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Linux moves up

SEPTEMBER 1998

It's the fastest growing OS outside of NT.

Many business managers seem content to genuflect toward Redmond and pay allegiance to an NT-centric universe. But IT departments have a subversive plan to wrestle back control of their operating systems. Fed up with the notion of building applications on a proprietary Microsoft OS, corporate developers have been smuggling in Linux, the open source, Unix-like operating system that users can freely download, modify, and share.

When I started looking at the networking problems that I was having with NT and with Windows, I thought I couldn't make my development schedules," says Eugene Devereaux, who uses Linux to build onboard computer systems and testing tools for the Boeing Co. Devereaux says that by the time management even realizes Linux is running on company workstations, the project is often half over. "So long as it's appealing to the technical workforce," says Devereaux, "I think it's unstoppable."

The Hacker OS

While Linux was initially smuggled in through the back door by rebellious engineers, it's now rapidly gaining acceptance as an enterprise operating system. A survey by the Gartner Group reveals that Linux is in use at 14% of all business sites. It's already the second-fastest growing OS, with an estimated seven million installations, and it's the only operating system in the world not made by Microsoft that's expanding its market share from year to year.

Impressive numbers if you consider that Linux was created a mere seven years ago by a self-effacing 21-year-old native of Finland. Linus Torvalds was then a University of Helsinki student frustrated with the limitations of DOS and too poor to purchase another operating system. Torvalds began experimenting with Minix, a tiny Unix-like OS for 386 machines, which he eventually completely rewrote. In keeping with the hacker tradition, Torvalds posted his kernel to the university's server -- thus making it available for peer review and modification.

Before long, other hackers around the world began downloading Torvalds' source code and sending back their improvements. Thousands of volunteer programmers eventually pitched in to refine the kernel, which was later combined with large portions of a free OS called GNU and dubbed Linux. Much of Linux's success is due to Torvalds' skill in recognizing good ideas and making contributors feel appreciated. He eventually copyrighted Linux under the GPL license, which means that anyone could sell a version of Linux, but the source code or any changes or improvements must remain public.

Linux enthusiasts point out that this collaborative development project has produced a particularly stable and reliable operating system. Unlike proprietary software whose vendors reveal only the binaries -- machine language versions of executable programs -- open source software (OSS) like Linux allows users to see the source code, enabling them to repair flaws and customize the program. Fans of OSS point out that with so many people scrutinizing the code, bugs are located, fixes are created, and features are allowed to evolve much more rapidly.

"We offer a price performance benefit that Microsoft users can only dream about, but the benefit of the model is not actually the price," says Bob Young, president and CEO of Red Hat Software Inc., one of several companies which offer free Linux downloads. Young argues that anytime a corporation has an application that requires a fair amount of engineering, access to the binary is not enough. "If there are some inconsistencies in how the application interfaces against the OS, they have no way of fixing it because they have bought a car with the hood welded shut."

Linux is now running everywhere from 3COM's handheld PalmPilot computer, to the Los Alamos National Laboratories, which used 68 Digital Equipment alpha processors to build a Linux-based super computer that cost only $150,000, yet in benchmarks performed more than 19 billion operations per second. Linux has even gone Hollywood, handling all the special effects renderings for the movie Titanic.

In addition to Boeing, Linux is also being quietly used by organizations as diverse as Sony Development Corp., Mercedes Benz, Southwestern Bell, NASA, and the FBI. The relative lack of enterprise and personal productivity applications has slowed down the acceptance of Linux in enterprise environments. But a turning point came in July when Oracle, Informix, and Netscape announced they were all porting server products to Linux.

Torvalds now works for a California chip design company where he is laboring on Version 2.2 of the Linux kernel. He surfaces at various locations around the world to conduct "World Domination 101" seminars attended by the Linux faithful, who are determined to revolutionize the way software is built, licensed, and supported.

Difficult Decisions

Eric Raymond, an early proponent of open source development, has become an ambassador of sorts for the acceptance of Linux in corporate environments. When asked why he has taken on this mission, he dispenses with marketing niceties. "Because closed software sucks," says Raymond. "It's painful knowing that there are lots of people out there who are used to an astonishingly low level of quality and reliability of software and furthermore have been brainwashed into accepting this as normal."

