Asymmetrical Information

I saw the article in the wee hours and thought it was excellent. My impression of the status and likely outcome of the SCO case was different, but your point, as I wrote at some length in my post on your piece, was a superb one.

I read you article and I think you are failing to see a major point of open source software. In case you didn't know much of the early work in software before the birth of the "software industry" operated in an open source spirit. Much of the research work executed at the universities and basement labs in the early days was shared and expanded upon to bring more and more maturity to computer software and hardware with intelectual property and trade secrets and afterthough at most. Many who think of the "software industry" today forget that it was built upon the back of these early individuals effots and "gifts" to science. Not to mention that for that past several hundred years scientific research executed in the public sector operated in an open source spirt where results of any major break through were published openly with a open invitation to be expanded on a researched futher. It is only more recently with the lawyers getting involved with NDA's accoppaning research grants and the private/public cross pollenization that have turn a once very public and open process into a more private closed one. And who are the winners of this outcome? The private companies or the public who finances their profits? I feel that the open source development model is the result of a natural reaction to some of the actions taken by the very greedy (80% ROE anyone?) and the very shady (vendor lock in, security as an afterthought, etc., DCMA) software industry of today. Todays "software industry" is a very powerful one which insures its continued success though product defects that can sometimes only be addressed with a purchased upgrade. Not only that but the fast moving pace of industry standards and the very small amount time it takes to reproduce and distribute a completed software product combined with 24 year patents, 90 year plus life of author copyrights and things like the DMCA give large software companies a guaranty of profit for the forseeable future. Guess who funds this profit???? All the users/liscensee's of software. Given the trend these days who will eventually that be???? All of socieity. So many members of said socieity have realized we do have a choice in this matter and can spare ourselves and our fellow members of socieity from having to pay for these enormous profits software giants have made and plan to make into perpetuity. In your mind does it make sense for a copy of 1980 MS-DOS need to be protected by copyright for until the year 2070? Or the 1990's version of MS-Word 1.0 be protected until 2090? Maybe you don't care since you and 2 generations past yours won't be around to care then, but you should because each of those generations will end up giving thier money to software companies. Given the obsolecence of software happening in at best 10 years these copyrights mean that by the time something is returned to the public domain it is useless. So opensource software does remove that undeserved profit from the private software industry. It also in the process provide a free and open education tool (if you have net access) so others can become software specialists without having to go to a certified Microsoft Testing Center and having to pay the $100/test fee. I say undeserved because the only reason they make profit is because of copyrights and the only reason we as a public allow copyrights which are really a grant of temporary monopoly (if you think life + 90 years is temporary) is to "promote the arts and the sciences". Notice it doesn't read in any portion of copyright law that the purpose is to "insure the profits of corporations or individuals". I'm a career software developer and I feel this way because I've been educated in the areas I have been and I can see through the smoke and mirrors those that don't understand the software development process get blinded by. Onto the legal area again you aren't seen the whole picture. Think of what SCO's case really proves. Open Source software is more transparent and thus in the long term is less likely to contain copyright infringement that proprietary software. This is exacly for the reasons SCO shows that since it is open for inspection any company or individual who intellectual property has been "stolen" can see exactly where and when and who performed the "theft". Now lets say I as a software developer wrote a great product by decided to store my software code on a computer running Windows XP before service pack 1 came out. The security problems with XP would have allowed a hacker to enter my computer, steal the source code give it to thier company and sell it as theirs with little or no way for me to know or prove. If that happened in the open source world I could witness the result of the theft without hiring any lawyers or taking anyone to court. Finally with Open Source software there is still a renevue model. Any software takes knowledge to administer and to understand and extend. People involved with a software products development will naturally be the most knowledgeable on the workings of said product and will be the best able to modify or extend said product. Thus if the product or changes to the product have value to a person, company or combination there of, then the software developer will be able to negotiate a price to perform changes, training, documentation, support etc. All the non IP/Copyright related areas the bigger tech companies are currently expanding into are equally profitable for an Open Source software model if not more so. So try not to see this from the perspective of a software company but rather from the perspective of any non software company or individual. Which model best serves them?

