Father of the Web gets a knighthood, Dec 31, 2003

Webmaster's note: Not Linux news, per-se, but Linux Online wouldn't be here without Sir Tim

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has received a knighthood recognising his contribution to the Internet's development.

"There was a time when people felt the Internet was another world," Sir Tim said, "but now people realise it's a tool that we use in this world."

When an obscure Utah software firm can claim that it owns part of the Linux operating system and demand royalty payments (without offering public proof!), when Microsoft must redesign its Web browser because a programmer got a patent for an obvious way to add multimedia to Web pages, and when manufacturers of things ranging from printer cartridges to garage-door openers get sued under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, no developer or consumer can be safe. Is that the future we want to live in?

Things augured well for the adoption of the Linux operating system even before the year had begun, with Red Hat moving into profit for the first time, fuelled by strong demand from the enterprise.

But while the corporate world was beginning to rally round the platform, MandrakeSoft, vendor of one of the most user-friendly distributions, filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11-style bankruptcy protection.

Even worse followed shortly, when speculation that a company called SCO had hired a high profile lawyer to look into revenue opportunities from its Unix IP turned out to be entirely true.

We're being consumed by the fact that we like to solve computer problems, and we can't understand why other people just don't see the benefits as plainly as we do. History shows far too many superior technologies that are rendered obsolete because of a more easily accessible alternative. Anyone who has owned a Betamax VCR can attest to this. I'd hate to see the same happen to Linux and OSS.

Linux on the desktop - I understand the arguments, I understand the availability of it, but it's not in this organisation and I suspect it would be some time before you would see it at scale and I don't think you'd ever see it, certainly not in my perspective, on the desktop," he said.

Barclays itself signed a £210m seven-year desktop services deal for 41,700 PCs in the organisation earlier this year as part of plans for the bank to standardise as an early on adopter on Microsoft's Windows and Office 2003 software products.

As far as PC operating systems (OS) go, it's free, more resistant to viruses and it works just as well on your five-year-old PC as it will on the latest gigahertz machine.

It is extremely stable, and is often used to run highly-secure information technology infrastructures like those in banks and stockbroking houses.

And did we mention, it is free?

So why isn't Linux running on your computer?

The East Coast LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, a trade show for developers and users of the increasingly popular Linux computer operating system, will be held for the first time at the John B. Hynes Convention Center in the Back Bay in February 2005. The show has been held at New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center since its inception in 1999, but its organizers said they were told they won't be able to return in 2005.

AlwaysOn: Speaking of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer recently admitted that the thing that keeps him up at night is Linux.

Adkins: That’s not surprising. I think the Microsoft model will be under continued pressure, given that there are viable alternatives. And Linux is a very viable alternative. It has continued to mature in its capabilities and how it participates end-to-end in the IT infrastructure. A lot of it started off as applications on the end of the network, like firewalls. Then it started to move into the application tier, and now we’re beginning to see Linux running heavy transactional-based applications. So it continues to mature.

Linux is ready for business IT systems – although there are still concerns about the cost, compatibility and security of migrating systems to the open source software, according to the latest silicon.com CIO Jury.

Following recent desktop Linux trials announced by the NHS and the government and recent IDC figures that showed the open source software continues to eat into the Unix market on the server side, we asked our panel if Linux is ready for the enterprise.

Dominic Paulraj, who worked on processor and operating system technology at Sun Microsystems, has been named chief technologist at Linare, which sells inexpensive computers using the Linux operating system. Paulraj will lead software work at Linare, the Redmond, Wash.-based company said in a statement on Monday.

ChessBrain announced the appointment of the Distributed Computing Foundation as the official organizer of its first official world record attempt

Bill Kendrick of the Linux Users' Group of Davis, California, was invited to speak at a nearby PC users group this week -- the Mission Oaks Computer Club, which is composed mostly of seniors, and focuses on PC basics as a 'life skill.'

Names in the Linux community are very important, too. It's GNOME, not Gnome. It's the K Desktop Environment, not the KDE Desktop Environment. SUSE as opposed to SuSE. Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora Core instead of Red Hat Linux. There is even a very strong debate about what to call Linux. Linux is the kernel and GNU/Linux is the operating system, many will stipulate.

