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Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has found some encouraging statistics on Ubuntu adoption for public-facing Web sites powered by Ubuntu. Unfortunately, Shuttleworth has taken a single data point and tried to suggest that it's an indicator that companies are choosing Ubuntu over Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for "enterprise computing." In reality, the stats from W3Techs about Web site usage are not a particularly useful tool for divining what companies are using for "large-scale enterprise workloads."

Red Hat’s customers using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6 are getting a little more breathing room when it comes to updates. The company announced today that it is extending the support life cycle from seven to 10 years for RHEL 5 and 6. Customers using RHEL 6 will have support through 2020.

According to a FAQ from Red Hat, the move is in response to customer requests. Many of the customers adopting RHEL 5 were doing so mid-cycle, and were looking at dealing with upgrades sooner than what’s desirable. With the extension, RHEL 5 support will be carried through 2017.

For the last decade, Windows has held the emperor's seat in Chinese enterprises. As a result, market share for Internet Explorer 9 and usage share of Bing are believed higher in China than in the U.S. When China's National University of Defense Technology - its key research academy sponsored by the defense ministry - teamed up last January with China Standard (CS2C), the country's principal licenser of Linux, the presumption here in the States was that China was gearing up to kick Windows out of that country.

The presumption was apparently wrong. This morning in a signing ceremony, Chinese industry officials including the president of CS2C formalized an agreement with Microsoft that will pool their research efforts toward nationwide cross-platform cloud computing. In short, it's a pre-emptive truce.

Jay Lyman, senior analyst for the 451 Group, spoke at LinuxCon North America 2011 on the changing Linux landscape. Sessions are short at LinuxCon – about 50 minutes in total, give or take. So there's not a lot of time to get deep into the nitty gritty and perform a detailed analysis or explanation of a market that's now nearly 20 years old. Lyman went through a brief discussion of the major players in the market, and touched on the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) for each.

Red Hat today announced JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6, which it calls "a cloud-ready, highly scalable distributed data cache." Cameron Purdy defines a data grid as "a system composed of multiple servers that work together to manage information and related operations - such as computations - in a distributed environment."

Like Apache Cassandra and Riak, Red Hat's data grid is influenced by Amazon's distributed data store Dynamo. The product will cache data in-memory and distribute among multiple servers, which will be useful for cloud computing.

Ceylon is a new enterprise development language being developed by Red Hat employee Gavin King. The team plans to release a compiler later this year. King detailed the project at QCon Beijing 2011, and slides from his presentation were published earlier this month. When finished, it will run on the Java Virtual Machine and feature static typing, automatic memory management and other features missing from Java. According to King's presentation, the Ceylon team will strive to make the new language "easy to learn and understand."

It's currently in a very early stage. In a blog post, King writes, "All we have right now is a specification, an ANTLR grammar, and an incomplete type checker." Regarding whether it's a "Java killer," King wrote, "Ceylon isn't Java, it's a new language that's deeply influenced by Java, designed by people who are unapologetic fans of Java. Java's not dying anytime soon, so nothing's killing it."

Open-source software is at an inflection point in the enterprise. According to a survey by Accenture, more than two-thirds of organizations anticipate increasing their investment in it this year, and almost 40% said that they expect to migrate mission-critical software to open source within the next 12 months.

The survey reflects a pattern that's best illustrated by Red Hat's most recent financial results. In the past year, its revenues were up 20%. All parts of its business are showing growth, with particular strength in middleware. The company signed the largest deal in its history during the last quarter. According to Datamation, Red Hat renewed all of its top 25 deals during the quarter at over 120% of their original value.