Thursday, July 11, 2002
GETTNG CLEAR
The appeals of Linux the enterprise are rapidly crossing the perceptual line between the possible and the obvious. On Monday eWeek published Open-Source Enterprise <http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,362400,00.asp>, where Debra Donston wrote, "It's not a question of whether open source should exist in the enterprise, but a question of how much and where". According to Donston and eWeek Labs West Coast Technical Director Timothy Dyck, "there's probably no company that hasn't used open source."
There's a trend here, and it's apparent in eWeek's name, which used to be PC Week.
But what is that trend toward, and is it only about open source? Let me put it a different way: Are open source, free software, or any of the other well-worn Linux development topics, the only subjects we can talk about here? Put another way, are there any new topics we should start paying attention to?
I had that question in mind yesterday when I interviewed Tim O'Reilly <http://tim.oreilly.com/> for two hours. It was a follow-up on an interview from January 2000 <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4467>, at the height of the dot-com boom, at Linux World Expo. What interested me at the time about Tim was his experienced perspective. Tim had been around both publishing and UNIX for so long that he knew how trends tended to work, how to take advantage of them, and how not to get sucked in by transient obsessions.
In yesterday's interview (which is still being transcribed), Tim said, "Successful businesses and movements know that trends tend to peak and start on a downturn. Often there is a related trend, an expansion, or a different slant on it, that is picking up steam at the same time. And you have to jump to the new curve."
When you're talking about subjects like Linux and open source -- a technology and a methodology that are each soaking into the world, spreading like a stain -- the trend is not part of a sine wave. If there is a decline, it's more likely to be one of velocity, not of direction. But even a velocity change is still a curve. And maybe the subject at hand isn't the only one that people want to talk about. Topics rarely travel alone. There must be allied trends nearby.
So, what are the allied trends that tend to support Linux and open source, but are not immediately concerned with them -- that are just starting to ramp up?
I've been thinking lately about two candidates. One is INFRASTRUCTURE, and the other is TRANSPARENCY. I've been writing about both here in SuitWatch, and also on the Linux Journal site. Is Linux Infrastructure -- or Is it Deeper than that? <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6074> ran in May. Is Transparency a Killer Virtue? <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6196> ran just a few days ago.
In both cases I looked at conversations taking place outside the traditional Linux community, or outside the usual conversations within the Linux community. For example, IBM may now belong to the Linux community, but its INFRASTRUCTURE campaign <http://www-3.ibm.com/e-business/doc/content/event/infrastructure.html> doesn't even mention Linux on its Web page. I believe that's because IBM is less interested in selling Linux as a operating system than in putting it to use as infrastructure supporting IBM products and services. In that role, Linux is somewhat invisible.
Which brings me to an question I've been wrestling with: Is infrastructure naturally transparent? That would seem to account for much of its appeal.
A few years ago I was talking to a friend who was a programmer for a rapidly growing dot-com. The development platform was Windows NT, which he said was frought with memory leaks and other reliability problems. He added this: "When I'm building a skyscraper, I want to know there's rebar in the concrete. With Linux, I know. With Microsoft, I don't. In fact, NT's memory leaks prove to me there isn't rebar in there. Since I have to work with NT for political reasons, I just cope with it. But I know if we could see the source, we could probably fix the problem pretty fast."
I've thought often about what he said, almost always in terms of "open" and "closed." But what about "transparent" and "opaque"? Yes, concrete building materials are hardly transparent in a literal sense, but builders need to be extremely clear about what they're working with. If it's foundational stuff -- true infrastructure, not a "platform" that sits on other infrastructure -- the builder wants to know, or to be in a position to find out, exactly what's in there. Lives, or at least livelihoods, depend on it.
There is another reason transparency appeals as a virtue. It's not a loaded term that brings up all kinds of old political conflicts from inside the community, as "open:" and "free" tend to do. It also doesn't need much explaining. The reason governments from Peru to China are adopting Linux has everything to do with the transparency of its innards. It may also have to do with its price and its development methods, but transparency is the deeper issue. Without any secrets, governments don't have to waste any time or energy wondering what's in there.
Positioning Linux as transparent infrastructure -- along with the Net it augments -- also tends to position Windows as non-infrastructural (or relatively less infrastructural) software, regardless of its immense popularity. If there are limits to which one can conceptually depend on it, then there are limits to its qualifications as infrastructure. This doesn't make it *bad*, just less useful as foundational building material.
Note that I'm not saying that opaque platforms and software that run on those platforms are bad either. Just that they are not necessarily infrastructural. If their developers are smart, they'll make use of existing infrastructural protocols, or write some of their own. That's what Userland and Microsoft did by developing SOAP -- a purely infrastructural protocol that benefits every product that uses it.
Yesterday I put up a new discussion at the LInux For Suits forum, titled "Should we be talking more about transparency?" <http://www.linuxjournal.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Forum&file=viewtopic&topic=180&forum=18>
I'm honestly not sure. What do you think?
Jump in on the forum and let's talk about it.