2004
Early birds point the way
By
Nuala Moran
Financial Times,
03 November 2004
Normally the also-ran when it comes to new technology, the public sector worldwide has taken the lead in adopting Linux. “There is an astonishing amount of Linux activity in the public sector,” says Peter Houppermans, Linux expert at PA Consulting Group.
Diverse examples include the governments of Japan, China and South Korea agreeing to co-develop an alternative to Microsoft Windows, the Dutch government’s decision to make remote e-voting software available as open source and the European Union, which this month is sponsoring a conference in the Hague where public sector speakers will trade Linux experiences. And last week the UK backed the use of open-source software.
The public sector is showing leadership and beginning to embrace Linux and open source in a major way, according to a report on implementations of Linux published in September by the consultancy, Butler Group.
Mark Blowers, one of the authors, says: “It is unusual for the public sector to lead in this way, and one of the main reasons is because public bodies have bought into the ethos of Linux in a big way.”
The assumption is that the public sector is attracted to Linux because it is free, but Mr Blowers says: “They are interested in freedom, as opposed to Linux being free. In contrast to inflexible proprietary systems they are not constrained by licences, and there are no longer any worries about handing out software.”
Malcolm Herbert, director of public sector development at Linux software company Red Hat, agrees. “The public sector does have an open source agenda, which is politically motivated, and which companies don’t have.”
Ole-Bjorn Tufledal, chief technical officer of the City of Bergen, one of the most high profile public sector defectors from Unix and Microsoft Windows servers, says the city chose Linux because it is “democratic”.
“We see this as the way of the future because it gives us freedom of choice, and re-establishes real competition in the market,” he says. Coupled with this is the high level of government support for open source in countries from India, China and Brazil, to Germany and Spain.
Of course, no amount of freedom, flexibility and international bonhomie would be attractive if Linux was not a good product. Proprietary software vendors have scoffed at the open source methodology of allowing anyone to contribute code, arguing that a small, tightly knit team is the only way to achieve internal coherence. But it turns out that the open source approach of having frequent public releases of new code, and open peer review, has produced a robust operating system.
Linus Torvalds, principal developer of Linux, never intended it to be commercialised. But Linux has attracted such a following that - inevitably - the large IT hardware and services vendors have pitched in. IBM in particular has put in huge resources, and is often referred to as the godparent of Linux. The company has 600 staff contributing directly to its development.
The market analyst IDC says worldwide sales of Linux hardware currently stand at $1bn per quarter. Public and private sector users in Europe will spend $98m on Linux services in 2004, rising to $228m in 2008. While this amounts to less than 1 per cent of total European IT services, IDC says Linux services is emerging as a mainstream market.
The involvement of big name IT vendors allows public sector organisations to hide any sentimental attraction to Linux behind a business case. But there have been stirrings in the open source community about the way different vendors’ versions of Linux - or distributions as they are called - are gathering non-standard elements.
Large IT companies should be well aware of the risk of going too far in differentiating their Linux offerings. This is exactly what happened to Unix, a supposedly standard operating system that became fragmented into many incompatible versions.
Linux is less at risk of fragmentation than Unix because the kernel is protected. But there is a delicate balance to be struck between big company involvement in, and support for, the club, and destroying the ethos that attracts the public sector to Linux.
“We’ve been very careful to become part of the Linux community,” says Adam Jollans, IBM’s worldwide Linux marketing strategy manager. For example, the company is currently supporting universities in the Middle East to write a local Arabic version of Linux.
Similarly, Richard Seibt, president for the Emea region at Novell, one of the largest Linux software vendors says: “We have influence, but we can’t direct the community. It is a case of what you contribute.”
It is as a direct result of the fragmentation of Unix - and the subsequent high costs and inflexibility of running proprietary Unix servers - that public sector users have so much to gain from adopting Linux. The key is Linux’s ability to run on any hardware platform. This allows users to buy lower cost servers, or to consolidate applications on virtual servers running on more powerful machines. As public sector adopters of Linux have found, this creates a more flexible infrastructure that is cheaper to support.
Now that criticising Linux for its idealistic origins no longer cuts any ice, and Linux is proving itself in the data centre, the battleground is moving to the desktop. The argument has become about the cost of owning a Linux system, with detractors, most notably Microsoft, arguing that the software may be free, but Linux systems are more expensive to implement and operate.
A famous example concerns Newham, a local authority in London, which after lengthy investigation concluded that moving to Linux on the desktop would cost more than sticking with Windows. The authority subsequently signed up to a 10-year deal with Microsoft.
“The main problem for Linux and open source on the desktop is that the open source world can’t come up with real total cost of ownership examples,” says Marcel den Hartog, Computer Associate’s chief Linux expert in Emea. “Users should ask where is the catch with free software, because nothing is free. How much it costs depends on what you’ve got to start with.”
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