The true cost of roll your own Linux (Part 2)
May 9th, 2008Yesterday, I discussed some of the disadvantages of taking the roll your own approach to Linux. Today, I’ll dive deeper into the Linux development process and why it isn’t commercially viable option off the shelf.
When you really understand Linux itself and the open source process, it is a clearly stated goal of the open source team (and the Linux team in particular) that the goal of the process is not to produce production quality, ready to go software at all. In reality, Linux is an R&D project. It’s a very fast moving R&D project that cycles every five to six months, and as part of the process the previous versions are essentially abandoned.
In that sense, Linux is a classic software engineer’s dream because it’s always about 90 percent done, and it’s been sort of roughly tested at best. It’s a wonderful process, but the process does not result in a commercial quality operating system. So, if you take a hard look at building your own variation of Linux, not only is it in general not worth your time to do this, but specifically, if you look at what you’ll actually have to do to the software (given that it was not designed to be used off the shelf) then it’s even more obvious that you don’t want to be doing this.
It’s an even more unstable starting point than you might have realized.
In that context, most business analysis would say that Linux is something that you’ll want to find a supplier for. There should be a software supply chain and that’s MontaVista’s role. We take all of that chaos with Linux and make it into something that you can inject into your product cycles and use. It’s something that you can really leverage, and in turn leverage your engineers to give you a different chain in values.
It’s pretty simple, and it’s why we’ve succeeded in the sense that we do have a lot of customers with all sorts of products that have gone to market and succeeded with our brand of Linux. At the highest level, it’s working, but I’ve seen surveys that say, yes Linux is going to be successful, and yes, people are going to use commercial Linux, but more people are going to roll their own. It doesn’t add up. I don’t understand why a company that makes instrumentation has engineers on their staff that are experts on the internals of a very complex operating system that their customers could care less if they’re using.
Even in our industry folks don’t understand software, and particularly don’t understand the software process and the costs. That’s why software projects are late, are buggy and run over cost. It’s a mysterious substance and you’d think that any manager, having an engineer with a CD with Linux on it with 30 million lines of source code, would say, “get that out of the building. We’re not doing well with the software we have already. Why do we want another 30 million lines of unstable code?”
It makes no sense to me.
