Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
That just can't be. Why, we've seen countless studies that prove that Linux is vastly more expensive, less reliable, etc. in the server room than Microsoft's offerings. These companies only think they're saving money.
That, or they've figured out that someone is lying to them.
Next thing you know, they might start wondering if the Received Wisdom might be wrong about the desktop, too.
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.
