The legal challenges against Linux by The SCO Group to
global companies embracing open source in recent years are all part
of the normal business technology and adoption landscape, said
analysts at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San
Francisco.
Rather than being dead ends for open source and Linux
development, the bumps along the way will, more likely, boost its
use and acceptance by companies, said the analysts.
That was the consensus of the State of Open Source Roundtable,
in which four leading industry analysts gathered to talk about the
status of enterprise open-source software today.
George Weiss, an analyst at Gartner said it was a series of
challenges with normal ups and downs, as open-source software
continues its natural development.
He noted that Linux is, in many ways, already being absorbed by
various suppliers.
"There's no such thing as a Linux supplier anymore, per se,"
Weiss said, pointing to major IT companies such as IBM and
Hewlett-Packard, which continue to make Linux an integral part of
their offerings to customers.
"Linux has been absorbed as a technology in their overall
framework. I actually think that in five or 10 years we will not be
meeting here on the topic of Linux because the technology will
become so embedded and embraced in business IT that it will
not even be a question to use it," Weiss said.
Even as open-source projects continue to develop, wider business
adoption will need to be nurtured, analysts at the
conference said.
Improved integration and deeper development tools, for example,
are still needed to help businesses create workable and more
reliable systems and bring open-source use to more critical areas
of their IT infrastructure, said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky.
"I think it's still piece parts at this point. The [IT]
ecosystem has to be important because no one supplier can do it
all."
The key topic at the event has been the SCO Group's legal
assault on Linux, which continues to push its $3bn lawsuit against
IBM, charging that IBM illegally introduced some of SCO's Unix
intellectual property into the Linux development process.
"The fact is, there are no facts on the table yet that are
public" about the complicated lawsuit, said Peirre Fricke analyst
at DH Brown Associates. That means, essentially, that until the
facts are known, corporate Linux users do not have solid
information on which to act.
Weiss was adamant that Linux needs its backers to come forward
more forcefully to counter the anti-Linux body blows being dished
out by SCO.
Red Hat also announced the creation of a $1m "Open Source Now
Fund" to pay for legal expenses associated with any infringement
claims brought by SCO in the future against any companies using
Linux.
"SCO may not be the last case" challenging open source, Weiss
warned, adding that these kinds of legal issues need to be nailed
down to protect users and suppliers in the future.
Whatever rulings emerge from the case will likely reverberate in
the open-source and Linux communities for years, said Forrester
Research analyst, Ted Schadler, and that will have a direct effect
on the continuing deployment of open-source software in the
corporate world.
One of the key reasons open-source software is chosen today by
corporate IT leaders is that it allows shared and rapid innovation,
providing answers than can be found in months rather than in years,
Schadler said.
Another key, said Weiss, is that open-source allows user
companies to choose their supplier and platforms based on needs and
costs, rather than being tied to specific supplier and the
limitations often inherent in that strategy.
"I think that they're rebelling against single-supplier
dominance," Weiss added.
Todd R Weiss writes for Computerworld