Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux helpSpecial Offers
Feature: Enterprise Applications
Experts say software vendors will soon offer products for different Linux 'flavors'
By Gene J. Koprowski
on
September 07, 2004 (8:00:00 AM)
Share
Print
Comments
Ready for this? Linux software vendors may soon be taking a Baskin Robbins
approach. This isn't just speculation. Oracle Corp. is in the midst of talks with SUSE's new owner, Novell Corp., presaging a
possible partnership that might change the Linux distribution landscape.
During July's annual OracleWorld conference in Melbourne, Australia,
Oracle president Charles Phillips said that the company was recently approached
by Novell, and, though it is already partners with Red Hat, the leading commercial Linux
distributor, it is considering the new deal, as it wants to add "another
flavor" of Linux to its product line.
"Historically, vendors have tended to work with one flavor of Linux," said Daniel K. Boice, president and CEO of The Jaxara Group, an open source software applications developer, located in Bethesda, Md.. "However, it seems that vendors, such as Oracle, are using the growing popularity and acceptance of SUSE, Red Hat, and other Linux distribution, to grow sales. I believe that in an effort to increase both visibility, and revenue, vendor will begin to partner with different Linux distribution."
The recent purchase of SUSE by Novell was simply the first public phase of the new environment for Linux distribution.
"The business model of companies like SUSE and Red Hat have now changed," said Boice. "They are attempting to secure a profit licensing their distribution, as opposed to 10 years ago, when revenues were strictly generated by providing support. This will help the different distributions appeal to companies like Oracle, etcetera."
Look for major players like IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. to start looking closely at alternatives like SUSE over the coming years, as the distribution of Linux evolves.
"We will definitely start seeing serious competitors in this space over the next few years," said Joseph Hamm, a security engineer for Lancope, located in the Atlanta area, who is also the technical editor of Linux Routing, a book from New Riders Publishing.
There are other business reasons why software vendors like Oracle are considering this move.
Among those factors, the discontinuation of support by Red Hat for some of its software is a motivator. "While I can't speak for trends at Oracle, some companies such as Lancope, Inc. (a network security intrusion detection software developer) are looking at SUSE as a result of the discontinuation of support for the Red Hat operating system," Hamm said. "My experience in the security space has shown increasingly more requests for vendors to support multiple flavors of Linux."
To be sure, this will not come without a price, he said. "This is a challenge for vendors because as you start supporting multiple distributions of Linux, your development time increases and your cost of supporting these multiple platforms increases," said Hamm.
But vendors are incurring the costs of support -- because their end customers want to have access to a variety of Linux offerings.
SIVA Corporation, a Denver area provider of point-of-sale software to the restaurant industry, was recently asked by a major, casual dining chain to certify its software for four different flavors of Linux, including Red Hat 7.x, Red Hat 9.x, SUSE, and BlueCat.
"Depending on the hardware vendor they choose, this restaurant group may run a second flavor on their back-of-the-house server," Jim Melvin, chief executive officer of SIVA, told NewsForge. "If they choose a Linux component for their enterprise data hosting, it could well be a third."
Another company, VMWare, an EMC company, located near Boston, tells NewsForge that many of its clients also request multiple versions of Linux, especially for testing purposes, and to reduce hardware acquisition costs.
Adds Frank Mayer, co-founder of Trensys Technology, a Linux software and security applications developer and National Security Agency contractor located in Columbia, MD: "Supporting multiple flavors of Linux is roughly equivalent to supporting multiple versions of Windows."
But some industry insiders were cautious about the developments, stemming from the Oracle and Novell talks. The distribution techniques employed by those vendors are "just one method of installing a collection of files," said Brad Rutledge, vice president of marketing communications at Linux Networx, located in Utah. "The installation mechanism, amount of stability testing, and management tools are what differentiate Linux O/S providers."
Rutledge worries that each customer's installation of software - no matter what the distribution source - conforms to the Linux Standard Base (LSB), and thus truly provided the benefits of Linux.
Another technologist, Dr. Adam Kolawa, the chief executive officer of Parasoft Corp., a Monrovia, Calif.-based Java developer, said that the trend toward multiple distributions for vendors of Linux may be risky.
"This is a danger," Kolawa told NewsForge. "Each of the Linux vendors is trying to put value in their product by differentiating themselves with extensions. These extensions make versions of Linux incompatible with each other, and, that is why vendors have to work with multiple versions. It is the same as it was with Unix versions before. This is not a good trend."
But other experts think that may be a bit too much fretting. "The trend that is developing is that all companies having major shares of the market - IBM, SUSE, Red Hat, etc., bring added value to Linux," Dr. Roger Norton, dean of the school of computer science and math at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY, said.
There will always be technical issues for customers who run multiple distributions of Linux. "But this is fundamentally not worse than having your application support Windows 2000 and Windows XP," said Ozzy Papic, chief executive officer of NetIntegration, a New York area developer of self-healing Linux. "And as everyone knows, this was not a major problem for any application vendor in the past."
