First Look: OpenSUSE 10.3 Desktop Linux, Oct 29, 2007

Beneath its slick graphical polish, the latest SUSE is still a hobbyist's OS at heart.

Free software is clearly an ideological movement, and as such it will naturally make some people uneasy. But a growing number of commercial software companies have begun to accept the Gnu GPL (General Public License), the most important expression of the free software ideology.

I came away from InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum this week with two conclusions. First, server virtualization is definitely a big deal. This time last year, customers and ISVs still seemed to be struggling to come to terms with this new approach to deploying and managing servers; today it's full speed ahead. And, second, nowhere is virtualization hotter than in the Linux market.

In October, Oracle sent Red Hat’s stock plummeting on the announcement that it would offer cut-rate support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, under the “Unbreakable Linux” brand. Could Larry Ellison now be planning a repeat with “Unbreakable MySQL”?

What do you get if you cross an open source development consortium with an organisation that promotes free standards? Answer: You get a Linux advocacy group. Or so it seems.

At a recent Sun Microsystems press event, Sun execs talked up plans to market the company's Solaris Unix OS to startups and small-to-midsize businesses. "Open source is what [customers] want to go after," said Peder Ulander, Sun's vice president of software marketing. "It's not so much Linux. Linux just happens to embody open source."

Just when the Mono Project was beginning to gain traction, along comes Sun Microsystems to take the wind from its sails. I can’t help but feel it’s a mixed blessing.

Traditional hardware design is a top-down process. If you need a CPU, you choose one from the various manufacturers’ catalogues and then build your device around its specifications. If a given part doesn’t suit your needs perfectly, you can sometimes work around its limitations in software, but otherwise you’re stuck. Only the largest electronics vendors can afford to dabble with custom components.

Enterprise Linux customers typically pick from just two options. Although HP’s decision to support Debian could widen the playing field, the choice really comes down to Novell and Red Hat. It’s worth comparing the two in terms of product offerings and overall style.

We all cheered when Apple began experimenting with community-driven, open source development for its flagship operating system, Mac OS X. But if those experiments are now drawing to a close, should anyone really be surprised?

Plainly, the real problem is that the old ideas just aren't working. Microsoft has been phenomenally successful as a software company, but as the years have gone by, it has increasingly struggled to adapt to change.

For the forthcoming SLED (Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10, Novell went back to the drawing board to rethink what makes a good desktop. The result is extremely impressive.

Scott McNealy is out. Jonathan Schwartz is in. And the future never looked brighter for Sun Microsystems -- or so we're told. But if Sun's new CEO is going to convince me that his company can remain a dominant player in enterprise software, first he's going to have to get his story straight, particularly when it comes to Linux and open source.

Say what you will about Windows' lack of openness or its seemingly never-ending software flaws, but if you double-click on an installer and the version of Windows you're using is reasonably up-to-date, your software will install. This is even truer on Mac OS X, where installing software often involves nothing more than dragging a single icon from the install disk to your applications folder.

The first draft of Version 3.0 of the GNU GPL (General Public License) has arrived, and its authors -- Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) -- predictably aren't shying away from controversy.

I believe that 2006 will be the year for Linux-powered consumer electronic devices. For the past few weeks I've been enthralled by one early example: the Nokia 770.

For server vendors such as Dell, Linux is a good thing because it lowers acquisition costs for customers. It's easier for a customer to commit to deploying a new server when software license fees are removed from the equation.

Suppose a single vendor took the big gamble and offered the whole ball of wax: a complete desktop Linux distribution pre-installed on certified custom hardware. I don't mean a budget white box, either, but a well-crafted system designed with usability in mind, fully supported, but with the built-in cost savings of open source. Would you buy?

What makes a software project "grown-up," in short, is the same thing that makes a person grown-up. A lot of it boils down to priorities. When you're young, you have the luxury of being free to engage in very idealistic or radicalized thinking. As you mature, however, other concerns take precedence.

In the Wintel-systems market, Dell is king of the hill. But what do you do when your hill just isn't big enough?

"To some extent, Dell is seen as more of an SMB kind of player," says Judy Chavis, director of business development for the enterprise products group at Dell.