Live (On Tape) From LinuxWorld

I just got back from the LinuxWorld conference in Boston and, boy, are my arms tired. Along with carrying around pounds of free CD-ROMs -- everything from hot new mail clients and browsers to cool database demos and development environments -- I'm worn out from listening to pitches from excited product managers who at long last see profit potential in open-source software.

It wasn't always like that. For years, the show was dominated by free-software acolytes and counter-cultural software gurus for whom Linux was an important technical and intellectual exercise. Whether it could also be a moneymaking opportunity wasn't always on their agenda.

That has all changed. No longer are there discussions about the viability of Linux. That's assumed. Even debates about which flavor of Linux will dominate have gone by the wayside. Now, it's pretty much a two-distribution world. Red Hat remains the king, with the largest installed base and a big presence in the enterprise. Playing Avis to Red Hat's Hertz is Novell, which boasts a strong partner program and has built up a strong brand since it completed its acquisition of SuSE Linux in early 2004.

At this year's show, the focus for the first time shifted away from the operating system itself. Just as clearly as 2005 is the year of the rooster in the Chinese calendar, it has definitely become the year of applications in the world of Linux.

No companies have played a more important role in proving that Linux apps are ready for prime time than Oracle and SAP. Indeed, Oracle's successes with Linux ports of its database and its application server boosted the company's 2003 Linux revenue -- the last year for which it has figures available -- by 360 percent. For its part, SAP says customers' use of Linux has doubled every year since 1999. It now boasts more than 3,000 customer installations running under Linux.

Along with ascendance of vendors such as Oracle and SAP, a reliable indicator of Linux's arrival is the corporatization of the conference. Consider the keynote of Computer Associates' new CEO, John Swainson, in which he averred that the arrival of open-source standards "will spur innovation at a rate we have never seen before." Corporate chieftains don't roll out such bromides unless they've signed on to the program big time, and CA is clearly among the vendors that's making Linux a priority for itself and its partners.

Novell, too, has big plans for its resellers, with enhancements to its PartnerNet programs in the works. In some good news for VARs targeting the midmarket, Novell is also at work on a Linux distribution tuned specifically for the SMB space. Company officials contacted at the show wouldn't comment on a projected release date, but said work is moving along.

Perhaps the biggest item of interest at the show was something that didn't happen: Microsoft was notable by its absence. Two years ago, when the conference was in New York, Microsoft used its huge booth to launch an anti-Linux campaign touting Windows' total-cost-of-ownership benefits. Last year, Microsoft came to LinuxWorld to advance the message that it works and plays well with other operating systems by launching its Windows Services For Unix 3.5 package.

This year, the Redmond software powerhouse was nowhere to be found. Perhaps Microsoft is marshalling its resources, plotting a response to Linux that's based this time more on technology than marketing. Remember that Microsoft continues to strengthen its ties to Sun Microsystems, which itself holds some relevant software intellectual property in the form of Solaris. My take: Long-term, don't look for the software wars to end; instead, look for them to escalate.