But LinuxWorld, the show, like Linux, the cultural phenomenon, is becoming less about open source and more about the business of open source.
This was inevitable. And anyone in the position of the keynoters at LinuxWorld would do exactly the same kind of comforting speeches that Mr Messman and Mr Fink delivered. Mr Messman spent a lot of time demonstrating how, unlike a little more than a year ago, before Novell bought German commercial Linux distributor SUSE, companies are no longer wondering about what to do when Linux breaks, if Linux is secure, and if it is ready to be deployed in the enterprise above and beyond simple Web, print, file, and firewall serving. We are hearing fewer and fewer of these concerns about Linux, Mr Messman said.
Well, this is what made Linux exciting, the whole David versus the Goliaths of Windows and Unix. What was fun about Linux was (and still is, when it is working well) being cultural, not commercial. Linux allows us to identify with David in that epic struggle. But, as has happened with Unix and then Windows, this Linux David is becoming a Goliath, even if it is one with its own particular (and good) open source and community characteristics.
This all makes for a good narrative arc, but companies that are deploying Linux underneath commercial applications don’t care about this. What they care about are worldwide organizations with support expertise like Novell (as well as Red Hat, IBM, HP, Dell, and others) standing behind you and and taking some money out of your wallet. This is what we all wanted with Linux (remember?), and now we have it.
This is an area that Mr Messman, quite predictably, spent a lot of time talking about in his address yesterday. He said that the Linux customer has moved on from worrying about a specific driver for a specific piece of hardware or compatibility for a specific piece of software with Linux to one where companies want to buy and use single, integrated solution stacks that run on Linux and have not only been certified to run with Linux, but with each other.
And increasingly, customers want support from a big name (like the ones mentioned above) or, as often happens, from a big name who is backed by the main commercial organizations that provide support for a product, such as with MySQL and JBoss. After more than a year of partnerships as well as the impending delivery of support from SourceLabs, SpikeSource, Gluecode, and others, current and potential Linux shops have stopped worrying about where they are going to get support for Linux-based products as well as Linux training for their employees.
While this is the open source business model that the industry has embraced, it is tough to get excited about it in a physical way, and Mr Messman seemed more energized by the fact that he is from Boston (and so, too, is Novell since he took over), LinuxWorld is in Boston (rather than New York), and that the Super Bowl and World Series champions are from Boston, too.
Where Mr Messman became clearly animated was in talking about the market share statistics that prove SUSE was a good buy for Novell. Many CIOs and CTOs agree that open source – and Linux in particular – is a key aspect of their future, he said. Companies are moving to open source alternatives to closed-source operating systems and applications for reasons we have heard about a million times: lower total cost of implementation and ownership, lower potential for vendor lock-in, and more flexibility on integrating solutions. Mr Messman cited a survey by CIO magazine that found that 53% of CIOs polled believed that open source programs would be dominant in their data centers by 2007. He was also quite pleased to say that Novell reckons that there are some 3 million Linux servers in production today. This is a very big number for a platform that only really went mainstream five years ago.
Where Mr Messman probably went off track was in ascribing to Linux the effects of simplifying infrastructure by server consolidation and standardization as well as cost containment and greater IT staff efficiency. This has more to do with the fact the IT shops are using Linux as a lever to change, or change as a lever to move to Linux.
This is what caused the Unix explosion in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and what gave Windows such good traction in the late 1990s. The success of Linux in recent years is more a function of disgust with server sprawl, just as the Unix and Windows waves were driven by the disgust with the excessive costs of mainframes and Unix servers, respectively.
Mr Messman also got a round of applause when he said that Novell had moved 197 of its core servers to Linux, was porting its Oracle Financials applications to SUSE Linux servers running clustering software from its new partner, PolyServe, and was starting the task of moving its 6,000 desktops from Windows and Office to Novell Linux Desktop and OpenOffice.
Novell’s CEO ended his speech by warning that even though his company is committed to being a contributor to the open source community through the GNU General Public License, Novell was a realist and knows that customers want to mix closed and open source products. Like it or not, it is not yet a complete open source world, he said.
