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Web2.0 Journal | Java Remains #1 Programming Language, But Ruby Is Now 10th

In the aftermath of the latest spat between Rubyists and Javaholics, it might be worth noting that Ruby is now the 10th most popular programming language, up from 13th place a year ago. That, anyway, is the story according to the TIOBE Programming Community index which gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages and is updated once a month based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings, according to TIOBE - which on its site carries the warning:

Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is

+"<language> programming"

The search query is executed for the regular Google, MSN, and Yahoo! web search and the Google newsgroups and blogs for the last 12 months. The web site Alexa.com has been used to determine the most popular search engines.

By applying the search engine query as defined above, a lot of hit counts are collected. Let's define "hits(PL#i,SE)" as the number of hits of programming language PL at position i of the TIOBE index for search engine SE. The counted hits are normalized for each search engine for the first 50 languages. More formally, the rating for PL#i becomes

((hits(PL#i,SE1)/hits(PL#1) + ... + hits(PL#50)) + ... + (hits(PL#i,SEn)/hits(PL#1) + ... + hits(PL#50)))/n

where n is the number of search engines used.

The Top 10 as at October 2007 is as follows:

1.   Java
2.   C
3.   (Visual) Basic
4.   C++
5.   PHP
6.   Perl
7.   C#
8.   Python
9.   JavaScript
10. Ruby

Below is a line diagram detailing the long term trends for these ten:

Link: Java Remains #1 Programming Language, But Ruby Is Now 10th @ WEB 2.0 JOURNAL.

SAP | SAP Empowers Partners to Better Reach Global Small Businesses

In a move to further empower its global network of SAP® Business One software solution partners, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that partners that serve small businesses now have access to streamlined global solution partner agreements, enabling them to expand their market reach to SAP’s fast-growing customer base of over 15,800 small businesses worldwide. SAP said that new marketing and sales support have been added to its successful SAP® PartnerEdge™ program, which provides a best-in-class approach for supporting software solution and reselling partners by leveraging a collaborative selling model and a micro-vertical product strategy around SAP Business One.

Also available to software solution partners are enhanced sales and marketing enablement tools, including increased customer visibility through an online solution catalog, new implementation methodologies and access to the SAP PartnerEdge P2P Network, an online community that allows software solution partners and resellers to collaborate and meet specialized customer needs, while expanding their global business reach. This micro-vertical approach allows SAP and its partners to launch fully integrated solutions that address specific customer requirements. These solutions include not only actual business capabilities, but detailed implementation guidance and support methodologies.

“The new benefits in SAP PartnerEdge help us tremendously by authorizing partners to sell in multiple markets internationally while simultaneously providing a comprehensive toolset for developing and marketing our offerings within new markets,” said Mark Loveys, CEO of Enprise Solutions Ltd., a founding SAP Business One partner.

Qualifying for SAP PartnerEdge
The SAP PartnerEdge program includes a qualification process for software solution partners, ensuring they meet rigorous requirements in traditional areas such as development, localization and translation, as well as the provision of adequate sales and product support, before making the solutions available in additional countries. This thorough process ensures that partner solutions smoothly integrate with SAP® Business One, contributing to high customer satisfaction.

To reflect the close nature of the partner relationship between SAP and the solution partners for SAP Business One, SAP has changed its partner designation to “software solution partner” from “independent software vendor.” In addition, SAP is launching a new designation for qualified micro-vertical solutions: Products carrying the “Enabled by SAP® Business One” have passed SAP’s micro-vertical solution process and are offered by partners as part of SAP’s comprehensive go-to-market strategy. SAP is working with partners such as Acellos (Canada), be.as (Germany), CitiXSys (India), Coresystems (Switzerland), Enprise (New Zealand), SoftBrands (USA), Trimergo (Netherlands) and Xioma (Israel) to provide the first group of such micro-vertical solutions.

“The program provides a strong foundation for co-innovation within our partner network,” said Ralf Mehnert-Meland, global director Software Solution Partners, SAP Business One.

