Mashed Articles

Profiting from Linux doesn’t involve an obvious winning formula. There are as many different business models as there are distributions, and you seldom find much overlap between those that are working. Instead, you find something more like the world of medieval patronage. It’s a place where the great distribution families fight for favour, sponsoring masked balls and conferences, while trying to attract geek heroes to work under their flags.

Yet despite this somewhat unconventional system, there’s no doubt that profit drives development, progress and ambition. You only have to look as far as the kernel at the heart of the system to see the proof. There may be terabytes of projected idealism in there, but a significant proportion is more prosaically driven and developed by business. When kernel supremo Greg Kroah-Hartman last collated contributions in 2008, he found some surprising statistics. For example, there may be over a thousand developers working on the latest versions, but a mere 10 individuals were responsible for almost 15 per cent of the code added to the kernel in the three years up to 2008. A further 20 individuals take that total to 30 per cent.

This is remarkable when you consider that version 2.6.33 of the kernel – released in February – more than doubles the number of lines of code found in the vanilla kernel from December 2003. That’s 13 million lines, an assemblage that has recently been estimated to be worth over £900million by researchers at the University of Oviedo in Spain.

What’s even more interesting is the list of who’s paying for these contributions. Top of this chart are independent developers, accounting for almost 14 per cent of the work, and these are closely followed by a group whose company sponsors are unknown. Third in the chart is Red Hat, followed by Novell, IBM and Intel. These four accounted for almost a third of kernel development in 2008, and there can be no doubt that each company’s motivation is far from altruistic.

If you had any doubts, note that Microsoft joined the party last July by contributing 20,000 lines of its own code to the kernel to help people running virtualized Linux from their Windows machines. Even though it’s more likely that this act was crafted to avoid legal action, rather than a flush of generosity, it still illustrates that the kernel has become a cut-throat gladiatorial arena in the fight for big business.

However, there’s one influential distribution that is completely absent from Greg’s Hall of Fame. Like the others, it’s a commercial endeavour. Unlike them, it neither makes a profit nor has a clear business model. This is despite it being the number one distro. Ubuntu, developed by Canonical, is the perfect example of what happens when Linux ideology and business meet.

Canonical is a global enterprise, funded by Mark Shuttleworth’s sale of Thawte for $575million in 1999. The charismatic figurehead combined coding skills with a penchant for space flight. He selected his early Ubuntu team by taking six months’ of Debian mailing-list archives with him on an ice-breaker to Antarctica, and choosing those whose comments and contributions he judged most worthy.

Despite its market share, Canonical is desperately trying to find a revenue stream from somewhere. It’s a sign of the sober, business-oriented times that Shuttleworth’s successor, Jane Silbur, isn’t an ex-astronaut, but ex-Vice President of Command and Control Systems at General Dynamics C4 Systems.

At the enterprise-end of the business, it’s chasing clouds by bundling an Amazon EC2 compatible server/client solution and selling support. At the user-end, Canonical has just launched its own online music store. This is a service heavily tied to its own remote storage service, which is used to download and store the tracks you buy, available only in the patent-riddled and legally ambiguous MP3 format.

Mark Shuttleworth’s parting blog post proclaimed he’ll be concentrating on “product design, partnerships and customers”, and the proof seems visible in the new release of Ubuntu. But Mark has also signalled another change for Ubuntu users. In a recent mailing list post dealing with community criticism of recent design changes, Mark wrote, “This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.” These aren’t the words of a geek with his head in the stars, but of a man who has fallen to earth. And things have changed.

What do patents think they are, eh? Coming in here, hoarding all our perfectly shareable technologies, talking in a barely understandable language of their own, eh? It’s terrible! They’re holding this fine country of ours back 20 years! What next? Shall we patent the act of purchasing a product using money so they can take over our retail establishments too? Even better, let us patent the act of drawing air into meaty sacks using a diaphragm! That’s sure to be a money-spinner. I’m not a filthy patentist, of course. No. I think they should be allowed to live. They just ought to keep quiet and stay in the patent office where they belong.

These patent / immigrant jokes doing it for you? Thought not.

In among the nonsense, I’m making a vaguely serious point: patents and the stupid legal squabbling that goes with them are holding technology back like a playground bully stunts the emotional growth of an awkward nerd. Look at Apple’s public and obviously duplicitous fight with HTC. To the cynical outsider it seems to have nothing to do with patents at all. Apple is barking and growling, its attitude based solely on professional malice, baring its teeth against any other manufacturer that dares sniff around the territory urine-marked as Apple’s own. It picks on HTC because a fight with bull mastiff Google might not end altogether pleasantly. I could understand a measure of stroppiness if the iPhone UI were being ripped off wholesale, but interface elements like multitouch control simply should not be reserved for a single company. They’re fundamentals. They are base functions that will help carry computing into the next decade. They’re the glue that holds mobile devices together. If these things have been put together from scratch, with none of the originating code, the fact that they do a similar job is irrelevant to me. It’s just healthy competition, isn’t it?

What if someone litigious held the patent for the keyboard? Or how about the ‘finger-based input device’? I would hope that a court would bash their unreasonable claims for dominance down, but I can’t be sure that they would.

I note with interest that snarling Apple isn’t yet spitting venom at Microsoft over the patents which are no doubt infringed upon in Windows Mobile 7, perhaps because WM7 isn’t yet on the shelves. An early pre-release battle will lead to a subtle change in technology, not a hefty and embarrassing payout, which I’m not sure is the desired result of all this.

Lest you accuse me of unfairly picking on Apple (again), let me remind you that this sort of thing has happened before. In 2002 BT exhumed from its vault a crumbling, dusty patent for the hyperlink, the fundamental building block of the internet. It then loaded its cannon and fired a lawyer at the broadside of ailing ISP Prodigy, presumably as a test case prior to levying a hyperlink tax on the entire internet. The case was dismissed, luckily, on the grounds that the exact text of BT’s patent didn’t match the exact use of the hyperlink in the field, but the antisocial and anti-competitive precedent set has carried forward, and it’s not likely to die out.

I am aware that my opinion makes something of a mockery of the patent system. Yes, there’s a very strong case to be made for protecting intellectual property in this day and age, and I do think the inventors of excellent things deserve a shred of market advantage. But let’s all just play nice, shall we?

Writen by John Barth

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