First day at LinuxWorld: moving up the free software stack and other progress
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Andy Oram
Feb. 14, 2005 11:11 AM
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URL: http://linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/events/12BOS05A...
Jacking in from the first day of the first LinuxWorld in Boston, Massachusetts, I'll discuss the following in this blog:Silly obligatory St. Valentine's Day reference
LinuxWorld happens to start on St. Valentine's day this year. So (like many other superficial-minded journalists attending the conference, I'm sure) I searched around for silly metaphors involving St. Valentine. Oddly, I found one that was appropriate.
St. Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers. Bees are valued and cultivated for their honey--which is certainly a miraculous substance--but another, lesser-known product from bees may be even more valuable. I am referring to propolis, a kind of glue that bees make from the wax and resins they collect. Propolis has valuable anti-biotic properties that make it useful even today for healing cuts, burns, and dermatological problems. It provides a general guard against disease and infection.
We all wait expectantly for Linux to yield us its honey--the rich variety of desktop and multimedia programs that the free software community has created for it--but we must remember that Linux is even more valuable for its propolis--for the inherent security of its design and the robust operation that earned it the term "unbreakable" from Oracle Corporation.
Microsoft's entry into free software, and other observations from OSTG
The ancient city of Jericho once experienced a crisis: its waters had turned bad and polluted the land. The prophet Elisha, newly brought into the role of prophet by the great Elijah, threw a jar of salt into the water. A miracle! The water was purified, and the people could now thrive. But strangely enough, as Elisha was leaving town, some youths mocked him.
Why is that? Commentators suggested an answer two thousand years ago by adding another dimension to the tale. They said the mockers were merchants who had based their living on bringing water to sell to the inhabitants. They were furious at Elijah for cleaning up Jericho's water and ruining their business!
Has anything changed over two thousand years? Even now, no good deed goes unpunished. When people contribute free software that increases the common pool of productivity, the narrow proprietary interests that profited from the lack of functional software strike back.
While Microsoft publicly tries to poison the open source well with stern animadversions, it quietly tests the waters by releasing open source projects of its own. No, I am not talking about the tangled, encumbered Shared Source initiative. Rather, check SourceForge for Wix (the Windows Installer XML toolset) and FlexWiki (a collaborative web-based authoring environment implemented on the Microsoft .NET platform)--two of the bona fide open source projects that Microsoft has put up. "To their credit," says Colin Bodell of VA Software, the company that owns SourceForge. "They ought to be exploring open source, and it's good that they're doing so."
Can companies open up proprietary software successfully? Many observers say that such efforts don't work--whether because the community doesn't see the projects as their own, or the companies put barriers up in front of user contributions, or for other reasons--but Bodell thinks they can. He suggests that Computer Associates, by making Ingress open source, created a base of expertise among its users and thereby offloaded onto the users a lot of its customer support costs. And he referred to other projects that had reduced support costs the same way. (I cynically pointed out that an investment in better documentation might have achieved the same benefits.)
Bodell is one of those who believe in the conquest of free software up the stack. Having achieved great things in providing infrastructure, free software will take on applications next. It is already difficult to find any proprietary software product for which there is no free software project trying to compete--and bit by bit, the open source alternative is becoming more viable. Bodell cited CRM solutions (Compiere and SugarCRM) in particular. We'll see another example in the following section.
VA Software developed incrementally the list of Open Source Technology Group sites that are now household words (among technologically sophisticated households): SlashDot, SourceForge, Linux.com, ThinkGeek.com, and so forth. An integrated vision for these offerings has evolved along with the sites themselves.
Originally, as VA Linux, the company was searching for a way to quickly bring into being the kinds of third-party applications that existed for other vendors with proprietary systems. Rather than build (slow) or buy (expensive), they decided to facilitate what the free software community was already doing by starting SourceForge. As they noticed other information gaps, they started sites to fill them. And In subtle ways these sites are all integrated. For instance, a manager might visit ITManagersJournal.com to find news about software that might be worth using, and pass on to a staffer the URL that points to implementation details on SourceForge. Postings on SlashDot (often consisting of nothing but a URL, but modded up to the highest rating by users) take readers to valuable information and software. Every level of potential free software user is served, from novices (Linux.com) to developers (SourceForge).
OSTG has just announced the milestone of registering its millionth user. As it scaled up over the years, it's had to make some interesting technical innovations. It has enhanced the PostgreSQL database, and passed its changes back to the project when they would be useful to others. It also has a clever proxying server for CVS so that multiple CVS servers can host different projects and be accessed by users through the same interface.
