Could the same thing happen to Linux?

Thankfully, no. To be sure that the corporate raiders don’t grab the publicly available Linux and resell it with proprietary extensions, Linus partnered with an advocacy group named GNU in an innovative (and cheeky) legal notion dubbed "copyleft."

Copyleft works like this: A public domain, uncopyrighted work allows people to share the program and (if they wish) share their improvements. But it also allows unsavory people and companies to convert the program into proprietary software by making changes and redistributing the program. People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original public domain author gave them; the middleman has stripped it away. "Copyleft" says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Thus, the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable.

When I broached the subject of Linux as a potential Windows competitor to a colleague of mine, the response was nasty, brutish and short: "Are you nuts?" he growled. "Why would you want to go backwards to a DOS-like command line interface? Linux is for hack-heads. I don’t care for how Microsoft does business, but at least they’ve got a graphical interface and support their products."

So, strike one, two, and three on the accuracy of perception scale.

The truth is, Linux runs reliably on almost any hardware platform, (Intel and clones, Sparc, DEC Alpha, Apple, Amiga, even Atari and VAX) requires a tiny memory footprint for the Operating System and can use any of a half-dozen different Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), including the very customizable X-Windows. USC Programmer Dave Broudy once commented, "X-Windows is flexible enough that you can make it look like any operating system on the planet. There are common configurations that look and act like Mac OS, Windows 95, Motif, BeOS—users can feel right at home. In fact, many probably won't even know they've switched [Operating Systems], except that their machines won't crash anymore."

The memory footprint on Linux is worth noting. Windows NT Workstation recommends 32 megabytes(MB) of RAM for starters, 64 MB if you are a power user, and 128MB for a truly muscle bound system. Linux (minus the GUI) can run in less that 4 MB. For specialty uses, major subsystems can be left out of the kernel, reducing the requirements to only 2 MB. Linux has even been demonstrated running as a web server on a "Palm Pilot" sized computer called "Itsy." Seeing Itsy demonstrated stretched my notion of "scalability" in directions I had never considered before.

Why do I think Linux may be a threat to Microsoft? Because Microsoft deals with competitors in two ways: It buys them, or it buries them by offering its own product for free. But in this case, Microsoft doesn’t have a fixed target that it can aim at: Linux is not developed by a single company, it is produced in "group mind" mode by programmers testing and cross-checking each other’s work. No one to buy out. And Linux is the point-man for the whole "open source" movement that seeks to tear down the closed architecture and proprietary solutions that presently dominate the software scene by offering the Linux source code for free. Linux is out of Microsoft’s direct grasp and is therefore a hazard to Redmond. Even the head loud-mouth at Netscape, Marc Andreessen, is crowing that Linux is a serious threat to Microsoft.

And the mouth may have something. Corel Computer Company (a division of Corel that makes systems) offers a new hardware platform called Netwinder using the DEC StrongARM RISC processor. (For a glossary of these arcane terms, dig our your January issue of PAUG.) Netwinder is designed specifically for use with Linux and the hardware will be sold with Linux preinstalled. Boasting 250 MIPS (million instructions per second), 3 gigabytes of local storage, all at a fraction of the cost of a traditional Intel PC, it consumes less power than most night-lights and is about the size of a high school textbook. This isn’t Flash Gordon fantasy: Corel is making these machines as you read this.

Unfortunately for Linux (and the open source movement), corporate management is suspicious about its ability to become a trusted, mission-critical part of corporate infrastructure because there is no warm body (or legal entity) to sue in case of problems. The public (and erroneous) perception of Linux is that no one takes responsibility for it. In truth, Linux administrators find they get better support from a "community" of developers than they do from ignorant pay-per-call tech support. The collaborative development process—a "massively independent peer review"—is akin to thousands of cross-checks occurring with every change in the system.

When a programmer writes a component or module for Linux, the source code is posted to the Internet where it is downloaded and evaluated by thousands of other programmers. Since there is no financial incentive to hide poorly written code, if a module has problems, it will be sent back to the original programmer with comments. If the programmer of the faulty module doesn’t do a good job correcting it, someone else will. This is Darwinian selection at its best, and would be financially impossible for a single company to provide that level of code and compatibility verification. Bugs that do make it into public release are corrected at amazing speed when the flaws are discovered. This isn’t just rosey PR predictions: The development system has been successfully working that way for the past seven years. Standing Linux on the shoulder’s of its Unix history and you have a very serious contender. Example: Infoworld has voted Redhat Linux Operating System of the Year for two years running.

Contrary to what is reported in the mainstream IT media, there are solution providers available that will, for a fee, support Linux the same way a traditional software company would. The difference with Linux is that if a company with a support contract has a specific problem with a component of Linux, it can be fixed by a programmer on the support staff (open source code, remember?) and the patch will usually be forward to the Internet for use by other companies and inclusions of newer versions of Linux. The best of both worlds.

Not that this makes much of a dent in politicized IT management. An anecdote appeared Inter@ctive Week, quoting Dan Kuznetsky of International Data Corp: "I talked to the chief financial officer at a bank in New York, and he said they weren't using Linux. They didn't want to run the bank on unsupported software. Then I talked to the IS staff, and they said they had 100 servers running Linux." When he asked why the chief financial officer didn't know about their Linux servers, the IS staffer replied: ‘He's the one who told us to build the intranet but didn't give us much of a budget.’" Attitudes are changes, but Linux is obviously still a grassroots phenomenon.

Since Netscape joined the open source movement with their release of the Mozilla (formerly Navigator) browser source code, open source solutions are looking better and better.

My personal interest in the war between proprietism and open source provoked me to explore Linux. Next time, I’ll tell you about my personal experience.

Peace,

WebWalker