Time for a switch?, Jul 02, 2007

Powerful, easy to use, bug-free - and best of all - FREE! Linux is becoming the Operating System of choice for many internet aficionados.

A year and half after it bought out its Indian JV partner and set up a fully-owned subsidiary in the country, open source software leader Red Hat Inc is making India the hub for its new services strategy.

... the new software makes it feasible for big businesses to offer their employees a choice of running Windows, Linux or Apple Macintosh software on desktop PCs, using the same underlying software code.

The penguin’s come of age. What began as a battle between proprietary and open source Linux software, started by geeks around the world, isn’t plain tech rhetoric anymore. It’s now a mainstream commercial platform — a technology that enterprises are taking very seriously and looking at as a major cost-effective solution that has scalability and a great future roadmap.

For the first time ever Redmond Giant Microsoft will be rubbing shoulders with its arch rival, the Penguin at Linux Asia 2007.

I'm not suggesting that switching an entire company over to Linux and other open-source software is a no-brainer. There are pros and cons that need to be assessed by a smart tech person.

Looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office? Try OpenOffice, touted as one of the best alternatives to MS Office. OpenOffice competes almost feature-for-feature with Microsoft Office. Primarily, OpenOffice is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite which is open source and, as a result, is available not only for Windows but also for Mac OS X, Sun Solaris, and Linux. And, most important, it's absolutely free!

"Linux is coming, Unix is dead." But there’s no need to panic. Not just yet. The end is not going to come overnight or even in next week or year, but it is certain, or as he puts it, “an absolute”

Priced at around $1 million, the open source (Linux)- based supercomputer is housed at the Computational Mathematics Laboratory (CML) of TIFR, located at the Pune University campus.

Red Hat, the largest distributor of Linux in the world, has unveiled its Enterprise Linux Version 4 in Punjabi.

As much as 83% of the computers in the corporate world run on Windows 98 and the earlier version Windows 95, while 4% preferred Linux, the open source software.

“Deployed on a large scale, Linux will save India a large amount of money,” said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom). He added that the open source movement was making rapid strides in India with the developer community evincing interest in the platform.

So doesn't Linux have much prospects in India? It sure does, but only if its introduced at the school level so that future generations can grow up working on Linux, a government official felt. Worldwide, there are many governments that have adopted a policy of using Linux. Germany, Taiwan, China and many other countries in the Asia Pacific region are encouraging the use of Linux and have announced many initiatives based on open source software.