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the Software View: Should Linux be written in Java?

Welcome back, gentle readers. Your intrepid reporter and faithful correspondent has traveled the entire galaxy and the software industry. All in an effort to bring the latest news to you.

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Now, dear readers, on with this week's episode of the Software View!

"Software, Lies, and Videotape". Video killed the Microsoft star. At the antitrust trial, did Microsoft intentionally and willfully falsify and tamper with a video? Microsoft exec Allchin looked like a deer caught in headlights. A software title bar changed in the middle of the test. Shell-shocked Allchin admitted that video evidence crucial to the company's defense appeared to be tainted. It's amazing that Microsoft's army of geeks, lawyers, and public relations hacks completely missed this gross error. Allchin admitted six different test machines were not "virgin", meaning having only the Windows 98 operating system installed. Microsoft has had problems with videos. In his pretrial deposition, Bill Gates was an evasive, disconnected, passive, schlumpy weasel of a Clinton understudy who couldn't put two truths back to back. The discrepancy was noticed by Princeton computer science professor, Edward Felten, and two of Felten's assistants, recent Princeton University graduates. The Department of Justice showed - beyond all doubt - and Allchin admitted that Microsoft had intentionally used multiple personal computers to film a videotape segment the company had initially implied was a seamless segment filmed on one personal computer. The knockout punch was a missing Outlook icon that appeared on one Windows screen in the video but was not evident in another segment. The courtroom revelation left Allchin stammering for an explanation, and drew harsh words from Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who held his head in his hands at one point. "We didn't make a very good tape," said Microsoft lawyer Neukom. Microsoft flack Murray admitted the tainted video offered into evidence at its antitrust trial was not of an actual test, but merely an "illustration." The test was rerun and videotaped, but only after government observers (two Department of Justice attorneys, Felten, Hicks, and Heath) were barred from the room for hours. What happened in that room for those two hours? No attempt was made to recreate the key test: Windows is allegedly slow when you remove Internet Explorer.
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Michelle Bradley, an ex Microsoft employee, says a verbal memo (no e-mail allowed) was passed around the Microsoft campus encouraging Microsoft employees to post to web sites. The theme was "Microsoft is responsible for all good things in computerdom. The government has no right to prevent Microsoft from doing anything. Period. The 'memo' suggests we use fictional names and state, and to identify ourselves as students." Is Microsoft encouraging its employees to lie in public forums? An individual with that name lives less than ten miles from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond. Phone calls to the listed number were not returned.
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Too little, too Slate. Microsoft's World Wide Web magazine is forced to stop charging for subscriptions after it loses millions of dollars in red ink.
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A reader of mine is Tom Curran, a 1964 West Point graduate, who is President and Chief Operating Officer of Infor*Med Medical Information Systems, Incorporated, developers of Praxis EMR, the fastest growing electronic medical records software company.
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Now, dear readers, on with this week's episode of the Software View!

The inspiration for this article came from Nathan Stevens. Gentle reader, I hope that you have had the pleasure of viewing the classic 1977 motion picture, Star Wars. If you have not yet seen it, I would wholeheartedly encourage you to see it some time. This movie was directed by the redoubtable director, Mister George Lucas. This film hearkens to the action adventure science-fiction fantasy genre.

The plot of Star Wars: A New Hope, Episode IV in George Lucas' masterpiece, is about young Luke Skywalker leaving his home planet, teaming up with a Rebel ally named Han Solo, and finally defeating the evil, tyrannical Empire. Luke survives personal tragedy and deep pain, and overcomes impossibly high odds to become a hero of the Rebel Alliance. It is an adventure that takes Luke on a voyage of self-discovery, with his bravery and commitment to the light, true, good side of the Force tested at every step. Luke constantly faces challenges that would test any mortal.

