For Sale: Free Operating System (LINUX)
By AMY HARMON -- September 28, 1998
DURHAM, N.C. -- In an experiment that is half
business model and half populist movement, a small
company
called Red Hat Software is charging $50 for an
operating system called Linux that anyone can get free
on the Internet, and it is paying programmers decent
wages to write code that it will give away.
While that might seem the most
contrarian of business plans,
Red Hat is attracting
blue-chip investors to the
notion that free can be
profitable.
The movement, known
alternately as free software
and open source, is built
around freely distributing
source code, the basic
commands that programmers
write. Publishing these
instructions before they are
compiled into the binary
language of computers offers
other programmers the chance
to examine the code and
suggest or actually write
improvements.
At its best, the movement's
proponents say, open source
could
harness the collective wisdom of the world's best
software designers for social good, undermine Microsoft
Corp.'s Windows monopoly and propagate an operating
system that does not crash.
A great deal of their passion is inspired by Linux, a
version of the Unix operating system developed by Linus
Torvalds of Finland and numerous collaborators
worldwide. Linux (rhymes with "cynics") has attracted a
cult-like following among programmers and systems
developers who say it is a more secure, flexible and
economic alternative to Microsoft's industrial-strength
operating system, Windows NT.
Despite that kind of following, the business-model half
of the Red Hat experiment strikes many people as
counterintuitive.
Robert Young, the chief executive of the three-year-old
company in Durham's Research Triangle Park, insists
that open-source products can make money. And although
he has nothing against contributing to a utopian vision
of software development in the process, his pragmatic
focus has lately attracted interest from venture
capitalists and corporate backers.
"The software industry is built on intellectual
property," said Young, a 44-year-old Canadian who used
to run a computer-leasing business. "You own your
technology, and if you get it widely disseminated you
can coerce your user base into buying new releases. We
give up that control -- and those profits -- but that
is exactly what is going to drive our success, because
that is what's best for the user."
Among Red Hat's potential corporate backers are Intel
Corp. and Netscape Communications Corp. An announcement
is expected as early as Tuesday, when Young is
scheduled to appear with executives from both companies
in San Jose, Calif.
Such support, particularly from Intel, whose close ties
to Microsoft have recently shown signs of fraying,
would lend considerable credibility both to Linux and
to Red Hat's plans to build a business by providing
customer service and technical support for the free
operating system.
Recent support for Linux and other open-source projects
seems to suggest a growing acceptance in the software
industry of an alternative to the tradition of
proprietary code.
IBM, for example, recently licensed Apache, a popular
program for serving up World Wide Web sites. Like
Linux, Apache is a free, open-source product.
And Netscape last February published the source code to
its Navigator browser for navigating the World Wide
Web. Forced to stop charging for Navigator by
Microsoft's free distribution of its competing browser
software, Explorer, Netscape gambled that going one
step further and releasing its code would give
Navigator a competitive advantage over Explorer in the
long run by spurring innovation.
"Open source has already radically changed the computer
industry," said Tim O'Reilly, whose publishing company,
O'Reilly & Associates, makes money producing user
manuals for free software. "In the first round,
open-source software will not beat Microsoft at its own
game. What it is doing is changing the nature of the
game."
Torvalds, who wrote Linux
in 1991 when he was a
student at the University of
Helsinki, licensed it in a way
that allows anyone to submit
improved code and
redistribute it at will. Since
then, thousands of
programmers have
volunteered elaborate
improvements of their own
design for no more reward
than the respect of the geek
subculture.
Submissions to Linux's core
code, or kernel, are
subjected to instantaneous
electronic peer review, a
technological meritocracy
that has so far insulated
Linux from the kind of
fragmentation that has
befallen other operating
systems built around the
international Unix standard.
Despite the operating system's reputation for power and
reliability, corporations have been reluctant to use
Linux because nobody owns it. That is why the emergence
of companies like Red Hat and Caldera Systems Inc. -- a
Linux distributor with a business plan based on
corporate training, services and support -- is
considered crucial to the success of the free operating
system.
Now, bolstered by commitments from companies like
Oracle, Netscape, Intel, Informix and Corel, all of
which have announced plans to support Linux in recent
months, Red Hat and Caldera are getting more
aggressive.
But their business plans are fragile. For instance,
since Red Hat wants whatever code it writes to become
part of the Linux kernel, it must be published under
open-source rules. That means that www.cheapbytes.com
can, and does, sell Red Hat's entire Linux package for
$1.99 -- $48.01 less than Red Hat's customers pay.
Red Hat's Young estimates that as few as 1 in 10 of the
people who use Red Hat have paid him for it. But that
is one of the paradoxical pillars of charging only for
support and services, not for intellectual property.
