By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor
The unification of the Free Standards Group and the Open Source
Development Labs into the all-new shiny Linux Foundation has drawn
a lot of attention this week. But while a lot of people are
interested in the motivation behind the merger, I am wondering what
the outcomes of this move might be.
First, and this is the gimmie conclusion, there’s going to be a
much stronger move to get the two major desktop environments (GNOME
and KDE) to work with each other. The OSDL has the Portland
Project, the much-needed collaborative project to get the two camps
to start coding together. The FSG is all about standardization,
since it’s in their name. Or, at least it was. Now they’re about
“Foundation”–whatever that means.
Beyond that, and that fact that they’re going to pay the bills
for Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, and other OSDL Fellows, what’s
this new Foundation going to be all about?
Here’s my suggestion: the LF may end up becoming the glue that
holds Linux together. Or saves one of those big desktop
environments from obscurity.
Over the course of the last few months, we have seen an
escalation (or “surge,” if the word suits you) in the competitive
rhetoric between Red Hat and Novell and Oracle. Which is a
politically correct way of saying that it’s been “pile on Red Hat”
season lately. Thus far, it’s been just
that—rhetoric. But soon—very soon, I
think, we may be looking at an event the likes of which we have not
seen a major commercial distribution do before.
The dropping of a desktop environment.
The rationale for this is pretty simple: Novell and Red Hat are
playing in the enterprise arena, and right now each of them are
trying to differentiate themselves from the other.
Business-wise, Novell’s big strategy is to partner with vendors
(including Microsoft) to get themselves into more customers’ shops.
Red Hat had that strategy too, with their star partner Oracle, and
we can see how well that turned out.
Red Hat’s big strategy seems to be “stay the course,” which is
to say keep doing what they’re doing: making the sales, following
up on leads, investing in other companies and new technologies.
On the technology side, things are much more fuzzier. After all,
both use Linux as their core offering, and there’s not too many
ways you can technically differentiate Red Hat Enterprise
Linux/Fedora from SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/openSUSE. Yes, I
know there are some technical differences, some brought about by
Red Hat’s determination to build special APIs and other hooks for
their developer partners, or Novell’s desire to do the same. Not to
mention toolsets: RHN vs. YaST comes to mind.
But right now, if you are a business that has an application
that runs on Linux, you would be hard pressed to find a technical
reason to choose between RHEL or SLES. Business reason, yes.
A side show to all of this is the Red Hat/Oracle brouhaha.
Oracle announces a distribution based on RHEL, with their own
cheaper support. Red Hat responds with the common sense notion that
a few dollars of savings per year per server isn’t all that great
for third-party support. Oracle comes back and announces their
Database Management Framework has been re-mixed with new tools
added for a Linux management tool that will be free to Unbreakable
Linux users (well, middle- and upper-tier UL users, actually). Red
Hat zings back an us-too management solution that promises to be
better.
And on it goes. This tit-for-tat situation leads me to wonder if
we are not about to see a similar battle between Red Hat and
Novell. If that’s the case, then I could very easily see a desktop
environment put on the chopping block by one of these distributors.
Not only would focusing on one desktop be a way to differentiate,
but it would also enable said vendor to put their support and
development efforts into one environment. Theoretically, this could
lead to accelerated development and a much better desktop
environment.
Theoretically.
I want to stop and be clear here. This is not about a commercial
distro that would only run one environment. This is Linux after
all, and all desktop environments would be able to run… but only
one DE would be supported.
The question is, if this theory is viable, who will blink first?
There, I have little doubt it will be Novell. They tried to do
something very similar to what I am suggesting back in 2004, when
they briefly toyed with officially supporting GNOME in their
enterprise product line. (Customers could still use KDE, but they’d
be on their own.) The hue and cry from the community led Novell to
back-pedal, but I think it’s still an option for them.
The real question: Which one would Novell choose? You’d have to
strongly favor GNOME, since there is still a strong Ximian
contingent in the company ranks. But all those ex-SUSE Linux AG
folk love KDE (which is the real reason Novell caved on their 2004
decision). This internal duality is, I am sure, the only reason
Novell hasn’t dumped KDE already.
If Novell made SLES a GNOME environment (maybe letting the
KDEers in the company play in the openSUSE sandbox), then what
would Red Hat do? Stay with the multi-environment approach? Or cut
their own time and effort (read: costs) and choose to support just
one DE? And then what would that DE be? GNOME (which Red Hat
historically likes) and be beholden to their competitor’s
development team for improvements? Or a full switch to KDE?
This is the very situation I believe the Linux Foundation is
here to prevent. If DEs become more standardized, then the
arguments of one DE versus the other become a lot less costly and
much more moot. The Big Two could afford to keep things the way
they are.
I don’t think we need more division between the commercial
players. If customers have to choose between environments in their
decision to choose a distro, then I fear that this will only dilute
the power Linux has overall in the enterprise market. And, if the
commercial vendors decide to go with the same environment, what
happens to the support and funding for the orphaned one?
The Linux Foundation, if it keeps all the players from moving
too far away from the rest, can prevent more technical
differentiation than there already is.
Here’s to their success.