Wow, I did not think that Business Week was concerned with the viability of the Linux desktop, but I stand corrected. I do however, not feel that Notes has as much of an impact as everyone keeps saying that it does.

Linux has had a major impact on the server end of corporate computing, but, so, far not too much action on the desktop. The reasons are clear: Microsoft’s Windows and Office products totally dominate and its hard to compete with network effects. Desktop Linux has only a couple of percentage points of market share. I don’t see anything on the horizon that seems likely to change that, but, for Linux fans, here’s a ray of hope: IBM, one of the penguin’s biggest backers, is releasing a version of its Notes communications and collaboration software designed to run on Linux. Unless you have important applications running on Linux, you won’t have corporations adopting it en masse. And Notes, with 125 million users worldwide, qualifies as an important application.

IBM’s release of Notes is interesting on its own, but, under the covers it signals a notable advance in the craft of writing software. The massive program was developed using the Eclipse programming framework, an open source project designed to make it easier, faster, and cheaper to create new software packages. Thanks to Eclipse, IBM was able to produce the Linux version of Notes in just one year–and nearly a year ahead of its original projections. But that’s just the beginning of the savings. Eclipse allows IBM to maintain a single code base for Notes going forward for its Windows, Linux, and, soon, Macintosh versions. That means it, essentially, only has to maintain, patch, and upgrade one application. “We probably never would have made the investment in Notes for Linux if we didn’t have this,” says Danny Sabbah, general manager of IBM’s Rational Software unit…. Source: Businesss Week