Feature - July 2003

You know we've crossed some kind of threshold when that's the opening line of a feature in The Wall Street Journal. That feature, titled "Out of the Shadows: Open-source software is not only becoming acceptable -- It's also becoming a big business", is written by Willam M. Bulkeley and appeares in the Technology section of the March 31,2003 edition of the paper.

The whole section is chock full of testimony to the acceptance of Linux in the enterprise. But acceptance is different than understanding; and for want of that understanding stories like this one veer toward fiction right from the start. Here are the two paragraphs that follow that opening line:

What does he mean, "outside the corporate framework?" Take away all the Linux code written by programmers working inside corporate frameworks and there isn't a lot left.

Why is it "most important" that "companies have found ways to make money"? Is that more important than the actual work that gets done?

What about customers' needs -- to save money, time, effort and capital investments? Don't those account for Linux' success too?

Not if you're only looking at what vendors are up to. Not if you assume nothing significant happens unless a big vendor pushes it.

In "Ten Technologies You Need to Know About Now -- From Wi-Fi to Open Source", the lead article in that same Wall Street Journal Technology section, Michael Totty writes,

But IBM's official enthusiasm for Linux came only after the company discovered a critical mass of Linux usage and know-how among the company's rank and file technologists. Aside from its felicitous "Peace, Love & Linux" campaign," IBM's Linux strategy has never been about mainstreaming hobbyists and rebels. It has been about leveraging its own resourcefulness and intelligence -- and appealing to the same in its customers.

Tolstoy's War and Peace was one long argument against the great man theory of history, which was big during the industrial revolution and the age of Western empire-building. As we come to the end of the industrial age, we find ourselves continuing to believe in the great vendor theory of computing history. We continue to believe nothing significant happens unless a big vendor makes it happen, and makes a lot of money in the process. We continue to believe that commodities, which comprise the majority of goods in countles industries, are Bad Things because they challenge the imagination of vendors accustomed to margins of up to eighty percent and more.

In fact, customers love commodities. In the software industry, they love commodities so much that they make their own, put them to use and improve them continuously. That whole process is what's behind the success of Linux, Apache, PHP, Ppython, Perl, PostgresSQL -- all the components that comprise the LAMP platform -- plus all the standards and protocols on which the Net and the Web are built.

But you can't see that process very well when you look at the enterprise through the one surface that faces vendors. What you miss seeing is that Linux' success in the enterprise is a product of each customer's applied intelligence -- and by a reluctance to play the customer role at all.

"We're very anti-pay-for-anything around here," says Greg Thompson, a scientist with the Research Applications Program at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. "Cheap hardware is what got Linux going in the first place for us," Thompson says. "That was back around '95. Before then we were a Sun and SGI shop. Now we're all-Dell, except for the occasional iBook, which we use because they run a flavor of UNIX. All the rest of our laptops are Linux. Mostly Debian with a little Red Hat. Some of them are dual-boot with Windows, so we can relate to customers. That's why we run a lot of VMware too."

Customer demand from organizations like UCAR doesn't even show on vendor radar unless you're Dell or O'Reilly. "Everybody here has a shelf full of O'Reilly books," Thompson says. We like to figure things out for ourselves. For example, I'm a scientist, not a programmer. But awhile back I saw a need to get past manipulating data with Perl and textfiles. So I started reading up on databases and learning MySQL. I wouldn't have bothered if MySQL hadn't been free. We don't have five digit figures around here to run Oracle. We don't need hard-core database stuff. We don't need transaction support. But we do need results that are Web-accessible. So MySQL made sense. Building internal expertise around something like MySQL is straightforward and easy. I do a little research on my own, see if something I need is already installed -- and if it's not I send a help desk email to a sysadmin-- and then the next day I just download a Debian package, run apt-get and I'm in business. Without spending a dime."

It's amazing how how small a software approval bureacracy can get when you're dealing with freeware rather than costware. When friction is low and costs are zero, free enterprise lives up to its name. Literally.

"Our IT budget is zero," says Elliot Noss, President & CEO of Tucows in Toronto. Tucows' business is hosting one of the largest software download sites in the world, plus running one of the three top-level domain name registries (OpenSRS), which manages around 3.5 million domain names. "We've built everything from the ground up with Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL and and other LAMP stuff that costs us nothing," Noss says. "I can't even imagine what it would cost to work with a big Sun system, or run a big Oracle database. If it weren't for Linux and LAMP, we wouldn't be in business."

