The collaborative development model that spawned Linux and the
Apache Web server is on the ropes, criticised publicly by its foes
as unworkable, weighed down by internal strife and bruised by a
struggling economy.
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."
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."