Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 16:36:33 -0400
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
To: Linux Weekly News <lwn@lwn.net>, editors@linuxtoday.com,
Subject: The Re-Unification of Linux (for immediate publication)

In the wake of the wildly successful Red Hat IPO. stories mooting the
possibility that Linux might `fragment' under corporate pressure seem
to be proliferating.  The memory of the great proprietary-Unix debacle
of the 1980s and early 1990s is constantly invoked -- N different
versions diverging as vendors sought to differentiate their products,
but succeeded only in balkanizing their market and inviting the 
Windows invasion.

But amidst all this viewing-with-alarm (some of it genuine, much of it
doubtless seeded by Microsoft) something ironically fascinating is
happening.  Unix is beginning to re-unify itself.

SGI's recent decision to drop IRIX and focus on Linux is one telling
straw in the wind.  Another is SCO's launch of a Linux
professional-services group, clearly a trial balloon aimed at
discovering whether SCO's branded-Unix business can be migrated to a
Linux codebase.  I visited a Hewlett-Packard R&D lab last week, and
learned that many people there expect HP to deep-six its HP-UX product
in favor of Linux in the fairly near future.

What's causing this phenomenon?  Open source, of course.  Whoever you
are -- SGI, SCO, HP, or even Microsoft -- most of the smart people on
the planet work somewhere else.  The leverage you get from being able
to use all those brains and eyeballs in addition to your own is colossal.
It's a competitive advantage traditional operating-systems vendors are
finding they can no longer ignore. 

Playing along now and trying to defect later won't work either -- because
running away from the community with your own little closed Linux fragment
would just mean you didn't get to use those brains any more.  You'd be
swiftly out-evolved and out-competed by the vendors still able to tap the
literally hundreds of thousands of open-source developers out there.

What we have now have going is a virtuous circle -- as each of the
old-line Unix outfits joins the Linux crowd, the gravity it exerts on
the others grows stronger.  The Monterey and Tru-64 development
efforts, the last-gasp attempts to produce competitive closed Unixes,
can't even muster convincing majorities of support inside the vendors
backing them; both IBM and Compaq are investing heavily in Linux.

Linux fragmenting? No way. Instead, it's cheerfully absorbing its
competition.  And the fact that it is `absorbing' rather than `destroying'
is key; vendors are belatedly figuring out that the value proposition
in the OS business doesn't really depend on code secrecy at all, but
instead hinges on smarts and service and features and responsiveness.

These are all things the worldwide community of open-source hackers are
really good at supplying.  Vendors become packaging and value-add operations
that never have to re-invent the wheel again.  Customers get better software.
By joining the Linux community, everbody wins.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His
failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
        -- H.L. Mencken