Lugging On To A Cult

Every third Sunday of the month, about 100 people gather in Delhi. They are the converts and evangelists of a new religion. They come together to worship at the altar of their new god, to exchange life-transforming experiences they’ve had since their conversion, discuss ways to gather more people into their fold, spread the message and to vilify what they see as Satan incarnate. Their numbers are growing every month. In fact, this group is just one of the 150 groups which meet regularly in almost every Indian city. The new god for these men and women is a software called Linux, and their Satan incarnate, Microsoft’s Windows.

Last fortnight, when one man in this Delhi lug (Linux Users Group) pointed out that Windows has its good points too, he was beaten up and thrown out of the meeting by Linux fundamentalists.

Quite simply, the computer world has never seen anything like Linux, the operating system (OS) a software that runs the basic functions of any computer created by a 21-year-old college student eight years ago. In a Microsoft internal memo leaked to the US press last year, senior executives admitted they’d not be able to make a cheaper or better product. A stunning admission from perhaps the world’s most powerful company.

First the cheaper bit. Microsoft can’t make anything cheaper as Linux is free. Its creator, Linus Torvalds, has given it away; anyone is allowed to resell it, but none allowed to charge money for it. Torvalds has not made a dollar from his creation, nor does he intend to. He earns his living working in a Silicon Valley start-up called TransMeta.

The better part. When Torvalds gave his software away, he also gave away its source code, the core of a program needed to change it in any way. This has meant that there are thousands of programmers across the world who work, mostly in their spare time, at improving Linux. It’s more than a software, it is a movement. People work free to improve and extend it, as labours of love, making it a continuously improving product, and it still costs nothing! No corporation can hire so many programmers to work so devotedly on any product as Linux gets, without paying a dollar for it.

There are already 10-12 million Linux users, and growing. Information managers the world over are discovering that Linux often outperforms Unix or Microsoft’s Windows and NT operating systems and at a fraction of the cost. For instance, it puts very little load on the hardware, which means your discarded 486 PC can be run at Pentium-speed. While Microsoft is working hard to ensure that its software runs on all the network computers, set-top boxes and other PC-like new machines, the Linux Router Project offers the core of just such an OS for free on a single floppy disk. But what is scariest for Bill Gates and Microsoft is that hoards of software developers are now using Linux to create server applications, which form the heart of the Internet.

In ‘98 alone, Linux’s marketshare rose by over 200 per cent. According to International Data Corporation, which tracks information technology (IT) trends, there were over 750,000 new installations last year, giving it about 17 per cent of the low to medium-sized server market. If Linux grows the same way, by year-end it could eclipse Microsoft’s NT as the server segment leader.

Says Vinod Sood, assistant vice-president, Hughes Software Systems, one of those offering support services for Linux in India: It has some obvious advantages over Windows. First, it has a monolithic kernel which lets it perform all services from one place whereas the Windows system uses microkernels where different services are performed by different subsystems. Since Linux provides access to its source code, a systems overseer can quickly write a software patch to fix problems. In case of proprietary systems like Windows, operators are forced to contact the software maker for any problem. Says Eric S. Raymond, a self-styled open source advocate: Linux allows your firm to run software, not a software company to run you.

Initially, Linux was considered a juvenile effort that had no support, no application and probably no users. But that’s history. Linux is now endorsed by IT giants like ibm, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems and Compaq. Some of them even offer their customers a choice of machines pre-installed with Linux instead of Windows.

Software movers and shakers like Computer Associates, SuSE, Informix, Oracle, Netscape and Sybase too have chipped in by starting software development on Linux. Corel recently launched its WordPerfect 8 for Linux and that too available free for download in true Linux spirit. H-P used Linux to port the Carnegie Mellon Mach kernel for their imaging work and Schlumberger chose it over sco-Unix for its new computers. Informix and Oracle are ready to port Linux. ibm has built a massive parallel Linux system, linking 37 servers together, which achieved graphics equal to a $5 million Cray supercomputer at a cost of only $150,000. It’s all happening. And early this year, PC Week magazine carried a story that Microsoft was working on a version of their best-selling Office software to run on Linux. Microsoft neither denied nor confirmed the story.

Being free isn’t the only attraction. Users claim that Linux is totally customisable and unbelievably stable. Daimler-Benz, for one, ran its servers on Linux for a year and did not need to reboot their system even once. Several corporates have clandestinely run the OS without its employees knowing it. It is also a complete OS and one does not need to buy anything else to deploy it, while other systems tend to give users the backbones and then make them pay heavily for required add-ons and options. It already has several desktop applications for the non-technical user like Star Office, WordPerfect, gimp and what’s more, most Windows applications can be opened from within Linux.

