By Nick Patience
Linux will surpass Windows NT in terms of servers shipped this year, so says Larry Augustin, president and CEO of Linux vendor, VA Research. He quoted IDC numbers that gave the OS a 17% share of the market in 1998, versus 35.8% ascribed to NT by IDC. That his prediction was made before a crowd of about 200 Linux enthusiasts at Comdex Spring in Chicago this week only helped to raise the cheering to a level that must have disturbed the studious types learning about the benefits of Windows 2000 professional edition next door. The eight-strong panel and followers had moved themselves from a dingy room downstairs that only held about 80 once it became obvious that the crowd would represent a fire hazard.
There was much self-congratulatory talk about how Linux would dominate the small appliance space, as well as desktop and server spaces and practically everything else, but a slight technical elitism couldn’t prevent itself from creeping in. The beauty of Linux, many of the speakers said, is that it lets you get under the hood and hack it, whereas the NT users are taught to be dumb, and just use icons, as Mark Bolzern, president of LinuxMall put it. However, that’s never been a catalyst for a boom in OS adoption in the past. But some sort of standardization just might be.
The Linux community is in the process of getting its standards act together and the Linux Standards Base (LSB) effort is expected to take between six and 12 months to come up with a standard set of libraries and a kernel. The LSB effort is supported by all the major players, including Red Hat Software Inc, Caldera Systems Inc and others. Red Hat CEO Bob Young was among some on the panel who insisted that the key to the development of a standard Linux was the continuation of the open source software development process, but others disagreed. Ransom Love, CEO of Caldera was adamant that open source alone is not enough. We have to agree on certain subsets, he said. But all present said they would support whatever came out of LSB. Some in the audience wanted to see some evidence that Linux was enterprise-ready. About 90% of Caldera’s new customer are corporations, said Love and about half of those are buying Linux for the first time. Augustin said almost all his customers are enterprises.
Towards the end, one brave soul asked what would happen if Linus Torvalds got run over by a bus tomorrow. Hockey continues, despite the loss of Wayne Gretzky, said Maurice Hilarius, CEO of Hard Data Ltd and so would Linux. Hilarius also emphasized the need for a standard base. Others pointed out that Torvalds only maintains part of the kernel under the General Public License (GPL) model and Linux is a whole lot more than just the kernel. Bob Young estimates that Torvalds has only written about 10% of the kernel code.
