There has been a marked increase in the word "enterprise" within the Linux community of late, and it has very little to do with the latest iteration of Star Trek. It's a catchy little phrase that encompasses all that is corporate in Western society. If something is big, it's the enterprise. If it has a lot of money, it's the enterprise.

Try to pin it down much farther than that and you can get hung up. If big corporations are enterprise, then how would something like the United States Postal Service fit into that definition? It's certainly big, but it's also a government-run organization. If they started using Linux, could the USPS be embraced within the "enterprise Linux" framework?

Probably.

I have my own definition for what the enterprise is, which I use in making judgments about where certain stories on Linux Today and LinuxPlanet will be placed. The enterprise is anything that either uses a lot of resources to get something done, or needs a lot of resources to get something done.

When I was in Boston last week at the Enterprise Linux Forum (ELF), I found a lot of people from organizations that would fit into this definition. And all of them were looking for ways to start getting Linux into their IT schemas. Now, to be fair, many of them were using Linux already in one way or another. But now the time had come to start using Linux in ways that would not only allow them to do their work but would also let them do their work better.

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