I accurately predicted long ago that the Linux project relied too much on altruism. Human beings eventually wish to be paid for their efforts. Altruism works only in the short run--and rarely, if ever, in the long run. Developing software is usually a full time endeavor. How many people do you know willing to work substantial hours for free? Even Jimmy Carter’s house repairers only donate their time a few weekends out of the year.

Linux has always been the utopian software project of the technical elite. Only the Microsofts, Oracles, and their toughest competitors are truly able to develop software that is both user friendly and greatly beneficial.

David, you have failed to contemplate the economics of open-source (at least in regards to operating systems). OEM's IBM,HP,SUN etc.) are paying to have operating systems on their iron - now earlier they used to produce systems in-house, very often duplicating each other - why? because they need something to run on their iron - not because they are interested in it.... Now they are instead financing an opensource system (by hiring and paying the programmers to do something to a community project (which noone can own (see: GPL))). There is no utopian concept in this - software is a means to sell hardware - software has *never* been the the income-source of the hardware producers (quite the opposite in fact). Take one look at the programmers of the Linux kernel and you will find that 90% are employed and payed to work on the kernel.

http://www.groklaw.com/article.php?story=20031005202427977#comments

Follow the link above to read an interesting thread about this Tech Central Station article. It's titled 'So ignorant it is hard to read' (search the page on 'so ignorant'). Why are there so many factual errors in this article?

"In case you didn't know much of the early work in software before the birth of the "software industry" operated in an open source spirit. "

I totally agree with you concerning the early history of the computer age. Alas, these same people finally got tired working for nothing. They then decided to go out and earn a few bucks. Our laws attempt to protect their creative efforts. If these laws did not exist---these folks would have given up on their software projects.

There is little question that the free enterprise system could not have accomplished so much without the earlier assistance from the government and the universities. But so what? Their aprons strings eventually had to bet cut. The Microsofts of today do not depend on governmental welfare benefits. And yes, we the tax payers have been amply rewarded. Our investment has been repaid many time over.

Your analysis does have merit. However, there is nothing that guarantees that closed source software doesn't have stolen code in it. The reason I have chosen to be anonymous is that I am aware of a case in which open source code off the net was incorporated into a product by a coworker at a previous job. To the best of my knowledge, there was no lawsuit. The code was replaced with an in-house version.

Certainly, a large vendor can indemnify customers. That doesn't mean that the vendor can't be sued and the shipment date that you were counting on for an upgrade slips.

There are a handful of important differences between open and closed source software. Some of them are fundamental and some are circumstantial. All of the fundamental differences arise from two facts:

1) Open source software has its source code published for the whole world to see.

2) All open source licenses, to the best of my knowledge, permit modification of the source and redistribution.

In some ways, the guarantees against code copyrighted by someone else being added to an open source project are weaker than for a closed source project. Those are a product of my second point. The relationship between the parties producing the code is much looser than in any closed source project I've ever heard of. With that looser relationship, there is less leverage to enforce norms of behavior in advance. However, the first point makes it much easier to detect violation of those norms and rectify them.

If we assume that SCO is in fact correct in their assertion that IBM violated a contract with them and placed their intellectual property into Linux kernel code, then we can look at that situation as it would pertain to both open and closed source code. BTW, because nearly all of the historical Unix base of BSD Unix was found to be non-infringing in the early 90's, one of the most likely common sources for code found in both SCO and Linux would not have resulted in infringement.

So, if Linux contains SCO code, that happened because someone had access to SCO code. That person was able to contribute it to the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel developers, other than the contributor, could not determine that the code belonged to SCO. In the case of a closed source product, instead of Linux, the possibility of someone having access to other closed source code and being a contributor is neither more nor less likely in any meaningful way. Via joint project, NDAs, libraries and development tools with source code, etc., it happens all the time. If nothing else, a programmer could take a copy of source code he had access to with him from one job to the next.

More people are able to contribute to open source projects. For some of them, the barriers are trivial and effectively, anyone with net access is a potential contributor. Some are more selective about their sources. On balance, open source is more open to contribution than closed source. More importantly, the relationships between the contributors carry less legal weight than with closed source. In a closed source environment, the contributors are employees, subcontractors, and occasionally customers in a joint development project. Regardless of the specific relationship, there are contracts and ongoing relationships.

