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October 5, 1998

TechView:
The Linux Alternative Gets Serious

ans of the Linux operating system have a lot more to cheer about these days. The investment by Intel and Netscape (along with two venture capital firms) in Red Hat, the largest Linux distributor in the United States, is just the latest coup for the freeware operating system.

Linus Torvalds isn't particularly surprised with the success of his creation--at least not anymore. As he sat on a panel at last week's ISPCON conference in San Jose, Calif., he joked about it being just a matter of time before "world domination kicks in."

The joke carries truth. Linux supporters have waged a long guerrilla war, picking up a band of truly dedicated followers over the years and gradually building up momentum. Now that Linux has gained support from commercial application vendors and has cells of support within many corporate IT organizations, it's ready to take the fight to Microsoft's backyard.

I predict that Linux will kick major butt. But it may take a while. Sure, application vendors such as Informix, Netscape, Oracle, and Sybase are lining up to build versions of their products for Linux. But that's just one hurdle on a long track that Linux has to clear. There are two more major hurdles for more widespread corporate adoption: corporate-level support and commercial developer tools. The investment by Intel and Netscape will help Red Hat address the first of these two--the money will be spent on building a support infrastructure for corporate customers.

Then there's developers' tools. There aren't really any native visual development tools for Linux yet, though Java-based tools should theoretically work on the operating system. There may be enough tools for the truly hard-core developer, but Linux still isn't ready for the PowerBuilder and Visual Basic set.

Sure, Linux developers have managed to handle distributed development of the operating system itself--its drivers and components without all the team development hooks and graphical debugging of most modern integrated development environments--they did it with nothing more than E-mail and FTP, for the most part. But most of us aren't ready to live on the edge like that--we need our GUI crutch.

Of course, once Netscape Application Server and databases from Informix, Oracle, and Sybase are available, the tools will rapidly follow. In fact, when standard application and database servers become generally available, much of the tool issue becomes moot--all the tools for those products on other platforms become Linux tools by default. At that point, Linux will be a true competitor to Windows NT in the corporate world. And Torvalds' joke about world domination will start to look less like a joke--to Microsoft's dismay.