Thursday, June 13, 2002
Productive Anarchy
When you read this I'll be in Munich, but I'm writing it at 6:30 on Tuesday morning, not long before I get on a plane out of Santa Barbara. Yes, it's a small world; but a fast one, too.
Seemed like only last week that Caldera was leading the United Linux effort -- wait a minute, it *was* last week -- and now they're suffering a Linux & Main headline that seems to come right out of The Onion: "Caldera clarifies 'everybody-fired' rumors".
<http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=94>
Yes, there were some layoffs, and yes, some employees went over to SuSE to work on United Linux, but what matters is that he story apparently began with a poorly written anonymous email. The headline might as well have read "Troll smears Caldera."
As long as we're on the subject of Caldera, I'm looking right now at a May 13 copy of EE Times, where the top of the front page carries the headline "Shifting tide of opinion rocks embedded Linux." The piece talks about "The travails of Lineo," which is the embedded Linux spin-off of Caldera. On the jump page is a graphic titled "Embedded Linux's Downward Spiral", which consists of a timeline of layoffs by Lineo, MontaVista, Red Hat and LynuxWorks.
Yet the same piece features a study by Venture Development Corp. (Natick, Mass.) that predicted "explosive growth" for embedded Linux. The study said embedded Linux products and services would grow from $59 million in 2001 to $346 million in 2006. More than three quarters of the 245 developers surveyed said they plan to use embedded Linux in the next three years.
According to analysts at Venture Development Corp., the main reasons why the remaining sub-25% were reluctant to endorse Linux did not include high development costs (one of the issues the story blames for Lineo's troubles), but rather "concerns over memory footprints, GPL licensing and Linux's real-time limitations". The piece goes on to credit the Linux community's own corrections to the last issue: Linus Torvalds' decision to include MontaVista's preemptible kernel patch into Linux's 2.5 kernel development tree.
Last night I was talking with Craig Burton about the success of Linux and other open source efforts in spite of all the FUD and hand-wringing over the stumbles and failures of companies associated with the efforts. "The anarchy is working," he said.
"To have an open source strategy, you need to embrace a paradox," he said. "You need to answer the question, "How do you cause global ubiquity and make money at the same time?" Open source, he said, is about creating infrastructure, which only happens when global ubiquity has been achieved. You only get global ubiquity, and infrastructure, when the protocols and technologies involved are out control. In other words, when you have a kind of anarchy. So the only way you answer the question, he said, is by "causing anarchy, and then taking advantage of it."
There are corporate success stories. Red Hat is a notable example, showing up amazingly well in a survey of IT managers on the future of the IT industry conducted by CNET News.com.
<http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-933857.html>
In response to the question, "Which of these companies will be the most relevant to your business in the next five years?" Red Hat came in second only to Microsoft, and its number was around 40%, easily beating IBM, Sun, dell, Cisco, HP-Compaq, Oracle, Apple, Palm and Siebel.
Half of all the respondents answered "significant" (16%) or "major" (42%) to the question "What role does Linux play in your company's plans?" An additional 14% said Linux would play a "moderate" role. role in their company's business plans.
The story also reported a recent poll from Giga Information Group, which said 59 percent of IT managers would increase their use of Linux in the next year. None said that Linux use would decrease. In the meantime, 56 percent of the surveyed managers said they would increase their use of Windows, while 18 percent said their Windows use would decline.
So Linux is fine. The question is, what can companies do to take advantage of the anarchy it causes? It's a question more companies are aware that they'll need to answer.