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2002-09-29:Why Linux will conquer the world

Why Linux will conquer the world - Expanded AntiFUD

EXPANDED DRAFT.

PREFACE

This is an extended version of a reply to John Carroll's article...
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-958923.html
My original reply matched John Carroll's article style and language
in a attempt to create a side by side comparative document as
a measure of the credibility of each sides argument.
This extended edition incorporates my responses to
the criticism John made concerning the original reply. It is still
a draft, but please feel free to adapt and adopt the content and
republish at will.

Why Linux will conquer the world

By David Mohring
Special to anyone willing to publish it.[Republish at will]

September 28, 2002,

COMMENTARY--. GNU/Linux clearly bears a strong resemblance to
Unix. It offers many of the same features, while adding
interesting additions of its own ( free licensing, open sourced
development, etc).

With the Linux platform the open source/free software community
has already created a cross-market software unification
infrastructure better than Microsoft has ever had ( or is ). This
has result in rapid expansion in Linux's popularity which has
eaten into Microsoft server market share as Linux also grows
toward taking over the governmental,enterprise, desktop and
development world.

There are a number of reasons for this:

1. The breadth of Linux's market presence.

Due to the liberal nature in which Linux is licensed, any real
measurements of Linux's current level of deployment is as
difficult to determine as the real number computers running
pirated versions of Microsoft windows.

Trying to measure the current level of Linux deployment based
around the number of computers/servers sold with operating systems
installed is flawed. Linux based solutions are often efficient
enough to be deployed on pre-existing hardware, whereas Microsoft
is dropping support for NT4 and a Windows2000/XP based solutions
almost always have a higher level of minimum requirements to do
the same job. Also unlike Microsoft OEM license releases, there is
no price advantage to purchasing the Linux with the computer, and
Evans Data survey discloses that a full 38.9% of new Linux
hardware deployments is assembled from parts.
http://www.evansdata.com/computer.htm

The one exception to measuring the level of Linux based
deployments is publicly accessible and query-able Internet
servers. In the netcraft September 2001 web server survey.
Linux based servers occupy 30% of the market compared to
Microsoft's IIS webserver's 27.46% share. As of August 2002, the
open source Apache webserver has 63.51% share compared to
Microsoft's IIS 25.39%.

Even so, You would be hard pressed to find a software or hardware
market where Linux does not have a rapidly increasing presence.
Linux works on obsolete hardware (so you needn't throw the
hardware away), common modern PC hardware, prototype wrist
watchs,PDAs, the Playstation, PlaystationII, Dreamcast and even
the XBox consoles, IBM mainframes, massive clusters, and a number
of supercomputers . Linux runs on a vast number of different CPU
chips, including the x86, Intel Itanium, AMD Hammer, ARM, Alpha,
IBM AS/400, SPARC, MIPS, 68k, and Power PC. Linux securely hosts
many databases, webservers, file and print servers, from many
vendors, scaling both in price and ease, according to need. Linux
now has two fully interoperating desktop systems and Libraries,
KDE and GNOME, the latters Accessabilty Toolkit with the
OpenOffice.org office suite has been singled out in this year's
"Helen Keller Achievement Award in Technology".
http://newsvac.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/09/13/1955240
Many vendors are now coming out with Linux based PDAs and embedded
devices.

Granted, many companies, notably IBM, already offer many Linux
based solutions. IBM has already turned all of its hardware and
many software platforms into Linux hosting or hosted systems,
however it is certainly not only vendor to do so. SGI, one of the
leading Unix companies, is shattering world performance records,
attaining linear scalability on a 64-processor Itanium2 based
hardware running Linux.
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2002/september/stream.html

With Linux many vendors already have the ultimate software and
hardware reference platform. Most of all the commercial Unixs,
Mini and Mainframe environments provide the ability to either
directly run Linux binaries or host recompiled Linux source, Linux
development will now dominate the enterprise market. Even
Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has boasted that Microsoft has to
make it as easy as possible to port Linux to Windows.
http://www.crn.com/Sections/BreakingNews/dailyarchives.asp?ArticleID=35789

The reason that the Linux and GNU libraries interpretation of the
open Posix interface standards is becoming the defacto standard
among most Unix and other OS vendors, rather than the BSD
variants, is that it is freely available under commons preserving
GPL and LGPL licensing. Unix/Posix popularity was driven by the
degree to which it has provided a consistent stable and relatively
secure interface while some other vendors change enterprise
architectures on an almost yearly basis. This has made Posix a
business requirement for forward looking implementors and vendors
who wish to maintain a feature-rich, reusable, cross-language
environments over a decent period of time, so the solution has a
chance to be developed to become more stable and secure. Open
source development under commons preserving licensing is providing
an even more consistently stable and relatively secure interface
for system hardware vendors,for open software/free licensed software
developers and even provides a highly stable platform for proprietary
software developers.

