What’s going on with Linux right now
Greetings from HP Linux Forum 2008! Some members of our team are participating one of the biggest Linux events here in Helsinki, Finland.
The crowd here is a nice mix of traditional Linux nerds, some people a bit more business-oriented and some from public sector. Linux seems to be doing well - judging from the amount of participants - as the subjective estimate is that there are more people than last year.
Hot topics are of course still virtualization, just like last year, interoperability in heterogeneous environments and also the trend towards communities. There’s a nice SMS poll system in use here, showing the poll results on a big screen in real time. One poll showed that way over 80% of the participants were using both Linux and Windows in their companies. The Finnish Linux User Group’s prize went to the Ubuntu Finland community. Congratulations, well done!
There was a very good and entertaining speech from Teppo Sulonen, the CIO of City of Tampere. He was praising not only open source software, but openness in bigger sense. Three big cities in Finland have started working together on a common ICT infrastructure. The system is being implemented using common standards and open source technologies instead of the old style of all the cities building their own incompatible systems using proprietary technologies.
Karl Paetzel from HP commented that even if Linux necessarily isn’t in every corner of every datacenter, it is mainstream for almost every customer they talk with. So I think that even if the great coming of desktop Linux may not be here yet, it looks like Linux is very much mainstream in almost every other area.
Signing out,
Ripa
