SuitWatch/Monday, January 14, 2002
Making a federal case for Linux
Several thousand years ago, back in the early Nineties, I did a bunch of consulting work for a large PC maker that was unusually skilled at winning immense government procurement contracts. In fact they lived and died by the grace of government. I believe they're dead now. If not, they might as well be, because I haven't heard anything about them since they got bumped out of the last big desktop procurement round sometime in '97.
Big Government is an anomalous force in the desktop marketplace, because it likes to acquire capital goods for the long haul. When a government buys a tank, a building, a road or a fighter plane, it expects those things to work for as long as they last. And they expect them to last for a very, very long time. For example, nearly every B-52 bomber has been going for nearly half a century.
This was the thinking, no doubt, behind the Department of Defense Personal Computer Policy Implementation Plan - FY1995 - FY 2000 <http://www.c3i.osd.mil/other/pcpp.html>, which was published in March, 1995. It specifies clock speeds of at least 33 or 66 MHz. It calls for at least 16 Mb of RAM, expandable to 32 Mb. It has concerns about SCSI cards, connections and terminations. We're now going on seven years since this document was published, and nothing it specifies is anything other than antique today.
Yet computers, like B-52s, are remarkably able instruments, even as they age. I have working computers in my house that date to the early Eighties, and none of them are in need of repair. In one corner of my office sits a 100 MHz Pentium box that remains resolutely failproof running an ancient version of Linux. It only goes off when the power grid fails. The rest of the time it's a rock-solid Web server. It's not all that bad as a desktop, either. It even browses the Web rather nicely.
The durability of desktop computers is something of a conundrum, because mass market demand for computing power constantly increases. This is widely seen as a side effect of Moore's law, which predicts the doubling of processing power every eighteen months. There are, however, two other laws that also play here. One is Metcalfe's law, which says the usefulness of a network increases as the square of the number of users. Another is the Cluetrain Corollary, which says the level of knowledge on a network increases as the square of the number of users times the volume of conversation.
Thanks to the Internet, a lot of people are in the conversation about PCs. They know a heckuva lot of stuff, and they won't stop telling each other about it.
What these huge federal contracts of the past never contemplated was the shift in base computing context from the desktop to the Internet. Suddenly the operating system was less of a context than the Internet Protocol stack, and the various allied protocols that together comprise the growing Internet infrastructure. The ability to run certain popular programs, or to welcome certain kinds of software development, mattered less than the ability to join and enlarge The Net.
In this context Linux has huge advantages. First, it clusters relatively cheap hardware -- even ordinary desktop-grade hardware -- into powerful supercomputers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Forecast Systems Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado uses a new supercomputing cluster consisting of 277 Compaq Alpha workstations. <http://www-fd.fsl.noaa.gov/hpcs/> And this system supplements other Linux clusters.
Linux is also a natural in federal procurement environments where agencies are mandated to expose their workings and to provide services over the Web. Deploying Web servers and services using Linux and Apache is now a rather trivial challenge, and a near-absolutely cheap one. Linux also doesn't yoke an agency into costly licensed relationships with providers of Web server software. With Linux, government organizations are free to be as resourceful as they like.
Needless to say, two fresh federal imperatives also tend to turn government agencies into penguins. One is the war on terrorism, which elevates security to a top priority. The fact that Linux keeps no secrets about itself -- operating on fully-exposed source code -- has huge advantages over closed source alternatives that hide their workings in private hands. The other is austerity imposed by a federal government adminisrtrationt determined to drive economic growth by cutting taxes. The more resourceful government gets, the more it will turn to the cheapest and most powerful resource. For operating systems, the obvious first choice is Linux.
These imperatives are multiplied in the less developed world. There are many -- myself included -- who believe that Linux will grow even faster in the third world than here in the first, due mostly to adoption by governments and businesses that need to do more with less. Linux may not be a hit on desktops here in the U.S., but in China you can walk into a computer retail store and see aisle after aisle of PCs running Linux.
To fully understand the nature of what's going on here, one has to see Linux as an example of something all governments love to talk about: resources. To show what I mean, I'll share a conversation I had last summer with some Microsoft friends I ran into at a conference in San Diego. They wanted me to list the three top applications for embedded Linux, so they could understand how Microsoft competed with Linux in the embedded "space."
"That's like asking me to name the three top applications for lumber," I replied. "Your problem is that Linux isn't a company. It's a natural resource. It grows on trees. It's endlessly abundant. You can use it almost anywhere for very little cost. And you don't have to license it from anybody."
One of them corrected me: "So it's not that it grows on trees," he said. "It IS trees."
The wood milled from those trees is a product of collective technical intelligence, formed in the real world where stuff needs to get done. Jokes to the contrary, they do a lot of real world work in government. That's why we have the Net. It's also why the Net has Linux growing all over it.