From: Adam <""4thwormcastfromthemolehill\"{at}the field.near
the bridge">

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=837

"A new IBM-sponsored study on Linux sent me by Joe McKendrick, our SOA
expert, goes a long way toward explaining the big Oracle and Microsoft
moves regarding Linux.

The war is over and Linux won. (The original Linux penguin was created by
Larry Ewing. This particular bird lives at the LWN Penguin Gallery.)

The truth of the assertion is in a chart near the back of the report. It
shows that 83% of companies expect to support new workloads on Linux next
year, against 23% for Windows. The move is slower for larger enterprises,
but the direction is clear.

At least in the server world, Linux has won.

Web servers and database servers remain the dominant applications, but
development environments are now among the most popular systems in
production, meaning the trend toward Linux and open source applications
should accelerate.

Over two-thirds of the respondents said they will increase their use of
Linux in the next year, and almost no one said the opposite.

So if Microsoft is doing a slow take-over of Novell, and Oracle is bringing
out its own stack, these are understandable defensive moves, a
re-arrangement of forces if you will. Because the war is over and Linux
won. And in business that means it's on to the next war. "

Adam

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