September 25, 2003
Penguinman
Back in the early Pleistocene, when I was still working in radio, there was a syndicated show called "Chickenman", the slogan for which was "He's everywhere! He's everywhere!" <http://web2.iadfw.net/amirado/copter/chickman.htm>
Today the same character would be a penguin.
This came to mind over the weekend when I ran into Scott Heiferman <http://www.fotolog.net/heif>, who has lately become famous for MeetUp <http://www.meetup.com/>, a Web project that has grown so vast in popularity that it now facilitates prairie-sized grass roots events for various political candidates. To date 705,315 people have signed up for MeetUps on 2197 topics in 591 cities in 44 countries. Those include 120,000 for Howard Dean, 34,800 for Wesley Clark and 15,800 for Dennis Kucinich. When just 4 people ambled in for Peter Ueberroth MeetUp in San Francisco, the local paper was there to cover the embarrassment, documented it with a front page picture, and the next day Ueberroth undeclared himself as a candidate for governor.
I was in the middle of a conversation with Scott when I remembered that MeetUp was hosted on Linux. He reported that the system continued to grow without a hitch, as does Fotolog, which now hosts 74,333 participants who have posted 1,139,244 photos as of yesterday, when they posted 12,168 more. Fotolog runs on Linux too.
Yesterday I was talking with Ken Nelson, President of CACMedia <http://cacmedia.tv>. CACmedia is doing some very interesting work in the "convergence" space where computing and consumer electronics increasingly overlap. Ken told me that Linux had become the ubiquitous and de facto standard embedded operating system for consumer electronics. "You can't see it, but Linux is everywhere." He and CACmedia are doing some very creative work with Linux, and they're not alone. "The business is at a whole new beginning. It might take twenty years before we see how it plays out." He expects Linux to be in the thick of it for the duration.
Just before I left for the Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise several weeks ago, I spent half a day at Real Networks in Seattle. There I met with Kevin Foreman, the company's General Manager for their Helix work, and two other top techies: Rob Lanphier, whose card reads "Helix Troublemaker", and Mark Warner, manager of broadcasting. Two things became clear in the course of the morning. First, Real is exactly what techies writing from inside the company have been telling me for years: a Linux company -- regardless of how else it may appear on the outside. Second, they don't have much choice. Walking through aisles and aisles of racks serving countless thousands of simultaneous broadcasts out of Linux systems, Mark Warner told me that there was no way other than Linux that the company could be doing what it does, or continuing to scale as fast as it does. Pointing at a small "remaining" island of Windows 2000 units (about half a rack) in a vast data center full of humming Linux machines, Mark told me this was about the most Real needed to maintain demand for Windows media, and that earlier experience with the OS made it clear that there was no way it would ever scale like Linux. Not as a base platform for the kind of work that Real does.
Which brings me to another conversation from last weekend. Several of us were wondering what, exactly, did Microsoft intended to do with its license of SCO Unix. This was following an earlier conversation about what it would take for Microsoft to compete with Google in the search business. Google's search system is a virtually endless, and growing, assortment of Linux systems. What would Microsoft use to compete? Certainly not Linux. Probably not BSD. So... what about SCO?
Nobody I've talked to about the submect takes the possibility seriously. Linux and BSD are better candidates, technically, they say. Microsoft will need to come up with something they can at least call Windows, no matter what it really is.
Meanwhile, Linux is laying around, waiting for just about anybody to make just about anything, of any size, and to make money with the results. Which is why, chances are, when you ask what kind of operating system lies inside any new product or service, it'll be Penguinman at work.
Doc Searls is senior editor of Linux Journal.