The Other OSS Stack

I've written before about the growing enterprise open source stack, which pieces together disparate software to form a complete enterprise solution. Now here's a rather different kind of stack:

Canonical Ltd, the lead sponsor of the popular Ubuntu operating system, and Linspire, Inc. the developer of the commercial desktop Linux operating system of the same name, today announced plans for a technology partnership that integrates core competencies from each company into the other's open source Linux offerings.

Linspire will transition from Debian to Ubuntu as the base for their Linspire and Freespire desktop operating systems. (http://www.linspire.com/OSblocks). This will mean that Linspire users will benefit from Ubuntu's fast moving development cycles and focus on usability. The Freespire community will start seeing early releases of Freespire 2.0 based on Ubuntu in the first quarter of 2007, with the final release expected in the 2nd quarter of 2007, following the official release of Ubuntu 7.04 in April.

What this means in practice, as this neat diagram shows, is that Freespire, upon which Linspire is based, will now use Ubuntu as its own base. Since that, in its turn, is based on Debian (which Linspire used previously), we now have a neat stack of distributions, moving from Debian through Ubuntu and Freespire to Linspire, which progressively add more features - and take off more freedom as they add more proprietary code in one form or another. (Via DesktopLinux.com.)

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Matt Asay has an excellent riposte to a singularly wrong-headed post entitled "Open source won't doom traditional enterprise software". As he rightly says, the real question is not the one the above piece thinks to deal with - "Is Enterprise Software Doomed?" - but

"What will be the primary bases for competition once everything is more (or less) open source?"

I believe the answers are also an explanation of why open source does doom traditional enterprise software, because the key differentiators will be things like innovation and serving the customer. Whatever lip-service traditional software companies pay to these ideas, the closed nature of their code, and the fact that customers are locked into their products means that they simply don't deliver either in the way that open source companies will do once they become the norm.