[advocacy-discuss] The Linux Crusade: A Prelude

[Qingye Jiang (John)]

Original URL:

Chinese Version: http://www.qyjohn.net/?p=493
English Version: http://www.qyjohn.net/?p=492

The Linux Crusade: A Prelude
September 30th, 2008 by qyjohn


The Linux folks seems to be pretty active recently.

On July 15, on the public Linux kernel maillist, Linus Torvalds
described the OpenBSD crowd as “a bunch of masterbating monkeys”
regarding their concentration on security issues. On September 17,
during his keynote presentation on the Linux Plumbers Conference 2008,
Greg Kroah criticized Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, for not
contributing back to the Linux community. Then, on September 24, in an
article published on InfoWorld (which was “accidentally reprinted” on
the New York Times), Jim Zemlin (Executive Director of the Linux
Foundation) declared that “the future (OS) is Linux and Windows” and
“Sun Solaris is on its deathbed”.

When was the last time the Linux folks became so aggressive, launching
warfares against other members in the open source movement, and brothers
and sisters in the Linux ecosystem as well?

I am not extremely interested in why the Linus Torvolds / Jim Zemlin
attacked OpenBSD and Solaris. Linux is not Unix, but competitors of
Unix. Therefore it is understandable for Jim Zemlin to denounce ZFS and
DTrace on Solaris while Ted Tso (the Linux Foundation’s Chief Platform
Strategist) wants them in the Linux kernel. After all, the platinum
members of the Linux Foundation include Sun’s business opponents like
HP, IBM, Oracle, and Novell. Despite the fact that Sun did not do well
financially in recent years, the Solaris operating system still has the
largest installed-base among all commercial Unix/Linux distributions.
Three years after Sun unveiled the OpenSolaris project (in 2005), there
have been tremendous interests coming from people previously using
Lunix, and the adoption of OpenSolaris as a development desktop is
accelerating. The assertion that “Solaris is on its deathbed” while its
market share is growing can only be explained as a FUD (Fear,
Uncertainty, and Doubt) strategy, which was learned by Jim Zemlin from
Microsoft only recently.

But why Greg Kroah set fire on Canonical? Isn’t Ubuntu a brother or
sister of the Linux family?

“Companies who rely on Linux must contribute, or they are at the whim of
others.” Just like a father reproaching his naughty child, Greg Kroah
kindly advised “developers who are not allowed to contribute to Linux
should change jobs”. To support his argument, Greg Kroah provided a
ranking of the companies contributing to the Linux kernel during the
past 3 years. Among all 99,324 patches, Canonical ranked number 79 with
100 patches, while Novell (Greg Kroah’s employer) ranked number 5 with
7222 patches. Well, Greg Kroah forgot the fact that Canonnical has only
130 paid developers, while Novell has about 4100. Also Suse Linux has
been around since 1994, while Ubuntu, since 2004.

Free software, as defined by Richard Stallman, has four degrees of freedom.

* Freedom Zero is the freedom to run the program however you wish.
* Freedom One is the freedom to study the source code of the program and
to change it to make the program do what you wish.
* Freedom Two is the freedom to distribute copies of the program to
others, when you wish. Now this includes republication of the program.
* And Freedom Three is the freedom to distribute copies of your modified
versions to others when you wish, and this also includes publication if
that’s how far you wish to go.

So, as long as Canonical publishes their source code, they are using
GNU/Linux in a legitimate way. And Canonical does exactly that. Should
we require Canonical to grow the moral responsibility to put back their
modifications to upstream projects, then we are giving Canonical free as
“free lunch” rather than “freedom”.

If we continue to explore whether Canonical should contribute more to
the Linux community then we are missing the point. During the past years
both Redhat and Novell have invested significantly on server-side
technologies, with the belief that server-side deals will be the future
of the open source economy. However, Ubuntu is gaining market share by
providing a user-friendly desktop to entry-level and medium-level
developers. The contribution of Canonical to the Linux community lies
not in the lines of code or number of patches to the Linux kernel,
glibc, or X.org. Rather, it lies in the number of people being
influenced by Ubuntu and switch (or consider to switch) from Windows to
Linux. By offering free CD’s to anybody who are interested, Ubuntu not
only wins users from those who previously use Windows, but also from
territories traditionally occupied by Redhat and Novell.

The open source movement today is quite different from what it was 10
years ago. As pointed out by Greg Kroah, most of the components that we
see in a Linux distribution ― just like the Linux kernel, glibc, gcc,
X.org, binutils and others ― are maintained and patched by paid
developers hired by commercial companies rather than amateur developers.
Unlike non-profit organizations or amateur individuals, commercial
companies invest in open source projects for financial returns rather
than an elevation in morality. (Otherwise there wouldn’t be the
notorious Novell-Microsoft deal in 2006.) The above-mentioned financial
returns can be in the form of a better public relationship (corporate
branding), a higher market share, or more directly, more revenue. In the
past Novell ― along with a couple of other mainstream distributions ―
controlled the majority of the Linux market, leaving the rest to other
minor Linux distributions. When Ubuntu joined the game in 2004, although
the total number of people using Linux is increasing, both Redhat and
Novell are losing market share to Canonical. Canonical is offering
enterprise-class support services for Ubuntu users with a price tag that
is more expensive than that for Windows Vista. The fact that there are
companies buying these services makes companies like Novell even more
unhappy.

Mr. Canonical, you are an outsider of the Linux community (because you
contribute very little). It is OK for you to earn a little bit money
from Linux. But, if you are earning too much from our work, then it is
too much.

This is exactly the kind of Linux ecosystem that is being destroyed by
Canonical with Ubuntu.

More and more companies have realized that open source can be a strong
weapon for technology adoption. When OpenSolaris joined the competition,
developers have one more option along with Linux and BSD. New companies
like Canonical also managed to grab business opportunities with products
like Ubuntu. The competition in the operating system market will be a
lot more violent, rather than Windows (desktop) and Linux (server side)
share the market peacefully. What we are seeing today is only a prelude
to the Linux crusade, and we should be well prepared for more eventful
warfares.

(PS. Although the author works for Sun Microsystems, the opinions
conveyed in this blog entry does not represent the point of view from
his employer.)


-- 

 ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._                Qingye Jiang (John)
  `6_ 6  )   `-.  (     ).`-.__.`)        Senior Manager
   (_Y_.)'  ._   )  `._ `. ``-..-         Sun Developer Network, China
  _..`--'_..-_/  /--'_.' ,'               Phone: +86-10-62673347
 (il),-''  (li),'  ((!.-'                 http://developers.sun.com.cn/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
About ME: visit http://www.qyjohn.net/,    http://calendar.qyjohn.net/.
About US: visit http://wiki.developers.sun.com.cn/index.php/SDN_China .