Recent moves in the Linux market indicate that the free lunch may
soon be over, with companies forced to pay licence fees for the
open source operating system.
Hewlett-Packard has produced its own secure version of Linux aimed
at companies that cannot afford specialist services to customise
and secure their systems. But at $3,000 (£2,069) per server, the
cost is substantially higher than the sub-£100 pricing of most
Linux distributions.
HP's move follows Linux distributor Caldera's decision to charge
users on a per-system licensing basis. The company's actions have
caused it to get a barracking from the open source community, which
is fiercely protective of Linux's status as "free" software.
Currently, Linux users can either pay distributors such as Caldera
or Red Hat for maintaining their system or rely on free support
from the open source community over the Internet. However, with the
increasingly complexity of Linux systems, there is only a limited
pool of programmers with the right skills to support it.
Christine Axton, lead analyst at research firm Ovum, said, "The
idea that someone, somewhere in the Linux community will help
[users] is fine at the moment, but, as functionality increases, the
number of able developers decreases and the time taken to produce a
fix increases. The whole proposition becomes uneconomical."
However, Eddie Bleasdale, a consultant with Netproject, an open
source software consultancy, believes that customers will welcome
HP's product. "We are often called in by customers to secure their
standard Linux systems but not everyone has the resources for
customisation services. There is a market for an off-the-peg
solution," he said.