Will success spoil Linux? After a spectacular rise from a little known, hobbyist operating system to the fastest growing operating system in the computing market, Linux is at the centre of some collective soul-searching.
The freely available system, initially developed by Finnish programmer Mr Linus Torvalds and honed by a vast volunteer programmer "community", represents the first triumph for the open-source software movement. Open-source adherents advocate sharing the code, or basic digital blueprint, for software programs. Programs are either free or available for a nominal sum .
"It's an absolutely fascinating development, and it's glowing red-hot in the US," says British-based analyst Mr Martin Hingley of International Data Corporation (IDC). Why? "The customer is looking for more competition and to avoid being tied to a single source [for an operating system]," he says.
Linux can be downloaded for free from the Internet, or is available on CDs from companies such as Red Hat and SUSE at under £50 (€63). At last count, over 145 sources offered a version of Linux.
"The benefit is control," says Red Hat's chief executive Mr Bob Young. "People are no longer beholden to their vendor."
But Red Hat itself is now seen by some as the Linux vendor that's getting too big and too successful, following an IPO and, this month, the establishment of its own acquisitions fund.
Red Hat fuelled Linux's success after it drew much-publicised investments from Intel and Netscape a year and a half ago. Following the Intel investment, software and hardware players stumbled over themselves to bring out a Linux product, among them Corel, Oracle, SAP, Compaq, Dell, IBM, Applix, Informix, and Computer Associates. That spurred investor fever and at the end of last year, tiny Linux-based companies saw their valuations head into the ozone. VA Linux System's shares alone jumped 498 per cent on their opening day, setting a market record.
Those developments have been crucial to Linux's fast growth, says Mr Alan Cox, one of Linux's crucial core programmers and maintainer of the website www.linux.org.uk. "The rest of the world [has seen] free software going from a crazy concept to a marketed advantage, and marketed in a way that the business community understands. The stock-market flotations also gave [Linux] a definite air of reality," he says.
In particular Linux is colonising the server market, due to its reliability and stability, say analysts. Linux is now the operating system of choice on 25 per cent of all new server shipments, according to IDC. Up to 30 per cent of Web servers run Linux, according to some estimates.
Linux is expected to experience 25 per cent growth every year through 2003, and over a third of enterprises use or plan to use Linux within the year, according to a recent report by analyst Booz-Allen and Hamilton.
The number of Linux users grew from about 1,000 in 1992 to nine million last year, say the Tower Group, which predicts that spending by the top 100 financial institutions on Linux will grow 32 per cent a year - from $50 million (€55 million) in 1998 to more than $200 million in 2003.
And while critics insist Linux won't move beyond servers into the "enterprise" market of crucial computing functions in big corporations - who will trust a system that is free? - signs indicate otherwise. A Gartner Group survey of 650 companies indicates that 5 per cent will use Linux this year for such operations, and 13 per cent say they will next year.
In a much-watched development, IBM has signalled it sees Linux as a key operating system. Already the company has Linux running on its S-390 mainframe.
"We believe Linux could be the defining platform for all new applications," says IBM enterprise server vice-president Mr Launy Vang Anderson. IBM envisions Linux running alongside a business's earlier operating system on the S-390, giving access to a company's old data.
He says it's easier to make big enterprise software programs like SAP run on Linux than other operating systems like commercial Unix offerings or Windows 2000/NT.
IBM thinks it can make money from Linux by offering support and services - a plan which must make small companies like Red Hat, modelled on the same business plan, nervous.
On the other end of the scale, Linux is increasingly seen as the operating system of choice for appliances because it is lean and agile, with a fraction of the lines of code in a commercial operating system. Oracle, Intel, and Gateway have all announced Internet access appliances running Linux.
So many uses for Linux, and so many vendors in the field, have led to concerns that Linux will "fragment" - split into a number of incompatible, competing operating system offerings from different companies.
Unix fragmented and never became the strong, standardised operating system many had hoped it would; Linux, which is technically a form of Unix, was created to succeed where Unix failed.
Mr Torvalds, in a column at www.linuxnews.com, says Linux won't fragment. "What will happen is that the `market' fragments, as opposed to the technology, which is good and proper. You'll have different Linux companies going after different markets, and having different priorities."
Mr Torvalds, who speaks half-jokingly of Linux achieving "total world domination", is clearly comfortable with commercial success for his operating system, although he will not work for a company that could directly make money from Linux - he sees it as a conflict of interest.
The Linux developer community, though, continues to wrestle with the idea of blending success and Linux. Discussion lists on pro-Linux site Slashdot have dissected the issue from every angle for months. "I write free software to make people (not least myself) happy. I don't do it to crush MS [Microsoft], I don't do it so I can become one of the high priests if the OS [operating system] cathedral and I sure as hell don't do it for the mickey-mouse money stock options," wrote one programmer.
Even those who cheer on Linux's commercial success wonder how companies will mould a business model around a free operating system. Linux-based companies that floated spectacularly last year, including Red Hat, have seen their shares crash in what many see as a market acknowledgment that Linux remains an uncertainty, either in its own right or as the basis around which to base a business. But Mr Cox is sanguine: "Linux is the sum of contributions so it will go where the contributors take it."
Web Link
www.linux.org, Linux main site;
www.linux.ie, Irish users' group;
www.slashdot.org;
www.redhat.com;
www.linux.org.uk
