Is Linux Going Mainstream? Maybe

Once relegated to a limited set of applications, the Linux operating system is moving into the mainstream. That's the word, anyway, from market research firm International Data Corp. and Linux vendors, such as Red Hat Inc. They said public and private organizations, rather than confining their Linux use to applications such as inexpensive Web serving and experimental, high-performance computer clustering, are now turning to the open-source software for broader uses, such as database hosting.Evidence of this shift is contained in an August IDC survey revealing that corporate and governmental information technology decision-makers are anticipating a 9 percent growth in Linux-related spending in 2002, up from 3 percent in 1999.Scott McLarnon, study director and group vice president at IDC of Framingham, Mass., stopped short of saying the results demonstrate a burgeoning Linux domination in the operating environment marketplace, which is currently led by Microsoft Corp. But he confirmed that the numbers bode well for the future of the open-source operating system, and that vendors had addressed many of the hurdles to adoption, including acceptance by hardware and software vendors.McLarnon added that the federal government sector was lagging behind many commercial industry sectors in adopting Linux. Commercial adopters of Linux include smaller job shops in manufacturing, professional services and technical services firms, software developers, universities, health care and research and engineering. The federal government is "marginally less likely to be moving today to Linux than most other sectors, with a few exceptions, such as banking and brokerage, which were very unlikely to consider Linux," he said.The survey of 865 corporate and governmental IT decision-makers, including 70 respondents representing federal government departments and agencies, also indicated that state and local governments were slightly more likely than the federal government to move to Linux, he said.Sandy Quant, associate analyst covering Linux and Open Source for the research firm Giga Information Group Inc., Cambridge, Mass., attributed the growth of Linux adoption to "the price and performance advantages of Linux on Intel hardware." According to Quant, the government continued to use Linux-based platforms in science and technology research at Los Alamos National Laboratory and elsewhere. But widespread adoption of Linux in government is potentially hindered by scalability issues that "hamper the ability of the operating system to support high-end applications," she said.Another hindrance may be the lack of a clear endorsement of the Linux OS from the Bush administration, Quant said.Michael Tiemann, chief technology officer for Red Hat, a Linux developer in Durham, N.C., bristles at remarks about scalability limits in Linux. He conceded that the 2.2 version of the Linux kernel had limitations, referred to collectively as the BKL, or "big kernel lock," that effectively limited the performance of Linux platforms when "kernel services" became overtaxed. The kernel is the core of an operating system."However, Red Hat did a lot of work on locking mechanisms in version 2.4 of the kernel, enabling operations to be performed independently and largely resolving any scalability concerns," Tiemann said. He said he is dismayed that analysts continue to raise the issue, and suggested that anyone concerned about scaling and performance consult industry test results that "demonstrated our Linux Web server to be two to three times faster than Microsoft's."Take, for example, the Terascale Computing Initiative at the National Computational Science Alliance and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and other government agencies. It is "based entirely on Linux, including small systems to collect data, and large Linux systems to process it," Tiemann said.Judy Chavis, manager of Compaq Computer Corp.'s Linux programs office in Houston, echoed Tiemann, noting that her company has incorporated high-scalability capabilities, such as Single System Image, in Linux, "enabling the creation of humongous clusters.""While I would agree there are not a lot of implementations of Linux out there running on eight-way servers, the ability to scale an application across a Linux cluster has never been in doubt," Chavis said. "Government is where the clustering efforts started, and we are starting to see an increase in Linux use in that space." Randy Sandone, founder and chief executive officer of Argus Systems Group in Savoy, Ill., is worried that the government is slow to adopt Linux because of security concerns fueled by the publicized involvement of the National Security Agency in overseeing security enhancements to the Linux operating system kernel. Sandone said it isn't fair to single out Linux for special attention. Linux is "no more or less secure than other operating systems," he said.Sandone, whose company offers its own kernel-level security augmentations for Linux in a product called Pitbull LX, said he "didn't understand why U.S. taxpayer money was being used to enable Linux security, when the commercial industry is already investing money, and off-the-self solutions are already available today."He said some government agencies may have gotten the wrong message from the $1.2 million contract the NSA awarded in February to Network Associates Inc., Santa Clara, Calif., for development of further operating system security enhancements. "They may think they need to wait on NSA's secure Linux before they use the operating system," said Sandone, who added that the government has a track record of building "unwieldy, government-centric systems."In contrast, Red Hat's Tiemann looks at the NSA's funding of open-source security enhancements as "testimony to the open-source model and its capability to support