“Let’s say there are four steps. Four
stages. Four levels. The first Is learning
the language of the dead, the second is to learn the language of the
living, the third is hearing the music of the spheres. The fourth step is
learning to take the first step.” – Dan Simmons in The Fall of Hyperion
The
standardization is an important point to be considered in the evolution of the
different technologies, and so is their openness. It gives developers the
possibility to understand the infrastructure requirements, to create compatible
products, to participate in their evolution, to innovate. This openness may be
well represented in the source code, the “alma mater” of every
computer program. We need to understand “Open Source” as the concept created by
computer programmers united under the hackers ethic. However, we should not be limited by it: We shall go one
abstraction level further to define the “Open” concept, by analysing also the
Open Systems, the Open Standards and the Open Platforms. The first part of the analysis will be
divided into three different tiers, which compose together the realm of IT and
Internet today. They are the infrastructure, the development and the
information exchange (see figure below).
Figure 1 – The three tiers under the scope of the first part of this analysis
Let’s
start by the bottom-level tier, and discuss in the first chapter the hardware and the operating systems used to build the Internet infrastructure. Different alternatives are investigated, trying to
understand their original goals, their evolution, their current situation and
the tendencies. The analysis is always focused on the applicability of the
platforms as servers taking part on the Internet infrastructure. And what is the base of Internet? The standards. They participated in the spread
of the Net from the very beginning, so they do in this document. The goal is
to understand what are the different hardware platforms, the software environments, their concepts, history and targets, and how they
became standards. We will also analyse what
benefits we may expect from the open environments, together with the level of
openness available from the common proprietary alternatives. We conclude with the role of standards on the creation of network protocols used worldwide, tantamount for the success of Internet.
In the
second tier - development - we can consider the ongoing battle for a common web
platform and the role of the web services. This is excellent for a case
study, as we have three different warriors: An open source, an open platform,
and a proprietary solution. Additionally we will analyse the usage of common rules
to exchange information about the design of applications and data, with the goal of technology
independence: MDA and UML. We briefly discuss the extreme
programming concepts and their relation with the open source products and
projects.
The
analysis ends with the third tier – information exchange - by exploiting the
benefits of a common language to exchange information and data definitions,
coupled and structured. This is done by XML and its derivates.
The aim
of the second part is to analyse the technologies by a broader standpoint. We
should be able to trace some conclusions and imagine future trends and proposals.
Using the cases detailed in the first part, we will analyse some of the basic
concepts around the network society and the new economy, trying to understand the impact
of standards in the usage of technological power, the strategies currently used
by the enterprises, the comparative elements between open and proprietary
solutions. Finally, we will discuss the role of politics, to enforce or stimulate
the usage of open technology.
This
study contains background material that introduces some important topics for
readers who are not familiar with them. References are provided for those who
want more complete understanding. The hyperlinks fans should refer to the Appendix A, on page 107, and feel free to use the online version on www.k-binder.be/Papers/, which intend
to be often up-to-date. As an avant-goût, the basic concepts used during the rest of
the document.
To
define the Open general concept, under the scope of this study, let us
consider two definitions, with the help from the dictionary:
Open
1: having no enclosing or confining barrier:
accessible on all or nearly all sides
5: not restricted to a particular group or
category of participants
Based on
this, we can consider as “Open” any product, concept, idea or standard:
§
That is freely available to be
researched, investigated, analysed and used with respect to the intellectual
property;
§
That can be adapted, completed and
updated by any person or company interested in improving its quality or the functionality, possibly coordinated by
a person or organization.
Let us now
analyse the open model, used for Open source development and the establishment
of open standards.
·
Definition
Historically, the makers of proprietary software have generally not made
source code available. Defined as “any
program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or
other developers see fit”, open source
software is usually developed as a public collaboration and made freely
available.
Open Source is a certification mark
owned by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Developers of open software (software intended to be
freely shared, potentially improved and redistributed by others) can use the
Open Source trademark if their distribution terms conform to the OSI's Open
Source Definition. All the
terms below must be applied together, for the product and its license, and
in all cases:
§
Free Redistribution – The software being distributed must be
redistributed to anyone else without any restriction.
- Source Code – The source code must be made available (so that the
receiving party will be able to improve or modify it)
- Derived works – The license must allow
modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed
under the same terms as the license of the original software.
- Integrity of the Author’s Source Code – The license must explicitly permit
distribution of software built from modified
source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different
name or version number from the original software.
- No discrimination against persons or groups
- No discrimination against fields of endeavour – It may not
restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for
a specific type of research.
- Distribution of license – The rights attached
to the program must apply to whom the program is redistributed without the
need for execution of an additional license by those parties. In other
words, the license must be automatic, no signature required.
- License must not be specific to a product – A product
identified as Open Source cannot be free only if
used in a particular brand of Linux distribution.
- License must not contaminate other software – The license must not place
restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed
software.
As
Perens summarizes, from the programmer’s standpoint, these are the rights when
using Open Source programs:
§
The
right to make copies of the program, and distribute those copies.
- The right to have access to
the software’s source code, a necessary preliminary before you can change it
- The right to make
improvements to the program
·
Licenses
There
are many different types of licenses used by Open Source products. The most common are:
§
Public
Domain – A public-domain program is one upon which the author has
deliberately surrendered his copyright rights. It can’t really be said to come
with a license. A public domain program can
even be re-licensed, its version removed from public domain, with the author
name being replaced by any other name.
§
GPL (GNU General Public License) – the GPL is a political manifesto as well
as a software license, and much of its text is
concerned with explaining the rationale behind the license. GPL satisfies the
Open Source Definition. However, GPL does not guarantee the integrity of the
author’s source code, forces the modifications to be
distributed under the GPL and does not allow the incorporation of a GPL program
into a proprietary program.
§
LGPL (GNU Library General Public License) – The LGPL is a derivative of the
GPL that was designed for software libraries. Unlike the GPL, a LGPL program can be incorporated into
a proprietary program.
§
X,
BSD and Apache – These licenses let you do nearly anything with the software licensed under them. This is because their origin was to cover
software funded by monetary grants of the US government.
§
NPL (Netscape Public License) – This license has been prepared to give Netscape the privilege of re-licensing
modifications made to their software. They can take those
modifications private, improve them, and refuse to give the result to anybody
(including the authors of the modifications).
§
MPL (Mozilla Public License) – The MPL is similar to the NPL, but does not contain the clause
that allows Netscape to re-license the modifications.
|
License
|
|
Modifications
can be taken private and not returned to their authors
|
Can be
re-licensed by anyone
|
Contains
special privileges for the original copyright holder over the modifications
|
|
Public
Domain
|
Ö
|
Ö
|
Ö
|
|
|
GPL
|
|
|
|
|
|
LGPL
|
Ö
|
|
|
|
|
BSD
|
Ö
|
Ö
|
|
|
|
NPL
|
Ö
|
Ö
|
|
Ö
|
|
MPL
|
Ö
|
Ö
|
|
|
Table 1 – Comparison of Open
Source licensing practices
·
Open Source software engineering
The
traditional software engineering process generally consists of marketing requirements, system-level
design, detailed design,
implementation, integration, field-testing, documentation and support. An Open
Source project can include every single one of these elements:
§
The
marketing requirements are normally discussed by using a mailing list or
newsgroup, where the needs from one member of the community are reviewed and
complemented by the peers. Failure to obtain consensus results in “code splits”,
where other developers start releasing their own versions.
§
There
is usually no system-level design for a hacker-initiated Open Source development. A basic design allows the first release of code to be
built, and then revisions are made by the community. After some versions, the
system design is implicitly defined, and sometimes it is written down in the
documentation.
§
Detailed
design is normally absent of pure open source initiatives, mostly because
most of the community is able to read the code directly, interpret the
routines, functions and parameters, and modifying them as required. This makes
further development more difficult and time-consuming.
§
Implementation
is the primary motivation for almost all Open Source software development effort ever expended. It is how most programmers
experiment with new styles, ideas and techniques.
§
Integration
usually involves organizing the programs, libraries and instructions in such a
way they can be used by users in other systems and equipments to effectively
use the software.
§
Field-testing
is one of the major strengths of Open Source development. When the marketing phase has been effective, many
potential users are waiting for the first versions to be available, and willing
to install them, test and make suggestions and correct bugs.
§
The
documentation is usually written in a very informal language, free style and
usually funny way. Often websites are created to allow the documentation to be
provided and completed by the user community, and becomes a potential source
for examples, “tips and tricks”. One of the brightest examples is the online
documentation for PHP.
§
The
support is normally provided via FAQS and discussion lists or even by the
developers themselves by e-mail, in a “best effort” basis, depending on their
availability, willingness and ability to answer the question or correct the
problem. The lack of official support can keep some users (and many companies)
away from Open Source programs, but it also creates opportunities for consultants or
software distributors to sell support contracts and/or enhanced commercial
versions.
The
commercial versions of Open Source software (like BSD, BIND and Sendmail) often use the original Open
Source code, developed using the hackers’ model, later refined by most of the phases described above.
·
Open-source cycle
Many
Open Source software start with an idea, discussed via the Internet, developed by the community,
implemented as first draft versions, and consolidated into final versions after
a lot of debugging. After this final software starts to be used globally, and
interesting companies, the authors may decide to start receiving some financial
compensation for their hard work.
Then an
organization may be created, or some existing company can start to distribute
the product alone or bundled with other similar pieces of software. Sometimes, after a reasonable
funding is raised and more development is done (now remunerated) a commercial
version of the product may be released, often with more functionality than the
free version, and sometimes without the source code being generally distributed. This is attributed to the difficulty
of small companies to remain profitable by distributing only open source
software.
·
Open Source Science
As
argued by DiBona, Ockman and Stone,
“Science is ultimately an Open Source enterprise. The scientific method rests on a process of discovery, and a process of justification.
For scientific results to be justified, they must be replicable. Replication is
not possible unless the source is shared: the hypothesis, the test conditions,
and the results. The process of discovery can follow many paths, and at times
scientific discoveries do occur in isolation. But ultimately the process of
discovery must be served by sharing information: enabling other scientists to
go forward where one cannot; pollinating the ideas of others so that something
new may grow that otherwise would not have been born.”
Ultimately,
the Open Source movement is an extension of the scientific method, because at the heart of the
computer industry is computer science. Computer science differs from all other
sciences, by having one means of enabling peers to replicate results: share the
source code. To demonstrate the validity of
a program, the means to compile and run the program must be provided.
Himanen
considers that the scientists have developed this method “not only for ethical reasons but also because it has proved to be the most successful
way of creating scientific knowledge. All of our understanding of nature is based on this
academic or scientific model. The reason why the original hackers’ Open Source model works so effectively seems to be – in addition to the facts
that they are realizing their passions and are motivated by peer recognition,
as scientists are also – that to a great degree it confirms to the ideal open
academic model, which is historically the best adapted for information
creation”.
One of the important factors in the success
of the Internet comes from the
"governance mechanisms" (rather than regulation) that guide its use
and evolution, in particular, the direct focus on inter-connection and
interoperability among the various constituent networks.
·
Standards
The standards are fundamental for the
network economy. They allow the
companies to be connected by establishing clear communication rules and
protocols. For manufacturing networks, composed by the company with the
product design, the suppliers of different components and the assembly lines,
standards guarantee the compatibility
of all the different parts in the production process. In the information and
technology networks, the standards guarantee the compatibility
of the infrastructure components analysed in the first chapter – hardware, operating systems and application software – and the interoperability
of the companies via the Internet with clear network protocols.
Standardization is by definition a
political, economical and technological process aiming to establish a set of
rules. These are documented agreements containing technical specifications or
other precise criteria to be used as rules, directions or definitions. Thus,
equipments, products, processes and services based in the same set of rules are
fully compatible with each other.
·
De
facto or De jure
Standards are normally classified according to their
nature. De facto standards are products and protocols which conquer the market by
establishing a network of interconnected and
compatible products, and gaining recognition from the consumers. An example is
the set of de facto standards built around the IBM PC specification.
Figure 2 – Examples of de facto
standards and their connectivity
De facto standards are normally preferred by
companies because they don’t need to follow a complex and time-lengthy process
for its validation. Often – as the case of Windows – they are accepted by the market even
without being elaborated by scientific process, and without strong
R&D investments. These are also
the reasons by which they are not easily accepted by normalisation organisations, by the
scientific institutions and by the academic circle.
By opposition, de jure standards are often based on a new
technology, created by a company that accept to publish their concepts and
definitions for a review of the academic and scientific communities, and be
officially approved by a normalisation institution. A good example
is the OSI standard and the protocols compatible with its
different tiers (see the Figure
14 on page 35).
Some of the main motivations for this are
the ability to compete with existing dominant standards, to easily found a cooperation network of software and hardware suppliers, to obtain
credibility from the academic world and consequently
gathering the cooperation from the students community.
A good practice from the really independent
and non-profit normalisation organisations is to only
accept to recognise open standards. This is necessary to avoid the formation of monopolies and unfair
commercial practices by the royalty-owners. This has recently been contested
when standards for web services have been analysed.
|
De facto standards
|
De jure standards
|
|
Strengths:
-
Quickly
developed
-
Optimal
solution for the original goal
|
Weaknesses:
-
Lengthy
development
-
Solution can be
used beyond the original goal
-
Compromise of
technical choices
|
|
Weaknesses:
-
Short-sighted
-
Not clearly
defined
-
Stimulates
monopolies (by copyrights)
-
Multiple
solutions for the same type of applications
|
Strengths:
-
Long term
analysis by experts
-
Clear and
complete definitions
-
Stimulates
competition
-
Standard
controlled by independent organizations rather than companies
-
Possibility of
independent certifications
|
Table 2 – Comparison between de
facto and de juri standards
·
Mare liberum or Mare clausum
One standard is known as proprietary when it has been developed by a company,
which remains the owner of royalties that limit the usage of the standard
specifications by the payment of licence fees.
Open Standards are standards with specifications which
are open to the public and can be freely implemented by any developer. Open
standards usually develop and are maintained by formal
bodies and/or communities of interested parties, such as the Free Software/Open Source community. Open standards exist in opposition to
proprietary standards, which are developed and maintained by commercial companies. Open
standards work to ensure that the widest possible group
of contemporary readers may access a publication. In a world of multiple
hardware and software platforms, it is virtually
impossible to guarantee that a given electronic publication will retain its
intended look and feel for all viewers, but open standards at least increase the
likelihood that a publication can be opened in some form.
From a business perspective, open standards help to ensure that product
development and debugging occurs quickly, cheaply and effectively by dispersing
these tasks among wide groups of users. Open standards also work to promote
customer loyalty, because the use of open standards suggests that a company
trusts its clients and is willing to engage in honest conversations with them.
Criteria for open standard products include: absence of specificity to a
particular vendor, wide distribution of standards, and easy and free or low-cost accessibility.
A protocol is the special set of rules
used by different network layers, allowing them to
exchange information and work cohesively. In a point-to-point connection, there
are protocols between each of the several
layers and each corresponding layer at the other end of a communication.
The TCP/IP protocols (TCP, IP, HTTP…) are now quite old and probably much less efficient than
newer approaches to high-speed date networking (e.g. Frame Relay or SMDS). Their success stems from the fact
that the Internet is often today the only
possible outlet that offers a standardized and stable interface, along with a
deliberate focus on openness and interconnection. This makes the Internet
extremely attractive for very different groups of users, ranging from
corporations to academic institutions. By contrast
with traditional telecommunications networks, the rules governing the Internet
focus on interconnection and interoperability, rather than attempting to
closely define the types of applications that are allowed or the rate of return
permitted to its constituents.
Architecture is a term applied to both the
process and the outcome of thinking out and specifying the overall structure,
logical components, and the logical interrelationships of a computer, its
operating system, a
network, or other conception. Architectures can be specific (e.g. IBM 360, Intel Pentium) or reference models
(e.g. OSI). Computer architectures can be divided into five fundamental components
(or subsystems): processing, control, storage, input/output, and communication.
Each of them may have a design that has to fit into the
overall architecture, and sometimes constitute an independent architecture.
As it will be exploited in the chapter 2.2.1 (z/VM and z/OS), the usage of open architectures – even when
maintained by commercial companies - can bring many technical advantages to the
suppliers of the building blocks (Software, hardware and network components) and mainly to the user community,
which can profit from a large network of compatible components, ensuring an
independence and favouring concurrence, creativity and innovation. The economic potential will be analysed in details on the chapter 6.3 (Feedback).
The term platform may be used as a synonym
for architecture, and sometimes may be used to designate their practical
implementations.
·
Certification
Certify is to validate that products,
materials, services, systems or persons are compliant to the standard
specifications. One chapter of the standard definitions is always dedicated to
the certification steps to be performed, and the specifications to be verified.
The certification process may be performed
by any entity. However, independent organizations are normally responsible for
the certification process, which may be expensive and require specialized
technological knowledge.
“It’s the question that drives us. The
question that brought you here. You know the question,
just as I did.” Trinity in The Matrix
“Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is
it neutral” – Melvin Kranzberg
According to Patrick Gerland, “the three
essentials of computer technology are: hardware - the physical machinery that
stores and processes information -, software - the programs and
procedures that orchestrate and control the operation of hardware - and people
who know what the hardware and software can do and who accordingly design and implement applications
that exert appropriate commands and controls over hardware and software to
achieve desired results”.
Despite the broad discussion about open
source and its influence on the evolution of hardware and software,
there’s a general lack of knowledge about the different types of operating
systems, their original and current targets, and their relationship with the
hardware platforms and architectures. For a better understanding of the further
topics, let’s start by discussing this infrastructure and analyse the status of
the hardware and basic software. This analysis will also solidify the
definition of architecture, standards and protocols, to be used on the following chapters. We will see, for example,
that new concepts as Open Source and ASP are largely inspired in their parents Open
Systems and Time Sharing.
The hardware and software components are sometimes
generically referred to as middleware.
Hardware is a broad term. It covers all the
equipment used to process information electronically, and it’s traditionally
divided into two main categories: computers and peripherals.
In this section, we will concentrate our analysis in the evolution of the
computers, from owned machines into commodities. Peripheral references to the
peripherals will be done. Let us consider the division of the computer into
servers and clients, discuss the traditional server families, and the new
concept of servers. After, we will briefly analyse the machines in the
client-side.
In the
beginning, they were simply called computers. And they were large-scale
computers. In the mid-1980’s, after the surge of the personal computers, we started to classify the
computers according to their capacity, their price, their “original” goal and
their target users. This classification remained until the end of the 1990s,
and the three different families will now be briefly described.
Let’s
not talk about the big computers filling entire rooms, weighting tons and
composed by valves.
This is not a mainframe any more, for a long time. Let’s think about relatively
small servers (they are often not larger than a fridge) with big power
capacity, enough to run online applications for thousands of users spread over
different countries, and to process batch jobs which can process millions of
nightly database updates. They have never been sexy (and this was not the goal:
we are talking about a period between 1970 and 1985, when graphics, colours,
sound and animation were not part of the requirements for a professional
computer application) and today it seems that the only alternative for them to
survive is to mimic and co-operate with open systems environments.
Usually mainframe applications
are referred to as “legacy” (“Something received from the
past”).
One can argue the usage of this term,
mainly because of the undeniable stability and performance of these machines
and considering that most of the core applications for big companies are still
processed using mainframe computers, connected with computers from other
platforms to get profit from a better user interface.
Current
mainframe brands are IBM zSeries, Hitachi M-Series, Fujitsu-Siemens PrimePower 2000 and BS2000 and Ahmdal Millenium.
The term mainframe is also being marketed by some vendors to designate high-end
servers, which are a direct evolution from the mid-range servers, with a
processing capacity (and price) aiming to compete with the traditional
mainframes.
Figure 3 – IBM ZSeries 900
This is
a difficult assumption to make. The capacity of the machines in this category
is increasing fast, and they are already claiming to be high-end servers, and
winning market share from the mainframes. Let’s consider it a separate
category, for the moment.
Once
upon a time, there were the minicomputers.
They used to fill the mid-range area between micros and mainframes. As of 2001,
the term minicomputer is no longer used for the mid-range computer systems, and
most are now referred to simply as servers.
Mid-range servers are machines able to perform complex processing, with
distributed databases, multi-processing and multi-tasking, and deliver service
to the same number of users than a high-end server, but with lower cost and often
with an inferior level of protection, stability and security.
The main
suppliers in this area are HP and Sun.
Figure 4 – HP RISC rp8400
Initially
the microcomputers were used as desktop, single-user machines. Then they
started to assume functions from the minicomputers, like multi-tasking and
multi-processing. Nowadays they can provide services to several users, host web
applications, function as e-mail and database servers. Initially each server was used for a different function, and they were connected via the
network. This is called multi-tier
server architecture. With the evolution of the processing speed, today
each server may be used for several functions.
They may
also work as metaframes, providing service to users connected via client or
network computers. All the applications run in the server side (that is required to have a very good processing capacity),
which exchange the screens with the clients (that can be relatively slow).
There
are several suppliers in this area, like Dell and Compaq.
Figure 5 – DELL Poweredge 1600SC
Figure 6 – Traditional Server
families
The
classification categories discussed before are becoming more difficult to
define and the division lines are blurring. The new generation of servers span
a large range of price and processing capacity, starting by low-entry models,
until powerful high-end servers, which can be tightly connected into clusters.
This methodology is implemented – in different ways – by the most part of the
hardware suppliers in the server market.
Figure 7 – The new generation of
servers
The
differences between the entry-level and high-end servers depend on the
architecture and the supplier. They may imply the number of parallel
processors, the type and capacity of each processor, the memory available,
cache, and connections with the peripherals. The clusters are normally used for
applications demanding intensive calculations, and are composed by several
servers connected by the usage of high-speed channels (when they are situated
in the same space) or high-speed network links (when the servers are geographically dispersed to provide
high availability in cases of natural disasters). There are many different ways
to implement the clusters to obtain a single point of control and maintenance,
treating the cluster almost as a single server – without creating a single point of failure, which could imply
the complete unavailability of the cluster in case of problems with one of the
elements.
Estimate
the throughput for future applications is only possible with a good capacity
planning, prepared by experimented specialists. To find a server – as performance tests with the real charge are quite difficult to
be elaborated - there are several benchmarks, organized by recognized
independent companies, each one with a clear advantage for a different
supplier. As the cost is extremely important - and when the hardware supplier participates in the capacity planning – a Service Level
Agreement (SLA) may specify guarantees that the
capacity installed will satisfy the estimated demand.
However,
another differentiating factor, which is gaining importance nowadays, is the
openness of the hardware and operating systems. This will be largely exploited further in
this document.
The
current challenge, in the quest for the holy server, is to build flexible, scalable
and resilient infrastructures, able to respond to unexpected surges in traffic
and use. The solution may be found by implementing concepts like grid computing
and autonomic computing, which are highly dependent on open standards and tightly related to open source.
·
Grid Computing
Grid computing
is a new, service-oriented architecture that embraces heterogeneous systems and
involves yoking together many cheap low-power computers - dispersed
geographically - via open standards, to create a system with the
high processing power typical of a large supercomputer, at a fraction of the
price. The goal is to link – mainly through the Internet – computers and peripherals, by cumulating their processing and
stocking capacities. All the connected systems may then profit from the set of
assembled resources – like processing capacity, memory, disk, tapes, software and data – that are global and virtual at the same time.
The
challenges are to connect different machines and standards, to develop software able to manage and distribute the resources over the network, to create a development
platform enabling programs to make profit of the parallel and distributed
tasks, security issues (authentication, authorisation and policies) and to develop
reliable and fast networks.
The
basic principle is not new, as the HPC (high performance computing) technology is already used in
academic and research settings, and the peer-to-peer has already been used to create a large network of personal computers (e.g. SETI@home). The target now is to expand
this technology to the business area via associations like the Global Grid Forum (assembling more than 200 universities, laboratories and
private companies).
Another
initiative is the Globus project, formed by many American
research institutes, responsible for Globus toolkit, which uses Open Source concepts for the basic software development, and has created the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), a set of open and published
specifications and standards for grid computing (including SOAP, WSDL and XML). The OGSA version 1.0 has been
approved in December 2002. Other similar projects are Utility Computing (HP) and N1 (Sun).
With the costs to acquire, deploy, and
maintain an expanding number of servers weighing down potential productivity
gains, the market is shifting toward various concepts of service-centric
computing. This may hold deep potential to not only lower the capital and
operational costs of a data centre, but also to impart that infrastructure with
the increased availability and agility to respond to an ever-changing business
environment.
·
Autonomic Computing
As IT
systems become more complex and difficult to maintain, alternative technologies
must manage and improve its own operation with minimal human intervention.
Autonomic computing is focused in making software and hardware that are self-optimising,
self-configuring, self-protecting
and self-healing. It is
similar to the grid concepts, by embracing the development of intelligent, open
systems that are capable of adapting to varying circumstances and preparing
resources to efficiently handle the workloads placed upon them. Autonomic
computers aren’t a separate category of products. Rather, such capabilities are
appearing in a growing number of systems.
The
objective is to help companies more easily and cost-effectively manage their
grid computing systems. It’s expected that when autonomic computing reaches its
full potential, information systems will run themselves based on set business
policies and objectives. The implementation of such a system start with a trial
phase, in which the system suggests actions and then wait for approval. After a
fine-tuning of the rules, the system may run unattended.
