Event Summary
11/30/99 - Bristol Technology, Inc. has announced shipment of its Windows-to-Linux
application-migration tool. Bristol is the Danbury, CT-based company that sued
Microsoft Corp. in 1998 for antitrust violations following Microsoft's alleged
attempt to substantially raise the price it planned to charge Bristol for a
Windows source-code license. Bristol's Wind/U for Linux product, which began
shipping Tuesday, enables developers to compile Microsoft Win32 API and Microsoft
Foundation Class source code directly on Linux, and create native, desktop and
server-based Linux applications, according to Bristol. As part of the package,
Bristol is providing ports of the RogueWave Stingray Visual C++ components on
Linux for use with Wind/U. Wind/U for Linux supports Red Hat Linux 6.1 and the
Corel Linux distribution. Bristol also is offering services, via its Linux Porting
Center, to help companies determine the effort required to port their applications
to Linux. The Porting Center also provides hands-on training in Linux development,
Bristol says.
Market
Impact
Bristol's announcement comes six weeks after rival MainSoft announced its plans
to offer its MainWin product for Linux. (See TEC News Analysis article: "MainWin
for Linux - NT Apps without NT", October 27th, 1999) As with that product,
this will help increase Linux's market share. As before, one of the key roadblocks
to Linux acceptance is a lack of applications, and providing easy migration
will help minimize that issue. This will help diversify the OS market, from
the perspective of increasing market share of a smaller player (Linux). With
an estimated 100,000 NT-based applications, this is a fertile segment for this
type of product. With the growing emphasis on Linux, we expect to see increased
competition between Bristol and MainSoft, resulting in increased consumer benefit.
User
Recommendations
The announcement affects those customers trying to decide between Windows NT
and Linux. As with the MainSoft announcement, this product may help users decide
in favor of Linux due to the increased potential for applications availability,
although it should not be the sole determining factor. Also affected are those
customers who have already decided on Linux, want to port NT applications, and
need to decide between Bristol and MainSoft. Bristol's lower price ($6K-$12K
vs. ~$25K for MainSoft) and shipping status (now vs. early-2000 for MainWin)
is an advantage, but customers need to compare functionality closely, to ensure
that they pick the product which best fulfills their needs. One of the risks
is that neither Bristol nor MainSoft yet has the complete source code for Windows
2000, so there will be some question of whether all applications will run "as
advertised". We expect that there will be some modest "issues" for a short time
after initial release of Windows 2000 (announced for February 17th, 2000), but
we expect both vendors to resolve them within 2-3 months of release. Finally,
as with the MainSoft release, customers with mixed NT and Linux environments
will see more benefit than those deciding between operating systems.