The obvious becomes apparent.
Today is the day. Mark it down. March 18, 2003: The day when the writing on the wall became clear, and the sea turned red with the blood. Or so it seemed to me this morning when the email automata delivered a double-whammy to the In box.
The first whammy was an Evans Data Corp. report that finally detailed the obvious: Linux, the survey said, is pulling developers away from Windows more than various forms of UNIX:
Fifty-two percent of respondents who currently have Linux as their target for applications say they used to write applications primarily for one of the versions of Windows. Only 30% have switched from some form of UNIX to Linux as their primary target.
Among operating systems primarily targeted before Linux, 22.5% named Windows 2000, 6.7% named Windows XP, 10.6% named Windows NT and 12.5% named Windows 95/98.
True, the Evans Data press release didn't place Linux in the larger context of all known platfoms. But that wasn't the point, which shows up in this Computerwire report on the survey:
A new survey from Evans Data Corp appears to contradict suggestions from Microsoft Corp that the growth of the Linux operating system has been at the expense of Unix, rather than its own Windows operating system.
In other words, Okay, we'll see your FUD and raise you a few FACTS.
The second whammy this morning came from David Berlind at ZDNet, who wrote Will open source force a sea change in IT? He writes:
Over the last few years, open source--meaning the royalty-free deployment of commercially capable and modifiable source code--has been doing quite well against commercial alternatives. Combine the success of open source software with the current major architectural revolution--service oriented architectures (SOA)--and we may be headed into a world where the only things we pay for (and that solution providers can make money on) are hardware, outsourced services, and patents (via royalties).
SOAs push all development up and away from the operating system and into the middleware layer. Given the increased focus on the two viable technologies for such a middleware layer--Sun's Java and Microsoft's .Net--the operating system itself is becoming increasingly irrelevant as a development platform...
Should open source successfully penetrate the application server layer, the industry's power structure could be very different from what have today. The more that traditional software companies--those that depended on revenues from licenses--start to give away software, the more they'll have to focus on the remaining havens of revenue for significant revenue: services, hardware, and in some cases, patents...
Should mass-market licensed software one day be a thing of the past, there's no time like the present to consider the ramifications on everything from your careers to your IT strategies, to your existing relationships with solution providers. If the industry eventually flips on its ear in this way (admittedly, a big if), it may take a while to play out because a lot of software companies will kick and scream as they get dragged into the new world order. But sooner or later, they'll have to go.
But who's dragging them there? Is it other vendors? Or is it developers, sysadmins, users and other folks who simply find Linux and open source more useful and appealing -- at least at the platform level -- than the commercial alternatives? The Evans Data Corp. findings suggest the latter.
Yet old loyalties die hard.
There are people out there, lots of them, who are quite fond of Microsoft and its products. Take my friend Robert Scoble. More than almost anyone I know who doesn't work for the company, he really likes Microsoft stuff. That's partly because he works at NEC, where he gets to play with rare toys like the NEC Versa Litepad (a Tablet PC). He carried one of those around at a recent party, showing off a gallery of digital photos he had just taken at a Microsoft event where he had become extremely excited about plans for Longhorn, Microsoft's next-generation operating system. Scoble told me Longhorn will make a huge leap beyond many of the familiar Windows (and Linux) OS conventions. Its directory, for example, will be a database. I'm not sure what he meant by that, but he's excited about it, even though the final release is scheled for something like three years from now.
I bring up Scoble because even he has a concern about Microsoft's persistent antipathy toward Linux and open source. That's why he recently wrote an open letter to Bill Gates with a series of "ideas on how to deal with the 'Linux threat'." This came on the heels of Dave Stutz' Advice to Microsoft regarding commodity software, which offered stern advice from an insider departing the company in an obviously frustrated state. (Dave was the prime mover behind Rotor, Microsoft's Shared Common Language Infrastructure for .Net.)
Dave asks some tough questions :
Will Microsoft continue to convince its partners that software is distinctly valuable by itself? Or will the commodity nature of software turn the industry on its head? The hardware companies, who actually manufacture the machines, smell blood in the water, and the open source software movement is the result.
latest Evans Data report, which finally says what some of us have taken for granted for awhile: that Linux is cutting seriously into Windows' market share, and not just into the market shares of legacy UNIXes. There's more. Today in ZDNet David Berlind
Army thing...
<http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/03/18/HNarmy_1.html>
Linux taking share from Windows.
<http://www.computerwire.info/brnews/73C4FE58AF70456D80256CEC0054E3D5>