SAP, one of the leaders in enterprise and CRM systems is now using
Linux as it's reference platform for all new SAP developments.
http://www9.sap.com/community/week35_1.asp

Oracle, one of the leaders in enterprise database systems, is now
working with Redhat and others to make Linux even more secure,
scaleable and faster platform for Oracle's own products.
http://www.oracle.com/linux/

It is inevitable that the inherent advantages will extend Linux
beyond the datacenter and server market to migrate to the the X11
enterprise application server, the technical desktop, the specific
role desktop, the business desktop, the home desktop, to the
inevitable ubiquitous computing environment.

X11 extends Linux beyond the Linux/Unix desktop universe. There
are X11-servers available for every desktop OS, from Microsoft's
windows to MacOS9 and MacOSX.
http://www.rahul.net/kenton/xsites.html#XMicrosoft
Many of these X11-servers, such as under MacOSX's XDarwin
http://oroborosx.sourceforge.net/
or WinaXe on Microsoft Windows
http://www.apcmag.com/pics/ws/0101config5.gif
can fully intergrate the X11 applications into the host desktop
environment, they look and feel like native applications.

In point of fact, X11 is the only distributed graphical interface
to remain network/binary compatible back to 1986 X-clients. An
organization can set up enterprise infrastructure behind a
internal firewall and have it interfaced via X11 to the desktop -
it can provide a consistent interface for decades. It is the only
such system to remain virtually future-proof.

It is even possible to run some Microsoft Windows applications in
a distributed thin-client environment under Linux, without needing
Microsoft Operating System licenses for each client machine.
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxofficeserver/

Because you can distribute X11 applications across computers, it
also can provide improved performance and a more secure
environment for your organization's systems and data. Data
intensive applications can run on or close to the the databases.
Processor intensive applications can run on unused or shared
special purpose computers. Exposed Internet clients such as web
browsers, instant messaging, file sharing etc, can be run on
"isolated" servers. Multimedia/display intensive applications can
run locally, taking full advantage of full hardware and OpenGL
acceleration such as DRI and GFX though interface libraries such
as the multiplatform Simple DirectMedia Layer
http://www.libsdl.org/index.php

This multimedia ability, along with Linux's flexibility as been
driving force for Linux's recent rapid adoption as a desktop for
professional animation and digital effects in Hollywood and around
the world.
http://www.linuxmovies.org/articles.html

Where locally hosted applications on other OS's are desirable,
GNOME, GTK and KDE applications can be quickly ported to Windows
and OSX.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steven.obrien2/

2. Sun Grants *full* rights to implement though JSPA agreement.

Unlike Microsoft's very limited submission to the ECMA (excluding
..NET notables, such as ASP.NET, WinForms and ADO.NET, to name a few)
Sun has granted the Apache and all open source developers FULL
rights to develop competing products.
http://jakarta.apache.org/site/jspa-agreement.html
[...]
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has made no similar
acknowledgments, in fact quite the opposite ...
http://swpat.ffii.org/players/microsoft/index.en.html
"Responding to questions about the opening-up of the .NET
framework, Ballmer announced that there would certainly be a
"Common Language Runtime Implementation" for Unix, but then
explained that this development would be limited to a subset,
which was "intended only for academic use". Ballmer rejected
speculations about support for free .NET implementations such as
Mono: "We have invested so many millions in .NET, we have so many
patents on .NET, which we want to cultivate."
There are those who claim that .NET is open to implentation,
but until Microsoft make a legal public declaration similar to
that of the JSPA, it is NOT.

Because of the above and Sun's progressive licensing toward both
proprietary and competing implementation vendors
http://java.sun.com/j2ee/licensees.html
Java will dominate anywhere a 100% portable and truly secure
distributed agent environment is required.

However it is easy enough to create portable Linux targeted source
code portable to all Linux hosted architectures, where the Linux
kernel can already provide a more secure environment than
Microsoft's XP or but does not suffer the implicit overhead
required by a virtual machine environment such as JVM or .NET.

