Daemon News 199906 : CorporateBSD

CorporateBSD

Copyright © 1999 Donald S. Wilde

Basic Business Sense

When you put a company together, your business plan includes costs and assets and predictions. No matter what the product or service, your bankers and Wall Street are going to look at the numbers. Unfortunately, between the lines is some nebulous thing called "value". You don't get to put numbers to this but it's critical to your business success. In the Executive Summary - which should be the last thing you write, according to all experts - you get to crow about all of this value stuff and how it's going to make you rich.

Value is more a perception than a thing. You believe you can sell your product for a certain price. Is that its value? Or is it the customer's use of it that determines the value of your product? What if I told you that many marketing experts will tell you that you actually can sell a product at many different prices, depending on how you pitch it? The product is the same, the end-user use remains the same, but the price can be very different and people will still buy. If price can vary, what does that imply about value? Can value be different depending on how you pitch it? Or how you think of it?

BSD is a tough, dependable computer operating system. It's also the foundation of the Internet. What is web port 80 but an open BSD API socket? Thousands of internet servers and gateways run BSD UN*X. Its reliability and efficiency are legendary, and it's one of the most stable multitasking operating systems around.

It's also "free". What an important word! Some of you pay money to get it, but it's not the price that's the important "free" with BSD. It's the lack of restriction on what you can do with BSD that's the key to value. Not only does the package come complete with all the source code and the tools - with source code - to compile it and modify it and debug it, you can do anything you want with it.

I don't recommend that you print out the entire /usr/src tree on green-bar paper, shred it, and then sleep on it. You could, though. You could also make a million CD's and sell them for a dollar and ninety-nine cents each. You could also pretty up the package, add a booklet and sell fifty thousand for $39.95. Now go copy the system onto two million PC's and announce your entry into the supercomputer-for-hire business. What a range of available "perceptions" there are for BSD's value! From valueless (but comfortable!) to mega-corporate strategic weapon and everywhere in between.

In each of these suggestions, the BSD code is the same. You as the possessor of BSD code can choose to use it in any manner you'd like as though you owned it. You don't own it, but you can act as though you did. Think about all the myriad programmer hours that went into BSD development. Aside from the copyright ownership, you can use it as though _you_ developed it all by yourself. With the source code, you can understand it completely, you can change it a little or a lot, you can even call it "Froolap" and sell it on Mars. Well, okay, maybe that last is a dumb idea. Back to "understand it completely". The beauty of BSD is that you don't need to understand all of the functionality of every piece in order to use it effectively as a strategic business weapon.

It is absolutely amazing how the community of BSD users collectively maintains the code base and supports each other. You individually don't have to understand it all because you collectively do. An outstanding example of this is the rapidity with which patches become available for the rare security flaw discovered. You would think that giving the crackers your source code would make BSD the most porous OS around, but exactly the opposite is true. All of the holes have been fixed, most of them long ago.

When Bill Gates first rolled out his BASIC for the Altair he angered a lot of people but he also started himself on the road to riches. He did it by creating a restrictive license for his BASIC. In doing so, he started the microcomputer "software industry", but he also shattered the cameraderie that surrounded the early developers. You could emulate him by packaging BSD as a new super-duper operating system, and market the 7734 out of it. Probably make enough to actually pay some people to improve it a bit. This is the business model the Linux camp is gravitating towards, with many competing distributions competing for user dollars. Being quite successful with it, too, as you might expect.

The BSD model of business success has been different, with the exception of CheapBytes, Walnut Creek and the Japanese variants. There is not a proliferation of distributions. What BSD users do is _use_ BSD and profit from it. Profit can be as mundane as the difference between paying $795 per computer for an operating system versus paying $39.95 and loading twenty computers from the one CD set. It can be the difference between buying a "workstation" and building one from commodity PC components that's faster for half the money and comes with lots more software.

