Myths of Linux on the Desktop, Apr 28, 2003

Supported versions of Linux are not free. What is basically free (or free to copy and distribute) are consumer versions of Linux and distributions that may be downloaded from the Web. Enterprises that use these distributions will have to rely on the open-source community for support. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and enterprises in some more-remote geographies point out that open-source support can be better than what they've been paying vendors for.

The tiny $500 PC sports a Via Eden or C-series processor and 256MB of RAM. The standard M-100 ships with 64MB of CompactFlash memory holding the MediaBox embedded Linux operating system.

SuSE has introduced a new Linux operating system product geared for telecommunications companies, named several new executives and signed up an advertising agency to elevate the German company's profile.

IBM has hired most of the Apache team. IBM has some major pull on what work gets done and does not get done. In some cases, it is frustrating, and other cases not. However, everybody just accepts it because IBM is paying the bills and people can do what they love. Is there an official IBM party line at Apache? Absolutely not! It is just that none of the Apache developers will talk negatively about IBM, even those that do not work at IBM. So in this sense, it already appears that Apache has been hijacked.

IBM has added several new centers worldwide devoted to Linux specialties in energy, government and mainframes, part of its years-long effort to spread the operating system as widely as possible.

The money is being used to see if Chandler [open-source personal information manager]-- currently aimed at individuals and smaller businesses -- can work on a much larger scale, serving the needs of huge universities.

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