An intellectual property expert, Doug Levin, chief executive officer of Black Duck, an IP risk mitigation consulting company, in Boston, said that the market for distribution, simply put, is evolving along natural lines, and distributors are all going to have to change.
"ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) must work with multiple distros of Linux because the market is divided, and each Linux distribution has various hardware, device, and other support built-in," said Levin, the former director of worldwide licensing at Microsoft.
-- Gene Koprowski is the author of "The Genius of Imitation: How to Profit by Using Others' Ideas in New Ways. Seven Imitation Strategies That Drive the Success of Marketplace Leaders" (Berrett-Koehler Publishing, Spring 2005, bkpub.com)
"Historically, vendors have tended to work with one flavor of Linux," said Daniel K. Boice, president and CEO of The Jaxara Group, an open source software applications developer, located in Bethesda, Md.. "However, it seems that vendors, such as Oracle, are using the growing popularity and acceptance of SUSE, Red Hat, and other Linux distribution, to grow sales. I believe that in an effort to increase both visibility, and revenue, vendor will begin to partner with different Linux distribution."
The recent purchase of SUSE by Novell was simply the first public phase of the new environment for Linux distribution.
"The business model of companies like SUSE and Red Hat have now changed," said Boice. "They are attempting to secure a profit licensing their distribution, as opposed to 10 years ago, when revenues were strictly generated by providing support. This will help the different distributions appeal to companies like Oracle, etcetera."
Look for major players like IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. to start looking closely at alternatives like SUSE over the coming years, as the distribution of Linux evolves.
"We will definitely start seeing serious competitors in this space over the next few years," said Joseph Hamm, a security engineer for Lancope, located in the Atlanta area, who is also the technical editor of Linux Routing, a book from New Riders Publishing.
There are other business reasons why software vendors like Oracle are considering this move.
Among those factors, the discontinuation of support by Red Hat for some of its software is a motivator. "While I can't speak for trends at Oracle, some companies such as Lancope, Inc. (a network security intrusion detection software developer) are looking at SUSE as a result of the discontinuation of support for the Red Hat operating system," Hamm said. "My experience in the security space has shown increasingly more requests for vendors to support multiple flavors of Linux."
To be sure, this will not come without a price, he said. "This is a challenge for vendors because as you start supporting multiple distributions of Linux, your development time increases and your cost of supporting these multiple platforms increases," said Hamm.
But vendors are incurring the costs of support -- because their end customers want to have access to a variety of Linux offerings.
SIVA Corporation, a Denver area provider of point-of-sale software to the restaurant industry, was recently asked by a major, casual dining chain to certify its software for four different flavors of Linux, including Red Hat 7.x, Red Hat 9.x, SUSE, and BlueCat.
"Depending on the hardware vendor they choose, this restaurant group may run a second flavor on their back-of-the-house server," Jim Melvin, chief executive officer of SIVA, told NewsForge. "If they choose a Linux component for their enterprise data hosting, it could well be a third."
Another company, VMWare, an EMC company, located near Boston, tells NewsForge that many of its clients also request multiple versions of Linux, especially for testing purposes, and to reduce hardware acquisition costs.
Adds Frank Mayer, co-founder of Trensys Technology, a Linux software and security applications developer and National Security Agency contractor located in Columbia, MD: "Supporting multiple flavors of Linux is roughly equivalent to supporting multiple versions of Windows."
But some industry insiders were cautious about the developments, stemming from the Oracle and Novell talks. The distribution techniques employed by those vendors are "just one method of installing a collection of files," said Brad Rutledge, vice president of marketing communications at Linux Networx, located in Utah. "The installation mechanism, amount of stability testing, and management tools are what differentiate Linux O/S providers."
Rutledge worries that each customer's installation of software - no matter what the distribution source - conforms to the Linux Standard Base (LSB), and thus truly provided the benefits of Linux.
Another technologist, Dr. Adam Kolawa, the chief executive officer of Parasoft Corp., a Monrovia, Calif.-based Java developer, said that the trend toward multiple distributions for vendors of Linux may be risky.
"This is a danger," Kolawa told NewsForge. "Each of the Linux vendors is trying to put value in their product by differentiating themselves with extensions. These extensions make versions of Linux incompatible with each other, and, that is why vendors have to work with multiple versions. It is the same as it was with Unix versions before. This is not a good trend."
But other experts think that may be a bit too much fretting. "The trend that is developing is that all companies having major shares of the market - IBM, SUSE, Red Hat, etc., bring added value to Linux," Dr. Roger Norton, dean of the school of computer science and math at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY, said.
There will always be technical issues for customers who run multiple distributions of Linux. "But this is fundamentally not worse than having your application support Windows 2000 and Windows XP," said Ozzy Papic, chief executive officer of NetIntegration, a New York area developer of self-healing Linux. "And as everyone knows, this was not a major problem for any application vendor in the past."
