The Linux movement is growing rapidly, despite the litigation taking place at the moment, and has the potential to solve many of the issues that surround on-demand computing.
This is the view of Sam Greenblatt, senior VP at Computer Associates (CA) and the organisation`s chief Linux architect. He was discussing the impact of Linux during a technology trends session held at CAWorld in Las Vegas.
"The first thing that needs to be cleared up is the misconception that open source equals free software. That is completely untrue. Open source simply means that the code is freely available to be used and modified," said Greenblatt.
"Linux is controlled by the community headed by Linus Torvalds, the platform`s originator, and because it supports multiple distributions, it has one of the highest industry adoption rates for a new technology."
The number one reason given for switching to Linux is, in fact, reliability
Sam Greenblatt, chief Linux architect, Computer Associates.
Greenblatt said that while some people say it is an operating system that does not work, if one looks at the fact that the top Web server five years ago was Netscape Community Suite, closely followed by Microsoft IIS, and now the top Web server is the Linux-based Apache, it shows that the system does work.
"I laugh when people tell me Linux doesn`t work, because Apache is the perfect example that it does. It now has something like 70% of the market share, while Microsoft`s has shrunk to about 5% and Netscape has less than 3%.
"On top of this, 60% of supercomputers run on Linux, and the system is experiencing growth that is over 27% year-on-year. No operating system has ever experienced this sort of year-on-year growth before."
Greenblatt noted that while the common perception is that the number one reason for switching to Linux is the savings it offers in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO), this is not true.
"The number one reason given for switching to Linux is, in fact, reliability, followed by acquisition costs, performance, scale, security and only then TCO."
According to Greenblatt, the advantages Linux offers as far as on-demand computing goes lie in the fact that it is homogenous, it offers the same look and feel from desktop to mainframe, it offers binary compatibility across multiple distributions, and it provides flexibility in terms of deployment.
"As far as CA`s Linux strategy goes, we understand that Linux is a community and we are a part of that community, thus we want to work with our community to develop better solutions.
"We are excited to be a part of the Linux community, we are excited that the community is part of us, and we are totally committed to the future of this platform."
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