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Making a killing with free software

Rahul Siddharthan

IN addition to ones discussed last week, there are other free-software success stories: Notably Apache, the Web server software which (according to statistics at www.netcraft.com) runs over half the Web servers on the Internet (often on Linux or BSD oper ating systems.)

The GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a powerful free graphics package comparable to Photoshop but without the hefty licence fees, and with some additional features such as scripting capabilities. It often comes bundled with Linux distribution s. Efforts are on to create entire free office suites comparable to Microsoft Office.

From an earlier generation, but still widely used, TeX is the premier document formatting and typesetting system, developed by Mr. Don Knuth of Stanford in its present form around 1983. It remains the standard in scientific publishing, but even for ordin ary text it can be matched in typesetting quality only by the highest-end (and most expensive) publishing systems. After years of use, it is about the most bug-free program in existence, and because of its design, it is still the most useful program of i ts kind and has a huge following.

The advantages of opening up the source code have been realised, though belatedly, by companies, and IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics (SGI), Compaq and others are now jumping on the bandwagon. In the past year, several key packages have been ``free d'' by these companies: IBM's DataExplorer and AFS journalling filesystem; SGI's XFS journalling filesystem, GLX graphics library and other programs; one sees a new announcement every few days.

The one which started it all was Netscape's Navigator, but the source code turned out to be so messy that the online community needed to rewrite virtually all of it. The ensuing delays have allowed Microsoft to overtake Netscape in the browser market. Ho wever, the Mozilla project, as the open-source Navigator effort is called, is close to a release now.

Moreover, all these companies have put in resources in improving and enhancing Linux; SGI in particular, after a brief flirtation with Windows NT, is making Linux its primary operating system for its future line of Intel CPU-based workstations, and is ad ding many improvements (all of it free, under the GPL) which were originally made for IRIX, its own version of Unix.

Meanwhile, Compaq and IBM have been helping with improving Linux on non-Intel CPU's such as the Alpha and the PowerPC. It is likely that Linux will also be able to run flawlessly on Intel's upcoming 64 bit processor, Itanium, the day it is released.

For India, all this can only be good news. Software licensing costs, which are high even by US income standards, can be prohibitive here. Free software is a legal alternative to piracy. Indeed, Linux has attracted a lot of attention from corporates as we ll as from governments in India, though perhaps not on the same scale as in countries such as France and Mexico, where there are serious Government-driven free software adoption efforts.

Moreover, the huge source code base allows customisation to Indian needs, a task that has barely been started so far. Most important of all, it gives Indian companies independence from American multinationals: In a closed source program one never knows w hat bugs or intentional backdoors have been left open, and one has to ``beg for modifications'', in Mr. Stallman's words; but with source code available, everything is open for inspection and change.

An enterprising company which tries to make a business of customising and maintaining this code for Indian needs could make a killing. The money is not in the code and the licensing, but in the packaging, services and support. It will happen: Free softwa re is an idea whose time has come.

Further reading:

I www.gnu.org (the Free Software Foundation)

I www.linux.com (a Linux portal site owned by VA Linux systems)

I www.redhat.com (the most prominent Linux distributor)

I slashdot.org (general "news for nerds")

I www.freebsd.org, http://www.netbsd.org, www.openbsd.org (free operating systems from the BSD family)

I www.daemonnews.org (a BSD-oriented monthly web magazine)

I www.gimp.org (the GNU Image Manipulation Package)

I koffice.kde.org (a free office suite project)

I www.tug.org, http://www.giss.nasa.gov/latex (TeX and LaTeX, high-quality and well-established scientific typesetting systems)

I www.lyx.org (LyX, a graphical front-end for LaTeX)

(Concluded)

The writer is a research student with the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.