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Open Source/400

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OS/400 is not free! That realization is starting to rile some of IBM’s prized AS/400 customers, especially in light of the burgeoning open source movement. And what is Open Source? It’s a loosely organized group of computer professionals dedicated to the rapid advancement of computer technology through Internet distribution of source programs (www.opensource.org).

Open source is a real antiestablishment movement within the software industry. It relinquishes some of the original developer’s intellectual property rights so that the “opened” application can attract more coders to enhance the product. The logic of this scheme is really quite utopian. When source code is freely distributed across the Web, any software company can potentially tap the combined developer brainpower of the entire Internet. But why would a company want to do this? Simple: The more developers you have working on a project, the faster that product can be developed. By the same token, the more people you have fixing nasty bugs, the better the quality of the final application. As a model for software development, open source fulfills a developer’s ultimate fantasy: unbridled access to unlimited brainpower. But isn’t this the same as “shareware”? Well, yes—and no!

Netscape: Software Development on Steroids

The concept of “shareware” software has been kicked around for more than 10 years in the PC circles: Freeware and shareware were early economic models that tried to buck the tide of commercial software manufacturing and distribution. In the shareware model, a single developer creates a single application and distributes it to thousands of users via the public networks. The open source movement, however, reverses the equation. Imagine thousands of developers around the world working on a single application for free! Who wins? Everyone! The user obtains better applications, and the developer obtains market dominance, and market dominance means higher stock prices. That’s the theory of the power behind the open source movement. But does it work?

Last year, Netscape announced it would make the source code of its Communicator browser free to anyone who chose to enhance it. By increasing the number of developers who had the browser source code, Netscape hoped to technically compete against Microsoft’s massive developer resource advantage. Of course, in a previous incarnation of software technology, something like the open source movement would have faltered

because software source code was unwieldy and monolithic. However, modular object- oriented programming (OOP) technology solved that problem, and Netscape proved that a single application could be successfully developed and modified by a diverse, decentralized group of developers, each working separately. Within the first week of the Netscape announcement, fans of the Communicator product sent Netscape thousands of patches and fixes. Although Netscape was ultimately acquired by America Online (AOL), Communicator still lives on as a growing and evolving entity.

Linux Opens the Source Blanket

Today, a little more than a year later, the Linux (pronounced with a short I as LIH- nucks) operating system has become the most significant and tantalizing offshoot of the open source movement. It is a free UNIX-like operating system that is distributed under the GNU (which, oddly, stands for “GNU’s not UNIX”) General Public License (www.gnu.org). GNU is a direct offshoot of the 1980’s open systems UNIX movement, and the merger of GNU/Linux into the welling stream of the open source movement last year marked a new computing watershed.

On January 25, 1999, the long-awaited GNU/Linux Kernel 2.2 was released to the public (www.linux.org). The 32-bit kernel supports x86, SPARC, Alpha, Ultra, m68k, and PowerPC servers, making it a direct competitor to Windows NT (Windows 2000), Sun, SCO, and IBM’s AIX. Moreover, because it runs on Intel platforms, it is even competing against IBM’s newest NetFinity platform. Why not on an AS/400? Why not at least on an AS/400 Netfinity Server card? Not in the plans, says IBM.

Is Microsoft Just Another Proprietary OS?

Of course, the next question is “Is Microsoft worried about Linux?” You bet! If Linux proves to have the right feature-function set that your business network needs, it will make you think twice about investing in Windows NT/2000 for your workplace. And with the number of Linux users currently at over 8 million and growing at 282 percent annually (estimated by IDC), Linux’s user base could conceivably overpower Windows NT/2000’s user base. More importantly, with so many developers fueling the Linux system and so many hardware platforms from which to choose, business managers may find ample reason to begin treating Windows as just one more proprietary operating system. That’s what really has Microsoft worried.

OS/400: Where’s the Beef?

All of this brings us back to some disgruntlement on the part of some AS/400 managers. What, exactly, are they paying for? How does the cost of an expensive proprietary 64-bit operating system created and maintained by a small group of programmers in Rochester, Minnesota, stack up against a free 32-bit operating system with a development team of thousands worldwide? (And although Linux doesn’t yet scale to a full 64-bit system, how long will it be before that problem is solved?) It seems to these managers that IBM should provide significantly better service and support, lower the price of OS/400, or start thinking about newer, faster, and cheaper ways to increase the speed of its development labs.

So what do you think? Open Source/400? The question deserves asking. The answer deserves careful thought on IBM’s part.

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