Randy Kessell, manager of technical analysis for a Southwestern Bell operation center, notes that because Linux allows his company to do more remote network administration and software loads than was possible with either Microsoft or NetWare products, it has driven down their network management costs. He adds that his company is thinking about replacing their NT network server with Linux. "Our preliminary tests show that the Linux solution is outrunning the NT solution," says Kessell. "It's much faster."

Of course, not everybody sees it that way. "The bad news about open source is that it requires you to make a lot of difficult decisions," says Walter Nelson, vice president of software engineering and product management at Fair, Isaac and Co. Inc. The San Rafael, Calif.-based company develops financial applications for Chase Manhattan and the top 20 banks in North America, but it has no plans for Linux. Nelson agrees that open source software offers flexibility, but says it requires more sophisticated IS capabilities than many businesses can support. "It means that you are using a wide range of multi-vendor components to try and construct your system," says Nelson. He says IT expenses are driving managers toward NT solutions that are integrated, work smoothly off the shelf and into which components can be added over time. "That kind of under-the-hood engineering is not what banks want to get involved with. What they want are functions that they can implement and maintain easily."

Overcoming NT Simplicity

While developers like Nelson are uneasy about the Linux learning curve, Linux supporters say they will overcome the attraction of NT's simplicity by selling its reliability. Ben Wittard, who is using Linux to run 90 print servers worldwide for Cisco Systems, says his managers are beginning to notice that his system has had no downtime for years. "Linux is an incredibly robust, very usable operating system," says Wittard. "It was incredibly cheap and very effective for our needs."

Linux advocates point to the relative stability of open source workhorses like TCP/IP, DNS, and Perl, which keep the Web running more smoothly than any commercial equivalent. They note that 80% of all Internet E-mail is routed by an OSS called Sendmail. As more businesses start to depend on the Web, they argue that access to source code becomes more significant to programmers and Web site operators.

As the complexity of Web-based software increases, OSS allows the number of people analyzing these programs to increase proportionately. Critics of proprietary software charge that as these programs get bigger, the relatively small number of in-house and beta testers means that more bugs will slip through. In the open source model, says Raymond, the large number of co-developers means there's a greater chance of catching problems, even in complex systems. With enough eyeballs, he says, all bugs are shallow. Boeing's Devereaux notes, for example, that if he has a problem with the way an optimization works under a compiler, sending the problem to Sun may or may not elicit a response. "But if I put it out as a problem report onto GNU or a newsgroup," he says, "I could have a fix to that within days."

Still, fans of NT are not impressed with the tremendous bug tracking power of Linux newsgroups. Nelson says there is no question that any version of Unix is more mature and stable than NT. But he insists there were many fewer bugs in NT 4.0 compared to NT 3.51, and he predicts that NT 5.0, when it comes out, will be even better. His view is echoed by many NT users, including Mark McCormack, executive vice president of Intertech Management Group Inc. in St. Louis. "Our view with customer implementations is that Windows NT is a very stable operating environment," says McCormack, whose company develops applications for the telecom industry.

But Kessell of Southwestern Bell says reliability problems he had with NT drove him to try Linux. His network monitoring group tried running PCs with Windows 95 and Windows 98, but the GUI for their monitoring tools kept locking up. "Because it was failing, our users never used the graphical interface which we had paid outrageous amounts of money for," says Kessell. Linux not only runs the application well, he says, but it's more secure. When Southwestern Bell's security team runs their intrusion tests on Linux, Kessell says he knows the versions they are testing are up-to-date. "Not just with one company, but the rest of the world."

Linux's Image Problem

Without close attention to technical standards, Linux would never have come this far, but sheer technical superiority is not enough to win converts in the business community. Devereaux notes the Boeing managers were impressed by how fast fixes are generated for Linux, but he says they took a dim view of software they perceive was created by a bunch of hackers and college students. "Now it's turning up in so many places, and it's being used in so many projects, they don't know how to get their hands around it. Who's really controlling this?"

The short answer is all the people Boeing managers suspect, plus a lot of engineers who cut off their ponytails years ago. Part of the image problem with Linux is the word "hacker," which has often been used incorrectly to describe crackers -- malicious people who break into or destroy computer systems. "It's what the hackers use, so it's got to be full of little back-door holes," says Southwestern Bell's Kessell, summing up management's traditional distrust of OSS. But Linux has proven more secure because Boeing gets patches and fixes months before they get them from IBM or Hewlett-Packard. "And we can read through the source code to see if there are any Trojan horses in it," he says.

