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.
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 there are now pleny of embedded Linux tool and OS vendors to augment and customize raw Linux.
The success of embedded Linux testifies to Linux' new position as 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. It also means that companies that take infrastructure and make all kinds of new products with it will come out of the woodwork at trade shows.
The center of gravity in the Linux community is now commercial, since it includes giant companies like IBM, which not only professes its commitment to Linux, but is driving as much of Linux development as it possibly can. The IBM guys I spoke to went 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 was the bean bag capital at past shows, was as businesslike as the foyer of a skyscraper.
I got the same sense from the other Big Player booths at the show. Compaq, SGI, Hewlett-Packard, Borland and Sun all had huge
. "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:
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:
That's all I'm doing here. And at Linux Journal as well.
— Doc Searls