Roger Ebert writes, it is "a deceptively simple, really very powerful, story. It was not by accident that George Lucas worked with Joseph Campbell, an expert on the world's basic myths, in fashioning a screenplay that owes so much to man's oldest stories." Campbell linked Luke with King Arthur, Beowulf and Gilgamesh; Darth Vader with Grendel and the evil Mordred of the Arthur legends. The Hero's journey is the same whether it's Orpheus in the underworld or Luke passing through Dagobah. Our reaction to the Star Wars mythos is programmed into our DNA as human beings. George Lucas tapped into the same stories that we all share subconsciously, stories that show the triumph of hope and right over wrong and the individual over tyranny, as well as the promise of redemption - all things just as timely now as in Homer's day.

Today, if I were to cast my gaze upon the current expanses of the software industry horizons, I would cast Linux as the young Luke Skywalker, a straight shooter fighting evil for the sake of good. I would cast Java as Han Solo, a helpful, reckless scoundrel and mercenary-turned-hero, moved to do good by Skywalker's example. And I would cast, as Darth Vader's Empire, the behemoth Microsoft Corporation, the 800 pound gorilla of the software industry headquartered in Redmond, Washington.

Patrick Porter writes, "Linux is an open-source Unix clone operating system that was hatched eight years ago by an obscure University of Helsinki graduate student named Linus Torvalds. Linux outperforms all other operating systems, including Microsoft Windows NT, when ranked by customers according to inter operability, cost of ownership, price, and availability. Everything about Linux goes against the grain. For example, instead of trying to get rich by selling his new product, Torvalds gave it away, posting his source code on his university's server and inviting contributions from programmers around the world. Before long, these programmers were submitting code that he could incorporate into his next release. The decision to make it open-source and free created a virtual support and development group. One reason Linux has quickly become one of the most robust and stable operating environments around is because more developers support it than any other operating system, including Microsoft Windows NT. Linux has entered the mainstream. As of September of the year 1998, 14% of all corporate businesses used Linux, according to a Gartner Group survey. More than eight million and growing copies of the operating system are installed. It is a reliable enterprise operating system that meets the needs of the world's most demanding customers. It is robust, reliable, flexible, free, and best of all, it is open-source."

Ann Harrison writes, "Linux is the only operating system in the world not made by Microsoft that is expanding its market share from year to year. Impressive numbers if you consider that Linux was created eight years ago by a self-effacing twenty-one-years-old native of Finland. Linus Torvalds was then a University of Helsinki student frustrated with the limitations of Microsoft's DOS and too poor to purchase another operating system. Torvalds began experimenting with Minix, a tiny Unix-like operating system for Intel 386 microprocessor machines, which he eventually completely rewrote. In keeping with the hacker tradition, Torvalds posted his kernel to the university's server - thus making it available for peer review and modification. Before long, other hackers around the world began downloading Torvalds' source code and sending back their improvements. Thousands of volunteer programmers eventually pitched in to refine the kernel, which was later combined with large portions of a free operating system called GNU (GNU's Not Unix!) and dubbed Linux. Much of Linux's success is due to Torvalds' skill in recognizing good ideas and making contributors feel appreciated. He eventually copyrighted Linux under the GPL (GNU Public License) license, which means that anyone could sell a version of Linux, but the source code or any changes or improvements must remain public.

This collaborative development project has produced a particularly stable and reliable computer operating system. Unlike proprietary software vendors, such as Microsoft, who reveal only the binaries - machine language versions of executable programs - OSS (open-source software) like Linux allows users to see the source code, enabling them to repair flaws and customize the program. In the case of OSS, with so many people scrutinizing the code, bugs are located, fixes are created, and features are allowed to evolve much more rapidly. This feature is known as "massive, independent peer review", reminiscent of academia and scientific fields.

"We offer a price performance benefit and millions more programmers than Microsoft users can only dream about, but the benefit of the model is not only the price," says Robert Young, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat Software Incorporated, one of several companies which offer free Linux downloads. Young says that anytime a corporation has an application that requires a fair amount of engineering, access to the binary is not enough. "If there are some inconsistencies in how the application interfaces against the operating system, they have no way of fixing it because they have bought a car with the hood welded shut."

Linux is now running everywhere from 3Com's hand held PalmPilot personal digital assistant computer, to the Los Alamos National Laboratories, which used 68 Compaq Digital Equipment Alpha microprocessors to build a Linux-based super cluster computer that cost only $150,000 United States dollars, yet in benchmarks performed more than 19 billion operations per second. Linux even went Hollywood when it handled all the special effects renderings for the movie, Titanic.

