The Linux High Availability (Linux-HA) Project is initiated to bring Linux to enterprise computing strength and reliability by exploiting redundancy and ensuring fast failovers in case of an outage. Since Linux is today amongst the five most frequently used operating systems for public web servers, I don't see why Linux shouldn't have HA features as well.
Linux-HA (which is the initial working title) will be a huge project, requiring lots of different conceptual and programming skills. In the commercial marketplace, HA installations tend to be large system integration projects, and this is what this is also about. Please note that commercial HA is not a niche product -- especially in the high end server market, HA is today key to selling Unix solutions. HA on Windows NT, on the other hand, is just in its infancy compared to Unix...
Generally, Linux already has some features which are required by Linux-HA but a lot still has to be done. This new project should gain the visibility (and possibly donations from the industry) which is needed to get the things done that are required.
To provide for the basic concepts, I set up the Linux High Availability HOWTO which can initially be found on http://www.mu c.de/~hm/linux/HA/High-Availability-HOWTO.html. Developers who are interested in HA concepts may want to look there. The HOWTO also represents the congress paper for Linux-HA.
The talk will be in German or English depending on the audience. Foils and papers will be in English.