Oracle and Linux win over NZX, Jul 13, 2004

NZX - the New Zealand stock exchange - has become the first major New Zealand company to adopt the Oracle 10g database running on Red Hat Linux.

Apart from being able to consolidate 21 databases into one, the new NZX system runs faster, more reliably and at less cost, says the company's tech team.

Research firm Netcraft is out with its latest Linux statistics, which said Red Hat is the dominant Linux distribution in the hosting industry.

The results come from Netcraft's hosting provider switching analysis. Netcraft said it showed that Red Hat holds 49.8 percent market share, which is actually down by 1 percent from its January survey. At that time, it counted Red Hat as holding 50.8 percent of the hosting market.

Len Carver is a practical man. He has decided it isn't worth trying to prise accountants away from Microsoft Excel, or to cure lawyers of their addiction to Microsoft Word.

The chief information officer of internet search and directory company Sensis isn't about to pick a fight he's likely to lose, nor is he wedded to the concept of rolling out open-source applications without a strong idea of how they will cut costs and make people's jobs easier.

Sensis's call-centre operators are his target: they will be shifted from PCs running Microsoft Office to a thin-client platform likely running Linux.

My friend Robin Miller recently wrote a very decent article about how spoiled we Linux users are, which inspired me to write this article that I've been kind of meaning to write for a while anyway, an article about how the various Linux repositories are and have been such a vast competitive advantage for Linux.

You always hear people talking about "ubiquitous computing"--the idea that at some point computers will become so pervasive that you will just hop from one computer to the next throughout your daily life.

It's an interesting concept, and I look forward to seeing where their research leads. In the meantime, though, you can do a lot of the same things just with a Knoppix CD and a usb key drive.

Although SCO has noted that it will not seek to gain information from the thousands of contributors that made material contributions to Linux, it is seeking a deposition from Linux creator Linus Torvalds. The company also wants to get information from some senior programmers, IBM partners and private groups that have made contributions to the open-source operating system.

Folks in the software industry doubt Linux will suffer from the same kind of forking and fragmenting that limited Unix and its ISV support, but the idea may nevertheless be pushed as an offensive against Linux by Microsoft, which is already running ads in Europe depicting mutant penguins assembled with other animal parts as if to suggest they are unsure what they are.

"I think delaying in doing something on standardization and work on adhering to the standards that have been established will result in cases where Linux will be forked," said Bill Claybrook, president of New River Marketing Research and longtime Linux analyst. "Now is the time that something has to be done. The crunch hasn't come yet, but when Linux starts making more inroads, Microsoft is going to kick in big-time on FUD."

Users in the market for an entry-level PC for simple tasks have a new choice with two models which compete with similar offerings from resellers such as Walmart and Tiger Direct. Obviously, the price is the attention getter for the two machines announced.

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