3. Freely avalable development enviroment.

The GNU GCC project is in the singular position of being the
leading development toolset for both the open source and
proprietary Unix enterprise community. Even before Linux and
FreeBSD was released, cross compiling and installing GNU utilities
on proprietary Unixs was first things you did. Even Microsoft
recognized this with the inclusion of the GNU GCC toolkit in it's
Services For Unix (SFU) toolkit.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/productinfo/overview/default.asp

Every iteration of GCC includes more support for the official
ISO/ANSI standards for C,C++ and Sun's specifications for Java (
yes! GCC compiles Java Classes into native code ), with the aim of
providing a consistent, stable and secure multi-targeted
development platform.

Freely available development tools such as Emacs, XEmacs and
Eclipse follows the principle of being able to fully customize the
enviroment for productive professional development. Third party
proprietary IDEs range from IBM's fully integrated J2EE
website/webservices application development environment Websphere,
to Borland's Kylix, the latter being freely available for
developing GPL licensed projects. There are so many freely
licensed development tools,environments,libraries and projects to
choose from, that it is VERY rare for not to find an pre-existing
open source stable solution for your problem; you do not have to
start from scratch, just adopt and maybe adapt a pre-existing open
source solution.
http://freshmeat.net/

The role of open source development, under commons preserving GPL
or LGPL licenses, in driving Linux adoption should not be
underestimated. Though few companies will be anxious pay for
software developed from scratch in the current slow economic
environment, they don't have to. One of the key advantages of free
licensing over proprietary solution development is the simplified
legal invocations without the hassle of NDA'a and intellectual
property cross licensing. It encourages both organizations and
individuals to participate in the full knowledge that none of the
participating parties can deny access at a later date though
threat of intellectual property lawsuits or licensing.

The end user rights granted by the GPL and LGPL even extend to
vendors of proprietary software, who may even be producing
software that is direct competition with open source software.
There is nothing to prevent proprietary software vendors from
*linking* and distributing LGPL licensed code with their software,
as long as are willing to distributed the LGPL'ed source code to
the end users. There is nothing to prevent proprietary software
vendors from *bundling* and distributing GPL licensed code with
their software, as long as are willing to distributed the GPL'ed
source code to the end users. As mentioned above Microsoft
already does this with the GPL licensed GCC developer toolkit.

Even with a full GPL, the proprietary software vendor can strip
out the required functionality from GPL sources and create
separate standalone application that runs as a mini-server,
callable via command line and passing data via pipes or even
shared dynamic memory to the proprietary licensed application.

In comparison, on Microsoft's OSs, most application and middleware
vendors that have gained a large enough market share of the
desktop, soon find themselves directly competing with Microsoft. In
many cases, Microsoft add the competing functionality to a freely
bundled or pre-existing Microsoft products, often in a manner that
is difficult for the competing vendor to interoperate with.The
only chance of redress in years of lawsuits or decades of
toothless antitrust cases. GPL Freedom is not only for the Free.

This means open source development method along with the commons
preserving free licensing such as GPL and LGPL will provide the
ultimate competitive advantage for the participants developing as
well as the end customers, serving an incentive that is driving
open source adoption far beyond what any NDA closed loop, RAND
hobbled UN-"Shared" source option will provide. Given the
assured lifespan of free licensed software, this is the pebble
that *is* causing an avalanche.

In the meantime proprietary software,made much easier by adopted
initiatives such as Linux Standard Base
http://www.linuxbase.org/
,will be there to fill gaps missing in ease of use or
functionality.

4. Anybody can generate revenue from an open commons.

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=commons
Commons : the legal right of taking a profit in another's land in
common with the owner or others

The GPL and similar licenses gives the inevitable strategic victory
in the battle for mindshare with Microsoft. Microsoft's recent
additions generate little for its end customers beyond its ability
to lock it's customers into Microsoft's own products. Few of
Microsoft's Internet exposed servers or clients are designed or
implemented with security in mind, whereas Linux has range of
security-compatible products ( securer servers & applications ,
chroot & LSM etc ) from which *END* organizations and individuals
can *USE* to generate revenue. Enough of that revenue will be
spent to make alliances with third parties to collectively develop
new functionality, as well as directly suport the development
infrastructure that has assisted in over one billion (a Gigabuck)
worth of development to freely available source code available in
Linux distributions today.
http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/

GPL/Linux free licensed distributions provides a true free market,
unconstrained by intellectual property monopolies that inflate the
prices, to the developing vendors and the end consumer. Redhat
could never be the next Microsoft, any attempt to lock customers
into it's products would have both customers and vendors quickly
switching distributions. But Redhat, and most of the other Linux
distributions, have actually collaborated in a manner that actually
encourages competition.
http://www.linuxbase.org/

Contrast that with Microsoft's attempts to drive Microsoft's
profitability by it's anti-competitive business practices ( Don't
take my word for it, read the Opinion of the Circuit Court of
Appeals
http://www.naag.org/issues/microsoft/docs-state/pdf/ms-ct_of_apls-opinion.pdf
) Microsoft has no flexibility to offer when dealing with any real
competition simply because they have so much of their
revenue-generating business model based solely around retaining a
absolutely dominant monopoly.

