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INDUSTRY WATCH: Two Linuxes, and That’s Okay
By David Rubinstein
 March 1, 2004 — The UnitedLinux effort—which brought together for a brief time four of the open-source operating-system vendors to work for a common distribution and global support for users—apparently has been snuffed out by fractiousness among its members, most notably SUSE, now under Novell’s ownership, and SCO.
Meanwhile, the Open Source Development Labs seems to be emerging as the Linux thought leaders, having brought in the creator, Linus Torvalds; kernel maintainer Andrew Morton; and former UnitedLinux general manager Paula Hunter. OSDL now is the overseer of the kernel, with its work on the 2.6 version just recently completed.
Frankly, none of this matters—at least not since November, when billion-dollar Novell entered the open-source world with acquisitions of Ximian and SUSE. Novell has completely changed the rules of the open-source game. Now, a vendor used to doing business the old-fashioned way—selling proprietary software that locks users into its product sets and turns a profit—is going to apply the same rules to Linux. Whereas the motivation to create Linux was to offer a technology alternative to the costly, tightly controlled Unix of the 1980s, Novell’s motivation to drive Linux forward is to offer a business alternative to the costly, tightly controlled Windows of today.
Novell will carry Linux into the enterprise, and as it cobbles together a larger software stack atop the operating system, it will finally be able to compete with Solaris and Windows. This is good for Linux as an enterprise platform, although it could result in two levels of Linux.
As IBM and BEA did with Java before it, Novell will undoubtedly put its engineers to work extending the platform—not forking the kernel, mind you, but adding enough proprietary “bells and whistles” features to be able to compete with the other two platforms. So, while the underlying “base distribution” might remain the same, essentially we will end up with two Linux operating systems—“enterprise” Linux and, for lack of a better word, “open” Linux.
Currently, Morton maintains the source tree for the Linux kernel, with input from Torvalds and a tight group of programmers who control what goes in and what doesn’t go in to the operating system.
I’m sure it won’t be long before we hear that Novell is forming a “Linux Community Process” of some sort, bringing in other third-party open-source vendors to decide what is needed for an enterprise-ready version of the operating system. Novell talks about contributing to the open-source movement. I expect that will happen much in the same way IBM contributed to the open-source movement by creating the Eclipse project, which usurped the NetBeans project at Sun.
Will Novell’s group work openly with Torvalds and OSDL? Will Novell hold back advances to the operating system until they first can be incorporated into Novell’s products? Will the OSDL group be sympathetic to the needs of profit-seeking companies in terms of functionality and faster version updates?
Again, whether they do or they don’t really doesn’t matter. The market won’t care. There will be users of the “open” Linux, and users of “enterprise” Linux. Some organizations might even use both. For smaller organizations looking to use the base Linux distribution for its servers, for example, without paying for the add-ins, service and support, there always will be the “open” version. For large enterprises that need a full software stack—database, middleware, presentation layer—the “enterprise” version as envisioned by Novell, with Novell standing behind it, will be the choice.
This has been proven time and again. IBM customers want to know that its Java implementation will work with other Java implementations, but they also have come to expect additional features that are not part of the J2EE specifications adopted by the Java Community Process. The same is true with BEA customers, and Sun customers.
Over and over, we hear from enterprise development shops that they want one vendor to whom they can bring their problems if things go wrong. If the Novell Linux product varies from the base distribution, vendors will appreciate the additional features as well as the ability to have “one throat to choke” if problems arise, which is how Novell CEO Jack Messman put it in his keynote address to open New York’s LinuxWorld Conference in January.
This will create tremendous opportunities for business integration vendors. Enterprise Linux customers employing the open-source stack above the operating system will have to be able to communicate and share data and files with Windows shops and with Java platform shops.
So, what will be left are two distinct Linuxes: the original little OS that could, used by small, technology-centric shops; and the industrial-strength OS platform, led by Novell but certainly meeting Red Hat in the enterprise. Users on either side probably won’t be interested in whether or not the two “forks” even lose interoperability, since they rarely if ever play in each other’s yards.
That is, until the “enterprise” Linux effort completely subsumes the “open” effort, and the operating system that grew from the minds of free-thinking programmers becomes the operating system the next generation of free-thinking programmers will rail against.
David Rubinstein is executive editor of SD Times. |
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