LinuxPlanet: comment: Strategic Linux

“…I mentioned the hard times that have befallen the
carrion beetles of the plaintiffs bar in part because it is a good
thing, and we’re in desperate need of good news; in part because it
illustrates the unintended consequences of a reprehensible action;
and in part because it cuts Linux businesses a little slack at a
time when they very much need it. This is important because of the
tremendous contributions that those businesses make to Linux and
because it is crucial that Linux not become a de facto single
source system.

As to the first point, Linux distributors have contributed a
number of ease-of-use features that do not fit easily into the
scratch-an-itch model of open source programming. A lot of the work
done by distributions is not what the excited young programmer
diving into Linux would undertake. Many people enjoy cooking, but
few like to do the dishes. For this reason it is a very good thing
that we have distributions producing installation and configuration
utilities.

The second point is more important. I’ve heard it argued by very
intelligent people that we might as well simply surrender to Red
Hat, whereupon all issues of incompatibility, file hierarchy
standards, and so on would disappear. And I have argued in response
that these issues must be resolved outside any one distribution, to
avoid any one distribution becoming so dominant that the others
really don’t matter. (It’s worth noting that corporations are
recognizing this as well, which is why IBM, for instance, has
working relationships with multiple Linux distributors. They were
the first to fall victim to the perilous nature of single source
software.)

The powers that be have been making very slow progress in
adopting a definition of standard Linux. To avoid pre-emption by a
dominant distribution — and by this I mean Red Hat, which produces
an excellent distribution but one that must not become the only
distribution — these bodies would have to do a little less meeting
and hemming and hawing and a little more producing. Here’s hoping
that they do just that. Standards are necessary in any operating
system, and they are likely to be far better, as we’ve learned with
Microsoft, if they’re established by a standards body and not a
corporation which, quite rightly, has its own interests chiefly in
mind.”

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