Beyond Price: Linux Still Lags Unix For Many UsesBeyond Price: Linux Still Lags Unix For Many Uses

Major IT vendors that have had success with Unix, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and even Sun Microsystems, are increasingly throwing their weight behind Linux. Yet more than a quarter of information Research's survey respondents indicate that growing support among large IT suppliers isn't more likely to get them to use Linux for critical business applications.

Market forces haven't skewed Linux in favor of one vendor or another because no single vendor controls it, says Evan Leibovitch, president of the Linux Professional Institute, an organization that since 1998 has offered a Linux skills-certification program. "You don't have the market-driven need to run the OS kernel out the door," he says. "A new kernel will be ready when it's ready, not so a vendor can make its year-end numbers."

The variety of Linux distributions invites comparisons to Unix. But there's one crucial difference: "Unlike Unix, the hardware vendors don't control the operating system," IDC research director Al Gillen says. "The server makers can't alter the kernel to manage their hardware specifically." As a result, it will be hard for Linux to do all the things that the different flavors of Unix can do on their respective hardware platforms, Gillen says. This platform independence could slow Linux's ascent to larger multiprocessor environments. "Linux is arguably good up to four-way servers," but single and dual-processor machines are its sweet spot, much like Windows, he says.

Linux's reliability and scalability can't match major vendors' Unix offerings such as HP-UX, IBM AIX, or Sun Solaris. But Unix can't compete with Linux on price, and Windows can't match Linux's flexibility, Leibovitch says. "It can run on servers, PDAs, firewalls, desktops, and other places."

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Illustration by Pep Montserrat