What are you going to find, if youre determined enough to make your way through airport security over the next few days to get to the August LinuxWorld in San Francisco?
As Peter Galli reports at eWEEK.com, the most popular buzzword is going to be virtualization.
Thats no great surprise. This spring, at the Boston LinuxWorld, virtualization was hotter than football practice on a Texas high school field.
Beneath all the hype and techno jargon, its really pretty easy to see why businesses want it: They want to get the most use out of todays high-powered, multicored computers.
Take it one more step, and it all boils down to people wanting to pay the least amount possible for their enterprise computing power.
It looks to me like theyll get it. Thats the good news. The bad news is that Im not sure any of the companies that are selling virtualization solutions, like SWSoft, VMWare and XenSource, are going to survive providing it.
Everyone, including Microsoft, is giving virtualization programs away. Microsoft can afford to give it away. The other companies cant.
It doesnt help the smaller virtualization companies that several of Linuxs core developers, like Andrew Morton and Greg Kroah-Hartman, want the most important of the Linux virtualization companies, XenSource and VMware, to work together on a common interface.
Again, this makes perfect sense for users and Linux developers, but its going over like a lead balloon at the virtualization circles.