While a lot of business managers conjure up the image of deviant 14-year-olds, traditional hacker culture traces it roots to the early MIT programmers who felt duty-bound to give their solutions away so their peers could move on to new problems. Since good programmers are already well-paid, this mostly Unix-based, online community is motivated by the satisfaction of advancing a good idea, dispensing advice, or collectively building something superior to what any one person or entity could create. This is the community that created Unix, the Internet, Usenet, and the Web. "I don't think hackers are bad," says Intertech's McCormack. "I think hackers drive the industry forward. Bill Gates was a hacker at one time."

Big companies are finally realizing that groups of hackers can produce superb technology. IBM recently entered into a partnership with the Apache Group, a loose collaboration of 20 OSS programmers who developed the Apache HTTP Server. The Apache Server has captured over 50% of the Web server market and is often used by ISPs who run Linux. IBM wants to use it as the basis of its WebSphere electronic commerce package. But the only currency the group would accept was IBM's technique to make the server run faster with NT and its pledge to work towards Apache's future development.

Linux's other public relations problem involves the phrase "free software." The GNU OS included in the Linux distributions was originally developed by the GNU project and Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation (see sidebar, "Stallman on Free Software") Raymond says the term "free software" frightens off mainstream corporate CEOs who assume anything they get for free can't be any good. In February, Raymond launched a plan to repackage "free software" as "open source." "There are a lot of people who have heard of the Free Software Foundation who have this distorted idea that we are all communists with long hair and sandals," says Raymond. "What we are dealing with here is perception, not reality."

Indeed, far from being deficient in comparison to NT, Linux is especially valuable to companies who engage in electronic commerce or Web computing and worry about NT bugs opening up security holes, or those whose servers lock up when they try to run too many applications on a Windows machine. And, of course, it's free.

But not all are swayed by the Linux marketing push, especially those who are tasked with running mission-critical applications. CyberGate in Deerfield Beach, Fla., which is one of the world's largest Web hosting operations, says they are sticking with IBM's AIX and RS/6000. The company's director of network operations, Joe Traister, says he runs Linux on his home PC and appreciates the fact that he can make his buffer larger and recompile the kernel. But he's not about to swap out the company's 40 AIX boxes in favor of commodity Linux servers -- a move he believes would require more machines and a big leap of faith. "With the amount of revenue that rides on them, I need to be answering to somebody," says Traister. "When something goes
wrong it's going to be a lot easier for me to say 'Yeah, that's an IBM product' than 'That's something I downloaded off the net.'"

A larger problem, says Traister, is the support issue. He prefers to deal with IBM because it has a greater financial stake in answering his questions. "I know that some companies are starting to do that for Linux, but at this point in time I just don't know that the support is where it needs to be for me to run this enterprise," he says.

Selling Linux Support

Contrary to popular belief, there are plenty of ways to find Linux support. Seasoned users go to Linux newsgroups and some companies rely on their in-house, Unix-trained staff. Still others opt for the increasingly broad array of Linux support services offered by application vendors and Linux distributors. The largest distributors -- Red Hat Software and Caldera Inc. -- both offer free downloads and CD-ROMs with the Linux kernel and accompanying utilities and programming tools for about $50. They also offer free installation support to users unfamiliar with installing the OS. But since anyone can resell Linux under the GUI license, both make their money selling tech support.

Red Hat focuses on providing wholesale technical support to such organizations as Austin, Texas-based Collective Technologies, which provides Unix and Linux system administration for Merill Lynch. Red Hat's Young says selling Linux is a brand management exercise. "We have to produce a better quality of Linux and we have to support that version of Linux better than our competitors do," he says.

Nicholas Wells, director of marketing for Caldera, says that while Red Hat targets the development community, his company focuses on commercial users such as Frontier Communications. Caldera offers a $200 boxed Linux set that includes Netscape's Fast Track Server, a Novell NetWare client, and a copy of the StarOffice productivity suite. It also offers inexpensive support contracts, sysadmin training and, soon, Linux certification classes. Wells acknowledges that the Linux community can seem chaotic to Fortune 500 companies. "They know the technology is great, but their boss doesn't want to run the company on free software," says Wells. "We're safe, you can get your products from us and we will support you."

