It started seven years ago as a university project. Recently its tiny distributor received a huge financial endorsement. Karlin Lillington gets the line on Linux
Only six months ago, Linus Torvalds conceded that in the business world, Linux, his trim and robust variation of the popular operating system Unix, was the OS that dared not speak its name.
“Not many people want to come out of the closet to officially say they are using Linux,” he admitted to the computer magazine InfoWorld in April. Although an estimated seven million people now run Linux, big businesses weren’t about to announce that their critical operations depended on a system created in 1991 by a 21-year-old Finn as a university project and is usually given away for free.
However, all that changed recently when Linux received financial backing from two technology industry stalwarts, Netscape and – intriguingly, given that Linux is seen as a threat to its de facto partner Microsoft – Intel.
In a deal announced at an Internet convention in San Jos, the two giants said they had taken an undisclosed equity stake in a small North Carolina company called Red Hat, which markets one of the handful of commercial “distributions” of Linux.
Perhaps Netscape’s choice of words prompted Torvalds’s ear-to-ear grin as he sat on a panel to discuss the deal. “The people are coming out of the closet in the corporations,” said Netscape’s senior vice- president, John Paul. “Customer demand” prodded Netscape’s investment, he said. “I’m no longer nervous talking to large businesses about Linux.”
Intel’s vice-president, Sean Maloney, was more restrained but similarly complimentary: “The investment in Linux is clearly a reflection of [its] growing importance and influence in the business community.”
As part of the deal, Intel will boost Red Hat into their top echelon of partners. Like Microsoft, Red Hat will be able to develop future products in conjunction with the latest Intel chips, including the forthcoming Merced 64-bit chip.
Given that Linux is software without a business model, it’s extraordinary that it has gained such major partners. It is offered under a free licence, downloadable from the Net, or is available on CD for as little as $50 from distributors such as Red Hat. In contrast, Windows NT, Microsoft’s OS targeted at business users, begins at around $800.
And unlike NT, Linux can be altered to suit an individual programmer’s or company’s needs. Commercial operating systems such as Windows, Unix or Macintosh are offered in “binary” form – a sequence of 0s and 1s that are unintelligible to humans. Linux, in contrast, is offered as “source code” – the language of commands used by programmers to create software.
Such “open source” software typically becomes a communal effort as programmers all over the Internet work to refine the code or create new applications for it. In the case of Linux, thousands of individuals have honed it into what proponents claim is a reliable and versatile OS, with a lean 1,5-million lines of code. (In comparison, Microsoft’s upcoming NT version 5.0 has more than 30-million lines.) Linux also runs the Web’s most popular server software, Apache, which is also free, open source software.
Robert Young, the Canadian chief executive of Red Hat, says offering Linux as source code is like giving people access to the engine of a car. “Would you buy a car with its hood welded shut?” he says.
Ultimate control rests with Torvalds, who oversees the Linux engine, or “kernel”, himself. Yet he makes no money from Linux and deliberately works for a chip-design company rather than a Linux-based business. He says he doesn’t want the economic success of a company he works for to depend on the technical decisions he makes. Nonetheless, Torvalds likes to speak with characteristically dry humour of his plans for Linux’s “world domination”, now a Linux community catchphrase.
World domination without a revenue stream is not a philosophy readily understood in the cut-throat Silicon Valley software world, or by the businesses that have decided to opt for Linux. But in growing numbers, corporate information systems managers are giving Linux a try.
The analyst Datapro says that in 1997, Linux jumped from the seventh to the fourth most frequently installed version of Unix. According to International Data Corporation, Linux is growing at more than 40% a year.
Such expansion has not gone unnoticed by software makers. Young notes that in recent months the five largest database manufacturers have all announced products for Linux: Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Computer Associates and IBM. Netscape already offers a version of its Internet- browsing software, and Paul says all server software products will be available for Linux by next year. Corel offers WordPerfect for Linux and Caldera will make NetWare, Novell’s widely used server software, available on Linux.
Significantly, say observers, those companies have an interest in seeing Microsoft reined in. Young says he believes Linux could cut Microsoft’s $2-billion market for operating systems down to $200-million, simply by offering a cheaper alternative. Microsoft, he says, is well aware of the challenge: when Red Hat classified its sales of Linux by US mailing codes, the Redmond, Seattle, region came out at the top.
For now, however, Young thinks that Microsoft will probably welcome Linux as evidence of a competitive software market, given the United States government’s current anti-trust suit against the company.
Sceptics, however, believe Linux’s seven million users will never pose much of a threat to Microsoft’s sprawling market of 300-million Windows NT users. “The computer press had run out of new ways for Microsoft to die at the hands of some tiny rival,” says David Coursey, who produces an industry newsletter and is an editor of the Silicon Valley technology business magazine, Upside. “But at the same time, Linux has started being taken as a serious Unix contender, which could hurt Sun [which has developed its own version of Unix, known as Solaris] more than Microsoft.”
Coursey doubts that Linux will ever be the OS of choice for the average computer user. (None of the major personal computer manufacturers – Dell, Compaq or Gateway – offers Linux as an option on their build- to- order websites, although a Dell representative says they will install it in servers or personal computer orders of more than 50 units).
“Computer hobbyists, students and geeks are taking to Linux, which is good for them and good for the operating system,” Coursey says. “The average user shouldn’t have to care, and [corporate] managers of information systems can watch from the far distance. Linux is, and will remain, a sideshow.”
But Torvalds, who has watched Linux grow from an OS for one person on one machine to the system of choice for Nasa, for the US postal service’s letter-scanning system, for Digital Domain’s special effects in the film Titanic, and for administration at Boeing and the US Navy, just smiles beatifically.
“In three, four, five years, when all the office suites and the games, and all the applications are lined up, that’s when world domination is complete.”