John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, said open source benefits from a community of users ready to provide support.

Hovsepian, who was also on the panel, said he's pushed his developers to keep consoles and software operations as simple as possible, like an iPod. «We've not made the datacenter as efficient as it could be,» he said.

But Lilly, who said he uses many Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) products, took some issue with the iPod analogy.

«You should be able to tweak things and make changes to suit your preferences. That’s what we do with Firefox,» he said. «Apple's products are easy to use, but they work how Steve [Jobs, Apple's CEO] thinks they should work.»

The netbook opportunity

Hovsepian said he's especially excited by the growing popularity of devices and appliances that rely on lighter-weight operating systems and cloud computing to perform.

«The cloud is a stepping stone to appliances that let the customer run their applications wherever they need to,» he said.

In particular, he praised the rise of netbooks, which generally can't handle the overhead of Microsoft's current Vista operating system, but run Linux (and the older Windows XP) fine. Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) forthcoming Windows 7 has lower hardware requirements that let it run on the tiny, low-cost PCs.

Near the end of his keynote, Hovsepian also announced the release of Novell SUSE Linux 11, reported earlier by InternetNews.com. The newer version builds on Novell's plans to get its flavor of Linux as widely distributed as possible.

Novell is now including a feature called JeOS (Just enough Operating System) that enables developers to include a stripped-down version of the OS in appliances. «This is the beginning of Linux being mass-customized,» Hovsepian said.

He also defended Novell's ongoing relationship with Microsoft, designed to support interoperability between Windows and Linux.

«When we announced our plans a few years ago, it was very controversial and I understand that,» he said. «But 97 percent of our customers said they planned to keep on using Windows. We have to live with it and embrace what the customers are using.»

Ключевые слова: economy, Linux, Mozilla, Novell, open source

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