Linux is being used at Boeing, Sony Development Corporation, Mercedes Benz, Southwestern Bell, NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cisco Systems, and many other organizations. Oracle, Informix, Netscape, Sybase, Inprise Corporations, Computer Associates, Corel, and many other organizations have announced that they are all porting or have ported server products to Linux.

Linux is an incredibly robust, extremely usable computer operating system. It is incredibly cheap, secure, and very effective. The Internet is awash in open-source software. Look at the stability of open-source workhorses like TCP/IP, DNS, Perl, and Apache, which keep the World Wide Web running more smoothly than any commercial equivalent. 80% of all Internet e-mail is routed by an open-source software called Sendmail. As more businesses start to depend upon the Internet, access to source code becomes more significant to programmers and Web site operators.

As the complexity of software increases, open-source software allows the number of people analyzing these programs to increase and scale proportionately. As proprietary software programs such as Microsoft's Windows become bigger, the relatively small number of in-house and beta testers means that more bugs will slip through. In the open-source software model, the large number of co-developers means that there is a greater chance of catching problems, even in complex systems. As the open-source software advocate, Eric S. Raymond, says, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

Without close attention to technical standards, Linux would never have come this far, but sheer technical superiority is not enough to win converts in the business community. You would be quite impressed by how quickly fixes and software patches are generated for Linux. Linux culture traces its roots back to the early MIT programmers who felt duty-bound to give their solutions away so their peers could move on to new problems. Since good programmers are already well-paid, this community is motivated by the satisfaction of advancing a good idea, dispensing advice, or collectively building something superior to what any one person or entity could create. This is the same community that created Unix, the Internet, Usenet, and the World Wide Web. Raymond says that open-source software, created in what anthropologists call a "gift culture", is better at producing high quality software because status is gained by giving ideas away. Companies that value secrecy miss opportunities to get wealthier by sharing ideas and creating information pools."

Java is a software technology platform invented at Sun Microsystems, Incorporated and created by Doctor James A. Gosling. It consists of not only the Java programming language itself, but also of the Java virtual machine and its associated core Java Class files and applications programming interfaces, or API's.

Java has the potential of becoming the de facto programming language for the Internet and World Wide Web, and the standard for cross-platform executable content. Its mantra is "Write once, run anywhere". Java annihilates the switching costs associated with portability between operating systems for software applications.

So, my question is: Should Linux be written in Java? "Sun was way too scared of Microsoft, and as a result they created a contract that didn't help them. Java is in the die-back stage - it's going into niche markets."

No less a software industry luminary than Linux creator Linus Torvalds spoke the above quote at the Oracle Open World conference on November 11th of the year 1998. Torvalds has been quite vocal and openly critical of Sun's control of Java.

Using Java, a technology for portability between operating systems, to create Linux, an open-source computer operating system, would seem to be much like staring at works of graphic art by Maurits Cornelis Escher for hours upon end. After a while, it all becomes a bit recursive.

But I ask that Linux advocates and supporters not be too hasty or quick to judge Java. I wish to submit the following: Java applications run on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and numerous other computer operating systems. Thus, the very success of Java ensures the further success of Linux. Java provides the critical software applications necessary to spur the adoption of the open-source Linux computer operating system.

TyroneZero writes that Star Wars is an "epic modern myth, an account of an enterprise conspicuous for courage and endeavor", much like the story of Linux. "Epics present characters in a series of adventures which form an organic whole through their relation to a central figure of heroic proportions and through their development of episodes important to the history of a nation or race. The scale of an epic is larger than life. Its heroes take part in events that set them apart for glorification by their community. This is the story of Luke Skywalker (Linux), the young heroic man called to adventure, the hero going out to face the trials and ordeals, and coming back after his victory with a boon for the community. Han Solo (Java) is the archetypal outcast of this epic." In the end, Han Solo proves to be noble, as well, and refuses to abandon our hero.

I would like to solicit responses from the Linux community. Do you think Linux should be written in Java?

Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich

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