No platform in IT can ever take its place in the ecosystem for granted. There are still arguments about how deeply and broadly Linux will get embedded into server infrastructure, mainly because of the limitations of the Linux kernel itself and the ability of vendors that want to sell their own platforms to push Linux at the expense of their own platforms.
The Linux camp is divided between people who think that Linux should be on the desktop and those who think it shouldn’t. Being at the tipping point does not solve any of these issues, but it does show that Linux has built up a certain amount of momentum, which is steadily increasing along a logarithmic curve pointing upward.
Ross Mauri, general manager of IBM, estimates that customers worldwide spent $25bn on hardware, software, and services specifically earmarked for Linux, and he said that there is a vibrant ecosystem based on open systems and open standards.
Linux succeeds because open standards trumps proprietary designs, he said, which only a few years ago would have gotten Mauri branded as a heretic at IBM.
The Linux community relies on individual ability and individual accountability, he explained, taking an obvious swipe at the accusations that IBM moved Unix intellectual property controlled by The SCO Group into the Linux 2.4 kernel. Mauri said that this is one of the key underpinnings of the adoption of Linux by commercial enterprises.
Over at Oracle, the top brass are seeing a shape to the Linux adoption curve. Dave Dargo, vice president of the Linux team at the Oracle Corp, lived through the RISC/Unix revolution in the early and middle 1990s, moving from proprietary mainframes or minicomputers to Unix servers.
This time around, since Linux is very much like the mainstream Unixes used in businesses today and Unix skills are more prevalent, the jump from Unix to Linux is certainly easier.
In 1990, when Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard were seeing increasing adoption of their RISC/Unix platforms and IBM finally jumped in with the RS/6000-AIX platform, Unix skillsets were still hard to find and Unix boxes used by pioneers required a lot of hands-on touch by Oracle and its resellers in order to sell.
By 1995, just as the dot-com bumble was starting to expand, Unix solutions were quite a bit more mainstream because many thousands of companies had made the jump to Unix. This was the inflection point for Unix, more or less.
By 1999, Unix had demonstrated unarguable enterprise capability, hardware and software solutions had been developed preferentially for these platforms, customers did not even require reference users to move, and Unix was a mass-market commodity.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
