750,000,000 Linux users in 5 years?
"I Want to Live in a World Where Software Doesn't Stink"
In a Q&A, Linux evangelist Eric Raymond talks about unseating Microsoft as the OS of choice
businessweek.com
Whether it's a flaw or an advantage, Linux is not owned by any one person or company. On one hand, this means no one is
charging for it. But it also means no one is in charge of keeping it up to date. That role has instead been filled by volunteer
programmers.
Perhaps the best-known of these is Eric S. Raymond, a freelance programmer (he prefers the term hacker, which does not, he
points out, always mean someone who breaks into other people's computer files) and full-time evangelist for Linux and the
open-source software movement. He is also the movement's self-appointed philosopher and economist, thanks to his two
highly influential essays: Homesteading on the Noosphere, which explores the dynamics of open-source development, and
The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which compares open-source programs (the bazaar) to closed-source programs (the cathedral).
Business Week Online staff writer Sam Jaffe recently spoke to Raymond about the future of Linux and the obstacles it faces.
Here's an edited version of their conversation:
Q: A year ago, most people had never heard of Linux. Now everyone is excited by it. Has Linux reached the critical mass it needs in terms of mass-market interest?
A: In terms of mass-market interest, maybe not. In terms of interest among people who have to run business systems and
servers, yes. The Microsoft story there is already over, although that probably won't become obvious for another nine months.
Q: Do you see the battle between open-source software and closed-source software as a conflict between good and evil?
A: No. It's a conflict between good business and engineering outcomes and bad ones. I guess the moral aspect for me is that I
hate shoddy work. I want to live in a world where software doesn't stink. I dislike most closed software because it's so badly
written, and I want to live in a world where that's not normal, where quality is normal. I think open-source software is the way
for us to get there.
Q: Does Linux need to run on desktops to be accepted by the corporate world? Why is it so much harder to install on a
desktop than is Windows?
A: No. There's a big difference between the desktop market and the server market. I think we've already won in the server market. It's all over but the shouting. Infoworld released a survey showing that the server population with Linux is going to double within the next year. We're at 17% now.
Microsoft's Windows 2000, which is supposed to be their operating system par excellence, is a disaster. It's turning into the
world's biggest train wreck. There's a big difference between that market on the one hand and the consumer desktop market on the other, which is harder to penetrate because it's so diffuse, and desktop users are in general less concerned with power and more concerned with a slick interface. That's a problem that Linux hackers historically haven't been as good at solving, although I think we're getting a lot better at it if you look at Gnome and KDE [two popular graphical user interfaces] So no, I don't think Linux has to be accepted as a consumer operating system to succeed in the business world, although I do think it will get there.
Q: Many executives are wary of an operating system that can be so easily changed because it can fork so easily into competing programs that aren't compatible. Do you see this as a positive or negative aspect of Linux?
A: It's really a red herring. Forking into incompatible versions is mainly a problem where you have a whole bunch of closed
products that are supposedly working from the same open standard but in fact the companies are frantically trying to
differentiate to gain a competitive advantage.
In the Linux world, the situation is completely different. Everybody's operating off the same open-source base, which means you can't differentiate the code for commercial advantages. As soon as you make a change, it goes back into the common pool, and everybody gets to use it. That means you have to differentiate off of service, which is good for consumers. It also means that there's no tendency for the code base to fly apart. There's no significant tendency to fork because there's no advantage in forking. In fact, the licenses require that changes that one party makes be made available to everybody.
Q: Red Hat has become the dominant vendor of Linux. Do you fear that it will become another Microsoft in the making?
A: No, because they can't do the bad things that Microsoft does. They can't lock up the bad code. They can't issue proprietary protocols that no one else can use or talk to. The anticompetitive tactics that Microsoft routinely pursues are simply not available to them.
Q: The General Public License under which Linux is published has never been challenged in court. Could it come unraveled if it were? [See "Linux May Be Running on Some Spindly Legal Legs"]
A: I don't know. Ask me when a lawsuit happens, if it ever does.
