November 9th, 2006
The war is over and Linux won
A new IBM-sponsored study on Linux sent me by Joe McKendrick, our SOA expert, goes a long way toward explaining the big Oracle and Microsoft moves regarding Linux.
The war is over and Linux won. (The original Linux penguin was created by Larry Ewing. This particular bird lives at the LWN Penguin Gallery.)
The truth of the assertion is in a chart near the back of the report. It shows that 83% of companies expect to support new workloads on Linux next year, against 23% for Windows. The move is slower for larger enterprises, but the direction is clear.
At least in the server world, Linux has won.
Web servers and database servers remain the dominant applications, but development environments are now among the most popular systems in production, meaning the trend toward Linux and open source applications should accelerate.
Over two-thirds of the respondents said they will increase their use of Linux in the next year, and almost no one said the opposite.
So if Microsoft is doing a slow take-over of Novell, and Oracle is bringing out its own stack, these are understandable defensive moves, a re-arrangement of forces if you will. Because the war is over and Linux won. And in business that means it's on to the next war.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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