16 May 2003 SCO Group, owner of the intellectual property of the Unix operating system, may be trying to dissuade companies from using the open source Unix operating system Linux (see SCO warns companies against using Linux), but a study by analysts DH Brown Associates has found that the technology has improved significantly during the last two years and is finally worthy of corporate consideration.

The DH Brown Associates study looked at all the commercially available iterations of Linux and compared them to proprietary versions of the Unix operating system. It measured a number of factors, including application support capabilities, remote administration capabilities, ability to support large amounts of memory, crash analysis and networking standards.

SuSE Linux came out top in the study, followed by Red Hat, with both products receiving an overall “good” rating, compared to just “OK” two years ago. SuSE and Red Hat are the world’s two biggest distributors of Linux. Debian Linux was also rated as “good”.

“Linux’s evolution and maturity is proceeding at a rapid pace,” DH Brown concluded. However, it also said that Linux continues to lag the best versions of Unix, such as Sun Microsystems’ Solaris, particularly when it comes to large-scale, multiprocessor environments. Overall, the analyst group suggested, Linux is closer in capability to Windows than to Unix.

However, Linux is expected to take another big step forward when the next version of the operating system kernel, version 2.6, is released. Version 2.6 will significantly improve the ability for Linux to “scale-up on large systems, allowing it to support much larger databases and other I/O-intensive applications,” according to DH Brown.