Progeny Evolves Beyond Distribution Model

By: Brian Proffitt
Thursday, October 17, 2002 12:19:33 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4500/1/

The Reports of Progeny's Demise...

At first glance, Ian Murdock does not look like the stereotypical Linux guru. There's no fervor about him, and little outward hint that he is anything but a successful corporate businessman. This is a man who belittles all the wrong-headed notions of Linux users being socially inept geeks whose idea of fashion is a clean t-shirt. Looking at Murdock and how he relates Linux to others, one can get a good sense of where Linux could be going, given time and some patience.

His company, Indianapolis-based Progeny, is also a firm that is breaking some established stereotypes about Linux. And, with the release of Progeny's Platform Services earlier this week, Progeny is moving closer to bringing Linux to the corporate masses--but not with traditional Linux methods. Like Murdock, Progeny may be showing us all where Linux is going.

In a nutshell, Progeny's Platform Services is a service designed to deliver Linux as a platform--not a distribition--to clients who need Linux for their post-PC products. That's the shiny nickel-tour answer to what Platform Services is, but to understand what all of this means, it's important to take a step back and see how Progeny, and Murdock, arrived at this point in time.

Progeny, once known as Progeny Linux Systems, is remembered for their efforts to package a more user-friendly version of Debian GNU/Linux, the distribution that Murdock himself started in 1993. Progeny was born in the height of the dot-com boom--and was quickly awash in the bubble-burst that followed a year later. With the retreat of venture capital investors and the lack of any Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) developing to Progeny, it quickly became all-too-clear to Murdock and his co-workers that to continue selling Progeny Linux as a boxed product would be impossible. Thus, exactly a year and two days ago, the Progeny Linux product was abandoned.

But not the company.

As Progeny tried to stay afloat in the economic storm that followed, there was an immmediate change in focus towards professional Linux consulting. Capitalizing on the tech knowledge under his roof, Murdock was able to keep the firm alive by taking on individual consulting projects, such as delivering deployments and migrations to corporate customers.

And so it went for a while, Murdock related. But as projects continued, Murdock and his team were hearing one thread over and over: customers were not interested in getting a certain distribution of Linux.

"What people really want is Linux," Murdock explained. There was not a desire for a lot of the distribution-oriented software the distro companies were using distinguish themselves from one another, he added. Customers, particularly those who wanted Linux for non-PC applications such as embedded Linux projects, were only interested in using "pure" Linux.

"We saw an opportunity here," Murdock said, "Don't sell it as a product. Sell it as a platform."

Distribution companies, play a very important role in making Linux as popular and as accessible as it is today. By acting as a middle layer between the broad and diverse Open Source community and the corporate customers, distro companies have acted as an important translator and buffer between the market-driven corporations and the freedom-driven Free and Open Source development community.

But, Murdock emphasized, distributions are not the only way Linux can be presented to the corporations. In fact, Murdock believes that there are indications out there that the distribution companies could be getting too popular for Linux's good.

Finding the Business Niche in Linux

One thing that quickly shows up in conversation with Murdock is his belief that eventually companies will find a way to make money from Linux, for the simple reason of all the sheer interest in the free software kernel and the operating system that surrounds it.

The major distributions, thus far, are generating revenue by using the old tried-and-true method of boxing up Linux and selling it as a product, coupled with the commoditizing of service and support to customers. And the model is working pretty well, as demonstrated by the successes of Red Hat, SuSE, and MandrakeSoft.

But the boxing and shipping of Linux as a product, Murdock believes, is based on an older model of getting revenue from software. And, he maintains, it is not the only way revenue can be created--even from free software such as Linux.

Instead, Murdock said, Progeny will go past the older distribution model and offer Linux to customers as a solid platform for them to build their own products.

"Distribution is unimportant," he said, "what's important is the platform and Linux is the platform."

Murdock likens the distribution model to a giant ecosystem, held together by the GPL and open source philosophies--a fairly succcessful ecosystem that feeds off itself. This, he indicated, is one of Linux's greatest strengths.