About SAP® PartnerEdge
Launched in 2006, the SAP PartnerEdge program is SAP's comprehensive business model for enabling partners to succeed in the small and midsize enterprise (SME) marketplace. SAP PartnerEdge provides an innovative and holistic way for partners to be recognized and rewarded for their business competency, technical and sales skills as well as performance in selling SAP solutions. The program provided a set of tiered benefits designed to help drive partners business including education, business enablement, technology, development and support, marketing and selling, and events and ongoing communications and enablement tools. The program provides partners with comprehensive benefits that increase as they advance to higher levels by way of SAP’s unique PartnerEdge Value Points system. (Additional information at www.sap.com/partners/categories/channel/partneredge)

About SAP® Business One
Designed specifically for small and midsize enterprises, SAP® Business One allows business owners to achieve an up-to-date and unified view of their operations, improve business-process efficiency and take advantage of growth opportunities. The software can be deployed rapidly, providing instantaneous access to critical business information through intuitive, easy to use reporting and drill down capabilities. With more than 1,340 business partners, 450 industry- and process-specific scenarios and add-ons, and 40 country versions, SAP Business One is helping more than 15,500 companies worldwide seamlessly link with customers and suppliers using SAP™ Business Suite applications. (Additional information at www.sap.com/solutions/businessone)

About SAP
SAP is the world’s leading provider of business software*. Today, more than 43,400 customers in more than 120 countries run SAP® applications—from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small businesses and midsize companies to suite offerings for global organizations. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform to drive innovation and enable business change, SAP software helps enterprises of all sizes around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. SAP solution portfolios support the unique business processes of more than 25 industries, including high tech, retail, financial services, healthcare and the public sector. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol “SAP.” (Additional information at <http://www.sap.com>)

Link: SAP - SAP Empowers Partners to Better Reach Global Small Businesses.

VentureBeat | Levana raises $8M for Linux data center automation

Levanta, a San Mateo, Calif. provider of Linux data center automation, has raised $8 million in new VC funding from Levensohn Venture Partners, vSpring and Walden International.

Here’s a copy of the statement.

Here’s a snippet:

Specialists in Linux data center automation, Levanta marries virtualization technology with comprehensive Linux life-cycle management. Levanta’s Linux data center automation solutions offer system monitoring, a configurable policy engine and automated change control, delivering dramatically faster and more flexible control of Linux on both physical and virtual machines. Levanta’s turnkey solutions drastically reduce time to implementation, enable your business to be more agile and responsive to change, automatically allocate resources, roll-out new applications faster, increase application availability, improve service levels, and reduce TCO. Levanta’s customers include industry leaders in e-Commerce, New Media, ISPs/ASPs/MSPs, financial services, education, and government. Levanta has partnerships with IBM, HP, Novell, and Red Hat.

Tagged co:Levana, deal, inv:levensohn venture partners, inv:vSpring, inv:Walden International

Link: VentureBeat » Levana raises $8M for Linux data center automation.

Rough Type: Wal-Mart - Changes its view towards IT

"I never viewed computers as anything more than necessary overhead," Sam Walton once said. Nevertheless, after I wrote "IT Doesn't Matter" back in 2003, critics would routinely present Wal-Mart as the killer counter example to my argument that information technology rarely provides a competitive edge anymore. Wal-Mart had famously set itself apart from its retailing rivals, IT analysts would point out, by building a lot of highly customized IT systems that its competitors were hard-pressed to match.

It was true, but it was also telling that the most prominent counter example relied on systems built years earlier, when business software was in a much earlier stage of maturation and commoditization.

Now, with commodity software greatly advanced, Wal-Mart's custom systems have turned from advantage to disadvantage, and the IT analysts have changed their tune. As CIO magazine's Thomas Wailgum writes in How Wal-Mart Lost Its Technology Edge:

"Wal-Mart was making their margins on sourcing and great technology systems, but everyone has got that now," says Patricia Edwards, a portfolio manager and managing director at Wentworth, Hauser and Violich who focuses on retail ... Furthermore, analysts say that Wal-Mart's reliance on homegrown IT systems—and its conviction of their superiority—needs to change. [CIO Rollin] Ford and his team, they say, must bring in best-of-breed commercial applications, such as BI and price-optimization tools, that can help it compete with rising retail superstars such as Target, JCPenney and Tesco. "We cannot overestimate how much packaged software can help them right now," says Paula Rosenblum, an analyst and managing partner with Retail Systems Research.

And switching from homegrown systems to packaged software is exactly what Wal-Mart is doing. The company has recently purchased off-the-shelf pricing and business-intelligence software from Oracle and HP, and on Thursday it announced it would install an SAP system for financial management and reporting. It was, as Wailgum reports, "another piece of evidence that the IT strategy of the world's biggest retailer is shifting in favor of packaged applications." SAP, in a press release, noted that the software would "replace some legacy systems." That's the way it is with IT: the custom systems that once set you apart are now the "legacy systems" that hold you back.

Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: For Wal-Mart, too, IT is a commodity.

WSJ | Tech Takes On Accounting Fraud

Want proof that some technologies that companies are using are having a measurable impact? Then take a look at accounting fraud, which has declined drastically in the U.S. over the past two years.

That’s according to a new survey on economic crime from PricewaterhouseCoopers, which found that accounting fraud at companies across the nation has dropped to 13% now from 36% in 2005. One factor driving the reduction: companies’ adoption of tech that puts more financial and risk controls into place, as mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, says Steven Salak, PwC’s global investigations and forensics leader.

In fact, Sarbanes-Oxley has helped drive something of a spending boom in certain parts of tech, such as security software. Tech companies like Silicon Valley start-up Solidcore Systems, which makes monitoring software, report that their business has increased as companies have opened up their wallets to buy software and other tech to comply with the legislation.

Tech is just one of several factors behind the fall in accounting fraud, however, notes Salak. Some companies have also formed internal audit committees to better track their own behavior, among other measures. And even as accounting fraud has declined, other offenses have popped up to take their place, such as increasing corruption.

Overall, economic crime at companies—including bribery and infringement on intellectual property—remains at roughly the same levels as two years ago, with 43% of the PwC survey’s respondents saying their company had experienced some economic crime in the past two years, down just slightly from 45% in the two years leading up to the 2005 survey.

It’s tough for tech to be able to do anything about bribery and IP infringement. The full survey can be found here.

Link: Business Technology : Tech Takes On Accounting Fraud.

Read/Write Web | Java: A Retrospective

It was 1995 and C++ was the language of choice for building large-scale software systems. C++ was a powerful object-oriented programming language, the successor of widely used procedural language called C. But not only was C++ powerful, it was also quite complicated. Seasoned programmers enjoyed the intricacies and the possibilities, but newbies would get burned after the first mishandled copy constructor.

Enter Java - a language of great elegance, power and, most importantly, simplicity. Designed by James Gosling and his team at Sun Microsystems, Java became a phenomenon that won hearts and minds, changed the rules of enterprise programming and seriously wounded Microsoft. Yet despite its glory, Java lost one of the most important battles - the battle for the web browser. In this post we look at what happened to Java in the last decade, from its glorious rise, to market politics, to the battle for the browser.

The Beauty Of Java

The first great thing about the core Java language was that it was simple. The creators of the language made assumptions and compromises and decided to take away some power from programmers, but the benefits by far outweighed the limitations. The second great thing was the virtual machine. To make a C++ program run on another platform required a lot of effort. Java programs, on the other hand, were portable automatically.

Then there were the libraries. Java's libraries made a huge impact because they shifted developer focus from worrying about the infrastructure to worrying about the application. Some of the earlier Java libraries truly set the bar for innovation, flexibility and utility. For example, the JavaBeans framework showed that component development can be easy (unlike COM and ActiveX). And the collections framework delivered reusable and extensible standard data structures and algorithms.

But probably the most important thing that Java taught many of us was to think about interfaces. The power of any object-oriented language is abstraction, and by emphasizing the interface, Java brought that power forward. Debunking the inheritance myth, Java named the interface to be a king of object-oriented programming.

Java's Enterprise Ambitions

As Java's popularity grew, so did the ambitions of its creators. Sun wanted Java everywhere: on the web, on the desktop, on mobiles and in the enterprise. The enterprise market looked particularly attractive because Sun would have the opportunity to sell its servers as well. Thus was born J2EE - a powerful infrastructure for building large-scale enterprise applications. Unfortunately, unlike the earlier Java libraries J2EE was quite complicated and even rather cumbersome.

Nevertheless J2EE gave rise to numerous standards, including probably the most important one - the modern application server. In a rather unexpected turn of events competitors like BEA, IBM, Oracle and Sun converged to create a set of standards that benefited first and foremost, the customers. All this was accomplished though the Java Community Process (JCP) - an industry round table for generating standard Java specifications.

The Java Community Process

Since its early days, the software community has lacked standards. In the 1980s and early 1990s consulting companies made a fortune building adapters that transformed output from one application into the input for another. Among the remarkable things that Sun managed to do with Java was introduce a process for generating industry-wide standards.