It’s
believed that only a holistic, standards-based approach can achieve the
full benefits of autonomic computing. Several standards bodies – including the Internet Engineering Task Force, Distributed Management Task Force and
Global Grid Forum – are working together with private companies to leverage
existing standards and develop new standards where none exist. Existing and emerging standards relevant to autonomic computing include:
- Common Information Model
- Policy, Simple Network Management
Protocol (IETF)
- Organisation for the
advancement of structured information standards
- Java management extensions
- Web Services Security
One
example of current technologies using autonomic components is disk servers with
predictive failure analysis and pre-emptive RAID reconstructs, which are designed to monitor the system health and
to detect potential problems or systems errors before harming the data.
Performance optimisation is also obtained via intelligent cache management and
I/O prioritisation.
In the
beginning of the personal computers, hobby was the main objective,
and there were several different platforms (Amiga, Commodore, TRS80, Sinclair, Apple, among others) completely
incompatible. BASIC
was the common language, although with different implementations. Then, in 1981,
IBM created the PC – the first small computer to be able to run business applications
- and in 1984, Apple released the Macintosh – the first popular graphical platform. The era of microcomputers
started.
The natural
evolution of the microcomputers, today’s desktops are able to run powerful
stand-alone applications, like word processing and multimedia production. They are normally based on Intel or Macintosh platforms and used by small businesses or home users. They are
much more powerful when connected to one or more servers, via network or the Internet. They become clients, and can be
used to prepare and generate requests that are processed by the servers, and
then receive, format and display the results.
Most of
the desktop market is dominated by computers originated from the IBM PC architecture, built from several suppliers (and even sold in
individual parts) around Intel and AMD processors. Apple is also present – with a different architecture - traditionally in
the publishing and multimedia productions.
Figure 8 – Desktop x Network
computers
Recent
evolutions from the desktops, the Network Computers (also called WebPC or NetPC) are also used as clients, with
less power and more flexibility. Normally these computers have built-in
software, which is able to connect to the
network and fetch the needed applications from the servers, or simply use
the applications running on the servers themselves.
The main
objective is to allow shops and sales persons to work from anywhere in the
world in the same way, with the same profile, even if changing the hardware interface. It also allows a better level of control over
personalization, as all the information is always stored in the server, the client working simply as
the interface.
Main
suppliers are IBM and Compaq, with network computers working as PC clients, and Citrix with a proprietary client able to connect only to Citrix servers and obtain a perfect
image of PC client applications via the network. Similar technology can be
found under the names “thin clients” and “smart display”.
To
support the development of network computing, the company Sun developed a new language (Java), aiming to guarantee the
independence of the hardware equipment or platform by the usage of Virtual Machines.
The idea
is to connected small devices than laptops to the network. The PDAs are largely used today, and have the capacity to work in network,
even if the communication costs avoid many to use them to send e-mails and to
connect to the Internet.
With the
decreasing size of the chips, and with the development of wireless protocols – like bluetooth and WiFi - some technology “hype-makers” are trying to convince the general
public that they need every single appliance connected to the network. Although with some interesting
applications, most of them are simply gadgets. With the current economic
crisis, there is a low probability that such products will have a viable
commercialisation soon.
Some
companies are using these technologies in warehouse management systems, to
reduce costs and increase the control on stock and product tracing. Also
current is the usage of Linux in set-top boxes, able to select TV channels,
save programs in hard disks for later viewing, filter channel viewings
according to license keys.
See also
chapter 2.3.4 (Trend: Open Spectrum).
As we already discussed, hardware is the equipment used to
process information. An Operating System is the system software responsible to manage the
hardware resources (memory, Input/Output operations, processors and
peripherals), and to create an interface between these resources and the
operator or end-user.
Originally,
each hardware platform could run its own operating system family. This is not true any more. Here we are going to briefly
analyse some examples of well-known operating systems, and present some
historical facts related to standards, architectures and open source.
Later we are going to discuss the initial dependence between the operating
systems and the architecture, and how this has changed.
With a history started in 1964,
IBM mainframe operating systems are currently z/VM and z/OS (a third one, VSE/ESA, is only kept for compatibility
issues). They share the same architecture (currently called z/Architecture)
and their main characteristics are:
§
z/VM was originally built to ease the machine resources sharing by
creating simulated computers (virtual machines), each running its own operating
system.
§
z/OS - has
always been the operating system used by large IBM systems, offering a great level of availability and manageability.
IBM has been the leader of the mainframe commercial market since the
very beginning, with strong investments in R&D and marketing strategies, and with a determination to use common
programming languages (like COBOL) in the conquest of programmers
and customers. One key factor for IBM’s success is standardization. In the 1950s, each computer
system was uniquely designed to address specific applications and to fit within
narrow price ranges. The lack of compatibility among these systems, with the
consequent huge efforts when migrating from one computer to another, motivated
IBM to define a new ”architecture” as the common base for a whole family of
computers. It was known as the System/360, announced on April 1964,
which allowed the customers to start using a low-cost version of the family,
and upgrade to larger systems if their needs grew. Scalable architecture
completely reshaped the industry. This architecture introduced a number of the
standards for the industry - such as 8-bit bytes and the EBCDIC character set
- and later evolved to the S/370 (1970), 370-XA (1981), ESA/370 (1988), S/390 (1990) and
z/Architecture (2000). All these architectures were backward compatible,
allowing the programs to run longer with less or no adaptation, while convincing
the customers to migrate to the new machines and operating systems versions to
profit from new technologies.
The
standardization of the hardware platforms, by using a common architecture, helped to unify the efforts
from the different IBM departments and laboratories spread over the world. The usage of a
common set of basic rules was also fundamental in the communication among the
hardware and software departments, which allowed the existence of the three different
operating system families, able to run in the same hardware.
This
architecture is proprietary (privately owned and controlled - the
control over its use, distribution, or modification is retained by IBM), but its principles and rules
are well defined and available to the customers, suppliers and even the competitors. This openness allowed its
expansion by:
- Hardware - Other companies
(OEM - Original
Equipment Manufacturer) started to build hardware equipment full compatible
with the IBM architecture (thus allowing
its use together with IBM hardware and software), and often with advantages on pricing, performance or additional
functions. This gave a real boost on the IBM architecture, by giving the
customer the advantage of having a choice, while enforcing the usage of
its standards and helping it to sell even
more software and hardware.
- Software – Initially IBM was dedicated to building
operating systems, compilers and basic tools. Many companies (ISV - Independent Software Vendors) started to develop software to complement this basic
package, allowing the construction of a complete environment. The end-user
could then concentrate in the development of its applications, while
buying the operating system and the complementary tools
from IBM and the ISV.
- Services – As the IBM architecture became the
standard for large systems, consulting companies could then specialize in
this market segment, providing standard service offerings around the
implementation of the hardware components, operating
systems and software. With the recent increase on the demand for this type of service,
mainly due to the Y2K problem, the Euro
implementation and the outsourcing hype, most of the infrastructure
services in large environments have been done by external consultants.
There’s
also a dark side: several times, IBM has been accused of changing the architecture without giving
enough time to the competitors to adapt their hardware and software. Only when the competition from
other high-end servers suppliers increased, IBM has been forced to review this
policy, creating the concept of “ServerPac”. The operating system started to be bundled with ISV software, giving the user a certain guarantee of compatibility.
A second
problem is the complete ownership of the standards, by IBM. Even if other companies found
good ways of implementing new technologies, thus improving the quality of the service or the performance, they always needed to adapt
their findings to fit in the IBM architecture.
This limited the innovation coming from the OEM companies as they could rarely think about improvements that would
imply architectural changes. On the other hand, the customers were never sure
if the changes imposed by IBM were really needed, or simply another way of
forcing them to upgrade the operating systems version or the hardware equipment with an obvious financial benefit for IBM.
A third
aspect is related to the availability of the code source of the operating
systems and basic software. Originally, IBM supplied the software with most part of the source code and a good technical documentation about the software’s internal
structures. This gave the customers a better knowledge about the architecture
and the operating systems, allowing them to analyse problems independently, to
drive their understanding beyond the documentation, and to elaborate routines
close to the operating systems. After, they created the “OCO” (Object Code Only) concept, which persists today.
The official reason behind this was the difficulty for IBM to analyse software
problems, due to the increasing number of customers that started to modify the
IBM software to adapt them to local needs, or to simply correct bugs. In fact,
by hiding the source code IBM also avoided that customers discovered flaws and
developed interesting performance upgrades. This also helped to decrease the
knowledge level from the technical staff, which is limited today to follow the
instructions given by IBM, when installing and maintaining the software. The
direct consequence was a lack of interest for the real system programmers and
students, who have been attracted to UNIX and Open Source environments. A positive consequence of the OCO policy is the
quicker migration from release to release. Since the code is not modified, but
instead APIs (Application Programming Interfaces)
can be used to adapt the system to each customer needs.
These
factors were crucial to create a phenomenon called downsizing: Several
customers, unhappy with the monopoly in the large systems, and with the high
prices practiced by IBM and followed by the OEM and ISV suppliers, started to migrate their centralized (also called
enterprise) systems to distributed environments, by using midrange platforms
like UNIX. In parallel (as it will be
discussed on chapter 2.2.2), there were many developments of applications and
basic software in the UNIX platforms, the most important around the Internet. To counterattack, IBM decided
to enable UNIX applications to run in their mainframe platforms: MVS (the Open
Edition environment, now called UNIX System Services) and VM (by running Linux as guest operating systems in virtual machines). IBM major effort
today is to create easy bridges between those application environments, and to
convince the customers to web-enable the old applications, instead of rewriting
them.
Important is to notice that the standardisation on the hardware level was not abstracted to the operating system level. As mentioned above IBM always maintained three different operating systems, each one
targeted to a different set of customers. This was not always what IBM desired,
and in every implementation of a new architecture level (e.g. XA, ESA), the rumours were that the
customers would be forced to migrate from VM and VSE to MVS, which would become the only supported environment. This is
still true for the VSE (note that there’s no z/VSE announced yet), but z/VM became a strategic environment allowing IBM to implement Linux in all hardware platforms.
Usually, the mainframe implementations are highly standardized. As the
professionals in this domain understood the need for standards, the creation of company
policies is done even before installing the systems.
"Unix was the distilled essence of
operating systems, designed solely to be useful. Not to be marketable. Not to
be compatible. Not to be an appendage to a particular kind of hardware. Moreover a computer running Unix was to be useful as a computer,
not just a `platform' for canned `solutions'. It was to be programmable -
cumulatively programmable. The actions of program builders were to be no
different in kind from the actions of users; anything a user could do a program
could do too...." (McIlroy - Unix on My Mind)
An analysed by Giovinazzo, “while it may seem by today’s standards that a universal operating
system like UNIX was inevitable, this was not always the case.
Back in that era there were a great deal of cynicism concerning the possibility
of a single operating system that would be supported by all platforms. (…)
Today, UNIX support is table stakes for any Independent Software Vendor (ISV) that
wants to develop an enterprise class solution”.
It may surprise some people but the
conception of UNIX (MULTICS)
started almost in the same time than the IBM System/360, and
the first UNIX edition was released just after the IBM System/370, in November 1971.
MULTICS was developed by the General Electric Company, AT&T Bell Labs
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to allow many users to access a single
computer simultaneously, allowing them to share data and the processing cost.
Bell Labs abandoned the project and used some of MULTICS concepts to develop
UNIX on a computer called DEC PDP-7, predecessor of the
VAX computers.
The “C” language has been created under
UNIX and then - in a
revolutionary exploit of recursion - the UNIX system itself has been rewritten
in “C”. This language was extremely efficient while relatively small and
started to be ported to other platforms, allowing the same to happen with UNIX.
Besides portability, another important
characteristic of the UNIX system was its simplicity
(the C logical structure could be learnt quickly, and UNIX was structured as a
flexible toolkit of simple programs). Teachers and students found on it a good
way to study the very principles of operating systems, while learning UNIX more
deeply, and quickly spreading UNIX principles and advantages to the market.
This helped UNIX to become the ARPANET (and later Internet)
operating system by excellence. The universities started to
migrate from proprietary systems to the new open
environment, establishing a standard way to work and communicate.
Probably one of the UNIX most innovations was its original
distribution method. AT&T could not market computer
products so they distributed UNIX in source code, to
educational institutions, at no charge. Each site that obtained UNIX could
modify or add new functions, by creating a personalized copy of the system.
They quickly started to share these new functions and the system become
adaptable to a very wide range of computing tasks, including many completely
unanticipated by the designers.
Initiated by Ken Thompson,
students and professors from the University of California-Berkeley continued to enhance UNIX,
creating the BSD (Berkeley Software
Distribution) Version 4.2, and distributing it to many other universities.
AT&T distributed their own
version, and were the only able to distribute commercial copies.
In the early 80s the microchip and
local-area network started to have an important
impact on the UNIX evolution. Sun Microsystems used the Motorola 68000 chip to provide an
inexpensive hardware for UNIX. Berkeley UNIX developed built-in support for the DARPA Internet protocols, which encouraged further growth of the Internet.
“X Window” provided the standard for graphic workstations. By 1984 AT&T started to commercialise
UNIX. “What made UNIX popular for business applications was its timesharing,
multitasking capability, permitting many people to use the mini- or mainframe;
its portability across different vendor's machines; and its e-mail capability”.
Several computer manufacturing companies
- like Sun, HP, DEC and Siemens - adapted AT&T and BSD UNIX distributions to their own machines, trying to seduce new users by developing new functions to benefit from hardware differences. Of course, the more differences between the UNIX
distributions, more difficult to migrate between platforms. The customers
started to be trapped, like in all other computer families.
As the
versions of UNIX grew in number, the UNIX System Group (USG), which had been formed in the
1970s as a support organization for the internal Bell System use of UNIX, was
reorganized as the UNIX Software Operation (USO) in 1989. The USO made several
UNIX distributions of its own - to academia and to some commercial and
government users –and then was merged with UNIX Systems Laboratories, to become
an AT&T subsidiary.
AT&T entered into an alliance with Sun Microsystems to bring the best features from the many versions of
UNIX into a single unified system. While many applauded this decision,
one group of UNIX licensees expressed the fear that Sun would have a commercial
advantage over the rest of the licensees.
The
concerned group, leaded by Berkeley, in 1988 formed a special
interest group, the Open Systems Foundation (OSF), to lobby for an
"open" UNIX within the UNIX community. Soon several large companies also
joined the OSF.
In
response, AT&T and a second group of licensees formed their own group, UNIX International. Several negotiations took place, and the commercial
aspects seemed to be more important than the technical ones. The impact of
losing the war was obvious: important adaptations should be done in the
complementary routines developed, some functions – together with some
advantages – should be suppressed, some hardware innovative techniques should be abandoned in the name of the
standardization. When efforts failed to bring
the two groups together, each one brought out its own version of an
"open" UNIX. This dispute could be viewed two ways: positively, since
the number of UNIX versions were now reduced to two; or negatively, since there
now were two more versions of UNIX to add to the existing ones.
In the
meantime, the X/Open Company – company formed in guise to define a comprehensive open
systems environment - held the centre ground. X/Open chose the UNIX system as the platform for the basis of open systems and started
the process of standardizing the APIs necessary for an open operating system specification. In addition, it looked at areas of the system
beyond the operating system level where a standard approach would add value for
supplier and customer alike, developing or adopting specifications for
languages, database connectivity, networking and connections with the mainframe
platforms. The results of this work were published in successive X/Open
Portability Guides (XPG).
In December 1993, one specification was
delivered to X/Open for fast track processing.
The publication of the Spec 1170
work as the proper industry supported specification occurred in October 1994.
In 1995 X/Open introduced the UNIX 95 brand for computer systems guaranteed to
meet the Single UNIX Specification. On 1998 the Open Group introduces the UNIX
98 family of brands, including
Base, Workstation and Server. First UNIX 98 registered products shipped by Sun, IBM and NCR.
There is now a single, open, consensus
specification, under the brand X/Open® UNIX. Both
the specification and the trademark are now managed and held in trust for the
industry by X/Open Company. There are many competing products, all implemented
against the Single UNIX Specification, ensuring competition and vendor choice.
There are different technology suppliers, which vendors can license and build their own product, all of them
implementing the Single UNIX Specification.
Among others, the main definitions under
this specification on version 3 - which is a result of IEEE POSIX, The Open Group and the industry efforts – are the definitions (XBD), the commands and utilities (XCU), the system interfaces and headers (XSH) and the networking services. They are part of the X/Open CAE (Common Applications
Environment) document set.
In November 2002, the joint revision to
POSIX® and the Single UNIX® specification have been approved as an International Standard.
The Single UNIX Specification brand program has now achieved
critical mass: vendors whose products have met the demanding criteria now
account for the majority of UNIX systems by value. UNIX-based systems are sold
today by a number of companies.
UNIX is a perfect example of a constructive way of
thinking (and mainly: acting!), and it proves that the academia and commercial
companies can act together, by using open standards regulated by independent
organisations, to construct an open platform and stimulate technological
innovation.
Companies using UNIX systems, software and hardware compliant with the X/Open specifications can be less dependent of the
suppliers. Migration to another compliant product is always possible. One can
argue that, in cases of intensive usage of “non-compliant” extra features, the
activities required for a migration can demand a huge effort.
Figure 9 – UNIX Chronology
“Every good work of software starts by scratching a
developer’s personal itch” – Eric Raymond
This discussion is not completely separated from the previous one.
Developed by Linus Torvalds, Linux is a product that mimics the
form and function of a UNIX system,
but is not derived from licensed source code.
Rather, it was developed independently by a group of developers in an informal
alliance on the net (peer to peer). A major benefit is that the source code is
freely available (under the GNU copyleft), enabling the
technically astute to alter and amend the system; it also means that there are
many, freely available, utilities and specialist drivers available on the net.
The hackers – not to be confounded with the “crackers” – appeared
in the early sixties and define themselves as people who “program
enthusiastically”
with “an ethical duty (…) to share their
expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to
information and computing resources wherever possible”.
After the collapse of the first software-sharing community
- the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
- the hacker Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT in 1984 and started to work
on the GNU system. It
was aimed to be a free operating system,
compatible with UNIX. “Even if GNU had no technical advantage over UNIX, it would have a
social advantage, allowing users to cooperate, and an ethical advantage,
respecting the user’s freedom”.
He started by gathering pieces of free software, adapting them, and developing
the missing parts, like a compiler for the C language and a powerful editor
(EMACS). In 1985, the Free Software Foundation
has been created and by 1990, the GNU system was almost complete. The only
major missing component was the kernel.
In 1991, Linus Torvalds developed a free
UNIX kernel using the FSF toolkit.
Around 1992, the combination of Linux and GNU resulted in a complete free operating system, and
by late 1993, GNU/Linux could compete on stability and reliability with many
commercial UNIX versions, and hosted more software.
Linux was based on good design principles and a good
development model. By opposition to the typical organisation – where any
complex software was developed in a carefully
coordinated way by a relatively small group of people – Linux was developed by
a huge numbers of volunteers coordinating through the Internet.
Portability was not the original goal.
Conceived originally to run on a personal computer (386 processor), later on
some people ported the Linux kernel to the Motorola 68000 series – used in early
personal computers – using an Amiga computer. Nevertheless, the serious effort
was to port Linux to the DEC Alpha machine. The entire code has
been reworked in such a modular way that future ports were simplified, and
started to appear quickly.
This modularity was essential for the new
open-source development model, by allowing several people to work in parallel
without risk of interference. It was also easier for a limited group of people
– still coordinated by Torvalds – to receive all modified modules and integrate
into a new kernel version.
Besides Linux, there are many freely available UNIX and UNIX-compatible implementations, such as
OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD. According to Gartner, “Most BSD systems have liberal open source licenses, 10
years' more history than Linux, and great reliability and efficiency. But while
Linux basks in the spotlight, BSD is invisible from corporate IT”.
BSDI is an independent company that markets products derived from the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD), developed at the
University of California at Berkeley in the 60's and 70's. It is the operating
system of choice for many Internet service providers. It is, as with Linux, not
a registered UNIX system, though in this case there is a common code heritage
if one looks far enough back in history. The creators of FreeBSD started with
the source code from the Berkeley UNIX. Its
kernel is directly descended from
that source code.
Recursion
or fate, the fact is that Linux history is following the same steps than UNIX. As it was not developed using
the source from one of the UNIX distributions, Linux have several technical
specifications that are not (and will probably never be)
compliant with UNIX98. Soon, Linux started to be distributed by several
different companies worldwide – SuSE, Red Hat, MandrakeSoft, Caldera International / SCO and Conectiva, to name some –, bundled
together with a plethora of open source software, normally in two different packages
- one aiming at home users and another for companies. In 2000, two
standardization groups appeared - LSB
and LI18NUX - and have
incorporated under the name Free Standards Group, “organized to accelerate the use and acceptance of open
source technologies through the application, development and promotion of
interoperability standards for open source development”.
Caldera, Mandrake, Red hat and SuSE currently have versions compliant with the
LSB certification.
Still in
an early format, the current standards are not enough to guarantee the compatibility among the different
distributions. In a commercial maneuver – to reduce the development costs – SCO, Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux formed a consortium called UnitedLinux, a joint server operating system for enterprise deployment. The software and hardware vendors can concentrate on one major business distribution,
instead of certifying to multiple distributions. This is expected to increase
the availability of new technologies to Linux customers, and reduce the time needed for the development of
drivers and interfaces. Consulting companies can also concentrate the efforts
to provide more and new services.
However, Red hat – the dominant seller in
the enterprise market segment – has not been invited to join the UnitedLinux family before its
announcement. Few expect it to join now. Also missing are MandrakeSoft and Sun Microsystems.
With the help from important IT companies,
it’s expected from the Free Standards Group the same unifying role than the one
played by the Open Group, which was essential for the UNIX common specification.
This is very important to give more credibility for the companies willing to
seriously use Linux on their production
environments. As in the UNIX world, the Linux sellers could still keep their
own set of complementary products, which would be one important factor to
stimulate the competition. The distributions targeting the home users can
continue separated, by promoting the diversity needed to stimulate creativity,
and by letting the natural selection chose the best software to be elected for enterprise
usage. Darwin would be happy. Also would the users.
Linux already proved to be a
reliable, secure and efficient operating system,
ranging from low entry up to high-end servers. It has the same difficulty level
than other UNIX platforms, with the big
advantage of being economically affordable – almost everybody can have it at
home, and learn it by practice. However, is it technically possible for
everyone to install it and use it?
The main argument supporting all the open source
software is that a good support can
be obtained from service providers, besides the help from the open source
community, by using Internet tools like newsgroups and
discussion lists. Although, our question may have two different answers: One
for servers, other for clients.
It is certainly possible for companies to
replace existing operating systems with Linux, and the effort needed is mainly related to the conversion of the
applications than to the migration of the servers or the operating systems.
Several companies have been created using Linux servers to reduce their initial
costs, and they worked with specialized Linux people from the beginning. Most
of the companies replacing other platforms by Linux already have a support
team, with a technological background, responsible by the installation and
maintenance of the servers. Part of this team has already played with Linux at
home and has learnt the basic knowledge. The other part is often willing to learn
it, compare with the other platforms, and to discover what it has that is
seducing the world.
The desktop users have a completely
different scenario. This is because Linux is based on a real operating
system, conceived to be installed and adapted by people with a good
technical background, and willing to dedicate some time for this task. The main
goal of most of the people (except probably the hackers themselves) installing Linux at home is to learn
it, to play around, to compare with the other systems. The Linux main objective
(by using the recursion so dear to the hackers) appears to be Linux itself. In
its most recent releases, even if the installation process is not difficult as
before, simple tasks as adding new hardware, playing a DVD, writing a CD or installing another piece of
software, can quickly become nightmares. Linux can’t yet match Windows on plug-and-play digital media or the more peripheral
duties.
One should continue to be optimist and hope that the next versions will finally
be simpler. The open source community is working on it, via the creation of the
Desktop Linux Consortium.
·
Ubiquity … and beyond!
Linux is considered the only
operating system that will certainly run on architectures that
have not yet been invented.
Four major segments of Linux key marketplaces are:
§
Workload consolidation - One of the
capabilities of Linux is that it makes it very
easy to take distributed work and consolidate it in larger servers. Mainframes and some large servers
support hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, each one running one copy of
Linux.
§
Clusters – Linux performs very well when
connected in clusters (due to its horizontal scalability), like the big
supercomputing clusters existing in universities and research labs.
§
Distributed enterprise – The central
management of geographically distributed servers is among the chief growth
areas for Linux.
§
Appliances –Linux is found as an embedded
operating system in all kinds of new applications, like major
network servers, file and print
servers, and quite a number of them new kinds of information appliances. It’s
very cost effective, reliable and fast. In addition, the open standards facilitate their operations.
The first Microsoft’s product – in 1975 – was BASIC,
installed in microcomputers used by hobbyists. In 1980, IBM started to develop the
personal computer (PC) and invited Microsoft to participate in the project by creating
the operating system.
Microsoft bought, from a small company called Seattle Computer, a system called
Q-DOS, and used
it as a basis for MS-DOS, which became the operating system of choice, distributed by IBM as
PC-DOS. By 1983,
Microsoft announced their planning to bring graphical computing to the IBM PC
with a product called Windows. As Bill Gates explains, “at that time two of the personal
computers on the market had graphical
capabilities: The XEROX Star and the Apple Lisa. Both were expensive, limited in
capability, and built on proprietary hardware architectures. Other
hardware companies couldn’t license the operating systems to build compatible
systems, and neither computer attracted many software companies to develop
applications. Microsoft wanted to created an open standard and bring graphical
capabilities to any computer that was running MS-DOS”.
Microsoft worked together with Apple during the development of the Macintosh, and
created for this platform their two first graphical products: a word processor
(Microsoft Word) and a spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel). Microsoft also cooperated
with IBM during the development of OS/2,
which was aimed to become the graphic replacement for MS-DOS.
