Openfiler Storage Management Software GPL'd

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article on The Inquirer, a UK based company has set up a GPL'd Linux-based storage management project called Openfiler, and donated its code to it. There are some nice screenshots showing off its features. Apparently, the code itself will be available for download on 30th of October. There is a press release on the company's website. The concept of special purpose Linux distributions for enterprise applications seems to be picking up in recent years, with release of products from SuSE, Smoothwall and the like."

Comments

Linux as application platform

[heironymouscoward]

I commented on this before, WRT to bootable Linux CDROMS for games.

Linux is an excellent platform for whole-system applications, i.e. applications that take over an entire system. This used to be a bizarre concept but today is perfectly sensible: hardware is cheap and if dedicated boxes make sense for firewalls, routers, and web servers, why not for enterprise applications too?

With Linux, the application designers can create a turn-key package that delivers a complete solution. The application does not even have to be GPLd unless it is derived from existing GPLd work.

The missing piece used to be device detection, but Linux is so good at this today that it has redefined the concept of "platform", which used to be an operating system, but is now simply random hardware.

The example of a bootable application CD based on Linux is an extreme one that I think shows the potential. Don't laugh: this is how many firewalls work today.

Last year my company provided an industrial application (a Kiosk) as a bootable Linux CD (on which there were three Debian layers, one for the boot server, one for the kiosk servers, and one for the kiosk clients). The application has not broken down a single time.

It works.