Linux Is Ready

Berlin’s art colleges are completely switching over to Linux. Most of the productivity software on the workstations has already been swapped for free alternative products as part of a project that started over eighteen months ago. The IT team at ServiceCenter-IT, responsible for the migration at three colleges; the Hanns Eisler music college, the Ernst Busch drama college and the Berlin-Weissensee art college, is hoping for an easy migration, as users will be able to keep on working with their familiar applications. Starting in June, their workstation PCs will switch to Ubuntu Linux and their servers will use Debian.

The change is being made because the existing hardware cannot be upgraded to Windows Vista or Windows 7. The colleges would have had to spend five-figure sums to buy newer hardware and pay additional licence fees for Windows. The money that they’ve saved is now going to be spent on teaching.

As part of the changeover, the colleges are also developing platform-independent software to manage teaching and working contracts. The application is being licensed under the GPLv3 and, after its completion, will be available to all users.

For those wondering whether Oracle or Red Hat is weathering the recession best, this week may have settled the question. On Tuesday the market cheered Oracle for only seeing a 5.2 percent drop in revenue, with a 7.2 percent drop in profit (absent the strong dollar, Oracle would have seen a 4 percent increase in revenue and a 5 percent increase in profit).

Red Hat? Well, on Wednesday Red Hat announced fiscal first-quarter revenue of $174 million, up 11 percent from the prior year. Subscription revenue was up 14 percent year over year to $148.8 million. The company’s total deferred revenue balance is now $567.3 million, an increase of 15 percent on a year-over-year basis. Net income for the quarter was $18.5 million.

Both Oracle and Red Hat are doing well, and Oracle is obviously dealing with much bigger wads of money, but it seems clear that Red Hat’s open-source model is the big winner in the recession.

In fact, on Red Hat’s earnings call, Chief Executive Jim Whitehurst indicated: “Budgets remain tight and we don’t see an end in sight for this. In relative terms, this is pretty good for us.”