Stories about: Critical Systems

The kernel developers are generally quite good about responding to security problems. Once a vulnerability in the kernel has been found, a patch comes out in short order; system administrators can then apply the patch (or get a patched kernel from their distributor), reboot the system, and get on with life knowing that the vulnerability has been fixed. It is a system which works pretty well.

Hewlett-Packard officials are marking the 30th anniversary of the OpenVMS operating system's introduction by telling users of the software that it still doesn't have an expiration date.

A Look at the all time greatest controversies in the history of the networking industry.

Even as its adoption in the enterprise has exploded, open source software remains dogged by questions regarding its legal status. Most recently, Microsoft has claimed that open source violates no fewer than 235 software patents.

A couple of weeks ago, I took BEA to task for insinuating that the open source community wasn't capable of delivering good management tools for its software. A few readers leapt to the defense: BEA is right, they said. Management is critical in complex environments, and the management capabilities of open source software are often pretty poor.

Lots of smaller commodity machines together with smart software can boost the reliability of enterprises' business-critical systems, according to search giant Google.

Where do we begin when it comes to separating the open source words from the business reality? Where is open source in business and, in particular, in New Zealand business?

Commercial software giants such as Oracle and IBM are moving deeper into the open source community by snapping up the startups built to provide services around the free software, a trend that means corporate buyers should think carefully about future projects before making deployment decisions, experts say.

Although having an open source strategy is becoming common in many enterprises, users and analysts say 2006 is the year the penguin flippers will hit the water in terms of Linux's evolution into an enterprise-application server platform. Linux usage started with lower-level admins, deployed on individual desktops or small boxes. Then it moved into e-mail, file-and-print and serving Web pages. Now those who use Linux say the time is right for the operating system to be running key corporate-software packages, including large databases, financials, sales, medical records and a host of other business-critical systems.

There are many good reasons why vendors shouldn't bypass the CIO, and making them angry is one of them.

In the previous column, I mentioned the new Novell Linux Desktop, which began shipping recently, so maybe we should take a closer look at it.