“We’re not sure if IDG has eased the gate pressure, or
simply made the floor tax more equitable; but expansive stands from
the likes of Zelerate, Blue Cat, Zimian easily outnumbered the
traditional corporate big spenders. And it’s only three years
since we spent an afternoon with Maddog in a corner of CeBIT hall
smaller than a Jacob Javitz bathroom. And that was the entire Linux
stand.”
“Naturally, the big hitters were there, and all had something to
announce. Even if it wasn’t very much. Take IBM for example. So
enormous is Big Blue, and so extensive its product catalogue, that
it can an afford to release an enormous amount of hot air in the
form of Linux announcements at regular intervals, without any
noticable depreciation in body mass.”
“Today it said it had Linux up and running on its Sequent ccNUMA
boxes, now renamed eServer x430, scaling up to 64 nodes. It’s
already got Linux either natively or in virtual machine mode on
AS/400 and S/390(ZzzzSeries), and IBM pointed to Deutsche Telekom
subsidiary TSystems hosting email services on large multiple Linux
VMs. There was plenty more largely inconsequential updates to
Tivoli and Notes, NetFinity and NetStation thin clients.”