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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The adoption of LSB can only be a good thing for CIOs. Most want to do business with one trusted supplier, not several, just as most developers would prefer to write for one platform rather than for many. And as the financial difficulties of VA Linux, TurboLinux and other publicly listed Linux companies show, the amount of money going into Linux may be substantial, but it is being spread between too many players. Consolidation, say many analysts, is already happening.
German distributor SuSE, for example, has virtually abandoned the US market after cutbacks within the organisation meant it could no longer offer support in that region. It considered a merger with Caldera in 1999 and, when that fell through, with tools vendor Cygnus Solutions a few months later. TurboLinux and LinuxCare also attempted to merge, but abandoned the process on the grounds that their “company cultures were to different”. Stormix Technologies in Vancouver, Canada, meanwhile, has filed for bankruptcy protection.
Consolidation
Despite his aborted merger, LinuxCare's CEO Arthur Tyde expects considerable consolidation in the next two years. “I was walking the aisles of LinuxWorld recently and saw firsthand how much consolidation there's going to be. You have 50 embedded Linux distributors, for example, right next to each other. One had embedded Linux in a watch. Another had embedded it in a fridge. You don't need both [companies].”
The fact that many open source companies will not survive, says Young of Red Hat, does not mean that the open source sector itself will not be successful. “In 1984,” says Young, “the leaders in software were WordStar and VisiCalc. The leaders in hardware were Acorn and Osborne. None of those guys exist today: does that mean the PC wasn't a revolution and wasn't important? Clearly it was, and well-run companies such as Dell, Compaq and even Microsoft spun out of that revolution. The fact that Stormix is no longer around doesn't reflect on the [validity of the] open source revolution, it reflects on the management team of Stormix.”
Steven Vaughan-Nichols, head of the Internet Publishing Guild, expects few actual acquisitions to go ahead, however. He says the bigger companies will simply poach staff from weaker companies rather than buy them, since none of them have recognisable brands or intellectual property to acquire, only talented staff. “It will not be consolidation so much as weeding out of the unfit,” he argues.
Powerful alliances
One of the major Linux alliances, which also indicates which companies are likely to survive, is between IBM and the four providers of the standard Linux distributions for IBM hardware: RedHat, SuSE, Caldera and TurboLinux. A lesser partner in the alliance is France's MandrakeSoft, as are several Latin American and Chinese distributors.
IBM's LeBlanc says IBM prefers not to settle on only one distribution because, “We don't think it's good to have one distributor having total control of the standard. We've seen that before and seen what's happened. It takes more effort to work with all the major distributors, but in the end, we think that achieves the goals of ubiquity and consistency that the market really demands.”
IBM has already committed to invest $1 billion in Linux this year, and is ploughing considerable development money into ensuring Linux has the capabilities needed by enterprise customers, such as better support for multiple processors, file systems, printer drivers and systems management tools, all of which it has given back to the open source community. Much of the money is going into services however - open source services are a potentially lucrative revenue stream for the company's massive IBM Global Services division.
IBM's only serious competitor in the open source area is Hewlett-Packard (HP), which has chosen not to ally itself with any one supplier or group of suppliers. Bruce Perens, senior strategist for Linux and open source at the company, says HP has standardised on Debian Linux because the distribution is not controlled by one vendor - it is produced by a group of volunteers around the world. Perens claims that “virtually everyone at HP is being touched by Linux”, and that HP promises to offer the same standard of service to customers that it provides for its own HP-UX Unix distribution.
Indeed, Perens personally believes that Linux will be able to replace HP-UX, boasting all the same capabilities, within three years. Supporting the system will be cheaper and easier, he says, because people who use Linux tend to know what they are doing and can generally fix their own problems. They even have access to the source code, he points out.
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