Linux bosses see no gain in meeting needs of SME businesses

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 7 Oct 2004 at 12:37

Will SMEs ever get the Open Source platform they deserve? The Great Linux debate.

At a panel discussion at Linuxworld Coference and Expo in London yesterday, executives from IBM, HP, Novell, Red Hat and Samba argued over whether Linux was meeting business needs.

While most agreed that the Open Source operating system was doing a reasonable job, many saw the future as a mixed landscape between closed and open source programs running on a Linux platform.

Both IBM and Novell said that the closed source products they sell fund the contributions to the open source community that they make. Red Hat conversely trumpeted their string of acquisitions whom they immediately converted to Open Source.

But at issue was that while Linux systems met about 70 per cent of business needs, on the straw poll taken from the panel, exactly who would meet the remaining 30 per cent remains unclear.

Jeremy Allison who heads up HP's Samba team pointed out that the Open Source community of developers may not even want to meet business needs.

'I don't care,' he answered the question of how far business needs were met. 'If you develop to a feature list and so on the software is going to be awful.'

The Open Source development community create software for the love of writing good software, he said, but you can't tell them what to write.

'If you think about Mozilla a couple of years ago, everyone was saying that that was a terrible decision [by AOL/Netscape to open source the software] to dump a load of indigestible code out there. The only reason it is becoming popular now is that IE is even worse,' he said.

'It's easy to dump a load of code as open source, but building a community around such a project is far more difficult.'

And this is possibly what will hold Linux back - at least for the SME market. Talking earlier to Scott Thompson, Director of OpenAdvantage - a open-source business advice service - he told us that getting SMEs to take up Linux desktops was a real hurdle because of specific applications that are missing, such as an Access component for OpenOffice, and popular accounts packages.

But if there is no motivation from the Open Source community to develop Open Source alternatives, then there is little hope that these remaining business needs will be met. And considering that the Access component has been missing from OpenOffice for some time now, that is a real possibility.

And the big corporates currently making money selling Linux seem stricken by the same apathy. When asked whether IBM would ever Open Source its Lotus office suite, Adam Jollans, IBM's marketing strategy manager for Linux replied that the company 'doesn't really operate in the applications market any more. We made a strategic decision not to go down that road. In terms of the office space, that's not an area we compete in any more.'

In a subsequent interview with Novell's EMEA Director of Linux Brian Green, he told us that although there were alternatives such as MySQL out there, it lacks the interface to make it as easy to use for SMEs as Access.

Green said that 'corporate applications are a bigger inhibitor' in terms of Linux adoption, which is why Novell is focussing on development environments such as the multi-platform MONO project. Making it easy for corporate apps built in-house to be ported to Linux opens more doors to the enterprise sector for Linux.

And this makes a lot of sense for IBM, Novell, HP and the rest. It is much more efficient to send in a sales team to win custom from a few very large companies rather than thousands of small ones.