Linux Bangalore returns as FOSS.IN/2005, Nov 24, 2005

India's largest Free and Open Source Software Event, will be held at the Bangalore Palace from November 29 to December 2, 2005.

Red Hat has announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 4 scheduled for release in February 2005 will support five Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi and Tamil.

In a bid to boost Linux solutions development, HP would be opening a Linux competency center in Bangalore next year.

Linux distributor Red Hat has opened its sales and support office in Bangalore. The new office will now be able to provide its customers in Southern India with the entire range of products and services on a local basis.

World’s largest distributor Red Hat also recently announced a long-term technology strategy, Open Source Architecture for the Enterprise. Open Source Architecture aims to extend the benefits of the Open Source model further up the software solution stack - to the middleware, application, and management layers - so open source benefits can be realized across the computing infrastructure. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the platform for Open Source Architecture. Red Hat Applications and partnerships make up the solution stack on this platform and Red Hat Network is the complete systems management platform for Linux.

Red Hat India, a joint venture between Red Hat Inc. and Clover Technologies, is eyeing the new server market in India to capture 50% of the market by this year-end. Red Hat Inc., the market leader in Linux server software with 65 per cent market share worldwide, has a 60 per cent stake in Red Hat India while the Indian partner Clover Technologies holds the rest.

The increasing popularity of Linux has fashioned a reversal in the fortunes of Red Hat, a front-runner in packaged Linux systems. The company, which has drastically cut down on its losses, is confident of achieving profitability by 2002.

In perhaps the most significant alliance for any of the dozen or so Linux software companies, IBM announced it will offer the Red Hat Linux operating system on all of its new server and mainframe computers.