Thursday, 3 May 2007

Oracle, IBM, NEC to Sell Linux Systems in Japan

Oracle, IBM and NEC have joined hands to set up an association to sell servers and systems with Linux operating system in Japan, a financial daily, Nikkei, said. This venture appears to be rather strange as all three players have a big role to play when it comes to traditional...

Oracle, IBM and NEC have joined hands to set up an association to sell servers and systems with Linux operating system in Japan, a financial daily, Nikkei, said.

This venture appears to be rather strange as all three players have a big role to play when it comes to traditional, commercial software. And here they are joining forces to advocate open source, free software.

This effort, is piloted by Oracle, they plan to roll out the services by June 2007. Other companies are also planning to follow suit, they include—Hitachi, HP and Dell.

This initiative was thought of soon after the Japanese government decided to advocate the use of the open-source Linux operating system within the government starting in July.

The government plans to invest 1.25 trillion yen (USD 10.40 billion) for spending on information systems in 2007.

The government is of the opinion that too much dependence on Microsoft’s Windows operating system will result in less freedom in systems development.

Linux is an Unix-like computer operating system family. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and of open source development; its underlying source code is available for anyone to use, modify, and redistribute freely.

After the Linux kernel was released to the public on 17 September 1991, the first Linux systems were completed by combining the kernel with system utilities and libraries from the GNU project, which led to the coining of the term GNU/Linux. From the late 1990s onward Linux gained the support of corporations such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Novell.

Predominantly known for its use in servers, Linux is used as an operating system for a wider variety of computer hardware than any other operating system, including desktop computers, supercomputers, mainframes, and embedded devices such as cellphones. Linux is packaged for different uses in Linux distributions, which contain the kernel along with a variety of other software packages tailored to requirements.