Saugatuck Technology has published research which suggests that have the large businesses on the planet will have switched to Linux for mission-critical applications within the next 5 years. Things will, Saugatuck say, get off to a relatively slow start with just 18% of businesses making that switch by the year end, but quickly accelerate by 40% between 2007 and 2009, and 80% from 2009 to the end of 2011. Who says so? The senior IT decision makers surveyed by Saugatuck, that’s who. The people with the budgets and the savvy to decide if Linux can make the move into the business big time.

The report states that “by now it should be obvious to even the most casual industry observers that Linux operating systems – and open source-based software in general – have reached critical marketplace mass.” Indeed, this enterprise grade message is reinforced by the kind of recent announcements and deals made by the likes of both Oracle and Microsoft, joining the open source is good debate that IBM and Unisys have long since been cheerleading. This legitimization of Linux can only continue to rub off into corporate culture, and that’s the thrust of the report findings.

But do you agree, is the end of commercial, proprietary platforms within the corporate marketplace really nigh?

It's quite likely that large corporations might start switching - after all, many are fed up with the long wait of Vista, the bugs it brings, and so forth. They need new features, and need them soon.

However, I think large corporations switching to Linux may also be a trend that will eventually come to an end. Recently, we saw the Georgia Public Library switch to open source management systems, the French Parliament, and earlier Munich switched to Linux. This may partly be due to being fed up with their Microsoft systems, but it's also something along the lines of "hey, if the French parliament's doing it, it must be alright."

Another thing is that I suspect that the costs of training employees to use the new systems will also come back and bite the corporations in the butt. At the moment, Microsoft has a big advantage: not only do they dominate the consumer operating system market, they also dominate the corporate operating system market. Employees likely already have Windows XP computers at home; so training new employees is very easy at the moment. If larger corporations switched to Linux, the training costs would increase dramatically as they force their employees to switch.

So although it's cool to see corporations take advantage of open source, we really can't tell how much money and hassle it saves them until they've used Linux systems for a while. But if I were Microsoft, I'd keep an eye out for Linux. Especially now.

do you know what MS could do to kill off Linux?

Release the source code for Windows 98 or NT4

There are few absolutes in life, but I suspect that one of them is that will never happen.

why not say, 95?
The XP kernel is only something like 12% Win95 code so it wouldnt damage ms

Such a move is not within the Microsoft mindset, simple as that.

...suppose


NT 3.51 or win 3.11 maybe?

I got them on floppies and cdroms here - excellent

Forget it - it just ain't happening.

What would be Microsoft's motive for doing such a thing. If they released the source code: a) wicked Windows modifcations are made that allow it to do far more than the regular Windows b) older versions of Windows become more popular than Vista.

Neither of these possibilities would be favourable. Microsoft is a commercial company; they aren't open source, nor do they want to be.

Secondly, Windows XP is based mostly off Windows's NT core. Although Windows 95 and 98 are actually quite dissimilar to XP, Microsoft decided to base XP off the NT's kernel, as it is actually pretty good. Open-sourcing it would probably kill them, even if it did kill Linux.

Waits for the MacOS Taliban to suggest a suicide-murder pact would be a good thing...

well you got me all nostalgic last night and i installed nt 4 ansd win95 on all my pcs lol

nt4 rocks it runs well on less than 64mb RAM! - 95 only needs like 24