One of the most significant differences between open and closed source is that open source is available for any copyright or patent holder to audit for infringement. I don't know how much auditing is actually done. The fact that the SCO lawsuit is the first after a couple of decades of open source projects leads me to believe that either violations aren't common, or that very little checking is done by copyright holders, or both.

When copyright violations are buried inside of closed source software, the owner of the copyright is not going to have any way to find them. That makes it more likely that when such violations occur, they will go undetected for longer periods. It will require insider knowledge to find them.

Some day, a whistleblower at Microsoft is going to point out a copyright violation in some of Microsoft's code. I am not accusing Microsoft of knowingly violating anyone's intellectual property rights. In fact, I think that Microsoft is more careful than most software vendors. But the cost of ensuring that there are no violations is too high to prevent them all. Because they are Microsoft, there will be a settlement. The original owner of the code will go away happy with some cash. But what happens when it is some niche product that Microsoft doesn't produce. Microsoft is in the mass-market software business. They don't produce the specialty products for every market. That is done by businesses a fraction of their size, businesses that can be killed by a lawsuit. Do you want to bet your company's future on those?

Whether the SCO lawsuit can kill Linux has wider ramifications than just whether open source will sink or swim. It is about software liability. It is about what size company will be necessary to survive producing software. It is about the balance between how much businesses depend on general-purpose software and how much they use specialty products designed for niche markets.

Yes, one lawsuit could destroy me financially and prevent me personally from developing open source software ever again. Under the right circumstances, a lawsuit over a specific open source project could make all of the code from that project untouchable for fear that it would open anyone using it up to a lawsuit. But to frame the SCO suit as being just about the future of open source is to miss a very important wider context.

"Take one look at the programmers of the Linux kernel and you will find that 90% are employed and payed to work on the kernel."

Yup--and that’s why the lawsuits were inevitable! Throwing an occasional bone to the open source movement is one thing. It’s totally another to spend enormous hours merely to benefit the masses.

Um, how do I put this without seeming to yell at you? You say "Nonetheless, if SCO wins this lawsuit -- or loses on technical grounds other than copyright infringement -- I think you'll see corporations taking a pass on open source software." The problem with this analysis is that SCO has not alleged copyright infringement in its complaint. SCO's suit against IBM rests on breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets. SCO knows full well that IBM is the copyright holder of the code that was allegedly misappropriated; SCO's position is that nevertheless the contracts that IBM signed with SCO's predecessors give SCO control of that code. This rests on a rather...creative...reading of the contract, but the point is that win or lose SCO's cause of action with IBM cannot carry over to any other distributors of Linux, let alone users such as corporate IT shops (unless they're foolish enough to sign a contract with SCO, say by accepting SCO's binary-only license--now there's copyright infringement!).

“SCO's suit against IBM rests on breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets. “

It matters little whether you describe the lawsuit as one of copyright violation or “misappropriation of trade secrets. “ The corporate world only cares about avoiding lawsuits! The semantics are of secondary importance.

"Or possibly I'm just too thick to understand how cutting off a multi-billion dollar revenue stream from software sales, without putting anything else in its place, could be good for the software business."

Very little software is bought just to have it. Mostly, it is bought in order to help complete other tasks. It is not important what is good for the software business, but what is good for all other business. If free software can make the tasks it's meant to help cheaper, then we will all benefit (except those who own a lot of MSFT). Having FLOSS available for the tasks you do is like having your factory next to a sea port or near cheap energy sources.

As the 3rd world enters the info age, FLOSS will become more and more important, and gain more and more developers. They are not going to be particularly concerned with SCO v IBM. If FLOSS becomes taboo in the US then it will be the signal that the info age has been outsourced.

"It matters little whether you describe the lawsuit as one of copyright violation or “misappropriation of trade secrets. “ The corporate world only cares about avoiding lawsuits! The semantics are of secondary importance."

