Is Red Hat becoming Linux's Microsoft?

A year ago, no one had ever heard of LinuxCare -- the company did not exist. But co-founders Art Tyde and Dave Sifry are hardly newcomers to the world of Linux. Tyde founded the Bay Area Linux Users Group in 1994, and met Sifry at the first meeting. The two men are peas in a pod -- quick to laughter, equally facile with the well-polished sound bite and boasting long records as successful computer programming consultants. Listening to them smoothly finishing each other's sentences as they talk about the "empowering" aspects of open-source software, you can easily imagine them knocking the socks off potential investors -- which may explain why LinuxCare is the only Linux company so far to have attracted the direct backing of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Today, veterans of the Linux scene express astonishment at just how fast LinuxCare moved onto center stage in the Linux marketplace. But that's what happens when "KP" gets behind you. Unlike other Linux startups, LinuxCare has enjoyed the luxury of having loads of cash to spend from the get go.

In February, LinuxCare announced that it had been chosen by the Dell Computer Corporation to provide support for Dell workstations pre-installed with Linux. Then, in March, LinuxCare made many friends by sponsoring a huge party at the LinuxWorld conference in San Jose, providing free beer, wine and food for thousands of attendees. The company also drew attention by placing a full-page ad in the Northern California edition of the Wall Street Journal nominating the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, for president of the United States.

The selection of LinuxCare to provide support for Dell computers that are running Red Hat's distribution of Linux could be construed as a slap in the face to Red Hat: After all, a key leg of Red Hat's business plan is to provide support for its own software.

"They chose us," says Art Tyde, "because, quite frankly, we are better at it."

Perhaps so (Dell was unable to comment by the time this story was posted). But one Linux insider says that the terms of the deal were so favorable to Dell that the decision was a no-brainer -- that LinuxCare volunteered to provide support at extremely low cost as a canny marketing move.

Whatever the case, LinuxCare is clearly aiming directly at a market that other, more established companies have hoped to make their own. Which is one reason that eyebrows in the Linux community rose when Tyde was quoted June 10 in the Investors Business Daily as saying, "Red Hat is not LSB-compliant -- most other distributors are."

LSB is the Linux Standards Base, a fledgling organization attempting to define a common standard for Linux distributions. The worst fear in the Linux world is that the multiple Linux distributions will lead to the fragmentation of Linux -- thus hurting its chances to continue to grow and prosper. A fragmented Linux would be a huge headache for support providers in particular, forcing them to be conversant in the different nitty-gritty details of an endless number of distributions.

Dave Sifry, president of LinuxCare, says Tyde was misquoted. As both he and Dan Quinlan, the chairman of the LSB, are quick to note, there is no standard yet for Linux specified by the LSB, so it is impossible to say whether Red Hat is LSB-compliant. Red Hat's official statement on the subject is as follows: "Red Hat is extremely supportive of the LSB effort, and we think its success is important for Linux to succeed in any meaningful way. We're actively participating in the LSB specification committee, and we're going to make every effort to ensure that Red Hat tracks the LSB standards as they are finalized."

Many Linux experts argue that Linux is in no danger of fragmenting, and suggest that the recurrent surfacing of the issue is just more FUD -- "fear, uncertainty and doubt" -- spread by Linux's competitors. First of all, they note, all distributions share the same kernel -- the heart of code that is the engine driving Linux-based operating systems. Second, nearly all of the code layered over that kernel is open source -- freely accessible to the public. If your software application doesn't work on a particular distribution, you can always look at the code, figure out exactly what went wrong and fix it.

But there are still some areas where fragmentation is a real concern -- most centrally, in the "C libraries." The C libraries are not a part of the kernel itself, but contain code that is used and reused by nearly all software applications. The original free software C libraries were developed by the Free Software Foundation founded by Richard Stallman. Today, ongoing work on the C libraries is carried out by a loosely linked group of programmers, most of whom work for various open-source companies.

Red Hat has a reputation for releasing distributions with extremely new versions of this critical code well before anyone else. This, say some of Red Hat's competitors, can cause major headaches for the other distributions and software application vendors. Quite frequently, applications that worked on older versions of Linux don't work on the new version.

"[With regard to] some of the core C libraries," says Cliff Miller, CEO of TurboLinux, "there should be a common ground that all of the distributions share."

Miller says that application developers ideally want their programs to be able to run on all the different Linux distributions, but that constant change in the C libraries makes it difficult for the developers to keep abreast. If there were a commonly accepted standard, says Miller, there wouldn't be a problem.

"I think you'll find agreement on that from most of the hardware vendors and almost all the application developers and the Linux distributions companies," says Miller. "Except that Red Hat is much less hot on the idea. If you are the market leader, then you want to create standards -- that's probably a pretty natural feeling."

Next Page: As long as the code remains free, what's the problem?

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