Linux Is No Longer The Cool New Kid On The Block. So Now What?

By Charles Babcock
InformationWeek
Sat Apr 12, 12:00 AM ET

Linux usage has
grown fast over the past several years as the operating system moved
from perimeter Web servers to workloads much closer to the heart of the
business, while gaining a broad following of contributors and
commercial users. But the days of these easy advances may be past.

That's the message IDC analyst Al Gillen delivered to about 300
attendees at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin,
Texas, last week. Linux has made many gains at the expense of legacy Unix systems. However, server virtualization combined with head-to-head competition with revitalized competitors, both Unix and Microsoft Windows Server, will likely slow things down.

Meanwhile, other problems plague Linux, including issues with driver
development stemming from an unwillingness of some peripheral device
manufacturers to reveal where they've deviated from specifications,
said Chris Wright, a Linux kernel developer
and conference attendee. Moreover, many Linux users fail to report
bugs, whether out of laziness or ignorance of the process. Bug
reporting is a priority of kernel developers, who depend on the larger
community to help detect and correct problems.

BILLIONS OF REASONS

Nevertheless, Gillen stressed that Linux is still a force to be
reckoned with. It's more and more frequently acting as a database
server, especially for Oracle,
he said, while assuming heavier business application workloads,
including ERP, CRM, and financial applications. "By 2011, the logistics
and manufacturing applications alone will be a $1.2 billion market on
Linux; human capital management will be a $2 billion market," Gillen
predicted.

Still A Force

IDC's Gillen has tracked Linux since 1999. His outlook for 2011:

$50 billion

Size of Linux market--server hardware plus OS

$96 billion

Market for Linux and Unix business apps; Linux represents one-third of total

$110 billion

Market for Windows Server applications

He cited figures showing that for every supported copy of Linux running
in the enterprise, there's another copy running unsupported, and thus
unpaid for. The Linux ecosystem is twice as large as it appears in most
revenue data because so many companies have support skills in-house or
are willing to rely on advice from forums.

Part of the purpose of the summit, now in its second year, is to let
business users interact with Linux kernel developers. One IT pro glad
to have the opportunity was Ed Reaves, a Nortel technology platform
manager from Research Triangle Park, N.C.

End users and server admins are happy with Linux's current five-nines
uptime, Reaves said, but Nortel and other telecom companies would like
to move Linux reliability to six nines, or one outage of about 30
seconds a year. In response, Nortel's Linux developers produced a block
of code that restarts Linux in 20 seconds in the event of a glitch;
however, that patch doesn't appear to be moving into the kernel, to the
dismay of Nortel executives.

"How do you get a kernel patch released into the mainline?" Reaves
asked, referring to the development process that steers additions to
the kernel past reviewers and into a hierarchical code tree maintained
by Linus Torvalds.
That led to a discussion of the difficulties inherent in the code
review process that must happen before a proposed patch makes its way
into the kernel.

"The limiting resource is not development of code but review of code,"
said Jonathan Corbet, a kernel developer. The Nortel patch, it turns
out, is a sizable block of code requiring reviewers with knowledge of a
particular part of the kernel.

The first day of the summit ended with energetic debate among mobile
device makers who use Linux over who was following standards and how
mobile Linux devices should be developed.

"There was an amazing amount of contention. I love to see the passion,"
said Linux user Stefano De Panfilis, laboratory director at Engineering
Informatica in Rome. And passion, of course, has long been Linux's trump card.