Only if you don't know or care about what the law (and your actual liability) is. You can't be sued for breach of contract if you are not a party to the contract; similarly you can't be sued for misappropriation of trade secrets if you haven't entered into an agreement to keep those secrets. The SCO v. IBM case has no bearing on anybody's legal liability except IBM's, and saying otherwise just contributes to SCO's FUD campaign.

Corporate leaders do not worry only about direct legal action. They are also concerned regarding the indirect results of these legal fights might have on the bottom line. Could a possible court victor demand additional money from these companies? Also, what about other open source programmers coming out of the woodwork? When does the worrying cease?

But Joshua, the issue isn't this particular lawsuit, as I said repeatedly in the piece. The point is that companies right now have no one to guarantee that they won't be sued. Traditional software companies provide a backstop: if Microsoft steals code, Microsoft gets sued. Whether or not these particular claims are valid, as they may or may not be, the lawsuit could still have a chilling effect on the decision to implement Linux.

IBM is being sued for, among other things, inducing others to distribute code, stolen by IBM or others, in order to cover up its own liability. It's also being sued for misappropriating code under license. These claims have been widely referred to in the media as copyright claims; I followed common usage. We can argue about whether or not it was legally allowed to do what SCO is claiming is misappropriation, but that doesn't get to the heart of the matter, which is how you guarantee the provenance of the software you're using. That's why SCO is bringing this suit. I agree that the suit is a publicity stunt, but it could still shut down open source if it goes badly.

"...but that doesn't get to the heart of the matter, which is how you guarantee the provenance of the software you're using. "

This is another way of saying that the purchasing company may have to pay out further money in the future. Paying money to a Microsoft or an Apple is a one time shot. There are no future financial surprises to be worried about.

The worrying ceases as soon as enough time goes by and SCO is forced to put up or shut up with regards to their Linux claims. They can only do this for so long with out taking direct legal action. While not a direct comparison look at the problems RIAA and MPAA are having collecting revenue from something that's not even legally contested from a copyright violation standpoint with P2P networks and the massive distribution of Copyrighted works. They showed by example that talk is cheap even in the face of blantant & obvious disregard for copyright. Now compare with SCO's highly questionable claims regarded old IP rights to a code base that was largely tainted in the IP sense with the whole AT&T BSD thing. Just like in the P2P world once enough of a user base is establised in Linux their will be too many end points to go after directly and OSS software can be cleansed all too quickly once the claims are out there in the public (as Darl rightfull fears). Companies are going to realize that just due to pure numbers and the fact that they can be running a distro that is clean by the time any legit case makes it to court will leave companies ignoring these types of claims. I think even in the end if SCO turns out to be right the speed with which the Linux code base will be cleaned will show companies with Linux investments / commitments that they made the right choice. They may have to upgrade all their servers to be in the legal clear but hey they should be doing that anyway to stay up to date with security patches etc. Whether SCO turns out to be right or wrong I think Linux will come out in the end smelling like roses since legal ramifications will not see the light of day for customers using the product. Right now they are saying pay us or else but are not actively invoicing customers or even taking direct legal action. This can only go on for so long until people eventually begin calling their bluff or think that these types of ploys are a cry wolf game. Now granted legal departments of corporations are more careful and wary than your average file trader but corporate legal teams will eventually get the picture when the study the case more closely. The worry is a result of SCO claims and drastic action to try and collect on their claims even before they are proven or even identified. If I as a company felt my claims were 100% solid I'd wait until they were proven in court before trying to collect on said claims but hey maybe I'm just a little too honest to be a CEO these days. I think in the end this case is going to do more for the OSS community than it does against it.

Megan,

I just read & commented on your article.

It was very poorly written. Your analysis seems clearly to be based upon ignorance of the issues involved.

Please do us a favor, and at least research the basic facts before publishing something. Unless you like to look ignorant.