BSD is showing up in lots of products these days. Because of the freedom in the license, manufacturers are under no obligation to disclose the fact that BSD code is a contributing factor to their success, but many do. Whistle Communications has long proudly displayed their Interjet's FreeBSD heritage, and now Apple Computer has joined them in announcing their thanks for the benefits of the source code of all three BSDs in creating their new Darwin server product. Probably the smartest new product roll-out for Apple since the Mac, they have made it a unique blend of open source tradition and proprietary innovation.

There are many new products on the market that are not so openly advertised. New routers, VPN gateways and specialized servers are showing up in the marketplace and BSD software is the key to their rapid development. Consider the difference between the cost of developing software equivalent to BSD versus the minor time investment necessary to understand it well enough to adapt it to your own business purposes. Even if your application is simpler, it's far easier to remove options from proven code than it is to develop powerful and complex algorithms from scratch. Your product has a far better chance of rolling out relatively bug free if it's built on BSD code.

The same holds true for the rest of us, whose applications don't even involve changing the operating system code at all. The BSD socket model is your best connection to the Internet, hands down. The Internet is built to this interface, and the BSD networking stack is the original reference implementation of the TCP/IP standard. The Apache web server's home platform is FreeBSD, though it's been ported to many other operating systems with varying success. Like the BSD OS itself, Apache is distributed under a completely free usage license, and it's the most popular webserver on the market. A powerful and well documented system despite its "price tag" of $0.00, the Apache server and BSD provide a solid and easily extensible platform for website development that can expand to utilize the many other features of BSD and its included software for unique systems applications.

With almost thirty years of continuous development as an open source system, BSD is a well known, well understood, and well debugged operating system. Although some of the emulations of proprietary protocols such as NFS are not truly interoperable, the BSD system itself is rugged and virtually indestructible even under extreme load. Given that its native networking protocol of TCP/IP is the protocol that's at the heart of the Internet, BSD servers are second to none in filling bandwidth with webpages and files, as evidenced by the volume of traffic served by ftp.cdrom.com, which held the single-CPU ftp record for a long time before recently being upgraded from a Pentium Pro 200.

New web systems are going to be the "retail stores" and "factories" of the twenty-first century. The success of FreeBSD-based Yahoo! has been reinforced by the fact that their website never breaks, despite its functionality being distributed over many dozens of machines. They haven't experienced the kinds of teething pains that have sidelined many web ventures built on lesser foundations. The Internet is a global arena for business, as good for fine artists with customer lists in the teens per year as it is for service providers like U.S.West whose simultaneous supported volume runs into many terabytes per minute. BSD fits the pocketbook of the fine artist and it's powerful enough to be the strategic advantage for the successful megacorp.

The robust scalability of BSD is what provides for a successful growth path from "twinkle in the eye" to "wildly successful" for good ideas. The efficiency ofthe tasking, networking and virtual memory routines combine to allow BSD systems to incrementally grow into load-balanced server farms with ease as customer volume explodes in the global marketplace.

Product or service, BSD provides the platform that enables business to do business with an enormous boost on the shoulders of thousands of contributors. The fact that they aren't obligated to doesn't stop money-making corporations from supporting the free and open code base with resources and code contributions, profiting further from the free debugging of worldwide scrutiny.

This is true despite the billions of dollars being spent by Microsoft and other operating system peddlers to convince you that their solutions are better. While it is true that there are some proprietary services that are available only on proprietary OS platforms, the vast majority of real-world system tasks can be accomplished with alacrity on BSD-hosted systems, and the tools to create unique and profitable new system concepts are included and well supported by source code, documentation and the internet community.

I started this article talking about price and value and ended up with profit, profit, profit and profit. Profit from conceptual brilliance and profit through multiplication. Combine those with profit by BSD's legal untouchability and freely-available raw power, and you can say that you have opportunities for profit to the fourth power!

Our friendly mascot D. Mon sure isn't the Devil, but he sure does have one heck of an operating system, and you don't have to fork out a lot to use it, either!

