Will desktop Linux ever grow up?, Aug 18, 2009

Will desktop Linux ever grow up? I ask because, after years of monitoring this wannabe Windows-killer's progress, I've yet to see it emerge from its awkward adolescent stage.

Every year InfoWorld painstakingly selects its Bossie Award winners -- the best open source software for business.

The show will feature several great sessions that focus on the realities of Linux and open source, beyond the hype.

Linus Torvalds and the developers who originally built Linux certainly didn't come from a background of heavy-duty Unix experience, yet they disrupted all of the incumbents. Heck, IBM couldn't figure out how to compete with Microsoft, yet a university kid out of Helsinki created the fastest-growing server platform ever.

"Consolidation" will be the watchword as Oracle absorbs Sun Microsystems, but it shouldn't ignore the plum technologies in Sun's portfolio.

Is Microsoft a friend or foe of open source? Going by the company's actions, Microsoft can't seem to decide whether to make love or war. But if it's war, Microsoft appears to lack the legal weaponry to defeat or even disturb its adversaries.

At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, the open source OS's desktop, mobile, and cloud potential were explored

Linux has achieved success on servers, but can it make a go of it on the desktop? Panelists at a technical conference Tuesday evening debated the question, with a Red Hat official wondering whether the issue is even relevant anymore.

Linux certainly has established itself as a prominent server OS these days, pushing Unix into the background. But the open source OS shares the stage with commercial software giant Microsoft, which remains a dominant player with Windows Server

The open source project unveiled on Wednesday that brings Microsoft's RIA platform to Linux and Unix was used to stream the Presidential inauguration.

It started small. A faint grumble here. A clenched-teeth comment there. Then came the accusations. Google is abandoning Firefox! Google is unfairly exploiting its position! Google is ... acting like Microsoft!

As my colleague Martin Heller recently observed, smart coders always optimize the slowest thing. Trying to optimize every trivial performance issue in your code is just chasing your own tail. You should find the one problem that's causing the biggest performance hit and fix that first.

...have you ever heard of a community version of the open source operating system displacing one of the popular commercial distributions? That's exactly what happened in Germany's third-largest public TV and radio station

Mainsoft, which enables developers to leverage Microsoft Windows development skills to build applications for other platforms, on Monday is introducing updates to development products for Java, Linux, and Unix, adding support for Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 IDE.

Want to run Linux any time, any place? Here's what to do with popular distributions like Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, and Fedora, so you can boot up directly from your thumb drive.

Red Hat is announcing availability Wednesday of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, with enhancements in virtualization, clustering, and hardware support.

Sun Microsystems is stepping up efforts to boost Java usage in Linux shops by working to remove some final encumbrances in the open-source Java platform.

Some of the Linux developers' and business customers' jitters may have been settled on April 15th when, at the MySQL Conference in San Francisco, Sun announced the next version of MySQL: MySQL 5.1. This edition, which is now available as a release candidate, is still under the Linux-friendly GPLv2.

Jim Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, Zemlin also has served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, providing products and services for the Apache Web server. Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference and Linux World. Zemlin met with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill this week to talk about Linux topics ranging from overtures to Microsoft to the progress of Linux on the desktop.

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) tools company Zend Technologies is announcing this week that its Zend Core product will run on the Windows Server 2008 platform, providing parity between Windows Server and Linux in running PHP.