as kiosks and embedded systems. 

Either way, there's still a good distance to travel before Linux becomes a
completely mainstream OS, observers say. "Linux has a lot of momentum and a
lot of support," says Laurent Meynier, chief executive officer and
co-founder of San Francisco-based open source consulting firm Olliance.
"But a lot of people are seeing Linux as one of their platforms rather than
betting on Linux as a key platform." 

Dramatic Growth

According to San Francisco-based financial services firm WR Hambrecht + Co,
the market for Linux products and services should climb 88 percent per year
for the next three years, hitting $12 billion by the year 2003. 

Hambrecht expects the corporate market to grow so much that even services
and support vendors will reap huge benefits. Revenue from Linux consulting
and technical support, product and hardware certification, education,
consulting and development should hit $500 million this year and climb to
almost $4 billion by 2003, Hambrecht projects. 

At the moment, however, Linux boxes are still in the minority in most IT
departments. Though Linux installations climbed dramatically in 1999 --
growing more than 93 percent -- that number is still dwarfed by the numbers
in sites running Windows. 

About 214 million servers, hosts and clients ran 32-bit Windows
installations (including Windows NT) in 1999, according to IDC. That's
compared to Linux's respectable but much smaller total of about 14 million. 

To date, much of the growth in corporate Linux implementations has been by
stealth, with administrators staging quiet rebellions to introduce the
technology for isolated projects. 

"For most companies, Linux is a Trojan horse coming in," says Dan Maher,
chief executive officer of TeamLinux, a Dayton, Ohio-based developer of
products and solutions for nontraditional computing devices. "People are
doing things on the cheap with Linux, on their own, because they can't
afford software licenses." 

Linux is likely to remain something of a backdoor solution till its
financial and operational benefits are better demonstrated, says Dirk
Elmendorf, chief technology evangelist and co-founder of San Antonio,
Texas-based Rackspace Managed Hosting. 

"The important thing to understand about Linux is that there are two
different worlds involved, the technology world and the business world," he
says. "Amazing things are coming out of the technology world, but the
business side is still sorting out how to make all of this translate into a
profitable bottom line." 

Although technology players disagree on exactly what applications win over
business execs, all seem to agree that some kind of large-scale,
confidence-inspiring example (or three) will be necessary. 

"Linux has to deal with the image it has," Meynier says. "Unix has two
decades of professional engineering behind it, while Linux came from the
hacker community." 

Differing Visions

But technical visionaries disagree about what it will take to bring Linux
further into the mainstream. Some see the future in maturing applications,
while others point to the embedded systems market. 

Perhaps the most conventional view is that Linux won't mature until it
captures a lion's share of the applications-support market. Durham,
N.C.-based Linux vendor Red Hat, for example, expects to see Linux growth
pass through a series of stages, moving deeper into the world of corporate
applications. 

Linux is already well-known as an infrastructure OS, running a host of
firewall, DNS, load balancing and routing apps, notes Paul McNamara, Red
Hat's vice president of products and platforms. It has also made inroads as
the OS behind application servers and under e-commerce stacks, messaging
apps and streaming video, among other areas. 

In the future, Linux should move steadily into the database and storage
arenas, particularly as the Linux 2.4 kernel emerges and the pending 64-bit
chip comes out of Intel, McNamara predicts. 

"Right now you're seeing Linux systems on the front end as Web balancers
and Web servers," McNamara notes. "Usually, the very large applications
have tended to be either Unix or mainframe. But we're going to move to
compete with Unix." 

Others see Linux desktop acceptance as the major hurdle. Accustomed to
running Windows servers, many corporate IT departments have gotten very
used to the idea of running matching Windows desktops, and that equation
currently squeezes Linux out, Elmendorf says. Current Linux desktop options
such as GNOME and KDE aren't mature enough to compete with Windows, he
contends. 

"As long as Linux doesn't have a strong desktop, whether that's really
important or not to the technical end, there's always going to be a
perception that Linux isn't there yet," he says. "And when it comes to
coming up with a desktop I could sit my grandmother in front of, it's not
there." 

Still others think Linux acceptance will filter in from outside the
enterprise entirely. 

TeamLinux's Maher expects to see Linux move up from the single-purpose
kiosks and other computing devices -- for example, those running banking
apps or issuing driver's licenses -- into corporate applications. 

Ultimately, high-volume use in these alternative environments will prove
Linux's mettle, he predicts. "Use in alternative devices allows us to
demonstrate that Linux is very reliable for key high-availability apps,"
Maher says. "As legacy systems begin to rotate out, Linux will begin to
move into the network." 

One wild card, meanwhile, is the structure and focus of the open source
movement itself. If the open source development community grows more
rapidly than outsiders expect, Linux adoption could accelerate regardless
of what happens on these other fronts. 

"As the community around Linux grows and matures, that's quite a force to
reckon with," Meynier says.

"People who participate in the development of a product are likely to adopt
it."

<www.cmpnet.com>
The Technology Network



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