IBM a winner in Mainsoft contest

The results on Mainsoft's "Race to Linux" are in:

• Brian Hendrickson, president and lead developer of Oregon-based Megapump, Inc. used PHP and PostgreSQL to rewrite Microsoft's Issue Tracker Starter Kit.
• Abishek Bellamkonda of Australia used Mainsoft's Grasshopper, a free plug-in to the Visual Studio .NET IDE, and SQL Server 2000 to port the Time Tracker Starter Kit and Reports Tracker Starter Kit to Tomcat.
• Juan Ignacio de Paula of Uruguay used Mono and Firebird to win the race in porting Microsoft's open source Time Tracker Starter Kit and Reports Tracker Starter Kit.

But the real winner here may have been IBM, and its multi-platform strategy.

Winners were judged using an IBM eServer xSeries machine running SuSE Linux 9 and Scott Handy (right), IBM's VP for WorldWide Linux Strategy, was thrilled with the results.

"We have a lot of customers who want the flexibility of using both Windows nad Linux," he said. ISVs "take this easy route and have their .Net application actually run, without being rewritten, on Linux."

Linux server hardware revenue is growing at four times the rate of Windows servers, with $1.5 billion in revenue for the second quarter. That growth rate is eight times the rate of the overall server market, he added. But software variety still lags and tools like Mainsoft's Grasshopper help fill the gap, he said, until software is re-architected.

If your shop is running any of these applications, programs written for Windows and just ported to Linux (rather than being rewritten in something like Java or re-architected entirely), I'd sure like to know how it's running. The proof of the pudding remains in the eating.