Open code frees up the Net
By Charles Babcock, Inter@ctive Week Online
October 22, 1998 4:38 AM PT
To date, the idea that software developers working within multiple organizations without compensation to call their own could possibly mount a serious challenge to Microsoft's hordes of wealthy or soon-to-be-wealthy programmers -- working from the safe solidity of a near-monopoly in the programs that control the operations of desktop, portable and server computers -- has been scoffed at as the wishful thinking of the company's plentiful but weak detractors.
Indeed, the dissemination of free software whose basic instructions are open to a worldwide community of developers to improve or alter has made little dent in mainstream corporate planning. Such "open source" code and the entire free software movement have been seen as occasionally successful, mainly in the delivery and maintenance of the widely used Apache Web server that still outguns Microsoft and Netscape Communications Corp.'s commercial challengers.
But a closer look at the record of development of Web-based computing puts the efforts in a much different light. In fact, the free software movement has delivered commercial-quality products in every key component of software infrastructure for computing in a hyperlinked world. Free software gave the Internet much of its start, from the Mosaic browser to the basic Web server. Obscure innards such as the Domain Name System, which translates numeric Internet addresses into English names such as www.baby.com, and domain name servers come from the same heritage. Now, operating systems are in the collaborative developers' crosshairs, from the much-publicized Linux flavor of Unix to Free BSD, the software that is at the heart of the most heavily trafficked site on the Web, Yahoo! Inc.'s www.yahoo.com.
E-commerce incentives
And with the use of Web sites to conduct electronic commerce likely to spread like wildfire -- some estimates put the amount of worldwide e-commerce at $344 billion by 2002 -- more and more companies are likely to move to adopt the programs that become Web standards, with the fact that they are free as an extra, compelling incentive.
Earlier this year, SBC Communications Inc. (www.sbc.com) replaced 36 Windows 95 and Windows NT workstations at its Kansas City, Mo., operations center with Linux workstations because they handled the results of a giant network monitoring system better. The system displays warning alarms triggered on the network of a subsidiary, Southwestern Bell. The graphics-intensive system caused the Windows 95 workstations "to lock up on average every 4.2 minutes. The Windows NT workstations locked up every 2.58 minutes," said Randy Kessell, a manager at the center. The Linux workstations haven't had a problem.
Gary Nichols, manager of network administration at WavePhore Inc.'s WaveTop business unit (www.wavetop.com), which distributes content from Time Inc., People and Money magazines and Warner Bros., was asked to rebuild the corporate network a year ago.
"I completely modeled the network around the Internet," and was surprised to find free source code such as the Apache Web server, the PERL scripting language, the Samba network connection and the MySQL (Structured Query Language) relational database, "were just as useful inside the company as on the Internet." Nichols runs Linux on 30 of WaveTop's 45 servers for such tasks as e-mail, Web servers and the firewall. He figures he saved $30,000 in license costs of Windows NT and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris by using the open source code.
"I bought $100 worth of Linux CDs and books and got the same functionality," he said.
These examples illustrate how Microsoft no longer dictates the standards that determine the business computing environment, and how difficult it will be to dominate the standards set for doing business on the Web. Microsoft acknowledged as much in a Sept. 25 financial filing that said one of the few threats on its horizon was Linux. The company (www. microsoft.com) still dominates in desktop applications. There are no open source code equivalents -- yet -- for Office-style word processing, presentation graphics and spreadsheets. But the importance of the operating system itself has receded. Both browsers and Web servers can do their jobs while remaining indifferent to the underlying operating system.
Of course, skeptics doubt that complex software can be developed consistently by open source code groups, which tend to form voluntarily under loose leadership. "I'm very leery of the shared source code movement," primarily for the known difficulty of complex software development, said Hadley Reynolds, director of research at the Delphi Group (www.delphigroup.com), himself a Microsoft skeptic.
Support of open source code, often provided by e-mailed responses from its developers, strikes information systems managers as a key weakness. They want someone under contract to fix glitches on demand.
Still, the Apache Web server is so reliable that it has gained 52 percent of the market against commercial competition from Netscape (7 percent) and Microsoft (23 percent). IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com) recently joined the Apache Group as a contributing developer and announced it will support Apache for customers of its WebSphere application server product line, another form of commercial support for an open source code product.
What looked like a few amateurish success stories is now turning into a movement with much larger implications. Microsoft may be able to stretch out an antitrust showdown with the U.S. Department of Justice (www.usdoj.gov). But software developers have a way of changing the nature of computing on their own.
Indeed, free solutions come because developers confront a problem "that has no commercial solution, or the commercial solution is viewed as overpriced," said Larry Wall, developer of PERL.
But it is the very nature of these new economics that makes many companies worry. The rap against the free software movement is that it will fall down from eventual lack of momentum -- meaning that source code developers can't continue to do this without some means of financial support.
The developers themselves disagree. They don't need to be paid for their efforts. It's intrinsic to the Internet culture to collaborate in solving the next problem, and they enjoy the camaraderie of doing so.hey also save their companies' money, while their employers make money on other software or services for which they can charge.