That, however, is a debate for another time and another place. What I wanted to bring up was a small trend amongst the commercial Linux companies to not use the Linux name at all in their branding--GNU or otherwise.

According to a survey of 200 small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the UK, conducted in September this year by Vanson Bourne on behalf of IBM, the use of Linux is growing in the UK SMB market. Indeed the survey indicates that 26 percent of small businesses already deploy Linux. Of those not yet using Linux, 15 percent said they are likely to use it in the future while a further 26 percent were undecided, and the remaining 59 percent had no current intention to adopt it.

A recent SG Cowen survey of more than 500 North American IT users found that more than 80% of respondents were currently using Linux and that more than half planned to increase their use of the open source operating system within the next two years.

The survey, which also found a growing interest in other open source software in areas such as application servers, e-mail and database systems, concluded that Linux will change the landscape in corporate data centers as it steals workload share away from both Unix and Windows systems.

I know, I know, I'm about three weeks early for my annual predictions column, but I want to come right out and say it: 2004 is going to be a big year for Linux.

Big in terms of its corporate enterprise adoption, which, according to every industry observer I spoke with, should continue apace or faster. Big in terms of a hot topic for next year, specifically with the infamous SCO lawsuits coming to a head.

And finally, big in terms of investors on both sides of the Linux equation.

The National Weather Service (NWS) is replacing outdated Unix-based computers from Hewlett-Packard Co. with new IBM IntelliStation computers running Linux.

The move should speed up the delivery of watches and warnings during severe weather by 400%, from 247 seconds to 62 seconds, and reduce the agency's hardware maintenance costs by 40%, according to Chuck Piercy, program manager for the NWS's Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System.

"That's pretty impressive," said Bob Lenard, director, IBM eServer Workstations. "When you're dealing with weather, any improvement helps. It's about saving lives and saving property, and that's what they're in business to do."

As far as revolutions go, the opening salvo was muffled. But for those within earshot, the reverberations were far- reaching. Last month, China - the largest single potential market for almost anything - selected an upstart computer-operating system called Linux for installation on 1 million computers next year. Ultimately, the country plans to install similar systems on 100 million to 200 million machines.

But the deal represents much more than a software deal - or China's declaration of independence from software giant Microsoft. Analysts say it marks a significant victory for an emerging way of building things. Open and highly dispersed networks of motivated people are organizing around galvanizing ideas, often offering results of their work for free.

Almost every week, it seems, another government is jumping on the Linux bandwagon, badmouthing Microsoft all the way. But for all the headlines, the open-source software movement remains very much a fringe business, raising troubling questions for investors who've plowed into publicly traded Linux providers in the past year.

The next problem in creating an instrument was to design an electronic platform that could make use of the samples, and to develop tone-generation and postprocessing applications that could turn the samples back into voices, singing out in response to an organist's fingers and feet. Since “neither of us was a hardware person,” Ogletree said, the partners and their growing team of developers turned to off-the-shelf hardware rather than custom DSP design. Upon investigation, the group concluded that a personal computer — or perhaps a linked network of PCs — with existing professional-grade sound cards could do the work.

So the team set out to develop tone-generation software running on a stock PC. Windows was quickly rejected as unreliable, and development was done on the Linux operating system. Following the death of James Murray — the key algorithm and software developer, himself an organist — new software designers joined the project, which by now was taking on a life of its own within the company. And then came the 9/11 attacks.

The market for Windows-based server systems is growing fast, but Linux-based systems are growing much faster in revenues and units, according to the latest quarterly data from market analysts at IDC.

The Windows-based and Linux-based servers are riding an overall trend in server purchases toward higher volume, lower cost sales. The same trend sees No. 4 Dell climbing in the vendor rankings to within striking distance of No. 3 Sun Microsystems.

Open source advocates say IT research bears out their claims that the many flavors of Linux are making steady strides in enterprise deployments.

