The Penguin and the Elephant

By Shannon Cochran

August 15, 2005

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Plenty of new stories came out of last week's LinuxWorld conference: OSDL has created a repository of patents that can be used to defend open source software from legal attack; Red Hat has launched a new security initiative; the debut of Sun Wah Linux and the presence of the Beijing Software Industry Productivity Center demonstrated the growing market for open source software in China.

But I was more struck by the old stories that have died away. SCO is, in the eloquent words of Bruce Perens, "still toast." And nobody's talking about "fragmentation" anymore, despite the fact that there are as many different Linux distros as ever, and more being launched every day. The credit for this, I think, falls squarely at the feet of the Linux Standards Base group, which has done a great deal of work both quietly and well. They're now tackling desktop issues such as installation behavior and libraries needed for desktop apps, and their standards have been adopted by groups such as the new Debian Common Core Alliance. In this field both KDE and the Gnome projects deserve kudos as well, for promoting interoperability between their platforms despite a sometimes-bitter rivalry.

Linux has thrived in the face of adversity. A myriad of both technical and legal challenges have been met and vanquished. So why are open source leaders still afraid?

"Things are looking up for open source," said Bruce Perens during a round table discussion at the conference, "but we need to understand that this is still an extremely fragile phenomonon. There is still legislation in the united states that would allow a pernicious company to entirely shut down open source development in the United States and in some other countries...And we have this elephant in the closet, which is the fact that any open source project of any significant size infringes on tens of thousands of patents in the United States.

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