Linux continues its relentless march across the enterprise IT landscape; there are now few places in the corporate data center where Linux doesn’t make sense. And Linux has been the default choice for start-ups, especially SaaS start-ups, for a while now. Zack Urlocker illustrates the point with the example of iLike, a music sharing site (the kids are all into it), which scaled from 1m to 6m users in a few weeks on the back of a LAMP stack.

So what happened to ActiveGrid, which was supposed to bring LAMP to the enterprise? Peter Yared’s gone onto other things, and has this to say about LAMP’s supposed lack of penetration into the enterprise market. Essentially, he’s arguing that it’s Java’s fault; Java’s gotten easier to use and taken the wind out of the sails of the scripting languages (PHP, Perl, Python, etc.) in the LAMP stack. I don’t know that I buy that explanation — Linux and Apache seem to be doing quite well, thank you, and I haven’t heard any complaints from MySQL either — but it explains, I suppose, ActiveGrid’s shift in focus to Java.