In a brilliant move, Sun shared its baby with everyone by inviting people to participate in the Java Community Process. The process consisted of phases, starting with the introduction of a new specification. If the need was established and approved, the draft and review phase focused on generating the first version of the spec and doing a public review. Anyone could provide feedback during the process, and then a group of authors would incorporate it into the draft.

IBM Hijacks Java With Eclipse

Sun has done many wonderful things with Java, but it also fell short at a few critical moments in history. First, it was a shame when Java was running faster on Windows than on Solaris. Their case for selling Sparcs as machines optimized for Java fell through. Sun recovered, but too late for people to buy into the benefits. Next, Sun did not develop a serious Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE) until late in the game.

IBM took advantage of this mistake and released a product ironically called Eclipse. This open source IDE allowed IBM to not only take over the basic development shell, but also release and distribute its own version of Java. IBM then made another clever move: it added standard development applications including testing tools, profiling tools, version control, etc. to Eclipse. And all of this it gave away free. With this move, IBM effectively cornered the developer tools market and cleared the path for selling more Web Spheres (IBM Application Servers) and Blades (IBM Servers).

Java Loses The Desktop And The Browser

Just like IBM out-maneuvered Sun, so did Microsoft. Microsoft has long maintained that Java is slow. Perhaps it was in the early days, but certainly that is no longer true. In fact, in most cases it runs as fast as native applications because of just in time compilation and various other optimizations. But Microsoft stuck to its guns, saying continuously that Java was slow, and added that Java user interfaces were also poor.

The image above is from Swing, written by Information Laboratory in 2003, and shows that Swing can draw its UI with thousands of objects.

Unfortunately for Java its first UI toolkit, AWT, was indeed not up to par. Eventually Sun came out with Swing, which was a superb UI framework; much faster than its predecessor and capable of creating the same kind of applications as Microsoft's tools. However, the myth had already been spread and middle management throughout the country trumpeted Microsoft's tune: Java was not good for the desktop.

And then there was the applet fiasco. Java applications where little applets that everyone grew to hate, thanks to their initial slowness and later inertia. Because of people's hatred for applets, Java lost the battle for being the programming language inside the browser.That loss is huge, given that the web is becoming more and more ubiquitous. What's sad is that Java lost to JavaScript (which has nothing to do with Java) and Flash - both inferior programming languages. The irony, of course, is that Java started with the web in mind.

The Cost Of Language Politics

There are great lessons to be learned from Java's story. The first is the lesson of simplicity and elegance. Java taught us that software can be simple to write. But another side of the Java story is about politics. Java won over people's hearts and minds and that alone made it a desirable target. IBM and Microsoft, both companies that have controlled dominant programming languages at different times in their histories, understood the value of Java and went after it. IBM executed perfectly. Microsoft pushed as hard as it could to block Java from the desktop and from the browser and succeeded.

The problem with politics, though, is that it's the people that get hurt, not the politicians. The fact is that AJAX, which has received a ton of positive press over the past couple of years, is a hacky, inelegant technology that pales in comparison to what exists in Java. If Java was part of the browser, it could manipulate HTML/DOM in exactly the same way that JavaScript does. But with Java we would get a first class programming language, a set of standards, robust libraries and a wide range of development tools. Alas, that's not to be.

Conclusion

The first decade of Java is a history of rapid rise and wide adoption. It is also a history of political battles and wrong choices made for the sake of marketing.

It is difficult to justify using inferior languages and tools to develop modern software. Java has come a long way and to throw it away would be a big mistake. Before inventing new languages and re-inventing new ways of doing things, the industry should pause and re-think the fate of Java in the browser.

Link: Java: A Retrospective.

