News

LinuxWorld Conference Draws Penguin Lovers to SF

• By John K. Waters
• August 8, 2005

The LinuxWorld Conference and Expo is underway in San Francisco (running Aug. 8 to Aug. 11). With 11,000 registered attendees, traffic is down slightly from last year (11,400), but exhibitors are up from about 180 to 200, according to event organizers IDG World Expo.

Here are the highlights:

- Microsoft is leading a session. Yes, the Great Anti-Linux! Microsoft’s director of platform technology strategy, Bill Hilf, will lead "Managing Linux in a Mixed Environment...at Microsoft?" with "A look inside the Linux/Open Source Software lab at Microsoft."

- Google's open source programs manager, Chris DiBona, will participate in a panel, “The Explosive Growth of Linux and Open Source: What does it all mean?” That panel, part of the "State of the Open Source Union" keynote, will include moderator Stuart Cohen, the CEO of Open Source Development Labs; David Patrick, general manager of the Linux Open Source Platforms and Services group at Novell; Eben Moglen, chair of the Software Freedom Law Center; and Tom Rabon, EVP of corporate affairs at Red Hat.

- Novell will formally launch the Open SuSE project, which opens the company's recently acquired Linux OS to community-based development. “We’ve moving from a closed development methodology, where betas were held privately and no one could contribute except by invitation,” Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, director of marketing for Linux and open source at Novell, tells AppTrends, “to a transparent and open methodology, where the development builds and the beta infrastructure is visible to all.”

- News that IBM is open-sourcing its newly acquired Gluecode application server management console software hit the wire over the weekend. Gluecode's software is designed to enhance the open-source Apache Geronimo J2EE application server.

- Hewlett-Packard may announce it is opening four new Linux expertise centers to help software makers support Red Hat Enterprise Server.

- Red Hat is expected to roll out a strategy to "outline our progress in available offerings in the security space and set technical and business investment plan in the security space for the coming years," the company says.

- Business Objects is bringing its BusinessObjects XI platform to Linux, the company says, to "allow customers to use the...BI platform on the OS of their choice."

- EnterpriseDB is expected to release EnterpriseDB 2005, an enterprise-class relational database management system designed to support update-intensive, high-volume applications.

- OpenLogic is announcing BlueGlue, an application designed to automate the installation, configuration, integration, testing and management of certified and supported stacks built from customer-specified combinations of more than 100 leading open-source projects.

- SugarCRM is planning to announce Sugar Enterprise Edition, an open-source relationship management package compatible with Oracle 9i.

- JasperSoft will demo JasperReports DBA Dashboard for MySQL, designed to let administrators monitor performance and use while identifying problems across an unlimited number of MySQL database servers.

In a Forrester Research survey in May, respondents ranked Linux third, behind Windows Server 2000/2003 and IBM z/OS, as an OS they consider strategic. And 26 of the 56 respondents said they are using Linux in their data centers.

IDC expects worldwide sales of open-source applications, tools and system software running on Linux to increase from $5.4 billion in 2005 to nearly $17 billion in 2009.