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.”
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.
With backers such as IBM and HP, Linux itself looks set to continue to grow at an exponential rate, even if many of the low end providers embedded Linux or Linux services perish. And, say analysts, over time, the open source revolution will start to look more and more like the mainstream. Over time, control of the future directions of Linux will increasingly be in the hands of larger companies. The bazaar will be run by the people building the cathedral.
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