	CorporateBSD Copyright © 1999 Donald S. Wilde Basic Business Sense When you put a company together, your business plan includes costs and assets and predictions. No matter what the product or service, your bankers and Wall Street are going to look at the numbers. Unfortunately, between the lines is some nebulous thing called "value". You don't get to put numbers to this but it's critical to your business success. In the Executive Summary - which should be the last thing you write, according to all experts - you get to crow about all of this value stuff and how it's going to make you rich. Value is more a perception than a thing. You believe you can sell your product for a certain price. Is that its value? Or is it the customer's use of it that determines the value of your product? What if I told you that many marketing experts will tell you that you actually can sell a product at many different prices, depending on how you pitch it? The product is the same, the end-user use remains the same, but the price can be very different and people will still buy. If price can vary, what does that imply about value? Can value be different depending on how you pitch it? Or how you think of it? BSD is a tough, dependable computer operating system. It's also the foundation of the Internet. What is web port 80 but an open BSD API socket? Thousands of internet servers and gateways run BSD UN*X. Its reliability and efficiency are legendary, and it's one of the most stable multitasking operating systems around. It's also "free". What an important word! Some of you pay money to get it, but it's not the price that's the important "free" with BSD. It's the lack of restriction on what you can do with BSD that's the key to value. Not only does the package come complete with all the source code and the tools - with source code - to compile it and modify it and debug it, you can do anything you want with it. I don't recommend that you print out the entire /usr/src tree on green-bar paper, shred it, and then sleep on it. You could, though. You could also make a million CD's and sell them for a dollar and ninety-nine cents each. You could also pretty up the package, add a booklet and sell fifty thousand for $39.95. Now go copy the system onto two million PC's and announce your entry into the supercomputer-for-hire business. What a range of available "perceptions" there are for BSD's value! From valueless (but comfortable!) to mega-corporate strategic weapon and everywhere in between. In each of these suggestions, the BSD code is the same. You as the possessor of BSD code can choose to use it in any manner you'd like as though you owned it. You don't own it, but you can act as though you did. Think about all the myriad programmer hours that went into BSD development. Aside from the copyright ownership, you can use it as though _you_ developed it all by yourself. With the source code, you can understand it completely, you can change it a little or a lot, you can even call it "Froolap" and sell it on Mars. Well, okay, maybe that last is a dumb idea. Back to "understand it completely". The beauty of BSD is that you don't need to understand all of the functionality of every piece in order to use it effectively as a strategic business weapon. It is absolutely amazing how the community of BSD users collectively maintains the code base and supports each other. You individually don't have to understand it all because you collectively do. An outstanding example of this is the rapidity with which patches become available for the rare security flaw discovered. You would think that giving the crackers your source code would make BSD the most porous OS around, but exactly the opposite is true. All of the holes have been fixed, most of them long ago. When Bill Gates first rolled out his BASIC for the Altair he angered a lot of people but he also started himself on the road to riches. He did it by creating a restrictive license for his BASIC. In doing so, he started the microcomputer "software industry", but he also shattered the cameraderie that surrounded the early developers. You could emulate him by packaging BSD as a new super-duper operating system, and market the 7734 out of it. Probably make enough to actually pay some people to improve it a bit. This is the business model the Linux camp is gravitating towards, with many competing distributions competing for user dollars. Being quite successful with it, too, as you might expect. The BSD model of business success has been different, with the exception of CheapBytes, Walnut Creek and the Japanese variants. There is not a proliferation of distributions. What BSD users do is _use_ BSD and profit from it. Profit can be as mundane as the difference between paying $795 per computer for an operating system versus paying $39.95 and loading twenty computers from the one CD set. It can be the difference between buying a "workstation" and building one from commodity PC components that's faster for half the money and comes with lots more software. BSD is showing up in lots of products these days. Because of the freedom in the license, manufacturers are under no obligation to disclose the fact that BSD code is a contributing factor to their success, but many do. Whistle