It's a Matrix moment for Linux

COMMENTARY--What's going on? Linux hackers suddenly find they are in the Matrix, their brains feeding robotic corporations, and previously successful organizations are in trouble. Could all this be happening simply because there's no money any more?

Seven or eight years ago, we used to say "The Internet changes everything". It was an optimistic, hip idea. Then it got appropriated into the dot-com boom. A bunch of bread-heads made virtual money by capitalizing on the strange combination of greed, optimism and blindness that afflicted everyone else. By and large the clever ones got out in time, turned their virtual money into cash and left the rest of the world to realize it had been conned.

But that was OK, because, whenever it has happened before, there has always been another bandwagon along to jump on. A couple of booms down the line, things feel different. I begin to think that something really is changing everything, and that is lack of money.

Take the open-source boom. That was just as optimistic and hip as the Internet. You bet! We all loved the idea of beating the big corporations by sharing intellectual property to make something better and cheaper without feeding the fat cats. Old lags of the industry liked the fact that it looked like the answer to our exasperation with Unix.

Everyone who had wanted a serious alternative to Microsoft was heartily sick of the tangle of warring snakes that made up the Unix world. They were a bunch of arguing incompetents who could always be guaranteed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Whenever one of them looked like standing its ground against Microsoft, the others would gang up on it, or form yet another standards group that would turn a powerful idea into a late, ineffectual "industry agreement".

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By taking intellectual property out of the equation, Linux sidestepped the Unix wars and, over the last five years, has made massive headway. For the last couple of years, though, we've been feeling that someone, somehow, is going to try and make the party go sour, as people try to link intellectual property and money in the good old ways. At one stage, Red Hat was supposed to be Linux's answer to Microsoft, and now SCO's campaign is an effort to put the angst back into Unix, by claiming rights over all Linux implementations.

It's a Matrix moment for Linux programmers. SCO is telling them that they haven't been breathing air for the last few years.

Their brains have been floating in tanks, feeding the parasitic robots (read lawyers) who are calling the shots at financially strapped SCO. Now the money is short, and it is time to harvest those brains.

Let's not go into details about the campaign. In these pages we have already talked about the roots of the case in SCO's Monterey gambit, picked apart Microsoft's duplicity, and looked at what victory for SCO would mean to the future of Linux. For my money, however, the sheer stupidity involved in the SCO campaign is better summed up by Arie Rubenstein, in terms of the Dukes of Hazzard. Linux is Daisy Duke, SCO is Roscoe Coltrane and Microsoft is, of course, Boss Hogg.

I do have a few things to add to the discussion, however.

Firstly, I don't think SCO can win it, and I think SCO knows it. It's a bargaining chip, and one that might irritate IBM enough to make it buy SCO. IBM is one of the more "sinister" presences at the Linux party, and some observers have long expected that it would be IBM that makes the first move in trying to turn Linux into a standard commercial property. The suit could just be the stimulus to turn IBM into the soulless machine that wants those Linux brains.

It's worth mentioning, of course, that IBM's irritation is not primarily about the suit itself. IBM has the best IT lawyers in the industry and should have no worries there. What worries IBM will be the indirect effects, and the way they will harm the development of Linux.

Analysts like The Gartner Group, which only just came to terms with Linux, have suddenly gone all cautious about it again, recommending that users limit the amount of Linux they use in mission critical systems. Oh yes, while a long-running suit is in Microsoft's interest ("buy Windows instead!"), it won't help IBM.

And it is also worth noting that the GPL license has stood up very well so far, so there is no particular reason to expect that SCO's half-baked efforts will actually succeed in changing the way it works. Primarily, just think of this suit as a big indicator of the kind of cannibalism the industry will attempt to perform on itself as the money goes away.

For two years now, every product launch has majored on "return on investment", or "low cost of ownership", to persuade users to part with money. The continued gloom shows that, if that ploy is working at all, it is an uphill struggle.

With less and less money to keep themselves going, companies are going to be thrown more and more into strategies that draw cash from new sources. For instance, wresting market share from others, cashing in on off-balance sheet assets like patents, or companies that can't get money out of users finding ways to screw it out of other suppliers. Open source is one area where lawyers think they can see money that is not being harvested.

We are now in the era of "I'm an IT vendor--get me some money!" There might be some areas where this will be beneficial to users. For instance, any place where fat old products have it too easy (I'll look at network management in a future column). But we are also going to see a lot of strange events that have nothing to do with users at all, and will give them no benefits.