Feature - July 2003

Unabridged editions of Tolstoy's War and Peace contain long epilogues by the author, many of which argue at great and boring length against the Great Man theory of history. That theory was highly current in Tolsoy's time, which followed Napoleon (whose failure to conquer Russia provides the historical setting for the book) and lasted past the Industrial Revolution and well into the era of Western empire-building. Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford were Great Men, too. Which makes me think Tolstoy would have had the same problems with the Great Vendor theory of business.

If markets are conversations, then the Great Vendor theory is a good name for the obsessive conversation around big technology vendors and the honchos that run them. It's the theory that gives meaning to the vendor vs. vendor sports coverage that still passes for journalism in the information technology (IT) marketplace. By the Great Vendor theory, everything that matters in the technology world is driven by Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Apple, Oracle, Cisco and their CEOs. Coverage of Linux requires casting Linus (and his mascot penguin -- go team!) as the functional equivalent of Linux' CEO.

The Great Vendor theory has always had problems, but there are signs that it's finally arriving at the flat-earth stage of relevance in the real world. Chief among those signs is the steady drift of enterprise "solution" building away from Microsoft's Windows and propietary forms of UNIX to platforms variously comprised of Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, Python, Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL (collecectively abbreviated LAMP) as well as Java, the Web and the Net itself.

Look at the enterprise as a polyhedron, and at each of its many surfaces as an interface with the outside world. The vendor interface is just one among many. So is the perspective it provides. That perspective remains important, but as the balance of market power shifts from vendor to customer, it is necessary to take other perspectives into account as well.

Even power balance needs to be put in a fresh perspective, because more of technology's supply side is inside companies, not outside. That internal technology supply side consists of smart and resourceful employees making maximum use of low-cost or zero-cost hardware and software. These employees often improve the free goods they use, and share the fruits of their efforts with the outside world. Those efforts in turn give employees even more ways to be smart and resourceful -- and to save the company money. This, perhaps more than any other factor, accounts for the success of Linux in the enterprise.

But progress doesn't come easy, or happen all at once. We know, because we get letters. Some samples:

I'm employed by one of the larger Dutch financial institutions as a Unix (Solaris) sysadmin. Ever since I started this particular job about 5 years ago, I've been promoting Linux, to the extent that I run Linux as my only workstation. Obviously a (alas) Windows oriented company has (way too) many proprietary, closed software with which I have to communicate, so for those few situations I make do with VMware. All the rest is pure "Linux". Needless to say, the good tidings of my succesful deployment has spread throughout the ranks of my more technically inclined collegues and a considerable number of them have started to use Linux too. We even have some sort of "standard" distribution based on installation descriptions and a software list.

There is bad news too: although I have attempted many times to draw attention of the higher management to the good cause, the "suits" (otherwise known by names such as corporate IT departments) will not take notice or play down the role and great potential of Linux. However, even amongst higher ranking officials I have some sympathetic allies so that I now have in my posession the official "corporate" view of Linux. In short they think it will grow especially in terms of servers where it will take the place of Solaris and AIX. It is still too immature to play any significant role on the desktop.

Blimey, have these guys ever seen the latest "average" distro with KDE and OpenOffice one wonders? Of course not! In fact, at home and for business I ONLY run Linux and I have never needed anything else <sigh>.

Now there are a couple of points I'd like to make. On reading some Dutch review on the use of Linux in financial institutions such as our own (supposedly zilch, nada, niente) I wrote to the editor saying that that was merely the "corporate IT" view, but that in actual fact the technicians (those in the know) had made a very different choice and Linux is being used much more than our suits would have you believe! Secondly, although I am not allowed to reveal the name of the company, I could probably get you a copy (do you know a Dutch translator?) with all the references to the name removed. I feel that as a leading Linux publication (to which I subscribe of course) you might be able to use it to our advantage. By doing so I hope you can provide me and other Linux "champions" with enough ammunition to spread the word even to the higher management of our companies.

I work for a Fortune 50 company whose IT has a new open-source policy, as well as a fully-approved open-source toolkit (with an internal "brand name") available for employee download from an internal web site. Already up to version 3.0, it comes in both Unix and Windows flavors. It consists of GNU tools and others on the Unix side, and the Cygwin toolkit on the Windows side. Linux (Red Hat for now) is one of the "tools."

The guy who heads up the toolkit project is a take-no-prisoners free software advocate, too. I've exchanged several emails with him, so I know. The stated purpose of the policy is to permit the company to save money by eliminating license fees and streamlining the software acquisition process, but the clear subtext is to make it possible for the company to protect its intellectual property from third-party (i.e. Microsoft) manipulation.