Communications has long proudly displayed their Interjet's FreeBSD heritage, and now Apple Computer has joined them in announcing their thanks for the benefits of the source code of all three BSDs in creating their new Darwin server product. Probably the smartest new product roll-out for Apple since the Mac, they have made it a unique blend of open source tradition and proprietary innovation. There are many new products on the market that are not so openly advertised. New routers, VPN gateways and specialized servers are showing up in the marketplace and BSD software is the key to their rapid development. Consider the difference between the cost of developing software equivalent to BSD versus the minor time investment necessary to understand it well enough to adapt it to your own business purposes. Even if your application is simpler, it's far easier to remove options from proven code than it is to develop powerful and complex algorithms from scratch. Your product has a far better chance of rolling out relatively bug free if it's built on BSD code. The same holds true for the rest of us, whose applications don't even involve changing the operating system code at all. The BSD socket model is your best connection to the Internet, hands down. The Internet is built to this interface, and the BSD networking stack is the original reference implementation of the TCP/IP standard. The Apache web server's home platform is FreeBSD, though it's been ported to many other operating systems with varying success. Like the BSD OS itself, Apache is distributed under a completely free usage license, and it's the most popular webserver on the market. A powerful and well documented system despite its "price tag" of $0.00, the Apache server and BSD provide a solid and easily extensible platform for website development that can expand to utilize the many other features of BSD and its included software for unique systems applications. With almost thirty years of continuous development as an open source system, BSD is a well known, well understood, and well debugged operating system. Although some of the emulations of proprietary protocols such as NFS are not truly interoperable, the BSD system itself is rugged and virtually indestructible even under extreme load. Given that its native networking protocol of TCP/IP is the protocol that's at the heart of the Internet, BSD servers are second to none in filling bandwidth with webpages and files, as evidenced by the volume of traffic served by ftp.cdrom.com, which held the single-CPU ftp record for a long time before recently being upgraded from a Pentium Pro 200. New web systems are going to be the "retail stores" and "factories" of the twenty-first century. The success of FreeBSD-based Yahoo! has been reinforced by the fact that their website never breaks, despite its functionality being distributed over many dozens of machines. They haven't experienced the kinds of teething pains that have sidelined many web ventures built on lesser foundations. The Internet is a global arena for business, as good for fine artists with customer lists in the teens per year as it is for service providers like U.S.West whose simultaneous supported volume runs into many terabytes per minute. BSD fits the pocketbook of the fine artist and it's powerful enough to be the strategic advantage for the successful megacorp. The robust scalability of BSD is what provides for a successful growth path from "twinkle in the eye" to "wildly successful" for good ideas. The efficiency ofthe tasking, networking and virtual memory routines combine to allow BSD systems to incrementally grow into load-balanced server farms with ease as customer volume explodes in the global marketplace. Product or service, BSD provides the platform that enables business to do business with an enormous boost on the shoulders of thousands of contributors. The fact that they aren't obligated to doesn't stop money-making corporations from supporting the free and open code base with resources and code contributions, profiting further from the free debugging of worldwide scrutiny. This is true despite the billions of dollars being spent by Microsoft and other operating system peddlers to convince you that their solutions are better. While it is true that there are some proprietary services that are available only on proprietary OS platforms, the vast majority of real-world system tasks can be accomplished with alacrity on BSD-hosted systems, and the tools to create unique and profitable new system concepts are included and well supported by source code, documentation and the internet community. I started this article talking about price and value and ended up with profit, profit, profit and profit. Profit from conceptual brilliance and profit through multiplication. Combine those with profit by BSD's legal untouchability and freely-available raw power, and you can say that you have opportunities for profit to the fourth power! Our friendly mascot D. Mon sure isn't the Devil, but he sure does have one heck of an operating system, and you don't have to fork out a lot to use it, either! Donald S. Wilde, don@Wilde-Media.com

CorporateBSD

Copyright © 1999 Donald S. Wilde

Basic Business Sense

Donald S. Wilde, don@Wilde-Media.com