Businesses should avoid deploying Linux at the core of their IT systems until at least 2001, according to analyst GartnerGroup.

Many major independent software vendors (ISVs) are failing to support the Linux operating system as a mainstream business platform, said Gartner.

"Businesses should not plan migrations or new application architectures requiring deep systems integration on Linux before ISVs and system vendors show firm support for Linux," said George Weiss, Gartner's research director of Unix and mid-range strategies.

"On a broad scale this will not happen until 2001," he added.

In the user application space, ISVs are waiting for "more assurance of enterprise acceptance", said Weiss. Before making any serious commitments, ISVs are studying the differences in the open source process, licensing issues and intellectual property issues compared with the proprietary domain, he said.

Despite large system software vendors such as Oracle, IBM and Computer Associates promoting strategies around Linux, other vendors including Baan, PeopleSoft and SAS Institute are "mostly absent thus far" and are "preventing Linux from becoming a stronger challenger to Windows NT", said Weiss. "The big exception is SAP."

Andy Dickens, European director of sales for Red Hat, disagrees. "The number of strategic software vendors that have ported to Linux is huge," he said. "It represents not an insignificant part of their investment. The demand is coming from large corporations to move to Linux.

"Since Year 2000, more companies are putting Linux pilot projects together and are sending support IT staff on training."

However, Weiss warned users to wait until 2001 because "a vacuum currently exists in the area of much-needed Linux system management tools for back-up and recovery, volume management, file system management, transaction recovery, high availability, San architectures, cluster server solutions, performance management and hierarchical storage management".

He advises users to ensure that ISVs are "strongly committed to the Linux distribution" by finding out revenue percentage and profit compared with other supported operating systems, and by "non-disclosure agreement if necessary", said Weiss.

He recommends that users find out whether planned upgrades will mirror the functionality and timeliness of other popular operating system environments, such as top-tier Unix or NT.

Users should also "beware proprietary extensions by hardware vendors or Linux operating system distributors that may affect the portability of the application to other hardware and operating system environments".

Weiss cautions against accepting potential deals on Linux for "less than optimal functionality and support in the hope of switching later to a Unix platform".

Before fully committing to Linux, ISVs are considering fundamental business issues that could break backward or forward compatibility, such as which Linux distributions to support.

Dickens said such considerations are not problematic because "what is good for open source software is good for Red Hat". The company is "open source and any changes made are fed back", he said.

"Every Friday, Raw Hide code is sent out to the community by our developers. This contrasts with proprietary software companies which just release bug fixes. The only risk in terms of waiting until 2001 is paying unnecessary money for proprietary software such as NT," he added.