Andreas Girardet

Girardet, who once founded a Linux distribution called Yoper, says the buzz around Linux in the enterprises he visits with Novell sales teams is unmistakeable. His role is to explain the ins and outs of Linux to senior IT executives and he says that acceptance and knowledge of Linux has grown in quantum leaps in the past two years.

“In the last two years I have seen it go from, ‘well let’s look at what Linux is’ to ‘OK let’s do it’. Now everyone knows about it. I have not been to a single sales talk recently, where we have had no success. We literally can’t keep up with the demand,” says Girardet.

According to Girardet, even the current dominance of Microsoft on the desktop does not stand a chance against the sheer size and volume of development taking place under the Linux banner.

“Linux is like building pyramids as opposed to the normal way of development which is like building a skyscraper,” he says. “In a pyramidal effort you have many individual people dragging stones to the building and it might take longer to build but the pyramid lasts longer. In Suse, there are about 15,000 to 20,000 developers working on the project and internally at Novell we have about 1,000 developers devoted just to Suse.

“In addition, there are millions of people devoted to the ongoing development of Linux. Microsoft can’t match millions of people building a pyramid. They don’t stand a chance. The code that Suse is based on is a community effort of millions - not just 20,000 Suse developers.

“We’ve caught up now with Linux on the desktop with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). It will not be long before we move ahead with the innovation driving the open development environment. This innovation effort is unparalleled. It is the effort of science because Linux really grew out of the internet idea, it feeds off it and also helped the internet to grow.  The whole innovation drive which the internet allowed us to do in society is the same drive behind Linux. That’s why I’m logically convinced that it’s just a matter of time for Microsoft and it stands no chance.”>>Page 2