But ask open source fans to comment on IBM's refusal to indemnify its Linux customers in the face of litigation over copyright disputes in some Linux code, and the arguments tend to turn to what are called specious claims by SCO Group.

eWEEK.com's Linux & Open-Source Center Editor Steven Vaughn-Nichols really likes what he sees for the server, corporate and retail desktop horizon for 2004. He boldly predicts that major vendors will start producing Linux PCs for the low-end retail market, and that your grandmother will love it.

A recent survey in Australia and New Zealand has found that the use of Linux on servers has grown dramatically, but its share of the desktop market is still very small

Within just days of launching it on Saturday, LinuxWorld Magazine’s quest for predictions as to what 2004 holds in store for the Linux operating system has already been read by 23,033 people – a figure that continues to grow hourly as members of the Linux community add their own - many and varied - suggestions. Join Florian Cramer, Matthew Johnson, and others today in adding your own responses.

LinuxWorld Magazine is in the process of collecting predictions about what will be happening with Linux in the upcoming year for an article to appear in our January issue. We're having such fun with it, we thought we'd share it with linuxworld.com readers and let you get in on the action!

Less than two years ago, Lynanne Fowle, a Holly Springs charter high school director and mother of five, made the switch. She said that security and costs were the two main reasons she jumped ship from Microsoft.

Sometimes I suspect Bill Gates doesn't sleep so well at night. Not out of any guilt over his billions or the alleged mediocrity of his product. No, I wonder whether he might actually worry about the competition. Not Apple (though that iPod MP3 player is a killer toy, and I'm cheerfully typing these words on an Apple PowerBook G4). No, I'll bet Linux and its creator, Linus Torvalds, cross Gates's mind when he's looking up at the ceiling late at night.

A few weeks ago I bemoaned the state of Windows compatibility for Linux. I was disappointed with Wine and CrossOver Office. I noted that VMware was a better, if more expensive, solution. Readers quickly told me I was missing something -- Netraverse's Win4Lin, which lets you run Windows from within Linux. And, after playing with Win4Lin for some time now, I see how right they were.

You can use Win4Lin with Windows 95, 98, and ME, but not 2000, NT, or XP. You need a Windows boot diskette as well as a Windows CD. Be sure your boot diskette matches the version of the CD; the first time I tried, they didn't match, and the error message I got was obscure enough to send me to Netraverse's tech support department. Also be sure you're not trying to install it on a laptop that doesn't hot-swap its removable diskette and CD drives; that's what stopped me on my second try.

If he is to make good on his promise to improve life for the tens of millions of Brazilians who live in dire poverty, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva knows that one key challenge is to bridge a massive technology gap. And if that means shunning Microsoft Corp. software in South America's largest country, then so be it.

Silva's top technology officer wants to transform the land of samba and Carnival into a tech-savvy nation where everyone from schoolchildren to government bureaucrats uses open-source software instead of costly Windows products.

Comdex also has a full three-day conference track devoted to Linux and open-source topics. The classes are a mix though of both open-source topics, such as "Open Source Database Shootout," and more general developer topics, such as "Soap vs. .NET: The Struggle Continues." In short, it's something of an odd mix. The usual subjects are handled, "Linux on the Desktop" and "Running your Business on Linux: Is it Safe?" But, the general theme of the more advanced subjects will be as appropriate for Java developers as it will be for open-source programmers.

Linux is a rising star in the geeky back office of computing.

Its gains have come as an operating system for the data-serving computers that run corporate networks and serve up webpages. On the desktop, however, Microsoft's Windows still reigns supreme.

But IBM and the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), whose membership includes Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Intel, are beginning a drive to promote Linux as an alternative to Windows on desktops.

Linux as an end-user system is at an early stage, but inroads are impressive. One statistic puts annual growth of Linux on the desktop at 44%. It is already in heavy use as a limited, kiosk type of application (point-of-sale terminals, for instance) and as a technical workstation. More general use is expected to come within the next couple years.

First-time computer users are flocking to a government-subsidised programme to bring cheap PCs to the public. Although pirate copies of Windows and Office have a street price as low as $4, the information ministry's scheme of selling PCs loaded with Linux and OpenOffice for $250 is a runaway success. A million new PC owners will be using Linux within the next few months.

