For years we’ve been trying to educate the world about the benefits and the ideology behind free software. We’ve been working hard to enlighten as many people and companies as possible, but somewhere along the way I believe we forgot our goal. Our goal was to get Linux, free software and open source into peoples homes, offices and even the data centers and believe it or not, WE ARE HERE!!!

Open source has gone into a new phase and whether we like it or not the rules have changed. Of course this didn’t happen over night, this is the result of a series of decisions a couple of companies made. Red Hat decided to release an enterprise version of their Linux distribution and begun to compete with Microsoft, Sun, HP and others about the space in the data centers and not too long ago Red Hat also bough the popular open source application server JBoss. Novell bought SUSE and pretty much replaced NetWare with SUSE Linux and joined the party in the data centers.

A company that definitely made a difference in leading open source into the next phase is Sun Microsystems. In the past few years Sun has been changing the licensing of Java to open source and also released OpenSolaris an open source version of Solaris. As another step in Sun’s open source strategy they bought two very significant open source projects, MySQL and VirtualBox. Sun isn’t the only company to buy open source projects at the moment and not to long ago Nokia bought Trolltech and Citrix bough Xen Source.

At this new playground there’s a new set of rules to live up to that the open source-community never faced before. At this playground of companies, business agreements, economics and profitability there’s no room for decisions based on ideology. We need to help these companies find ways to make their decisions so that they do not interfere with the ideology behind open source and so that these companies can benefit from their decisions.

It’s no longer the open source-community’ believe in their ideology that brings open source further, open source has silently taken the step into the commercial world and whatever you all think about that it was all of us that brought it there. We got what we asked for and now it’s time to learn to play by the new rules.

The last ten years speculations about however this is the year for Linux or not has been literally attacking us when surfing the net. This year these speculation has been hard to find despite the fact that the number of people speaking for open source has been growing strong last year thanks to Ubuntu and others. The only one I can remember to speculate about if this is THE year is IBM who said that they never said it before, but 2008 is the year Linux take over our desktops.

Instead all the discussions are about that Lenovo released two of their laptop modells from the IBM ThinkPad-series with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop pre-installed on the Swedish market and that HP and other computer manufactures are planning on releasing some of their models with Linux pre-installed. Two months into 2008 two huge companies bought three important and significant open source projects. Of course am I thinking about that Sun bought MySQL and VirtualBox, and that Nokia bought Trolltech including the copyright for QT.

The fact that huge companies has begun to buy open source projects is absolutely positive in my point of view and I’m not worried that these projects will be closed source or difficult to access in other ways like many others do. The companies are not going to close the source of further releases since the open source community is the worlds greatest test department free of charges. To release a product as open source for people and small businesses to download and use free of charge results in that they report bugs and literally test your product for you. When this product is considered stable the manufacturer package the product together with administration tools, security updates and patches, documentation and support to an enterprise product for companies that need these kinds of guarantees.

The benefits of big IT companies buying and developing open source softwares is that the development becomes more stable and organized since a company has to deliver a product to survive. These big IT companies also guarantees that the product is working together with different hardware and software that a non-profit open source project got a hard time to provide to the customer. The fact that big IT companies is buying open source projects makes them competitive on the market for software which will contribute to more companies taking the step to open source solutions.

Open source is also a great marketing strategy, to give your customer access to the product before it’s all done gives the customers the possibility to have all the internal testing done when the finished enterprise version of the product hits the market and the implementation can be done instantly. For all technicians that work with these products open source gives them the opportunity to run exactly the same software at home without expensive licensing models and the fact that they’re able to influence the development of the product they use.

The companies has finally accepted the challenge of open source! 2008 will certainly be an interesting year in open source history.

Novell together with IBM has developed a special edition of SUSE Linux named SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Starter System for IBM System z. As the name tells it’s SUSE Linux for IBM’s most powerfull servers IBM System z, and with the package you get SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 together with administration tools for SUSE-based virtual servers. Novell says that with this new product it will be as easy to install Linux on a mainframe as it is on a regular PC. This opens for a lot of new opportunities for the use of mainframe computers.

For all of IBM’s customers that already invested millions of dollars into mainframe computers this is good news since they can reuse their hardware when building a more standardized server environment. For new customers this opens new possibilities to virtualize Linux servers and all the benefits that comes with using stable and redundant mainframe computers for virtualization. The different modells of IBM System z can run from eight to 1500 virtual Linux servers which means there is a size of IBM System z for everyone. Other benefits from virtualize Linux servers on your company IBM System z is that you can use all of the administration tools your staff is used to.

IBM is working together with RedHat on developing an edition for IBM System z since before.

Source: http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.143428 (swedish)