And, BTW, as bad as that article was, I find your nom de plume "Jane Galt" an insult to Ayn Rand. [unless, of course, your ignorance also extends to your use of the feminine of "John Galt" from Atlas Shrugged."] Her protagonists always possessed a very strong ethical philosophy. All stood for TRUTH & HONESTY that bordered upon perfectionism. None would have suffered that tripe which you have fosted upon us.

rho

Dave I think saying Linux depends on Altruism is an oversimplification of the truth if not an outright distortion of it. Altruism is giving of oneself for the benefit of others. But with OSS both the all users of the software benefit and I'd challenge you to find a Linux code contributor that doesn't in turn run Linux themselves. See they aren't just giving of themselves for others they are giving of themselves to directly benefit themselves and the benefit to others is just a side effect of that process that the developer decided not to capitialize upon since his motivation wasn't capital in the first place it was function. I think Utilitarianism is a greater force at play here which assumes the giving of one's effort and knowledge to produce a product that does something useful for them. The payment is the usefulness the product gives them not the licensing fees others pay for the right to use it.

Jane --

"IBM is being sued for, among other things, inducing others to distribute code, stolen by IBM or others, in order to cover up its own liability. It's also being sued for misappropriating code under license. These claims have been widely referred to in the media as copyright claims....

I haven't read the entirety of the complaint against IBM, but I haven't heard that particular bit before. IBM is being accused of contributing code to Linux, but the code in question is its own. SCO is claiming that the code was originally written as part of AIX (IBM's version of Unix), and thus is a derivative work, and therefore that SCO has control over its distribution. SCO's interpretation of 'derivative work' is so broad as to be ludicrous, as I am sure you are aware.

The copyright claims (and the fact that the media are generally misrepresenting the entirety of the situation) are due to an entirely different action, one that was until recently purely a PR ploy (I say until recently because they have recently brought suit again SGI). SCO is claiming that parts of the unix code base that it bought (several incarnations ago) are in Linux; it has not produced any evidence that this is true. The analysts who say that they "may have a case" have said that they were shown chunks of code that look identical, but they have no way of knowing from whence it came. The only instances of code that SCO has actually produced have been shown to be public domain.

I don't know that SCO has brought suit against any makers of linux boxes. Red Hat has sued SCO, asking the court for a declaration that SCO is basically full of it.

The fact that this suit is a publicity stunt, as you point out in your comment above, is important. But the outcome, should it actually get to trial, will likely be good for open source. The code base cannot be declared clear for good and all, but it will create a precedent for complaints, and clarify the responsibilities of end users. Admittedly, the court system produces the occasional truly stupid ruling, but barring something phenomenally moronic, the result should be a better understanding of the legal footing of open source.

Or I can hope so, anyway.

"The payment is the usefulness the product gives them not the licensing fees others pay for the right to use it."

It appears that not everyone involved in the open source movement agrees with you. Sadly, it only takes a few to mess it up for everybody. A mere .00001% is sufficient to scare the heck out of a major corporate entity.

I am also, by the way, not an enemy of open source software. It was obvious that sooner or later, though, that someone would demand added compensation for their efforts. The proverbial crap has finally hit the fan.

But Megan, it's simply not true that when MS releases code, it's only MS that can be sued. Witness the Microsoft v. Timeline case: MS licensed patents from Timeline, but didn't license the rights for third-party developers. The Washington state appeals court found for Timeline, and it appears that developers who use SQL Server 7 are liable to Timeline for royalty payments, and the CEO of Timeline is threatening to sue at least some of them for treble damages.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/29419.html

You can't get a guarantee that you won't be sued, not from open source and not from closed source; the best you could hope for is indemnification if you do get sued, as HP is offering for its Linux, or MS offers--with many caveats--to "volume" purchasers (as far as I know, they have not offered to indemnify any SQL Server developers against Timeline's suit, though).

The point is that despite a lot of scary noises made by SCO, nobody has ever sued any organization for copyright infringement for its use of Linux, let alone prevailed, so it is irrational to count being sued as a significant risk for Linux but not for closed-source code like SQLServer.

Joshua, I'm speaking of corporate desktop/server implementations, not third party developers, which I agree is a different sort of market, but also not really the crucial problem for Linux right now. All I can do is repeat what I said: the legal experts I saw quoted stated that corporate clients faced increased risk of liability and penalties from a Linux installation.

No one has -- yet -- sued end-users for Linux, but that doesn't mean they can't or won't; SCO was threatening to do just that.

