Please feel free to forward this newsletter to as many friends as possible. I have a personal goal of reaching one million readers. I can achieve it with your help.

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

Welcome back, gentle readers. For those of you with Web access and a Netscape Navigator browser, please click here:
http://www.softwareview.com/
Scroll down the page and you will notice a link entitled, "Daily view weblog". The daily news page is also known as a "web log". It is en vogue and the fashion of these days to call it that. Click on the link, click "reload" on your browser or clear your browser cache to ensure that you always receive the freshest, hottest daily news concerning Java^TM, Linux®, XML, wireless, Napster, and the software industry! The link never changes, but I will be updating the HTML file page behind it every day. Please, do take a gander at it every day.

Also, gentle readers, the Software View is an Associate Internet World Wide Web site of Amazon.com. I'd like to extend my sincere, heartfelt gratitude and thanks for your patronage. I'm offering links to books, et cetera that you can purchase from my web site. I'd greatly appreciate it if you would purchase software industry books from my web site. Help support my newsletter and web site by purchasing items from Amazon.com from my web site. Here is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator):
Click here

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

THE LURE OF LINUX

So many analogies and metaphors have been used to explain the success of Linux. The following quote is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi.

"First, they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win."

This Unix clone, a community product of software engineers, based upon the work of Torvalds, has escaped its cage. Once prophesied by pundits to be one more in the tragic line of superior technologies doomed to an untimely demise (like AmigaDOS, the Next computer workstation line, and IBM's OS/2), Linux has, instead, confounded its critics by establishing a foothold on enterprise networks. While Linux was initially smuggled in through the back door by rebellious engineers, it's now rapidly gaining acceptance as an enterprise operating system environment. According to DataPro Information Services (Delran, New Jersey), the number of companies using Linux grew by twenty-seven percent from 1996 to 1997. More and more professionals plan on increasing the presence of Linux in their enterprises.

Why? Because articles appeared in high-technology publications, illuminating the attributes of Linux. It outperforms all other operating system environments, including Microsoft's Windows, when ranked by customers according to interoperability, cost of ownership, price, and availability. Indeed, DataPro's customer satisfaction poll of eight hundred twenty-nine information systems managers in large organizations showed Linux trouncing the likes of Open Server, UnixWare, AIX, NetWare, and, yes, Windows.

Why do professionals choose Linux for their enterprises? Because Linux is freeware and can be easily downloaded from the Internet; it's easy to manage and configure; it's a legendarily stable operating system environment; and it is supported by a large user community; its excellent performance, it's easy to work with, it runs on legacy computer hardware, it has a large number of low-cost or free applications that run on it, and because its source code is easily available. One of the reasons Linux has become so popular is that no single vendor controls it.

Eric S. Raymond's famous essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," argues that most commercial software is built like cathedrals by small groups of artisans working in isolation. Open-source software, like Linux, is developed collectively over the Internet, which serves as an electronic bazaar for innovative ideas. "It's subversive," says Raymond of open-source software, "because it takes all of the thirty-year verities that we understand about software engineering and stands them upon their head."

The first of the two programming styles is closed source - the traditional factory-production model of proprietary software, in which customers get a sealed block of computer binary bits that they cannot examine, modify, or evolve. Microsoft is the most famous practitioner of this approach. The other style is open-source, the Internet engineering tradition in which software source code is generally available for inspection, independent peer review, and rapid evolution. The standard-bearer of this approach is the Linux operating environment.

The open-source model threatens to make closed-source software companies obsolete. To understand why, we need to step back from the particularities of Microsoft and Linux and consider that engineers and some high-technology executives are attracted to open-source development for three reasons: reliability, reduced total cost of ownership, and improved strategic business risk.

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. "That's a pragmatic statement," says Raymond. "Not an ideological one."

Traditional hacker culture traces its roots back to the early academic Massachusetts Institute of Technology programmers who felt duty-bound to give their solutions away so that their peers could move on to new problems. Since good programmers are already well-paid, this mostly Unix-based, online 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 community that created Unix, the Internet, Usenet, and the Web.

The promise of an open-source operating environment is the ability to freely exchange ideas in a community based upon voluntary service. It's like having an enthusiastic information technology Peace Corps standing ready to solve the problems you've been paying vendors like Microsoft thousands of dollars to resolve - if you can get Microsoft on the phone.

And after all this, we've come to see open-source development as only the next in a series of incremental steps toward true open-standards computing. It's a trend being propelled by the success of the Internet, which itself grew out of a vibrant open-source tradition. And it's contributing to a business environment in which services and other extras are increasingly more valuable than software code. As Brian Behlendorf, the co-founder of the Apache Group (which oversees the open-source Apache HTTP Web server) suggests, in due time open-source software will be a given for the infrastructure-level technologies like platforms, programming languages, and servers that form the basis of the open-standards marketplace. "You don't have to own a platform to make money from it," says Behlendorf.

Linux advocate Raymond points out that unlike proprietary vendors, Linux developers and distributors exchange ideas and information. As soon as a particular approach demonstrates viability. Raymond says it gets propagated across all the versions. "Techniques don't propagate across corporate boundaries," he says. "But in the Linux world, you have this powerful centrifugal force in which everyone wants to use the best of what everyone else is doing."

Linux's open development model is appealing. Because the software source code is freely available, anyone can create modules for Linux. Such a model promotes innovation and the development of new Linux features. Among Linux developers, a system of checks and balances is observed to make sure that bad code doesn't find its way out onto the Internet. Before a programmer posts code on the Internet, you can bet he or she will have thoroughly tested it. Otherwise, if there's a problem, that person risks his or her reputation. Also, once Linux code is posted, others are invited to tweak it, either to improve it, or to correct errors. Another advantage of the open development model is that it enables programmers to rapidly fix any problems found within Linux components.

To be continued ...

Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich

Join my free e-mail newsletter called the Software View by clicking here or by sending an e-mail to thesoftwareview-owner@west-point.org