News in View: Linux vendors map out future of open source

Open source vendors claim Linux still has to scale up to the high-end and down to mobile devices before it becomes a significant player in the corporate IT market.

In this week's News in View, leading Linux vendors, VA Linux and Redhat, mapped out their future strategies for taking business away from Unix and NT.

Larry Augustin, CEO of VA Linux, is pushing Linux towards the high-end. "Linux hasn't scaled into very large databases - 16 or 32 processors - very large systems," he said. "That's where Linux's next step will be."

Alan Cox, key Linux kernel developer at Red Hat, stressed the need for additional desktop penetration. He said: "The desktop is going to be the big one. Over the next six to 12 months you'll start to see a lot more desktop applications on Linux, both free software and proprietary."

Mainstream computing firms are moving quickly into the open source space, with IBM looking to use Linux on everything from mainframes to laptops. Dell offers desktop PCs with Red Hat Linux pre-installed.

Red Hat CEO, Matt Szulik, feels support like this is crucial . "Open source is not being developed by some blue-haired person in the basement of a house, as some of our competitors in the proprietary world would like the market to believe," he said.

The full News in View is available in the Enterprise OS channel.