Open Sauce Software

A BusinessWeek article says the open source model is broken. But Red Hat's CEO tells us it isn't.

The original article actually says "the open-source business model that relies solely on support and service revenue streams is failing to meet the expectations of investors", and it's by Stuart Cohen, CEO of Collaborative Software Initiative, and a supporter of the Microsoft/Novell deal.

As Matthew Aslett points out at 451 CAOS Theory, Cohen, does not say open source won't work, merely that it's not going to give good returns to investors, as long as it relies on basic support revenues for the Linux kernel.

The day that article came out, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehouse told us more or less the same thing: "If all we did was give support for free software we would be out of business," he told a group of journalists in London on Monday. "We might as well call ourselves Joe's Linux Support."

Instead (and this abbreviates what Whitehouse told us), Red Hat aims to ride a wave of change, as IT users move to cloud models, and clouds all adopt Linux. Red Hat provides the broad horizontal functions and middleware that clouds require, but stops short of providing actual cloud services (unlike Microsoft, with Azure).

All this - like the FLOSS 2020 report which also came out this week - can seem somewhat fuzzy, and un-technical. But that goes with the territory.

Open source is ready to take over the mainstream, but that means reaching out into areas where users won't care what operating system their application is running on, and in many cases (like clouds) they actually won't even know.

Whitehouse came to Red Hat from outside the IT industry (from Delta Airlines) and makes no apologies for that, endearingly dismissing technical issues as "speeds and feeds".

He sees himself as a transitional figure, helping Red Hat broaden its appeal: "We win on technology, in companies that use IT for competitive advantage, but we don't do so well with mainstream customers."

He's pushing the company to do more strategic thinking and smarten up its sales processes: "Last year, Red Hat had its first strategic plan," he says, something the company had thought it didn't need, in a period of highly profitable growth.

What does it need now? "Well-schooled sales people."

By 2020, the cloud will have taken over, and open source will rule in the cloud - with the result that 40 percent of IT jobs will be related to open source, according to a roadmap launched yesterday.

The FLOSS 2020 roadmap, announced at the Open World Forum in Paris, gives a set of predictions of where IT will be in 2020. It then gives recommendations - admitting in the process that the recommendations are "formulated in the hope that these predictions will come true" - ie the open source nirvana only happens if we work for it now.

There's 78 pages of the report, and it goes into some very sensible public policy recommendations (ban software patents etc) along with ideas for education and corporate governance.

It also makes the interesting point that in moving to the mainstream via cloud computing, the actual code that is the basis of open source will be further hidden from the user. This is an inevitable part of the move to the mainstream, but some will see it as a "dilution" of open source.

This will be worth looking at in more depth.

Good news from the leading Wi-Fi silicon maker - it's opened up, so its hardware will fully supported upstream in Linux.

Atheros will share source code for its hardware abstraction layer (HAL) with the open source projects working to support it in Linux - reports Sam Leffler, the champion of open source Atheros support.

Sam has released the source for his HAL binary, and announced: "Coincident with the release of this code I have concluded my agreement with Atheros whereby I had access to information about their devices. This means that in the future all fixes, updates for new chips, etc. will need to be a community effort. Atheros states the Linux platform will be the reference public code base so folks wanting to add support for other platforms will have to scrape the information from there."

This is great news for Linux laptop users. Linux Wi-Fi support has been getting much better of late, but Atheros has been mistrustful in the past. Thanks to Steven Vaughan-Nichols for the link.

Vyatta's open source routers are bubbling away, and have a new deployment, not far away as the packet flies: in Telecity, Amsterdam.

I think open source is a good bet for router software. It doesn't suffer the difficulties of more visible software such as desktop operating systems (user interfaces take lots of hands and eyes to make them, and lots of effort to keep them consistent). It just needs to work well, and have a responsive support company for fixing problems.

The leader in the field - correct me if I'm wrong - seems to be Vyatta. The company is doing all the right things marketing-wise, including selling open source as a recession-buster with a discount offer, going head to head with the competition, and issuing test results that show it beating Cisco,

The company is also gathering good case studies. For instance, Ben King of network designers, Net That Works, has just installed two routers at Telecity in Amsterdam, for IT services and hosting company Danego.

The installation includes a BGP Endpoint for each of Danego's two upstream providers, external firewalling, and internal subnetting and routing, done in a ’router on a stick’ style using VLANs. The whole thing is clustered for failover so it's resilient to failures of switches and routers.

Those routers? It's just Vyatta software running on general purpose Dell hardware provided by the client. King's only problem was when the customer gave him untried new Dell hardware: "Typically we deploy Vyatta on Dell R200s (what were 860s), Danego however managed to get a stunning deal out Dell on 2950s."

Fine, only the new Dells use a different chipset for their RAID controller, and Vyatta didn't like it. It's a known bug, though and Vyatta sent a new version of the software, pronto, when King phoned them. "This is why we love Vyatta," he says.

"Although this is not anything like the biggest Vyatta deployment we have done, I like it because it demonstrates how using HP and Vyatta you can very effectively deliver a relatively complex redundent solution for a fraction of the equivalent Cisco price."

There are pictures here.

I've been hearing that open source vendors will win when the money gets tight. Is this true, or is it just spin?

In the short term, there's no denying that open source companies will suffer, like everyone else. Everyone is so shocked at the powerful downturn meme, that it can look like no-one is buying anything at all (it's true. I've been holding off on buying things like printer paper and toner).

This hits open source vendors. It's been the "most unpleasant quarter I've ever been through," according to Mat Asay of open source content management company Alfresco (quoted in a good article at Linux.com).

Long term, though, people do have to buy things again - but they will be more price conscious. (Yes. I'm printing on the back of documents. When they run out, I'll get more paper, but I won't go for the high-quality stuff).

At that point, open source wins - because it's cheaper in upfront costs. Asay lists three deals where he says Alfresco was up to 90 percent cheaper than proprietary: "One competitor had a $5 million bid, and we won with a $500,000 bid. We won another with a $250,000 bid; and another in Canada, [the bid from the proprietary software company] was well over $1 million, and ours was $100,000."

But there's a big danger. Open source companies make their money on service and support. Customers take the software on evaluation, and are free to use it, then turn it into a commercial deal when they start to rely on it.

The danger is that they will start to rely on "free" software, without going over to commercial support - something that Gartner analyst Mark Driver likens to "driving without insurance".

"In every case with us, and across the board with companies I work with, customers can evaluate a long time before they make a purchasing decision," Asay tells Linux.com. "One Fortune 10 company has been using our product in production for a while without paying us a dime."

But at the moment, most of these companies have a significant strength: long term contracts with customers. The trick now is to get more customers to sign up for this sort of regular business, by undercutting proprietary, and by offering better services.

Red Hat's consulting service promises just this, helping users cut costs by ditching proprietary software.

And developing this sort of thing should be possible. Canonical's Gerry Carr tells Linux.com that a lot of the resources you need to grow your business are going to be cheaper in the downturn.