A year ago, Linux World Expo in New York was a mining town at the height of the dot-com gold rush. Red Hat, VA Linux, Andover.net and Cobalt Networks were together worth dozens of $billions, even though their collective sales were in the dozens of $millions.

During this year's show, Red Hat and VA were both trading around $10 per share. At that level they were together worth less than the $2 billion Sun paid for Cobalt only a few months earlier. Andover had morphed into OSDN (Open Sources Development Network), while Cobalt had been re-energized as a rather independent-looking brand of Sun. In show terms, this ammounted to roughly the same number of booths, paid for by half the number of companies.

Yet for all the post-crash sobriety, the show was almost twice as big, taking up nearly the entire main floor of the Javits Center. So, while some Linux companies may have been punished in the dot-com crash, the movement continues. In fact, it's accellerating, big time.

Two reasons stand out. One is embedded Linux, which is beginning to explode. The other is IBM and all that is signified by its newfound nature as a Linux Company.

Embedded go boom

In the embedded development world, Linux has been as contagious and transformative as Ice Nine. Developers there have been picking it up faster than slang. It's small, free, easily customized and — running on modern and cheap 32-bit processors — close enough to Real Time for many applications. And where it doesn't quite cut in its raw form, there are pleny of embedded Linux tool and OS vendors to augment and customize Linux

Linux is now commodity infrastructure. It's two-by-fours and ten penny nails. The GNU tools were commoditized first, but what matters is that both the GNU tools and Linux are together responsible for a lot of the infrastructure we all take for granted, whether our work is open, closed, proprietary or public domain. They didn't build everything — not by a long shot — but credit where due. And they are getting a lot of credit from the commercial embedded Linux development community.

Linus himself is perceived as the owner of Linux, big time. Maybe not by everybody, but by plenty of programmers who believe that Linux grows in the directions Linus personally allows it to grow. Whether or not this is true, enough people believe it is true to make it so. I was told this, repeatedly, at LWE, and it blew my mind. Mostly it was by programmers who want stuff in the kernel they believe won't happen, or happen soon, because Linus just isn't interested in it. This is a non-trivial issue, and we need to talk about it. In fact, Craig gives us a good start with the matrix he drew during an interview in the August 2000 issue of Linux Journal. That's it, above. I believe Craig was the first to observe that we collapse two wholly different distinctions when we call "open" the opposite of "proprietary" and "closed" the opposite of "public domain." A lot of people have told me they think this is "trivial" and "doesn't really matter. But it does. Distinctions are about meaning, and if meaning doesn't matter we're in trouble.

The center of gravity in the "Linux Community" is now commercial, since it includes giant companies like IBM, which not only profess their commitment to Linux, but are driving as much of the development as they can. These guys are going out of their way to be as friendly as possible to the traditional Gnu/Free/Open geek community (IBM was the booth filled with bean bag chairs for geeks to lounge around in, while VA's booth, which used to be the bean bag capital, was all-business to the verge of sterility. "We are going out of our way to be as friendly as we possibly can to the Linux community," one IBM guy told me, explaining that they had "standardized" on four different distributions. The rest of the conversation went like this: "Including Caldera?" "Right, including Caldera." "So you don't want to compete with Caldera in the Linux space." "Oh no, no way." "But it's okay for them to compete with you." "What do you mean?" "Have you see Volution, their new network management solution?" "No." "It competes with Tivoli." "Really? It does?" "Not across the board. Just across all your Linux distributions." "Oh." I could see the blood drain from the guy's face.

Across the board, commercial Linux vendors talk open and sell closed, talk public domain and sell proprietary. Just three examples:

• Red Hat Network Services utilizes proprietary Novell products (notably NDS, rebranded eDirectory) and which is the result of a Red Hat-Novell partnership that Novell promotes far more eagerly than Red Hat does.
• Caldera's new Volution network management system is perhaps the first serious enterprise offering from a Linux software vendor. Caldera talks about how Volution is " built on open standards," but it fails to mention that the product itself is both closed source and proprietary.
• VA Linux makes a big deal about being an open source company, but that doesn't stop it from doing a deal with closed-source nVidia, when Matrox Linux and 3dfx Linux are open source and need help too.

Note that I am not saying anybody is being "good" or "bad" here. In fact, I am scrupulously avoiding making moral and political statements. There are way too many of those and they only get us in trouble. I am pointing out three things:

1. Nobody has yet figured out how to make enough money by selling free software to deserve the enormous investments VCs gave these Linux companies 1-3 years ago.
2. Selling closed source/proprietary software is a proven way to make money (even if it doesn't attract big VC investments).
3. The Linux community suddenly includes a lot more folks from the commercial world (for instance, a big hunk of IBM). Sooner or later they're going to fork Linux off in a direction that works for them and is not fundamentally commercial, but rather fundamentally functional in ways Linus doesn't countenance. Then what? I believe this is the kinds of question Craig wants us to start asking.

That's all I'm doing here. And at Linux Journal as well.