Part of the new policy is something of "don't ask, don't tell". IT agrees not to complain if anyone decides to install these tools on whatever computer they use. All any non-management employee now needs to do is get approval from his or her local manager to download and install the tools. Managers do not need anyone's permission to install the tools for themselves. Per the policy, IT does not get involved in any way! So spread of the tools -- of Linux and the rest of the free software suite -- happens naturally and organically.

This is an enormous simplification, of course. Before the policy was implemented, even GNU Emacs required an official IT review/approval process. Even if your boss wanted it, IT could fight it if they wanted to. But with this new policy, that's now history.

This is huge. Why? Because, if the company, with its gazillion employees and its long-time use of Windows desktops, suddenly allows a modicum of personal choice in software, I Linux will pop up everywhere. (Not on every desktop, certainly, but in just about every department.)

Furthermore, if our big hardware supplier begins seriously offering a Linux option, then we'll be on the verge of a day when Linux is as acceptable to the company as Windows. Then, when you think about how much money the company ships to Microsoft... well, put two and two together.

Plus, where we're willing to go, surely other members of the Fortune 50 will follow.

(My department (dubbed 'The Client Interaction Center') was moving down to Tampa, Florida as of April 1st (ie...if I did not want to move down there, I was on my own... either.. get a job in CA somewhere, or be laid off April 1st.) Early December, with no intention to move to Florida, I began to realize that approx 80% of my 130 people org were also not moving down... Also.. I noticed that our support for Mac was being basically dropped, our support for Linux half-assed, and our support for *BSD non-existant. I determined that I would do the most daring thing I had ever done, which was to email the CEO of Computer Associates...

Over the past 2+ yrs, I have emailed him quick replies of encouragement, and it seemed as if he answered me personally (you never know with those open-door CEO types)... This time, I emailed him a ",... I have an idea..and if you promise to keep an open mind, I would like to share it with you". He replied "The worst I could do is disagree..."... So... I hit him with a balls-to-the-wall "we don't get Open Source, and so they don't get us" email... He replied Jan 4th and said "Gary Q will be responding to this".. Gary Q. was a tech-dude who is now an EVP of some dept, and a direct report. Wen Jan 16th rolled around, and no reply had come from GQ, I replied to the CEO "Do you have any idea WHEN GQ will be replying?". The next day, I received a reply from GQ to that email... Sanjay Kumar had forwarded my request for when he'd be getting back with no text of his own... (read:"Do something about this"). Gary and I met, I prepared a powerpoint, and he was impressed (a friend told me word was GQ digged a .ppt...I thought it highly ironic that I was writing a presentation about OSS on microsoft .ppt ....but you have to start somewhere, eh?

My proposal had been for an "Open Source Ombudsman" position within Computer Associates. That is, someone who could answer internal questions about Open Source software, licenses, whatever, as well as someone who sought to shrug our big nasty soulless ogre rep with the open source world...by making us 'get it'.

Everyone was impressed... GQ seemed scared of me in our meeting, and a guy named Sam Greenblatt who had dressed up in a Penguin suit the week prior to me meeting with him, told Gary he wanted me in his organization asap. That was the last week in January. GQ happened to be my boss's boss's boss's boss's boss. He cleared me for a 2-1-03 transfer to the "Linux Strategy Group". I know they were impressed... because normal rules would state a 2wk 'notice' to my current dept, and because I'm in sales, that would've kept me there through the end of February, because commissions are figured monthly.... and on Thursday 1-30-2, before I ever met with Sam, ownership of the loose cannon was passed from GQ to Sam. Needless to say... I am now payed 75% more to NOT answer phones, and to work on bringing CA closer to Linux and Open Source, before Open Source demolishes CA. I even said in my email "plans need to be made before our world collides with the open source world, and we sit there gaping, unprepared".

that's the history...as far as our take on Linux, and selling our proprietary stuff against open source and free-as-in-beer stuff.... I could tell you what it is now.. We are going to pitch our stuff based on legality, protection and indemnification. I already told one of our chief technology guys that it was a load of horse-shit (on my first and only day doing this shit, so far... before the baby was born)... I said... 'indemnification' is one tactic...what about solidly written software, pieces tightly coupled for a snug and powerful fit? ((Of course...that answer would mean we'd actually have to solidly write the software... I'll keep you posted))

either way..right now..I am the loose cannon. To get to this group, and out of my lousy job, I broke many rules, jumped over many heads, and said many things I might have never said had necessity not been guiding my hand...

Are you familiar with Computer Associates as a company? Our website sucks, so.. if you have any questions about what we do...go ahead and ask me...

What these guys are doing, gradually, is turning Linux into what Goldman Sachs calls "an enterprise-class operating system that we believe will have a significant and lasting presence on the IT landscape."

