By John Leyden, VNU Net
Red Hat’s chief executive Matthew Szulik has outlined the
company’s mission to consolidate the Unix market around Linux,
which he said would become possible once Linux is available for an
Intel 64-bit environment.
Speaking exclusively to vnunet.com, Szulik said that the project
to port Linux to the IA-64 architecture – called IA-64 Linux
Project – would for the first time allow a level of functionality
in the OS comparable to proprietary solutions such as Sun
Solaris.
With Linux for IA-64, Szulik said it is possible that clustering
and other technology developed by proprietary vendors can be used
with Linux. He compared making high-end functionality available for
the free operating system with Robin Hood taking from the rich and
giving to the poor.
“Part of our mission, as a representative open source community,
is to act as a Robin Hood and return all of that high-end
functionality and make it freely available from whence it began,”
he said.
“Open source development efforts provide an opportunity to bring
a level of functionality to enterprise customers at a previously
unavailable price performance level.”
Notwithstanding the increased scalability of Linux, even
enthusiasts for the freeware operating system see a continuing role
for Sun Solaris.
Nick Kew, technical director of Linux development and support
organisation WebThing, said: “It seems to me that Solaris and Linux
can coexist very happily. The only issue is the applications that
they run. I use both [Solaris and Linux] and the only one I avoid
is Windows.”
Szunik said the proposed break-up of Microsoft would create
opportunities for Red Hat and the Linux community, but is not a
prospect he greets with much enthusiasm.
“Do you remember horror movies when the monster gets cut in two?
All of a sudden you have two monsters to deal with, and that is my
concern about the Microsoft trial,” he said.
Aside from its legal problems, Microsoft faces a challenge in
its aspirations to move into the corporate data centre, and in its
other technology developments, according to Szunik.
“Microsoft will have to deal with the growing migration of
applications over to a browser server relationship as opposed to
client server,” he said.
A key area for Red Hat is embedded systems, and Szulik said the
company would make announcements of customer wins in the handheld
device market later this month. Linux based handhelds will be
between 25 per cent and 40 per cent cheaper than devices currently
on the market, and would be available within 12 months, he
predicted.
“We’re going to cannibalise the royalty stream Microsoft
receives from its proprietary franchise from Windows CE and
hopefully this will be passed on to the consumer,” he said.
“Innovation can occur much faster with open source operating
systems to produce more interesting technologies at a lower
price.”