Ubuntu and the coming Linux popularity contest
It's just a matter of time before Ubuntu is crowned "enterprise ready" by one of the major ISVs. Will it be able to maintain its popularity once it is popular with enterprise buyers?
Ubuntu plays an increasingly important role within the larger Linux market. According to a new white paper from IDC [PDF], Linux is big business and is ready for prime time, with IDC forecasting overall spending on hardware, software, and services for Linux to increase 25.2 percent annually through 2011, particularly at the expense of Unix:
Increasingly, deployments of the Linux server operating system are expanding from infrastructure-oriented workloads to more commercially-oriented workloads such as database, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and other general business processing, workloads that historically have been the domain of Microsoft Windows and Unix. Where once Linux was seen by customers primarily as a low-cost infrastructure solution, it is now increasingly viewed as a solution for wider and more critical business deployments.
The question in my mind is therefore, "Which of the big-three Linux vendors is going to dominate the market?" Red Hat is the obvious first choice, but I think there's a serious spoiler in the Linux market, and its name is Ubuntu.
Novell's SUSE, with its rising Linux revenue, should perhaps be the contender for the throne, and I believe it will continue to leverage its Microsoft relationship to the maximum advantage. But Novell (and Red Hat, for that matter) is missing something that Ubuntu has in spades:
This isn't just about downloads. As I've seen within my own company, where Ubuntu is our fastest-growing Linux distribution, community momentum increasingly translates into revenue momentum.
If you're Sun, IBM, Oracle, HP, or other big companies in or surrounding the Linux phenomenon, Ubuntu has to look mighty tasty. For Oracle, Ubuntu has proved that it can compete head-to-head with Red Hat. As movement from Sun, IBM, and others is starting to show, OEMs and ISVs are making room for Ubuntu in their certification plans. Given enough community momentum, the certifications will follow.
Oracle need not continue attempting to replicate Red Hat, the market leader. It could buy into Ubuntu and foster a new market leader.
Ubuntu has done all of this largely on its own. Consider what would happen if an IBM or Sun seriously threw its weight behind Ubuntu, banishing the "It's not enterprise-ready" myth forever? I suspect we'd see widespread, immediate enterprise adoption of Ubuntu. Why? Because Ubuntu is already being used widely within enterprises. It's just not being allowed to carry mission-critical enterprise applications yet, because those are reserved from the "enterprise Linux distributions" like RHEL and SUSE.
In short, the only thing Ubuntu is missing is a big brother that will officially declare, "Ubuntu is enterprise class." It's already there, but needs the certification by A Big Company. IBM, Sun, and others all have their own reasons for crowning it such.
It's just a question of when and who. My money is on Sun, as IBM still wants to pretend it's a neutral Switzerland in the Linux market. Oracle could also make a move, but I've not heard any rumblings on this one.
Would such an action make Ubuntu the winner in the Linux popularity contest? Of course not. If anything, it might stifle Ubuntu's popularity, just as Red Hat's transition of its Linux distribution into Fedora and RHEL caused consternation in its community (but not in its stock price or annual sales :-). Ubuntu "growing up" might be the worst thing that ever happened to its community.
But I think Ubuntu's increased commercialization is not up for debate. It will happen. It's just a question of whether Ubuntu can "grow up" on Mark Shuttleworth's terms, rather than on crass materialistic terms. I think it can.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
It's true that the percentage developing for a project that grows in use shrinks, but so long as the percentage shrinkage is limited it's still an increase in real numbers and the more developers a project has, the faster it improves.
In the meantime, I know what you think of CentOS, but that project wouldn't exist if RHEL wasn't so difficult to get hold of without either a great deal of technical expertise or money which has been a community shrinking move on Red Hat's part. Accusations that Fedora has been the unpaid BETA for RHEL have not been entirely unwarranted, even if some do seem to enjoy its somewhat bleeding edge style. Then Novell have made moves which have both been very community-centric (Open Sourcing YaST, their work on OpenOffice.org) and alienating (the MS deal, the Moonlight distribution restrictions).
Shuttleworth's not stupid, and I think it's been stated before that Ubuntu on the desktop was designed to garner community momentum, a good reputation, and so feed into business support contracts. What seems like a cynical move is actually much more in line with how I like to see businesses run; get business by doing what's best for the customer, not by trying to squeeze them. Shuttleworth understands that the community is as much his bread and butter as the paying support customer and he understands that community support is essential to the success of his business.
Maybe that's why he got into Linux and set up Ubuntu in the first place. As much as I hate some corporations and how the economic system under which we live often favours the nastiest and most selfish behaviour, I also see some corporations and business people who do well almost despite being good people. I'd like to think that the reason Shuttleworth set up Ubuntu is because it's an area in which success not only allows, but requires that you treat people well.
If Ubuntu takes over in the Enterprise, it'll be because it's run by someone who gets just how much his business depends on the community while others, who once seemed to understand, have almost fallen back on the old ways of squeezing the customer dry.
Asides from anything else, community momentum is development momentum. There will only ever be a small percentage of the community for [i]any[/i] project that actively develops for that project, but as the community grows so does them number of active developers it attracts.
It's true that the percentage developing for a project that grows in use shrinks, but so long as the percentage shrinkage is limited it's still an increase in real numbers and the more developers a project has, the faster it improves.
In the meantime, I know what you think of CentOS, but that project wouldn't exist if RHEL wasn't so difficult to get hold of without either a great deal of technical expertise or money which has been a community shrinking move on Red Hat's part. Accusations that Fedora has been the unpaid BETA for RHEL have not been entirely unwarranted, even if some do seem to enjoy its somewhat bleeding edge style. Then Novell have made moves which have both been very community-centric (Open Sourcing YaST, their work on OpenOffice.org) and alienating (the MS deal, the Moonlight distribution restrictions).
Shuttleworth's not stupid, and I think it's been stated before that Ubuntu on the desktop was designed to garner community momentum, a good reputation, and so feed into business support contracts. What seems like a cynical move is actually much more in line with how I like to see businesses run; get business by doing what's best for the customer, not by trying to squeeze them. Shuttleworth understands that the community is as much his bread and butter as the paying support customer and he understands that community support is essential to the success of his business.
Maybe that's why he got into Linux and set up Ubuntu in the first place. As much as I hate some corporations and how the economic system under which we live often favours the nastiest and most selfish behaviour, I also see some corporations and business people who do well almost despite being good people. I'd like to think that the reason Shuttleworth set up Ubuntu is because it's an area in which success not only allows, but requires that you treat people well.
If Ubuntu takes over in the Enterprise, it'll be because it's run by someone who gets just how much his business depends on the community while others, who once seemed to understand, have almost fallen back on the old ways of squeezing the customer dry.