Caldera founder fires up penguin portal, Feb 02, 2001

One of the founders of Linux distributor Caldera Systems plans to launch a B2B marketplace in March called PartnerAxis that is designed to link Linux service providers with manufacturers and customers.

PartnerAxis, whose parent company Ebiz Enterprises owns LinuxMall.com and TheLinuxStore.com, was formed four months ago to meet the needs of solution providers interested in Linux but without formal channel relations with vendors.

IBM and a host of other companies last week launched Linux services and products aimed at stimulating sales of technology related to the open-source operating system.

IBM, for its part, plans to work closely with solution providers as part of a $300 million investment in Linux services by IBM Global Services over the next three years, IBM President and COO Sam Palmisano said during a news conference after delivering a keynote speech at LinuxWorld Expo here.

Eric Raymond, self-proclaimed open-source evangelist and Linux advocate, is not depressed by the state of technology stocks. In fact, he believes now is an ideal moment for companies that are looking to tighten their belts to start using low-cost open-source software.

"(Open source) looks like a better proposition than ever," Raymond told ZDNet News at the LinuxWorld show in New York. "Companies need to save money, so they need to stop writing checks for expensive proprietary software."

Linus Torvalds & Co. soon plan to release its mobile Linux distribution to the open-source community.

Transmeta Corp.'s Mobile Linux - whose development effort was led by Torvalds, a Transmeta engineer and the initial creator of the Linux kernel -- will be publicly available "any time now," Dan Quinlan, another Transmeta engineer, said Thursday at LinuxWorld.

Eazel's much-anticipated launch of the Nautilus Linux desktop and Web services platform, expected earlier this year, has been put off until the beginning of the second quarter, Eazel executives said at LinuxWorld this week.

Dell Computer and Sun Microsystems have pledged to bundle the Linux desktop, and Red Hat plans to support the Linux graphical user interface and file manager with Red Hat 7.1, he added. Red Hat 7.1 is due to be released within weeks, sources said.

The question is: Will information technology (IT) managers, who buy and oversee corporate technology purchases and operations, opt to use Linux and other open-source technologies?

Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown analysts Philip Rueppel, Ghazi Benothman and Kevin Burke think so. In a recent report, "Open Source Infrastructure, a Manifest for the Coming Big Bang," they argued that open source operating systems offer more value than proprietary systems. Because the source code is known and available to all, it can be easily customized by each company's IT department, unlike generic products software makers sell

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