Computer Makers, Intel Team Up to Form Linux Lab

[Sean]

I thought this was interesting. 

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000830/tc/linuxlab_dc_1.html
Wednesday August 30 1:02 AM ET
Computer Makers, Intel Team Up to Form Linux Lab 

By Nicole Volpe

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Computer makers International Business Machines Corp.
(NYSE:IBM - news) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HWP - news) said on
Wednesday they teamed up with chipmaker Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM:INTC - news)
to form an independent lab for Linux developers to expand the alternative
operating system for heavy business tasks.

The consortium, which also included NEC Corp. (6701.T), plans to provide
equipment and funding to the lab over the next several years.

``We're each putting in millions per year over the next several years,''
said Will Swope, vice president of Intel's architecture solutions enabling
group.

Giga Group analyst Stacey Quandt said the effort was a bid to rev up Linux
to compete with Sun Microsystem Inc.'s (NasdaqNM:SUNW - news) Solaris
operating system, which now dominates the datacenters that house the
technology behind Web-based business operations.

``This is a way to address some of the higher functionality and feature
sets of Solaris,'' she said. ``This is an open source or a collaborative
way for these companies to advance Linux and get it into the datacenter.''

Sun, the largest maker of computers that run Web pages, known as servers,
has not made Linux part of its strategy.

Linux, which was developed by a Finnish programmer, is free and freely
distributed and developed by programmers around the world. It is currently
not up to carrying out industrial strength business tasks, but companies
such as IBM have committed to developing it for business use.

``The company that stands to lose the most from these efforts is Sun,''
said Quandt. ``Their goal is to get Linux into the datacenter within 2
years.

Some of the efforts are to bring Linux to scale beyond the 8-way, or 8
processor architecture it can currently run on to more powerful machines.

Other efforts include improving Linux's ability to manage workloads, said
Ross Maury, vice president of Unix software at IBM.

``We think Linux is an important phenomenon of the Internet,'' he said.
``It is the fastest growing system in the world today.''

The lab, currently under formation, will provide open source developers
with a centralized enterprise development environment for sharing ideas
and innovations.

``The Open Source Development Lab will help fulfill a need that individual
Linux and open source developers often have -- access to high-end
enterprise hardware,'' said Brian Behlendorf, Chief Technical Officer of
open source Web site Collab.net.

The lab will be based near Portland, Ore. and it is expected to open at
the end of the year.