Open source tries to regroup at annual event
- Posted:
- 13:25 23 Jul 2001
- Topics:
- Open Source Software | Operating Systems | Linux
But the troubles of the open source strategy have not stopped its supporters trying to make the model viable for large businesses. That is the promise of the third annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention, which began today in California.
"This is really the first conference of its kind to have an executive focus," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and chief executive officer of event organiser O'Reilly & Associates. "It really is aimed at business people more than strictly the technical people."
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Critics such as Microsoft have lashed out against open source. And while many of the major hardware and software vendors expect to announce new initiatives with the open source and Linux models, bickering among open source developers has slowed progress. Finally, a slow economy has also put several leading open source vendors out of business or in financial problems.
As proponents of open source struggle to overcome these pitfalls and look for a place in the mainstream business sector, a shift in priorities among open source developers may be starting.
For instance, Hewlett-Packard said it plans to "confirm" its commitment to open source and Linux at the show as well as using an open source approach for one of its projects under development. Sun Microsystems will make a similar statement at the event regarding its peer-to-peer research project JXTA. Similarly, a few of the show's top events will focus on the plans of the movement's most outspoken foe, Microsoft.
Ximian is due to outline more details of its project Mono, touted as an open source, Linux-based companion to Microsoft's .Net. The convention will also reveal work underway by independent developers working on an open source alternative to Microsoft's Passport authentication service, O'Reilly said.
Despite an effort to focus on the progress of open source, it will be hard this week to ignore its weaknesses, which have wounded open source companies in the face of shrinking IT budgets and a sour economy.
VA Linux Systems, for example, recently ditched its hardware business selling Linux servers and workstations in the face of a dwindling dotcom customer base and new competition from major vendors such as IBM and Dell. Open source desktop software developer Eazel shut down in May after failing to secure funding. And open source software and services firm CollabNet last month closed SourceXchange, a marketplace for open source projects.
These problems have raised concerns as to how open source can become big business. "It's almost a contradiction in terms to speak of commercial distribution of open source software," said Jon Rubin, an analyst at Gartner.
"How do you add value to a product if it's the same as all the others?" he asked. "It shows the inherent problem that any open source segment has to overcome in order to achieve commercial viability."
However, according to the organisers, focusing on the faults of Linux companies has clouded the movement's other successes. "Open source is used all the time in the enterprise, it's just not getting ink," O'Reilly said, citing its contributions to the rise of the Internet Service Provider industry through open source projects such as Sendmail and Apache.
"Clearly open source has a long way to go before it can lead the enterprise," but open source fuels businesses that generate tens of billions of dollars, argues O'Reilly.
Still, there are critics who debate this, laying the foundation for a planned debate on the merits of the open source model and the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public Licence (GPL). Red Hat chief technical officer Michael Tiemann and Microsoft senior vice-president Craig Mundie plan to fight it out along with a panel of other industry pundits, following a session from Microsoft where it will lay out its shared source philosophy.
"I think people are realising there is interesting work coming out of Microsoft, and it's not just us versus them," O'Reilly said.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF), whose founder Richard Stallman authored the GPL more than 10 years ago, has already taken issue with a number of companies on the open source debate. The group, which promotes its own philosophy of freely distributed and governed software, said it was left out of the debate despite its close association with the issue.
"The debate is being held under the banner of open source, yet the fundamental issues about this debate are about software freedom and the GPL," said FSF spokesman Bradley Kuhn.
The convention is also expected to play host to another controversy in the open source and free software communities that highlights some of the potential pitfalls associated with the development models.
Executives from two open source database companies, MySQL AB and NuShere, the company behind the MySQL.org developers community, are expected to address an ongoing legal battle over the use of the MySQL trademark. The two companies began a partnership a year ago when MySQL AB first open-sourced its product under the GPL, and have since exchanged lawsuits over their working relationship.
"It's sort of a petty fight going on between the two companies," said Gartner's Rubin, who follows the budding open source database market. "I see it more as a culture clash between the traditional culture of open source versus attempts to come up with commercial distributions of open source."
