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| Sunday, February 4, 2001 |
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Blogrocking
I've just added Jay R. Ashworth's Baylink to my new list of links. I first heard from Jay a couple weeks ago when he sent this in:
Don't you think the inability of the iDVD to author *any* dupeable DVDs, even *original material* is more comment-worthy than just the fact that it can't steal movies?
After I requested permission to quote his email, at the same time submitting my admission that I actually know far too little about the whole topic, he sent along this response:
In today's Baylink, Jay gives this response to what Craig Burton says about Linus Torvalds' ownership of Linux:
Yeah? So what? That code wasn't all written by Linus, and there are *so many* names in just the kernel alone, all of whom have chosen to license that code for distribution under the GPL, that it really doesn't *matter*. The implications of that quote are just not the same as they might be in the 'Real World'.
I don't much like the way RMS phrases his outlook on 'GNU/Linux' as a preferred term for Linux distributions, but the fact remains that the GPL has done for Linux exactly what he wanted for it to do: it's protected it from Big Business. You simply *can't* rope it back in; the code is out there; if Linus gets hit by a bus, or worse, inveigled by the Dark Side of the Force, we'll just fork the kernel, and move along.
I just got back from Linux World Expo in New York, where a number of things were freshly obvious (to me anyway) . Here are a few observations, the third of which answers Jay directly:
- Linux is now commodity infrastructure. It's two-by-fours and ten penny nails. The Gnu tools were commoditized first, but what matters is that both are profoundly and almost universally responsible for building a lot of the infrastructure we all take for granted, whether our work is open, closed, proprietary or public domain. They didn't build everything — not by a long shot — but credit where due. And they are getting a lot of credit from the commercial embedded Linux development community.
- The embedded processing world is adopting Linux at such a breakneck pace that it's almost scary. It's like the Andromeda Strain or Ice Nine, only in a very positive sense: just as contagious, but in a health-producing way. Gnu tools and Linux are proving to be very easy ways to build embedded component infrastructure that works with the surrounding world's infrastructure, which is growing around the Net, which Gnu tools and the free software community did much to produce as well.
- Linus himself is perceived as the owner of Linux, big time. Maybe not by everybody, but by plenty of programmers who believe that Linux grows in the directions Linus personally allows it to grow. Whether or not this is true, enough people believe it is true to make it so. I was told this, repeatedly, at LWE, and it blew my mind. Mostly it was by programmers who want stuff in the kernel they believe won't happen, or happen soon, because Linus just isn't interested in it. This is a non-trivial issue, and we need to talk about it. In fact, Craig gives us a good start with the matrix he drew during an interview in the August 2000 issue of Linux Journal. That's it, above. I believe Craig was the first to observe that we collapse two wholly different distinctions when we call "open" the opposite of "proprietary" and "closed" the opposite of "public domain." A lot of people have told me they think this is "trivial" and "doesn't really matter. But it does. Distinctions are about meaning, and if meaning doesn't matter we're in trouble.
- The center of gravity in the "Linux Community" is now commercial, since it includes giant companies like IBM, which not only profess their commitment to Linux, but are driving as much of the development as they can. These guys are going out of their way to be as friendly as possible to the traditional Gnu/Free/Open geek community (IBM was the booth filled with bean bag chairs for geeks to lounge around in, while VA's booth, which used to be the bean bag capital, was all-business to the verge of sterility. "We are going out of our way to be as friendly as we possibly can to the Linux community," one IBM guy told me, explaining that they had "standardized" on four different distributions. The rest of the conversation went like this: "Including Caldera?" "Right, including Caldera." "So you don't want to compete with Caldera in the Linux space." "Oh no, no way." "But it's okay for them to compete with you." "What do you mean?" "Have you see Volution, their new network management solution?" "No." "It competes with Tivoli." "Really? It does?" "Not across the board. Just across all your Linux distributions." "Oh." I could see the blood drain from the guy's face.
- Across the board, commercial Linux vendors talk open and sell closed, talk public domain and sell proprietary. Just three examples:
- Red Hat Network Services utilizes proprietary Novell products (notably NDS, rebranded eDirectory) and which is the result of a Red Hat-Novell partnership that Novell promotes far more eagerly than Red Hat does.
- Caldera's new Volution network management system is perhaps the first serious enterprise offering from a Linux software vendor. Caldera talks about how Volution is " built on open standards," but it fails to mention that the product itself is both closed source and proprietary.
- VA Linux makes a big deal about being an open source company, but that doesn't stop it from doing a deal with closed-source nVidia, when Matrox Linux and 3dfx Linux are open source and need help too.
Note that I am not saying anybody is being "good" or "bad" here. In fact, I am scrupulously avoiding making moral and political statements. There are way too many of those and they only get us in trouble. I am pointing out four things:
- Nobody has yet figured out how to make enough money by selling free software to deserve the enormous investments VCs gave these Linux companies 1-3 years ago.
- Selling closed source/proprietary software is a proven way to make money (even if it doesn't attract big VC investments).
- The Linux community suddenly includes a lot more folks from the commercial world (for instance, a big hunk of IBM). Sooner or later they're going to fork Linux off in a direction that works for them and is not fundamentally commercial, but rather fundamentally functional in ways Linus doesn't countenance. Then what? I believe this is the kinds of question Craig wants us to start asking.
- The software business looks more and more like the construction business . This is also not a bad thing. In fact it's a very good thing. It's just not an attractive thing to VCs. (Think about it. Would a VC invest in a construction company?)
That's all I'm doing here. And at Linux Journal as well.
Happy contrails
Flying west yesterday, I observed the shadow of our 767's contrail stabbing west like a gray spear across the Nevada desert. Then in the evening Jeffrey and I went out to fly his Air Hog and observed a sky filled with contrails. By sunset, all of them had spread into beautiful cirrus wisps from one horizon to the other.
Now it's morning, and the sky is cloudless, again except for contrails. East of here, over the Central Valley and Sierra, the sky is overcast at high altitude from contrails morphed into cirrus veils. Made me think there was something climatically creepy about it. So I looked up contrails on the Web. Good God. All kinds of stuff, from the paranoid to the paranormal. A lot of science too. Interesting stuff.
discuss
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