Scalix: an example of moving up the free software stack
Scalix has jumped into the competitive market for Exchange replacements with a flexible, Linux-based email and calendaring platform. Scalix is sufficiently powerful that one might be insulting to call it merely an Exchange clone. And while Scalix is proprietary, it rests heavily on open-source software.
For instance, although one of the company goals is to work so seamlessly with Outlook that users couldn't tell when the back office switches from Exchange to Scalix, the platform works equally well with a number of Web browsers. For this purpose, the company has developed a clever cross-platform development library that uses vanilla technology such as JavaScript and style sheets to create such sophisticated effects as tool tips and drag-and-drop. (The resulting interface is really cool and well worth viewing a demo.) Furthermore, while Scalix interoperates with Active Directory, it can also be used with other LDAP servers. Its storage is built on LVM.
The Scalix company didn't place its bet on open source components in order to provide bragging points for free software developers. (Well, maybe they did, but that alone wouldn't be a sufficient business model.) Rather, founder Julie Hanna Farris points out that using these components means Scalix could focus its resources on developing an email and calendaring platform, period. No need for reinventing the wheel with new storage, backup, and other components.
But the pay-off for the customers is just as great as for Scalix. They have more choice among components and don't need to follow along like sheep when each upgrade comes along, as they do when they accept a complex, integrated Microsoft solution. (They should, however, use a the versions of software that Scalix has tested and certified to be compatible.) Furthermore, if they are willing to give up the enhancements Outlook offers and use more standard-based email solutions, Scalix supports that in parallel with Outlook.
What does Scalix offer that would make sites choose it over free software servers? Like many proprietary products, it offers a more attractive and efficient graphical interface than users generally get with the free software. For instance, trying to find an email that's blocking a queue means, for most free software servers, hunting through obscure directories and checking timestamps. The newest version of Scalix lets you find the queue with a couple clicks and look at what's on top. I was impressed with their web-based administrative interface that supports several types of administrators with different privileges.
Looking ahead to the rest of the conference
At LinuxWorld this year, I will probably meet other companies hungry for the Exchange server market, along with proprietary computer vendors making the big transition and asserting their open source credentials, racks and racks of blade clusters, and companies offering GUI sugar for common administrative needs. I meet them every year. But when one makes a mark in a way that's worth noting, I'll note it here. And I'll be on the lookout for new paradigms in free software.
St. Valentine (or one of the two other early Christian martyrs named Valentine) was famous for healing a blind girl. He thus serves as a good patron for LinuxWorld, which tries to progress year by year in gradually curing the leaders in business and government of their blindness toward the benefits of free software.
The blindness is slow to lift. Short-term thinking wins out over strategic advantage. The importance of transparency in public institutions' software--like transparency in other areas of public discourse--is little appreciated. IT departments fear dislocation and the costs of retraining above everything--even in a world of constant innovation where people always are having to learn something new. But change comes nevertheless. The Boston Globe announced this morning a repository for free software for government sites.
I do not by any means ignore the enduring problems of Linux, especially as a desktop system (I run into some new problem every week). Nor am I blind to the new ways of thinking required to get free software tools working together smoothly. But this is what IT departments in what large organizations are for. It's time for executives to open their eyes and get their IT departments to do what they're paid to do.
Andy Oram is an editor for O'Reilly Media, specializing in Linux and free software books, and a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. His web site is www.praxagora.com/andyo.
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I agree in the principle of open source moving up the stack, but it seems the majestic transition from infrastructure to application skips an important space that I think is more on the open source playing field: middleware. I will concede that this has always been an ambiguous term, but if you consider it to be the enabling software that provides the necessary abstractions for thousands of flowers to bloom, I think you can at least understand why it is distinguished from the same realm as an email client.
I perceive there is a general business culture with inertia that still expresses a need to see individual applications as line items on a budget summary with pressure-easing support contracts lined up behind them. They do care about detailed evolving requirements, but they have proprietary vendors lined up to eagerly take those particular orders. What they don't care about is what's under the hood making the functions function. Enter open source.
Consider JBoss. What problem does it solve? It may be better to ask: what problem doesn't it solve? With the emergence/resurgence of platform independence, I think middleware will be where the battle is won. For example, the real grist won't be Exchange vs. Evolution/Scalix/Thunderbird/etc. so much as it will be something like J2EE vs. .Net, AD vs. OpenLDAP, or Sharepoint vs. the inevitable OS alternative(s). Win the middle with a closed solution, and the application space will get strong-armed in winner-take-all fashion as we've seen before.
If, on the other hand, the open source movement takes the middle, then it's winner be all. Considering middleware is the heart of innovation, who do you think has the odds at taking the flag? Sorry Redmond, my money is with the renegades.