If this drive is true, it means the ability of one company to maintain a stranglehold over any key aspect of computing will draw to an end. Neither Microsoft nor any other commercial company will be able to position itself as controlling access to the Internet. And that means the DOJ with its antitrust suit has arrived on the battleground too late to play a decisive role in overturning any monopolies in software.
"We're building the infrastructure for what the world will look like" as it switches over to a digital economy, said Eric Tachibana, co-founder of Extropia Inc. (www.extropia.com), a developer of open source Web site applications, such as WebStore and Groupware, which are available from its site. Its applications are in use at Boeing Co. and General Motors Corp.
It wasn't intended to be this way. Proponents of the open source code movement, such as the Apache Group's Brian Behlendorf and Wall, said they didn't set out to beat commercial companies, and in many cases it wasn't on their agenda to produce something that the rest of the world would use.
"Open source developers are technical people who sense a need for a piece of system-level software that doesn't exist yet," said John Ousterhout, author of the TCL scripting language used to tie together disparate site elements. He was an open source code advocate as a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley when he invented TCL in 1988. TCL now is widely used on Web sites to pull together Common Gateway Interface scripts, Java applications and database access programs.
But sharing source code in 1988 was a more laborious effort. In those days, a developer interested in TCL would send him a big, half-inch magnetic tape reel of the sort used to store mainframe data, and Ousterhout would take it downstairs from his office to the machinery room in Evans Hall, where he would load it on a Unix host and copy the data onto it. Then he'd take it to the post office to mail back to its sender. That method would make it impractical to send out the 8,000 to 10,000 copies of TCL that go out to prospective users per month over the Internet, he said.
The Net's leading role
So far, open source successes "have been largely infrastructure software," said Tim O'Reilly, publisher at O'Reilly and Associates Inc. (www.ora.com). That's the kind of software that made IBM and Microsoft powerful, each in their own eras of computing. Now, that very infrastructure -- the Internet -- makes possible both the long-distance developers' collaboration and the distribution of their software, he said. Never before could a piece of free software have instant worldwide availability and testing by thousands of developers.
The Linux example has begun to elicit interest among venture capitalists. Kevin Harvey, a partner at Benchmark Capital (www.benchmark.com) in Menlo Park, Calif., sees "a community of developers working together [as] a big and proven trend." They are likely to find the bugs in a system as they configure and use it with a wide variety of other components.
Both Benchmark and Greylock Management Corp., a Boston venture capital firm, have taken minority positions in Red Hat as the company seeks to expand its staff and more vigorously push the distribution of Linux.
Robert Young, president of Red Hat, "is doing exactly the right thing. He knows where he wants to go and the market is behind him," said Michael Tiemann, founder of Cygnus Solutions, a tools and services open source code company. Cygnus is built around its GNU's Not Unix open source code project, which was founded by Richard Stallman to create tools and compilers for Unix developers. Cygnus gained the backing last year of two venture capital firms, August Capital of Palo Alto, Calif., and Greylock.
Some developers fear venture capital could prove to be the undoing of the movement. If developers start counting on making money on open source code by creating private companies around it, they may get into struggles over who controls the code, and it may cease to be open code.
But they also acknowledge that venture capital and private companies are needed to address the Achilles' heel of open source code: technical support for products that have no around-the-clock technical staffs or on-site assistance. The business model for open source companies is to add to the open source developers' efforts in packaging, marketing and support, but not to try to take control, said John Oltsik, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. (www.forrester.com).
If open source code development broadens, it is not likely that there will be a single company that ever takes Microsoft's place in the center of networked computing. Instead, there will be many cells, each making its own contribution. Indeed, Red Hat's Young jokes that his goal is not to make his company as big as Microsoft, but to make Microsoft as big as Red Hat.
At open source company Extropia, Tachibana, 29, said his company's giveaway applications attract so much development work that he farms it out to selected developers. He and his partner, Gunther Birznieks, also 29, continue to develop generic Web site applications to be given away, such as Extropia's WebChat for group interaction.
The practice keeps a steady flow of work passing through the doors of Extropia as the pair builds a network of 20 skilled developers with whom they wish to collaborate. And if they develop an application that becomes part of every Web site, there will be many ways to convert that success into a long-term business.
It's as if Lilliputians came to hold sway over Gulliver. Size will not matter on the Internet, only usage of your product. "I feel we could have an open source code company that is just as successful as Microsoft," Tachibana said.
The bottom line
With the advent of the Internet, the free software movement has flourished, rendering the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft too little too late.
Weaving a free Web
It's not altogether necessary to pay for software if you want to run an effective Web site. Networks of developers have collaborated on creating free software whose lines of code are "open" to improvement by other parties for key pieces of Web infrastructure. Web Infrastructure / Open Source Code / Commercial Product Server Operating System / Linux, Free BSD / Unix, Windows NT Client Operating System / Linux/KDE or Gnome / Windows 95/98 Web Server / Apache / Microsoft IIS; Netscape SuiteSpot Languages / PERl, TCL / Inprise C, C++; Microsoft Visual Basic E-Mail / Sendmail / Lotus Notes Mail; Microsoft Exchange Photo Editing / GNU Image Manipulation Program / Adobe Photoshop |