An intellectual property expert, Doug Levin, chief executive officer of Black Duck, an IP risk mitigation consulting company, in Boston, said that the market for distribution, simply put, is evolving along natural lines, and distributors are all going to have to change.
"ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) must work with multiple distros of Linux because the market is divided, and each Linux distribution has various hardware, device, and other support built-in," said Levin, the former director of worldwide licensing at Microsoft.
-- Gene Koprowski is the author of "The Genius of Imitation: How to Profit by Using Others' Ideas in New Ways. Seven Imitation Strategies That Drive the Success of Marketplace Leaders" (Berrett-Koehler Publishing, Spring 2005, bkpub.com)
Comments
on Experts say software vendors will soon offer products for different Linux 'flavors'Note: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
Re:Linux still Free as in Freedom for non develope
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 08, 2004 04:02 AM
Talk about over-dramatizing. One master for another? Please!
*Most* apps do run on all distributions - it all depends on library versions.. It takes a bit of tweaking, but you can do it (generally without recoding any part of the application - well, maybe recompiling...) What does NOT come with every distribution is support for the given application. Oracle "doesn't run on Gentoo", yet I know people who run Oracle on Gentoo - granted, not at work but at home...
*Most* apps do run on all distributions - it all depends on library versions.. It takes a bit of tweaking, but you can do it (generally without recoding any part of the application - well, maybe recompiling...) What does NOT come with every distribution is support for the given application. Oracle "doesn't run on Gentoo", yet I know people who run Oracle on Gentoo - granted, not at work but at home...
I am tired of the zillion distro game, with one distribution supporting some hardware perfectly, while the next one fails to do so.
Say what? Debian/PPC should be good enough for anybody.
Say what? Debian/PPC should be good enough for anybody.
Most IBM software and hardware already supports 4 Linux distributions: <A HREF="http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/links/index.shtml" title="ibm.com">Redhat, Suse, Turbolinux, and United Linux</a ibm.com> (although that last one may not last much longer... cough... SCO... cough).
Even if every vendor is using the same directory structures, configuration files, etc., they don't necessarily package identical software options as their "default" core testing components.
One might focus on IO testing with an eye towards a database server space, while another might be spending more time on their network management. As a result, the packages that are "current" for each distro are not necessarily identical.
Hence the need for multiple packaging options, most of which are just rebuilds with the distro's current libraries and packages.
Once these vendors wake up and figure out what the LSB is, they can make their applications run on any version of Linux that is LSB compliant.
The LSB standards create everything needed for an application to be able to run.
And most all major distros are LSB compliant.
An application written to the LSB standards is guarenteed to run on any LSB complaint distro.
The problem is some vendors such as Oracle, are more interested in the "exclusive" co-marketing agreements right now instead of taking the time to make their application be LSB compliant.
Regardless, don't blame the Linux community...it has already solved this problem, its the individual software vendors that dont seem to want to play well with others.
http://www.linuxbase.org/
The LSB standards create everything needed for an application to be able to run.
And most all major distros are LSB compliant.
An application written to the LSB standards is guarenteed to run on any LSB complaint distro.
The problem is some vendors such as Oracle, are more interested in the "exclusive" co-marketing agreements right now instead of taking the time to make their application be LSB compliant.
Regardless, don't blame the Linux community...it has already solved this problem, its the individual software vendors that dont seem to want to play well with others.
http://www.linuxbase.org/
I'm real curious how you're going to get, say, Yellow Dog running on an Intel box. I'm also puzzled as to how you have managed to solve the RPM vs. Apt vs. source-build differences between vendors.
Don't forget that in order for business to assign responsibility for packaging or security, the vendors have to actually be doing something to earn that revenue. That QA process means they don't stay 100% in sync, which means you need to have different builds for different vendors.
Don't bother preaching source-only -- that isn't what customers pay distributors and vendors for.
are we in need of Xopen Mark2 ?
Linux still Free as in Freedom for non developers?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 08, 2004 03:21 AMIn one of its most recent interviews with Cnet, Sulick , declined to explain how people needing to run Oracle on Linux or a vast majority of other apps were not just as locked into Red Hat as they were with Windows. In fact, he promoted this lock-in, i.e., certification process, as a competitive advantage.
It is also telling that Linux was supposed to bring computing to those in the developing world that couldn't afford it, yet enterprise Linux remains very expensive. I never thought one would pay more than $100 to get five years of security updates on a linux distribution. I guess I was wrong. So I guess I am growing tired of all these feel-good stories about how we are the good guys when we seem to be vying for the same kind of control that the monopolist now has.
Until all apps run on all distributions or at least the major ones (Debian, Mandrake, Suse, Slackware, Red Hat), I believe the future of Linux is in jeopardy. We have traded one master for another one.
#