Guild Companies

Red Hat has introduced a new version of its Linux operating system, Linux 8.0, that is designed for PC, workstation, and entry servers that includes a new graphical user interface technology called Bluecurve that seeks to create some common ground between the rival Gnome and KDE Linux GUIs. The company has also announced a new commercialized version of the open source PostgreSQL database, called Database 2.0, that it hopes will give it a revenue stream outside of the Linux operating system sales and technical support that has been the core business for Red Hat to date.

Microsoft learned a long time ago that the best way to break into the server platform business is to have a large presence on desktops, and Red Hat seems to have figured this out with Linux 8.0. By having a single Bluecurve interface that looks essentially the same whether it is running on top of Gnome or KDE means that everyone running Red Hat Linux on their PCs, workstations, or servers sees the same screens. This is an important step. Even though Windows operating systems for PCs and servers has historically been based on radically different code bases, the user interfaces converged with Windows 95 and the result is that people think they know how to deal with Windows because it all looks the same.

This is, to a certain extent, an illusion, but it is one that makes people more comfortable about using Windows, and therefore helps spread Windows from desktops to servers. By having the Bluecurve interface give Linux--or at least Red Hat Linux--the same look and feel no matter what GUI companies choose, Red Hat is setting itself up to be the dominant supplier of Linux for the desktops of the future. Staunch supports of Gnome and KDE are not happy about Bluecurve, and many view it as a bad idea. But Red Hat is pushing forward anyway because it knows that many companies, faced with Microsoft's new licensing practices, are looking for open source alternatives to Windows, Office, and the server middleware suite that used to be called BackOffice and is now collectively called .NET Servers. In the end, if Bluecurve sells, all the technical arguments in the world against it that are coming out of the Gnome and KDE camps will be so much history.

Red Hat Linux 8.0 is based on the latest stable implementation of the Linux 2.4 kernel and includes the full suite of OpenOffice desktop applications, which are based on the open source implementation of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice software. The software also comes with a firewall, updated C compilers, the Apache 2.0 Web server, and configuration tools to set up network connections as well as the firewall, the Apache server, and the Samba Windows-alike print and file server. The Personal Edition of Red Hat Linux, which is intended for desktop users, costs $39.95 (that includes 30 days of support). The Professional Edition, which is intended for workstation and entry servers, costs $149.95 and includes system administrator CDs and 60 days of support.

Red Hat Database 2.0, which is also available now, is based on the most recent PostgreSQL 7.2.2 open source relational database code. it also includes installer software, documentation, and graphical database tools created by Red Hat to make it easier to administer the PostgreSQL database. Red Hat Database 2.0 is for the moment supported on Red Hat's Linux 7.3 and Linux Advanced Server 2.1; presumably support for Linux 8.0 will be coming shortly. The PostgreSQL database boasts over 20,000 customers worldwide and has been championed by the University of California at Berkeley, the same place that gave birth to the BSD and then FreeBSD open source implementations of Unix. Database 2.0 has large object support as well as support for triggers, referential integrity, row-level locking, rollback, and other features of commercial-grade transaction processing databases. The database is SQL 92 compliant, has support for ODBC and JDBC APIs, and supports many programming languages, including C/C++, PHP, Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk, Embedded SQL within C. Pricing was not available as we went to press.