Nancy Brittle, World Wide Program Director of Linux in Academia and Ty Harris, Manager of Linux Technology Services at the IBM Linux Technology Center talk about the Linux Scholars Challenge competition, and provide a sneak preview of some of the winning projects.

Earlier this fall, IBM invited students from around the world to submit Linux projects to compete against their peers in the Linux Scholars Challenge competition. When Linux Scholar Challenge submissions were closed and tallied up, everyone was surprised at the response: IBM received 1462 applications from students at 669 universities in 64 countries around the world.

According to Nancy Brittle, World Wide Program Director of Linux in Academia, "IBM offered the Linux Scholar Challenge to gauge just how widespread the use of Linux is among students worldwide. Though IBM felt that Linux was entrenched in the universities, we didn't really know how deeply entrenched it was globally. What we learned from the overwhelming response to this challenge is that university students worldwide are indeed using Linux."

"By offering the Linux Scholar Challenge, IBM wanted universities worldwide to know that IBM's commitment to Linux goes far beyond the total commitment we've made on our IBM eServers and IBM middleware," Nancy added. "We are also looking for ways to collaborate on curricula, research, and other types of Linux and open source projects to benefit the community as a whole."

The twenty-five winners have now been selected by a world-wide review panel of IBM Linux researchers and technologists. To get a sneak preview, we asked Ty Harris about his impressions of the winning projects. Ty is the Manger of Linux Technology Services at the IBM Linux Technology Center, and led the final project review.

Rayme:  Ty, what impressed you the most about the responses to the Linux Scholar challenge?

Ty:  A few things, the global interest in Linux, the quality of the entries and the overall technical knowledge of the participants.

Rayme:  Without going through each and every winner, did some projects catch your eye?

Ty:  Yes. Projects dealing with Accessibility and Usability enhancements. It is my opinion that very soon we will see a different type of Linux user; the user that is accustom to operating systems that provides a good graphical user interface. As Linux gains acceptance into businesses currently dominated by Windows, usability, ease of use and accessibility will become a key decision factor for many businesses looking to deploy Linux.

There was one other that caught my eye, The Cyclop robot, a Linux-based robot with vision system. Cool, practical and productive.

Rayme: Were the entrants mostly kernel projects? Applications? Tools?

Ty:  A good mixture of projects were submitted, some kernel, some applications and some tools but a narrow majority of the projects were applications. What this tells me is, the Linux community is very aware of what is needed to help the maturation and acceptance of Linux and it's not just kernel improvements, but tools and applications as well.

Rayme:  Are there any business problems that may be eased thanks to some of these Linux projects?

Ty:  There could be, for example, one of the winning projects deals with improving performance through the use of Threadpools. Performance improvements for Web Serving could be realized through the use of Threadpools with takes advantage of POSIX threads. Test results from this project suggest threadpools showed superior performance compared to the monolithic implementation.

Rayme:  Anything else you'd like to add?

Ty:  I am pleased and excited with the number of entries from all over the world. The students using Linux today, like the ones that participated in this Linux Scholar challenge program, will be tomorrows IT decision makers. This speaks well for the continued growth, acceptance and investment in Linux.

Rayme Jernigan is the managing editor of the IBM Linux portals. He has published articles through several publications and content sites including JavaWorld, IBM/developerWorks, and Javasoft at Sun Microsystems. He was the founder and first president of the Triangle Java Users Group, and can be reached at rayme@us.ibm.com.

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