But this model also leads to one of Linux's greatest weaknesses. All distributions lie within a big circle called Linux, but in order to differentiate themselves from the other distros, companies like Red Hat and the members of the UnitedLinux consortium are pushing themselves to opposite edges of the circle, staying as far from each other as they can.

Within this differentiation, there can be real incompatabilities between distros. For instance, if one distro carries an API that the others don't, then there will be applications that will (at least unassisted) run on one distro and not another.

Murdock, like all active members of the Linux community, recognizes that because of the GPL, Linux will never truly fragment the way UNIX did. But, he emphasized, without strict adherence to standards, there might be perceived fragmentation at the application level.

Corporations are already seeing this problem from the distributions, which is why they are requesting "pure" Linux more and more.

How Platform Services Will Work

In the recent past, any company that wanted to implement Linux on a device that would later be sold at market would have one of two choices: try to use a stock Linux distribution as is or take an existing distro and modify it to meet their needs. Essentially, therefore, creating their own distribution. Murdock's assertion is that providing Linux as a ready-made platform for such a business gets around this problem.

"The platform is for businesses who don't want to get into the distribution business," Murdock said.

Murdock cited the Google Search Applicance as an example of a company that could have benefited from the Platform Services approach. What Google did was modify Red Hat Linux to their needs. If Google had come to Progeny, Murdock said as a hypothetical, Progeny could have provided the mega-search firm with a tailor-made Linux platform upon which Google could have built their technology.

Linux has a lot of positives working in its favor as a platform, Murdock said. There's no chance of vendor-lock, the code is open source, intellectectual property issues are virtually non-existent, and Linux is already a time-tested OS.

"And," Murdock added, "you can't discount the royalty-free aspect."

Holding up his two-way pager/PDA device, Murdock mused that when such devices have an OS with a proprietary license, the cost of the OS severely cuts into the profit margin for the manufacturer. The amount of profit generated from each unit sold is nil when using a proprietary embedded OS. The manufacturers are compelled to generate revenue from other sources, such as services.

"Using Linux," he said, "allows companies to make money on products, not services."

What Platform Services will do, therefore, is take the best parts of Linux, whether it's whole distributions or just the bare essentials of Linux--whatever the customer needs to implement their own technology.

Currently, Platform Services is modeled on a subscription fee system of revenue, which is not tied to the number of end units sold.

Murdock hopes that this will soon evolve into a more end-to-end model, where Platform Services will have more of a subscription-based model as Progeny will assist the customer from initial development, to deployment, and even to maintenance, if need be.

"My hope in moving toward an end-to-end model down the road is that we can derive revenue based on the number of units deployed, rather than the number of units sold, the traditional way to derive revenue from software," he explained.

Platform Services already has one big-name customer to its credit: HP has utilized Progeny's new service to create an effective programmer's toolkit that HP's developers can use to more effectively develop apps for Linux.

Change on the Horizon

Since Murdock was one of the early and significant members of the Linux community, the question of what he thinks about Linux in the here and now was bound to come up. Here, Murdock sat back a bit and smiled.

"I knew it was something special," he recalled, "but did I know it would become Microsoft's number one enemy? And IBM's best friend? No.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be this big," he added.

Because of its phenomenal growth, however, Murdock sees that the future of Linux will need to present some changes from the way things are now. Going back to his layer model of community, distributions, and customers, he said that while the Open Source community was perfectly fine, it would be the middle layer, the distributions, which would need to change.

Distributions, he said, would need to adapt to what the customers need, as customers would only go so far to adapt to the distributions and no farther. This adaptation could take many forms, but it is in this middle layer, between customers and the Open Source community where the chance for generating revenue would be found.

Murdock firmly believes that because of the great interest in Linux, there is an enormous chance for opportunity with Linux and Open Source software. More than enough to create some viable business models.

"We just need to be careful not to strip away the magic," Murdock said, which makes Linux so unique.