Q: One of Microsoft's arguments against Linux is that it is too amorphous and has no real leadership or hierarchy to keep it going in the right direction. Do you agree that this is a fault in the open-source model of software development?
A: This is a virtue. It means that there is a fluid internal market in improvements in Linux going on all the time. If you go with the solution that [Microsoft] likes, which is basically to make yourself dependent on a monopoly supplier, that monopoly supplier runs your business, not you anymore. They've got you by the vital parts, not the other way around. On the other hand, the amorphous nature of Linux means that you will always have alternatives. There's no one group that has a lock on your corporate information strategy.
Q: Linus Torvalds is the closest thing to a supervisor that the Linux project has. If he were to disappear or lose interest, what would happen to Linux? Is there a system for succession in place for the overseer of Linux' development?
A: Right now, it looks like Alan Cox would take over. He's pretty clearly No. 2 on the totem pole in terms of stewardship of the Linux kernel goes. What you have to understand is that Linus doesn't run any other project except the kernel. He's got a lot of influence, and people listen carefully to what he says.
There's sort of an elasticity in the system that a big hierarchy wouldn't have. In particular ,if Linus were to get hit by a truck
tomorrow, it wouldn't make that much difference for the people who actually put together Linux distributions. They'd wait for
Alan Cox to take over and then just keep going. I don't mean that people wouldn't be upset about it. [Linus] is the leader in
influence even if he has no authority in the conventional authority in the sense of power over people.
Q: There is a lot of talk now about information appliances. Do you foresee a day when they run on Linux? Or are both Windows and Linux about to get swept away by another operating system, like the Palm OS or Sun's Java/Jini?
A: I don't believe the appliance story. The present notion of an information appliance is a real simple, single-function device
like a pager or cell phone or PalmPilot. It is essentially defined for one task or a small set of tasks. This is not what people want, I don't think. I don't want to carry around a cell phone and a PalmPilot and something that I can use to access my E-mail.
What I really want is a machine that unifies my communications at a high level. That pushes us back to something that's more like a small portable or wearable PC. These appliances tend to grow functions and grow extensions over time, and eventually they end up being full-fledged computers even if they don't look like them on the outside. The appliances in the future are going to be like very small, very lightweight, and very carryable PCs that just happen to have a simple interface wrapped around them. And yes, I think that Linux will dominate them.
Q: Apple recently open-sourced its server operating system. Do you think that they will eventually open source the Mac OS?
A: Yes, I think it's quite likely in the medium to long term. All of the economic arguments for open-sourcing software when you are a hardware vendor apply to Apple in full force. The arguments are especially strong in Apple's case because of the fact that the Mac OS is dependent on a hardware ROM that Apple has a lock on, so they don't have to worry about other people cloning that software and using it on their hardware because they can't without the ROM. So it's even more of a no-brainer in Apple's case.
I can tell you this: There's a lot of speculation that Apple will open-source Quicktime, which I think would be the next logical step, but that's just Apple employees kicking possibilities around. None of this is official Apple policy.
Q: What are the greatest hurdles in the way of Linux becoming a standard operating system?
A: I think we have to not merely do what we do well now, which is to handle the server end. We have to solve the user-interface problem and be able to take over the desktop as well. Fortunately, mainly what we have to do is be better than Windows, which is not very hard. But I want us to be a lot better than Windows, not just a little better.
Q: Five years from now, how many people will be using Linux?
A: If we continue to grow our user rate at the level we've been doing now, [Raymond writes an arithmetic formula to determine this] we'd get six doubling periods, which means just shy of a billion people, 860 million in fact. I'm not expecting it to be quite that high because trends like this tend to show logistic growth rather than exponential, and it's not clear what the threshold is. I'd say somewhere near 750 million would be a good conservative estimate.
Thanks to slashdot.org |
