January 18, 2000 Web posted at: 9:40 a.m. EST (1440 GMT) by Judy DeMocker

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(IDG) -- Linux service and support has become a big business, with large hardware manufacturers taking increasingly active roles in helping the open-source community create software that is the best of its kind. IBM and Intel are now building Linux into their long-term e-business strategies; these giants are formulating ambitious projects that will hopefully ensconce the rogue operating system in the upper echelons of the corporate and research worlds.

IBM announced this week that it will offer Linux on its Intel- and RISC-based machines. It ships the four most popular distributions (Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, and Caldera) on its Netfinity servers this week, and offers LinuxCare's Yellow Dog on some RS/6000 workstations and entry-level servers.

In the coming year, IBM will work to port Linux to each of its product lines, including the big S/390 mainframes that large Websites use to host their backend databases. And, more importantly, the company will work with third-party software developers to port the hundreds of enterprise applications from its own AIX platform to Linux. IBM ultimately wants to provide interoperability between the two platforms.

Intel is also preaching the gospel of compatibility, helping manufacturers prepare for migration to its IA-64 processor architecture upon the new chip's release later this year. The chip behemoth is working with all four major Linux distributors to make sure that they have working code at release time.

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The company has the same sort of relationship with IBM, Compaq, SGI, Cygnus, and Hewlett-Packard, ensuring that their proprietary OSs are ready for the IA-64; the fact that upstart corporations like Red Hat and SuSE find themselves in such company is an indication of the importance of Linux to Intel. The effort, called the Trillian Project, has been underway for about a year.

This quarter, Intel will release the first work to the open source community, including a developer's release of a ported kernel and utilities -- all of which will be distributed under the GNU Public License. The chipmaker has also made capital investments in Red Hat, TurboLinux, and, more recently, SuSE.

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How big's the market?

"What you get is a recent college graduate loading Linux on some old system that's kicking around, and it's free," said Dan Kuznetsky, program director for IDC's operating environments service. "We have done a great number of studies and are finding that a good deal of the time, the normal IT decision maker is unaware of [Linux's] presence."

As the market for Linux server systems grows in the service provider community and in universities and laboratories, so does the revenue that can potentially be derived from the servicing and support of those systems. Linux vendors and service companies, like Red Hat and VA Linux, can be reasonably sure that IBM won't be putting them out of business any time soon; but the potential danger of losing customer care revenue to the distribution channel hasn't gone unnoticed.

"We'd be fools not to worry about large companies coming into our space," said Chris DiBona, Linux community evangelist for VA Linux. But companies that focus exclusively on Linux will have the edge in serving customers, and DiBona is confident there will be enough business for them to coexist with the largest service organizations.

IBM's Rod Atkins, general manager of the RS/6000 group, agrees that his organization defers to its business partners when it comes to support for its shared customer base, and that so far there haven't been any complaints from customers about that arrangement. Having a global services organization backing Linux can only broaden its acceptance as an enterprise-class operating system, others argue.

"Customers whose companies have branch offices in Bangladesh, and run all different platforms and all different OSs, those customers will look to IBM, HP, and Compaq to provide comprehensive services," said Paul McNamara, general manager of the business enterprise unit at Red Hat. "Others will want to deal with the producer of the technology, and talk to people who are dealing most directly with the technology."

There remains a question of how many Linux distributions even a growing market can accommodate. So far, box makers have been distribution agnostic; Dell, which chose to preload Red Hat exclusively, is a notable exception. Compaq, HP, and IBM have inked partnership agreements with all the major distributions, but managing multiple documentation sets, utilities, and installation packages for essentially the same operating system kernel may weed out some distributions over time.

"It's not as bad as when there were a hundred different companies selling Unix," said Bill Claybrook, research director at the Aberdeen Group, in Boston. "There are maybe six or eight Linux distributors we all know about. But given the size of the market, even though it's growing quickly, it's not clear that they will all exist three or four years from now."