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  the Software View: It's smart to visit iQLinux.com. (Part I)

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

As we live in the world of today, we have the great good fortune of being able to bear witness to a unique and special confluence of long-term trends emerging from off in the distance. Please allow me to inform you of a company that will enable you to take advantage of these coming trends.

LINUX: OPEN SORCERY

From the ether of the Internet, emerged a powerful operating system that breathes fresh air into a desktop world populated with few alternatives. It is free, yet is as robust as any Unix operating system and more reliable than Microsoft's Windows. Linux is the fastest growing software operating system environment in the world, is loved by pony-tailed software developers world-wide, is free, and best of all, it's open-source. No longer the rarefied operating system environment of Unix developers, it is making its way onto numerous corporate networks. Many aspiring developers and Unix systems administrators cut their teeth on Linux, taking advantage of bundled software development tools, numerous well-written books, and fully open-source software code. It's fast becoming the darling of networking vendors and enterprise users alike, with a very devoted and knowledgeable following. Tux, the Linux penguin mascot, has finally waddled off its isolated iceberg into the waters of enterprise network operating system environment territory.

Although warmly embraced by its devotees, Linux has often gotten the cold shoulder from the proprietary Microsoft Windows establishment. The efforts of loyalists to get the word out about this versatile, flexible - and undeniably economical - operating system environment were once considered a Linux love fest thrown by fringe-element code junkies who occasionally peered up from their workstations to flip through the latest issue of Pocket Protector Monthly. As this stereotype persisted, it pushed Linux to the bottom of the pile when it came to mind share among network managers and information technology professionals who were becoming more aware of the link between enterprise computing resources and business issues.

The open-source Unix look-alike was hatched a mere eight years ago by an obscure, self-effacing twenty-one years old, native of Finland, University of Helsinki graduate student named Linus Torvalds. The thought that anything free could eventually have commercial value might make skeptics smirk. We're so invested in the party lines of behemoths like Microsoft, that many of us disregard Linux, at least where serious work is concerned.

FREE AGENT WORLD

Dan Pink writes, "There's a new movement in the world. From country to country, in communities large and small, people are declaring their individual independence and drafting a bill of rights. An authentic grassroots spirit has appeared and infused the world.

If you go look for it, as I did, you can't miss it. It's out there, from country to country, and it's growing every day. The residents of Free Agent, USA are legion: Start with the fourteen million self-employed Americans. Consider the 8.3 million Americans who are independent contractors. Factor in the 2.3 million people who find work each day through temporary agencies. Note that in January, the IRS expects to mail out more than seventy-four million copies of Form1099-MISC - the pay stub of free agents.

So let's hazard a guess. If we add up the self-employed, the independent contractors, the temps - a working definition of the population of Free Agent Nation - we end up with more than sixteen percent of the American work force: roughly twenty-five million free agents in the United States of America, people who move from project to project and who work on their own, sometimes for months, sometimes for days.

Free Agents feel more invigorated than they ever did in traditional jobs. No surprise there. But - and this is one of the many counterintuitive truths of Free Agent World - they also feel more secure. They pilot their work lives using an instrument panel similar to the one they use for their investments: plenty of research, solid fundamentals, and most of all, diversification. Just as sensible investors would never sink all their financial capital into one stock, free agents are questioning the wisdom of investing all their human capital in a single employer. Not only is it more interesting to have six clients instead of one boss; it also may be safer. This concept eludes some.

Unless you're into self-abuse, or you're incredibly lucky and avoid restructuring, being a lifer is no longer an option. As you take to the highways found on the new map of work, you'll soon learn the foremost rule of the road: freedom is the pathway to security, not a detour from it. Free agency forces you to think about who you are and what you want to do with your life. Previously, it was only those wonderful, flaky artists who had to deal with this.

The old social contract didn't have a clause for introspection. It was much simpler than that. You gave loyalty. You got security. But now that the old contract has been repealed, people are examining both its basic terms and its implicit conditions.