The earth moved last week. The seismic shock was felt most keenly in Redmond, Wash., where Microsoft Corp. executives bask in world dominance.

Red Hat Inc. announced it was dropping the desktop version of its high-profile Linux operating system to concentrate on corporate customers with its Enterprise Linux line, first released last year. And within days, Novell Inc. announced that it had purchased SuSE Linux AG, Red Hat's most important competitor, based in Nuremberg, Germany.

Not many corporations run Linux on their client hardware, but that situation will start to change if the Linux community can make a business case around the lower costs and greater manageability of enterprise Linux desktop environments, according to speakers at the Desktop Linux Conference here on Monday.

Linux advocates are trying to convince IT managers to abandon Microsoft Corp.'s licensing fees and security issues in favor of Linux software for the desktop. The strategy isn't to convert the masses all at once, but rather to explain the advantages of Linux over the Windows operating system for certain types of companies running certain types of applications.

Although Microsoft is pitching Virtual PC primarily as a way to run several versions of Windows on one machine, or even the old OS/2, the software also will run various versions of Linux. Microsoft said it will refer Linux-related problems to the Linux vendor but that if the problem appears to be a bug in Virtual PC, it will work with the Linux company to resolve the issue.

Webmaster's note: Interesting comparison of Linux and Open Source development methods with the world of US presidential politics

The metaphor of choice for Howard Dean's Internet-fueled campaign is "open-source politics": a two-way campaign in which the supporters openly collaborate with the campaign to improve it, and in which the contributions of the "group mind" prove smarter than that of any lone individual.

Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi has admitted on numerous occasions that his time in Silicon Valley affected his thinking about politics. "I used to work for a little while for Progeny Linux Systems," Trippi told cyber-guru Lawrence Lessig in an August interview. "I always wondered how could you take that same collaboration that occurs in Linux and open source and apply it here. What would happen if there were a way to do that and engage everybody in a in a presidential campaign?"

Open-source software conferences tend to attract a typical assortment of long-bearded geeks, tech evangelists, and the odd business suit. But at the Linux Desktop Consortium conference, which will take place on Nov. 10 at Boston University, one of the stars will be Dr. Martin Echt, an avuncular cardiologist from Albany, N.Y. Dr. Echt, chief operating officer of Capital Cardiology Associates, an eight-office practice, will discuss his decision to shift his network of PCs to Linux from Microsoft's (MSFT ) Windows, the operating system that controls the basic functions of computers running on Intel (INTC ) microprocessors.

There's a school of thought among long-time Linux watchers that the real Holy Grail for most Linux companies isn't the death of Microsoft or even mere profitability, but salvation by buy out.

Pushing Linux in and of itself is a dead end, goes the theory. The only hope these people really have is to 1) make a product so good that enterprises cough up the dough on a yearly basis for updates, or 2) be swallowed by IBM and become a Linux R&D division for big iron.

This particular outlook won some water cooler bragging rights this week, as the two most viable commercial Linux outfits, SUSE (neé SuSE) and Red Hat, announced acquisition by bigger fish and formalized major business model shifts, respectively.

Six years ago Chad Harrelson started using the Linux operating system and says he’ll never go back to Microsoft Windows.

“My eyes have been opened,” he says.

Linux—often recognized by its penguin mascot—is a free operating system created in the early 1990s by college student Linus Torvalds and perfected by developers from all around the world. The source code for Linux is similar to Unix but is free, and developers are encouraged to build upon the code and redistribute it for worldwide use.

The Desktop Linux Consortium's conference will be hosted at Boston University's Corporate Education Center on November 10 and new program information is now available.

Highlighted at the event is a presentation by Dr. Martin Echt, CEO and Cardiologist of Cardiology Associates (CCA) that demonstrates the business case for switching to Linux thin clients in his Albany-NY based cardiology practice. Plagued with problems using Microsoft infrastructure, he expanded his network using Citrix and Linux. Using a system integrator, Lille Corp, Dr. Echt discusses decision, cost savings, integration experience, and the office transition to Linux.

