As reported over on The Financial Times, Google’s long-held stance that its employees should be free to choose whatever operating system they feel most comfortable with on their desktops will come to a sudden, screeching halt: while you’ll still have the choice of a Mac or a PC, you’ll have to run Linux or Mac OS X.

According to an un-named Google employee, the move is an official decision from the higher-ups that “we’re not doing any more Windows[, as] it is a security effort” and that already “many [employees] have been moved away from [Windows-based] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks [against Google.]”

While Mac OS appears to be the operating system of choice – possibly for its out-of-the-box, pre-configured ease of use – employees are also given the option to run a flavour of Linux. Again, an un-named employee states that “Linux is open source and we feel good about it[, but] Microsoft we don’t feel so good about.”

The news is something of a disaster for Microsoft: with such a large company – and one seen as a trend-setter and trailblazer for the industry as a whole – making the concious decision to avoid the use of Windows altogether for security reasons, it could start to find its traditional iron grip on the corporate desktop market starting to weaken.

Do you believe that Microsoft has anything to worry about following Google’s decision to drop Windows, or is this just posturing by Google as a response to Microsoft’s rival Bing search engine? Share your thoughts over in the forums.

Linux has soared in recent years in the embedded world, especially with the Linux-based Android giving it a boost in smartphone sales. More fun is on the way, according to ABI Research, which recently projected that Linux-based mobile operating systems, led by Android, will own 33 percent of the global smartphone market by 2015, with a growth rate that is faster than the robust smartphone market at large.

Banca IFIS is the only independent Italian bank specializing in financing enterprises. Committed to the development of new services for lending financial support and managing working capital, the bank helps thousands of enterprises every year find the appropriate solution to their financial needs. Banca IFIS implemented Ingres Icebreaker, which allows a low cost, simplified installation of Ingres Database. It is the first fully integrated enterprise-class database and Linux operating system with an intelligent online patching mechanism. In addition, administrative tasks are simplified with an easy-to-use consolidated management portal.

Banca IFIS also chose to take advantage of an operational services engagement with Ingres. This provides a proactive 24 hour support service to ensure optimal performance of this mission critical installation.

The platform itself is built primarily on Linux, but Solaris and Cisco networking also play important roles. The back-end database engine is based on Oracle. The LSE expects to see transaction speeds drop from a claimed best speed of 2.7 milliseconds — which was rarely, if ever, seen under TradElect — to the Linux solution’s claimed 0.4 millisecond speed.

It wasn’t just raw speed though that brought the LSE to Linux. Linux is cheaper, a lot cheaper, for high-end servers.

According to an IBSJ report, David Lester, director of information and technology at LSE, said that compared to the annual bill of $65 million for TradElect, MillenniumIT was a bargain at a purchase price of $30 million. The LSE predicts that moving to Linux will give the company an annual cost savings of at least £10 million ($14.7 million) from 2011-12. In addition, “The new technology is a lot lighter, nimbler and easier to install” and will also enable faster releases.

The LSE hopes to close the deal this month. The transition from TradElect to the MillenniumIT is expected to take up to 18 months. Lester hopes to get it completed faster than that.

In the end, the LSE and its traders will profit from this move. As Steve George, director of corporate services at Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) told me when we talked about the deal. “When performance and stability matters, as they do in business, Linux is the positive choice. This move will be good both for the LSE and its customers and to the wider family of Linux.”

A Windows virus hit the networks of Integral Energy and, according to a submission to Slashdot, the virus managed to spread to the operator display consoles in the control room.

Quick thinking techies in the control systems department of the utility swapped the infected Windows boxes for machines running Linux that they were using for development.

The move prevented the virus from taking over all the operator displays in the control room.

Quoting an inside source, the German economic newspaper, “Handelsblatt” that staff at IBM have been given ten days to change to Symphony, IBM’s in-house Lotus software. The use of Microsoft Office will in future require managerial approval. With immediate affect, the Open Document Format (ODF) will rule at IBM with the file ending .doc soon belonging to the past.