There's no overstating the importance to an enterprise of saving money and increasing efficiency. This is even true for enterprises in the public sector. Andre Adrian, an ATC engineer with DFS (the German air traffic control system) at the Frankfurt Tower, writes,

This is not the kind of stuff that shows up in the vendor vs. vendor sports coverage that still passes for in-depth coverage of the information technology (IT) marketplace, even by respectable publications like The Wall Street Journal. Still dragging one foot in the Industrial Age, they miss a fundamental economic fact of life in the Information Age: The demand side is supplying itself.

With Linux and open source, the biggest enterprise suppliers are internal, not external. They are the smart and resourceful employees making maximum use of low-cost or zero-cost hardware and software. Their successes, however, don't come at the expense of vendors. Instead, vendors find themselves in a whole new ecosystem --one in which they can be just as smart and resourceful as their customers.

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

We can see what a grown-up software industry looks like when we turn to the mature industry from which software borrows so much of it vocabulary: Construction. It's no accident that the software world has "architects", "designers", "builders", "tools" and "platforms". Nor that when it makes a world of its own, such as the Web, it speaks of "sites" called "homes" with "locations" and "addresses".

Construction is the biggest and oldest industry in the world. Sales estimates run as high as two trillion dollars worldwide. It's filled with commodities, and with companies making a good living selling, installing and servicing commodities. It has many huge vendors, including some at least as large as Microsoft; yet it has no Microsoft. No one company dominates the industry.

The arts and sciences of construction have few secrets. Open source is such a standard value that it's not even an issue. If somebody thinks of a better way to hang a door or to put up sheetrock, that know-how is passed along to everybody else. What matters is getting the work done, and constantly finding better ways to do that.

In the software business, we're finally arriving at that realization. Avery Lyford, President and CEO of Linuxcare, explains it this way:

Think about the world before Bill Gates' open letter to the hobbyists. That's where we're going. We're coming to the end of the Gatesian Era in computing history. Yes, the guy is an incredible businessman.Credit where due. But his time is passing. It's just not passing all at once.

Linux is a lock. It's done. The only remaining resistance is around open source, and that's only because a lot of IT people still don't understand it. But that will change soon, too.

The real issue with open source isn't low cost. It's high value. That's what vendors like ours try to bring into the enterprise today....All we have to do is figure out how much of your problem we can help you solve and how we can help you solve it.

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.

So what's happening, as LAMP establishes itself, becoming the commodity platform of choice for enterprises? Mostly the action starts shifting up the stack: from operating systems and applications to data. We think it's the information age, not the operating system age," says Larry Ellison 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".

[Goldman quote?]

There is also a drift of corporate focus upward in the stack, from platforms to data. Jamie Lewis, President of The Burton Group, puts the situation this way:

First, a large enterprise is going to have everything, platform-wise. They'll have Microsoft, they'll have SUN, they'll have LAMP. All of it. But what they care about most isn't that stuff, but the data that is the life blood of their business.

That's why the conversation is shifting to Web services. I have to be careful here to differentiate real Web services from the kool-aid you hear from big vendors on conference panels -- "Oh, everything is great and we all love each other now!"

Real Web services are about XML, SOAP, XML-RPC, SAML and other standards that bring services together.With a common encoding data format, and common protocols for communicating that data, we are beginning to create what I call a software communications bus. It's just like the hardware bus for the card in your PC. You plug a card in there and it can communicate with all the other piece parts in the machine. Now we're getting a software bus that allows all the piece parts to talk to each other. That gets us into a loosely coupled federated model where it's not like I have to understand your DNA in order to talk to you. In this model all we need is just enough in common so that we can exchange just enough information, just in time, to do something meaningful -- without having to go through recombinant DNA exercizes in order to interoperate. This is fundamental. It's a huge deal.

And none of this would be happening nearly so fast if there weren't all this smart activity taking place around Linux and open source. The Linux community is building out huge portions of this new model. Look at Mono, Jboss... There are lots of efforts going on that have the combined effect of turning the network into a platform. Once that happens, things will really get interesting. We'll build stuff on top of the Net that will transform it in ways we haven't even thought of yet.

How Linux helps make smart companies smarter