The Linux Killer
,----[ Quote ]
| "It seems to me that the battle isn't really SCO versus IBM, or SCO
| versus Linux," McBride says. "I think there's a war going on. The war
| is around the future of the operating system, and whether it's going to
| be free or not."
|
| On that score, at least, McBride is right. Over the past decade,
| Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds and his global band of coders have
| created an open operating system just as capable as closed proprietary
| systems like Microsoft's Windows or Sun Microsystems' Solaris. Companies
| from IBM to Red Hat sell services based on Linux, often at substantially
| less than what it costs businesses to buy and operate Windows. Corporate
| America has noticed. Linux now runs on 19 percent of servers, according
| to research firm IDC, and on a small but growing chunk of the desktop
| market. Meanwhile, millions of consumer electronics devices - from
| cell phones to DVRs - rely on Linux, too.
|
| The effects of Linux's rise can be seen throughout the tech industry.
| Microsoft agreed in April to pay $2 billion to archenemy Sun to settle
| all patent claims and to work on interoperability between Windows and
| Solaris. The reason: They have a common enemy in Linux. Last fall, IBM
| funneled $50 million to Novell to help it buy the German firm SuSe, a
| Linux distributor. The deal completed Novell's defection from the closed
| team (as a vendor exclusively selling its own operating system, NetWare)
| to the open source team.
`----
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.07/linux.html
How ironic it is that, several years down the line, Sun embraces Open Source
and sidles next to ubuntu Linux. The 'war' is being won.
|
|