I think it's worth pointing out here that "open source" does not begin and end with Linux. Much of the critical infrastructure of the Internet (sendmail, Apache, etc...) is open-source code. The so-called "open source movement" is in fact just a continuation of larger trends toward open standards (TCP/IP, SQL, HTML) that have been going on for quite some time - and it doesn't have anything to do with altruism or "gift economies" - it's just good business sense for companies to avoid lock-in to one vendor and take advantage of the economies of scale that shared development provides.

Sorry, Jane - usually I'll give you props for reasonableness even when I disagree, but you're really missing the boat on this one...

Mr. Miller: One word. PARAGRAPHS.

James Miller: does Linux have a return key? Geez, dude!!

Megan: if I were going to get on a blogging kick right now so that I could be viewed as a prescient prognosticator in 2 years, this would be the topic. "Open Source Software" is tired rhetoric and a movement on the decline.

It looks like the problem will disappear if "loser pays" is adopted.

There are many things that require response in this article. I believe it was written not out of malice but without some understanding of the reason that free software and open source evolved.

It has never been the goal to copy existing works line for line and make it "free" for everyone. The driving passion for most of us is to write software that works the way we want it to work. We write because we have a belief we can write it better. Commercial software is constrained by budgets and market-driven deadlines. If you read "Peopleware" by Tom DeMarco and Tom Lister you'll get an idea of the issues for developing software in a commercial environment. You'll see phrases like "quality - if time permits" and "we haven't got time to think about this job, only to do it". That is the constraint that developers have fought against.

Open source and free software (open software) development evolved from an existing mode of development - skunkworks projects. These projects were hidden away from upper management because the belief of the development team was so strong that they defied the management decision to kill the projects. These beliefs also drove us to develop these projects by even committing our own leisure time. So this stuff on open software hasn't emerged full blown and without precedent.

However, the corporatisation of research and development from the mid-eighties has killed real innovation. Short term gains, with a yearly and more usually a quarterly focus has allowed only the low hanging research and development fruit to be reaped. Look at the contributions of Bell Labs to technology and compare it to the contributions of the corporatised Lucent. That's corporate reality. And the tight fiscal control imposed since the eighties has driven skunkworks from the corporate world into the wilderness - it is what most people call the FLOSS world.

Things perhaps evolve at a slower pace in the open software environment, but more effort is spent in getting the engineering right. There are no pressures for corporate deadlines and there is no pressure to cut corners. There is a strong effort to get it right and a belief that the finished product is going to be better than a commercial product. This to a large extent also means that developers are less inclined to want code tainted by commercially cut code mainly because of the in-grained belief system and mind set of these developers. Given specifications we might develop similar implementations. However, appropriating proprietary code is not even a consideration for the vast majority of open source and free software developers.

The current UNIX/SCO dilemma exists because of the cross-pollination of code and the availability of publicly released code. For the record, UNIX is both a trademark and a brand, neither of which is owned by SCO. The Open Group own the UNIX trademark and are the maintainers of the Single UNIX Specification. Any UNIX-like implementation that passes the certification tests for the Single UNIX Specification can use the UNIX brand for their product. The specification allows developers to produce specification-compliant systems. And the public release of code, even by SCO itself has contributed to this deluge of UNIX-compliant code. There has never been any malicious intent to use proprietary code. The collaborative and open practices for open software development has made the code implementation process transparent and available for the public record. This makes it uniquely different to proprietary coding practices and allows immediate scrutiny by any viewer, including proprietary development houses.

The code that SCO have so far highlighted does not indicate any breakthrough advances that greatly benefit the Linux product. Further the code in question related to a very specific hardware platform - the ia64 (Itanium 64-bit processor) and to performance improvements related to this development. This work was contributed to by SCO in various ways and in various incarnations. For further background, I would suggest looking at the Trillian project and the Monterey project to see the tangled developments between SCO, Caldera, IBM and SGI. Information on these are available publicly and on-line. So there are a number of layers of deception about the claims and SCO have not helped themselves by contributing to the releases of code, tainting any work in the areas in question. However, this is merely an aside in addressing the misconception that open software developers are somehow actively looking to misappropriate code at every opportunity. Sheer self-belief and weight of numbers will suffice in developing good software implementations.

