The software product industry likes to promote the idea that one size fits all. For the office, this approach typically results in the most complex and expensive product being provided as the basis for deployment on the enterprise desktop. Never mind that the typical office worker uses only a fraction of the capabilities of the product. And never mind that the very complexity and universality of the solution can open it to grave security vulnerabilities and make safe use nearly impossible.

There must be a better way. Complexity should become the exception rather than the rule. Uniformity should be right sized, not one size fits all. It should neither sink to the level of least common denominator nor, at the other extreme, require that every user be overstuffed with a grab bag of complex and expensive tools.

An alternative, modular approach tries to adapt to the business processes of specific organizations. By uniformly deploying a simpler, more focused desktop suite using applications and capabilities targeted to an organization’s actual job, the solution can be cheaper both to acquire and to maintain.

Modularity and focus is the appeal of the new “Government Desktop” (Der Behördendesktop) unveiled in June at the LinuxTag 2004 conference in Germany. The German “Government Desktop” focuses just on what most government knowledge workers require: word processing, e-mail, presentation preparation, and spreadsheet analysis. The desktop distribution emphasizes security and reliability in a platform integrated and localized for the kind of work at hand and in the user’s own native language.

The German “Government Desktop” is one of a growing number of custom distributions designed to solve a specialized world of computing requirements. This desktop distribution is based on Debian and contains KDE, Mozilla and a highly integrated, themed version of OpenOffice. Emphasizing security, it uses encrypted filesystems and secure e-mail. It incorporates spam and virus protection and has a preconfigured personal firewall.

Like the “Government Desktop”, many customized distributions auto-configure and can be used live from CD without having to disturb an existing PC software installation. Important distributions are being aimed at organizations whose focus is scientific computing (e.g., Quantian), education (Skolelinux/Debian-Edu and Freeduc), business (Debian-Enterprise), non-profits (Debian-NP), law (Debian-Lex), medicine (Debian-Med), multimedia (AGNULA), government (Debian-eGov and Behördendesktop), as well as many others. Each of these distributions assembles best-of-breed applications for the kind of work being addressed and at the same time tries to provide automatic hardware recognition to ease installation and adoption. Where mature components do not yet exist in a particular area, the distribution can provide a working framework for making contributions and enhancements. Increasing attention is also being paid to issues such as RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability), security and performance.

While the assembly of the best-of-breed applications for a specialized subject area requires some domain expertise to pull off credibly, the technology for crafting a working distribution has rapidly matured. You certainly do not need to be a Red Hat, Novell, or Sun to build a compelling distribution. Each Debian project mentioned above is an example of a “Custom Debian Distribution” or CDD which is built using tools to select the right components from a superset of over 10,000 packages maintained by Debian. Other well-developed technologies also can be used to build special purpose distributions. For example, the LNX-BBC project offers a sophisticated foundation for building self-configuring, small-footprint solutions that can be targeted for appliances such as servers or security devices.

The beauty and wisdom of OSS is that such distributions can be collaboratively produced by the larger community of organizations that need a particular type of solution. For each kind of enterprise or department, a powerful tool set can be configured precisely, securely and cost-effectively. Such “just-in-time” distribution manufacturing serves to empower the very groups that will use the solution, providing a positive feedback loop to fine-tune and evolve the content of the solution. Deployment and maintenance are also a breeze because these systems, like the German “Government Desktop”, are based on Linux and can be easily scripted and centrally managed.

I attended LinuxWorld in San Jose for the first time in 2000. Five years later, LinuxWorld 2004 has been the mirror of the world of open source evolving from being “open for freedom” in 2000 to becoming “open for prime time business” today.

Welcome to LinuxWorld 2004, Moscone Center, San Francisco

This year’s LinuxWorld in San Francisco highlighted participation from every company in the mainstream IT industry who wants to make it big riding the open source software wave. IBM, Novell, Sun, Oracle, CA, HP, Intel, AMD and even Unisys (yes, the very same company that wanted to take everyone to court for their “gif” patent just a few years ago). Open source companies such as Red Hat, Mandrakesoft, MySQL, Zend, Zope and others were there too.

The “.org pavilion” with the OSS community was the place “to be.” You could meet first-hand key team members from Mozilla, KDE, GNOME, LTSP, Trolltech, and a whole gamut of other cool open source projects responsible for changing the paradigm of IT today.

