Linux
Continues To Make Headway
We
seem to be running a Linux section in nearly every issue.
And we haven’t even gotten to LinuxWorld (August 4-7 in San
Francisco) yet. Here
are a few stories from the last few days:
Linux In Your Hand?
A
number of the largest consumer electronics vendors have decided to
form an alliance around a Linux platform for consumer products.
This Consumer Linux Forum (CELF) will try to coordinate
discussions on the requirements for extensions to Linux for such
consumer electronics devices as mobile phones, PDAs, set-top boxes,
Internet radios, residential gateways, and automotive interfaces. Initially, they will work on improving Linux performance,
particularly startup and shutdown and real-time capabilities and to
improve efficient power management.
The forum's initial goals are to improve Linux startup and shutdown
time, to improve its real-time capabilities, to reduce ROM/RAM size
requirements, and to improve the efficiency of power management
European Government Adoptions Of Linux
IBM
was pleased to pass along news of many government announcements of
forward movement in the Linux market, in this case focused on the
European market – a Linux hot spot – and IBM.
IBM believes that. “Governments
around the world are adopting Linux in record numbers to save costs,
consolidate workloads, increase efficiency and integrate their
infrastructure.”
It is now one year since the German Federal Ministry of the Interior
signed an agreement with IBM to help German governments at every
level move to Linux and more than 500 agencies throughout German
have signed up to avail themselves of this service.
New
European government customers include:
 |
A
Brussels based government agency for calculating medical
salaries
|
|
A Finish
pension provide
|
|
The
French Ministry of Education
|
|
A German
Institute for High-Speed Dynamics
|
|
A Spanish
tax agency in the Ministry of Finance
|
|
The West
Yorkshire (UK) Police force
|
Government
interest in Linux is not limited to Europe, IBM notes.
In the U.S., the DOD (Department of Defense) has issued a
memo formally approving the use of Linux.
This followed a report last January that noted that 115 open
source applications and more than 250 open source projects were
already in progress at DOD.
In China, the government has opened a new Linux Research Center, run
in partnership with IBM, to help local companies improve Linux
skills and develop applications that run on Linux.
Linux
continues to grow more rapidly than other operating systems on the
market today -- at a compound annual rate of 35 percent, according
to industry sources. Adoption
rates by governments are faster – about 38%.
IDC has
recently noted that they expect the market for Linux-based servers
in western Europe (government and business) to triple between 2003
and 2007, so that the market will then be worth $1.9 billion and
have seen volume growth of 203%, to nearly 500,000 servers.
They also believe that 15.5% of business users will be
employing Linux desktops by that time.
SuSE
Expands Its Partnerships
SuSE,
formerly most prominent for its dominance of the Linux distribution
market in Europe, advanced its U.S. position recently, announcing
that it had signed partnerships with HP and Dell.
With HP,
SuSE will support HP ProLiant Servers with its SuSE Linux Enterprise
Server 8, powered by United Linux.
The software will be available preloaded on ProLiant servers.
Service and support will be provided by HP Service with back
up by SuSE engineering and product maintenance.
(back to top)
