Feature Article By Jeff Gould
Copyright © 2007, Peerstone Research Inc, All rights reserved.

April 28, 2007
I've been a Linux fan for years, but lately I wonder if the drum beating from the big IT vendors in favor of open source hasn't finally slipped over the edge from sincere enthusiasm to meaningless - or in some cases downright hypocritical - sloganeering. The example that brought this gloomy thought to mind was a recent IBM press release touting a "new open client solution" as an "alternative to vendor lock-in". Wow. Imagine that. An alternative to vendor lock-in.

Upon examination, this press release turns out to be unintentionally hilarious.

"Armonk, NY - 12 Feb 2007: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled a new Open Client Solution for customers of any size or industry so they can help their employees better collaborate, improve productivity, and lower the total cost of information technology ownership... Customers can benefit from the opportunity to make one investment in the single, flexible Open Client Solution, a more efficient alternative to vendor lock-in because only minor changes are typically required to run on different operating system platforms. The solution can include capabilities for desktop management support and application migration and are aimed at helping customers pilot, implement, and gain value from security-rich and reliable Linux and other open standards-based solutions. Operating system services will be provided by Linux distributors Red Hat and Novell."

Just what does this "open client solution" consist of? Why, haven't you guessed? It's Lotus Notes. Yes, folks, IBM in its bold combat against vendor lock-in has decided the time has come to let you choose whether you want to run Notes on Windows, Red Hat Linux, Suse Linux, or even a Macintosh.

I'm not making this up, they're serious. Just in case you didn't get the message, IBM even inserts the following helpful sub-title into its press release:

"Alternative to Vendor Lock-In Includes Lotus Software Running With Linux or Windows and Macintosh"

The grammar in that heading is a little strange (do they really mean "Linux or Windows and Macintosh"?). But never mind. Did I mention that your choice of collaboration software in this "open solution" also includes IBM WebSphere Portal? Hmm, I wonder what happened to Microsoft Outlook, or Microsoft SharePoint, or BEA WebLogic Portal, or the Oracle Collaboration Suite, or SAP Netweaver with Duet? I guess fighting vendor lock-in sometimes requires a little bit of vendor lock-out too.

I don't know about you, but my guess is that IBM's promise to fight vendor lock-in is about as trustworthy as Nabisco's promise to take the trans fat out of Oreos. Either they're not really going to do it, or they're going to put something else in that's just as bad.

What's odd about the open source debate these days is that it's no longer really about "free and open source" vs. "commercial and closed source". In the hands of IBM and other software-freedom-touting vendors like Oracle, open source has become a cudgel used to beat up on other commercial software vendors. IBM bashes Microsoft because Windows isn't open source. But IBM sells more than $15 billion worth of closed source software per year, and is widely known to have spent billions building up the Linux ecosystem to challenge Microsoft. Similarly, IBM bashed Sun for years for not open sourcing Java, but when Sun finally took the plunge last year and put its Java virtual machine and the JDK under the same Gnu Public License (GPL) as Linux, IBM promptly complained that Sun should have used the Apache license instead. Now the Apache license, although nominally open source, has a very convenient feature for commercial software vendors in that it allows them to privatize a piece of software and incorporate it into their own proprietary products, without publishing modifications back to the community as the GPL requires. So it would seem that Sun has made Java too open source for IBM's taste.

IBM isn't the only offender in this game of marketing smoke and mirrors. Oracle charges astronomical fees for its high-end database, but it bashes Red Hat for charging a fraction of those fees for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and then brazenly proceeds to resell a binary clone of Red Hat's product. Let's do the math here. Suppose you have a fairly big transactional application and you want to run the enterprise edition of Oracle's 10g database in a clustered configuration on four servers, each equipped with a single Intel quad-core processor. Under Oracle's licensing scheme, you'll need to buy two licenses per server (since each Intel core counts as half a processor), or eight in all. With 10g EE at $40,000 per license and Real Application Clusters at $20,000, that will be 8 x $60,000 or $480,000 in one-time license fees, plus an additional $105,600 per year for support and updates. But if as a thrifty buyer you are willing to throw out Red Hat and bring in Oracle instead as your supplier of Red Hat Linux, you will save an additional $500 per server per year, or $2,000 in all - that is, less than 2% of your recurring annual Oracle maintenance contract and less than 0.5% of your Oracle license fee. With deals like this, it's little wonder that most Red Hat shops have decided they have more important things to do than replace an operating system that's working perfectly well with an identical binary clone from Oracle (remember, most Linux shops that don't want to pay Red Hat prices are already using Fedora or a free RHEL clone like CentOS).

The only reason IBM and Oracle get away with this kind of posturing is that the magical words "open source" have come to function as the software equivalent of carbon offsets. In the dreary conventional view of economics shared by Richard Stallman's side of the open source world and some of his pundit fans, profits are akin to global warming: both are evil. By this logic, common corporate strategies for achieving profits - such as building a better mousetrap, making your brand a household name, or trying to keep the recipe to your secret sauce a secret - are inherently wrong. You see, it's just plain wicked for software developers to go out and create really useful solutions to a really hard problems, and then have the nerve to keep them secret so they can charge people money.

But some software vendors are cleverer than others, and have learned to buy indulgences for their sinful profit-craving ways by selectively building open source components into their stack. They do this at the lowest possible layers, preferably those that are costly to develop but unlikely to yield a competitive advantage. For example, those pesky server operating systems that are indispensable to the performance and stability of important applications, yet demand years of thankless system programming to do well.

This is all that IBM and Oracle are doing with their open source marketing. They use the worldwide community of Linux contributors as a low-cost R&D operation and they exploit distributors like Red Hat as a communally owned distribution channel - ideally one that shouldn't get too uppity about demanding the right to make its own profits. Their own software remains every bit as proprietary as the Microsoft products they compete with. And if open source projects begin to climb up the stack and threaten IBM WebSphere or Oracle Fusion middleware - watch out! An enraged software elephant can do a lot of damage just by stomping its feet, even if there is no business sense to its actions, as demonstrated by Oracle's venture into the Linux cloning business in order to punish Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss. I shudder to think what will happen if Red Hat ever acquires MySQL.

IBM and Oracle are not the only technology vendors who have leveraged commodity open source plumbing into fabulous profits at the proprietary application layer. Google is another great example, perhaps one that will prove much more influential in the long run. The Mountain View search firm has built what amounts to the world's largest dedicated compute engine using its own customized dialect of Linux and a stupendous quantity of dirt-cheap PC-caliber motherboards and disk drives. By some estimates the firm now runs over half a million of these homegrown servers, which as nearly pure commodities in the economic sense are the hardware equivalents of Linux at the operating system level.

But in one important respect Google is playing straighter than IBM or Oracle. Unlike them, the search giant doesn't try to gloss over its profit-making ways by flaunting its commitment to open source, despite the fact that it is by far the largest user of Linux on the planet. On the contrary, Google makes no bones about the fact that its search algorithms and its data center architecture are proprietary, and that open source is no more than an accidental ingredient in its ultra-secret, money-making sauce. We would all be better off if IBM and Oracle would get off their high horses and do the same.