Enterprise Unix Roundup: A Whole Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

This week will see the opening of the LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit in New York City — the show formally known as LinuxWorld Conference and Expo East. This is a smaller show, with no exhibition floor to speak of. It will be all meetings and sessions, all the time. For the unwary press corps, it provides a chance to mix and mingle with the enterprise movers and shakers until they drop their notebooks and grab alcoholic beverages in sheer frustration all the while looking for substance.

Hence, my decision not to attend this year.

Actually, I tease a bit. There will be some interesting news to come out of this show, primarily in the form of the new

Open Source Alliance, a collection of open source vendors set to launch on Valentine's Day.

At first, like many who heard the news, I wondered why yet another open source group is needed. It's beginning to look like the proliferation of sewing circles in my grandmother's church. True, there has been some consolidation, with the recent merging of the Free Standards Group and the Open Source Development Labs into the Linux Foundation. But lately it seems like if you have an open source business, it's a good idea to start allying yourself with other vendors, pronto.

And why is this? Do open source vendors have a genetic predilection to socializing? Is it the free beer?

Well, despite the talk about synergy and mutual support, the biggest reason for joining one of these groups is redundancy — specifically, the elimination thereof.

Say I am a small-ish open source vendor. I make the Best Software (referred to, from here on out, as BS). Anyone who uses the BS I develop loves the product. They cannot get enough of it. The problem is, my BS is licensed to only five paying customers, not including my Uncle George, who gets it for free. Clearly, some marketing is in order.

But marketing is expensive. I have to either hire some in-house employees or job it out to one of those sharks in the marketing world. (I know some of these people — one guy runs marathons so he can chase reporters down more efficiently.)

Or, let's flip the example around. Through the miracle of viral marketing, i.e., word of mouth, my BS is hugely popular. I can't make it fast enough, and the support contracts are selling like hotcakes. Too bad I have a tech staff of two (not counting my Uncle George, who gets around). I have to hire and train tech staff, like yesterday. I can't support BS 1.0, and customers are already clamoring for BS 2.0, to which I have little time and resources to devote.

What do I do?

1. Sell the company for a bazillion bucks to a group of venture capitalists and retire to Tahiti.
2. Find other vendors in the same boat and combine talent and resources.

If you said option 2, you were right (though option 1 certainly has its merits). The combining of resources is the No. 1 reason for the Linux Foundation, the Open Management Consortium, the KDE League, the GNOME Foundation, and (now) the Open Source Alliance. All are groups dedicated to helping their individual members become greater than the sum of the whole.

These groups aren't sure-fire ways to succeed. They take much effort and planning because even though cooperation is key, competition remains. And it seems like there's always one joker in the pack who sees an opening and tries to take over. (Read up on the history of UnitedLinux for an example of that.)

Ideally, the formation of these groups gives the constituents more freedom than outright partnerships would. Partnerships are more binding, and a bit messier to extract from. When SCO wanted to leave UnitedLinux, all it had to do was sue IBM. Quick and simple!

If this all seems a bit tongue-in-cheek, perhaps it is. There is a much to be said for the open source methodology that lets these groups get together in the first place.

But I sometimes wonder if a company that can't make it on its own in open source, perhaps would be better off re-tuning its own business strategy before joining with others.

Brian Proffitt is managing editor of JupiterWeb's Linux/Open Source channel, which includes Linux Today, LinuxPlanet, and AllLinuxDevices.