Linux Trends and Directions

A presentation about Linux Trends and Directions in 2003.

Transcript

1. Linux Trends and Directions Harish Pillay harish@maringotree.com CEO/CTA Maringo Tree Technologies Pte Ltd March 26, 2003
2. Agenda • Revisiting Corporate Computing Requirements • State of GNU/Linux Today • GNU/Linux's future – the all important technology/features “road-map” • The Business Ecosystem of GNU/Linux and Free & Open Source Software companies
3. What Every Company Needs – i • A standards compliant set of office productivity tools to do wordprocessing, spreadsheets and presentations • A standards compliant email client complete with a calendaring as well as a address lookup features • A standards compliant web-browser • A standards compliant and secure environment
4. What Every Company Needs – ii • A standards compliant set of office productivity tools to do wordprocessing, spreadsheets and presentations • XML data formats – eliminates hidden formats • Able to be retrieved and manupulated by third party tools • Not beholden to one vendor
5. What Every Company Needs – iii • Standards compliant email clients complete with a calendaring and address lookup features: • LDAP-enabled to access both local and public data/address sources • Email clients that are able to include and use strong cryptography
6. What Every Company Needs – iv • Standards compliant web client/browser: • Conforms to W3C standards • Does not force the browser to be dependent on “proprietary OS”- specific features (like for example ActiveX, DirectX etc) • No hidden, non-standard, non- documented browser extensions
7. What Every Company Needs – v • Standards compliant security: • Interfacing and working with both public key infrastructures especially the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) and Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). • Ability to secure the servers and client machines with no exception
8. Filling Those Needs • OpenOffice/AbiWord/Gnumeric/Koffice/ Magicpoint, StarOffice • Kmail, XFmail, Evolution, OpenLDAP • Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, Netscape, Galeon • PGP/GPG keyservers
9. State of GNU/Linux Today • Current kernel version at 2.4.20 • Development state at 2.5.65 • Version 2.6 expected to be released by end 2003 • Currently scales to 8 CPUs, upto 64GB of RAM • Ability to achieve 5 9s is doable – especially for telco deployments
10. State of GNU/Linux Today • Today GNU/Linux supports all the standard input/output devices via USB, Serial, Parallel, Gigabit ethernet, wireless LANs (802.11a/b/g/x), IrDA, Bluetooth • IPv4, IPv6, IPsec • Crypto support built-in into the Kernel and filesystems • Fully journalled filesystems providing RAID support at all levels
11. State of GNU/Linux Today Distributed computing via OpenMOSIX to allow for smart use/re-use of existing resources in a corporate office network (coupled with a “terminal server” netboot scheme)
12. GNU/Linux Roadmap • Increase the number of processors to 64- way • Increase RAM support to 2TB • Using processor threads • 64-bit processor support of Intel's Itanium and AMD's i86-64 • To meld in clustering technologies into the core
13. Legal Challenges to GNU/Linux • Recent SCO Group suit of IBM has been largely discounted as a gimmick • Legally, all of GNU/Linux is developed without any tainting of code from any previous UNIX, so any challenge will have to be examined closely and not accepted at face value • The power of the GPL licensing scheme ensure no take over of GNU/Linux
14. The Business Ecosystem “how does one make money with F&OSS” • Value to end customers: no exclusivity for one company and provides real choices • Free & Open Source Software companies compete on service, support and product customization • Corporates need to rethink their IT spending and support structure to see how F&OSS tools can be a key business driver and not be beholden to vendors
15. The Business Ecosystem “how does one make money with F&OSS” • Local companies include SCS Linux Competency Centre, Singapore Engineering Software and Maringo Tree Technologies Pte Ltd • Maringo Tree Technologies is a one year old, privately-held company focused on bringing business value using F&OSS providing secure and high performance computing, wireless security
16. The Business Ecosystem “how does one make money with F&OSS” • Global companies like IBM have been reported to spending US$ 1 billion for GNU/Linux development • Other companies like Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, Mandrake and Debian provide a solid collections of distributions to suit end user needs • Growing number of Asian distributions from India, China, Thailand and Philippines
17. The Business Ecosystem “how does one make money with F&OSS” • Support structures: the local Linux users' groups are an excellent source for help – they are almost always more than willing to go out of the way to make things work for you • Schools are adding GNU/Linux and F&OSS into their curricula meaning that there will be more people with the right skills soon
18. Maringo Tree Technologies • We provide GNU/Linux support, training and product development with a team of highly skilled GNU/Linux and F&OSS engineers • Wireless and Internet security services and solutions • Specialized hardware design using microcontrollers • GRID, Cluster and High Performance computing
19. GNU/Linux in 2003 • Asian Linux Conference to be held as part of EDB's Global Entrepolis from October 27-31 2003 • LinuxWorld Singapore in May • Seminar about GNU Public License and other Open Source licensing schemes as a viable and productive model for releasing code in May
20. Questions?
21. Thank You harish@maringotree.com