By Jason Compton, VNU
Net
Linux backers say it’s only a matter of time before traditional
Unix vendors join their open-source party.
Linux and Windows NT/2000 continue to squeeze Unix market share.
Many pundits will tell you that life is becoming a little too
interesting for the old guard. Michael Dell for instance, was
spotted in London recently, promoting his vision that Unix will
give way to Linux in the not-too-distant future.
Now word has leaked from semi-private briefings that Unix
stalwart Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) will release its own Linux
distribution by the end of this year. While some are asking what
this will mean for the future of Unix and Linux, the real question
is: what took it so long?
The writing has been on the wall for some time that SCO was
going to evolve, if not into a pure Linux company, then at least
into a major Linux player. The firm couldn’t afford to let Linux
pass it by.
SCO’s sales staff have been putting on brave faces, downplaying
Linux momentum with talk of UnixWare and OpenServer’s market-tested
stability, the promise of Monterey, and the strength of its retail
channel. But the company’s strategic planners were casting the
deciding vote. SCO has already made significant investments in the
Linux future, with holdings in TurboLinux and a pre-IPO stake in
Caldera, as well as LinuxMall.com.
Serious applications
Linux is more than an investment hedge, for SCO has announced that
Linux will be a supported server platform for its flagship
Tarantella application-hosting system. And the company’s
professional services division will cheerfully help you with a
Linux deployment, because installation and support is where the
money is, rather than upfront purchase costs.
Other major Unix players have danced in and out of Linux, with
IBM shipping Aix and Linux side-by-side, Sun Microsystems buying
into the Linux application market with StarOffice, and so forth.
But SCO has been perched so close to the edge of the Linux pool
that jumping in seemed inevitable.
The specifics of ‘SCO Linux’, for lack of an official brand
name, are still unavailable, as SCO has not yet acknowledged that
the cat is out of the bag. But it may not really matter what’s
inside the box. Sure, the technical experience and expertise of
20-plus years of Unix development will certainly provide a boost to
Linux development. SCO is likely to target better clustering and
multi-processor operation, and an opportunity to leverage
Tarantella to cement Linux as a top-tier choice for
application-hosting.
Linux as a sales tool
The real significance of SCO entering the Linux market may lie not
in the developer cubicles, but in the sales force. Linux vendors
have learned the ins and outs of the Unix market well enough to
sell against Unix, but they lack a history.
SCO knows how to sell Unix, and has done rather well at it for
some time, especially in the lower-end and embedded areas of the
market.
Being able to wrap knowledge around a Linux offering may not
make Red Hat, SuSE, and Caldera irrelevant overnight, but it could
be enough to change the way enterprises think about moves in IT
infrastructure, with both sides of the Unix coin being represented
by one vendor. Watch for the fork police to get edgy before SCO
even has a chance to formally announce its intentions. Still, it’s
not unthinkable that SCO could throw a new ratchet into the unified
code puzzle.
If SCO plans to go beyond simply rebadging a Caldera or
TurboLinux build, and slapping a Tarantella Express demo version on
top, don’t be surprised if it considers proposing some changes to
make Linux closer to its vision of what an operating system should
be.
SCO is a card-carrying sponsor of Linux International, which
theoretically means it should want to play nicely with all the
other developers and avoid causing a source tree split. But friends
are friends, and business is business. And this may be the first
day of the rest of Linux’s life.
Update: Linux product and industry news
AMD pushes embedded Linux
Having jump-started its desktop business with the heavy-duty Athlon
processor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is hoping that Linux will
stir up enthusiasm in its embedded devices business. In partnership
with embedded Linux company Lineo, AMD will bundle the Embedix
Linux variant in its embedded processor developer kits. AMD’s
embedded processor line consists of two basic product families:
ageing and retired desktop processors, such as the K6-2, and
integrated processor/chipset microcontrollers in the Elan family.
While AMD’s system of farming out slower, market-tested
processors to the small devices market is cost-effective, it hasn’t
made the company the toast of the town. Bundling a ready-made
embedded Linux could help the development community embrace AMD’s
more humble silicon.
Plan 9 For Everyone!
Operating system completists have something new to be thankful for.
Plan 9, the operating system from Lucent (originally developed by
the now defunct Bell Labs in the late 1980s), and arguably more
classic than the film from which it adopted its name, has been
released as open source. Lucent opted to mint its own open source
licence, (the ‘Plan 9 Licence’) although it is fairly easy to read
and liberal in its terms. In short, modifications must be published
as open source, although developers are free to market and sell
their derivative works of the Plan 9 source, subject to certain
naming and trademark rules.
The new version of Plan 9 is described as a ‘snapshot’ rather
than a true 3 stable release. Lucent has axed the 1995-vintage
‘Mothra’ web browser, but added an inter-process communications
system (dubbed ‘plumbing’), an IMAP4 (Exchange) mail server, and
SSH encryption.
Unlike Linux, a grassroots effort to replicate and then expand
beyond Unix, Plan 9 was an attempt at an evolutionary step beyond
Unix, but with much of the same look and feel.
Plan 9’s open source code offers developers a chance to reflect
on the evolution of operating systems, as well as emerging
distributed computing networks. Plan 9 was designed with
distributed processing in mind, at a time when processor cycles
were considerably more scarce.