"My job is not to compete with Microsoft," Young
stresses. "It's to lower the value of the operating
system market. Microsoft makes $5 billion in operating
system sales. If I get that market, I automatically
make it a $500 million market."
Skeptics are quick to note that the technology
companies lining up behind Linux, with its estimated 7
million users, have their own competitive reasons to
oppose Microsoft, which has 300 million users for its
Windows operating systems.
What is more, the skeptics point out, no one knows how
long Linux's labor-of-love development by programmers
will last.
"An operating system is a living thing," said Carl
Shapiro, an economist at the University of California
at Berkeley and a co-author of "Information Rules," a
book to be published this week by the Harvard Business
School Press. "Ongoing investment and upgrades are
essential to attract customers. Nice cooperative
thoughts are not enough."
Still, use of Linux is growing by more than 40 percent
a year, according to IDC, a research firm. And a 1997
survey by another research firm, Datapro, found that
Linux scored higher with users than any other operating
system. Dell Computer, which last year began offering
Linux to customers who ordered at least 50 computers a
quarter, said that more interest had been expressed in
Linux in recent months.
James Love, director of Ralph Nader's Consumer Project
on Technology, which has encouraged the Justice
Department to investigate Microsoft's Windows licensing
deals with computer manufacturers, said his office had
found it impossible to buy Linux already installed on a
PC from a major commercial vendor. But he managed to
install it on his own computer, and he was impressed.
"This is the first time
we've seen an
industrial-strength product
developed without a
corporation behind it, and
we think it's amazing" Love
said. "If the operating
system is in fact a natural
monopoly, then what could be
better than having an
operating system that nobody
owns?"
No one argues that Linux
poses a threat to Microsoft
right now. But at a time
when the next version of
Windows NT
appears indefinitely delayed by a complexity that has
grown unmanageable, Linux enthusiasts are beginning to
find back-door ways to introduce the operating system
into their corporations.
For example, when Randy Kessel, a manager for technical
analysis at Southwestern Bell, part of SBC
Communications, installed Red Hat's Linux on the 36
desktop personal computers that monitor network
operations in Kansas and Missouri, it was done on
something of a dare.
After poor results testing a memory-intensive
application with Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT,
a colleague had asked Kessel why, if he thought Linux
was so great, he did not try it.
"So we took a mission-critical operation and we
deployed a free operating system there," Kessel said.
"And now we spend a tenth of the administration cost
for those desktops that we do for the rest of the 315
we use."
Even so, he met resistance.
"The legal department says, 'When it fails, who do we
sue?' " he said. "The IT department says, 'It's not a
proved product.' Corporate security says, 'It's
hackerware.' But it's the only thing that worked."
Other recent Linux converts include the movie director
James Cameron's special-effects company, Digital
Domain, which used the operating system to help create
the illusions in "Titanic."
And when the city of Medina, Wash., was overwhelmed by
documents -- including the four file cabinets filled
with paperwork on the mansion built by Microsoft's
chairman, Bill Gates -- it installed an electronic
document retrieval system that runs on Linux.
Ray Jones, president of Archive Retrieval, which
installed the system for Medina, said he was aware of
an irony in his choice of an operating system. But he
recalled feeling vindicated when a bug arose in the
scanning process.
"We asked a question on the Internet, and within a
couple of hours we had an answer," Jones said. "I fixed
it myself with three lines of code. With a commercial
product I'd have had to wait for Microsoft to fix it --
if it ever did. This way, the whole Linux community
benefited."
Marc Ewing, 29, who started Red Hat in 1995 because he
found downloading the various pieces of Linux a major
headache, said developing software in isolation --
without public contributions -- "would be like typing
with one arm."
And yet for Linux to ever compete with Windows, it must
be easier to use. Now users must control Linux with a
complicated syntax of arcane commands. So Ewing
oversees six programmers working on a project called
Gnome, an effort to hide the nuts and bolts of the
operating system behind the kind of graphical interface
familiar to users of Macintosh or Windows machines.
While they sleep, other groups elsewhere in the world
are getting up to work on Gnome. Often by the next
morning, someone will have translated the code into
Portuguese.
But Torvalds, who now works for a chip design company
in Silicon Valley, insists that the true strength of an
operating system is reliability.
"You use a Windows machine and the golden rule is:
Save, and save often," Torvalds said. "It's scary how
people have grown used to the idea that computers are
unreliable when it is not the computer at all -- it's
the operating system that just doesn't cut it."
Linux Online: linux.org
Linux Myth Dispeller: kenandted.com
Linux Center, a web directory: linux-center.org
Amy Harmon at amy@nytimes.com welcomes your
comments and suggestions.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
|
