Event
Summary
On May 24, 2000, Linus Torvalds and the Linux Kernel Archives released
an unannounced test version of the 2.4.0 Linux kernel.
As
Torvalds remarked (in May 2000), "It doesn't really exist yet." 2.4 was
originally slated for October 1999 release. Industry observers now expect
Linux 2.4 to be finished no earlier than year-end 2000. However, when
asked about delays to Red Hat distributions of 2.4-derived products, Red
Hat officials had no comment.
Market
Impact
A nearly infinite number of penguins, eventually, can develop a great
operating system. The challenges are twofold:
Big things
await Linux 2.4 when it comes out. Although there are an ever-increasing
number of server applications that run on Linux - Oracle 8i and Lotus
Domino among them - the biggest enterprise systems are looking for the
2.4 kernel to provide critical features. 64GB memory support, journaling,
and improved SMP are crucial to winning over enterprise ISV's and IT managers.
We expect
the Calderas and Red Hats of the world to be affected by the delay, but
not critically. Microsoft has had similar problems getting the high-end
version of Windows 2000 finished. [See TEC Article Microsoft
Readies Win2K Datacenter Edition for Defeaturing.] Further delays,
however, will mean Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition will beat Linux to
market.
This
is going to mean that service vendors expecting revenue from supporting
top line data applications on Linux in 2000 are going to look toward other
opportunities. "We're going to target front office, data-less applications
like Apache and network attached devices," said Jim Fitzgerald, CEO of
Steeleye Technology. Steeleye provides high availability, fault resilient
clustering for Linux applications.
User
Recommendations
Linux 2.4 will have enough features to satisfy most server requirements
for an OS - unless you're running an IBM System 390 or a Sun E10000. ISV's
know this, and we expect a slew of business applications to follow Linux
2.4 throughout 2001.