LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 15, 2003

SCO suspends, Gartner warns

The SCO Group, it seems, has finally read the GPL; the company has announced that it has suspended shipments of its Linux distribution. It does not do, after all, to be claiming proprietary rights on code which has been mixed into a GPL-licensed product. SCO stands every chance of losing its right to distribute (at least) the kernel in any case; better to take the step ahead of time.

Of course, other interpretations are possible. The company's Linux shipments have, most likely, dropped to something approximating zero in any case. SCO, having lost in the Linux marketplace (even before the lawsuit) appears to wish to bring that whole market down in flames. It's hard to come up with another motivation for statements like:

SCO has also sent an unsettling letter to some 1500 companies worldwide.

As FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) attacks go, it is hard to be less subtle than this. If you use Linux, SCO has just threatened to sue you. So much for them not having anything against the Linux community. (The company's posting of a page of quotations from "Linux leaders" - such as noted kernel hacker Richard Stallman - also gives a hint as to what their current attitude toward the community is).

SCO has also trotted out the Gartner Group to drive the point home.

Of course, the SCO suit has nothing to do with patents, but it is time to adopt procedures which "may slow adoption" of Linux just a little bit. Of course, Gartner has no suggestions on how anyone might verify that a given chunk of code does not violate anybody's patents. To top it off, Gartner states "However, one thing is certain: The community process is fraught with risk to users." (The report does also note, for what it's worth, "In Gartner's opinion, SCO's claim that IBM misappropriated trade secrets from AIX will be difficult to prove...")

SCO's action, which was once presented as a simple contractual dispute between two corporations, has now been clearly exposed as an attack on Linux itself. At some point, however, SCO is going to have to stop talking and demonstrate some stolen source. If the company actually has something to show, it's past time to put some cards on the table. As it is, SCO gives the impression of trying to destroy the Linux community away with words that have little backing in the real world.

Comments (29 posted)

Where are the Linux laptops?

[This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

Finding a laptop that is Linux-compatible can be a daunting task. Buying a laptop with Linux pre-loaded is pretty much impossible if you want to buy from major vendors like Dell, HP, IBM or Toshiba. HP recently announced a low-end Linux laptop for sale in Thailand. This sounded like exciting news at first, but it turns out that the HP laptop is being underwritten by the Thai government and won't be offered in the United States.

Dell and IBM have offered Linux on some of their laptops in the past, but both companies have stopped doing so. Lindows.com -- not a major company, but important in the sense that they have managed to put machines with Linux pre-installed into some traditional retail channels -- announced a budget Linux-based portable computer this year, but it's not widely available (it's only available through one of Lindows.com's resellers) and it's seriously underpowered.

So what is a Linux user to do? The only real options for Linux users are to buy a notebook or laptop computer that comes with Windows pre-installed, or to go to a smaller vendor that offers Linux on a portable. A few of the vendors that sell Linux pre-installed on laptops or notebooks are Emperor Linux, Qli Linux Computers and ASL.

There are a number of reasons why you probably won't see Linux being offered by any of the big retailers anytime soon. For one thing, a vendor like Dell or IBM has a hard time offering what Linux users really want -- the most recent distribution on cutting-edge hardware. Lincoln Durey, president and founder of Emperor Linux, said that when major manufacturers have tried to offer Linux laptops they've tended to be at least one revision behind a distribution -- and usually only offer a choice of one or two distributions. And, when they have offered Linux they didn't offer a dual-boot system with Windows as well, something Durey says many of his customers are looking for.

Durey also noted that all or almost all major components of a laptop will change every four to six months, which causes major difficulty for anyone trying to test compatibility with Linux as well as Windows on those machines. Ray Sanders, founder of Qli Linux, says that they're "almost guaranteed" that sound, video, USB and integrated Ethernet will work but "we never expect modems to work under Linux." Durey added that "PCMCIA is a perennial nightmare." Of course, that's a chicken and the egg problem. If the Dell, Toshiba and other big vendors started demanding Linux-compatible parts, it wouldn't take long before their upstream vendors responded.

It's not as if there isn't demand for Linux on laptops, though it's not in the same kind of mass quantities that vendors like Dell are used to. Durey says that most of the demand they see is from university and government researchers or others who are buying a Linux laptop because that's also what they use at work. In other words, demand is increasing, but there still isn't a great demand from home users clamoring for a Linux notebook, at least not relatively speaking. Sanders says that Qli's sales of Linux laptops is "brisk," at least by their standards. "In my mind, moving a couple hundred notebooks a month is fantastic, whereas IBM and Dell need to move thousands of units to make it worthwhile." Durey said that Emperor's sales have been growing by 12 to 15 percent a year, after the initial boom in 1999 when the company hit the market.

If Linux is going to gain mainstream acceptance, it's going to have to be available on laptops through normal retail channels. More and more people are choosing to buy a laptop for home use instead of a desktop PC, so it's vitally important that Linux be there if it's to catch on in the desktop market. Wrestling Linux onto a laptop designed only to run Windows can be a daunting task, and it certainly isn't something that Linux newbies want to attempt. Until the demand reaches a higher level, however, alternatives to installing it yourself will remain scarce.

Comments (23 posted)

Who speaks for the community?

Recently, the "Open Forum Europe" released a statement in favor of software patents in Europe. Those signing on to the statement included Graham Taylor "...as a representative of the Linux/Opensource world." Of course, many people in the Linux community are not particularly sympathetic to an expansion of software patents, so they were something other than pleased with this "representation." Mr. Taylor has since backed off from any claims that he was representing the open source community. But the question remains: who does represent this community?

The Linux / free software / open source / whatever community does tend to share a common set of beliefs. We wish to retain control over our computers (and our lives). We have little tolerance for limits - technical or legal - on what we can program. We have, through voluntary contributions, created a vast commons of increasingly capable software, and we intend to continue doing so. We respect technical excellence and working code; we have less faith in words.

And, as a community, we have little patience with those who would position themselves as our leaders or representatives. We are a very independent-minded community that has managed to bring together a very broad spectrum of people and get them all to work together in a productive manner. But we are, as a community, not even remotely coherent enough to be represented or led by anybody.

There is a certain Wild West charm to a leaderless, institution-free community. We see an itch in need of scratching, submit our patches, and ride off into the sunset. Our code speaks for us, and we need not tolerate some bozo making statements we may not agree with in our name. It feels free.

On the other hand, we are a large community of highly talented people who have changed the software industry, and, increasingly, we are creating the software that runs the world. And, yet, our voice in political and industry circles is tiny. Governments happily adopt free software, while passing laws that make the software harder to develop and turn some of our hackers into criminals. With few exceptions, the computing industry pays little attention to free software in the development of its products.

Once you look beyond the actual code we have published, we are a marginal force, dependent upon a handful of companies to pressure representatives, obtain hardware information, and extract protocols for us. The partnership with those companies has done the community much good, but we should not confuse their agenda with ours. At some point, one can only hope that the community will develop institutions that can express our common beliefs with a louder voice. Creating those institutions is unlikely to be an easy task for anybody who tries, however.

Comments (7 posted)