Linux Gets Down to Business, and This Is Good

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The main events at the LinuxWorld expo in Boston last week were the keynotes by Jack Messman, chairman and CEO of Novell, and Martin Fink, general manager of Linux at Hewlett-Packard. In keynotes past, Linux was less commercially established, so having industry luminaries among the traditional IT vendor community come and swear their fealty to Linux was not just interesting, but significant. But LinuxWorld, the show, like Linux, the cultural phenomenon, is becoming less about open source and more about the business of open source.

It was inevitable. And anyone in the position of the keynoters at LinuxWorld would do exactly the same kind of comforting speeches that Messman and Fink delivered on Tuesday. Messman spent a lot of time demonstrating how, unlike a little more than a year ago, before Novell bought German commercial Linux distributor SUSE, companies are no longer wondering about what to do when Linux breaks, if Linux is secure, and if it is ready to be deployed in the enterprise above and beyond simple Web, print, file, and firewall serving. "We are hearing fewer and fewer of these concerns about Linux," Messman said.

This all makes for a good narrative arc, but companies that are deploying Linux underneath commercial applications don't care about this. What they care about are worldwide organizations with support expertise like Novell (as well as Red Hat, IBM, HP, Dell, and others) standing behind them and taking some money out of their wallets. This is what we all wanted with Linux (remember?), and now we have it.

This is an area that Messman, quite predictably, spent a lot of time talking about in his address last week. He said the Linux customer has moved on from worrying about a specific driver for a specific piece of hardware or compatibility for a specific piece of software with Linux to a point where companies want to buy and use single, integrated solution stacks that run on Linux and have not only been certified to run with Linux, but with each other. And increasingly, customers want support from a big name (like the ones mentioned above) or, as often happens, from a big name backed by the main commercial organizations that provide support for a product, such as with MySQL and JBoss. After more than a year of partnerships as well as the impending delivery of support from SourceLabs, SpikeSource, Gluecode, and others, current and potential Linux shops have stopped worrying about where they are going to get support for Linux-based products and Linux training for their employees.

While this is the open source business model that the industry has embraced, it is tough to get excited about it in a physical way, and Messman seemed more energized by the fact that he is from Boston (and so, too, is Novell since he took over), LinuxWorld is in Boston (rather than New York), and that the Super Bowl and World Series champions are from Boston, too.

Messman became clearly animated while talking about the market share statistics that prove SUSE was a good buy for Novell. "Many CIOs and CTOs agree that open source--and Linux in particular--is a key aspect of their future," he said. Companies are moving to open source alternatives from closed-source operating systems and applications for reasons we have heard about a million times: lower total cost of implementation and ownership, lower potential for vendor lock-in, and more flexibility on integrating solutions. Messman cited a survey by CIO magazine that found 53 percent of CIOs believed open source programs would be "dominant" in their data centers by 2007. He was also quite pleased to say that Novell reckons there are some 3 million Linux servers in production today. This is a very big number for a platform that has only really gone mainstream five years ago.

Where Messman probably went off track was in ascribing to Linux the effects of simplifying infrastructure by server consolidation and standardization as well as cost containment and greater IT staff efficiency. This has more to do with the fact the IT shops are using Linux as a lever to change, or change as a lever to move to Linux. This is what caused the Unix explosion in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and what gave Windows such good traction in the late 1990s. The success of Linux in recent years is more a function of disgust with server sprawl, just as the Unix and Windows waves were driven by the disgust with the excessive costs of mainframes and Unix servers, respectively.

Messman also got a round of applause when he said Novell had moved 197 of its core servers to Linux, was porting its Oracle Financials applications to SUSE Linux servers running clustering software from its new partner, PolyServe, and was starting the task of moving its 6,000 desktops from Windows and Office to Novell Linux Desktop and OpenOffice.

Novell's CEO ended his speech by warning that even though his company is committed to being a contributor to the open source community through the GNU General Public License, Novell knows that customers want to mix closed and open source products. "Like it or not, it is not yet a complete open source world," he said.

HP's Fink ended on a similar note after spending his time analyzing the parallels between the advent of the commercial aviation and the commercialization of Linux. Fink cited a survey that showed three out of five companies plan to have a mix of closed source and open source software in their data centers. According to that survey, only 2 percent of the companies polled said they plan to have an infrastructure based completely on open source software. Another 38 percent said they would use mainly closed source products, while another 35 percent said they would use a mix of open and closed source. The remaining 25 percent of those polled said they would use a mix of closed and open source, but that the mix was going to get heavier into open source over time.

After talking about how open source technologies would increasingly move into ERP, SCM, and CRM applications and other core enterprise applications, Fink threw his hat into the ring on the issues of software patents and open source licensing. He explained that while many people were protesting the advent of software patents in America and its attempted (but not yet successful) spread into Europe, the fact remains that all open source programs have intellectual property rights assigned to them through the copyrights embodied in the various open source licenses. On the topic of people who objected to patents, Fink said software companies generally take the opposite side and that patents are the main return on software investment because many software products never get commercialized successfully. He said people who wanted to protest software patents should resist them in concept, but that it didn't make any sense not to get patents for patentable software. "We live in a world where patent laws exist," Fink delicately chastised. "It is what you do with the patent that matters, not the fact that you have a patent."

Taking a swipe at rival Sun Microsystems and its new CDDL license, Fink reminded the LinuxWorld crowd that last year when he talked at LinuxWorld, he said that 54 different open source licenses were too many, and now we have 60. He said that as a member of the board of the Open Source Development Labs, he intended to use that position to encourage OSDL to work with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) organization that controls the license definitions to curb license proliferation.