By Rachel Chalmers
Linux developers are a gregarious group, and the San Francisco Bay Area Linux community is closer-knit than most. It came as something of a shock, then, when on September 2 1999, French Linux distributor MandrakeSoft Inc struck a Chinese translation deal with a Mountain View, California-based Linux start-up that no one had ever heard of. Local Linux evangelist Rick Moen – he was one of the media pranksters behind February’s Windows Refund Day – did a little digging, and found that the company’s LinuxOne OS was a barely modified Red Hat distribution. That didn’t ring too many alarm bells – MandrakeSoft itself started the same way, and has since become a valued community member.
It was when LinuxOne filed for IPO on September 22 that Moen really began to wonder. The filing is remarkably similar to that of Red Hat, except that LinuxOne has no underwriters. Between the product and the absence of backers, Moen says he started to ask himself whether the company had any real assets besides the Nasdaq ticker symbol to which it was laying claim: LINX. Was LinuxOne thrown together to capitalize on market fondness for the open source operating system in the wake of Red Hat’s highly successful IPO? Founder Dr Wun Chiou’s IPO record is not exactly auspicious. His last start-up, a web company called NetUSA Inc, is trading at 56 cents from a 52-week high of $6.88.
Moen became still more dubious about LinuxOne when on October 21, he received the company’s beta CD ROM, consisting of Intel binaries and no source code – not a very politically correct way to ship a Linux distribution. Moen says LinuxOne OS looks to him like an unmodified 2.2.12 kernel. He says each installation screen looks like a replica of the corresponding screen in Red Hat 6.0, with the LinuxOne logo replacing Red Hat’s red hat. It also borrows from Mandrake, he told ComputerWire. Postfix, Mandrake Update and Mandrake Doc are bundled with the beta. There is one package that appears to be original: LinuxOne desk, a set of themes for KDE 1.1.1. Moen complains that the integration wasn’t even particularly skillfully handled. The Sendmail and Postfix mail daemons were both enabled by default.
His main criticism, however, is that LinuxOne was shirking a key responsibility under the General Public License (GPL) – that of providing public access to source code. It’s a GPL violation and it needs to be fixed soon. Given its clumsy handling of issues that should be second nature to any open source company, Moen wonders whether LinuxOne will enjoy the stellar IPO Red Hat earned. If people buy into it completely, they are likely to be disappointed, he says. From a certain perspective, what LinuxOne is doing is not that different from packaging other people’s distributions and selling them. The thing is, substituting their name for Red Hat’s doesn’t strike me as having a great deal of class. But in the end, what matters and what will affect the valuation of their company will be whether they will provide value.
Longtime Linux developer Bruce Perens is far more trenchant in his criticism. I have a legitimate Linux company and I’ve been working on this since 1994, he says. I don’t want to see my company tarred with their brush. I’ve been trying to point out to investors and the press, ‘Hey this doesn’t seem right.’ The open source community is kind of unique in this respect. A lot of the software we use requires that the source code be disclosed. We can get in an look at the source code and know what work they’ve done and whether they’ve done it themselves. We can evaluate work better than most businesses. We’re very sensitive to the presence of posers. It hurts our reputation if they’re taken as the real thing.
Dr Chiou did not respond to ComputerWire’s requests for an interview, but the company’s attorney Michael Morrison says those who view LinuxOne as a Red Hat copycat are wrong. We’re way out ahead of Red Hat on applications, he told ComputerWire, citing LinuxOne Lite, which allows users to run Linux over Windows, and LinuxMac, which allows users to run Linux over MacOS. Red Hat doesn’t have it, Caldera doesn’t have it, Morrison said. He denied that these applications would only be of interest to very casual users, as a Linux emulation would generally perform much worse than the real thing. Some people like to go back and forth between operating systems, and some people also like to transmit files from one to the other, he explained.
As for the similarities between Red Hat Linux and LinuxOne OS, Morrison says: I have a very difficult time understanding why anyone in the Linux operating system would have a different operating system. They’re all based on the one Linux. Different distributions, however, boast different installation procedures, for example – that’s why Rick Moen picked up on the similarity between the installation screens. Morrison says he can’t respond to that: You’re asking something that very technical to the Linux systems. Finally, Morrison dismisses any comparison whatever between Chiou’s NetUSA and his latest venture.
None of what LinuxOne has done is even remotely illegal. At worst, it is opportunistic. Speaking broadly, anyone can take any Linux distribution, put their own name on it and resell it. That’s what the GPL is for. It’s the company’s tactlessness in its handling of the community that marks it as an outsider. Omitting source code from a distribution is very much frowned upon. Announcing your IPO before building relationships with the local Linux community is clumsy. Other CEOs of Linux companies are anything but inaccessible. They make themselves highly available to the media. They don’t communicate through lawyers. What has distinguished the open source community in the past is that its members have tended not to resort to the high-handed tactics of other software companies. Whether that will continue to be true in the wake of Red Hat’s $2bn market capitalization, remains to be seen.
