With the end of the year just a few weeks away, and this being my final column for the year, I felt it appropriate to take a brief snapshot of the open source world.
The past year has been a highly successful one for Linux and the open source ethic. Linux now sits firmly and comfortably in the Sun and IBM camps with both vendors building an entry-level strategy around the operating system (OS). So much so that a recent Sun Microsystems publication had a picture of Scott McNealy alongside a replica of the Linux "tux" penguin at a recent Sun conference.
Clustering made its way into the headlines in 2002 and has opened up a whole new world for supercomputing power.
Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb
Linux has also found its way into other vendors, some more successfully than others. Oracle for one is backing the open source horse and now has a firmly established relationship with Red Hat, while SAP and SuSE have issued announcement after announcement about their compatibility over the past year.
On the desktop front, Open Office is a winner, and is only benefiting from Microsoft`s "no tolerance" licence campaign. And Ximian`s Evolution personal information manager is the application open source users and business have been waiting for.
Clustering made its way into the headlines in 2002 and has opened up a whole new world for supercomputing power. Supercomputers traditionally have been room-sized machines that cost millions and millions of rands. Today a cluster of smaller computers is outperforming even the largest mainframes. And almost without exception these are Linux clusters.
Linux also found its way into the movies in a big way this year, even if it was largely behind the scenes. Linux was used to do much, if not most, of the rendering for movies such as Shrek, Toy Story and the forthcoming Start Trek movie. This prompted one commentator on geek site Slashdot to remark that "Linux is now obviously ready for the Enterprise".
But it is not only the Linux OS that made it into headlines in the past year. Apple`s Mac OSX, which is built largely around a BSD core, has been making headway this year, proving Unix-based products can be just as attractive as any other OS.
And, on the server side, FreeBSD`s latest release is perhaps one of the best products of the year. A simple installation routine and great tools make FreeBSD my open source server OS of the year.
I have been writing about and advocating Linux and open source for close on four years now and 2002 has been the best year so far. The growth levels in open source have been phenomenal and the movement can only get stronger in the coming year.
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