Conclusion

Customers benefits from seamless interoperability with other
vendors products. (Microsoft has not even implemented a fully
inter-operable version of the BSD licensed Kerberos ). This is
partially true in a world where networks are ubiquitous and
computing devices extend far beyond the traditional computer. In
such a market, breadth is a very good thing. It creates
innovations in software design Even more important, it gives the
customer the knowledge that they can choose a range of products to
truly suite their individual needs. Even competing proprietary
vendors can benefit from the freedom provided by the GPL and LGPL
to insure that their own products and services can fully
inter-operate, now and in the future.

Linux is simply the best positioned to be the cross-platform,
cross-market unification technology, guaranteed to grow correctly
because of the way Linux is licensed. Many market vendors are
already heavily involved with Linux, open source and free licensed
software, benefiting from unification under free licensing.
Microsoft could have provided that unification ( based on
Microsoft's early popularity among PC developers), but, right or
wrong, Microsoft's executives greed ensured that it would not.
Once again, Microsofts guilty of multiple violations of the Sherman
Act
http://www.naag.org/issues/microsoft/docs-state/pdf/ms-ct_of_apls-opinion.pdf
( including five counts directly involving Java)
, yet once again, seems unable to comply with the most liberal of
Department Of Justice Settlements
http://216.133.66.117/091802.pdf

Horace Greeley (1811-1872), Editor of the New York Tribune in
an editorial in 1841 said:"Do not lounge in the cities! There is room and health in the
country, away from the crowds of idlers and imbeciles. Go west,
before you are fitted for no life but that of the factory."

In the same way, I urge you to...
Do not lounge on the Microsoft platform! There is room and scope
on Linux, away from the crowds of idlers and imbeciles, Go open,
before you are fitted for no life but that of the helpdesk.

But more importantly, by 1871 Horace Greeley also wrote:
"This Daniel Boone business is about played out."
In the same way, the last decade's Linux customer base can be seen
as the self reliant pioneers. The "Do It Yourself" attitude and habit
was learned from a time when "doing for themselves" was the only option.
This is no longer the case, there are plenty new settlers
and far many more willing to migrate, who are all too willing to
pay for hardware, support, customization, collective development
and even quality proprietary licensed products.

Linux will conquer the world. Yet, only by attempting to pull the
wool over your eyes does Microsoft stand a chance, of denying
what they have known to be true from the outset...
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/

David Mohring - "Go Linux, Young Person!"

* Updated links

Since I first posted the above article a number of the links are no longer valid. Here is some more uptodate replacements.


Evans Data Corp.
http://www.evansdata.com/n2/pr/releases/North%20American%20Fall%202003%20Release.shtml
Other findings from the survey of more than 500 developers in North America include:


*Open source has become more socially acceptable over time. Back in Spring 2001, only 38% of developers used any open source software modules. Today, 62% of developers are incorporating open source code in their applications ? a growth rate of 63%.


*The three most expected features for Java development tools are Web services support, profilers and optimization tools, and J2EE frameworks.

*Confidence in Linux has risen by almost 90% since 1999. In Evans? Fall 1999 North American Development Survey, only 34% of developers felt the OS was ready for mission critical applications, compared to 64% expressing such confidence today.

Since 2002
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2002/september/stream.html
Linux has been scaled way beyound 64 processors
http://www.open-mag.com/features/Vol_79/redstorm/redstorm.htm
http://www.wallstreetwebcasting.com/webcast/needham7/cray/3__Slide16.JPG

SAP on Linux
http://www.sap.com/linux/

X11 on Windows
http://xfree86.cygwin.com/
Note that Microsoft as added a X11 server to the latest release of Services For Unix(SFU). ( Most of the source for SFU libraries is derived from OpenBSD )
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030927090008
MacOSX also now includes a X11 server.

Linux use in Movies and Hollywood is now entrenched
http://linuxmovies.org/

The Cygwin GNOME project aims to port the GNOME desktop to Windows OS, using Cygwin as a porting tool and user environment.
http://cygnome.sourceforge.net/

And lastly, Microsoft antitrust issues refuse to slip away...
http://news.google.com/news?scoring=d&num=100&q=Microsoft+Antitrust

Posted by: David Mohring   Posted on: 02/12/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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