Webmaster's note: Linux Online is proud and honored to mirror the LDP's documentation. Happy Birthday LDP!

Once upon a time, there was a general consensus that Unix in general, and Linux in particular, lacked good documentation. Matt Welsh decided to do something about this, and wrote the first Linux HOWTO - the "Installation HOWTO" - the first of what is now a huge collection of focused, solution-oriented documents. It became a movement just like Linux itself. More and more people joined in on the effort, tools were created, and documents were written, translated and published.

Ten years later, it is no exaggeration to say this issue has been dealt with thoroughly: today, TLDP is one of the largest Internet projects, where a few hundred people have written several hundred documents, ranging from small manual pages to in-depth guides that span over a hundred pages. The documentation covers nearly all aspects of Linux and is freely distributed, like Open Source software itself. In fact, many Linux distributions include the complete TLDP collection with the installation, helping both newcomers and more experienced users.

If you sell products, measuring sales in terms of dollars during some reporting cycle -- like a quarterly or annual period -- makes perfect sense. It's dollars you're interested in, so dollars you measure. That's not true, however, for the open-source community. If you give away the product, then usage is the only measure that counts.

Unfortunately, no one provides a widely accepted measure of open-source installations or usage. As a result, the measures that do exist consistently underestimate the actual install rate.

Linux is now a power behind the screen for millions of people making airline reservations on the Web, be it through online agents, major carriers or travel agencies.

Travel commerce leader Sabre Holdings Corp., a $2 billion global travel commerce online transaction services provider, is joining those ranks. Sabre announced it is moving a significant part of its Sabre Air Travel Shopping Engine (ATSE) low-fare lookup service to the open source MySQL database and open systems GoldenGate Data Synchronization software running on Linux.

Here was a speaker at a Linux enterprise conference telling the audience that Linux isn't the best choice for every IT need.

Linux and other open-source software products in many cases may not offer the highest-quality choice available to enterprises, and proprietary software isn't evil, said Jonathan Eunice, president and principal analyst at Illuminata Inc., an IT research and consultancy group in Nashua, N.H.

But enterprises looking to tweak the code of the software they run and avoid "entanglement costs" associated with vendors who may not listen to their needs may want to consider open-source software, he said, speaking at the Enterprise Linux Forum in Washington yesterday.

"The question is, how do we get from 1 percent to 2 percent (of desktops), not 1 percent to 20 percent," Friedman said, during a presentation at the Enterprise Linux Forum Conference and Expo in Washington, D.C. Google statistics show that 1 percent of its search requests come from Linux machines, 3 percent from Apple Macintosh PCs, and most of the rest from various versions of Windows. A study released by IDC this month noted small growth in both Windows and Linux on the client side, with Windows maintaining more than 93 percent of the client market

Enterprise IT administrators holding a Linux certification are in possession of a coveted confirmation of their skills with the operating system.

Experts say as more enterprises explore the potential cost savings and efficiencies promised with a switch to Linux, admins holding a Linux cert will be higher on the list for new jobs, promotions or pay raises.

"Bosses are telling managers to get their Linux hats on, that they are going to be using it very soon," said Ross Brunson, director of Linux and Unix education with Philadelphia-based The Training Camp, an outfit that trains and prepares administrators for certification exams.

SGI's latest results edged closer to profitability, as it announced NASA had bought a Linux machine with 256 Itanium 2 processors and was planning to buy more

NASA is using a Linux machine from Silicon Graphics with 256 Itanium 2 processors and plans to double that soon, the company said on Monday after posting financial results that moved it closer toward profitability.

We will list the myths Federica Troni, a senior Gartner analyst, told the hundreds of PC system builders here at the conference.

• 1 Linux will be cheaper than Windows because StarOffice can be used instead of MS Office
• 2 Linux is free
• 3 No forced upgrades
• 4 Linux will require significantly less labour to manage
• 5 Linux will have a lower total cost of ownership than Windows because of available management tools
• 6 Hardware will be able to be kept longer if Linux is used or holder hardware can be used
• 7 Applications will be cheap or free
• 8 Transferable skills

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