The old showbiz adage that it takes years of work to become an overnight success could yet hold true for acceptance of Open Source software and its common denominator the Linux operating system.
Originally defined by Finnish software developer Linus Thorvalds; developed as a collaborative effort by interested techies the world over; championed to greater or lesser degrees by a motley crew of supporters ranging from rebellious zealots in Penguin T-shirts to the deadly serious suits in such corporations as Oracle and IBM; loathed and derided in similar measure by Microsoft, the biggest software company of all—Linux has taken the best part of a decade to get as far as it has.
This, in the case of mainstream IT deployments in Ireland, is not very far at all. Certainly it appears to be well established in the areas where it was initially attractive and into which it made inroads very quickly, namely administrative applications that are largely invisible to most computer users such as e-mail servers, Web servers and file/print management systems.
These applications are, like Linux itself, usually available for the price of a download or a minimal sum to cover the media on which they are distributed. Their attraction to overworked under-resourced technical administrators was obvious. They were freely available, they did a job that needed to be done—but was never appreciated until it failed and there was no need to bother parsimonious directors with budget approvals.
Another area where Linux is achieving great success is in high-performance clusters where a large number of standard computers are linked together to perform highly complex mathematical processing tasks in research and academical institutions. For example the Centre for High Performance Computing at Dublin University has installed a cluster of 32 IBM Intel servers running Linux for use by research programs across a range of disciplines at the college, including computer science, mathematics and the life sciences.
The next step, that which takes Linux and Open-Source computing to the point where they figure in the strategic IT decisions taken by top corporates, is one that has been taken in other countries. At the Linuxworld Expo in San Fransisco in August, several large companies including Credit Suisse and Amazon described how they had migrated key applications from commercial Unix platforms to Linux.
In Ireland, however, large organisations are a little more cautious. The dogs in the street seem to be aware of two major Linux rollouts in the public sector: One in which a major institution is deploying Sun’s StarOffice open-source desktop productivity suite to its workers, and another in which a semistate company is consolidating several ‘tier-two’ ERP application suites on to a standard Oracle Financials platform running under Linux. Both projects, however are in the rollout stage and neither organisation wished to be interviewed at this point in time.
Linux supporters
Nonetheless, there are several small companies springing up in Ireland ready and willing to support Linux and open-source computing projects in the corporate market just as soon as they materialise. They are backing their own hunches that the time is now, or at least Real Soon Now.
One such company is Securelinx which grew out of established IT services company, Mentec. According to founder, Peter Corkery, the Irish market has been slow to adopt Linux but he expects it to catch up very quickly and is positioning Sercurelinx to capture the market opportunities that will ensue. The company will offer consulting on Linux to organisations that want to learn about it, and will also provide what Corkery calls ‘Point Solutions’ in certain areas, especially in network security.
He sees the growth of clustering as a big opportunity for Linux and also points to an EU directive urging governments to consider open source software where appropriate when tendering for IT goods and services.
Securelinx is less than three months old. So too is OpenApp, established by three executives with much experience in traditional software and consultancy companies like Amdahl DMR and Microsoft. One of their number is Ciaran McCabe who is chairman of the marketing special interest group in the Irish Linux Users’ Group (ILUG)
McCabe buys in fully to the whole concept of open source software. ‘Enterprises should adopt the whole Open Source approach,’ he said, ‘not just the Linux operating system. They should embrace open source software from the desktop to the back end.’
Nonetheless, McCabe accepts that organisations are not going to throw out all their old software just for the sake of moving to open source. His argument is more subtle than that. ‘People are going to keep a lot of their existing software,’ he said, ‘especially if it’s a mature entity that has been written within the organisation and people are comfortable with it. The real value of Open Source is that it means you become more standards compliant and are therefore able to manage your entire IT resource more efficiently.’ McCabe is particularly confident about the prospects for Linux on the desktop in Irish companies over the next 12 months, a scenario that not everybody agrees with.
Strident positions
All of the world’s leading IT companies have adopted strident positions on the role of Linux and Open Source in their strategic plans. IBM, the world’s largest IT company, is an enthusiastic supporter of Linux and sees it as an ideal vehicle for maintaining the lifespan of its venerable hardware installations in which so many of the world’s financial and government institutions have made long-term investments.
In September it announced an alliance with leading Linux developer Red Hat which will see that company’s Advanced Server operating system software ported to IBM’s entire range of servers from Intel-based products right up to MVS mainframes. In return, IBM will make all of its key software products including the Websphere application server, DB2 database, Tivoli systems-management software and Lotus communications products available for Red Hat Advanced Server. Both companies will also collaborate on consulting and services for Linux products worldwide.
Stephen Kelly, IBM’s X-series brand manager in Ireland conceded that as regards enterprise applications on Linux: ‘The Irish market is a little behind in Linux adoption. We have not seen the uptake happening as quickly here as elsewhere.’ However he points out that many companies in Ireland are using it for running mail and Web servers and that it is gaining popularity in high-performance clusters. As well as Dublin University, NUI in Maynooth is also building a supercomputer with a cluster of Linux servers.
Sun Microsystems, the world’s leading supplier of Unix systems, might seem at first glance to be caught between a rock and a hard place with regard to Linux. On the one hand, anything that increases the credibility of Unix—any Unix—might be said to grow the potential market for Sun’s products. But with Linux available on such low-cost hardware, it also represents a threat to Sun’s business which depends on high-margin sales of proprietary hardware.