Using this knowledge, and a lot of ideas
from the XEROX research, Microsoft release the first version of
Windows in November 1985.
The impact of OS/2 was very limited, as it did
not provide full compatibility with the old MS-DOS software. On the other hand, Windows was a large success mainly because it
supported the existing MS-DOS character-oriented
applications, in parallel with exploiting the potentials from the new graphical
software.
Application support for Windows was initially sparse. To encourage earlier
application support, Microsoft licensed a free of charge
runtime version of Windows to developers, which made their programs available
to end-users. This runtime version allowed use of the application although it
did not give the benefits that the full Windows environment provided. With
version 3.1, Windows acquired maturity, reducing the incredible number of bugs
- mainly related with the user interface, and with the constant need of
rebooting the system - and with the wide availability of graphic applications.
Its popularity blossomed with the release of a completely new Windows software development kit (SDK) -
which helped software developers focus more on writing applications and less on
writing device drivers – and with the widespread acceptance among third-party
hardware and software developers. The
bugs are persistent, and today are the main source of virus by opening security flaws.
Microsoft decided to keep the compatibility with the
MS-DOS applications to avoid losing
customers. However, this also avoided Windows desktop systems to be stable, and reduced the
pace of innovation. Microsoft then started to develop a completely new desktop system
from scratch, oriented to business customers that needed more stability. After
1993 two different families of desktop operating systems co-existed: the
Windows 3x (that later evolved to Windows 9x and Windows Millennium),
descended from MS-DOS and the Windows NT (that later evolved to Windows2000),
completely built around the graphic interfaces and new hardware features. In 2001, Microsoft
abandoned the 3x family and used the base code from NT to create the Windows XP, with
two different packages and prices: one “edition” aimed for home users, another
for professional use.
Figure 10 – Windows client evolution
In July 1993, Microsoft inaugurated its Windows server family with the release of
Windows NT Advanced server 3.1.
It was designed to act as a dedicated server (for tasks as Application,
Mail, Database and Communications Server) in a client/server environment, for Novell NetWare,
Banyan VINES, and Microsoft networks. The next releases improved the
connectivity with UNIX environments (3.5),
integrated a web server (4.0) and consolidated the
web facilities with ASP (2000). To follow is the
Windows .NET server, which aims
to better exploit the XML Web services and the .NET
framework. The different editions for the server families are Standard,
Enterprise, Datacenter and Web.
Figure 11 – Windows server evolution
·
Easy-to-use, easy-to-break
The main advantage of the windows families
– over Linux and UNIX - is their easy installation and operation.
As we saw, Microsoft copied the concepts from
Apple Macintosh and always based their windows products in
graphic interfaces, with intuitive icons opening the doors for all the tasks,
from running the applications to configuring the hardware and changing the software options, colours and sounds.
This seems to be a major benefit for end users, that don’t need to bother with
learning the concepts of operating systems to be able to write a letter, scan
some photos, mix everything and print. The problems start to appear when
something changes, like the version of the operating system, a
new hardware component or simply when an inoffensive application is installed
or removed from the computer. These tasks often need an intervention from a
specialist, or a complete reinstallation of the windows system. This happens
even with the recent XP releases, despite Microsoft
publicity stating the opposite.
Finally, the main technical advantages
disappear, and only the market dominance, compatibility of the document
formats, and marketing strategies convince the user to keep the windows system,
rather than installing Linux or buying a Macintosh system.
Microsoft strategy always consisted in identifying the
good opportunities, react quickly and offer a solution (often without taking
care of the quality) to conquer the market and later improve it to keep the customers.
Again, as it was the case for IBM with the mainframes,
marketing strategies revealed to be more important than technological features,
paving the way for “de facto” standards.
Windows is extremely important for Microsoft’s
marketing strategies, serving as a Trojan horse to introduce “free” Microsoft
programs. This happened in 1995, when Internet Explorer quickly gained an impressive market
place in a short time – again, instead of developing a concept and a product,
Microsoft simply acquired Mosaic from the company Spyglass and make quick
modifications transforming it into Internet Explorer. After, with the
development of extensions to the standard HTML language, it almost
eliminated Netscape from the market.
This drive us to the conclusion that
Microsoft practices aim to conquer a
complete monopoly – not only for operating systems, but also for applications,
appliances, the internet and content
– through the complete elimination of the competition. This has already been
analysed by the American and European justice departments.
One of the main reasons behind Windows’
success is the independence from the hardware supplier. If the processor
chip is usually built by Intel and AMD, the computers can
be manufactured by any company following the specifications from the PC architecture, or even
assembled at home, by using standard components available in any electronic
shop. On the other hand, the Apple Macintosh and IBM PS/2 architectures force the
customer to buy the hardware and software from the same supplier.
There’s no compatibility with other vendors, thus the cost remains higher than
the PC/Windows platforms, which benefit from the competition and the higher
market share to decrease the production costs.
Yet, the windows systems remain dependent
of the PC architectures, and this may
be a serious disadvantage by opposition to the portability offered by Linux systems. This is important
to understand what is behind the strategies adopted by the Microsoft competitors, to be studied on the next
chapter.
One important difference between the
proprietary MS-DOS and Windows families and the open systems is not
technical, but social. There is not such a concept as Windows hackers.
Windows environments were conceived to run alone, not in networks. The UNIX systems have been built with strong
networking facilities, since their first versions, what allowed creating a
large community that used, analysed, developed and cooperated for its
improvements. Moreover, the UNIX systems appeared in the academic world, which favoured this community to be
extremely creative and looking for technological innovations. This concept,
also known as peer-to-peer (P2P), obtained its climax with Linux, which has entirely constructed (and still evolves) through the
Internet.
As well defined by Eric Raymond,
“the MS-DOS world remained blissful
ignorant of all this. Though those early microcomputer enthusiasts quickly expanded
to a population of DOS and Mac hackers order of magnitude greater than that of the
‘network nation’ culture, they never
become self-aware culture themselves. The pace of change was so fast that fifty
different technical cultures grew and died as rapidly as mayflies, never
achieving quite the stability necessary to develop a common tradition of
jargon, folklore and mythic history. (…) The fact that non-UNIX operating systems don’t come bundled with
development tools meant that very little source was passed over them. Thus, no
tradition of collaborative hacking developed.”.
Complementary, as Himanen explains, “Bill
Gates (…) gained hacker respect by programming his first interpreter of the
BASIC programming language (…)
[but] in Microsoft’s subsequent history, the profit motive has taken precedent over
the passion”.
Released
in 1984 and integrating the hardware and software into the same platform, the Apple Macintosh was the first to have good graphical interfaces to perform all the
basic functions. Apple refused (until 1995) to let anyone else make computer
hardware that would run it, limiting its success and avoiding it to become the
standard for graphical platforms.
The
technical comparison with PC and Windows is not easy to be done, and the eternal discussion is far from
coming to an end. Apple addicts always considered the Mac as a more stable platform, and
with best results with multimedia applications. The counterargument is that the modern windows /
Intel systems improved their graphic and sound systems, with the help
from external cards, and could produce the same quality. The reality today is that the
Mac systems are more expensive, and are still preferred by designers and artists
to produce graphic, music and images.
The new version, MacOsX, is based in the
UNIX operating system OpenStep, and implement Vector-based graphic
interfaces.
It’s
surprising that IBM is still maintaining versions of their OS/2 Warp operating system. In 1984, after having realized
the real market potentials of personal computing, IBM decided to create a close
platform (PS/2) with a stronger architecture than the IBM/PC – with mainframe customers in mind - and a solid operating system
(OS/2), to be able to run professional applications and compete with the DOS, Windows and Macintosh families. The smaller prices of the PC clones, which already had a
large installed base, and were sold with an incorporated DOS/Windows system,
avoid this to happen. Contrarily to IBM hopes, the price was a more important
factor than reliability, and the OS/2 platform has never been largely used.
The only
one that can unequivocally be called a “minicomputer” operating system, the OS/400 is the evolution of
the IBM midrange System/36 and System/38 systems, implemented on PowerPC
chips. Despite the lack of good technical reasons to keep both Unix and OS/400
platforms, the large installed base of these systems is able to guarantee their
continuity.
Additionally,
the current OS/400 gives the users the ability to run Java, Windows and UNIX applications (via PASE - Portable
Application Solutions Environment which supports a subset of the AIX environment).
Considering two major criteria discussed in
the previous paragraphs – scalability and openness – the operating systems can
be classified by using the following chart:
Figure 12 – Operating systems –
Openness and scalability
Scalability is the ability of increasing
the system throughput by adding processors or new systems, with a low impact in
the efforts for managing the system (license costs and human resources). Linux outperform the other systems
due to its capacity of running in virtually all hardware platform and machine sizes,
its reduced cost, the openness of its source code and the usage of open
standards and protocols.
Figure 13 – Operating systems –
set-up costs and proven reliability
The number of installed mainframe and UNIX systems for critical systems in large
companies, in addition to the decades of experience and fine tuning, help these
systems to have more confidence from IT specialists. The reduced initial setup
costs for
windows and Linux platforms justify their
choice when price is an important element. Goldman Sachs considers Linux as
“Enterprise Class”, and estimates that Linux will soon replace windows in
medium-large servers.
The cost analysis and comparisons will be detailed on chapter 6.4.
The co-existence of different standards on the hardware and software domains may stimulate the
competition, the innovation and the market. For the
network infrastructures, the absence
of widely accepted standard and protocols can simply avoid the
communication to happen in a global way.
One of the first problems identified when the Internet ideas started to flourish
was “to understand, design, and implement the protocols and procedures within the
operating systems of each connected computer, in order to allow the use of the
new network by the computers in sharing
resources.”
The free exchange of information via the Internet, independently of the hardware or operating system we may use, is possible due
to the previous definition of standards, which we may classify in three different tiers: The communication
via the network, the addressing of each node and the content formatting and
browsing. Standard bodies are responsible for their definition, publication and
conformity. Let us discuss the communication and addressing tiers. The content
will be discussed in details on the chapter 4 (page 70).
As we saw in chapter 2, the first mainframes and minicomputers performed very specific
tasks, independent of any other computer, and the users and operators were
connected locally, normally in the same building than the machines. When
distant systems started to connect with each other, and to remote users, clear
conventions needed to be established.
The OSI reference model was
developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1984, and is now considered the primary architectural model for
inter-computer communications.
OSI is a conceptual model
composed of seven layers, each specifying particular network functions. It only provides
a conceptual framework. Several communication protocols have been developed using it
as a reference, allowing their interoperability.
Figure 14 – The OSI model -
Seven layers and two categories
The seven layers of the OSI reference model can be
divided into two categories: the upper layers (which deal with application
issues and generally are implemented only in software) and the lower layers (which handle data transport issues).
In the mid-1970s, the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA)
started to develop a packet-switched network that would facilitate communication between
dissimilar computer systems at research institutions. The result of this development
effort was the Internet protocol suite that
contained several basic network protocols. Among
others, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and
the Internet Protocol (IP) are
the two best known and commonly used together.
One of the main reasons of their quick adoption
by the research institutions (and later the whole market) was
their openness. The Internet Protocol suite is nonproprietary, born in an
academic environment close to the UNIX developments, and soon both work in synergy.
TCP/IP was included with Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX
to become the foundation of the Internet.
Figure 15
– Correspondence between the OSI layers and some Internet Protocols.
In 1974, IBM introduced a set of
communications standards, called SNA, which was extremely
convenient to the mainframes hierarchical topologies. Like other IBM
definitions for hardware and operating systems
architectures, it is a proprietary protocol, but clearly defined and open for the use of other manufacturers.
This allowed IBM and many other companies to provide servers communication
hardware and programming products, which could be connected by the usage of
common communication definitions, hardware specifications and programming
conventions. The administration of a SNA network is centralized, what
improves its security while reducing its
flexibility.
IBM tried to evolve SNA to an open-standard known as
High-Performance Routing (HPR), without success. SNA is still used in the core mainframe
connections, although it is being replaced by TCP/IP in distant connections, due
to pressures of intranets and the Internet, and for more flexibility.
A set of techniques is used to allow the identification of each
single machine in the world, to allow the Internet packets to be distributed
efficiently. Each computer with capability to be connected to the Internet
receives from its manufacturer a single and unique address (called MAC address). When a computer connects
to an Internet or intranet server, it receives a network address.
As the IP addresses are quite
difficult to remember, a domain name is created for important servers (like web
or FTP servers). A hierarchy of systems
have been created to locate a domain name. It is called DNS. The intelligence behind
the DNS servers is provided by the open source program BIND, and soon the “Domain Wars” started to decide who would control the
domains.
The conflicts have been solved by a policy specifying the
codification of roles in the operation of a domain name space:
§
Registrant - The entity that makes use
of the domain name.
§
Registrar - The agent that submits
change requests to the registry on behalf of the registrant.
- Registry - The
organization that has edit control of the name space’s database.
One non-profit organization has been created, ICANN, which the role is to
oversee administer Internet resources including
Addresses (by delegating blocks of addresses to the regional registries),
Protocol identifiers and parameters (by allocating port numbers, etc.) and
Names.
The Internet is the result of many
technologies developing in parallel, around the Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA, today called DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense. Motivated by the launching of the first sputnik, ARPA started to
design a communications system
invulnerable to nuclear attack. It was the ARPANET project, based on packet
switching communication technology. “The system made the network independent of command and
control centers, so that
message units would find their own routes along the network, being reassembled
in coherent meaning at any point in the network”.
Important is to notice that, since the beginning, the concept around
the network had stronger cultural and
social than technical motivations: "The ARPA theme is that the promise
offered by the computer as a communication medium between people, dwarfs into
relative insignificance the historical beginnings of the computer as an
arithmetic engine."
J.C.R. Licklider perceived the spirit of
community created among the users of the first time-sharing systems. He envisioned an
“'Intergalactic Network”, formed by academic computer centers.
His ideas took almost one decade to become reality: On October 25, 1969 a
host-to-host connection has been successfully established between the
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute
(SRI), creating the network roots for the Internet.
In the same time – as we already discussed – UNIX was born and the Internet Protocols have been defined.
In 1973, 25 computers were connected using the ARPANET structure, opened to the research centers
cooperating with the US defense Department. Other networks - using the ARPANET
as the backbone communication system – started to appear, aimed to connect
scientists from all disciplines, military institutions. This network of networks, formed during the 1980s, was
called ARPA-INTERNET, then simply INTERNET, still supported by the Defense
Department and operated by the National Science Foundation.
In 1995, motivated by commercial pressures, the
growth of private corporate networks, and of non-profit, cooperative networks,
the Internet was privatized. About
100,000 computer networks were interconnected around the world in 1996, with
roughly 10 million computers users. The internet has posted the
fastest rate of penetration of any communication medium in history: in the
United States, the radio took 30 years to reach 60 million people; TV reached
this level of diffusion in 15 years; the Internet did it in just three years
after the development of world wide web.
·
The World Wide Web
In addition to being a means of communicating via e-mail, the
Internet has become a means of
propagating information via hypertext documents. Hypertext
documents contain specific words, phrases, or images that are linked to other
documents. A reader of a hypertext document can access these related documents
as desired, usually by pointing and clicking with the mouse or using the arrow
keys on the keyboard.
In this manner, a reader of hypertext documents can explore
related documents or follow a train of thought from document to document, in
the intertwined web of related information. When implemented on a network, the documents within such a web can reside in different machines,
forming a network-wide web. Similarly, the web that has evolved on the Internet spans the entire globe and
is known as World Wide Web.
A wide variety of organizations contribute to internetworking
standards by providing forums for
discussion, turning informal discussion into formal specifications, and
proliferating specifications after they are standardized.
Most standards organizations create formal
standards by using specific processes:
organizing ideas, discussing the approach, developing draft standards, voting on all or certain aspects of the standards, and then formally releasing the completed standard to the public.
They are normally independent, aimed to stimulate a healthy competition, but
they are often influenced by companies and lobbies.
Some of the organizations that contributed to the foundation of
Internet with internetworking
standards may be found in the chapter Appendix B. The heart of Internet standardization is the IETF, which coordinate the developments in working groups. According to
Scott Bradner, co-director of the
Transport Area in the IETF, “IETF working groups created the routing,
management, and transport standards without which the Internet
would nor exist. They have defined the security standards that will help secure the
Internet, the quality of service standards that will make the Internet
a more predictable environment, and the standard for the next generation of the
Internet protocol itself. (…) There is enough
enthusiasm and expertise to make the working group a success”.
Apart from TCP/IP itself, all of the basic
technology of the Internet was developed or refined in
the IETF.
Resulting from the working groups are the base documents in the
standardization process, known as RFC (Request For Comment). The RFC series of
documents on networking began in 1969 as part of the original ARPANET project. Initially they were
submitted for comments (as the name indicates) but, after the Internet has been developed, they ave
generally gone through an extensive review process before publication. In the
end, they become proposals for standards (and following the standard
track possibly become Draft Standards and Internet Standards),
best current practice guides, informational guidelines, etc. They are freely
available on the Internet and may be republished in its entirety by anyone.
Interesting examples of RFC are the 2026, which recursively
describes the Internet standards process and the 3160, known as “The TAO of IETF”.
The proposed standards are analysed by the IAB, which may use them to create the final standards. The research is done by the IRTF.
Also important are the IANA - responsible for names,
domains and codes – and the W3C – which coordinates the work
over the standards related to the Web, like the
HTTP protocol and the HTML language.
The web standards have three different stages.
The first is the draft, where the proposals are made public and are open to
large-scale reviews and change. After they have been available for a certain
time, the draft moves to the second stage, known as Proposed recommendation.
During a 6-week period, members of the W3C vote to decide upon the
adoption of the proposal as the final standard (either fully or with minor
changes). If the standard is rejected, it may return to draft status for
further modifications and consultation.
A radical idea, open spectrum can transform the communications
landscape as profoundly as the Internet ever did, by suppressing the
telephone, cable and Net access fees. The idea is
that smart devices cooperating with one another function more effectively than
huge proprietary communication networks, by
treating the airwaves as commons, shared by all.
In an open spectrum world, wireless transmitters would be as
ubiquitous as microprocessors (in televisions, cars, public spaces, handheld
devices) and tune themselves to free spectrum and self-assemble into networks.
If the Internet revolution started with the
Arpanet, the wireless paradigm is happening via Wi-Fi, protocol that uses a narrow slice of
spectrum that is already open. When spectrum licensing was established in the
early 20th century, radios were primitive, as was the regulatory
model used to govern them. Broadcasters needed an exclusive slice of the
spectrum. Today digital technologies let many users occupy the same frequency
at the same time. In 2004 half of the laptops
used at work are expected to have wireless connections, and in 2006 Intel hopes to incorporate
transmitters into all of its processor chips.
The current trend is the increase the level of Hardware and Software
Independence, transforming IT into a commodity.
Initially the customer was
entirely tied to the hardware supplier. All the software was built in machine code (or in
low-level languages like Assembler), different for each machine, even from the same supplier. This
incompatibility brought several problems, when these machines needed to be
changed or simply upgraded to a larger model:
§
Compatibility
– All the code should be reviewed, and sometimes completely rebuilt. Some of
the code could be bought from the hardware supplier (mainly for the basic
software tools), but the main part was
developed internally.
§
Migration
tasks – The formats and protocols used to store the data were also
different among the hardware platforms. To transfer the data,
conversion procedures needed to be written.
§
Specialization
– The persons should be trained to learn the new platform. This also motivated
some people to change their jobs to keep their technological knowledge and
specializations.
The hardware suppliers started to create
architectures (as the case for IBM S/360, analysed on page 18), to reduce their development tasks, cut maintenance
costs, and simplify the migration tasks among the different machines using the
same architecture. Nevertheless, the customer was still tied to the hardware
manufacturer. To change the hardware platform, the operating system need also to be changed,
implying a redesign of the application and the change of the bridges between
the system and user interfaces. In most of the cases, the complete application
is rebuilt, to better use the facilities from the new operating system.
As an example, this is what
occurs in downsizing process, in companies migrating from mainframe
applications to smaller platforms. This may take more than a decade to be fully
completed.
The development of open systems
platforms – like UNIX – freed the customer from the
hardware supplier. After the creation of The Single UNIX Specification Specification (see page 22), the portability of the applications is paramount.
However, the customer is still tied to the extensions to the base platform
provided by the supplier. To change the hardware supplier or platform, the
usage of the hardware extensions and software specificities should be checked
and rebuilt. To avoid this, the usage of these “extra-features” should be
reduced to a minimum and well documented.
Many manufacturers use the tie
between their hardware and software to distinguish their systems,
while other companies treat hardware and software as separate businesses.
·
Software Independence
To reduce the efforts of maintaining different hardware platforms, while keeping the
development of operating systems that satisfy different customers requirements,
some companies started to standardize the hardware platforms, keeping it
compatible with different operating systems. It was the case of IBM, initially within the mainframes family, with one line of computers
(zSeries) is compatible with three operating system families (zOs, zVM, zVSE).
Recently, with IBM concentrating their revenues in the services rather than in
the software or machines, all lines of
IBM computers (Series Z, X, I and P) are compatible with Linux. Now customers can even add Linux and Open source applications to
IBM UNIX machines (pSeries),
co-existing with the IBM UNIX (AIX5L) operating system.
·
Applications
Originally, the programming
process was accomplished by the arduous method of requiring the programmer to
express all algorithms in the machine’s language (expressed in binary digits). The first step toward removing these complexities from the
programming process was the creation of assembly languages (also called
second-generation languages), which replaced numeric digits by mnemonics. The
evolution continued with the third-generation languages (e.g. COBOL, C), which used statements closer to the human language, traduced into
the machine language by compilers.
With the development of
third-generation languages, the goal of machine independence (discussed
previously in this document) was largely achieved. Since the statements did not
refer to the attributes of any particular machine, they could be compiled as
easily for one machine as for another.
The evolution continued, with the
implementation of software packages that allow users to
customize computer software to their applications without needing hardware, operating systems, or programming languages expertise. Some of those
packages are so complex, however, that need the participation of business
specialists, with an advanced knowledge of the packages, for the implementation
of business functions.
On the chapter 3, we will se how open platforms like CORBA and Java
can be used to achieve a maximum independence over the third-level languages,
without the inconvenience of the software packages.
Still on the cradle is the usage
of declarative programming (sometimes referred to as fifth-generation languages
or logic programming), for expert systems and artificial intelligence
applications.
In the 1960s, the computers
resources were so expensive that they were shared among different companies,
who bought slots of “CPU time”. It is a concept known as “Time Sharing”, and it started the vision of hardware as a commodity. The company does
not need to buy a computer, install it, or have a special team to maintain it.
Computer systems are simply used, and the fees are either fixed (based on the
resources available) or based in the usage of the machines.
Nowadays, the evolution of this
concept is the usage of applications as commodities. With the good performance
and the relatively low price of the network communications, it’s possible to
run a system completely separated from the company. Moreover, with the advanced
level of hardware and system independence, the
only compatibility to be considered is in the application level.
That’s the era of ISP (Internet Service Providers), which take
care of the internet, e-mail and part of the network infrastructure, and the ASP (Application Service Providers),
which supply the access to the application, freeing the company of most of the
concerns related to the information and communication technologies (ICT).
Companies can run complete
applications, hosted by ASPs and available via the Web. The network infrastructure can be rented
from a third-party, also responsible for its maintenance. Network computers can
be leased from a specialized company, which may offer the technical support. In
this case, computing power is a facility at almost the same level than
electricity and water.
·
Open Crystal Ball
The different hardware platforms will probably
continue to broaden their initial scope, and possibly start to fusion. The
division lines among them will finally disappear, each computer being able to
run several different operating systems, in parallel. The open platforms are
the key for this to happen, with the proprietary hardware being increasingly
compliant with them, assimilating open architectures definitions.
The end of the windows monopoly will mark the next decade. However,
nobody needs another dominant operating system. The existing software platforms need to co-exist,
to allow the companies and users to have choice, with the competition helping
to increase the quality. The choice must be based on real business and personal needs;
marketing will continue to blur the technical advantages, and to reduce this
negative effect, information must be simplified and well focused to the public.
Most of the Internet tools have been developed
through the open-source process. Apache – The Open source web server – still dominates the market. What are the advantages of
open source technology over proprietary products, for a worldwide
network?
One answer is communication. The Internet is based in open standards, which were always successful to perform the connection of
different hardware and software platforms. The communication
was always possible and often perfect. Compatibility problems started to appear
with proprietary extensions to the standards (like the HTML extensions for Netscape and Internet Explorer).
A second answer was the availability of common (and free) tools to
start using the Internet and creating web pages.
Proprietary solutions (like Microsoft ASP and .NET) and standards (like Shockwave) often need
an expensive set of tools and machines, what limits their usage by academic and home users.
A third answer is probably “too” clear: the openness of the source
code. Early web sites - using technologies like HTML and Javascript – were easily
copied, altered and published again in another part of the world. This made the
creation of personal web sites easy, and allowed a quick “learning by example”.
The implementation of open source technologies like CGI scripts and PHP – which “hide” the source
from the page – has been helped by the hacker community, which created sites
with several examples of source code, which can be freely used, without
royalties. The online communities maintained by commercial companies behind
proprietary solutions can help to reduce this gap.
Most of the well designed Internet applications are developed under
object-oriented methodologies, to better cope with the
modular structures of HTML and XML, and to more effectively reuse or even share programming modules
with other companies. The applications using object-oriented languages are
often designed using a formal methodology and tightly related to modelling
languages.