Gartner | Oracle Seeks to Consolidate the Middleware Market With BEA Deal

On 12 October 2007, Oracle made public a letter it had sent to the board of BEA Systems, offering to buy the company for $17 a share, a 25% premium over the previous day's closing price. BEA's board of directors declined the offer, saying it undervalued the company, and asked for greater clarity about Oracle's intentions. In the past month, investor Carl Icahn, who holds 13% of BEA, has said he would like the company to be sold. Analysis Gartner believes Oracle's main motive is not to acquire technology, but to gain market share. If a deal is finalized, Oracle would emerge as a portal, process and middleware vendor with revenue second in size only to IBM, the market leader. These two vendors would be the main players in the Java-centric middleware market, well ahead of the remaining vendors. Oracle and IBM would also have a significant lead over Microsoft, which focuses on .NET-centric middleware, although Microsoft and SAP will continue to be formidable competitors in the larger application infrastructure market. It is also possible that Oracle's motive is to prevent others from entering the middleware market by buying BEA. The technology of BEA's portfolio and Oracle Fusion Middleware overlaps significantly, so an acquisition would mean a lot of rationalization. Some BEA products — such as Tuxedo and WebLogic Server — have customers generating substantial maintenance revenue, so it would be in Oracle’s interest to keep supporting them, even if they don't become strategic components of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Others — such as JRockit, AquaLogic BPM, AquaLogic PEP and AquaLogic Enterprise Repository — complement Oracle Fusion Middleware, so they might be fully integrated in the Oracle stack. BEA's technology is generally of a high quality, so it is not certain that Oracle's own products would always be strategic. In some cases, the needs of Oracle Fusion Applications would determine which product became strategic. The offer might create obstacles for BEA by generating uncertainty in clients and prospective customers. It might also pose problems for Oracle, as prospects may not buy products that might be replaced by BEA equivalents or be converged. Oracle has given no indication about the direction of products after an acquisition. Even though it has stated it intends to protect customers' investments in BEA products, its product road maps and convergence plans are still unknown. This uncertainty will create short-term opportunities for the likes of IBM, Software AG, Tibco Software, Progress Software and Red Hat, and further consolidation is likely as second-tier players try to gain the critical mass needed to compete against the two middleware behemoths.

Recommendations

Users of BEA's most popular products: Don’t panic, as long-term support is not in danger, even if the acquistion proceeds. Customers and prospects should continue to monitor the situation and weigh the risks of new strategic implementations before investing. Oracle Fusion Middleware users and prospects: Monitor progress of the proposed acquisition and its potential impact on Oracle products, weighing risks when making new purchases. Other players: Prepare strategic countermeasures. If the acquisition proceeds, second-tier vendors will find it harder to survive.

Recommended Reading

"BEA Systems Under New Pressure to Be Sold” — Carl Icahn has invested more than $400 million to acquire a significant stake in BEA and is advocating the sale of the company. By Yefim Natis, John Rizzuto and Massimo Pezzini "Trends in Platform Middleware: Disruption Is in Sight” — The combined effect of 14 major trends will disrupt the apparently static application server and transaction-processing markets. By Massimo Pezzini and Yefim Natis (You may need to sign in or be a Gartner client to access the documents referenced in this First Take.)

Link: Oracle Seeks to Consolidate the Middleware Market With BEA Deal.

VentureBeat | Microsoft. Ballmer: MSFT will acquire 20 companies a year

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer just said at the Web 2.0 conference here in San Francisco that the software giant will acquire 20 companies a year for the next five years, ranging from $50 million to $1 billion.

This steals from the playbook of News Corp, the media company that generated excitement among Internet companies after it acquired MySpace and others. There’s a tactic here: By declaring you are hungry, you get entrepreneurs coming to you to show you their wares — letting you get a glimpse of emerging technology even if you’re not going to buy it.

Google and to a lesser extent, Yahoo, have also acquired dozens of companies over the past few years, with Google much more acquisitive recently. Google has acquired at least 10 companies over the last year (there may be more than we’re unaware of), compared to Microsoft’s four. Yahoo has also acquired four. See list here.
With Google’s momentum lately, the fear and loathing that startups once had of Microsoft might be ebbing. Microsoft became famous during its hegemonic rule of the 1990s for engaging in negotiations with a start-up, and then pulling back at the last minute and launching an internal competitor. Now, with less time on its hands to stay in front of eager, nimble Web competitors like Google, and needing more goodwill from Internet developers for its latest initiatives online, Microsoft may lose some of its ruthless edge — or at least, be perceived to be losing it.

Link: VentureBeat » Microsoft’s Ballmer: MSFT will acquire 20 companies a year.

WSJ | Continued Strong Growth in the USA

German software maker SAP AG (SAP) is experiencing continued strong growth of its operations in the U.S., Chief Executive Henning Kagermann said Thursday in a conference call following the release of third-quarter figures.

"The market environment in the U.S. didn't change in the third quarter," Kagermann said.

"We're gaining market share in the U.S. from competitors," Deputy CEO Leo Apotheker added.