In India too, Linux fever is catching on as most of the networking is being done on Linux. In major cities, Linux programmers and users have started a new cult lugs who follow and endorse any new development in the software like a religion. The movement is being spearheaded by people as young as Linus Torvalds. Take Suman Saraf. At 23, he heads the Linux development section at Hughes Software Systems. Saraf discovered Linux as a schoolboy in Surat in 1992-93 and is today one of its most prominent preachers in India.

Big Indian companies too are shifting allegiances. The Eicher group, Bennett Coleman, icici, Air-India and Bharat Petroleum are a few running Linux successfully. Almost all Internet service providers (isps) are developing their protocol on Linux. Several software firms have also announced that they would be developing customised Linux-based operations. Says Sharad Talwar, general manager (marketing), hcl Infosystems, which has already begun developing complete on-line end-to-end installations on Linux: It’s a damn good solution for isps who are looking at a good package at economy rates both in terms of hardware and software costs.

For Microsoft, it’s all a storm in a tea cup. It says the whole business of free and open source software is ill-adapted for the marketplace. Says a Microsoft bigwig: Open source and Linux is more of a PR phenomenon. It is just another brand of the Unix operating system and the world is not crying out for another Unix. Gates has said that though there clearly is a market for free software, it would be confined to relatively simple applications like word processors and not large, mission-critical applications which Windows excels in.

At a recent gathering of IT professionals in Houston, Gates said: Customers will stay with Windows as it is a more homogenous product than Linux which, originally created by a Finnish college student, has been further developed by a diffuse band of programmers. There are different things people have done to the kernel, which affect applications compatibility. There are five different windowing systems written for Linux which are unable to interchange data. Microsoft says it is taking Linux seriously, but does not expect it to threaten the Windows supremacy in any way.

Says Neeraj Shaabi, marketing manager, Microsoft India: Linux is just one more phenomenon in the server area. It’s a short-term affair. Linux has this promise of being free but when it comes to serious corporates, the cost of acquisition is not always a factor. The real factor is tenacity, support, predictability and most important, future prospects, most of which is suspect in the case of Linux.

Security is yet another problem for Linux, says Shaabi: Nothing is safe with millions of hackers piling on to the open source code and changing it according to their wills and fancies. Agrees Hanif Sohrab, product manager, network security, hcl Comnet: How can you have a secure product when its source code is open and freely available on the Internet for all and sundry?

Also, Linux’s scalability is yet to be proven in handling heavy loads on big, multiprocessor machines where other versions of Unix, such as Sun Microsystems’ Solaris and ibm’s aix have so far proven to be more scalable. Some experts feel that most Linux programmers have excelled with the OS in low to medium-sized server businesses. They haven’t aimed at high-performance commercial computing yet. A report by a leading Unix analyst said that Linux had to improve beyond its technical niche and handle commercial IT tasks. It said that it fell short of high-end Unixes in several areas including multiprocessing and high-availability clustering and file system features like journaling, large file and logical volume support.

Their arguments would be extremely persuasive but for one fact: more and more corporations continue to adopt Linux at the cost of both NT and Unix and just about every owner of a proprietary Unix operating system has thrown its weight behind Linux by making investments in leading Linux companies including Red Hat Software, Caldera Systems and VA Research. And as the operating system gains critical mass, more applications are being written to run with it, making information managers more willing to give it a serious try. Caldera Systems recently launched Caldera Open Linux version 2.2, which removes the installation headaches which often weighed against the OS.

Microsoft may have won the web browser war, at least for now, but the Linux challenge could be formidable. Just because Linux is as much a culture and a set of values as it is a product. There is no one company for Microsoft to target and no one product to focus on as Linux has the resources to stay agile and elusive. Of course, Linux is still minute compared to Windows, which has a vast, satisfied and accustomed user base, at over 250 million (legal) copies in use.

But then things can change very fast. Because Torvalds believes quality will always be on Linux’s side, that free software will always be the best software. Some months ago, he told respected computer columnist Robert X. Cringely: Because the software is free, there is no pressure to release it before it is really ready just to achieve some sales target. Every version of Linux is declared to be finished only when it is actually finished, which explains why it is so solid. The other reason why free software is better is because the personal reputation of the developer is attached to every release. If you are making something to give away to the world, something that represents to millions of users your philosophy of computing, you will always make it the very best product you can make. Microsoft has never faced a rival like this.