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Zeichick's Take: LinuxWorld: It's about the phones, data centers and penguins


By Alan Zeichick
August 7, 2008 — 
While some call it the March of the Penguins, this week’s LinuxWorld conference is a sign of how far Linux has come. It’s mainstream, at least in the data center. Nobody need ever apologize for installing rack after rack of Linux servers.

For the desktop, well, despite the well-publicized travails of Windows Vista, there’s no sign that Linux has made any serious inroads. While some folks have doubtlessly migrated to Ubuntu or one of the other user-friendly Linux distros, the big winners on the desktop have been the Mac and Windows XP.

The mobile phone, however, remains a rich opportunity for Linux, for two reasons. First, it’s a wide-open battleground, and nobody—not Microsoft, not Symbian, not Apple—has succeeded in world domination of the software stack. (Google is going to try to do that with Android, but it’s premature to make predictions.) The other reason is because, frankly, a mobile phone’s operating system isn’t very important. Consumers don’t buy phones based on their software stack; instead, looks and functionality are the deciding factors.

That leaves the data center as the real home of Linux. LinuxWorld, which has a section called NGDC, or Next Generation Data Center, showed off plenty of hardware, from blade servers to power distribution centers, from appliances to keyboard-video-mouse switches. Big server applications, like Oracle and WebSphere, are in vogue. Systems management applications continue to penetrate the Linux market, along with backup utilities, database recovery systems and security solutions.

What struck me at LinuxWorld is that everyone was very serious. Not much laughter, not many smiles. A rare bright spot came from GroundWork Open Source, which sells systems management software. They were having a contest to determine the “Next Open Source Idol.” After the first day of voting, there were 43 votes cast. The results shouldn’t be surprising:

»
 Tux the Linux Penguin 37.2%
»
 The Mozilla Firefox 25.6%
»
 Beastie the BSD Demon 18.6%
»
 The GNU Gnu 18.6%


Alan Zeichick is editorial director of SD Times. Read his blog at ztrek.blogspot.com.


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