SAP posted a 6% year-on-year increase in third-quarter sales in the Americas, at EUR862 million.

Link: Article - WSJ.com.

WSJ | How Far Behind is Linux?

If some of Linus Torvalds's own family members back in Finland don't use Linux, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Linux, the free operating system whose development is overseen by Mr. Torvalds, has long been entrenched in the worlds of science and commerce. When Google gives you a search result, a Linux machine is doing the work. At tens of thousands of other companies, computer managers take comfort in the fact that these days, no one ever gets fired for "buying" open source.

But world domination? That's another story.

Even though Linux is easier than ever to use, the dream of many Linux buffs of it replacing Windows as the desktop mainstay is, at best, stalled, and at worst, fading. While exact numbers are hard to come by, one survey has desktop Linux users barely scraping a single percentage point of the market share. Among Microsoft's customers, concedes Mr. Torvalds, are his father and sister, though Mom has managed to resist the allure of the dark side.

So, with the top version of Windows Vista running at nearly $400, at least for new users, why do people continue to open their wallets wide when there's a free alternative?

One reason is that for most consumers, Windows is "free," coming as it does with their new PCs. Computer companies hardly seem interested in offering alternatives. H-P, for example, ships more PCs than anyone, but won't sell a computer without Windows, at least in the U.S.

Dell is far more Linux friendly, and offers a line of consumer Linux machines that run $50 less than their Windows counterparts. But Dell doesn't exactly broadcast the option; there's no mention of it on its home page and you need to know to click on an "Open-Source Computers" link on an inside page of its Web site before you know of the alternative.

Dell started installing Linux earlier in the year after a suggestion box on its Web site drew a deluge of requests for the system. Dell doesn't say how many Linux PCs it ships, but one survey puts it at a tiny fraction of total units.

And, tellingly, far more people requested that Dell sell Linux than actually bought a machine once it went on sale. That suggests the typical consumer user has none of the philosophical objections to Windows of some members of the open-source community. Windows works well enough that the difficulty involved in switching operating systems outweighs any slings and arrows of using it.

Linux developers, though, remain determined to eliminate that difficulty. The best example of their efforts is a Linux "distribution" known as Ubuntu, a Zulu/Xhosa word for "human-ness." More than anything else, Ubuntu has come closest in making Linux ready for prime time.

Ubuntu's most prominent backer is Mark Shuttleworth, a 34-year-old South African who made a bundle in 1999 when he sold his security firm to VeriSign. He used some of those proceeds to become the first African in space, as a for-pay tourist in 2002 on a Russian space mission. He regards his work with Ubuntu as partly a philanthropic endeavor, because of its use in developing countries, where loaded computers are hard to come by.

Ubuntu's claim to fame is that its developers have bundled not just Linux, but a shelf full of other important programs, such as Web browsers and word processors, into a single easy-to-install package. Once on your computer, it looks and acts much as Windows does. What's more, Ubuntu updates itself every six months and notifies you if security updates are needed in the interim.

That last feature, incidentally, should disabuse an actual Ubuntu user of the notion that a non-Windows operating systems is security utopia, where hackers are powerless and children are all above average. I recently installed the April version of Ubuntu on my home machine and promptly was informed that more than 50 security patches to problems discovered in the interim awaited my downloading. Who does Ubuntu think it is? Windows?

Everything about Ubuntu worked as billed, but don't take my word for it. Test-drive it yourself at Ubuntu.com. Developers have created a mode that lets you experiment with the software without permanently installing it on your PC. You also can load Ubuntu into its own hard-disk partition using a built-in, dual-boot program -- although if you have to ask what that means, you probably shouldn't try it.

Mr. Shuttleworth says Linux-Ubuntu has become so easy that anyone, anywhere can use it as a primary operating system, as long as they have a technically savvy friend to help with rough patches. And that gap, too, he's determined to close, he says.

Mr. Torvalds isn't involved with Ubuntu. That isn't the way Linux works. He agrees that increasing the desktop presence of Linux is a crucial long-term goal, largely because that's how new programmers get interested in the software, which keeps the wheel turning.

He still believes that ultimately the race for dominance will go to the slow and steady. "Maybe the desktop isn't exactly getting conquered, but it's getting a fair amount of development attention," he says. "I'm a technical guy, so I tend to believe in the 'if you build it, they will come' motto, even if the inertia in the market would make it a long road to travel."

Link: Portals - WSJ.com.