There's a bit in the 1999 movie The Fight Club where Ed Norton joins a cancer support group to help him sleep. Part of the group therapy is a session of guided meditation, where sufferers are asked to imagine an encounter with an animal totem - a 'power animal'.
In Ed Norton's case, it's either Helena Bonham-Carter or a penguin, depending on how far you've come in the story. The penguin waddles forward, looks up at Norton, and says something like 'slide'. Or 'sly', perhaps.
In the movie, the power animal symbolises redemption for the main character played by Norton, but exactly how is left tantalisingly unclear. The same is true of the Linux penguin in the turbulent world of the Australian channel.
Some resellers have latched on to Linux as saviour in a number of recurrent and difficult problems. But sometimes the reasoning for the penguin's entry into the story is, like in the movie, inconclusive.
Steve Rolfe, technical director at Narrandera-based reseller The IT Group, gives some reasons why the Linux penguin might be power animal of choice for some Australian companies.
Number one reason for many firms is as a way to avoid 'huge licensing costs' associated with Windows desktop applications, he says.
'One customer made a corporate decision to get rid of all the Microsoft offerings on business desktops and get them Lotus - which was going to save him thousands,' Rolfe says.
The IT Group is big on open source-derived brand Xandros right now, which Rolfe sees spreading through business desktop environments rapidly. 'Sales are going to start popping up when the next version of Office or XP comes out.
People are going to make that move. If you look at Windows 97 and XP, there's no real gain in spending a lot of money on an upgrade,' he says.
Although Rolfe concedes that installing Linux on desktops is 'a pain in the neck', he says Xandros' X-over Office product, for example, enables clients to install Microsoft Office over Linux, cutting total cost of ownership (TCO). 'With Office, if you have four-year-old machines, upgrades cost a fortune.
But with Xandros X-over, you pay for the media but there's no upgrade fees so that can extend their desktops by another couple of years,' he says.
He says SMBs with 10 or 20 PCs that replace Windows with Xandros could save thousands. Windows upgrade packages can cost $500 each, with ongoing licensing, support and staff hours on top of that. 'People are always behind the eight-ball [with Microsoft],' Rolfe says.
Companies have avoided open source due to the difficulty of getting staff with open source-related skills. Yet recent IT graduates often now have Linux skills, Rolfe says.
Stephen Yeo, UK-based marketing director for the Asia-Pacific region at thin-client vendor Wyse Technology, says Linux is 'ideally suited' to server-based computing.
Yeo is watching the global spread of Linux with optimism. He says that, if Linux' European growth rate continues it will be that continent's most popular server platform in under three years. 'Linux has about 22 percent of the European market, compared with 54 percent for Windows CE,' Yeo says.
'Worldwide, according to IDC, Linux is the fastest-growing thin-client operating platform, [growing] at 63 percent in 2002.'
He says the Linux operating system's 15 percent of worldwide market share is growing. Windows CE had 57 percent market share in 2002.
He believes that Linux complexity and management desktop 'issues' can be solved by using Linux with thin clients. Linux is also delivered with flash memory pre-installed, can be remotely managed by systems administrators, lowers software licensing costs, is relatively 'light' on hardware, and enables easy Java and X-Windows implementation, Yeo says.
Jay Peretz is the US-based vice-president of partner technical services at software vendor Oracle, which claims to have been the first company to offer Linux-based relational database management back in '98. Oracle has a lot of faith in Linux' future as an enterprise operating system, he says.
'Linux lowers the cost of computing for our customers,' Peretz says. 'It runs on the Intel platform, runs well and scales high ...When software is not developed by a proprietary company, companies can really make their money on services rather than on software and licensing.'
Oracle's Intel-based systems running Linux can come in ten times cheaper than using IBM, HP Solaris or similar, he adds. 'Linux gives us choice and flexibility,' he says. 'We believe Linux will get to the capability level that Unix got to in ten years probably in less than three. And we're seeing that already.
Peretz says IDC figures show that Linux is the only server operating system expected to grow from 2002 through to 2006. An Oracle-sponsored IDC study suggests Linux has a 58 percent growth rate worldwide. The same study shows the presence of Windows servers shrinking globally by four percent, Netware by 48 percent, and Unix 18 percent in that period.
IDC also confirmed that Oracle applications run faster and cheaper on Linux than on RISC server systems. The Intel/Linux combination ran at 2.4GHz, responding in 1.3 seconds, for $US8,860. RISC ran at 750MHz and had an average response time of 1.7 seconds for $US53,330.
'We believe that in the application server class, where customers are running their Java applications, for example, there's no reason why 100 percent of those systems can't be run with Linux today,' Peretz says.
Linux and open source offerings have traditionally been seen as a good choice for Web-hosting.
Perth-based ISP Reynolds Technology has used open source to host the main Website, eight divisional sites and four support group Websites of the Australian Democrats since 1994.
Mark Reynolds, managing director at Reynolds Technology, says proprietary software tends to be more expensive for customers, while open source offers excellent quality, security and support, and is easy to use. 'We would prefer to employ additional staff rather than spend exorbitant amounts on proprietary software purchase fees and their associated ongoing upgrades and bug fixes,' he says.
Reynolds confirms the company used open source software for all its clients' Internet needs and frequently for local file and print servers as well.
'Because there are no associated licence fees, we can include virus-blocking and anti-spam services free,' Reynolds says.
Perhaps the best-known Linux vendor, Red Hat, recently re-focused its Australian distribution channel away from consumers and towards the enterprise in a response to increased demand from that sector.
Meanwhile, Federal Government has dipped its toes in the debate, asking departments to 'look very carefully' at the value for money offered by the technologies available, including open source.
Senator Richard Alston, Minister for Communications, IT and the Arts, does not think it appropriate for the Government to overtly favour one technology over another. 'We want it to play out in the marketplace, but we want people to very clearly analyse the alternatives [to proprietary software],' Alston says.
The decision to adopt the penguin is frequently political. It is, after all, the enterprise that drives the engine of the Australian dream, and companies often believe that engine would run better if it used a particular ideological lubricant.
Glenn Tesla, managing director at value-added reseller and
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