The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Consider the success of the ASUS Eee Linux PC. This helped bring Linux to a mainstream audience and this is continuing through the many netbook platforms we are now seeing rise up since the Eee first came to light. Netbooks have many things going for them; portability is one. Another is very important and that is their price. It has to be said, for all their coolness of size and weight it really is the price which made people stop and pay attention.
Now, netbooks don’t exactly use state of the art hardware. It’s not like the Eee had a blistering video card for instance. So, the hardware choices keep the price down low. Something else really helped keep prices down ...
... namely, the operating system. The netbook needs an operating system; any computer which must do something more besides perform calculations (without either getting input from the user or showing the results) must have one.
If you’re a software company, or a contributor to collaborative software development sites like SourceForge, you will want to bundle your downloads up so others may use them. In this conceptual reality the dominant file format will be virtual machine hard disks, for that ultimate in ultraportability.
However, for a working virtual machine to be constructed you first need to ensure it can actually boot. This means you must install an operating system on it. Yet, some operating systems cost money to purchase and to pass around. Therefore, to make a virtual machine running Windows XP or Vista you must purchase an appropriate license. To make a virtual machine running Linux – any distro or flavour – costs nothing.
We will thus see the Eee effect again in this future I’ve been describing. Linux will come repeatedly into the hands of the masses because of its highly-accessible price tag of $0. It will be the operating system of choice for virtual machines that expect to be distributed to the general public.
So that is my view of what’s to come: media will become more componentised with tinier but larger volumes coming along. More importantly, this componentisation will extend to software. Vendors will see the merit of packaging their software in virtual machines making it much easier to backup and to implement in an existing network without disruption. The natural choice will be Linux because of its remarkable price, bringing about another small revolution like we saw with the advent of netbooks. We will see virtual machines become mainstream and Linux will predominantly be the operating system used to power them.
Virtual Linux – coming to a desktop computer near you!
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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