Free agents quickly realized that in the traditional world, they were silently accepting an architecture of work customs and social mores that should have crumbled long ago under the weight of its own absurdity. From infighting and office politics to bosses pitting employees against one another to colleagues who don't pull their weight, most workplaces are a study in dysfunction. Most people do want to work; they don't want to put up with brain-dead distractions. Much of what happens inside companies turns out to be about ... nothing. The international workplace has become a country-to-country Seinfeld episode. It's about nothing.

But work, free agents say, has to be about something. And so, instead of accepting the old terms, they're demanding new ones. Thus the second rule of the road for navigating Free Agent World: work is personal. You can achieve a beautiful synchronicity between who you are and what you do.

A large organization is about submerging your own identity for the good of the company. People have their game faces on. In traditional companies, people don't believe in themselves. How they act is so frequently not who they are. They put on masks for eight hours and then take them off when they're done. Free agents gladly swap the false promise of security for the personal pledge of authenticity. In free agency, people assume their own shape rather than fit into the shape of some corporate box.

As free agents, they have become something altogether new: they have become whole. They used to think that what they needed to do was balance their lives, keep their personal and professional lives separate. But they discovered that the real secret is integration. They integrate their work into their lives. They don't see their work as separate from their identities. The masks are gone. For free agents, their work is who they are.

And just as the first rule of the road leads to the second, the second yields to the third: Work is fun. For example, they can come up with some of their best business ideas while taking the afternoon "off" to attend a day game of their beloved Florida State University Seminoles. They don't know if going to a college football game is business or fun. But, they've stopped worrying about it. Because in Free Agent World, work is supposed to be fun.

So, at the top of their careers, people leave to become free agents. It's yet another way that free agents have reversed the organizing premises of work in the World. Remember the Peter Principle? That old chestnut held that people rise through the ranks until they reach the level of their incompetence. The Free Agent principle: People rise though an organization until they stop having fun. Then they leave to become free agents. They are first-round draft picks who've opted to play in a league of their own.

One of the most compelling sub-plots in the Free Agent World story is unfolding at iQLinux.com. Throughout the world, small groups of free agents are helping one another succeed professionally and survive emotionally. These groups belie another of the central myths about free agency: that without that office water cooler, free agents become isolated and lonely. Working solo is not working alone. iQLinux.com provides you a Linux community on the Internet.

This group - at once hard-headed and soft-hearted - is creating a new community. One part board of directors, another part group therapy, this small, self-organized cluster is part of the emerging free-agent infrastructure. It is helping to form the new foundation of our economic and social lives.

They believe in a talent-driven model. They have in mind something like the film industry. In a temp agency, you test 'em and roll 'em out. In their model, everyone is a star. The new realities of computers and networking make several of the old structures obsolete. In the new metaphor of work, the loyalty factor is still very high. In the new metaphor of work, you have a smaller-team model and a greater sense of loyalty to the team than to this archaic, quaint artifact known as corporations. Companies do not exist. Countries do not exist. Boundaries are an illusion. But the team exists.

A new economic infrastructure is being built, and few people seem to notice." Include among those people in the know, the members of iQLinux.com.

SILICON VINEYARD

This upstart company has offices in Burnaby, a remote Canadian city drawing attention to a little-known area of British Columbia known as the "Silicon Vineyard", an area that includes B.C.'s lush Okanagan Valley. What you find is one of Canada's best-kept secrets: a thriving high-tech community of some 500 companies in a stunning region blessed with mountains, lakes and balmy weather. A lot of people jokingly describe it as "the nicest neighborhood in Seattle, Washington."

A four-hour drive east of Vancouver, the vineyard boasts six daily non-stop flights to Seattle, a high-tech sector expanding at a rate of 20-35 percent annually, and a GPD in 1997 estimated at $120 million, the same as the local forestry sector's. It's also on the telecommunications backbone running between Calgary and Vancouver, making bandwidth cheaper than in Seattle.

Local high-technology companies include 360networks, Workfire Technologies International (which was recently acquired by Packeteer), Onvia.com; and of course, iQLinux.com

MISSION POSSIBLE

The mission of iQLinux.com is to become the leading Web destination that connects customers, vendors, and a global supply of independent Linux consultants. The Web site's features emphasize community empowerment, relationship building, virtual development and support teams, fair business practices, and dispute mediation by peers. It provides a market place where open-source products and support services can be negotiated and acquired.

