Unison in InformationWeek
by Rurik Bradbury on September 17th, 2008
A nice summary of Unison by InformationWeek. Serdar rightly focuses on how Linux could benefit from polished commercial apps that are simple to deploy directly from a partner repository, and talks about Unison’s partnership with Ubuntu. He raises the question of whether people adopting Linux on the desktop will be prepared to pay for apps, and I strongly feel that they will.
The poor attendance at LinuxWorld in San Francisco and robust crowds at this week’s Interop show in New York illustrate a trend: Linux is going mainstream and more corporate. A niche product needs a niche trade show. But now that Linux is mainstream, it can blend in to a mainstream IT show.
The many IT professionals at Interop are not especially interested in buying a product because it’s Linux. They buy a solution because it is the right product and total cost for them. And if it happens to be Linux, then so be it. The ideological battle is calming down, in this sense. And this is good for Linux. Once people start comparing offerings in the cold light of day (for example: Microsoft’s high-cost, high-effort unified communications solutions versus low-cost, low-effort solutions like Unison on Ubuntu) then we’ll really see some traction for Linux in business IT.
