Linux software may be free, but does that mean you don't have to pay for it?, Sep 05, 2001

As Linux becomes a viable platform for business applications, one key question for finance executives is whether a system praised for being free will exact a high price in the form of service and support. Computer geeks may be thrilled by the communal spirit of collaboration in the Linux world, but once a company has placed a crucial application, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning), on the Linux platform, decisions about how or whether to acquire adequate service and technical support become an important element of corporate risk management.

The Red Hat Embedded Linux Developer Suite includes Red Hat Embedded Linux based on the industry-leading open source Red Hat Linux operating system config ured for use in embedded systems. The offering provides the developer with broad capability for different device requirements targeting MIPS, SuperH, X86, PowerPC and ARM/StrongARM/XScale architectures.

You can sum up Microsoft's dominance of the productivity market as resting upon three pillars: the proprietary format of its documents; user familiarity with the Office user interface; and IT organizations' unfamiliarity with users' actual productivity needs.

By contrast, StarOffice only gets part of the way there. It provides an acceptable level of document interchange, and Sun has tried to make the user interface more familiar to Office users. But other than citing cost, Sun still fails to provide IT users with a reason to use StarOffice.

For some in the open source community, the forces of software development have come to resemble the age-old paradox of Yin and Yang, which states that light does not exist without dark and there is no good without evil.

According to luminaries who subscribe to this philosophy, and who spoke about it last week in San Francisco at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, the mere presence of Microsoft Corp. has played a big role in the development of the Linux operating system and other open-source projects. Indeed, for some there could be no Linux without Microsoft.

"With btX, Bitstream has developed a leading-edge font rendering technology for Linux devices and applications," said Anna Chagnon, President of Bitstream. "btX can render eight font formats -- not just two -- including compact fonts that can fit in embedded Linux devices where space and memory are at a premium. With our font rendering technology, we can deliver well-hinted, anti-aliased characters to the screen, resulting in text that looks great anywhere, even on LCD displays and other low-resolution devices for Linux. What's more, btX includes Font Fusion, a high-quality, fast font engine, including the fastest TrueType rasterizer on the market."

Consumers have been slower to adopt free software. Much of the reason is that the software still requires some technical expertise to use, and many home users prefer Microsoft's simpler approach. De Icaza is part of a new generation of open-source programmers who are trying to change that. Unlike many of his predecessors, who were more interested in the behind-the-scenes technical aspects of free products than in how they looked, de Icaza believes the colors, the size of the buttons and other features of interfaces are as important as the engines.

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