Leadership By Numbers :: Ubuntu Notes -- Peanut Butter and Chocolate

Category Linux

Good news from Lotusphere, 2008. Finally, a supported Notes release on a Free Open-Source platform. It had to happen, there is just too much of a need and everyone has been hacking Notes into their own, favorite FOSS distro. The question, for me, was which Linux? Fedora, and OpenSuse I expected as a logical choice (their commercial Linux offerings already provide a supported operating system for Domino and Notes). Fortunately, the choice was made for Ubuntu.

Putting Notes on Ubuntu is a marketing coup. Checking trends.google.com shows a strong momentum for Ubuntu versus, say, Windows Vista.

Not everyone thinks that IBM & Ubuntu makes the greatest pairing. The Register's Open Season thinks that Ubuntu Notes is “Red Hat's worst nightmare” because it marks a move away from Red Hat. I don't see it that way at all, because there is much more IT control over a server OS, than a client OS. My organization supports only one Linux release, Red Hat, and if I ever attempted to bring in any other Linux server OS, I would be stopped in my tracks. And, I agree.

There is just too much work with integrating a server OS with monitoring systems, backup agents, SAN drives and more, that enterprise Linux will only benefit from Ubuntu Notes. If I spread out the cost of 1,000 FOSS clients and one or two Linux servers, the savings is all in the clients. That's going to be appealing to enterprise accounts. Likewise, mixing IBM Nitix with Ubuntu Notes is going to be irresistible to the penny-pinching SMB market.

Sometimes the strangest combinations turn out to be the most natural.

Comments

3 - I don't think Domino on Ubuntu is going to happen. Ubuntu Notes, yes; Ubuntu Domino, nada. Now, there is nothing stopping a VAR from packaging up a CentOS/Domino install and supporting it as an appliance. But, there is just too much system level code and architecture to secure in order to provide 24x7 IBM support.

Here's another way to think of it. A hardware vendor is going to support their drivers (SAS, IDE, etc) for their preferred Linux distro. What's the odds of getting legacy support (meaning, five years later) on a server with FOSS. Ubuntu, maybe, but I don't think it's worth it. I'd rather have my RHEL or SuSE fully supported, fully spec'd. I building to Sametime 8 servers on Linux, and I want those things bullet-proof, with the monitoring tools and support of the (1) hardware vendor, (2) OS vendor (in this example, it is RHEL) and (3) the application vendor (IBM).

Posted by Jack Dausman At 08:02:47 PM On 01/30/2008 | - Website - |