Tale of Two Markets

Let's start by savoring the irony that the biggest thing ever to hit business—the Internet—was the creation of hackers working with government money. They didn't do it for the money, and they didn't do it to make money. They did it because it needed to be done and doing it brought a priceless kind of esteem: the respect of their peers. Crafting the Net was a good and noble work that still goes largely uncredited outside the circle of peers who best understand what actually happened. Given the importance of that work to the economy, it's a wonder these guys don't have statues on Wall Street.

Now the stock market is going gaga over Linux for the same reason it went gaga over the Net: it's good for business. Why doesn't matter to the market. Putting Linux to work is kind of like putting an e in front of your idea or a .com after your company name. It's a grace. A particularly lucrative grace, it now appears.

But just as the Big Boys didn't understand at first what that .com truly meant, they don't understand what Linux and open source mean, either. They thought the Net was just a 10-million-channel TV with a keyboard instead of a remote control. Likewise, they think Linux is just a 10-million-hacker version of Microsoft with bloated attitude instead of bloated software.

Not that the “free software” community is especially understanding about Business. Scott Lanning had this to say about Linux Journal for a Seattle Times story: “It's proprietary, so it means nothing.”

Makes me wonder: how are we “proprietary”? In Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Richard Stallman writes, “The `Linux' magazines ... are filled with advertisements for proprietary software that works with GNU/Linux. When the next Motif or Qt appears, will magazines warn programmers to stay away from it, or will they run ads for it?”

Well, probably both. Why shouldn't we give Troll Tech a way to say good things about Qt tools? What's wrong with that?

Answering this question will, of course, bring up blood-boiling moral questions which find their most concrete expressions in licenses and copyrights (also copylefts) that are strange and baffling to those who never heard of “open source” or “free” software until confronted with the need to use it. What's so “free” about something that comes with so many restrictions—and with so many people who are quick to flame you for breaking rules only they understand?

Business has a real demand for what Eric Raymond calls “software that doesn't suck”, and for the people who make it. Likewise, those people have a real demand for good development tools. And not all of those tools are going to be free or open source. Qt is an old example. The new example comes from Inprise (formerly Borland, also known as Borland/Inprise).

This past July, Inprise ran a survey of developers visiting various Linux sites including Linux Journal. Of the 24,000 unique responses, about 6,000 called Linux their primary development platform. Naturally, the leading development tools for this group were gcc/egcs (47%) and Emacs with gcc/egcs (27%). Yet a majority of these same 6,000 developers were willing to pay for commercial Linux development tools: 27.9% said they would be willing to pay $300 or less, and another 37.2% said they would be willing to pay $100 or less. Only 21% said, “Nothing, it must be free.”

What kind of tools did they want to buy? By class, the favorites were “Rapid Application Development IDE (RAD, visual development)” at 53.6%, and “traditional development IDE (integrated editor, compiler, debugger)” at 35.7%. As for particular tools, first choices were “C++Builder (C/C++ with RAD)” with 29.6%, “New IDE that works with existing standard Linux tools” with 24.2%, Delphi with 19.2%, and “Borland C++ (C/C++ without RAD)” with 13.3%.

Inprise has responded to demand with Kylix, described by Michael Swindell, who heads the project for the company:

Now here's the really tricky part, because it's cross-ethos as well as cross-platform:

As I write this (late September), Corel is getting beat up for putting a proprietary boilerplate on the beta version of its new Linux distribution. No doubt Inprise will run through a similar gauntlet, all the way to the market. In fact, Swindell expects it: How will each model subvert the other? Consider the parting words from Michael Swindell: The default assumption is that the most powerful interest—shareholders—will want Inprise's source code to stay closed. But it's not hard to imagine investor pressure on traditional software companies to free their source code, just as the same investors pressured .com companies to free their content.

Freedom is an efficiency that drives value. Isn't it fun to watch this new software business teach Adam Smith's lesson, one more time?