In this chapter, we will analyse the development of open
methodologies for application design, which can be extremely helpful to ensure scalability, security and
robust execution of Web applications under stressful conditions.
After, we will see three different platforms used to develop the web
applications, and discuss the importance of open standards to build web services.
We cannot finish without analysing the current hype around agile
development and extreme programming. To conclude, we will review some ideas
about comparison elements between open and proprietary platforms.
Modelling is the designing of software
applications before coding, being an essential part of large software projects,
and helpful to medium and small projects. Using a model, those responsible for
a software development project's success can assure themselves that business
functionality is complete and correct, end-user needs are met, and program
design supports requirements for
scalability, robustness, security, extendibility, and other characteristics,
before implementation in code renders changes difficult and expensive to make.
The OMG Model Drive Architecture (MDA) provides an open, vendor-neutral approach to the challenge of
business and technology change. Based firmly upon other open standards, MDA aims to separate business or application logic from underlying
platform technology. The platform-independent models enable intellectual
property to move away from
technology-specific code, helping to foster application interoperability.
·
Specification
In September 2001, OMG members completed the series
of votes that established the MDA as the base architecture for
the organization's standards. Every MDA standard or
application is based, normatively, on a Platform-Independent Model (PIM), which represents its business functionality and behaviour very
precisely but does not include technical aspects. From the PIM, MDA-enabled
development tools follow OMG-standardized mappings to produce one or more
Platform-Specific Models (PSM): one for each target platform that the developer chooses.
The PSM contains the same
information as an implementation, but in the form of a UML model instead of running code. In
the next step, the tool generates the running code from the PSM, along with
other necessary files. After giving the developer an opportunity to hand-tune
the generated code, the tool produces a deployable final application.
MDA applications are composable:
If PIMs are imported for modules, services, or other MDA applications into the
development tool, it can generate calls using whatever interfaces and protocols
are required, even if these run cross-platform. MDA applications are
“future-proof”: When new infrastructure technologies come on the market, OMG members will generate and
standardize a mapping to it, and the vendors will upgrade his MDA-enabled tool
to include it. Taking advantage of these developments, cross-platform
invocations can be generated to the new platform, and even port the existing
MDA applications to it, automatically using the existing PIMs. Although MDA can
target every platform and will map to all with significant market buy-in, CORBA plays a key role as a
target platform because of its programming language-, operating system-, and
vendor-independence. The mapping from a PIM to CORBA has already been
adopted as an OMG standard.
·
The core
Figure 16
– Model Driven Architecture
§
The Unified Modeling Language (UML)
As discussed, each MDA specification will have, as
its normative base, two levels of models: a Platform-Independent Model (PIM), and one or more Platform-Specific Models (PSM). These will be defined in UML, making OMG's standard modeling language the foundation of the MDA. UML is
discussed separated in the next chapter.
§
The Meta-Object Facility (MOF)
By defining the common meta-model for all of OMG's modeling specifications, the MOF allows derived
specifications to work together in a natural way. The MOF also defines a
standard repository for meta-models and, therefore, models (since a meta-model
is just a special case of a model).
§
Common Warehouse MetaModel (CWM)
The CWM standardizes a complete,
comprehensive metamodel that enables data mining
across database boundaries at an enterprise and goes well beyond. Like a UML profile but in data space
instead of application space, it forms the MDA mapping to database schemas.
The product of a cooperative effort between OMG and the Meta-Data Coalition (MDC), the CWM does for data modelling what UML does for application
modelling.
CORBA is the acronym for Common
Object Request Broker Architecture, OMG's open, vendor-independent architecture and infrastructure that
computer applications use to work together over networks. Using the standard
protocol IIOP, a CORBA-based program from any vendor, on almost any computer,
operating system, programming language, and network, can interoperate with a
CORBA-based program from the same or another vendor, on almost any other
computer, operating system, programming language, and network. CORBA is useful
in many situations because of the easy way that CORBA integrates desktop and
servers from so many vendors.
·
Technical overview
In CORBA, client and object may be written in different programming
languages. CORBA applications are composed of objects. For each object type, an
interface is defined in OMG IDL (Interface Definition
Language). The interface is the
syntax part of the contract that the server object offers to the clients that
invoke it. Any client that wants to invoke an operation on the object must use
this IDL interface to specify the operation it wants to perform, and to order
the arguments that it sends. When the invocation reaches the target object, the
same interface definition is used there to parse the arguments and perform the
requested operation.
This separation of interface from implementation is the essence of
CORBA. The interface to each object is defined very strictly. In contrast,
the implementation of an object - its running code, and its data - is hidden
from the rest of the system (that is, encapsulated). Clients access objects
only through their advertised interface, invoking only those operations that
that the object exposes through its IDL interface, with only those
parameters (input and output) that are included in the invocation.
Figure 17 – CORBA request
from client to object
The above figure shows how everything fits together, at least
within a single process: The IDL is compiled into client
stubs and object skeletons. Passing through the stub
on the client side, the invocation continues through the ORB (Object Request Broker), and the skeleton on the
implementation side, to get to the object where it is executed. Because IDL
defines interfaces so strictly, the stub on the client side matches perfectly
with the skeleton on the server side, even if the two are compiled into
different programming languages, or even running on different ORBs from
different vendors.
Figure 18
– CORBA remote
invocation flow using ORB-to-ORB communication
The figure above diagrams a remote invocation. In order to invoke the
remote object instance, the client first obtains its object reference. To make
the remote invocation, the client uses the same code that it used in the local
invocation we just described, substituting the object reference for the remote
instance. When the ORB examines the object
reference and discovers that the target object is remote, it routes the
invocation out over the network to the remote object's ORB. Although the ORB
can tell from the object reference that the target object is remote, the client
cannot. This ensures location transparency - the CORBA principle that simplifies
the design of distributed object
computing applications.
The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is a open method for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and
documenting the artefacts of software systems, as well as for business modelling
and other non-software systems. It represents a collection of the best
engineering practices that have proven successful in the modelling of large and
complex systems, addressing the needs of user and scientific communities.
·
Medieval ages
Identifiable object-oriented modelling languages began to
appear between mid-1970 and the late 1980s as various methodologists
experimented with different approaches to object-oriented analysis and design. Several other techniques influenced these languages, including
Entity-Relationship modelling and the Specification &
Description Language. These early methods could not satisfy most of the design
requirements, and started to incorporate each other’s techniques. A few clearly
prominent methods emerged, including the OOSE, OMT-2, and Booch’93 methods. Each of these was a
complete method, and was recognized as having certain strengths. In simple
terms, OOSE was a use-case oriented approach that provided excellent support
business engineering and requirements analysis. OMT-2 was especially expressive
for analysis and data-intensive information systems. Booch’93 was particularly
expressive during design and construction phases of projects and popular for
engineering-intensive applications.[151]
·
All for one
The UML started out as collaboration
among three outstanding methodologists: Grady Booch (Boock’93), Ivar Jacobson
(OOSE), and James Rumbaugh (OMT-2). At first Booch and Rumbaugh sought to unify their methods with
the Unified Method v. 0.8 in 1995; a year later Jacobson joined them to
collaborate on the slightly less ambitious task of unifying their modelling
languages with UML 0.9.
The user community quickly recognized the advantages of a common
modelling language that could be used to visualize, specify, construct and
document the artefacts of a software system. They enthusiastically applied
early drafts of the language to diverse domains ranging from finance and health
to telecommunications and aerospace. Driven by strong user demand, the
modelling tool vendors soon included UML support in their products.[152]
·
One for all
At the same time that UML was becoming a de facto
industry standard, an international team of modelling experts assumed the
responsibility to make the language a formal standard as well. The “UML
Partners”, representing a diverse mix of vendors and system integrators, began
working with the three methodologists in 1996 to propose UML as the standard
modelling language for the OMG. The Partners organized themselves into a software development team
that followed a disciplined process. Since the process was based on an
iterative and incremental development life cycle, the team produced frequent
“builds” and draft releases of the specification.
The Partners tendered their initial UML proposal to the OMG (UML 1.0) in January 1997.
After nine months of intensive improvements to the specification, they
submitted their final proposal (UML 1.1) in September 1997, which the OMG
officially adopted as its object-modelling standard in November 1997. UML 1.5 is
the current specification adopted by the OMG, and in mid-2001, OMG members
started work on a major upgrade to UML 2.0. Four separate RFPs - for UML
Infrastructure, UML Superstructure, Object Constraint Language, and UML Diagram Interchange - keep the effort organized.
The OMG defines object management as
software development that models the real world through representation of
"objects." These objects are the encapsulation of the attributes,
relationships and methods of software identifiable program components. A key
benefit of an object-oriented system is its ability to
expand in functionality by extending existing components and adding new objects
to the system. Object management results in faster application development,
easier maintenance, enormous scalability and reusable software.
OMG members are preparing to
standardize a Human-Usable Textual Notation (HUTN) for UML models, or at least those
that fit into the Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC) UML Profile.
·
(Almost) Ten Years Later
UML defines twelve types of
diagrams, divided into three categories:
§
Structural Diagrams represent static
application structure and include the Class Diagram, Object Diagram, Component
Diagram, and Deployment Diagram.
§
Behavior Diagrams represent different
aspects of the application’s dynamic behavior and include the Use Case Diagram
(used by some methodologies during requirements
gathering); Sequence Diagram, Activity Diagram, Collaboration Diagram, and
Statechart Diagram.
§
Model Management Diagrams represent
ways the applications modules can be organized and managed and include
Packages, Subsystems, and Models.
The Advanced UML Features add to the
expressiveness of UML:
§
Object Constraint Language (OCL) has been part of UML since the beginning and
express conditions on an invocation in a formally defined way: invariants,
preconditions, post conditions, whether an object reference is allowed to be
null, and some other restrictions using OCL. The MDA relies on OCL to add a
necessary level of detail to PIMs and PSMs.
§
Action Semantics UML Extensions are a recent
addition and express actions as UML objects. An Action object may take a set of
inputs and transform it into a set of outputs, or may change the state of the
system, or both. Actions may be chained, with one Action's outputs being
another Action's inputs. Actions are assumed to occur independently - that is,
there is infinite concurrency in the system, unless you chain them or specify
this in another way. This concurrency model is a natural fit to the distributed
execution environment of Internet applications.
UML Profiles tailor the language
to particular areas of computing or particular platforms. In the MDA, both PIMs and PSMs will be defined using UML profiles; eventually
OMG will define a suite of
profiles that span the entire scope of MDA. Examples of three supporting UML
Profiles and one specialized profile are:
§
The UML Profile for CORBA defines the mapping from a
PIM to a CORBA-specific PSM.
§
The UML Profile for EDOC is used to build PIMs of
enterprise applications. It defines representations for entities, events,
process, relationships, patterns, and Enterprise Collaboration Architecture.
§
The UML Profile for EAI defines a profile for
loosely coupled systems. These modes are typically
used in Enterprise Application Integration, but are used elsewhere as well.
§
A UML Profile for Schedulability,
performance, and time supports precise modelling of predictable systems,
precisely enough to enable quantitative analysis.
·
Opening the iron mask
UML is clearly an open
methodology, and the three main characteristics are the independency of the
technical infrastructure, the independency of the methodology and the openness
of its definition, managed by a recognised and independent organisation (OMG).
At first, UML can be used to model any
type of application, running on different combinations of hardware and software
platforms, programming languages and network protocols. Built upon the MOF metamodel which defines class and
operation as fundamental concepts, UML is a natural fit for object-oriented languages and environments
like C++, C#, Java and Python. Some UML tools analyse existing source
code and reverse-engineer it into a series of UML diagrams. Other tools execute
UML models in interpretative way (to validate the design) and other may even generate program language code from UML.
The process of gathering and analysing an application's
requirements, and incorporating them into a program design, is a complex one and the industry currently supports many
methodologies that define formal
procedures specifying how to go about it. The second characteristic of UML is that it is
methodology-independent. Regardless of the methodology used to perform the
analysis and design, UML can express the results. Using XMI (XML Metadata Interchange, another OMG standard), the UML model can
be transferred from one tool into a repository, or into another tool for
refinement or the next step in the chosen development process.
At last, the UML definitions are openly
discussed by an independent organisation – OMG, freely published in the Web and implemented by any software
vendor, including several open source projects.
The OMG is structured into three
major bodies, the Platform Technology Committee (PTC), the Domain Technology Committee (DTC) and the Architecture Board. The consistency and technical
integrity of work produced in the PTC and DTC is managed by an overarching
Architectural Board. Within the Technology Committees and Architectural Board
rest all of the Task Forces, SIGs, and Working Groups that drive the technology
adoption process of the OMG.
There are three major methods of influencing the OMG process, in addition to the
impact of general review, commentary and open discussion. The first is the
ability to vote on work items or adoptions in the Task Forces that are
ultimately reviewed and voted on at the Technology Committee level. The second
is the ability to vote on work items or adoptions at one or both of the
Technology Committee levels. The third is the ability to actually submit
technology for adoption at one or both of the Technology Committee levels.
Membership fees are based on these levels of influence.
The Java platform is based on the
power of networks. Since its initial commercial release in 1995, Java
technology has grown in popularity and usage because of its true portability.
Java is a general-purpose concurrent object-oriented programming language. Its
syntax is similar to C and C++, but it omits many of the features that make C and C++ complex,
confusing, and unsafe. Java was initially developed to address the problems of
building software for networked consumer
devices. It was designed to support multiple host architectures and to allow
secure delivery of software components. To meet these requirements, compiled
Java code had to survive transport across networks, operate on any client, and
assure the client that it was safe to run.
·
Java platform
A platform is the hardware or software environment in which a
program runs. We've already mentioned some of the most popular platforms in the
chapter 2. Most platforms can be described as a combination of
the operating system and hardware. However, Java is a software-only platform
that runs on top of other hardware-based platforms.
The Java platform was designed to run
programs securely on networks and allows the same Java application to run on
many different kinds of computers. For example, PersonalJava applications power
home appliances, Java Card applications run on smart cards, smart rings, and
other devices with limited memory, and Java TV applications run in television
settop boxes. This interoperability is guaranteed by a component of the
platform called the Java virtual machine (or "JVM") – a kind of interpreter that turns general Java platform
instructions into tailored commands that make the devices do their work.
Figure 19 – Java platform components
The other component – Java API – is a large collection of
ready-made software components that provide many
useful capabilities, such as graphical user interface (GUI) widgets. The Java API is grouped into libraries of related classes
and interfaces; these libraries are known as packages.
The power of compiled languages is the execution speed. The power of
interpreted languages is the flexibility to run a same program in different
platforms. The Java programming language is
unusually powerful in that a program is both compiled and interpreted. With the
compiler, first you translate a program into an intermediate language called
Java bytecodes —the platform-independent codes interpreted by the
interpreter on the Java platform. The interpreter parses and runs each Java
bytecode instruction on the computer. Compilation happens just once;
interpretation occurs each time the program is executed.
Figure 20 – Java compiler and interpreter
·
Java editions
Three editions group the different technologies according to the
hardware platform: J2ME (tiny commodities, like
smartcards), J2SE (development of applets and
applications) and J2EE (enterprise server-side applications).
Figure 21
– The Java platform and editions
Java is owned by Sun Microsystems, which has in
place the appropriate mechanisms to meet the evolving needs of the industry,
and to fulfil the needs of Internet application developers.
·
Java buzzwords
§
Architecture
neutral
§
Portable
Portability is closely related to the
architecture independence. It describes the characteristics of the language
that must remain unchanged independently of the platform, like data types (e.g.
character, byte, integer). Even if this may seem simple at first sight, this is
not true for most of the languages, in which one of the activities when porting
a program from one platform to another is the adaptation of the data types.
Java did not make this mistake. The data types
have specific, defined lengths regardless of the system.
The Java virtual
machine is based primarily on the POSIX interface specification – an
industry-standard definition of a portable system interface. Implementing the
Java virtual machine on new architectures is a relatively
straightforward task.
§
Simple – Reduces
software development cost and time to delivery
§
Object oriented –
To function within increasingly complex, network-based
environments, programming systems must adopt object-oriented concepts
§
High performance
– Obtained from the compiled bytecode
§
Interpreted – The
bytecode is transformed into executable code during the execution of the
program
§
Multithreaded –
Multiple tasks can be executed in parallel, improving overall system
performance
§
Robust – Provides
a solid, reliable environment in which to develop software
§
Dynamic - Classes
are linked only as needed. New code modules can be linked in on demand from a
variety of sources, even from sources across a network.
·
Applets
Sun's HotJava browser showcases Java's interesting properties by making it possible to embed Java programs
inside HTML pages. These programs, known as
applets, are transparently downloaded into the HotJava browser along with the
HTML pages in which they appear. Before being accepted by the browser, applets
are carefully checked to make sure they are safe. Like HTML pages, compiled
Java programs are network and platform-independent. Applets behave the same way regardless
of where they come from, or what kind of machine they are being loaded into and
run on.
With Java as the extension language, a Web
browser is no longer limited to a fixed set of capabilities. Programmers can
write an applet once and it will run on any machine, anywhere. Visitors to
Java-powered Web pages can use content found there with confidence that it will
not damage their machine.
·
Open Belgian Cathedrals
According to Tony Mary,
openness and flexibility are the main Java advantages. This openness could be widened
further, with a creation of a unique media technology by a group of companies.
This could be compared – accorded to him – to the cathedrals. In opposition to
the medieval castles – strongly protected and closed, and almost destroyed
today – the Cathedrals always remained open and survived.
According to Edy Van Asch, Open
Source is the main Java trend. Java has always been closely related
to Open Source, but since 2001 this relationship became stronger. Examples are
Eclipse (Open Source Java Development environment),
Junit (Open Source Test Structures), Jboss (Open Source Application Server) and Jini.
Jini network technology is an
open architecture that enables developers to create network-centric services –
whether implemented in hardware or software – that are highly adaptive to change. Jini
technology can be used to build adaptive networks that are scalable, evolvable
and flexible as typically required in dynamic computing environments. Jini
Offers an open development environment for creative collaboration through the
Jini Community, and is available free of charge with an evergreen license. It
extends the Java programming model to the network (by moving
data and executables via a Java object over a network) and enables network
self-healing and self-configuration.
.NET (read as “dot-net”) is both a business
strategy from Microsoft and its collection of proprietary programming support for the Web services. Its goal is to provide individual and business users with a
seamlessly interoperable and Web-enabled interface for applications and
computing devices and to make computing activities increasingly Web
browser-oriented. The .NET platform includes servers (running Microsoft Windows),
building-block services (such as Web-based data storage), device software and Passport (Microsoft's identity verification service).
Functionally the .Net architecture can be compared to the Java platform. In the scope of our study, they are
completely different: Java aims to give the companies and users the liberty of
choosing the hardware and software platforms. .NET is tightly
related to Microsoft Windows operating systems (the only software platform
supported) and favours the usage of complementary Microsoft products such as
Internet explorer and the Office suite. Omnipresence
is the goal, and the weapon is the relative complexity of Java platform.
The full release of .NET is expected to take several years to
complete, with intermittent releases of products such as a personal security service and new versions of Windows and Office that implement the .NET strategy
coming on the market separately.
·
Dot objectives
According to Bill Gates,
Microsoft expects that .NET will have as significant an effect on the
computing world as the introduction of Windows. One
concern being voiced is that although .NET's services will be accessible
through any browser, they are likely to function more fully on products
designed to work with .NET code.
§
The ability to make the entire range
of computing devices work together and to have user information automatically
updated and synchronized on all of them
§
Increased interactive capability for
Web sites, enabled by greater use of XML rather than HTML
§
A premium online subscription service,
that will feature customized access and delivery of products and services to
the user from a central starting point for the management of various
applications, such as e-mail, for example, or software, such
as Office .NET
§
Centralized data storage, which will
increase efficiency and ease of access to information, as well as
synchronization of information among users and devices
§
The ability to integrate various
communications media, such as e-mail, faxes, and telephones
§
For developers, the ability to create
reusable modules, which should increase productivity and reduce the number of
programming errors
·
Dot components
Figure
22 - The Components
of Microsoft .NET-Connected Software
§
Smart clients: “Smart” is the term
used by Microsoft for client computers using one of its
proprietary operating systems: Microsoft Windows XP,
Windows XP Embedded, and Windows CE .NET. All
other clients platforms are excluded from the .NET architecture.
§
XML Web services let applications share data, and
invoke capabilities from other applications without regard to how those
applications were built, what operating system or platform they run on, and what devices are
used to access them. While XML Web services remain independent of each other,
they can loosely link themselves into a collaborating group that performs a
particular task.
§
Developer Tools – Microsoft Visual Studio .NET (with high-level programming languages like
Visual Basic, Visual C++ and C#) and
the Microsoft .NET Framework (The application execution environment, which
include components like the common language runtime, a set of class libraries
for building XML Web services, and Microsoft ASP.NET)
aim to supply a complete solution for developers to build, deploy, and run XML
Web services.
§
Servers – In opposite to the
portability of Java applications, only servers running Microsoft operating systems (Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, and the
.NET Enterprise Servers) are certified to fully
obtain good results from the .NET platform.
·
Dot integration
Microsoft considers XML “deceptively simple”, and would certainly prefer a complex and proprietary solution to integrate the .NET platform – composed by Microsoft operating
systems and basic software – with other vendors environments. XML is
revolutionizing how applications talk to other applications — or more broadly,
how computers talk to other computers — by providing a universal data format
that lets data be easily adapted or transformed. Therefore, Microsoft saw in
XML an opportunity to connect its completely proprietary platform with other
proprietary or open environments. As an example, XML is extensively used by
Microsoft Host Integration Server 2000 to provide application, data, and
network integration between .NET platforms and host
systems (Mainframe and AS/400 environments, considered “legacy” by
Microsoft, and estimated to contain 70 percent of all corporate data).
Figure
23
- Microsoft Host
Integration Server
The comparison between Java and .net is not only technical. Economical
and cultural aspects are far more important. In this chapter, we will analyse
some of the differences and exploit possible alternatives.
·
Co-existence
Considering the easy
integration of both .NET and Java platforms, by the usage of XML and Web services, many analysts suggest a
co-existence of both platforms in most companies. Scott Dietzen foresee this to happen in the next five years. One of his arguments
is the current .NET power in the client-side and J2EE in the server-side.
But he also prophesises that the integration of Java to the companies culture,
and its implementation should become easier, before Microsoft .NET technology is mature enough to attract
large customers in projects where reliability is too important. Nico Duerinck agrees with the co-existence to be possible, mainly if Web services
are implemented, even if a reduced number of companies are currently using both
technologies.
·
Portability
For new projects, Java may be clearly preferred to ensure the
portability of the applications. It guarantees that a server may start small, running Windows operating systems, and move to other
platforms like Linux or UNIX to satisfy more advanced requirements like
parallelism, high-availability and reliability. An application developed under
.NET will always require a windows-based server to be able to exploit all its capabilities.
Additionally, as described
by Dietzen, the Java community is composed by more than 100
vendors, working to improve the Java features and developing complementary and
concurrent solutions. The innovation resulted is far beyond what a single company
can afford.
·
Symbiosis
According to David Chappell, Windows DNA (seed of .net) and Java appeared together in 1996. Since then, J2EE was built using windows DNA interesting
concepts, and .net framework incorporated Java-like features. This “mutual and
cross-pollenization” helps innovation in both senses and minimize the problem of
“single source of creativity”, suggested by Dietzen.
·
Infrastructure Costs
According to Duerinck, most
of the companies will try to keep the existing infrastructures, and will tend
to implement .net platforms in windows systems and Java for all the other architectures. It is often
a simple financial decision. If a Microsoft license exists, it will probably be kept and exploited.
The cost of .net framework in existing windows systems is very low. Some Java
application servers can be rather expensive, however cheap and open source
alternatives exist.
The training costs and
simplification of the hardware and operating systems diversity is also an
important point to be considered.
·
Complementary
products
Products are often developed
by independent companies to be compatible with both platforms. This is the case
of Compuware development products and Real Software development architecture. This can also minimize the costs to transport an application from
one platform to another, by reducing the effects of .net proprietary philosophy.
The term LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl / Python / PHP) refers to a set of Open Source software tools that allow for the
development and deployment of web applications.
All of the components of LAMP can be downloaded without
any costs. The support is done by a network of developers aggregated in
online communities like “OnLamp” to help each other get the
most out of LAMP. Training is available from a wide array of providers, and
many consulting firms offer advanced capabilities for those businesses that
require sophisticated LAMP development.
I have used LAMP to develop my web site. All dynamic pages have
been developed in PHP, and the databases in MySQL. The website is hosted by ALL2ALL on Linux and Apache servers. The usage of Open
Source allows the web hosting to be performed with low costs. The learning cost
was a book about PHP and MySQL complemented by a large
amount of free online information, from FAQS to complete systematic training.
The learning time was reduced by using the large amount of online examples.
Most of the sites using LAMP provide the sources used for their development.
§
Linux
See chapter 0 on page 23 for a large discussion on Linux.
§
Apache
The most widely used web server software in the world, Apache can be run on a variety of
operating systems, including AIX, Digital UNIX, FreeBSD, Irix, Mac OS X, Netware, OpenBSD,
Solaris, SunOS, Windows, and of course, Linux. Apache's security record is far better than
that of Microsoft IIS.
§
MySQL
This database was built with the philosophy that a web database
should be lean and fast. It doesn't incorporate the diverse array of
application server features that Oracle and Microsoft database tools do, instead
focusing on core performance and leaving enhanced functions to scripting
languages. MySQL runs on a variety of
operating systems, including AIX, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Solaris, Windows, and Linux. It is well known for its reliability; while the recent
"Slammer" worm that crippled much of the Internet was spread through Microsoft
SQL Server, it did not affect MySQL databases.
