FW: NICHOLAS PETRELEY: "The Open Source" from InfoWorld.com, Wednesday, January 17, 2001

Wed Jan 17 14:19:17 EST 2001

Interesting idea:

Stephen Dawes B.A. B.Sc.
Web Business Office, The City of Calgary
PHONE:  (403) 268-5527. FAX: (403) 268-6423
E-MAIL ADDRESS:  sdawes at gov.calgary.ab.ca

-----Original Message-----
From: OpenSource at bdcimail.com [mailto:OpenSource at bdcimail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2001 10:40 AM
To: sdawes at gov.calgary.ab.ca
Subject: NICHOLAS PETRELEY: "The Open Source" from InfoWorld.com,
Wednesday, January 17, 2001

========================================================
NICHOLAS PETRELEY:   "The Open Source"    InfoWorld.com
========================================================

Wednesday, January 17, 2001

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PERSUADING AMD AND INTEL TO FIGHT OVER OPEN SOURCE THIS
YEAR

Posted at January 12, 2001 01:01 PM  Pacific

I SPENT MY YOUTH during the pop psychology age of I'm
OK, You're OK, a book by Thomas Harris that helped
popularize something called transactional analysis.
One of my favorite authors of the genre was Dr. Eric
Berne, who wrote an interesting book called Games
People Play. I'm about to play one of the games Berne
identified as "Let's you and him fight," a game in
which you ignite a conflict between others and then
sit back and watch with glee as they battle it out.

My contestants are AMD and Intel. I'd love to watch
these chipmeisters wage war.

The catalyst for the fight is some advice I'd like to
offer on how each of these competitors might leverage
open source in an attempt to beat the other. The
operative word here is "attempt." Ideally, I wouldn't
want either company to actually beat the other for any
extended period, because ongoing heated competition
keeps prices low and performance high.

Here's the advice: Go for broke and invest heavily in
open source. Devote as many resources as possible to
tune the optimizations in the GNU compilers to produce
code that runs best with your chips. Then post
benchmarks demonstrating how much faster Linux and the
various BSDs run when you rebuild them using these
optimizations and run them on your AMD or Intel
hardware.

If possible, convince commercial Linux and BSD
distributors to offer versions of their products
optimized specifically for your chips. Better yet,
rebuild a handful of distributions yourself and then
offer the CD-ROM images free for the download. You'll
have to rebuild all of the applications, not just the
kernel, to make this strategy worthwhile.

Most important, do it now because all of the external
factors are aligning perfectly for this move to work.

In the first place, open source is about to get a big
boost because the dot-com economy is tanking. It may
sound counterintuitive, but open-source guru Bruce
Perens was right when he said a slow economy presents
the best opportunities for open source because
companies turn to free software when they no longer
have money to burn. The dot-coms aren't floundering
because there aren't opportunities. They're
floundering because they got spoiled on the irrational
exuberance of investors and spent money foolishly.
Open source can benefit from the lessons in frugality
these companies now have to learn.

Second, Linux and possibly the BSDs will get a lot more
attention and updates this year. The long-awaited
Linux 2.4 kernel was just released, and minor kernel
updates are sure to follow quickly. Watch for a flood
of new versions as the commercial distributors line up
to get their versions of Linux with the 2.4 kernel out
the door. Expect a second round of bug fixes to be
distributed later this year. Shoot for that round of
updates. If you can finish and test your compiler
optimizations by midyear, you'll be perfectly
positioned to flaunt benchmarks at the fall Linux
trade shows. Make a compelling pitch to buy and use
your hardware to get the best performance from the
latest versions of Linux and the BSDs.

Finally, do it now because you can. This strategy would
be unthinkable with Windows, because nobody's free to
rebuild the Windows 2000 operating system with special
optimizations and offer the optimized version for
free. To get started with Linux, submit patches to GCC
(for more information about the GNU compiler
collection, visit http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc.html).

Admit it. It's a compelling strategy. Now, let's you
and him fight.

Nicholas Petreley is the founding editor of LinuxWorld
(http://www.linuxworld.com). Reach him at nicholas at petreley.com.

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