“Red Hat’s Linux version 6.0, which shipped yesterday, was
accompanied by announcements from Dell Computer Corp., which will
preload Linux on systems; Hewlett-Packard Co., which officially
debuted its promised 24-by-7 Linux support; and IBM, which has
ported its ViaVoice speech recognition software to Linux.”
“Linux’s well-documented momentum shows no signs of slowing;
indeed, it appears to have entered a cyclical phase, where vendors
announce support for the open source platform, which brings more
large enterprise administrators to investigate the technology,
which in turn attracts more vendor support.”
“For example, “the whole aerospace and mechanical
engineering-related industries are going Linux for their high-end
needs,” said Bryan Smith, a software engineer at Coleman Aerospace.
For certain applications, Smith said, “$20,000 Linux clusters match
$200,000 SGI and Sun [Microsystems Inc.] systems in performance. We
have a $17,000 12-way Celeron cluster currently on order that will
speed up our analysis [more than 10 times] compared to our current
PC/NT and SGI/Irix systems.”