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According to Internet consultancy firm Netcraft, the Open Source Web server Apache continued its dominance, being used on over 60% of Internet servers worldwide in the year 2002.
In addition, the Linux kernel version 2.4.18 lasted over 150 days this year, making it generally accepted as the first stable kernel in the 2.4 series. Previous kernels had lasted, on average, less than 25 days before being obsoleted.
These two back-end-centric events were hardly surprising. On the other hand, the determination of the Open Source community to make their products viable on the desktop, was.
An Office alternative
The Holy Grail of the Open Source world is Microsoft applications running under Linux, particularly the Office suite. Yet even the best of the emulators still don?t run Office XP. But a viable alternative, OpenOffice 1.0, saw the light of day in May, and is entirely Open Source.
OpenOffice provides a similar user interface and compatibility with documents from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris (a Mac OS X port is nearly complete) and supports Asian languages, including Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Thai. Given that the next version of Microsoft Office is likely to require at least Windows 2000, OpenOffice?s support back to Windows 95 is another reason for some IS departments to consider it besides just the price, which is free.
Ximian?s new Outlook-like client for Linux called Evolution covers the final missing piece. First released this year, Evolution integrates e-mail and scheduling in a very familiar style, but unfortunately requires a proprietary ?connector? to talk to an Exchange server.
Worthy of a new war
Just when you thought it was over, the ex-Netscape crew at AOL-Time Warner released an Open Source browser named ?Mozilla? that is worthy of renewed competition with Internet Explorer. Mozilla has an unique feature called tabbed browsing, which eliminates desktop clutter by allowing you to open and bookmark multiple Internet sites in the same window. Another popular feature is the ability to block the advertising popups that suddenly became so annoying this year.
Finally, the Mozilla suite includes an e-mail client that uses a standard text format database. This means you never have to worry about losing the ability to read archived e-mail. Mozilla is also the basis for Netscape 7, which adds AOL Instant Messaging and an online radio player. Both Mozilla and Netscape run on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows (back to Windows 98) and support most Asian languages. Consider Netscape in order to get commercial support for a fee.
Desktop Linux?
Several distributions released in 2002 made Linux more appealing to the desktop by offering improved GUIs, rather than command lines. RedHat 8.0 standardised on a slick new user interface called BlueCurve, that makes GNOME and KDE look nearly the same. It also includes friendlier system configuration and application installation tools, plus all applications mentioned in this story so far.
RedHat 8.0 dropped support for MP3 due to new royalties that were imposed on players this year. But in a possible portent of things to come, this year?s new products included the first Open Source implementation of
Ogg Vorbis, a comparable but patent-free audio encoding format. Sound quality is equal to or better than MP3, Windows Media and Real Audio, but popularity won?t pick up until portable devices start playing the format.
A small company named Lindows.com, which released its first product in 2002, deserves mention as making the most aggressive play for the desktop. Touting features that appeal to novice Linux users and compatibility with Windows, it has already partnered with US-based retailing giant Walmart to offer ultra-low cost systems, assembling an online subscription library of freely downloadable applications, and offering ?all you can install? licensing to hardware OEMs for US$500 per month.
Linux distro news
Midyear, the US headquarters of TurboLinux sold the company name and the still popular Japanese operations to SRA, one of the oldest software companies in Japan. The joint venture in China with SpaceLinux was also sold to SRA, and so both Asian versions are likely to survive.
Although the US side dropped out of sight, TurboLinux continues to be the Asian anchor of the UnitedLinux group formed early this year, which includes the European leader SuSE, the US-based SCO Group (formerly Caldera), and the Brazilian distro Connectiva. UnitedLinux members hope to compete with RedHat worldwide by attracting independent software vendors to their Linux distributions, each of which will be a customised version of the UnitedLinux core released in November.
Another validation that Linux could become the dominant Unix is Sun?s introduction of its own Linux distribution for its Intel-based servers in August; Sun?s Linux currently contains only minor differences from RedHat. The last distro news for the year is that IBM did not release their own. As IBM bets more and more of their business on Linux each year, this continues to be a significant non-event because it implicitly provides backing for each of the distributions they ship on their hardware.
Linux storage maturing
The year 2002 saw software NAS vendors continue to bet on demand for an alternative to Windows-based products. Although some notable FreeBSD holdouts like Synology exist, most, like Mountain View Data, Telemedia, and several storage hardware manufacturers, moved ahead with Linux- based products in order to take advantage of wider community shared development and support. These products have begun to show up as OEM appliances around the world.
Linux-based clustered SAN filesystems, which will be the next revolution in Open Source storage, advanced in 2002 as well. Sistina Software continued to refine its Global File System (GFS) for Linux, a formerly Open Source product, releasing a new point version 5.2, and starting on a project to support the IBM zSeries mainframe.
A newcomer, PolyServe, released their own closed source SAN filesystem for Linux this year, the Matrix Server. Matrix Server promises to support Windows in its next release, eventually allowing mixed Windows and Linux clusters. An October financing round of US$19.5 million means they should be around to do it. Matrix Server is likely to be highly scalable due to their veteran engineers having pioneered large scale SMP and NUMA operating systems at Sequent Computer Systems in the 90?s.
The highlight of the year in storage came in July, when Veritas used their Linux Storage Day to herald, in their own words, ?Linux?s Second Coming?. They announced versions of their Cluster Server and ServePoint NAS products for Linux and presented a roadmap for more of their high-end storage product to come to Linux over the next 12 to 18 months.
Resolutions for 2003
If your business desktops run predominately e-mail, Web applications, and Microsoft Office, the time is now right to test whether you can get the same value at lower costs with Linux. Likewise, don?t be afraid to evaluate high-end Linux storage solutions farther back in the data centre. But as Linux in the storage space is still maturing, make sure they really meet your maximum projected requirements before replacing existing products. If they don?t, just wait another year and they likely will.
source:
hxxp://www.ncasia.com/ViewArt.cfm?Magid=3&Artid=18169&Catid=8&subcat=79
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