§
Perl
This scripting language was invented to help overworked system
administrators. It still performs that function admirably well, but is also
often used in web development for things like dynamic forms, server monitoring, and database
integration. Perl runs on a wide variety of
operating systems.
§
PHP
Developed from the ground up as a Web developer's language, PHP is easy to use and executes
very quickly. Skilled developers can use PHP to build everything from online
forms to complex database-driven web applications. PHP is extremely popular,
runs on a variety of operating systems, and is most often used in conjunction
with MySQL.
One of the most powerful PHP features is the extensive
library of functions, open to be expanded by volunteer work. It contains
functions to address any possible need, to communicate with a large range of
databases, and to read and write files in many different formats, like PDF. The documentation is written by volunteer work and consists in
examples supplied by the community. For any developer trained in other
languages the learning by example process is extremely efficient.
§
Python
A general-use high-level language, Python is often used to tie
different backend pieces together. It lends itself particularly well to Java/XML integration and development
of dynamic content frameworks. Python runs on several operating systems.
§
Trends
To give a large impulse to this initiative, Sun unveiled a dual-processor
server - LX50 – that runs the new
Sun distribution of the Linux OS. The server will run Intel x86 chips and will be
available not only with Linux but also with an Intel-enabled version of Sun's
own Solaris operating system. In a briefing with analysts and press, Sun's new executive vice president of software, Jonathan Schwartz, further detailed the vendor's Linux strategy.
While Sun will keep pushing Solaris in the data centre and J2EE for middle-tier business
logic, it is making a major bet on LAMP as the application
environment of choice at the edge of today's corporate infrastructures.
A company called BD-X used LAMP as the basis for its web
services strategy. BD-X's chief
technology officer Kevin Jarnot started prototyping a wide-area content-creation
environment that would allow BD-X to provide XML-based financial content on demand for a wide variety of
subscription customers. "At first, our decision to use Open Source was to
build a prototype without a lot of cost," according to Jarnot. But after
his prototype was built, Jarnot found, "it would actually be fine for
[the] project's required performance and scalability."
BD-X founders reasoned that if
they could transcribe these calls, mark them up into XML, and then offer them to business customers, they might just have a
viable business. In the end, Jarnot says that 60 percent of the reason BD-X
ended up with an Open Source solution was because of cost. Thirty percent, he
says, was because "we were doing some pretty bleeding edge stuff... if we
had been using proprietary software, it would have been a lot harder to do the integration." Oh,
and the last ten percent of why BD-X went with Open Source? "Coolness
factor," says Jarnot.
Jarnot said he expected BD-X would eventually need to
port the system to a more production ready commercial environment like Solaris
running Macromedia's ColdFusion. But, Jarnot said, it turned out that his Open Source prototyped
version was good enough to take into live production. Using the standard Open
Source LAMP stack as a backend platform,
they also decided to use the Open Source ELVIN message-oriented middleware
to filter the transcriptions and deliver them to customers. On the XML side, the developers used
Jedit (Open Source Java text editor) for XML markup
and editing. Jarnot mentions quite a few options he is considering for using
J2EE and Microsoft .NET technologies in conjunction
with his Linux, PHP and Apache systems. What proves again the
clear advantages of the symbiosis theory, between commercial, proprietary and open platforms.
According to Brad Murphy, “by now, virtually every
company is fully aware and engaged in various stages of integrating the
Internet into their business model to
help serve customers better. A key part of every integration strategy is the
use of Web services. The phenomenal growth of Web services is made possible by
open standards that are built into the
products that comprise the Web services infrastructure”.
With a standards based infrastructure,
companies have the ability to use the Web rather than your own computer for
various services, linking applications and conducting B2B or B2C commerce regardless of the
computing platforms and programming languages involved. In a way, Web services
are the natural evolution of the Internet – again all based on open
standards. At this point, Web services may seem straightforward, but a
critical issue companies face is choosing the best enterprise/strategic
development platform for creating and deploying these new interoperable applications.
·
Open standards
Several options are available, but the key thing to remember is that
any Web services development platform – by definition – must follow open
standards to be interoperable, be
innovative with rich and robust functionality and work properly in responding
to and addressing the complex needs of a typical enterprise organization. The
W3C has working groups focused
on refining the SOAP 1.1 and WSDL 1.1 specifications, which
should improve things considerably. The XML Protocol Working Group is
working on SOAP 1.2 while the Web Services Description Working Group is
creating the WSDL 1.2 specification. Meanwhile, the IETF and OASIS are also working
on standardizing Web service specifications, including DIME and WS-Security.
While work at the W3C focuses on new versions of
the core Web services specifications, a separate organization is focusing more
attention on interoperability. The Web Services Interoperability Organization
(WS-I) is focused on defining best practices for ensuring Web service
interoperability. The WS-I Basic Profile Working Group is currently developing
a set of recommendations for how to use the core Web service protocols like SOAP 1.1 and WSDL 1.1 to maximize
interoperability.
The clear leaders in the race to deliver Web services functionality
are IBM and the entire Java / J2EE vendor community. They
recognized nearly five years ago the need to support standards that provide customers the
flexibility of choice and as a result, devoted serious resources to creating
its solution. As discussed on chapter 3.2.2, the Microsoft approach is very different
when it comes to implementation. IBM and the Java community are committed to a
Web infrastructure based on open standards – especially Java and Linux – to make disparate systems
work together. Microsoft presents .Net as an open platform that
supports Web standards, but it is still a highly proprietary technology that runs solely
on the Windows platform. Microsoft supports
Web standards interoperability – such as
XML and SOAP – but only within the
proprietary Windows framework that is not easily portable.
·
Proprietary
platforms
Locking-in Web services to the Windows platform may be a perfectly
acceptable solution for a small or mid-tier business. However, for larger
organizations, this approach is not only impractical but also caries with it
risks and hidden costs when addressing the integration and collaboration
challenges of significant internal applications as well as a large, dispersed
organization. It's important to consider that almost every large company has a
rich, complex heterogeneous computing environment.
Another critical factor to consider is that a commitment to only one
operating environment such as Windows means companies lose the
ability to choose and negotiate among Web service application vendors for the
best function and price. Will companies really want to marry their Web services
application development –including the possibility of a substantial portion of
their future Internet-based revenue and vital customer relation activities – so closely to
Microsoft?
Microsoft's commitment to standards and interoperability in the
Web services world is both welcome and critical to large-scale adoption in the
marketplace. The fact that Microsoft has embraced standards and interoperability with
the Java world is evidence that
Microsoft recognizes customers will no longer tolerate proprietary solutions. It's also true
that the .NET offerings will likely
capture a large segment of the existing pool of Microsoft developers and
customers. Unfortunately for larger customers however, this won’t produce
increased platform choice or vendor flexibility.
If future Web usage, cost savings and revenue generation is only
half of what is projected, it is likely that most companies will continue their
investment and support of Java as their strategic platform.
Will .NET gain acceptance and find an
important role to play in a Java/Standards-based world? Absolutely, but only if Microsoft delivers on their promise to
truly support standards. Which raises an interesting question – does history give anyone
reason to believe that Microsoft is truly interested in customer choice and
flexibility based on vendor neutral standards? Ignorance is bliss.
·
Open source
Not only big names (IBM, Microsoft, BEA) are behind web services software. Open Source software and tools exist such as the Apache Tomcat servlet engine, the JBoss J2EE-based server and Apache AXIS (a Java toolkit for building and
deploying Web service clients and servers).
According to Thomas Murphy, "Consider the fact that Web
services themselves are built on top of Open Source technologies like HTTP and
TCP/IP, people don't realize the amount of Open Source technology that
underlies everything that they do. Many companies use Open Source technology
areas other than Web services without giving it a second thought, and so should
open themselves to using the technology for Web services as well. Look at the
Internet — the most predominant
server is Apache, which is Open Source, and so people don't really have problems
running Open Source software. And look at the underlying protocols; they're all Open Source as well."
Those involved in the Open Source community, not surprisingly, tout
the benefits of Open Source tools for Web services development. Marc Fleury,
founder and president of JBoss says that many commercial Web service tools are
"pricy implementations rushed to the market with poor quality." He believes that because of this, most commercial vendors
will disappear over time, but that Open Source technology will survive because
of its superior quality. Additionally, he adds, Web services technology is a
"moving target. Many implementations are fighting for standard status. Going
with a free software implementation guarantees
you the maximum probability of going with a standard." It's not only the
Open Source community and analysts who believe that Open Source technologies
are the best solution to Web services development — those involved in Web
services creation and deployment are backers as well. For example, FiveSight Technologies provides comprehensive Web
services workflow integration and software tools, and they've built those tools
using Open Source software.
Paul Brown, president of FiveSight, says that "Without using Open Source, we wouldn't have been
able to launch our company. If FiveSight on its own, or any other company, had
to implement XML schema or WSDL or any other number of Web
services technologies in combination, it would be an impossible task. The Open
Source community is a catalyst for innovation in software, and so I know things like where we can get a good Open Source
implementation of a transaction manager. It's an opportunity to solve a hard
problem by building on work from the community at large. We've used Open Source
in our development work, from the first piece of software we deployed. We
didn't have the money to pay for developers and staff," and so instead
turned to Open Source software, which already had the software available, to do
the job.
Murphy also notes the drawbacks. When companies devote themselves to
using Open Source technology for Web services, they're taking on responsibility
for product support and management, since there is no commercial vendor that
takes care of that for them. That means no technical support, and no clear
upgrade paths. There may also be legal issues involved with Open Source
licenses, and so businesses need to have their legal staffs examine the
implications of using Open Source before committing.
Another issue is that the Open Source community has yet to fully embrace
Web services technologies with open arms. JBoss's Fleury, for example, says
that "Web services isn't real so far. We see zero dollars in Web
services." There are signs, however, that that is changing and an
increasing number of Open Source tools and developers have turned their
attention to Web services.
Agile Development is a collection of methods
and practices aimed to reduce the time and effort required to develop an
application, through communication, simplicity, feedback, courage and humility. Some of its processes are Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Scrum, Xbreed, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) and Usage-Centered Design (UCD). However, the best known agile method is XP (Extreme Programming).
In the early 1990s, a man named Kent Beck was thinking about better
ways to develop software. Kent worked together with Ward Cunningham to define
an approach to software development that made every thing seem simple and more
efficient. Kent contemplated on what made software simple to create and what
made it difficult. In March of 1996, Kent started a project using new concepts
in software development: the result was the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology. Kent defined Communication (programmers communicate
with their customers and fellow programmers), Simplicity (the design is simple and clean),
Feedback (quick feedback by testing the software
starting on day one), and Courage (the programmers are able to courageously
respond to changing requirements and technology) as the four values sought out
by XP programmers.
Extreme Programming (XP) is actually a deliberate and disciplined approach to software
development, and it’s successful because it stresses customer satisfaction. The
methodology is designed to deliver the software required by the customer in the
target timeframe, and empowers the developers to confidently respond to
changing customer requirements, even late in the life cycle. This methodology
also emphasizes teamwork. Managers, customers, and developers are all part of a
team dedicated to delivering quality software. XP implements a
simple, yet effective way to enable groupware style development.
XP is an important new
methodology for two reasons. It is a re-examination of the software development
practices used as standard operating procedures, and it is one of several new
lightweight software methodologies created to reduce the cost
of software. XP goes one step further and defines a process that is simple and
enjoyable.
According to Kent, software development is a difficult task and the
efforts should be concentrated in the four main activities:
§
Listening – Consists in obtaining
information from clients, users, managers, and business people. The problem
must be identified and the data must be collected for testing purposes.
§
Designing – Some contradictory
opinions exist around this topic. Some think that XP consists in low design, short-sighted. As this is far from a preferred option, let us consider
the other opinion stream: the design must be performed by the developer and be
validated by the user, but the time spent shall not be extremely high.
§
Coding – The heart of development.
§
Testing – Validate the application,
with the help from the customer in the final phases.
·
XP Open Values
The four XP values fit with the hacker’s
ethic:
§
Most open source projects rely on
communications. As normally the teams are geographically dispersed, the
exchange of written messages (via e-mail, newsgroups and forums) may have a
positive effect as it allows a record of the discussions and the comment from
the community.
§
Simplicity is often present – and
sometimes even exaggerated – in open source projects, which are normally
started to satisfy basic needs of one person or one part of the community.
§
The feedback is one of the most important
features of open source development, as the responses from the community can be
based on the functionality (new features required, conceptual and technical
problems) but are often recommendations on the programming techniques (via the
sharing of the source code) or suggested new routines, functions or updates.
§
It normally takes a lot of courage to
start a new open source project, as the source code may be analysed and
criticised by a huge number of peer programmers, but also to join an ongoing
project and commit to using the spare time to perform the coding.
·
XP Open Practices
§
Planning - XP assumes you have a customer
(or a proxy) as part of the project. Open Source projects generally don't have
a well defined "customer". Nor is there a single voice for their
users. Instead, Open source projects tend to be guided by a combination of the
vision of their key developers, and the "votes" of their other
developers and users.
§
Small releases - Release early, release
often. This is a current practice in XP and Open Source projects
§
Testing - Automated tests are a key
part of XP, as they give the courage for re-factoring and collective
ownership. They are what allow the small releases (release early, release often
XP and Open Source principle) to happen. Although many Open Source projects
include test suites, this is possibly the best XP practice to be adopted. An
Open Source project that incorporated XP style tests would have enormous
advantages. It would require less oversight and review and it would encourage
more people to contribute because they would have immediate feedback on whether their changes
worked or not. Moreover, it would ensure that as the software changed, grew and
ported, it wouldn't break.
§
Re-factoring – “Re-factoring is the
process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the
external behaviour of the code yet improves its internal structure." Many Open Source projects
are reviewed and re-factored, but often reluctantly. In XP re-factoring is recommended
all the time, so that the design stays as clean as possible.
The fear, of course, is that something will be broken, but this is counteracted
by having automated tests, and pair (or
peer) programming.
§
Pair programming – One of XP recommendations is to always
have two persons working in the same programs. This is rather difficult to
achieve in the real world of commercial development, but compensated by the
Open Source peer programming, with an exponential number of programmers
revising important projects.
§
Collective ownership - In XP collective ownership means
that anyone can change any part of the project – programmers are not restricted
to a certain area of expertise. Open Source projects normally work differently,
having restrictions on the persons allowed to make changes directly, and the
process required for submitting changes. This is necessary because of the large
numbers of contributors. However, in the Open Source software all the parts of
the software are visible to every programmer, who can always request access to
change “restricted” parts of the code in special cases.
§
Continuous integration - Some Open
Source projects integrate contributions continuously and others group them into
releases. Some projects allow anyone to commit changes whereas others require
changes to be submitted for review. Nevertheless, on an individual level, most
hackers do practice continuous integration.
§
40-hour week - It’s hard to apply this to hackers that are working in their
spare time. The main objective of this XP principle, however, is
satisfied by the Open Source definition: motivation.
§
On-site customer - Most Open Source projects don't have a
physical "site" or a specific "customer". However, the
essence of this practice is to have good communications between programmers and
users, and this has already been explained.
§
Coding standards - Most Open Source projects adhere to coding
standards, for the same reasons that XP requires them: To allow
different programmers being responsible for the same code at different times.
On smaller projects, the standards are often informally enforced by the key
developer, who adapts the contributions into his own style. Large projects
usually have an explicit set of standards.
·
Open Source XP software
§
JUnit is a regression testing
framework written by Erich Gamma and Kent Beck. It is used by the developer who
implements unit tests in Java. JUnit is Open Source Software, released under the IBM's Common
Public License Version 1.0 and hosted on SourceForge
§
CurlUnit is a an instance of the
xUnit architecture commonly used
as a testing framework within the Extreme Programming methodology (XP) methodology. Like Junit, CurlUnit is Open Source Software, released under the IBM Public
License and hosted on SourceForge.
Other resources for Open Source development under XP rules may be found in http://www.xprogramming.com/software.htm.
·
Final word
Open source software can be used in Extreme Programming development, and XP concepts can be adopted by
Open Source projects. The design part should be given more importance,
tough, with the integration of XP, Open Source and MDA. The goal s being to reduce the time and increase the quality of open source development,
and to reduce costs and improve efficiency and portability of applications
developed under XP principles.
A good starting point in deciding whether to use Open Source
software is to take a look at what
phase a company is, regarding the development of Web services, says Thomas
Murphy, senior program director for Meta Group consulting firm: "Open
Source is ideal for when you need to keep up with where technology is headed,
and for that portion of your technical staff working in future technologies.
It's well suited for these early stages. But when you're looking to use
something for production and development, that requires a stable release path.
So I think that often, people look for commercial tools at that point."
Another deciding factor is money. Open Source may be the perfect
solution for companies that haven't decided yet to go full-bore into Web
services, or those that are operating on a shoestring or looking to hold down
costs,.
An exceedingly important issue, but one that is easy to overlook is
the "cultural" factor, says Eric Promislow, senior developer
specializing in Web services with ActiveState, which provides Open Source-based
applications, tools and support. "Go with Open Source for Web services
development if your staff already uses Open Source for other purposes, and want
to stay with the tools they know and love," he says. "They know how
it works, and they know how to get support for it from the Open Source
community." They'll be far more productive — and happier in their jobs —
than if they had to use commercial tools.
Promislow adds that Open Source software is an ideal way for
companies to dip their toes in the water when it comes to Web services
development, and so is suited for companies still deciding whether to seriously
pursue Web services. "They can make no upfront investment except in
time," he says, and so can inexpensively develop pilot projects.
Murphy warns that there are a series of not-obvious issues that
companies should be aware of when they ultimately decide to go the Open Source
route. "Businesses need to understand that in using Open Source, they are
also taking on support and product management responsibilities," he warns.
"You need someone to track where the bug fixes are, and know what the
newest features are likely to be. It's not like a commercial product where
someone makes money off support and so provides it for you — you have to do it
yourself." Of course the existence of service companies around Open Source
is increasing and reducing the effect of this problem.
Another costly activity may be installing the software. Not all Open Source software have easy installation routines, and
often a commercial implementation of Open Source software is required to ensure
the community support, the low cost, and technical support.
Open Source software is built by community, and
is a community effort, and so businesses have to decide up-front how involved
their developers can be in that community. Should companies allow developers
not only to work with Open Source software, but also participate in the
community, and in the community development of the software? Will managers
allow developers to spend company time working on Open Source community
projects? The rules shall be put in place for this ahead of time, to avoid
problems in later project phases.
A basic concept of computer sciences – explained in the very first
class of any good introduction course – is that any information
is stored in a computer by using the binary digits (bits). Only zeroes and ones, and there must be basic rules to translate
them to alphabetic and numeric symbols, comprehensible by the human race and -
for the multimedia environments - to transform
them into formatted text, images, sound, etc. This is the realm of codes and
formats.
When the first ideas about networking appeared, data was not
standardized. Each proprietary system used a different form
of data representation, considering only the needs for local applications and,
in the best cases, the local languages. Some standardization works started, and different
standards have been implemented in
parallel by computer manufacturers and independent organizations. The most
important ones (in terms of current adoption) are briefly explained here.
EBCDIC is a binary code for alphabetic
and numeric characters that IBM developed in the 1960s
together with the first mainframe architecture, the System/360. This code is still used to represent the information in all IBM
mainframe platforms, with each alphabetic or numeric character represented with
an 8-bit binary number. 256 possible characters (letters of the alphabet,
numerals, and special characters) can be defined, and different tables exist
for country-specific characters.
It is a code elaborated to fit programming needs. As it is
intimately related to the architecture, the IBM Assembler language could use the
logical distribution of the numbers and letters in EBCDIC to make validations,
translations and arithmetical operations.
·
ASCII
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was
developed in 1963 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). It is the most common
format for text files in computers and is the American National Version of ISO/IEC 646. Each character is represented with a 7-bit binary number
(a string of seven 0s or 1s). 128 possible characters are defined.
UNIX and DOS-based operating systems use ASCII for text files. Even IBM's PC and workstation operating
systems use ASCII instead of IBM's proprietary EBCDIC. Conversion programs allow different operating systems to change a
file from one code to another.
·
ISO
There is a joint technical subcommittee of ISO and IEC to deal with
information technology to promote the standardization of graphic character sets
and their characteristics, associated control functions, their coded
representation for information interchange and code extension techniques. It is
identified as ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2, which published several standards.
·
Unicode
In 1991, the ISO Working Group responsible
for ISO/IEC 10646 and the Unicode Consortium decided to create one universal
standard for coding multilingual text. Since then, they have worked together
very closely to extend the standard and to keep their respective versions synchronized.
Officially called the “Unicode Worldwide Character Standard”,
Unicode is a system for the
interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse
languages of the modern world, also supporting many classical and historical texts
in a number of languages. Currently, the Unicode standard contains 34,168
distinct coded characters derived from 24 supported language scripts. These
characters cover the principal written languages of the world and additional
work is underway to add the few modern languages not yet included. Although the
character codes are synchronized between Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, the Unicode Standard imposes additional constraints on
implementations to ensure that they treat characters uniformly across platforms
and applications. To this end, it supplies an extensive set of functional
character specifications, character data, algorithms and substantial background
material that is not in ISO/IEC 10646.
For each character defined in Unicode there is an assigned code
point: a hexadecimal number that is used to represent that character in
computer data.
Several open and proprietary formats have been defined
for the exchange of multimedia documents. To discuss them
is out of the scope of this document, and more references may be found on the
Internet:
Audio: http://www.diffuse.org/audio.html
Video: http://www.diffuse.org/video.html
Images: http://www.diffuse.org/raster.html
Paper documents are linear, normally read in the order specified by
the author. Hypertext documents, on the other hand, are structured in a
non-structured way, to allow the information to be obtained in a sequence
determined by the areas of interest of the reader. The hypertext structures are composed by
nodes (the documents) and links (the references linking two different nodes, or
two different segments of the same node). The evolution of the
hypertext documents is briefly explained here:
·
SGML
SGML provides an object-oriented method for describing
documents (and other information objects with appropriate characteristics). The
standard defines a set of semantics for describing document structures, and an
abstract syntax of formally coding document type definitions. Apart from
defining a default (concrete) syntax, based the ISO 646 code set, that can be
used for text and markup identification when no alternative is specified, SGML
does not suggest any particular way in which documents should be structured but
allows users to define the structure they require for document capture or
presentation.
SGML has made its principal
impact in markets making use of structured textual information. This has
particularly included those markets managing and producing technical
documentation, although not exclusively so.
Its take up elsewhere has steadily increased, especially following
the arrival of the World Wide Web, where it has been used as the formal basis for HTML and XML.
·
HTML
HTML is the data format that has
made the World Wide Web possible. Its first proposal
has been written by Tim Berners-Lee (member of CERN in Switzerland) and
described a mark-up language that was able to execute in a heterogeneous
distributed environment. HTML documents are SGML documents with generic
semantics that are appropriate for representing information from a wide range
of domains. HTML markup can represent hypertext news, mail, documentation,
and hypermedia; menus of options; database query results; simple structured
documents with in-lined graphics; and hypertext views of existing bodies of
information.
HTML has been in use by the World
Wide Web (WWW) global information
initiative since 1990, when the MOSAIC program has been created by the
University of Illinois, based on Berners-Lee’s proposal. Version 2.0 (RFC 1866) roughly corresponds to
the capabilities of HTML in common use prior to June 1994.
An extended version (4.0) of the HTML specification was released
to the public on 8th July 1997 and became an approved W3C Recommendation on 18th
December 1997. The extensions include facilities for multilingual data
presentation, interactive elements and objects and control of presentation
using cascading style sheets.
·
XHTML
The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML™) is a family of
current and future document types and modules that reproduce, subset, and
extend HTML, reformulated in XML. XHTML Family document types are all XML-based, and ultimately are
designed to work in conjunction with XML-based user agents. XHTML is the
successor of HTML, and a series of specifications has been developed for XHTML.
But … what is XML?
·
Metadata
Giovinazzo states, “The universal delivery of information, both
within the corporation as well as to its partners, requires system and device
independence. The need, therefore is to devise a common language for the
communication of data while maintaining the structure and context of that data.
The solution is a metalanguage, a language whose primary function is to express the metadata
surrounding data. (…) Metadata is data about data. It
defines for us the structure, format and characteristics of the data.
Typically, metalanguages are referred to as mark-up languages, but (…) the
mark-up aspects of a metalanguage are just one of the main characteristics”.
Metadata is used to give a meaning to
the data, transforming it into information. This is the main difference of XML if compared to HTML. HTML contains simply the data, together with formatting
instructions. XML allows the metadata to be sent together with the data, giving
a meaning to the information transmitted via the network. The information can then
be interpreted by automatic processes, stored in databases, displayed and sent
to other recipients. The requirement for all the processes is the ability to recognize
the XML format and convert the information into other formats used to store and display
information. This allows the information to easily flow across a peer-to-peer network of companies and
individuals, independently of the types
of software involved in the
communication and data processing.
·
Fiat
Lux
The World-Wide-Web consortium (W3C) began discussions in 1996
to define a mark-up language with the power and extensibility of SGML but the simplicity of HTML. In February 1998 the version 1.0 of the XML specification has been
approved. One of the first real-world applications was Microsoft CDF (Channel Definition Format).
·
Objectives
The objectives of XML recognize SGML’s complexity and structure as well as HTML’s simplicity and lack of structure. XML is not a replacement for
HTML or SGML but a complement to them. The three basic XML objectives are:
§
Extensibility - the tags are not fixed
and controlled by the standard organizations like HTML, but defined by document authors, which allow the creation of
language extensions, shared by many nodes in a network.
