The Linux world is growing up fast. Just look at who are the keynote speakers for LinuxWorld: executives from Sun, Oracle, IBM and Google. What happened to the real penguins who started this revolution? Are they not worthy of the main stage? Has the penguin gotten too cosy with the establishment for its own good? Or is it simply learning to live in a world in which revenue and customer lists are critical factors for success?

We are entering a new phase in the evolution of Linux and open source, in which the stakes are higher, capitalism rules, and holding the community spirit together becomes much more difficult.

The news from LinuxWorld shows all the signs of open source as a mainstream enterprise server platform. IBM, HP, Dell, Red Hat, Sun, Oracle, AMD and a host of other companies are coming out with new products, alliances, and most importantly, customer wins, especially in the workstation and low-end edge server markets. Sun and Red Hat are talking about making significant investments to deliver a Linux desktop to corporate customers.

Even Oracle CEO Larry Ellison touted Linux as if it were the best technology invention since his company pioneered relational databases. Ellison said he was promoting Linux because it is the best operating system, and to back up that statement said his company is running all of its enterprise applications and Web sites on Linux.

Despite the Linux love fest testimonials, maintaining the promise of open source software to be interchangeable and interoperable is a big challenge. The open source concept is to allow you to choose the components and partners you prefer without getting locked into a proprietary schema.

Most of the establishment players have made their fortunes by creating proprietary solutions that differentiate them from their competitors. The level playing field is a new phenomenon for them, and at this point in time they cannot ignore the power of the open source movement and the demand from customers for more cost effective, flexible technology.

The good news is that Free Standard Group, which manages the Linux Standard Base (LSB), announced this week that the three major Linux distributions -- Mandrake, Red Hat and SuSE -- are certified LSB compliant. This means they adhere to a common set of interface standards that should guarantee portability of applications across the open source platforms. Sun is planning its own distribution and has pledged obeisance to the LSB.

At the same time, Red Hat and a coalition of rivals have squared off. Red Hat currently has a leading share of market, and is behaving like a normal corporation -- doing everything it can to strengthen its position and squeeze out competitors. Red Hat's rivals announced this week that UnitedLinux -- the server distribution standard derived from the combined efforts of Caldera, SuSE, Conectiva, and Turbolinux -- would be available for beta testing soon.

The Red Hat versus UnitedLinux fight will hopefully encourage more rapid innovation, but it could also cause fragmentation. Red Hat's basic Linux distribution has now been certified LSB compliant, but the Advanced Server version has not. Will Red Hat use its unique extensions to sell customers on its distribution? For sure. At some point the company will make its Advanced Server LSB compliant, but in the meantime it will exploit the advantage over its competitors.

As a buyer of open source or proprietary platforms, you don't want to get caught in the crossfire as the companies act out their dreams of dominating a market by selling products that ultimately won't provide the optimal level of interoperability and flexibility.

In response to the Microsoft-led Initiative for Software Choice, a lobbying effort aimed at convincing governments that mandating open-source is not in the best interest of progress, free software community advocate Bruce Perens has proposed a Sincere Choice set of six guidelines for choosing a software platform, whether it's open or has proprietary tweaks:

Open Standards
Intercommunication and file formats should follow standards that are sincerely open for all to implement, without royalty fees or discrimination.

Choice Through Interoperability
No user should be required to use a particular product simply because other users do. Competing products should interoperate with each other through open standards.

Competition by Merit
Software vendors should compete fairly on the merit of their products, rather than by attempting to lock each other's products out of the market. Besides functionality, merits include the copyright and patent policies attached to a product, and the disclosure of file formats and communication protocols so that other software may interoperate.

Research Availability
The people pay for government-funded research; its fruits should be available to all of them equally. We promote Open Source / Free Software licensing of taxpayer-funded software and data as a means of distributing research results fairly.

Range of Copyright Policies
We include the supporters of a broad range of different copyright policies, from Public Domain through Open Source and Free Software to Proprietary. We support use of the GPL and LGPL licenses when appropriate. We assert that Open Source and Proprietary models can be used together effectively.

Freedom to Set Policy
Individual users, businesses, and government should all be free to set their own policies regarding what sorts of software they will acquire and use. They should not force a particular software paradigm or product choice upon others.

Playing by guidelines like Sincere Choice will test the character of all the players. Each company will bring certain value to the marketplace, whether they are open source or proprietary products or services. The marketplace ultimately should decide how to value them.

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