many options."Security has not hampered adoption to any perceptible degree, said Robert Hiddard, Red Hat's manager of federal systems programs. For all of the noise around potential impediments to Linux adoption, Rob Scheschareg, vice president of marketing and product development for World Expo of Framingham, Mass., remains bullish. World Expo's annual Linux World conference and exposition is growing in attendance and sponsorship, according to Scheschareg. "We are 30 percent up in attendance compared to last year, but the interesting thing is there are more IT directors and system administrators, not just hard-core developers doing personal applications. There are more mainstream commercial applications, and more sponsors," he said. That trend is why World Expo is holding its first Open Source Conference Oct. 2-5 in Washington. According to Scheschareg, feedback collected from federal government attendees of the Linux World shows has been very supportive of a program catering to government interests.He said two-thirds of agencies continue to use Microsoft operating systems, "but they are giving us the impression that there is a lot of frustration with Windows NT." Linux offers an attractive alternative because "it can be introduced in small projects at a very low cost and with no procurement processes," Scheschareg said. That description fit the Federal Aviation Administration in December 2000. What began as an experiment with Linux as an alternative to other expensive or error-prone operating systems is now the foundation of projects aimed at migrating several FAA mission-critical, Oracle database-driven applications off of Microsoft NT and Hewlett Packard Unix platforms and on to Intel-based servers running Linux.According to John Kelly, database administrator and project manager with Kenrob & Associates Inc., a contractor at the FAA Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Herndon, Va., the move to Linux is no longer perceived as a radical departure with convention. Linux is "stable, offering the flexibility of Unix but at a much lower cost," Kelly said. Moreover, the strategy enables the FAA to "reutilize several medium-sized servers, giving us more equipment options," he said. The FAA began exploring the Linux option about eight months ago, as the need to upgrade existing Oracle databases to later software versions became a priority. At the time, frequent problems with Microsoft NT-based servers soured Kelly and others on the operating system. "We were not been pleased with NT. It seemed like the doors of the equipment cabinets [housing the NT servers] were always opened, like there were always problems that needed to be fixed," Kelly said. "The other operating system used in the FAA data center, HP UX, had the downside of high cost. Linux was seen as a possible replacement for both, and we started an informal evaluation at the beginning of the year."By February, according to Kelly, the FAA had ported its application development environment to Linux, a move encouraged by Oracle's support for Red Hat's version of the operating system for use with its new database products. Kelly said he had heard the debates about the security and scalability of Linux, but rigorous testing alleviated his concerns. "We saw we could push it hard in the testing that we performed and decided to purchase Dell servers to host Oracle on Red Hat Linux, phasing out our HP servers in the process," Kelly said.Today, the FAA has migrated several important applications to Linux and is developing new database applications for hosting on the platform that "have a lot to do with the way that FAA does business," he said.In the process, the move to Linux has saved the FAA considerably in costs, Kelly said. While he could not quantify the savings, "we know what we're looking at, and it is quite a cost difference compared with the HP UX systems," he said.Kenrob's security manager had evaluated the overall security of the platform and "developed a policy for locking it down" that met the FAA's data protection requirements, Kelly said. He said any doubts he has about the scalability of the operating system were offset by two factors: better performance than HP-UX system and cost savings.XXXSPLITXXX-Linux is a Unix-like operating system comprising a kernel developed in 1991 by Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in Finland, and a number of system components developed by team members of the Free Software Foundation as part of an open-source operating system project.Conceived as a free or very low-cost alternative for Unix, Linux is a complete operating system that includes a graphical user interface and other components usually found in a comprehensive Unix system. While creators of some Linux components own copyrights of their contributed elements, Linux is distributed using the Free Software Foundation's "copyleft" provisions, which require that any modified version of Linux that is redistributed must be freely available. Linux is a lightning rod for criticism by vendors of proprietary operating systems, such as Microsoft Corp., which has termed the operating system un-American and a "threat to intellectual property rights." Linux is available for most major microprocessor platforms from Intel servers to IBM mainframes. It is widely used for Web serving and for high-performance, highly scalable server clustering, though advocates argue that it is just as capable as any other operating system of supporting mainstream applications and databases.Free distribution makes Linux market-share numbers difficult to pin down. Analysts note on their operating system market share data, which usually shows Linux as the second most popular server operating system (behind Microsoft), that license-free Linux may actually enjoy much greater share than that recorded by commercial distributors, such as Red Hat.