§
Structure - XML makes it possible to support
structures like hierarchies and data associations, and to divide a document
into its components and parts.
§
Validation - a valid document strictly
complies with the mark-up and syntax of a particular network environment.
·
Usages
XML can be used in different
ways:
§
Traditional data processing – XML encodes the data for a
program to process.
§
Document-driven programming – XML documents are containers
that build interfaces and applications from existing components.
§
Archiving – The foundation for
document-driven programming, where the customized version of a component is
saved (archived) so it can be used later
§
Binding – The DTD or schema that defines an XML data structure is used to
automatically generate a significant portion of the application that will
eventually process that data
§
Format Independence – Changes to
display do not depend on changing the data. A separate style sheet specifies
the display format.
§
Portability – because the display is “extracted”
from the data, this becomes portable. Therefore, the code is often shorter and
interoperable.
§
Searching – searching the data is both
easy and efficient. Search engines can simply parse the tags rather than the
raw data, becoming “intelligent”.
§
Collaboration – In conjunction with
Internet applications, XML’s associated linking facilities make possible for many persons to
work in the same document.
§
Repository – XML is the emerging standard for
repositories, which are becoming the primary means for storing and relating
software system components.
§
Relationships – XML allows the exchange of
communication containing complex relationships like trees and inheritance.
§
Self-describing code – this is a
self-describing item.
XML complement the technologies
discussed previously in this document. It is a open standard by excellence, and
can be associated with Open Source programs, operating systems and internet
technologies to obtain a maximum openness and independence.
§
Plain Text – Since XML is not a binary format, the
files can be created or edited with standard text editors or visual development
environments. That makes it easy to debug programs, and makes it useful for
storing small amounts of data. At the other end of the spectrum, an XML front
end to a database makes it possible to efficiently store large amounts of XML
data as well. Therefore, XML provides scalability for anything from small
configuration files to a company-wide data repository.
§
Wide open standard – In a similar way
than Open Source – where both the executable and source codes are available,
allowing any programmer to understand the detailed processes and information
exchange between the programs – XML opens the access to the
different layers of information: Data, description and display format. By
certifying that all the information is stored and exchanged in XML format, it
is guaranteed that it will always be accessible, independently of the supplier
of the software used for its processing.
§
XML and Open Source – If Open
Source programs are used to process the information stored in XML, the complete
open environment is available, and a complete independence of the supplier may
be guaranteed. Future changes in the direction of technology may imply in some
programs or formats to become obsolete. In this case, the information, its
formats and all the processing algorithms may be easily understood and
rewritten.
§
Security and Privacy – When the
description is available together with the data, the reasons to hold some kinds
of information may be understood. When XML is associated with Open
Source, the lack of privacy – by sending secret
information to hidden recipients – may be discovered. Companies and
governmental agencies may be certified of the information to be exchanged with
the network. This does not happen with the usage of proprietary – and close – code and
formats, as many cases of privacy and security breaches have been found
recently.
XML allows the design of new, custom-built
languages. Before a draft of the new XML language appears, designers must agree
on three things: which tags will be allowed, how tagged elements may nest
within one another and how they should be processed. The first two – the
language's vocabulary and structure – are typically codified in a Document Type
Definition, or DTD. The XML standard does not compel language designers to use DTDs,
but most new languages will probably have them, because they make it much
easier for programmers to write software that understands the mark-up
and does intelligent things with it. Programmers will also need a set of
guidelines that describe, in human language, what all the tags mean.
Schemas, like DTDs, define the structure and semantics of an XML document, but in a more
verbose way, using XML to define the rules and allowing for a richer set of
data types to do so.
Publishers – who would often like to "write once and publish
everywhere" – may extract the substance of a publication and then show it
in different forms, both printed and electronic. XML allows this to happen by
tagging content to describe its meaning, independent of the display medium.
Publishers can then apply rules organized into "stylesheets" to reformat the work automatically for various devices. The
standard for XML stylesheets is called the Extensible Stylesheet Language, or
XSL.
XML is being put across industry
platforms. Groups of interest create working tasks to identify the information
types used in specific domains, to document the data structures and to codify a
DTD, creating a new language. The wide-range of applications that are
exploiting the XML standard provide some indication of the widespread interest
in the language. For example:
§
cXML (Commerce XML) –
Developed in conjunction with more than 40 companies, it is a set of
lightweight XML DTDs, based on XML, with their associate request/response
process.
§
OTP (Open Trading Protocol) – It provides an
interoperable framework for Internet commerce. It is able to handle cases where
the shopping site, the payment handler, the delivery handler and the support
provider are performed by different parties or by one party.
§
XML/EDI – The integration for XML and EDI
(Electronic Data Interchange) is a logical step for electronic commerce.
XML/EDI provides a standard format to describe
different types of data (e.g. a loan application, an invoice, an healthcare
claim) so that the information can be decoded, manipulated and displayed
consistently and correctly.
§
MathML (Mathematical Mark-up Language) – A XML application for describing mathematical
notations and capturing both their structure and content. Its goal is to enable
mathematics to be served, received and processed on the Web.
The expanding development of Frameworks is probably going to expand
to all main commercial and academic areas. As an example,
according to Bosak and Bray, “From the outset, part of
the XML project has been to create a
sister standard for metadata. The Resource Description Framework (RDF), finished on February 2003, should do for Web data what catalogue
cards do for library books. Deployed across the Web, RDF metadata will make
retrieval far faster and more accurate than it is now. Because the Web has no
librarians and every Webmaster wants, above all else, to be found, we expect
that RDF will achieve a typically astonishing Internet growth rate once its
power becomes apparent.”[232]
It is virtually possible to reorganize any existing structure, from
the web or the technical infrastructure, by using XML. One example is the development of a standard for XML-based
hypertext, named XLink and due later this year from the W3C. It will allow the user to choose from a list of multiple
destinations. Other kinds of hyperlinks will insert text or images ad hoc,
instead of forcing you to leave the page. Bosak and Bray argue “XLink will
enable authors to use indirect links that point to entries in some central
database rather than to the linked pages themselves. When a page's address
changes, the author will be able to update all the links that point to it by
editing just one database record. This should help eliminate the familiar ‘404
File Not Found’ error that signals a broken hyperlink.”[233]
To conclude by quoting again Bosak and Bray, “The combination of
more efficient processing, more accurate searching and more flexible linking
will revolutionize the structure of the Web and make possible completely new
ways of accessing information. Users will find this new Web faster, more
powerful and more useful than the Web of today. (…) Web site designers, on the
other hand, will find it more demanding. Battalions of programmers will be
needed to exploit new XML languages to their fullest.
And although the day of the self-trained Web hacker is not yet over, the
species is endangered. Tomorrow's Web designers will need to be versed not just
in the production of words and graphics but also in the construction of
multilayered, interdependent systems of DTDs, data trees, hyperlink structures,
metadata and stylesheets--a more robust infrastructure for the Web's second generation.”[234]
Of course the peer-to-peer networks, the collaborative
works and the powerful aggregation of hackers may find innovative ways of
learning and may adapt themselves to this new way of constructing the Internet.
Possibly, as we are going to discuss in the next chapter, the hackers are
better equipped than the institutions to adapt easier and quicker to new
demanding technologies. The key word is motivation.
“I don’t know the future. I Didn’t come here to tell you how this is
going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin” Neo in The Matrix
"It is not proper to think of networks as connecting computers.
Rather, they connect people using computers to mediate. The great success of
the Internet is not technical, but in
human impact. Electronic mail may not be a wonderful advance in Computer
Science, but it is a whole new way for people to communicate. The continued
growth of the Internet is a technical challenge to all of us, but we must never
loose sight of where we came from, the great change we have worked on the
larger computer community, and the great potential we have for future
change." – David Clark
Licklider, as David Clark, was among the first to notice the social
importance of networks, and to envision the future paradigm of a global network. It is important that the technology evolved as we analysed in the
previous chapter, providing the infrastructure that allowed this network to be
possible. However, the computers, network devices and protocols were simply the media to get
the communication performed. Similar to the psychophysical definition of the
sound, as a wave transmission that is perceived by the ear, the information
available in the network only becomes interesting when it’s consulted by a
user. The users of a network are the elements that count, as stated by Metcalfe: “The community value of a network grows as the square of the
number of its users increase”. The mission of people like
Metcalfe was to be like the first architects that built cities and planned
squares, working to give the material conditions for the people to meet and
communicate.
We saw that the first networking concepts were built around the
definition of common protocols, open standards and the open systems. After
the networks were established, they have been used to improve the communication
among the researchers, and revealed to be the best way to exchange information,
discuss ideas, have agreements, publish them, and restart the cycle. This
created a positive spiral, which elevated the performance of the network:
§
With an increasing consistency,
due to the high sharing of knowledge between the users, aimed to increase the
efficiency and usage of the network.
§
With a high connectedness, due
to the increasing efficiency and usage of the network, and to its reduced cost and complexity.
We may also note two external factors with participated in the
factors above:
§
The incentive of the governments – and
most specifically the military organizations during the cold war – that funded
the infrastructure and sponsored the academic institutions. This allowed
the research to produce the knowledge and
be connected to the network.
§
The increasing performance of the
microchips at a given price, as specified in the Moore’s law, which implied in reducing
costs of computer power and hardware components, allowing more
users to be connected to the network.
Figure 24
– Network power spiral and external factors
Initially, the networks were used by high-tech companies – like
ATT’s Bell labs, Rand Corporation, BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman), IBM – to exchange information
with the scientific community, and to
progressively build stronger infrastructure devices, protocols and software. IBM still uses its revolutionary proprietary protocols and standards to promote a cohesive work
among the different R&D centres all over the world,
smoothly integrate them with the other departments and – by the usage of
standard interfaces, TCP/IP and OSI-compliant protocols – with the academic institutions. IBM understood
it should increase its sources from all forms of knowledge, to remain an
innovative firm. Innovation was critical and companies like Sun and 3COM have flourished in this
environment. The computer scientists participating of this networked
environment alternated or cumulated jobs in the industry and in the academic
institutions. This created a networked milieu of innovation whose dynamics and goals
became largely autonomous from the specific initial purposes.
Later all the enterprises started to be connected, via the network, with suppliers, customers, service providers and research laboratories over the world,
in a multicultural framework, forming network enterprises, and founding the
global economy. Thus, the information economy emerged in a planetary level, in
different cultural/national contexts, evolving around a common matrix of
organisational form in the processes of production, consumption, and
distribution.
Castells identified an important shift from vertical bureaucracies
(the hierarchical oligopolies from the industrial era) to
the horizontal corporation (the networked companies that survived and thrived in
the informational economy), “dynamic and strategically planned network of self-programmed, self-directed
units based on decentralization, participation, and coordination. (…) The
manner in which a company shares information and systems is a critical element
in the strength of its relationships”[240].
The networks formed by the horizontal corporations are divided,
according to Ernst, into intra-firm (link
different divisions and business functions from the company) and inter-firm
(normally relying suppliers, producers or customers). However, the scope of our
study is to identify two other important inter-firm connections, also
identified by Ernst:
§
Standards coalitions - initiated by
potential global standard setters with the explicit purpose of locking-in as
many firms as possible into their proprietary product, architectural, or
interface standards. This is the case of Wintel (Microsoft and Intel association
explained on the chapter 2.2.4) and .Net (discussed on chapter 3.2.2).
§
Technology cooperation networks –
built to facilitate the exchange and joint development of product design and production technology,
involving cross licensing and patent swapping, and permit the sharing of
R&D. Under such arrangements, knowledge typically flows in both
directions and all participants need to master a broad array of technological
capabilities. The mainframe architecture (explained on the chapters 2.1.1 and 2.2.1), MDA (discussed on chapter 3.1.1) and Java (discussed on chapter 3.2.1) illustrate this.
“Some people use virtual communities as a form of psychotherapy. Others
spend many hours per day pretending they are someone else, living a life that
does not exist outside a computer. ”
- Manuel Castells
In parallel with the formation of the network enterprises, academic people started to use the
network to build strong communities of interest, which started by exchanging
ideas and finally discovered a potential to defy and compete big monopolies.
New companies were created to exploit the new technologic developments in ways
unanticipated by the scientists and big companies - it was the case of Apple, Microsoft and Intel – reducing the entry price
to be part of the network. The benefits of being in the network grew
exponentially, because of the greater number of connections. This gave birth to
the modern counterculture movements like the hackers and the crackers; it helped to break geographic barriers in the consolidation of
currents of thoughts, like anti-globalisation; it helped the formation of
worldwide/underworld organizations like the (cyber) terrorism.
One of the start points of the online subculture was the set of science
networks (like ARPANET, CSNET, BITNET) being used to exchange personal messages around
subjects like science fiction, but the advent of personal computing and cheap
networking equipment gave birth to the BBS (Bulletin Board Systems).
Described by Rheingold as “a grassroots element to the Net that was not, until very
recently, involved with all the high-tech, top-secret doings that led to
ARPANET (…). Real grassroots, the kind that grow in the ground, are a self-similar
branching structure, a network of networks. Each grass seed
grows a branching set of roots, and then many more smaller roots grow off
those; the roots of each grass plant interconnect physically with the roots of
adjacent plants, as any gardener who has tried to uproot a lawn has learned.”. Rheingold – who was an
active member from an online community called WELL and specializes today in
the creation of new communities - uses the term virtual
communities to define the social
phenomenon spawned from the BBS. Virtual communities are social aggregations
that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions
long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships
in cyberspace.
He identified that the technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential
to bring enormous power - intellectual, social, commercial and political - to the citizens, but this latent technical
power must be used intelligently and deliberately by an informed population. He
considered the online subculture to be “like an ecosystem of
subcultures, some frivolous, others serious.” Some of the serious communities
united programmers, who used the network to exchange information and
programs – mostly related to the network itself – aiming recognition from their
peers.
The hackers were already used to the
time-sharing systems networks as a communication
medium. With the networks, it was easier to exchange programs and routines, and
the university walls were not barriers as before. The community would then span
to other academic centres, and to other
countries. Due to fate, or to the anarchic tendencies of academic ecosystems,
the networks started to be organized in a horizontal manner.
Initially, the term peer-to-peer (P2P, or simply peer) described a protocol, application, or network where every node had
equivalent capabilities and privileges, being able to initiate or complete any
supported transaction. Beyond the technical definition, the term started to
designate decentralized virtual communities where every individual
participated in the same level, obtaining information with the same access
rights, and sharing this and new material with other network members. Bauwens abstracts the peer-to-peer concept to other levels,
like politics and spirituality, and even suggests the hypothesis of a new
civilization format based in P2P.
Bar and Borrus suggested that based on the two elements already
discussed - ubiquitous computing and a coherent infrastructure - a new
computing paradigm emerged in the 1990s, shifting from simple linkage of
computers to "cooperative" computing. Mimicking the cooperation
between different companies, and based on peer-to-peer anarchic structure of
organization, the hackers started to organize
themselves, initially simply letting spontaneous and informal communication
flourish at the same time, generating reciprocity and support by the dynamics
of sustained interaction.
The world-wide web was built on the
contribution of the hacker’s culture of the 1970s. The group of researchers at
CERN led by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau
relied on the hypertext concept created by Ted Nelson in the 1970s, used
hacker technology like UNIX and TCP/IP and distributed their software free over the Internet.
Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds gave the initial impulse to the
new-hackerism movement, by creating GNU and Linux. As important as GNU and Linux technological features, are their
sociological ones. They are in the core of the modern hackerdom
activities. They started the projects alone, and once their
concept was stable enough to be understood by other people, they used the
Internet as the communication media to form P2P task forces, by opposition to having a
project team - sponsored by governments or companies – working in the same
space. They had a centralization role, needed to guarantee the integration
among the different software parts, but the community was still in the power.
According to Eric Raymond, “Linux is subversive. (…) I
believed that the most important software (…) needed to be built like
cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages
working in splendid isolation. (…) Linus Torvalds' style of development —
release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of
promiscuity — came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here —
rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of
differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites,
who'd take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system
could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.”
The most difficult, for people outside the hacker communities, is to
understand what are their motivations. According to Himanen, the hacker ethic may be
divided into the work ethic, the money ethic and the network ethic. By the work ethic, he
explains that the hacker activity must be joyful, enthusiastic and passionate,
while performed in an individualistic rhythm of life.
The money ethic states that the main hacker objective shall be the
recognition from the peers, and through the “capitalism hackerism”, one can
take part in the traditional capitalism only temporarily (until have enough
capital to dedicate exclusively to “have pleasure”) or on a part-time basis
(working for a traditional company during the day, developing free software during the night). In
addition, most of the hackers who established companies to
earn money from free software and open source don’t see any problem in selling
software or services, once the work ethic is followed.
The network ethic (or nethic) preaches
that a hacker should always try to practice the freedom of expression, respect
privacy and stimulate self-activity
– “the realization of a person’s passion instead of encouraging a person to be
just a passive receiver in life (…) very different to the traditional media”
“A hacker who lives according to the hacker ethic on all three of
these levels gains the community’s highest respect. This hacker becomes a true
hero when she or he manages to honour the final value (…): creativity - that
is, the imaginative use of one’s own abilities, the surprising continuous
surpassing of oneself, and the giving to the world of a genuinely valuable new
contribution”.
David Stutz, The man formerly responsible for Microsoft's anti-open source strategy, attacked in February 2002 (just after
his retirement) Microsoft's PC-based strategy, which he argued as misguided in a computing world
where complex networks are more important than single devices. He maintained
that the internet, the web and open source software projects, in which
communities of programmers contribute improvements which are distributed free,
are all part of the steady advance of networked computing.
Stutz suggested that Microsoft needs to focus on building a
layer of software that integrates network technology. But that layer
should not be an operating system like Windows, which is tied to PC technology. "To
continue to lead the pack, Microsoft must innovate quickly," he said.
"If the PC is all that the future holds, then growth prospects are
bleak."
The hacker communication tools are the e-mail, newsgroups, chats
and, later, the weblogs. The contents are around new programs, tools, routines,
problems, and updates. The language was often English. It changed, after the
spread of cheap web access in other countries, and then voluntary translations
for programs, web sites and documentation flourished – again in exchange of
recognition. This phenomenon helped to expand the hackerdom borders, by
creating hacking sub-networks speaking regional languages, even if the common
language among different local communities was English. To some analysts, the
exchange of information via written medium could give an impulse to the
recuperation of the constructed and rational discourse. What finally happened,
on the contrary, was the stimulation of a new form of oral language, expressed
by the electronic texts and richly completed by funny symbols, weird acronyms
and multimedia.
Another important factor is the asynchronous communication favoured
by the e-mails and newsgroups. This allowed each developer to work when convenient,
with no time obligations, exactly as preached by the hackers ethic.
The need for privacy on the net started to
attract the public opinion in 1999 during the menace, from Intel, to create a processor identified by a unique number, known as PSN (Processor Serial Number). Although this practice is current in mainframes – software licenses are often validated
by comparing an encrypted key with the computer’s serial number – its
implementation in the personal computers could be the foundation of a
vast tracking system that could help accumulate data on users as they travel
around the Web, violating their fundamental right to privacy. The outraged
privacy advocates launched a boycott of products containing the Intel Pentium
III chip, the first such broad-based boycott of a product over the privacy
issue. And they won the battle.
After a letter from the American government, Intel finally decided to
disable the PSN feature.
Another long-term battle is against the abusive usage of cookies, to trace the virtual
footsteps of online users. The main advantage of cookies is the addition of a
simple, persistent, client-side state, which significantly extends the
capabilities of Web-based client/server applications. Without this
type of persistent applications, it is virtually impossible to securely
transfer the user information between two web pages, functionality required by
commercial web sites. Nevertheless, sometimes the collection of information is
excessive, with consumer habits being monitored by marketing companies and
stored into databases, later used in aggressive advertising actions.
The original cookie definition, by Netscape, had several flaws, avoiding the user acceptance of the cookie
execution. The IETF prepared a new proposal,
containing a privacy section to enforce the need
for this acceptance. The newest releases from
Microsoft explorer implement part of
those suggestions.
A famous case is the EPIC against DoubleClick. “EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade
Commission on February 10, 2000, concerning the information collection
practices of DoubleClick Inc., a leading Internet advertising firm, and its
business partners. The complaint alleges that DoubleClick is unlawfully
tracking the online activities of Internet users (through the placement of
cookies) and combining surfing records with detailed personal profiles
contained in a national marketing database. EPIC's complaint follows the merger
of DoubleClick and Abacus Direct, the country's
largest catalog database firm. DoubleClick has announced its intention to
combine anonymous Internet profiles in the DoubleClick database with the
personal information contained in the Abacus database.”
Important is to notice that all discussions about cookies, and the
discovery of the privacy issues, are due to the
openness of the HTTP protocol, needed for the interoperability between the HTML language and the browsers.
If similar initiatives were taken under proprietary environments, everything
could remain secretly hidden for a long time.
“The concept of profit has always been the noble version of a
deeper, more fundamental human instinct: greed” - Manuel Castells
A new economy – networked, global and
informational – emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century on a
worldwide scale. Its epicentre has been the information technology industries
and financial institutions in the 1990s. The first aspect of this new economy –
the network – has been discussed in the
previous section. The second aspect is the institutional, organizational, and
technological capacity to work as a unit in real time, or in chosen time, on a
planetary scale, enabling the company to survive and thrive in this global
economy. This discussion is out of the scope of this document. Let’s now
consider the fundamental elements of the third aspect – the informational
economy – always from the open
source and open standards point of view.
The quest for possible answers to three important questions will
drive this chapter:
§
What strategies have been used by the
IT companies to dominate the hardware and software market?
- What has been the
impact from the open platforms and standards on those strategies?
- What are the chances
for the Open Source community to increase the market share?
To increase profits, when looking for short-term results, there are
four main ways: to reduce production costs (as seen in the last two years with
the labour cost reduction - mainly in the ICT market – and the falling
price of electronic components), to accelerate capital turnover, to broaden the
market, and to increase productivity. This last has been the main advantage of
the open source products over the competition. The productivity, when applying
the hacker ethical principles, is extremely higher than
in the other firms. Its technology is proved
to have higher quality and to be more innovative.
Productivity and technological innovation are important means, but
certainly not the only ones.
When a new technology standard appears, it may complement (and
sometimes merge) or compete with the existing ones. When UNIX become a standard for open
operating systems and started to dominate the market, IBM decided to create its own
version of UNIX, and let the mainframe platforms to be UNIX compliant. It
reacted so fast that the OpenEdition layer of the MVS operating
system was one of the first to
comply with the POSIX standard. This was motivated
by two interdependent factors: The first was the risk of the established base
of mainframe customers to migrate from the old systems to the most attractive
and flexible UNIX environments, which appeared to be less expensive and to have
more human knowledge resources coming fresh from the universities. The second
was the usage of UNIX-compliant software under mainframe platforms.
It revealed to be less expensive for IBM to develop a UNIX layer than to
redevelop a whole subset of software – mostly related to the Internet, Web, User interfaces and Database technologies - to compete with
the UNIX versions. It proved to be the right decision – even if many customers
eventually migrated to open systems platforms – as many mainframe customers use
today the UNIX layer to run network and Internet services.
With Microsoft, it was the opposite. At first, in the desktop segment, when its
cooperation with IBM and Apple was terminated, it decided
to profit of its own installed MS-DOS base – a high-valued network – to implement a new graphic
environment. The quality revealed to be a less
important element than the number of users (see section Network externalities below), and quickly Microsoft became the preferred operating system provider from the
manufacturers of PC-compatible machines – including IBM. In the server segment, Microsoft always
thought of mainframes and UNIX as legacy technologies, and started by
dominating the low-entry market share, by providing small servers fully
compatible with the installed base of desktop PCs. With the increased capacity
of Intel-based machines, the Microsoft servers started to perform functions
for which a mainframe was needed before. And Linux appeared to play in the same
market share than Microsoft windows servers. As the ideals of Microsoft and the
Open Source community were completely
different (money, monopoly and marketing against gratuity, freedom and quality)
the fusion or cooperation was not possible.
As Metcalfe helped us to demonstrate in
the section 5.1, the value of the network increases with the number of
its nodes. All new networks start with a zero value, and the network
externalities from the opponent networks make their spread more difficult. When
a new technology appears, incompatible with the existing ones dominating the
market, a huge effort must be made to create a large network, for its value to
be higher than the changing costs. This concept is not new,
and has been implemented in the postal services, railways, airlines and
telephones.
Currently, in the operating systems market for desktops, the value
of the network composed by the windows
users is extremely higher than the competition, as more than 90% of the users
are connected to it. This high value forces most of the companies and
individuals willing to use Macintosh or Linux desktops to keep at least
one PC compatible with the windows
systems. It also motivates the creation of Linux products that may interface
with windows systems – by recognizing the Microsoft proprietary formats, by being able to
execute windows-compatible programs in a simulated environment, by recognizing
the Microsoft proprietary protocols in client-server and network connections.
This causes negative reactions from Microsoft, which keeps changing its
standards and protocols to difficult
the connections and data exchange with other systems and products, aiming to
keep the users locked into its network, and forcing them to pay expensive costs
to get out.