Linux and open software are not about and have never been about toppling Microsoft in any concerted and corporate way. Many analysts take the notion that the products have been developed as some sort of corporate strategy by FLOSS. This is not the case, and to portray it in such a manner does us a disservice.

The developers have a belief that they can produce a better computing system. Whether or not the business world adopt open software is really a side issue. The banner against commercial competitors may be taken up by business advocates or by the services organisations but for the rest of us as open software developers, we built software because we didn't like what was available commercially. Free software is about freedom of choice.

Finally, I think the comparison to car dealerships is a poor one. Open software development should not be likened to the car dealerships because they represent the producer or manufacturer. The car dealerships are analogous with Red Hat, IBM, HP, SGI and SuSE. This middle-tier provides services to the customer. They are the value-add. As many people are at pains to point out, open software developers cannot provide guarantees on support. However, organisations with good service arms can provide service guarantees and they avoid the costly investment in research and development by using open software products. They might help seed or help better engineer the open software products as evidenced by IBM's efforts, but at nowhere near the same cash burn rate as internal product might.

Believe me, JonB, I was not meaningfully attempting to compare Linux with a car dealership, except in the sense that things can have qualities that are non-obvious because they aren't valuable to you, but are nonetheless critical. Nor am I trying to make any sort of comment about how open source works, or why people develop it. I'm looking at it from a market perspective: will it be adopted, or not?

Wow. There are a huge number of people here who hold obvious malice against Linux. I'm not talking about disregard or disinterest. It's not even as benign as arguing the position of devil's advocate. There are people here who obviously hate Linux and feel no qualms about insulting the developers, the users and the software itself.

I honestly can't understand why. Linux developers write their code and give it away, for free, for any use, and they ask nothing in return. They're happy to share the code with you. They don't force the code upon you. It's a gift, not a burden.

So why so much vindictive against Linux? It's like spitting on Santa Claus.

Analysing whether the business market will adopt or will not adopt open software is fine. But don't assign to the open software movement any ambition other than a desire to build better software. As developers, we can build alternative software if we don't like what we have to use now, whatever the personal reasons. That is what has been done. Whether the business market wants to use the products created is a question for the business market.

But from a market perspective, I believe the beneficiaries will be service organisations. It is the "dealerships" that become the important value add. This is the area in which IBM is focusing. It makes sense of the acquisition of Price Waterhouse Coopers. The integration of products into a coherent business framework, the delivery to the corporate customer of a custom business solution are areas into which the open software developer does not venture. The software components themselves are just a part of the solution and open software initiatitives have commoditized certain components.

SCO for want of a better term, has failed in the value chain as a reseller and failed as a value-added service provider, against competition such as Red Hat, SuSE and IBM. They are now trying to return to an OS market where there is not much competition, with few OS providers and where the OS is therefore of high value. It is doubtful that they will be able to reverse the progress of the past 12 years. Even in the unlikely event that SCO should succeed in their suit against IBM, there is an alternative to Linux in BSD. And SCO rely on many pieces of open software including compilers and development tools, and the Samba technology, to name but a few of their dependencies. So their victory may limit their own on-going capability to establish new future business. But that is quite beside the discussion at hand.

For what it is worth, I believe the next strategic battle will be over the business service infrastructure. It will be about the ability to quickly deploy business solutions that are aligned with each company's unique and changing value proposition to their customers, and about enhancing that proposition. This will firstly be the choice between the J2EE framework and the ability to connect with many open standards based business infrastructure; or Microsoft and its proprietary .NET framework. Secondly it will be about the service personnel who can achieve the delivery of this to the business plans.

The OS in an open standards world can be replaced by another standards compliant OS. It is of little moment in the value chain. In a sense, open standards lead to open software and interchangeability of components. There is a limit on product differentiation for components and this acts to drive the perceived market value of the component down. Therefore, the OS market itself should not be the burning strategic desire of any IT company with an expectation for any significant future business in an open standards world. But that, I believe, is a topic for another time.

I'm amazed and saddend at what a closed mind can see when writing about open concepts.

Comments are Closed.