BEGIN AGAIN

iQLinux.com's founder, Peter So, grew up as an Asian on an Indian reservation in the Pacific Northwest. He started his career implementing real-time computing and control systems relying upon Unix platforms. He ventured out on his own after a decade of working for the same forestry company.

While on his own, it turned out that he did a lot of software development with Microsoft tools and platforms. Work was abundant and demand for his skills was high, coupled with the joy of his family's first child arriving. After more than four years of building solutions in the so-called mainstream, and accepting daily personal computer reboots as the norm, most of the world seemed to have been sold on Microsoft marketing.

Although times were fine, he was always influenced by a dear friend, Jim Pick. His friend challenged him to rethink the necessity of having to reboot an operating system to load a device driver. Over the last two and a half years, Peter So returned to his early computing roots and began to explore Linux. In the early days, although Linux was amazing, a Linux solution was a hard sale.

Although the situation has changed more recently, he still finds it a challenge getting enough experienced Linux people to work with when a project becomes available. With the birth of his third child and the agreement of his wife, he worked up the courage to divest himself of all his non-Linux clients and staff, and start over.

Last year, he started to design iQLinux.com. Helping to introduce Linux to the mainstream, to small and medium-sized businesses, and to the government market requires more than just hiring a bunch of Linux experts and charging a high rate for their consulting. He saw the need for a Web site that would bring Linux consultants together; a site that would enable them to work together on projects or opportunities and set their own price. Having been a long-time consultant and owner of a company, he always found billing, account settlement, heckling over bad debt, disputing with sometimes-unreasonable clients, and marketing a chore. iQLinux.com was designed with those features in mind: to make consulting in a global setting practical.

The project was initially developed using Zope, but they quickly ran into challenges with a high transaction and heavy traffic Web site. They actually have a number of Linux servers in place now for production. In the future, they plan on rewriting the Web site using PHP, an open-source scripting language. Most of the software development and testing team have family and they all have a weakness for Chinese food.

THE BAZAAR AS MARKETPLACE

iQLinux.com offers a unique vertical market portal for vital relationship building and making contingent services available to the open-source community; in particular, the Linux community. This Web site provides great value to its members - both for customers acquiring Linux products and services, as well as consultants offering them. Consultants are able to collaborate and form virtual teams that will most effectively meet the customer requirements.

The Web site can be thought of as both a meeting place and a market place; it has been described as a combination of eBay and Onvia. It brings members of the open-source Linux community together and helps them to meet their business objectives with as little overhead costs as possible. Customers are able to post their needs ("requests") and consultants are able to post their available products and services. The Web site supports the negotiation and establishment of contracts between a customer and a consultant. Consultants are able to identify sub-contractors and form teams collaboratively through the vertical market portal. The Web site also facilitates the acceptance of deliverables and closure of these agreements. Should discrepancies arise in the course of delivery, dispute mechanisms are provided to resolve them in a negotiated fashion.

iQLinux.com offers its members a powerful and flexible mechanism to join and collaborate. Members may assume one or more roles, simultaneously, if needed. When they first sign up, they are considered, by default, to be customers who may avail themselves of any products or services offered through the Web site. Once a member has defined for him or herself a profile of products and services, the member may also take on the role of consultant - forming teams, bidding on requests for proposals posted by other customers, and accepting service requests made directly to them by customers. Members may also make themselves available as sub-contractors to other ("lead") consultants for the purpose of forming teams.

The net effect of the iQLinux.com vertical market portal is that a consultant is able to define a Web presence at a Web site associated directly with the open-source Linux community and, thereby, market his or her products and services to customers world-wide. By utilizing this Web site, he or she can effectively publicize the experience and capabilities of his or her team and describe the capabilities and properties of his or her products. Furthermore, Linux customers regularly visit this Web site to post their requests (project and technical support requirements); thus, the consultant will be able to browse the Web site at any time for work opportunities as they arise in real-time.

To be continued ...

Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich

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