Linux celebrates 10 years

The Linux OS celebrates its 10th anniversary this week at the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco.

At the Expo, high-tech vendors IBM, Oracle and Hewlett Packard will join Red Hat, Caldera and SuSE, among others, to demonstrate their wares.

Despite the slowing economy, the conference is expected to attract roughly the same amount of traffic as last year, about 20,000 to 25,000 visitors.

Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, will present a $25,000 community award to an association, company or individual that has shown exceptional dedication to the open source movement.

The award will be presented on 29 August.

Linux sales increased about 27 per cent last year, which made it the fastest-growing server operating system worldwide, according to Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst at IDC.

IBM said it would take the wraps off the next version of its Websphere Commerce Suite at the conference. The company added that the latest release would improve the conducting of global ebusiness, as well as providing better customer support.

IBM also announced it had teamed up with enterprise storage management software provider Legato Systems to provide information protection, management and application availability for IBM's DB2 Universal Database running on Linux.

The two companies demonstrated the software during the Expo.

Hewlett Packard demonstrated Linux-based offerings for the security and intelligent device markets, as well as a software developer's portal and a variety of other software tools.

In other Linux Expo news, Red Hat announced partnerships with Compaq Computer and Pioneer-Standard, in which Pioneer-Standard will provide system integration engineering by installing and configuring Red Hat's E-Commerce Suite on Intel-based systems such as Compaq's ProLiant servers.

Pioneer-Standard will also supply consulting services for web application development and legacy system integration.

James Neiser, chief marketing officer at Red Hat, said the combination of proven open source software and industry-leading Compaq ProLiant servers "will deliver the scalability and customisability that many businesses demand without the complexity or cost of high-end enterprise applications."

SuSE Linux introduced SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, version 7, based on the latest Linux kernel 2.4.

The newest version runs email, internet and application services, as well as file and print services in Unix, Windows, Novell and Macintosh networks.

And chipmaker Intel will underscore its commitment to Linux by announcing a series of programming tools to help developers create applications that better run on its chips.