UPDATED: Linux and open source may be reaching a new era as the faithful congregate at next week's LinuxWorld conference in New York.
Linux and open source may be reaching a new era as the faithful congregate next week at the LinuxWorld conference in New York.
As the legal battles over Linux and Unix continue to play out, more vendors are offering users legal indemnity, and the 2.6 kernel will soon start finding its way into products.
But according to Sam Greenblatt, senior vice president and chief architect for Computer Associates International Inc.s Linux Technology Group, in Islandia, N.Y., the show will be about much more than that.
"Industry executives will be using their keynotes to make the declaration that we are now into the Linux generation," Greenblatt said in an interview. "Like the transition toward the PC in the 1980s, Linux has now matured to the point where it will be taking over as the next form of computing. The SCO [Group Inc.] lawsuit and all the issues related to that are yesterdays old news. We are going to be stressing the maturity of Linux and how pervasive it has become."
Nevertheless, the legal story will be a hot topic. This week, Open Source Development Labs Inc.
created a $10 million Linux Legal Defense Fund to defend users against litigation from SCO. Novell Inc., of Provo, Utah, has also
set up a Linux Indemnification Program for its SuSE Enterprise Linux customers, under certain conditions, with protection against intellectual property challenges to Linux and to help reduce the barriers to Linux adoption in the enterprise.
The moves will put more pressure on IBM to consider indemnifying its Linux customers, something the Armonk, N.Y., company has not done, although Scott Handy, a Linux vice president at IBM, told eWEEK there is "no change in our policy toward customer indemnification."
Instead, IBM will use next weeks conference to announce its NT-to-Linux Migration Program, designed to encourage customers still running the Windows NT legacy operating system to move to Linux. IBM will offer free NT-to-Linux migration classes and give education and training to its global base of business partners.
Next page: Will Microsoft extend Windows NT support?
Peter Galli has been a financial/technology reporter for 12 years at leading publications in South Africa, the UK and the US. He has been Investment Editor of South Africa's Business Day Newspaper, the sister publication of the Financial Times of London.He was also Group Financial Communications Manager for First National Bank, the second largest banking group in South Africa before moving on to become Executive News Editor of Business Report, the largest daily financial newspaper in South Africa, owned by the global Independent Newspapers group.
He was responsible for a national reporting team of 20 based in four bureaus. He also edited and contributed to its weekly technology page, and launched a financial and technology radio service supplying daily news bulletins to the national broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, which were then distributed to some 50 radio stations across the country.
He was then transferred to San Francisco as Business Report's U.S. Correspondent to cover Silicon Valley, trade and finance between the US, Europe and emerging markets like South Africa. After serving that role for more than two years, he joined eWeek as a Senior Editor, covering software platforms in August 2000.
He has comprehensively covered Microsoft and its Windows and .Net platforms, as well as the many legal challenges it has faced. He has also focused on Sun Microsystems and its Solaris operating environment, Java and Unix offerings. He covers developments in the open source community, particularly around the Linux kernel and the effects it will have on the enterprise.
He has written extensively about new products for the Linux and Unix platforms, the development of open standards and critically looked at the potential Linux has to offer an alternative operating system and platform to Windows, .Net and Unix-based solutions like Solaris.
His interviews with senior industry executives include Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Linus Torvalds, the original developer of the Linux operating system, Sun CEO Scot McNealy, and Bill Zeitler, a senior vice president at IBM.
For numerous examples of his writing you can search under his name at the eWEEK Website at www.eweek.com.
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