Congratulations to team Ubuntu who today shipped Lucid Lynx Desktop and Server editions.  As many of you know Likewise Open 5.4 ships as part of Lucid Lynx.  We’ve worked on a number of customer projects with the Canonical team and we continue to see growth of the Linux platform in all areas of the enterprise.

I frequently get asked about the state of affairs in the Linux world both relative to the platform vendors and relative to the degree of penetration of Linux as a desktop and server platform.

I’ll focus briefly on the Linux desktop.  There are three types of Linux desktop projects that I’ve observed:

The Technical workstation. Often engineers, sometimes former Solaris, HP/UX, and AIX users, have also spent time with Windows before moving to Linux.  What Linux variants?  We’ve seen it all:  RHEL, SLED, Ubuntu are all represented; we also see Debian, CentOS, and Fedora.  This group of users are almost always unabashedly enthusiastic about using Linux and have talked to me at length about the virtues of Linux as a viable desktop platform.

The Single Task Worker. Usage includes vertical markets such as call centers, manufacturing, and retail.  Usually multiple workers share a single computer and the security settings as managed by the company are fairly restrictive.  I have spoken to users on several of these projects that were unaware of the details of the underlying operating system.  Their interest was usually in the application that they use to accomplish their job instead of the platform itself.

The Information Worker. Linux is clearly not a mainstream platform for the information worker today.  There is, however, a non-trivial number of early adopter organizations that are experimenting with new platforms and hosted applications in a way that is quite different than the dominant paradigm today — Microsoft Windows + Office.  Many of the interesting projects that I’ve seen involve desktop virtualization.  Some organizations are experimenting with allowing users to choose whatever platform they want including Windows, Mac, and Linux while they provide a tightly controlled virtual desktop environment.  There are some very interesting intersections between the desktop, virtualization, and cloud computing.

Likewise gets involved with these projects because organizations want to leverage the infrastructure they have put in place to manage their Windows desktops.  Almost always this includes Active Directory both for authentication and as well as using group policy to enforce various security policies and settings.  With Likewise they can bridge their Linux and Mac users directly into Active Directory.

If I look to our customer base, we usually wind up with the Linux administrator as a big Likewise fan.  By using Likewise, they are able to offload authentication and account management issues to the same helpdesk that already supports the Windows desktop infrastructure.  We also allow them to integrate familiar Unix tools like Sudo into Active Directory which can be a powerful and highly scalable solution.  One of our customers told me this was “the best of both worlds” from her perspective.  From the users point-of-view, we help organizations take a big step in the direction of single sign-on which means less complexity for the user.