When a company has a complete monopoly in the operating systems or
hardware market share, it is
extremely easy to trigger the network externalities in favour of
its own related products to destroy the competition. It was always the IBM strategy in the mainframe
market. A first example is the security layer, tightly related to
the operating system to improve the enforcement
of the access authorization. IBM has its own product – RACF, later renamed to Security Server – that comes imbedded in the MVS
installation material, even if not ordered. To install the products from IBM
competitors, one must follow a procedure to remove the IBM product. A second
example was in mainframe networking. A company called Interlink developed a software product that implemented TCP/IP on IBM mainframes. The
performance was better, the price lower, and the flexibility higher, the door
to the Internet was finally open. IBM
quickly offered its own TCP/IP stack “free” together with
the operating system, and started to build tight links between its own product
and its databases. After complaints from customers, IBM started to provide a
refund for companies that did not want IBM TCP/IP. As the impact was only felt
by big companies, the affair is almost forgotten. A similar case happened with
Microsoft against Netscape in the browser segment. This
time, with a larger publicity and the difference that Microsoft continues to
freely distribute Internet Explorer, what practically eliminated Netscape from
the browser market. The only solution found by
Netscape was to “escape” to the open source community, creating Mozilla, one of the best browsers compatible with Linux.
The feedback is an important factor in
the competition for market shares, already existent in the industrial age,
which attained a fundamental position in the information economy. Due to the
virtualisation of the networks explained in the section 5.1, the feedback effect tends to create monopolies in
each domain of the software and information realms. The
feedback may be classified, according to its impact for the creation of
monopolies, as positive or negative. Please note that the feedback impact for
the economy as a whole might be the opposite than its name would suggest.
The feedback is tightly related to the
network externalities. In cases of
positive feedback, the quality of a product (or sometimes
the success of a brand or its marketing strategies) expands the network of
users, which will in turn increase its network value, motivating more users to
integrate it. This may happen successively, in a positive spiral, until the
stability brought by the saturation level of the market segment. The earlier
the product starts its positive feedback, the more chances it has to become a
monopoly. However, as the technology evolves in cycles, products dominating the
market in one moment can be quickly dominated in the next evolution step if
they are unable to evolve as quickly as its opponents, or if they cannot react
to new products bringing superior features.
Figure 25
– Two cycles of positive feedback
To illustrate this, let us consider the Figure 1 above and the computers market from the 1960s until the
1990s, discussed in the section 2.2.1. Initially there were several computer suppliers,
competitively sharing the market. Then IBM created the System/360 architecture, with a
superior technology, standards and aggressive marketing
campaigns. It quickly dominated the market, eliminating part of the
competition, and forcing the remaining to survive with a small market share.
The paradigm was the evolution of UNIX systems, which could provide
a good an inexpensive solution, as demanded by the potential customers. The
market share of the IBM machines - then known as mainframes - started to
reduce, forcing IBM to evolve an old platform – S/36, then transformed into AS/400 –, create its own
UNIX-compliant machines and systems – AIX – and create a UNIX
compatibility layer in the mainframe systems. The mainframe environments are
targeted for death since then, but elevated migration costs and unbeatable
technical superiority are still keeping them alive with a stable market share.
IBM is trying to stimulate a new positive feedback in favour of their
mainframes – now called high-end servers – with a strategy called server consolidation, which
includes a compatibility with the Linux operating system and the advantage of
integrating the processing capacity of multiple low entry servers into a single
box.
Shapiro and Varian may describe this later
reaction from IBM as a negative feedback, when force motivates weakness (UNIX competition conquer market
share from IBM mainframes) and weakness motivates force (IBM redesign the
mainframe systems to be compatible with UNIX and Linux). If IBM succeeds in its movement, the result may be the
stabilization of the market, until the next paradigm, as shown in the Figure 26 below:
Figure 26 – Negative feedback
Standards de facto often evolve in the
marketplace favoured by positive feedback cycles. As seen, they
stimulate the monopolies in detriment to a healthy competition. The absence of
competition normally has negative impacts in the technology (by reducing the
pace of innovation), the social welfare (by increasing unemployment
rates with the elimination of the competitors) and the economy (by directing
the flows of profit into the dominating company).
Standards de jure can promote the competition, by creating a negative feedback with the publication of the
standard protocols and definitions, the
implementation of several compatible products, and stimulating the innovation by the different
implementations of the standard recommendations. This is one of the reasons by
which the standards are increasingly limited to
general specifications, leaving the details for the companies and scientific community to decide. The
other reason is to reduce the time needed to develop a standard, allowing the
negative feedback effect to happen before one company decides to implement its
own product, outside the standard specifications, trying to quickly ignite a
positive feedback in its favour. This is the preferred practice of companies
like Microsoft, as defined by Bill Gates in his book The road ahead:
“Because de facto standards are supported by the
marketplace rather than by law, they are chosen for the right reasons”[272].
Microsoft is also accused of
practicing “vapourware”: to avoid the competitors
to conquer its market with products offering better quality, creating a technological paradigm and originating a positive
feedback, one company may announce a new version of its product, containing
the same facilities than the competition, even before its design.
The most important part of the production cost for software development, is from
research and development (R&D). Other important costs are for marketing, promotion and
documentation.
Those costs are important even for the open source software, despite the wrong impression that they are “free”. Studies based
in the COCOMO model estimates that “It would
cost over $1 billion (…) to develop [the GNU] Linux distribution by conventional
proprietary means in the U.S.”. Another study points out:
“If Debian [one of the Linux distributions]
had been developed using traditional proprietary methods, the COCOMO model
estimates that its cost would be close to $1.9 billion USD to develop Debian
2.2”. IBM announced investments of $1
billion USD in R&D for Linux, many other
hardware and software suppliers –
including HP, Intel, Sun and SAP participate in Linux
research laboratories.
As for the other products from the digital information economy, the
reproduction costs are extremely low. They are normally the duplication of a
CD-ROM, and may imply the reproduction of documentation.
The reproduction costs of the open source software, if we consider the main Linux distributions, are even
higher than the proprietary software. Normally the Linux
kernel is supplied with many
complementary software products, in several CDs, and a good documentation for
the installation and customisation procedures.
The open source software may be distributed in two
ways: a free download from the web (with indirect network costs for the distributors
and users) or a CD containing the operating system, tools, applications and an installation manual. In this second
way, it has the same costs than other proprietary products.
The transaction costs are measured by the cost for the customer and
the distributor per copy of the product.
Probably the main difference between Linux and the other operating
systems, and between open source software distributed under the GPL license and other commercial
software is the reduction of the transaction costs, for companies installing
them in several computers. Normally commercial software is licensed according
to the number of computers or users. The open source software is often
distributed without limits for its usage, copy or installation. This is
extremely important for big companies, and in moments of financial crisis, this
might be a determinant factor for the adoption of open source software. In
parallel, the new licensing practiced by Microsoft is helping to push customers
out of the windows software, mainly from its server family. This has been
anticipated by Bill Gates in 1995: “Customers express to me their worry that
Microsoft, because it is, by definition, the only source for Microsoft
operating-system software, could raise prices and slow down or even stop its
innovation. Even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to sell our new versions.
Existing users would not upgrade and we wouldn’t get any new users. Our revenue
would fall and many more companies would compete to take our place.” This may reveal an even
more amazing approach: Microsoft may have increased its licenses to measure the
real interest by the companies in the open source software. If it starts
loosing market shares, its prices may be reduced again, to the previous level,
in parallel with a strong marketing campaign.
The changing costs are paid by the companies and individuals willing
to adopt a new technology, changing from an existing network of users to another. The
total changing costs are calculated by adding the investment in new hardware, software, training and the maintenance of the compatibility with suppliers
and customers. For example, companies wishing to move from windows to Linux benefit from the first two
elements (Linux is compatible with all windows hardware with better
performance, and the license and maintenance fees from
open source products are usually lower). They may have expenses with training,
higher for the people responsible for the installation and support than for the
end-users. These subjects will be detailed on the next paragraph (TCO).
When analysing the implementation of a new technology inside a
company or intranet application, only the internal costs are considered. When
the implementation implies changes in external users, the collective changing
costs must be taken into account. An example can be taken from the traditional
client-server applications, when part of
the application runs in the client side, another part on the server. If a new release of the server component - requiring a new
version of the operating system - is to be installed, the
changing costs are limited by the reduced number of servers. If a new release
of the client component needs a new version of the desktop operating system,
the cost is multiplied by the number of users. In case of applications
available outside the company – like clients for home banking applications -
the situation is even more complicated, because the customers need to be
convinced to upgrade their own operating systems. Internet applications helped to
eliminate this problem, with the usage of server applications exchanging
information with the clients by the usage of standard formats and protocols – like TCP/IP and HTML. If a new version of the application is released, only the
application servers are impacted. The customer is even free to choose the more
convenient operating system.
A difficult task when comparing alternatives – in our case
proprietary against open source – is the
need to estimate all the costs involved in the implementation (changing costs)
and the recurring periodic costs. This is called “Total Cost of Ownership”. Elements like operating
system licenses and hardware equipment are obviously
included, but salary, consultancy services, training and the licenses for
complementary – although mandatory – software should be obtained in
advance. The scope of this document does not allow an extensive study of all
costs implied in the installation and maintenance of servers and desktops;
several comparisons have already been made and a brief analysis may be
summarized by some of the TCO items:
§
Hardware – Solutions build around
environments like Linux and Windows can use the same hardware equipment, and even if the
performance obtained by Linux is commonly accepted to be better, this can be
ignored for a fair TCO comparison. The comparison with
proprietary hardware solutions, like Sun, Apple, IBM mainframes and AS400 generally gives a higher
difference, in favour of the open source alternatives. Hardware maintenance fees,
insurance and floor space may also be considered to obtain a more complete
analysis.
§
Software – The Open Source solutions are always cheaper
than proprietary ones, for small-to-medium
environments. Generally, the license costs for large environments
should consider the usage of proprietary databases and applications, which are generally less
expensive – or with an equivalent price - when installed under open source environments.
An important factor to consider is the need to pay yearly fees – known as
maintenance and support – to have the right to use the software.
§
Human resources – It is extremely difficult
to estimate the manageability – or the simplicity of installation,
configuration, support and usage - for each solution. Commonly accepted
arguments for solutions based on Windows are the easy installation
(it is normally pre-built into new hardware) and cloning – duplication of servers and desktops -, absence of
structured problem-solving analysis, and consequently the need for more support
and help-desk people, and operations like “system restarts” and recovery of
lost information. For Linux and other UNIX systems, the existence of
well-trained (and more expensive) people, the time-consuming tasks to install
and configure the environment, with later facility to maintain it. IBM mainframe environments are
far more difficult to install and configure, often requiring specialized
consulting services, but easier to maintain after the stability level is
attained. Smaller systems tend to require more servers to give the same
capacity of large systems, and consequently need more people to support them.
§
Training – The clear advantage is for
well-known products like Windows, which are still largely used in schools and at home. The Linux interfaces – like KDE - and office suites – like
OpenOffice and StarOffice - are quickly reducing this
advantage. For the support staff, the
time needed to learn how to maintain an open or proprietary environment is not
different. Exception made for full proprietary environments, like IBM mainframes and AS400, where the complexity is higher, and so is the time for the
technical staff to be fully productive. For any solution, the ideal situation
is often to have experimented consultants to help in the initial steps and to
complement self-study and classes with ad-hoc training.
§
Services – Related to the training
costs, the consultancy services needed to help in the implementation of any
solution are more dependent on the complexity of the environment than the
openness of the source or platform. There are always differences in the price
for consultancy for each platform, but due to the volatility and dependence of
cultural differences, this should be analysed in the moment and country of the
implementation.
The overall conclusion - based on the previous paragraphs and on the
bibliography referred by them - is composed by the following points:
§
For each item described above, the
initial costs, the changing costs and the recurring costs should be identified.
§
Considering the installation of new
hardware and software, in a company or educational establishment without previous
knowledge of any solution – open or proprietary – the TCO for implementing proprietary
software is more elevated than any open source solution, with the difference
being directly proportional to the size of the computing environment.
§
As most of the companies already have
an installed base of computers, the changing costs might be more important the
other elements, and must be analysed carefully. Conversions from proprietary environments like mainframes
may have a large cost for the redeployment of the applications and the tasks
needed to redevelop the interfaces with other platforms. Migrations from
Windows-based environments to open systems shall have a higher transition
cost for the desktops than for the servers – due to the reduced impact on end
users -, so the size of the network is an important factor to
consider.
§
To compensate the changing costs, the
recurring costs after the initial investments are generally lower for open
environments, thus when considering the cost impact for a period like 3 to 5
years after the implementation of the new system can give different results
than comparisons taking into account only the implementation costs.
§
All environments must be continually
upgraded to keep current operating system versions and to profit from
technological evolutions, like improved security, increased processing capacity, reduced machine size. The cost for
upgrading mainframe environments is known to be high in terms of human
resources – but decreasing – and normally oblige hardware changes each 10 years. Windows-based systems, while having usually minor technological advances,
imply hardware changes – or upgrades of memory and processor resources – each 2,5
years. In the open systems, the capacity is directly related to the amount of
service needed and not to the version of the operating system. An average time
between hardware upgrades is estimated to 5 years, to benefit from the
technological advances.
§
When the changing costs are higher
than the cost savings, and the technological benefits are not compensated by
attaining important business objectives, there is a lock-in situation. The
decision is complicated because of the recurrence of the consequences: The
lock-in increases with the time, due to the increasing usage of the technology
– by new people, in new functions and by new applications - and consequent
higher changing costs. This is one of the best arguments in favour of the open
standards: freedom of choice. Once the migration is done, the changing costs
may be amortized in the long term, and the company is free from lock-ins. If
the supplier increases the price, does not follow the evolution pace or does
not give a good support, the changing costs for a new alternative are lower:
the open formats and standards are compatible with several
products from the competition and consequently the migration tasks and training
become easier. This is an example of good recursion: as the supplier is aware
of the facility to change, it is more motivated to ask for a correct price and
continuously invest in innovation. Both supplier and customer benefit from this process.
|
|
New Installation
|
Changing Costs
|
Recurring Costs
|
Upgrade Costs
|
Lock-in risks
|
Freedom of choice
|
|
Open
|
æ
|
ä
|
æ
|
æ
|
æ
|
ä
|
|
Proprietary
|
ä
|
æ
|
ä
|
ä
|
ä
|
æ
|
Table 3
- Cost comparison summary
6.4.8.
ROI - The conclusion is beyond the costs
Despite the obvious reduction of software costs and considering the
high changing costs and the nightmare of calculating a real TCO, the Open Source community tries to concentrate
their marketing efforts in comparing open source against proprietary software (and the example is
often Windows x Linux) by measuring factors like manageability, control, stability,
scalability and freedom of choice. This may be represented in a business case
by estimating the amount for the Return on Investment. Besides the cost savings
obtained, which in our hypothesis is already part of the TCO, all the other elements
benefit the open source software, and the analysis should concentrate in the
importance of the benefit for the business objectives.
As an example of the indirect benefits, let us consider the opinion
from Bruce Perens: “Control means being able to get a different service
provider if you don't like the service you're getting on your software. Control means not having to convince the software's producer that
your needs fit in their marketing plan. Control means not living in fear that
the BSA (Business Software Alliance) will bring federal marshals to raid your
business. Control means not having a domineering software company”. More benefits can be
exploited with the help from the explanations and comparisons made on chapter 2.
A careful functional analysis should always precede the cost
analysis, to verify if the open source alternatives can be implemented. A good
example is for graphic environments. Currently there are no good solutions to
compete with proprietary software – which largely uses
proprietary formats - like Macromedia Flash®, 3D Studio Max™ and Adobe Photoshop®, which only run under
proprietary platforms (Mac or Windows).
Despite the high importance given by consulting reports to the ROI evaluation, a research conducted by DataNews showed that only 30% of the
Belgian companies measure the ROI to
verify the economical benefits of technological projects.
The Linux strategy is a major part of
Unilever's drive to cut its IT bill, a part of an organisation-wide plan that
already reduced the IT budget from €600m (£398m) in 2000 to €500m (£332m) in
2003, and aims further reduction of €100m until 2006. The main savings will
come from hardware, which currently accounts for 40 per cent of the company's
infrastructure costs. The Linux strategy will contribute through server consolidation and by
reducing unit costs.
Implementation of Linux is also behind cost saving
for Morgan Stanley. The numbers have not been announced but the company said that the
goal of the project, underway since mid-2001, is to reduce the cost of
computing by adding flexibility to its computing architecture. Morgan Stanley's
institutional securities division has opted for new architecture that moves the
company's data, applications and operating systems off specific machines and
onto network servers throughout its
global computing infrastructure.
This infrastructure is made up of around 6,000 servers, 25,000
desktop computers and thousands of applications. The aim is also to increase
flexibility : "We want to be able to run any application on any box at any
time," said Jeffrey Birnbaum, managing director and global head of
enterprise computing at Morgan Stanley's institutional securities division. "Now, around 35 per cent
of our servers are running Linux."
By 2005, two years ahead of schedule, the division plans to be
running 80 per cent of its systems on commodity hardware, most of them using Open Source and open protocols for hardware independence.
"When you run everything including the operating systems off the network adding computing power is
simple," explained Birnbaum.
A study published by the Swiss consultancy Soreon Research GmbH
concluded that “Companies with a €1 million ($1.1 million) budget for office
software can reduce their costs as much as 20% by using OpenOffice software
instead of Microsoft's Office product. (…). And those running the open source
Linux operating system instead of Microsoft's Windows on their servers can save
as much as 30%”. An interesting conclusion of this study is that small and
midsize enterprises may benefit only marginally by using open source software.
“A company with 10 computers, for instance, can reduce its costs around 2% by
using open source software. A larger company with 100 computers can save 6% on
office software and 7% on server software.”
Another research conducted by TheOpenEnterprise.com points out that 74% of the
corporate managers interviewed consider lower costs as the main benefit from
the usage of Open Source and Open standards-based software (see Figure 27 below. And 66% of the same group of managers consider the
cost of Open Source software to be between 25% and 75% lower than proprietary
alternatives (See Figure 28 below).
Figure 27 –
Benefits of Open Source / Standards-based software
Figure 28 – Comparison between Open Source and Proprietary software costs
By opposition to the above cases, studies conducted by IDC research show that in some cases
proprietary solutions like Windows may appear cheaper – in the
long run – than Open Source alternatives. This study
shows that Linux is certainly best for web sites
hosting but for other server applications, Windows may be
cheaper, due to reduced training costs. This study should be considered
cautiously as it has been sponsored by Microsoft, by interviewing 104 American IT managers, related to the
implementation of printer, security and file servers. One of the
most important cost differences was for a security server, which would cost USD 91.000 under Linux compared to USD 70.000 for
Windows (over 5 years). The main fact from the study is the low participation
of license costs in the total
implementation of the system (around 5%).
Considering the elements discussed in the previous sections - and
based on the conclusions by Shapiro and Varian - four different strategies may
be adopted by the information suppliers (like software and hardware vendors and internet service
providers) when creating a technological paradigm. One criterion is the
adoption of open or closed standards (control); the second is the
option to create a new revolutionary technology or to keep the evolution of
former technologies. These factors shall be
recognised when implementing a technological change, to better know the
changing costs in advance, and to avoid lock-in situations. This section
concentrates in the analysis of the suppliers viewpoint.
Proprietary architectures may give enormous benefits for the network enterprise built around the
companies controlling them, when the positive feedback is generated. The
controlling companies are the copyright owners and the producers of the core
technology. The control is kept when those companies believe their products to
be widely accepted without the help from certification and standard
organisations, and start to build a supplier and distribution network around
their technologies. Normally commercial coalitions are formed quicker than
standards are approved, so their
chance to trigger a feedback effect is higher if the users are convinced of
their technological superiority. This has been the reasoning publicly defended
by Microsoft and Intel.
The major benefit for the controlling companies is when the network value becomes higher than
the competition. The feedback and lock-in effects are
created and the tendency for the network is only to grow until a new paradigm
arrives or a complete monopoly is created. Due to the feedback, new users are
attracted to profit from the high network value; due to the lock-in, existing
users have problems to change of technology.
When implementing a new technology to replace the current
generation, two options exist: to ensure a backward compatibility – evolution
-, or to create new functionalities and a performance level that can convince
the users to abandon their current product in favour of the new one -
revolution.
A compromise may sometimes be found and it’s by far the best option.
Guarantying the compatibility while giving more performance and functionalities
will reduce the changing costs – a precious argument to gather users from the
previous technology – while being attractive to new users.
This is the ideal situation and does not happen often in the
information economy. What may facilitate the users to migrate to the new
technology is the existence of conversion tools – to easily convert information
in the old format – or the availability of bridges, in which the new product
can read information created by the previous one. When the standards and formats are open, this
is simply a question of development. However, closed standards may give the controlling
company the right to legally avoid these features to exist, or to ask the
payment of high license fees. This is again a reason
to implement products based on open standards and formats: even if the
customer does not have high costs to terminate a lock-in situation, the
companies creating new technologies may be simply inhibited to innovate.
|
|
Control
|
Openness
|
|
Compatibility
|
Closed migration
|
Open Migration
|
|
Performance
|
Superiority by Performance
|
Disruption
|
Table 4
– Evolution and Control strategies
To summarize the concepts of this section, let us briefly describe
the four strategies:
§
Closed Migration – This is normally the release of new versions of a proprietary product, and should not
present a risk (for the supplier or user) if the backward compatibility is
fully guaranteed, and the migration tasks are not complicated enough to produce
a high changing cost. Two examples of closed migration are the successful replacement
of DOS by Windows, and the limited usage of Mac OS.
§
Superiority by performance - This is the introduction of a new and proprietary technology, incompatible
with the dominant market solution. The changing costs should be calculated upon
the existence of bridges and conversion tools – tested before to ensure a
complete compatibility of the totality of the user information. Attention
should be made to the credibility of eventual announcements made by the company
owning the current market solution, to avoid the “vapourware” to destroy innovation. A market analysis should also be done to verify the existence of
an open alternative, with similar changing costs, but with higher control – for
the user. A thriving story is the implementation of the UNIX operating systems, by
opposition to the PS/2 and OS/2 failure to conquer the PC market.
§
Open Migration – This is the preferred choice for the customers, with the solution
being offered by different hardware, software and service suppliers,
reduced changing costs, reduced risk of lock-in by the new product. For the
supplier (without the ambition to create a monopoly, and accepting the
challenge represented by the existence of innovative competitors) this is also
a comfortable situation, as it may benefit from a wider network – even with the help from
the competition – that can bring benefits when launching future initiatives or
products. The UNIX wars show that the success
of this strategy is not always guaranteed, and the creation of the single UNIX
specification is a good example of the perseverance needed to attain a goal.
§
Discontinuity – This happens when a new technology appears, and it’s implemented
by many suppliers. Its characteristics are similar to the previous strategy,
with the exception of the existence of changing costs. It’s also favourable to
the most competitive suppliers, able to provide an added-value network of service and compatible
hardware and software products. To exemplify, the
triumphant implementation of the OSI standard and the Internet protocols and the flourishing Linux server market are good examples, by
opposition to the difficulty of Linux to conquer desktop users, with the need
to improve the compatibility bridges (like the Wine software) and migration
tools (like OpenOffice, that accepts documents created by Microsoft Office).
In the end of the 1960s - the beginning of the information age – the
computer manufacturers were focused in the production of machines, which came
coupled to the operating systems. As discussed in the beginning of this
chapter, in the 1980s the surge of the UNIX systems and the TCP/IP-based computer networks allowed the companies to form strategic
alliances becoming network enterprises. With the
consequent need for the flexible, interactive manipulation of computers,
software became the most dynamic segment
of the industry.
Irony, it seems, is that again an operating system from the UNIX family is helping to
accelerate a paradigm shift: from software to services. This time the
network was also important. The
computer networks worked as the media, but the social peer networks were the
real catalysts.
Figure 29
– UNIX and Linux catalysing the shift of informational power
This time IBM was one of the first big
companies to react. Instead of considering Linux as another concurrent of its
5 operating systems (zVM, zOS, VSE, AS400 and AIX), IBM became part of the open source network, by sponsoring projects, creating laboratories around the world
dedicated to open the door of every hardware platform and investing in
Marketing. Other major companies
interested in promoting Linux are Intel, HP, SAP, SAS and Oracle. There are two (non-exclusive) possible reasons for this: the first
is pure marketing, the second a potential service market around Linux.
According to TheOpenEnterprise.com (See Figure 30 below), 43% of the companies may consider to implement
enterprise applications.
Figure 30 – Potential applications to be hosted in Open Source solutions
HP, IBM and Intel are big players in the
hardware arena. Today they work
together with proprietary and open systems. In the
case Linux growth previsions are true,
and it finally dominates the server market in the near future,
their interest is to be part of the new and powerful Linux network as hardware suppliers,
keeping their market share.
These companies will keep their investments in the current operating
systems, and will continue to actively participate in the Windows network. If the paradigm does not happen, due to important changing costs -
in a period of slim IT budgets -, and Linux keeps a low part of the
operating systems market, they have not lost their investment. They will enter
to history as Linux Maecenas, have a good
image to the open source community, and finally remain active in its market
share.
Let us consider one statement from Castells’ analysis of the classical
theory of post-industrialism: “Economic activity would shift from goods
production to services delivery. The demise of agricultural employment would be
followed by the irreversible decline of manufacturing jobs, to the benefit of
service jobs that would ultimately form the overwhelming proportion of
employment. The more advanced an economy, the more its employment and its
production would be focused on services”. An extrapolation of this
sentence would produce a complementary one: The more advanced a company, the
more its research and development would be
focused on the production of services. This is the strategy from IBM, followed by the other companies.