Notable sessions, keynotes and announcements

Although the number of talks were fewer than at OSCON, stellar presentations were easy to find. A panel discussion with Andrew Morton on “How the Linux kernel gets built”, Brian Aker of MySQL on “MySQL replication and clustering” and, Jim Stallings of IBM on “Linux in Asia Pacific emerging markets” were well worth attending.

Red Hat booth at LinuxWorld

Both Matt Szulik and Nick Donofrio delivered excellent keynotes - on innovation. Red Hat’s Szulik emphasized the urgency to reform US patent law to protect innovation, boost economic sharing, and presented the need to use open source software for education. IBM’s Donofrio reiterated his company’s support for open source and Linux and drew appreciation from the OSS community for his statement that IBM would not enforce its patents covering Linux kernel technologies.

Amongst the big announcements made at the conference were release of Xandros’ Business Linux Desktop, IBM open-sourcing Cloudscape, a Java based embedded database through the Apache Software Foundation, CA’s $1 million dollar Ingres tools contest and release of Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 with kernel 2.6.

How about a ball game after the show!

Giants game at 3Com Park, San Francisco

To top off the show, a party organized by EFF and Red Hat at the Yerba Buena gardens near Moscone center and tickets to the SF Giants ball game were popular drawings with the attendees and vendors alike.

At LinuxWorld, one felt that Linux has become more about business than about technology and that open source technologies are what enterprises are looking at today. It may be fashionable for big corporations to show open source has become ready for prime time. However the IT industry which has wholeheartedly adopted Linux, still has to work with the technology creators and collaborators who are part of a larger open source system of collaboration. One hopes that future LinuxWorld events, will have the core open source projects represented by the “.org pavilion” in the center of the expo floor rather than on the fringes - to demonstrate open source is part of mainstream life.

2004’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) by O’Reilly went off well. Even though Portland’s weather was unusually hot for the end of July - a searing 100 F, almost 2000 people converged with their enthusiasm and energy to participate in this 5-day open source gathering of the gurus and hackers along with friends and family of the extended open source community. This large crowd may signal the end of the recession in the US IT industry and rejuvenation of energy and growth in the open source development community.

Technology Talks

OSCON focuses on the gurus of technology in the world of Open Source. Tutorials covering a variety of topics such as Subversion, Perl 6 rules, XSLT, Zope’s Zcatalog. There was even a PHP 5 boot camp. Technology sessions covered almost every Open Source topic under the sun. Great sessions on the latest in Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python, XML, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Java and security were well attended. Another highlight of this conference was the Emerging Topics track and its discussions about wireless Linux, Apple’s Rendezvous project to Darwinian software programming. Talk about diversity in ideas!

Michael Tiemann of Red Hat answers a question during a panel discussion on commercial open source

The State of the Linux kernel talk by Greg Kroah-Hartman, a key Linux kernel developer revealed how BitKeeper has become a part of life in the Linux development cycle and has sped up the release cycle by optimizing team coordination greatly. A panel discussion on “Commercial OSS: Business Panel” drew spirited interaction from the audience as points were made on the growth and maturity of OSS and whether it was ready for prime time. Microsoft’s Jason Matusow was perhaps the only panel participant with an opinion defending his company’s policies and direction contrary to consensus towards OSS being the only way to go in cost conscious IT markets. Brian Behlendorf of CollabNet highlighted on Asian markets being very pro-OSS. Another interesting talk by Michael Tiemann of Red Hat on the state of Fedora 2 was just right for getting a glimpse of long term positioning and strategy of the Fedora project as well as how Red Hat will as grow Linux into the enterprise market. The State of the Dolphin (MySQL) by Zak Greant and Brian Aker, developers on the MySQL team, talked about the progress that this highly-popular database had made with 5 million installations and various contributions to the OSS community.

Tim O’Reilly’s interesting keynote focused on some of the underlying trends of open source such as social networking applications like Orkut, iTunes and Amazon which have become part of the participatory universe that the OSS community lives in.

(L to R) Louis Suarez-Potts, Chris DiBona, Brian Aker, Brian Behlendorf, Zak Greant

Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions were held on various topics from Plone to e-voting and sparked discussions about issues and their resolution.