That last quote is from "Fear the Penguin", a Goldman-Sachs report issued early this year. The report said Linux' "continuing emergence will likely cause considerable changes in the enterprise IT vendor ecosystem." Why? Because "the technical developments and market forces are in place for it also to become the dominant O/S on the higher-end servers of the enterprise data center, where mission-critical functions are run and the lion's share of IT spending occurs. In particular, we believe that enterprise customers will use Linux primarily to take advantage of lower-cost, higher-performance Intel-based servers and avoid technology lock-in situations. As a result, we believe the Linux-on-Intel model will displace the existing paradigm of premium-priced proprietary systems based on Unix operating systems and RISC processors."

Goldman-Sachs isn't a computer technology vendor. It's a customer. More to the point, Goldman is a huge technology ecosystem that only looks like a customer in those places where it's interacting with vendors. Like many other companies, less and less of its world faces vendors, or involves extreme vendor dependency. The percentage may still be high (it would be a hard metric to measure); but adoption of vendorless technologies is bound to reduce that value.

Here's a better way to look at it. Like countless other companies, Goldman is busy appling its own intelligence to its own problems. Linux and other free and open source products are means to an end: they help smart companies make themselves smarter.

There's a pattern here. In 1999, The Cluetrain Manifesto said "markets are getting smarter -- and getting smarter faster than most companies." Four years later, something very much of the same kind is happening inside companies with respect to their technology vendors. And the result is a whole new ecosystem that subordinates vendors to work. This is good for everybody, including vendors. It means the industry is finally growing up.

There is also a drift of corporate focus upward in the stack, from platforms to data. "We think it's the information age, not the operating system age," says Larry Ellison, President & CEO of Oracle. "The OS manages hardware; we manage the software."

Not that Oracle doesn't care about operating systems. For many years the company made a big deal of its OS agnosticism. Today it is arguably ranks with IBM as one of the biggest "Linux companies" on Earth, and glad to say so. Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle's Linux kernel team, says "Linux is really, really important to Oracle. We are very much a 'Linux company.' He proudly credits the work his kernel development team has contributed to making Linux "enterprise class".

That class is an extremely heterogeneous one. Jamie Lewis, President of The Burton Group, puts the situation this way:

But while we are clearly at the beginning of Something New, we are also at the end of Something Else. Avery Lyford, President and CEO of Linuxcare, explains it this way:

Mårten Mickos, the CEO of MySQL, says his company successfully sells free software (MySQL is GPL'd code) because "there is more value to code you can see than to code you can't see." He adds,

We are part of a huge community of customers and other developers who are all passionate about improving the code base. Every day we are proving it is possible to have a commercial relationship that benefits free software.

MySQL has an impressive list of customers: Nokia, yada, yada, yada... When Miklos was on a panel with Doron Gerstel of Zend (vendor of PHP) at PC Forum this Spring, I asked them both if their customers were at the top of the IT pyramids -- at the CTO or CIO level -- or down in the middle and lower tiers, where the work gets done. Both told me their sales and relationships were in the latter category.

Jeremy Zawody, a self-described "technical yahoo" with Yahoo Finance, says ""MySQL will penetrate the enterprise similarly to the way SQL Server did, but with much greater speed. MySQL is to Oracle as Linux is to Windows. It will slowly but steadily creep up the food chain, just like Linux has."

David Sifry, co-founder and CTO of Sputnik (and co-founder of Linuxcare as well), explains how a breed of free software such as MySQL represents an adaptive response to the autonomous and growing intelligence inside companies:

MySQL is different than, say, Red Hat, in that it owns its code. They hold the copyright. But the code is also GPL'd. That means they can give it away for free and get the benefits of constant improvement to the code by a vast worldwide development community. But since they own the code they're also free to sell it, along with commercial support. If you want help from MySQL the company, you need a commercial relationship with them. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Tucows are big and smart and well-staffed enough to go to themselves for support -- even if they already have a paid relationship with MySQL. But smaller companies, or smaller parts of big companies, may need to outsource some of that support. MySQL is glad to sell it to them.

This approach also works well for, say, a big bank that may be worried about the GPL issue. Fine: they pay MySQL for the code. Then they can build their own extensions into it and embed it in their products. Meanwhile, people who choose to use MySQL code under the GPL get no downside. All the latest featrues are there. Near as I can tell, there are no downsides, either way. More choice for customers, better code for everybody.

Markets, to put it as simply as possible, are adapting to the applied intelligence of their participants. Thanks to open source projects like those involved in LAMP,

Avery Lyford, who was in the audience for the same panel, put both vendors' answers in perspective:

How Linux helps make smart companies smarter