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Technology Stocks : Red Hat Software Inc. (Nasdq-RHAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Niels Larsen who wrote (1150)	9/10/1999 11:56:00 AM
From: J. Stone	Respond to of 1794

Linux article Linux at the Gates of Redmond The trend to Linux has built up momentum at a remarkable speed. The only comparable trend that I can think of was the rapid take-up of Windows in the early 1990s. In the space of a year, Linux has moved from being a fringe technology to the fastest growing server platform, and it looks as though it may also become a force on the desktop. Let us consider the growing inventory of facts. There are already at least 9 million Linux users, more than for the Macintosh or OS/2. Support for Linux can be purchased from several companies including specialists like Caldera, Red Hat Software, SuSE, Pacific HiTech and other major vendors like IBM. All these specialist Linux companies claim to have expanding businesses and there are many other retailers on the web that will provide Linux related products. In terms of usage, over 50 percent of ISPs in the world run Linux, although until recently some have been cagey about admitting it, thinking that it might reflect badly. However there are now a large number of organisations that boast of being Linux users including Boeing, Sony, Mercedes Benz, Southwestern Bell, NASA, the FBI, Cisco Systems and even some banks. In September 1998, Gartner Group reported that 14% of all corporations were using Linux. Linux was even used for the special effects renderings for the movie, "Titanic". 1998 was the year that ISVs began to provide mainstream software for Linux. It attracted support from IBM, Oracle, SAP, Informix, Netscape, Sybase, Inprise, Computer Associates, Corel and others. A mass of new software products were added to the existing portfolio, that already included Tuxedo, ApplixWare, StarOffice, Flagship, Faircom, C/Books and AcctOnit. One CEO of a large software company surveyed his developers to find out how difficult porting products to Linux would be, only to discover that 9 out of 10 of his developers were already using Linux. In the first few months of 1999, the hardware vendors began to line up behind it. Sun Microsystems was already shipping Linux along with Solaris. It was joined by Dell and Compaq, and then in quick succession both IBM and Hewlett-Packard lined up to support Linux on high end Intel servers. In late 1998 Corel had released a cheap sub $1000 Internet server and is now promising a 10-way server called Zaphod with a price tag around $20,000. The Los Alamos National Laboratories in the US built a massive 68 processor Alpha based super cluster to run Linux at a cost of only $150,000. When surveyed, customers rank Linux ahead of Microsoft Windows NT for interoperability, robustness, availability and value for money. Linux also scores very highly for support, although this should not be surprising. In reality there are more developers supporting it than any other operating system ? a direct consequence of it being open source. We are now even beginning to see sites moving applications from Windows NT to Linux. The success of Linux should not surprise us, but it does because it has happened without any marketing investment from anyone. Linux was always growing but very few people called attention to it until its growth became rapid. It won 17 percent of the server market last year according to IDC and it may well become the dominant server platform this year. It may also begin to make a significant impact on the desktop. Microsoft must be very worried. it-analysis.com