Open free-for-all
- Article 1 of 1
- Open Source Strategies, June 2002
There are more than 150 commercially available variants of the Linux open source operating system. Could that be its downfall?
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Linux is fragmenting, say its detractors - and that could pose administrative problems for any organisation using or hoping to use the open source operating system.
The concern is that there are already as many as 150 different, commercially available 'distributions' of the open source operating system, and in the future, there will be even more.
As a result of this proliferation, many distributions will have too few customers, which means few open source suppliers will be able to make a profit. Many of these companies will eventually fail, leaving customers with software that is no longer developed or even supported.
It is enough to give even the most fervent supporter of open source software a moment of pause. But what would consolidation among open source suppliers really mean for customers?
The question of fragmentation certainly bothers potential Linux customers. In a recent survey by US IT publication, InformationWeek, 43% of IT managers and Linux vendors said that the lack of control by a single vendor was among Linux's biggest shortcomings.
Many Linux experts argue, however, that Linux fragmentation is not necessarily an undesirable outcome for the open source software movement. Saying that diversity in open source software is bad, comments Bob Young, chairman and founder of market leading Linux distributor Red Hat, is like saying the Soviet Union's 'planned economy' was the best production model. “You only had one shoe factory: no wasteful duplication of effort,” he says.
Most other Linux supporters also say that the dangers are being overplayed, pointing out that the 'Linux' kernel - the underlying layer of the operating system that controls access to hardware and other low-level operations - is under the control of one just person, Linus Torvalds, the developer who created the first version of the system that now bears his name.
Kernel bundles
Since no company can sell a product as Linux unless it is built on top of the Torvalds' kernel, only the set of software tools that accompany the Linux kernel vary from distribution to distribution. Most of what people refer to as Linux is, in fact, the software tools from the GNU project, run by the Free Software Foundation, that are generally bundled with Torvalds' kernel. And, if the software a company needs to use does not work with those tools, it can download other tools (for free, usually) or even look at the accompanying source code, see what is wrong, and fix it.
In a further effort to mitigate the effects of fragmentation, the Free Standards Group has created the Linux Development Platform Specification (LDPS). Similar to POSIX, the US military specification for ensuring developers can easily rewrite programs for other types of POSIX-compliant operating systems, LDPS is a set of specifications for developers that enables them to write Linux software that will run with little or no rewriting on all other LDPS-compliant distributions. The aim is for the standard to evolve into a more stable Linux Standard Base (LSB) over time. Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, Corel Linux, OpenLinux and others already support it in some of their later distributions.
IBM, for one, is pushing other vendors to support LSB. Robert LeBlanc, vice president for software strategy of the IBM Software Group, explains that, “IBM is driving an effort to get LSB incorporated. We want to get LSB to really be the body that keeps the Linux community together in terms of its APIs and the other standard pieces of Linux because, today, it's really controlled by a group of individuals.”
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