May 24th, 2004
Press
Expanding the capability of the Windows server on which Trimble had been running its GPS application meant moving from Windows 2003 Advanced Server to Windows 2003 Data Center to be able to scale up to four nodes, Johnson says. Even then, Windows 2003 Data Center couldn’t promise the scalability that Linux could. Besides vendor enthusiasm, another factor that has contributed to Linux’s corporate success is economic uncertainty. “The economic downturn has ended up being very good for Linux,” says Dirk Elmendorf, founder and chief technology evangelist of Rackspace Managed Hosting, a provider of IT-hosting services. “It shook people up. They had to start thinking about how they were going to change their business to survive in a new environment. Companies don’t want to change anything when things are good.”