Lotus Symphony is an office software that incorporates huge chunks of customized Open Office without a databank module. The free software download provided by IBM is an attempt at luring customers away from Microsoft. IBM’s cooperation with Linux distributors like Red Hat, Canonical and Novell was designed to strengthen the software’s market chances.

IBM’s management have obviously decided to practice what they preach. 330,000 IBM workers already use Symphony, reports the newspaper. The motive for the migration appears not to be the saving of license fees, and according to an IBM press officer, the move is a clear statement in appreciation of open source standards.

OpenLRT has been designed for traffic information systems and dynamic route guidance, and is available as an open-source technology. It can easily be adapted to the requirements of system integrators, and the technical community can contribute with their ideas to improve it.

At the same time, IT is under more pressure than ever. There is less capital to invest in new systems at the very moment when companies need to leverage technology to innovate — both to contain costs and to hone competitive advantage. IT managers are being told to lay off personnel and reduce operating expenses, yet are expected to continue providing the same support to business users as when fully staffed.

But there’s a bright spot amidst the general gloom. Specifically, the value proposition of low-cost, highreturn open source solutions is resonating now more than ever. Although used successfully by leading-edge companies for more than 20 years, some mainstream businesses have remained with their proprietary technology alternatives, either due to vendor lock-in or misconceptions about open source. That is rapidly changing. Today, open source is being increasingly recognized for its ease of use, high performance, and affordability, especially amidst today’s turbulent economic conditions. Indeed, the high value of open source, coupled with economic and organizational pressure, represents a “perfect storm” for CIOs, giving them the opportunity to deploy high-performing, cost-effective open source solutions to carve costs out of their IT infrastructures.

Postal Service information technology officials have upgraded the 15-year-old, mainframe-based system to handle more transactions and lower the cost of operating the system.

The work to upgrade PTS is part of a larger plan to standardize on the open-source and less expensive Linux operating system, said John Byrne, manager of application development and head of USPS’ Integrated Business Solutions Centers.

The service is moving 1,300 Sun Solaris midrange servers to a Hewlett-Packard Linux environment. USPS is using Novell’s SUSE Linux on the mainframe and distributed computing platforms to forge greater interoperability between the two environments, Byrne said.

However, the mainframe story is one of migration and reuse of valuable business logic developed over 15 years, Byrne said.

“We’ve hosted [PTS] on the mainframe, and the mainframe is a proprietary environment, meaning you have to pay the software vendors a certain price to use their software,” Byrnesaid . “We wanted to take advantage of Linux and open source. We want to grow the scanned events without having to pay more software costs. So we started down the path to Linux.”

Behind this growing acceptance is a non-commercial movement of independent developers that are putting together the open source software that anyone can use.

Paul Allen, editor of ComputerActive magazine, said the defining feature of open source software was that the set of tools and systems were developed by enthusiasts rather than big companies.

But he added it should be treated as “free thinking rather than a free lunch” because it is not always free of charge.

Out of this movement have come fully-fledged programs, such as Open Office for e-mail, spreadsheets, word processing and presentations, and VLC for video, that were put together for free by a community of people.

“The entire source code for the software is made available to the community and anyone can modify it,” said Phil Andrews from open source software provider Red Hat.

‘Catching up’

While the core software may be free to download and install, some companies are making money from open source by offering support services. This can be in the form of a helpdesk or more technical aid to troubleshoot problems once the software is being used.

“In the same way that you would take purchase software and have a maintenance contract… we supply a support contract for open source software,” said Mr Andrews.

Despite many businesses turning to open source and its use becoming widespread, it remains relatively unknown to the masses of computer users, said Mr Allen.

He said consumers were particularly unaware of the free versions of operating systems, largely Linux, that are available. This could be because many appear in different versions that can look fragmented to those unfamiliar with them.

Beyond operating systems, many do use open source programs even if they may not know them as such.

“On the applications side, programs like Firefox and Thunderbird are immensely popular and are catching up Microsoft in some places,” said Mr Allen.

Many of the open source applications have millions of users.

For instance, statistics suggest that there are about 40 to 50 million users of Linux desktops, while Open Office has been downloaded 60 million times since October 2009.

The browser Firefox has been gaining popularity with web users and the organisation behind it claims it now has 270 million users.