Not surprisingly, Sun’s country manager for Ireland, Aidan Furlong, takes the optimistic view. ‘Linux opens up a whole new marketing opportunity for Sun,’ he said. It is now being used to try to bring Sun to the corporate desktop, a market traditionally dominated by Microsoft.
Two years ago, Sun bought Star Office, a suite of desktop productivity applications similar to those in Microsoft Office from its German founders. These are now being made available at a low-cost licence fee, which includes international support, to corporates or one can download it for free from www.openoffice.org. Furlong claims that there have been between 6 and 7m downloads of Star Office to date.
Last month Sun brought out an entry-level server called the Cobalt LX-50 based on Intel processors—a first for Sun whose products have hitherto used its own Sparc processors—and fitted with an option to run Linux or Sun’s own Solaris for Intel operating systems. Furlong describes the Cobalt LX-50 as ‘Sun’s first general purpose server,’ and says it will be the first in a series of announcements from the company regarding Linux.
Sun’s adoption of Linux has raised doubts about its commitment to Solaris on Intel. Although Furlong points out that the Cobalt LX-50 has Solaris available as an option, it is clear that the emergence of Linux has had an effect on other computer makers who have traditionally offered Solaris as an option on their Intel systems.
Dell Computer, for example, no longer offers Solaris as an option. Customers who want to run Unix can now select Red Hat Linux when configuring their server on the Dell Website. Similarly, Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, which sells Sparc-based servers running Solaris now offers a variety of Linux distributions on Intel servers, but not Solaris.
Linux v Unix?
Just how Linux complements the existing Unix business of traditional IT companies is a nettle they all have to grasp. Tony Redmond of HP says that the two product lines are complementary. ‘We have significant capabilities in existing Unix systems that won’t work with Linux,’ he said. ‘For example our large Superdome servers which are used to run big databases and systems with multiple transactions are better suited to traditional Unix. It has years of development expertise behind it, not just at the operating system end but also in all the other bits like management and monitoring tools.’
Nevertheless he expects to see Linux move up in capability over the next few years so that it will move from the ‘edge of the network’ where it predominates now to the data centre. Linux is currently not available on 64bit hardware but Redmond expects that there will be a move over from Intel’s IA-32 (32bit standard) to IA-64 in the near term.
Another powerful factor affecting the long-term viability of Linux is the growth of storage area networks or SANs which decouple large storage systems from the servers that control them. This means, Redmond points out, that when Linux gets established as a data centre operating system, upgrading processing power will become increasingly cheap and easy. ‘The data stays on the SAN,’ he said, ‘so all you have to do is upgrade the server.’ As Linux tends to run on commodity hardware, as opposed to traditional Unix which tends to require expensive proprietary boxes, it will become increasingly attractive.
For the moment, however, HP supplies Linux on its entry-level servers where it competes with Windows NT and NetWare, both of which are also offered.
Leading suppliers of corporate software applications are also largely in favour of Linux. Oracle in particular has seized upon the affordability of Linux as a way of delivering its software on commodity hardware. According to Chris Ward, Oracle 9i marketing manager for UK and Ireland: ‘We have promised that Linux will be a tier-one operating system. That is, it will be one to which we will immediately port new versions of our software. Previously our tier-one operating systems were Windows NT and Solaris.’
Thus Oracle will make all its software products including database development tools, application servers and collaboration suites available under Linux at the earliest opportunity.
SAP, The world’s leading supplier of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, is also fully supportive of Linux, according to Irish country manager, Michael Kearney. ‘We have 1,000 customers world wide, out of a total of 36,000 who use Linux to run our systems to some extent,’ he said, ‘although none of these are in Ireland.’ He maintained that some parts of SAP’s software, such as its own database, is available under an open source licence although in practice most SAP installations are built on commercially available databases.
Asked whether SAP would ever consider making its core ERP code open source, Kearney scoffed at the idea. ‘We have no plans at all to do that,’ he said. ‘We have to make money some way.’
Sceptics
One software supplier that is not at all impressed by the Open Source model is Microsoft. Its chief executive Steve Ballmer once famously described Linux in an internal mail as a major threat to Microsoft and during a visit to Dublin last month referred to it again as a ‘pesky operating system with a zero revenue model.’
Microsoft’s Irish general manager, Joe Macri expanded on the company’s position. ‘We have no problem with giving out source code to partners and sometimes to end users when it is required,’ he said. ‘But we fundamentally disagree with the general public licence [which requires open-source developers to publish all changes they make to software source code]. We believe it fundamentally undermines intellectual property and copyright law. If you invest in research and development, you have a right to a return on that investment.’
He also attacked software companies who are happy to support an open-source operating system but refuse to make their own applications available under a general public licence. ‘We think it is disingenuous to talk about the operating system but not about the applications themselves or the hardware. Why don’t they just give their applications away for free?’
At the end of the day, Microsoft is still the world’s largest and richest software company and by common consent, the Irish market’s adoption of Linux has been slower than elsewhere, but there are interesting projects in the pipeline and the whole scene could have changed dramatically in a year or so. We will watch unfolding developments with interest.
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