|
March of the Penguins
Another year over
And a new one just begun
- John Lennon |
 A
lot happened last year in the world of Open Source. On the desktop front Firefox
and OpenOffice were downloaded like gangbusters. Meanwhile Sun opened up Java
and whacking big chunks of Solaris under the ambit of the OpenSolaris project.
Linux had its share of wins across the globe though it was conspicuous by its
absence on most desktops.
2007 will be a good year for Open Source software, at least in the enterprise.
The LAMP stack will continue to find adherents and the Penguin will find followers
in government (witness the Tamil Nadu big bang Linux effort) and, if the applications
get ported, in BFSI. HPC will also see a surge of interest in Linux with the
emergence of what supercomputer maker Cray calls Compute Node Linux (CNL).
|
2006 was a good year for the Open
Source movement. Here's a look in the crystal ball for 2007
|
Beyond Linux, Sun’s become very active with three communities—OpenOffice,
Open Source Java and OpenSolaris. J2ME going OSS should help it solidify its
presence in the smartphone market.
Where the Open Source community has failed so far has been in the area of enterprise
software—SAP and Oracle’s Linux ports are doing just fine without
any serious competition thank you very much—and the desktop where despite
much ado about nothing, Vista is still the only game in town when it comes to
hardware support and an integrated desktop OS.
I’m curious about Microsoft’s intentions vis-a-vis Linux. The much
ballyhooed partnership with Novell left watchers dazed and confused. Despite
all the flip-flopping, I get the feeling that Microsoft could well come out
with an OSS product. After all it sold Unix all those years ago, remember Xenix?
I’ll leave you with a couple of insights from Gartner. The first is that
software developers might be discouraged because of the tons of open source
software that’s available for free. “This is further driven by major
vendors that are making their software available as open source,” says
Gartner.
Meanwhile the analyst group is getting scads of feedback
from its clients that companies increasingly want to run open source software
on top of Windows, or proprietary stuff on Linux.
prashant.rao@expressindia.com
|