Other Highlights

A session to “Meet the Authors” featured some of the open source gurus who have written on Apache, PHP, Ruby, Digital Media and other topics. Dan Gillmor, a well-known technology columnist released his new book We the Media on grassroots journalism by the people for the people.

The SCO Moot Court organized by UC Berkeley law professor Pamela Samuelson and Groklaw founder Pamela Jones drew vociferous comments about the legal issues surrounding the ongoing Linux/SCO lawsuit in the US.

O’Reilly’s Dale Dougherty previewed “Make,” its magazine of do-it-yourself tech projects which debuts in January 2005.

A “Must Attend” conference for all open source hackers

All in all, OSCON certainly is the best US open source conference for its high value content and environment of creativity. It’s a “must attend” conference for all open source players who want to keep pace with the fast-moving world of open source technologies!

Keynote: The Future of Linux

Enterprise Linux Workshop
Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, India

Robert Adkins of Technetra keynoted at C-DAC’s 5-day Enterprise Linux workshop in Pune, India. His talk highlighted on the future of Linux and Open Source.

Talk: The Linux Mandala

A Seminar on “Linux Implementation: The Future Ahead”
PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PHDCCI), Chandigarh, India

Robert Adkins of Technetra talked about how the “Linux Mandala” (i.e., Linux Universe) offers functional equivalency today and addressed myths such as deficiencies of Linux support and issues of cost and risk in Open Source adoption.

The last year has seen both an inflow and outflow of Open Source Software talent in and around the tidewaters of Silicon Valley. Guido van Rossum, author of Python, arrived. But coming to ground zero of OSS, he doesn’t work full time on his creation! Apparently there isn’t enough money to sustain his family and expenses by working solely on Python projects.

Gone are the days when every dotcom competed to pull in name-brand developers and other open source stars. Attractive startups pulled in Rasmus Lerdorf of PHP and many others. Even Linus was offered his job in 1997 at Transmeta as the hardware venture strove to bolster media publicity before its IPO. Today different skills are needed for leadership in the technology startup game in an economic climate that is just beginning to improve again.

There has been a loss of over 200,000 high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley since the dotcom bust. Even among the majority of technical workers who are not great luminaries, the outflow of talent has been palpable and painful. Many companies, instead of trying attract talent to Silicon Valley are going to where the talent already exists and is, bottom line, cheaper. Despite political sensitivities, outsourcing and offshoring are inevitable in all technology industries including the Open Source Software product and project space.

Now the outflow of talent includes none other than Linus himself. He recently announced he is escaping the craziness of Silicon Valley to move up the coast to Portland, Oregon. Portland is a cheaper, lower speed but still trendy destination. His employer, OSDL, is located there. Portland, which gets lots of rain and is affectionately called “Silicon Forest”, is home to major Intel research labs as well as other high-tech ventures. Plus, it will be hosting this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON 2004).

Linus avers that he is happy to grow webbed feet to be able to survive in Portland’s temperate rain forest and, besides, it does not matter where he is physically located to discharge his Linux stewardship responsibilities. While this may be true on a day-to-day basis, Linus’ view may not reflect the ground realities of the infrastructure required to provide him with the top tools he needs and the benefit of access and influence that’s amplified by the strong organization he is intimately a part of.

Tim O’Reilly likes to say that the Open Source Community was built by the brilliant innovation of individual visionaries. In the long run, however, this may not be how the community is sustained. Many of yesterday’s efforts and leaders are today coalescing around highly organized resources such as labs, multi-national corporations, government projects, and educational institutions. Even Linus today is supported by a well endowed lab with global sponsorship and reach.

For this reason, the outflow of OSS stardom from Silicon Valley will not diminish the luminance of OSS. In fact there is a kind of democratization to the spread of talent and resources into many Silicon Valleys, Alleys, Forests, Prairies, and Plateaus. Talent can be nurtured more widely, indeed globally. Everywhere the best of the talent can be harvested.

As the OSS universe matures, it is clear that progress proceeds by a loosely coupled, global mix of individual talent and well-resourced organizations. In today’s virtual communities, the talent may be observed right in front of you on your Web browser, but sustained access to and utilization of that talent will inevitably require, and at the same time foster deeper, wider and more distributed OSS resources. The spread of talent in all directions, whether to Silicon Valley, Portland, Bangalore, or Singapore ultimately reinforces the foundational stability and access to resources of OSS.