The spread of the services realm, by the replacement of internal
labour forces did not happen as predicted by analysts like Rifkin. The usage of highly
specialized consultancy services increased during the years preceding the Y2K issue, the implementation of
the Euro currency and the hype of Internet start-ups. They were
long-term and expensive contracts. The crisis originated by the flop of the
Internet bubble and accentuated by the spawn of terrorism and the menace of
another gulf war changed the figures and projections. The current tendency is
to keep the knowledge inside the enterprise, dedicated to satisfy the real
business needs. The services are still required, in a smaller scale and for
short-term assignments, and concentrated in the infrastructure. Stated another
way, if knowledge is power, the enterprises prefer to keep it internally
pushing the core business to increase profit, and to use external forces -
specialized in the volatile technologies - to decrease cost.
The installation of a new hardware, software or network component is surrounded by
several complementary activities – some already discussed in this document -,
like capacity planning, installation, migration from former systems, training,
consolidation of smaller servers into a large one, or into a cluster. The main
advantages of Linux and open standards for service providers are:
§
The sharing of R&D costs with the other members
of the open source network;
§
The availability of the source and
protocols for problem investigation
and a better understanding of the logic behind the software;
§
The easier communication across
different hardware and applications;
§
The pervasiveness of Linux - able to run in any
existing platform, and quickly adaptable to eventual new ones - thus giving the
choice to the service provider to recommend hardware equipments from best partners,
and to change these partners without compromising its recommendations, and need
of retraining.
This motivates the companies to participate in the standard
committees, to be aware before the technological changes, but mainly to create
lobbies to influence decisions, favouring technologies implemented by their
coalitions, and blocking standards with new innovations from
the competition.
Open source software is a commodity market. In any
commodity market, customers value a brand they can trust. The brand building,
in open source, is highly based in supporting the community. Marketing
strategies from the big companies joining the open source movement (among them
IBM, Intel and Oracle) consist in announcing their investment in open source, by creating
laboratories specialized in testing new versions of open source software with
hardware components and helping to port
open source operating systems to new hardware developments. Another common
tactic is to sponsor developers to produce open source code.
On the other hand, Microsoft has a hard work to change the
bad image associated with its brands. David Stutz – The
man formerly responsible for Microsoft's anti-open source strategy – said: "Recovering from current external perceptions of Microsoft as
a paranoid, untrustworthy, greedy, petty and politically inept organisation
will take years."
“Technology does not determine society. Nor does society script the
course of technological change. (…) Yet, it can, mainly through the state,
suffocate its development.” Manuel Castells
In the previous sections, we discussed the social and economical
viewpoints of the adoption of open standards and open source. The
provisory conclusions are the need for open standards to guarantee the freedom of
choice and a healthy market competition, and the advantages of open source code to guarantee the innovative
pace of technology with benefits for the privacy and security. Now we will analyse the political aspects: How can the European governments and the European
Community – in the scope of this
analysis – recognise these needs, and how can them support this openness?
Let us base the analysis in the Castells’ opinion that “firms do not
seek technology for the betterment of humankind, but for profit and growth of
value of their stocks. And political institutions are normally oriented toward
maximizing the competitiveness of their constituent economies. Thus,
profitability and competitiveness are the actual determinants of technological
innovation and productivity growth.”
The academic environment is the natural
root of the open standards, to allow the research initiatives to spread over
different institutions and countries. As already discussed, this happened
during the development of the UNIX operating system and the Internet Protocols. In opposition to
commercial research – oriented by the market potentials of new products and
technological features – academic researches are normally oriented towards
innovation and quality – even when economic
subsidies come from major companies
like IBM. The political subsidies, whenever they exist, should stimulate
this openness to continue in the centre of the research, and guarantee the
quality of new technologies, which shall target the increase of social welfare.
This does not mean the suppression of proprietary architectures and closed
software from the academic world. These technologies should
continue to be investigated, and open bridges should be built between
proprietary alternatives and Open Source. One of the possible solutions of the Microsoft antitrust case would be to allow selected academic
institutions to have access to selected parts of the source of selected
Microsoft products. This selectivity should be forced by political means to be
increased to the whole bunch of software code responsible for the interfaces
between the Microsoft operating systems and Microsoft products (e.g. Windows and Internet Explorer) and in parts of
the code where potential security or privacy breaches may put the social
or private security under threat by commercial companies or crackers. Academic research could then be conducted to
help to avoid potential risks, where Microsoft already proved unable (or
unwitting or even unwilling) to act effectively.
The main objective of research in open technology, however,
should be to guarantee the open software to evolve and be able to
compete with commercial software in the same level. This happen by the
technological improvements made by academic research, and by teaching
the usage of this software to the students.
The wide usage of Open Source software and the increasing usage of
open standards by commercial software may
be stimulated by letting the students use, learn and disseminate this knowledge
in their future working environments. As already discussed, the license costs have a low importance
in the total implementation of the system (around 5%), and the main part comes
from training. The companies are more
open to the implementation of pieces of software that are well known by current
and future employees, as this may reduce the training costs of the technological
departments and in the user community. This is the role of governmental
institutions behind academic subsidies: wherever as possible, open software should be preferred to close
and proprietary alternatives. Beyond the
academic institutions, public entities could follow the same path.
The increasing importance of institutional projects in the IT
market, in domains like e-government, education and health, is giving an
important impulse in the usage of Open Source. As discussed before, mixed solutions integrating proprietary software and Open Source solutions
shall be considered, to guarantee the balance between the existing and new applications.
This enforces the need for Open Standards, to be able to integrate both solutions, and to be able to easily
migrate to new alternatives when there are economical or functional advantages.
The American government is highly influenced by the major IT players
like Microsoft, Intel and CISCO, who lobby against Open Source. One of the arguments is the
risk of reducing the profit – and consequently employment – of big companies
part of ISC. The increase in the usage
of Open Source software in Europe does not have any negative
impact in the economy, as the owners of main proprietary software are not European companies. In the opposite,
they may benefit the service companies, by reducing the software license costs and allowing more
projects to be implemented. The European institutions
and governments start to take advantage of this fact by using Open Source
software in internal projects, and if the e-government initiatives really take
shape in the next years, this may bring a real advantage for the open platforms.
As an example, after some Italian and Brazilian regions, the Region
of Brussels (COCOF) voted in February 2002 a
proposal to impose the usage of Open Source software. The usage of proprietary solutions may only be
authorized in areas where no open alternative exists, and the planned period
for the full migration from proprietary to Open Source software being only
three years. Agoria, a Belgian entity representing many
software suppliers, considered that legal interference from the government in
technological domains should not happen. During the writing of this
document, ISC, the same group that is responsible for lobbying the American
department of defense, is also
pushing the Brussels government against such a decision. The arguments used by
the ISC are purely juridical, and
are quite incoherent with the practices of some companies in the very heart of
the association.
Another good example comes from the Belgian government, which voted
on the 7th April 2003 a law to increase the transparency of
electronic vote. The source code is available on the
internet.
“We need a clear citizens' vision of the way the Net ought to grow, a firm idea
of the kind of media environment we would like to see in the future. If we do
not develop such a vision for ourselves, the future will be shaped for us by
large commercial and political power holders.” Rheingold
The most famous cases are always around Microsoft and the antitrust processes,
run by the American and European governments. As this process
has been extensively discussed, we will rather analyse the
ISC arguments against the usage
of open source by the Belgian governmental institutions. We will analyze each of the
arguments and show how can have an opposite interpretation and become a clear
pro-Open Source argumentation.
The first “Nefarious” situation would be the risk for those
institutions to be restricted to a single type of software systems. This is really a
risk, but far higher for proprietary solutions with closed file
formats and protocols, and this is never mentioned by ISC. In the future, if the institutions would like to migrate to newer
software solutions, the conversion of existing information and adaptation of
technical interfaces could easily be performed, with the help of documentation
from the internet or the source code.
The second risk appointed by the ISC is the economical impact to
the “Belgian Software Industry”.
Considering that most of the profit made by pure Belgian companies comes from
service, and service is always needed, independent of the origin of the
software, this argument is difficult to be understood.
A third argument, purely juridical, is that actions forcing
institutions to use Open Source software would be against OMC dispositions to ensure the
freedom of international commerce. Without entering in a juridical debate, we
can easily challenge this viewpoint by arguing the validity of agreements
forcing hardware suppliers to sell PCs with
built-in Windows systems, with an implicit
and mandatory cost for the end-user.
The fourth ISC argument is that the
software market is dynamic and
competitive enough to be self-ruled by commercial and technological
differences. This is a very valid argument that could be used against the
public known fact that companies making part of ISC are blocking the usage of
Open Source solutions by building
commercial alliances.
The fifth argument, which comes from the ISC objectives, is to guarantee
that all pieces of software can participate equally in
the market, without preferences or legal restrictions. We should wait for the
legal conclusions of the antitrust cases against Microsoft, to see if legal restrictions are very independent of commercial
lobbies.
“Whatever chance remains for the survival of anything good may be in
the preservation and availability of information, the only commodity that will
be cheaper and more convenient.” Ted Nelson
We discussed before that a mix between proprietary and open source alternatives
may be preferred to a monopoly situation from either side. Many companies are
highly influenced by mutual agreements, and ban open source solutions
completely from their IT environments. To compensate this fact, governmental
institutions could favour Open Source solutions and force the
exchange of information with other companies to happen by open protocols – like XML – instead of proprietary
standards – like MS-Word or MS-Excel spreadsheets. This can
happen in e-government domains like taxes and social security, starting to be implemented today, and where conversions of
software and file formats are already
taking place. Considering the perspectives of increasing demand by such
services, they may boom the open standards and open source adherence by
the companies, which can later expand the usage of such technologies in
internal applications.
In Belgium, the first phase of a project to
implement tax payment online, with the development of 500 intelligent forms – a
third of them oriented to the general public and companies, two thirds for
internal usage – has chosen XML as the format for data exchange since 2001.
This may give an impulse in the usage of XML in other companies and citizens,
for other applications.
“Although there are those among us now who have been granted the
gift of being able to glimpse patterns of the future, probabilities tossed like
dice on the uneven blanket of space and time, even these gifted ones know that
no single future has been preordained for us or our posterity. Events are
fluid. The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of
specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality
this way or that.” – Dan Simmons in The Rise of Endymion
The roles of desktops and servers will continue, but the
peer-to-peer concept will allow them to
act together, with groups of desktops joining forces to outperform powerful
servers. This concept will continue to propagate to several domains and
communities outside technology, with distant people gathering via the networks
to make face to big commercial monopolies, and dominant political parties.
Democracy rules will need to be
reviewed, as the need for representatives will decrease, people being able to
give their own opinion at any time or any place, and have enough free
information to base their decision.
The real TCO - Total Cost of Ownership – is extremely difficult to be
calculated, for implementations of complex applications that require intensive
computing capacity, high availability, large databases, and communication with
many users via the Net. Of course, it must be considered, but it’s only one of the elements of
a good analysis matrix including factors like usability, compatibility with
existing systems, potential evolution of the hardware and software platform, and quality of support. Even if specialists,
consultants and service providers are there to provide the good answers, a
general knowledge about the infrastructure may increase the quality of the
project definition, and consequently reduce the risk factor in the decision
making process.
As said by Rheingold, “More people must learn about that leverage
and learn to use it, while we still have the freedom to do so, if it is to live
up to its potential. The odds are always good that big power and big money will
find a way to control access to virtual communities; big power and big money always found ways to control new
communications media when they emerged in the past. The Net is still out of control in
fundamental ways, but it might not stay that way for long. What we know and do
now is important because it is still possible for people around the world to
make sure this new sphere of vital human discourse remains open to the citizens
of the planet before the political and economic big boys seize it, censor it,
meter it, and sell it back to us.”
Not all software has to be open-source,
though. Only that software that is critical to research, to security, or to ensure communication with other companies has to be
open-source. Open protocols and open formats should be
used essentially in critical areas, where the information must be always
accessible independently of the usage of specific pieces of software. It’s very
reasonable for everything else to be proprietary and to then compete on that
basis in the marketplace. It’s how companies like HP, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM makes billions in revenue.
It’s how companies and application developers build their infrastructure. In
fact, the better all the pieces – open source and proprietary – are integrated,
the more the industry advances and the better everybody can compete with their
proprietary software, applications, services, and all the things that drive the
IT economy.
The usage of alternatives like MDA and XML may reduce the negative
impact of proprietary alternatives, by virtually eliminating the risk of
imprisonment in closed platforms and formats. However, they are not the only
elements to be considered – as demonstrated in the part 2 of this study – and
their usage must be clear and complete to be a real advantage. If the software
platforms are built around XML-based documents, this solution must be implemented
in every important part of the software, to hold all the information. No piece
of closed format should be used for strategic data.
The social and economical advantages for most countries and small and
medium companies should really push the governments to take part on this
battlefield. As proven in the recent gulf war, economical and political fights
are more important and take longer than the military ones. However, as stated
by Himanen, “The hacker open model could be transformed into a social model.
(…) We have seen that the hacker model can bring about great things in
cyberspace without governments and
corporations as mediators. It remains to be seen what great things individuals’
direct cooperation will accomplish in our ‘flesh reality’ ”.
Based on this study, a future landscape of the technical
infrastructure has been suggested and is available online (http://www.k-binder.be/INCA/). After browsing the online
chart, the reader can come back to the document, read selected topics and leave
comments in the website.
This thesis is published online to allow
Internet readers to read, comment and
complement the theories - the final part of the conclusion is only available in
the online version. The complexity of the document structure, with internal
hyperlinks, did not allow the creation of a simple HTML document. For the moment, a
web site has been created using LAMP to allow the readers to
comment the overall work and form an online community. PDF has been chosen as a format
for the document visualization.
The proprietary format will give place to XML, and
LAMP (Linux/ Apache/ MySQL/ PHP) will be used in the technical infrastructure for its
visualization. The online version will also contain hyperlink references to the
products, brands, books and sites discussed in this document.
In parallel, to revise the content,
newsgroups will be used to validate, and complement the concepts and theories.
Some of the most important organizations
that participate with standard definitions, studies, analysis and control of the
Internet protocols, names and addresses are:
§
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – Created
in October 1994, the W3C develops interoperable technologies (specifications,
guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. W3C is a forum
for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding.
- The Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF)
– The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international
community of network designers, operators,
vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet
architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any
interested individual.
- Internet Activities Board (IAB)
– Created in September 1984, IAB is a technical advisory group of the
Internet Society, who discuss issues pertinent to the Internet and set
Internet policies through decisions and task forces. The IAB designates
some Request For Comments (RFC) documents as Internet standards,
including Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The IAB provides advice to the IESG on working group formation and the
architectural implications of the IETF working group efforts.
§
Internet Engineering
Steering Group (IESG)
– The IESG is the standards approval
board for the IETF. It is responsible for technical management of
IETF activities and the Internet standards process,
administering the process according to the rules and procedures that have been
ratified by the ISOC Trustees.
The IESG ratifies or corrects the output from the IETF's Working Groups, gets
WGs started and finished, and makes sure that non-WG drafts that are about to
become RFCs are correct.
- The Internet Research Task Force
(IRTF) – Its
mission is to promote research of importance to the
evolution of the future Internet by creating focused, long-term and small
Research Groups working on topics related to Internet protocols, applications, architecture and technology. The Research
Groups are expected to have the stable long term (with respect to the
lifetime of the Research Group) membership needed to promote the
development of research collaboration and teamwork in exploring research
issues. Participation is by individual contributors, rather than by
representatives of organizations.
- Internet Society (ISOC)
- Brought into existence in January 1992, the Internet Society is a
professional membership organization of Internet experts that comments on
policies and practices additionally to overseeing a number of other boards
and task forces dealing with network policy issues.
- Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority (IANA)
– Based at ICANN, IANA is in charge of all "unique parameters" on the
Internet, including IP (Internet Protocol)
addresses.
- International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
— ISO is an international standards organization responsible for a wide
range of standards,
including many that are relevant to networking. Its best-known
contribution is the development of the OSI reference model and the
OSI protocol suite.
- American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
– Founded in October 1918, ANSI - which is also a member of the ISO - is the coordinating
body for voluntary standards groups within the United States. ANSI
developed the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) and other communications standards.
- European Telecommunications
Standards Institute (ETSI)
– Created in 1989, ETSI plays a major role in developing a wide range of
standards and other technical documentation as
Europe's contribution to worldwide standardization in telecommunications,
broadcasting and information technology. Its prime objective is to support
global harmonization by providing a forum in which all the key players can
contribute actively. It tries to compensate ANSI’s influence and it developed the standards Euro-RNIS and GSM.
- Electronic Industries Association (EIA)—EIA specifies electrical transmission standards,
including those used in networking. The EIA developed the widely used
EIA/TIA-232 standard (formerly known as RS-232).
- Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)
– Founded in 1963, the IEEE is a non-profit, technical professional
association of more than 377,000 individual members in 150 countries,
which defines networking and other standards.
The IEEE developed the widely used LAN standards IEEE 802.3 and IEEE 802.5.
§
International Telecommunication Union
(ITU) – Founded
on 17 May 1865, the ITU – headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland – is an
international organization within the United Nations System where governments and the private
sector coordinate global telecom networks and services.
- ITU Telecommunication
Standardization Sector (ITU-T)
– It is one of the three Sectors of the International Telecommunication
Union (ITU). It was created on 1 March 1993, replacing the former
International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT) whose origins go back to 1865. Its mission is to ensure an
efficient and on-time production of high quality standards covering all fields of
telecommunications.
- Object Management Group (OMG)
– The OMG was founded in April 1989 by eleven companies
and in October 1989, it began independent operations as a not-for-profit
corporation, including in 2002 about 800 members. The OMG was formed to
create a component-based software marketplace by
hastening the introduction of standardized object software. The organization's
charter includes the establishment of industry guidelines and detailed
object management specifications to provide a common framework for
application development.
All trademarks
are the property of their respective owners.
All the photos are © 2002 Joyce Binder.
Figure 1 – The
three tiers under the scope of the first part of this analysis 2
Figure 2 – Examples
of de facto standards and their connectivity 7
Figure 3 – IBM
ZSeries 900_ 11
Figure 4 – HP RISC
rp8400_ 11
Figure 5 – DELL
Poweredge 1600SC_ 12
Figure 6 –
Traditional Server families 12
Figure 7 – The new
generation of servers 14
Figure 8 – Desktop
x Network computers 15
Figure 9 – UNIX
Chronology 23
Figure 10 – Windows
client evolution_ 30
Figure 11 – Windows
server evolution_ 30
Figure 12 –
Operating systems – Openness and scalability 33
Figure 13 –
Operating systems – set-up costs and proven reliability 34
Figure 14 – The OSI
model - Seven layers and two categories 35
Figure 15 –
Correspondence between the OSI layers and some Internet Protocols. 36
Figure 16 – Model
Driven Architecture 44
Figure 17 – CORBA
request from client to object 47
Figure 18 – CORBA
remote invocation flow using ORB-to-ORB communication_ 47
Figure 19 – Java platform components 53
Figure 20 – Java compiler and interpreter 53
Figure 21 – The
Java platform and editions 55
Figure 22 - The
Components of Microsoft .NET-Connected Software 59
Figure 23 -
Microsoft Host Integration Server 60
Figure 24 – Network
power spiral and external factors 78
Figure 25 – Two
cycles of positive feedback_ 85
Figure 26 –
Negative feedback_ 88
Figure 27 – Benefits
of Open Source / Standards-based software 94
Figure 28 –
Comparison between Open Source and Proprietary software costs 94
Figure 29 – UNIX
and Linux catalysing the shift of informational power 97
Figure 30 –
Potential applications to be hosted in Open Source solutions 98
Table 1 –
Comparison of Open Source licensing practices. 5
Table 2 –
Comparison between de facto and de juri standards. 7
Table 3 - Cost
comparison summary. 92
Table 4 – Evolution
and Control strategies. 96
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David A. Wheeler
http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc
74. Counting potatoes: The size of Debian 2.2
©2001
Jesús M. González-Barahona, Miguel A. Ortuño Pérez, Pedro de las Heras Quirós,
José Centeno González and Vicente Matellán Olivera.
http://people.debian.org/~jgb/debian-counting/counting-potatoes/
75. Microsoft Windows 2000
Server to Linux Comparison
©
2001 Microsoft
http://members.microsoft.com/partner/products/Servers/Windows2000Server/Windows_2000_Server_to_Linux_Comparison.aspx
76. A strategic comparison of Windows vs.
Unix
©
2001 LinuxWorld.com / Paul Murphy
http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/1018.tco.html
77. Linux vs.
Windows - Total
Cost of Ownership Comparison
© 2002 Cybersource® Pty. Ltd.
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/linuxvswindowstco.pdf
78. Unilever moves to Linux for
savings
31-01-2003
Andy
McCue.
http://www.vnunet.be/detalle.asp?ids=/News/Enterprise_Computing/Strategy/20030131023
79. Morgan Stanley turns
to Linux
30-01-2003
Jonathan Collins
http://www.vnunet.be/detalle.asp?ids=/News/Enterprise_Computing/Strategy/20030130004
80. "Fixer une frontière à l'open
source"
28-11-2002
Jose Delameilleure
http://www.vnunet.be/detalle.asp?ids=/News/Enterprise_Computing/20021128013
81. Un décret pro-logiciels libres jugé
'inopportun' et "néfaste"
25-03-2003
Olivier Fabes
http://www.vnunet.be/datanews/detalle.asp?ids=/News/Top_Stories/Enterprise_Computing/20030325006
82. Retired Microsoft man
issues Linux warning
20-02-2003
Nick Farrell
http://www.vnunet.be/detalle.asp?ids=/News/Enterprise_Computing/Technology/20030220015
83. Linux plus
cher que Windows
04-12-2002
Jose Delameilleure
http://www.vnunet.be/detalle.asp?ids=/News/Enterprise_Computing/20021204009
84. Understanding XML
Eric
Armstrong
http://java.sun.com/webservices/docs/1.0/tutorial/doc/IntroXML.html
85. Clear-cut choices in battle over Web services
By Brad Murphy
Special to ZDNet - December 12, 2002
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-977034.html
86. What's Next: The Future of Web Services
Microsoft
http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/understanding/whatsnext/default.aspx
87. What are XML Web
Services?
Microsoft -
January 14, 2002
http://www.microsoft.com/net/basics/xmlservices.asp
88. .NET Glossary
Microsoft - March
31, 2003
http://www.microsoft.com/net/basics/glossary.asp
89. How to Get .NET
7 Steps to Connecting Your World of Information, People, Systems, and
Devices
Microsoft -
September 13, 2002
http://www.microsoft.com/net/basics/glossary.asp
90. Defining the Basic Elements of .NET
Microsoft -
January 24, 2003
http://www.microsoft.com/net/basics/whatis.asp
91. What Is .NET?
Microsoft
http://www.microsoft.com/net/basics/
92. Whatis: .NET
searchWebServices.com
Definition
http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid26_gci342248,00.html
93. Microsoft® Host Integration Server 2000 Product Overview
© 2002 Microsoft Corporation
http://www.microsoft.com/hiserver/techinfo/HISoverviewWP.pdf
94. WEB SERVICES AND OPEN SOURCE
Preston
Gralla
Part
1:
http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid26_gci868183,00.html
Part 2:
http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid26_gci870011,00.html?FromTaxonomy=%2Fpr%2F288973
95. LAMP Lights
the Way to Web Services for Financial Reports Firm
08/02/2002
- Robert McMillan
http://www.oetrends.com/cgi-bin/page_display.cgi?75
96. XML and the
Second-Generation Web
JON
BOSAK and TIM BRAY - May 06, 1999
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0008C786-91DB-1CD6-B4A8809EC588EEDF
97. Introduction to OMG's Unified Modeling Language™ (UML™)
©
1997-2002 Object Management Group, Inc.
http://www.omg.org/gettingstarted/what_is_uml.htm
98. UML 2001: A
standardization Odissey
Cris
Kobryn
© 1999 ACM 0002-0782/99/1000
(This article appeared in Communications of the ACM, vol. 42, no. 10,
October 1999)
http://www.omg.org/attachments/pdf/UML_2001_CACM_Oct99_p29-Kobryn.pdf
99. MDA® Specifications
© 1997-2003 Object
Management Group, Inc.
http://www.omg.org/mda/specs.htm
100.
CORBA BASICS
©
1997-2003 Object Management Group, Inc.
http://www.omg.org/gettingstarted/corbafaq.htm
101.
Extreme
Programming and
Open Source Software
Message Posted 13 Nov 2000 by “apm” and replies
http://www.advogato.org/article/202.html
102.
Study: Big
companies save big from open source
By John Blau
© IDG News Service, 05/08/03
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0508studybigc.html
Seminars & Commercial Presentations
103.
Open Source and
Free Software
Richard
M. Stallman – GNU Project
104.
e-mail evolution
By
Eric Allman, author of sendmail
105.
Intel and
Linux
Rod
O'Shea - EMEA Enterprise Business Director - Intel
106.
SAS and
Linux
Patrick
Xhonneux - Director Business Development - SAS Institute
107.
Oracle and
Linux
Dries
Cuypers - Product Marketing Manager - Oracle Belgium
108.
SAP and
Linux
Denis
Rousseau - Business Development Manager - SAP AG
109.
HP and
Linux
Urs
Rengli - Director Marketing and Alliances EMEA - HP
110.
IBM and
Linux
Several
IBM speakers
111.
High Availability Solutions for Linux
John
Banfield - EMEA Director - Steeleye
This paper is Copyright © 2003 Jean Binder.
Verbatim copying and duplication is permitted in any medium provided the source
is mentioned and this notice is preserved.
