After my brief glimpse of VMworld, I flew into Chicago to be part of the Redhat Summit.  The open source based company, where I am currently the International Partner Development Manager, had an exhibit.  As well, I gave a presentation about our software.

On Monday, I spent the day checking out the exhibits at VMworld in San Fransisco USA.  While the key focus was on VMware and many of the companies present focused their product support on the MS platform, it was encouraging to see a strong representation by enterprise level companies such as Canonical, Redhat and Novell.  While it is common knowledge that probaly 75% of the servers around the world run on a Unix platform, there are still Microsoft holdouts.

As a proponent of open source programming, I recommend that users install the Firefox browser as the first step in the migration to software choice and freedom.  Besides the obvious reasons of speed and compatiblity with current web standards, I also promote Firefox because of the following reasons:

Our 3rd episode discussion points were varied indeed!  We shared our opinion on whether the take down notice that Mark recieved was indeed valid, and why was this Orwellian approach was taken, instead of going to the source of the website in Russia.

Today I had the task of looking on the Dell & HP sites for desktops or workstations that would support Ubuntu and multi-station software. 

The checklist was not long,  I wanted to find a machine which had Ubuntu pre-installed so I knew that there were Linux drivers to support the hardware inside.  As well I wanted to have at least 2  PCI-E slots and 2 PCI slots on the machine in order to support additional video cards.

Previously, Mark and I recorded a podcast on Linux migration strategies.  I find that assisting people or organizations through the change to open source or Linux is a key factor in the success of long term adoption.

I believe we are experiencing an exciting time for the adoption of Open Source Software around the globe.  First and foremost, the challenging economic situation in which the world finds itself has caused many organizations to re-think their current IT strategy.  As well, many governments have mandated the use of FOSS in their departments, but were slow to actually implement a migration strategy.