As Linux moves deeper into the enterprise, some predict that companies will hire more in-house support staff to mediate with the OSS community and evaluatesoftware downloaded off the net. Wittard of Cisco agrees that it helps to have an in-house staff of "nerds, the really geeky people."

Application vendors are also stepping up to support their products on Linux. Tim Payne, director of database marketing at Oracle, says many of his company's corporate customers have made large investments in Linux. When Oracle announced in July that it would be offering 24x7 support for Oracle8 on Linux, he says 300 customers called the next day asking about availability. "It's reliable, it's proven, it runs on commodity Intel boxes, and it's a really low-cost alternative to NT," says Payne. "The fact that you are going to be able to get enterprise quality support from Oracle to deploy on the Linux platform will help customers adopt Linux."

Taking On NT

Payne argues that NT will inevitably grow less important as more companies deploy systems on the Web once the client platform becomes the Web browser. But Red Hat's Young insists that Linux's main competition is NT because the latter is by far the fastest growing operating system in corporate settings -- and that momentum will be hard to stop.

Indeed, NT advocate, Nelson, of Fair, Isaac and Co., says he doesn't see any of his financial services customers switching to Linux. Their data centers are still running mainframe legacy applications on IBM's MVS and OS/390 operating systems, he says. And those that are using NT to build front-end applications are concerned about staffing and training, key selling points for NT. He notes that NT offers a graphical interface that makes it easier to use. It also can be supported by simple development tools such as Visual C++. Many system administrators still don't have the level of skill required to run Linux, he argues, and putting it in the hands of neophytes could dramatically increase IT's administration costs.

Nelson acknowledges that Unix programmers know more about systems compared to what it takes to develop in a Windows environment. But he says these programmers are harder to find and retain in industrial settings. According to Nelson, major institutions say to themselves, "'If I want to do development, I'll hire some people who are maybe mid-level developers, but can use these tools and get me the functionality I need.'"

Companies that are already developing on NT appreciate the fact that they can develop to a single standard, which ensures a certain level of compatibility. Nelson points out that Microsoft has succeeded in bundling functionality with integrated applications in both back-office and desktop suites. "Microsoft is spending a lot of time with customers putting together a cogent, overall strategy for what their operating system has to do to meet enterprise implementation standards," he says.

Linux proponents say the flip side of this argument is that when a company uses Microsoft products, they are in lockstep with Microsoft's development agen da. If a company has gained all the benefits they need from standardization, they should continue using Microsoft products, says Red Hat's Young. "But most sophisticated corporations recognize that they simply can't do that. It looks good on paper, but in reality they don't get all the tools and services they need from a single supplier, no matter how big it is."

Boeing's Devereaux predicts that many companies will eventually run parallel operating systems to leverage the benefits of both Linux and NT as his firm has done. He says the biggest challenge that NT presents to Linux is the ubiquity of its office automation suite. The Boeing office environment has standardized on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. But there are now so many Boeing employees running Linux from home that the company initiated a "single glass project" to help these users download E-mail from Microsoft Exchange. A Citrix Java client now uses X-Windows to link engineering workstations with the Windows-based office environment. Devereaux says there need to be better viewers for Linux. Other Linux users, like Kessell of Southwestern Bell, say that as long as Applixware comes out within two or three months of Word, compatibility is a non-issue.

Will Linux Save Unix or Destroy It?

While Linux distributors claim that they are going after the NT market, they could be a greater threat to Unix vendors. "It's a virtual work-a-like," says CyberGate's Traister. "You can get your favorite Unix code off the net and put it on your Linux system with the same amount of effort as putting it on any other platform."

Young of Red Hat argues that since Unix vendors make most of their money on servers, Linux will help ensure that Microsoft does not own the desktop so completely that users will buy a Microsoft enterprise server to integrate with their Microsoft desktops and departmental servers. Linux's success in departmental and Web servers will keep companies open to the idea of heterogeneous environments, he says. "They know they are getting their heads handed to them," says Young. "Linux is competing with them, but it is also an ally in the necessary battle to keep Microsoft from owning the whole world."

Mike Cowpland, CEO of Corel, points out that the balkanization of Unix meant that no one platform was worth developing for, with the result that most Unix applications are legacy programs. But the popularity of Linux at universities, where it is the dominant OS, means that a new generation of programmers could eventually develop for Linux and Unix. "Linux is what Unix maybe should have been, but it just split into ten flavors," says Cowpland.

