Bill Moffitt's Weblog

Thursday August 05, 2004

Proprietary comments...
Copyright 2004, all rights reserved, etc.

No, no, that's not what I meant by "proprietary comments." :-)

Someone objected to my identifying Red Hat Enterprise Linux as proprietary; the logic (as I understand it) being that it cannot be proprietary because one can get the source code and hack it any way one wishes.

While that's a wonderful attribute of RHEL, that doesn't keep it from being proprietary - proprietary means, simply, that someone claims ownership rights to it. While you can get the source code for all the things that comprise RHEL, and you can compile them, put them together, and even build a bit-for-bit replica of RHEL, it's not RHEL because only Red Hat owns and can grant you the rights to use the real RHEL. You may have the software, but you don't acquire the rights that Red Hat sells as part of RHEL; indeed, changing the code at all can cause you to lose rights to support.

My very good friend Larry Wake is much more articulate than I about this; those inside of Sun can easily see his thoughts on this at his Proprietary Propriety website (sorry that link doesn't work unless you're inside the Sun network), but the essence of it is that some of our competitors have chosen to describe our products as "proprietary" and then corrupt the meaning so it looks like it means "closed." Of course, just about anything that is sold is "proprietary," otherwise it wouldn't have much value. The fact that you can get all the source code for RHEL for free doesn't make it any less proprietary, and it only makes it marginally less open than Solaris. It just means the source code is freely available.

The real and important difference and distinction between operating systems is really open vs. closed. Open means it's built on open standards, and that you can move easily between different proprietary implementations of those open standards. Linux (all the distributions) and Solaris are open, and it's very easy, for instance, to move code that was built for one to run on the other. Open also means that the interfaces are freely available, so innovation can happen in the implementation of those interfaces or in what is done on top of those interfaces.

Windows, z/OS, and OS/400 are not only proprietary, they're closed. That means that code written to run on one of those operating systems cannot easily be moved to another OS because all (or nearly all) the interfaces are proprietary and cannot be replicated in other OSs. It's very difficult and expensive, in general, to move a Windows program to UNIX or Linux because so many interface calls need to be changed (or sections of the code re-architected), and the only opportunity for innovation is on top of those interfaces, not underneath them.

So Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Solaris, and Windows, are all proprietary, and that's a good thing because that's how the respective companies can sell and support those products.

The important distinction to be made is not proprietary vs. non-proprietary; it's open vs. closed. Open means easy to switch, high innovation, and competition based on quality of implementation, not "lock-in." Linux and Solaris are open, Windows is closed.
(2004-08-05 10:54:42.0) Permalink