The Once And Future Linux

As Comdex winds down in Las Vegas, it's time to come to grips with one obvious reality. The real fun this year was not at either of the two convention centers, which housed Comdex proper, but instead was tucked into the first floor of the Las Vegas Hilton at the Linux Business Expo. Who cares that the Expo got second billing behind the mammoth trade show. Or that its exhibitors numbered only a fraction of its host's. It achieved something Comdex proper did not. Buzz. And lots of it.

Linux pator Linus Torvalds emerged as the star of the keynote lineup. His visage appeared on Vegas cable and convention TV more frequently than Leonid Breshnev at the height of the Cold War. Torvalds, with his laid-back, unassuming style, was the darling of convention interviewers. And the buzz did not stop with Linus. Caldera Systems Inc.'s CEO Ransom Love also made the rounds, offering a corporate point of view on techy talk shows.

Sky divers, who in other weeks perform as The Flying Elvises, dressed in penguin garb, jumped from a plane, clustered together as they fell, and parachuted into the parking lot of the Las Vegas Hilton before breakfast one morning. Moments later, they joined with the troops from TurboLinux (clad in the penguin colors--black, yellow and white) and jumped symbolically through a paper Monopoly board with an image of Mr. Monopoly at its center that suspiciously resembled Bill Gates. Never mind that only a handlful of Linux faithfuls and a smattering of press were awake at that hour to see them. The event was picked up and repeated in national news of the trade show.

For people like Tony Baines, corporate evangelist for the Santa Cruz Operation Inc. (SCO), long-time purveyor of Unix systems, it was all great fun. But when the week was over, it was time to get back to business. The high profile Linux now enjoys, he postulated, is just the fall-out of a year's worth of media focus on Microsoft's woes with the Justice Department and Judge Jackson's recent finding of facts. Although Linux may be new, he says, "the concept of collaborative development and shared code is not. It has been a ubiquitous feature in the UNIX industry from the beginning. And that, of course, is a whole 20 year involvement."

Indeed, for those who watched Unix grow up (and into more flavors than Baskin-Robbins) on the campuses of universities around the country, the energy of the programmers who have written and advanced Linux programs across the Internet for the past couple of years is not new at all. The tradition of Open Source, borrowing code and advancing it, is part of that campus tradition. What is new is the fact that the operating system is free (for the cost of a download) and that, in spite of that, a number of vendors have staked high claims on the territory and are attempting to build it into a business.

Part of the charm at the Linux Business Expo was watching the recent adapters--guys in ties--standing side-by-side with pony-tailed programmers to watch demos at Corel, Red Hat and Caldera this minute and line up at the Andover.Net exhibit the next to order their Think Geek sweatshirts and Fridge Code.

It has all the schizophrenic charm of computing in the early days, when development still took place in garages and the programmers who did it were ambitious but still hungry. In these days of IPOs, venture capitalists, mergers and acquisitions, it will be interesting to watch the movement evolve. Linux as a business enterprise is raising the profile of the operating system and earning it ink in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and BusinessWeek as well as trade journals such as VARBusiness. Corporations are embracing it. And that opens new opportunities for VARs and integrators to build and enhance systems and offer service bundles for them. Even within the industry, even companies like SCO, long-timer marketers of a commercial Unix, are embracing it in their business plans.

For his part, Torvalds sees no conflicts and seems to even welcome business involvement. To quote an oft-repeated phrase from last week: "Programmers just want to have fun." With penguins everywhere, they only gain more opportunity to do so.