Linux supporters say Unix never made it on the desktop because it was expensive and ran on proprietary hardware. Once the desktop is lost, they say, it's difficult to get enough mindshare to make the OS grow. Now that Linux is going after the desktop, observers say they see Unix vendors uniting around Linux. "We're seeing Linux become the standard Unix," says Larry Augustin, president of VA Research Inc., a Mountain View, Calif., company that can barely keep up with demand for their PCs with Linux preinstalled. Yet Augustin notes that the Linux desktop strategy is making many Unix vendors nervous. He believes that SCO is the most vulnerable because, unlike the other Unix vendors, they are a pure-play software company and would be hardest hit if they had to give up their proprietary standard. "It's very difficult to see where they have a future," says Augustin.

But Michael Foster, director of Unix systems marketing for SCO, says Linux is good for his company because it's creating a resurgence in Unix system development. "I'm excited," he says. "It was a lot harder two years ago to market Unix."

Even so, Foster insists that none of SCO's customers would consider switching to an OS that he charges has no commercial infrastructure. SCO, on the other hand, provides "security and safety, support and service, and anti-churn and accountability," says Foster. What's more, he alleges that Linux, like Unix, has already fragmented (see sidebar, "Is Linux Too Fragmented?").

While Sun has already joined Linux International, Raymond believes that they and other Unix vendors will not be able to compete with Linux because they have a smaller number of developers. Some users believe the rise of Java-based apps makes Linux more attractive because Enterprise Java Beans could be used as middleware in NT and Linux environments. But Raymond says licensing problems have soured the relationship between Sun and the Linux community, which sees Java as having the same bug and maintenance problems as other closed source products.

Brian Croll, director of marketing for Sun's Solaris product, says he sees Linux as more of a partner than a competitor because it sparked the development community and it's easy to port between the two platforms. He says that if the operating system is well-defined, users don't need the source code to build interesting applications. "We see ourselves as sort of a big brother to Linux in the sense that as applications are developed, they will want to move to the point where they will want to deploy it in a stable fashion," says Croll.

The Linux Wish List

Stability, accountability, and trust. These are the concerns that Linux skeptics will continue to bring up every time an enthusiastic IT person wants to load a free OS onto their company's servers. Raymond argues that Linux will continue to evolve faster and further than proprietary software until it becomes one of the world's most trusted programs. But even proponents of OSS development say this will depend on the Linux community's ability to deftly manage its own growth. OSS consultant Marshall McKusick got laughs at the recent Usenix Unix conference when he joked that organizing the contributions of thousands of extremely smart people is another branch of animal husbandry.

NT users like McCormack of Intertech acknowledge that upstart operating systems like Linux are pushing the entire software industry forward. But his clients, such as GTE, which uses NT-based customer service and billing applications, will stick with the more established OS. "If they go down, they are not going to get their revenue," says McCormack. "I'm not sure that they would make the leap of faith to more of a grassroots effort right now."

Organizations whose lawyers want to make sure that they can sue someone if their applications crash are not likely to consider Linux vendors sufficiently deep-pocketed. Others will point out that Linux still needs a good volume manager and needs to scale up to run more than four processors reliably. These companies are bound to listen to Unix vendors like SCO's Foster, who notes that he doesn't see Linux working with companies like Compaq or Tandem for high-end clustering.

Yet, as Stallman of the Free Software Foundation notes, the promise of a free operating system is the ability to freely exchange ideas in a community based on voluntary service. It's like having an enthusiastic IT Peace Corps standing ready to solve the problems you've been paying your vendor thousands of dollars to resolve -- if you can get them on the phone.

It's worth noting that a mere two weeks after their release, Linux developers simultaneously harnessed four Intel Xeon processors. Taking note, Intel sponsored a Bastille Day Linux discussion at the Santa Clara, Calif., convention center where Torvalds told the audience that the Linux community would take only a few weeks to get the Merced chip up and running for their OS. Not that anyone's signed contracts or anything.

Linux developers still need to build a GUI, develop enterprise tools, convince vendors to support products on Linux, and get training companies to teach the OS. But Young of Red Hat says Linux is in a marathon race, not a sprint. Indeed, the question in the minds of many true believers is not what Linux can do for you, but what can you do for Linux? Says Young, "There is a whole industry that has to be built and it's going to take us ten years to do that before we are in a position to be perceived as an acceptable alternative each and every time to a Microsoft solution."

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