Opinion: Linux Success, A High Price Tag?

It was a vastly different (Linux)World this time around.

The corporate types have seen the light: Linux is the ABM (Anyone But Microsoft) crowd's last, best hope to hold back the NT/2000/XP onslaught in servers. Linux has become sufficiently robust that big companies are putting their mission-critical apps on it.

Our article, "Enterprise Vendors Win Honors at LinuxWorld," tells the tale: The winners are corporate applications, not personal solutions, not desktop applications, not a killer multimedia app.

That's great, you say. Linux finally has the credibility it deserves.

But at what cost? The international community of programmers, developers, hackers, and enthusiasts that has nurtured Linux did it for themselves and one another. Will they be as eager to expend their efforts so that Computer Associates or IBM can get bigger and stronger?

And what of public licenses? Software developer Ximian, among others, has adopted the MIT X11 license instead of the Gnu Public License because the GPL mandates that all modifications to the source libraries be published back to the community. That doesn't sit so well with big vendors who want proprietary advantages over their competition, not equalizers. For the first time, Linux developers won't be starting on the same page.

Take a look into your crystal ball--what do you see? A consistent public/small guy Linux and a bunch of semi-proprietary, customized, corporate Linuxes that occasionally reach into the public area to reap the best of the current harvest, while giving nothing back?

If that's the future, the success of Linux is coming at a high price.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in ExtremeTech.