The Hindu Business Line : Choose your side of the road

Consumer electronics companies can no longer put off choosing between Microsoft and Linux. Either way, there is a price to pay. eWorld scans both sides of the software road as companies make their choice.

BEING pulled in opposite directions cannot be pleasant. Less so if it is Microsoft pulling on one side while a bunch of rather anonymous geeks are on the other. Still less so, with business practice on Microsoft's side — and emerging business logic on the side of the open source enthusiasts on the other.

It makes the average consumer electronics (CE) company wonder if the billions of dollars to be made in selling TVs is worth the worry.

Obviously, it is. Witness the aligning and testing of strengths that is going on in the CE industry today with several CE companies preferring to be Microsoft partners and others going the Linux way. Clearly, both types of companies see business logic. The choices equipment manufacturers face and the decisions they take can have far-reaching consequences not only for their consumers and shareholders but also for a myriad others — including a large chunk of India's $4.5 billion of software exports. eWorld takes a look at the decision chain.

If you are among that bunch of billion-dollar companies trying to get people to buy flatter televisions or curvier music systems, you may not relish having to choose between the expensive comfort of the Microsoft decision and the low-cost, flexible, but hard work, of choosing the Linux way.

However, as more and more equipment manufacturers are finding out, there is more to this decision than a tussle between Microsoft and open-source. Being in the middle of such a tussle, admittedly, gives a company a new perspective on things altogether.

Similar decisions will have to be made by an increasing number of companies in a variety of industries.

If it is the CE companies now, it will soon be the turn of the telecom original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and the others will soon have theirs.

Chain reaction for chipmakers

Semiconductor companies have been catering to the demand from their customers for more and more product functionality on the chip itself. For them, it means greater and greater investment in software development — apart from the demands of the hardware design that they traditionally do. This software development either happens in-house or by outsourcing the work to independent software vendors (ISVs). An additional dimension for them now is the offshoring of such development.

Although chipmakers have been catering to customer requirements, the most important market trend they see now is the need for more generic, powerful and versatile processors. Two major industry trends determine this requirement. The first is the logical move towards open standards-based design and development. This is now a fact of life and most companies have to grapple with the shift away from closed, proprietary systems.

The next trend is that end-users now require a variety of functionalities on each device. A mobile phone now needs to be able to take pictures, download and play music and perhaps have capabilities for streaming videos. Whereas each of those functionalities catered to different markets earlier, they all now go into the same device. Hence the need for powerful, generic chips that can be put to a variety of uses. With so many demands from the CE companies, chipmakers might prefer that CE companies either do the sourcing themselves — either from Microsoft, which provides a compelling alternative — or through development under the Linux GPL.

An eye on alternatives

Even as the Microsoft partner network keeps expanding, there are many companies eager to focus on alternatives. The reason: Cost.

Towards the end of the last decade, the Microsoft Chairman, Bill Gates, had said that the company would rather people used even pirated Microsoft software because they would like it so much that the company could figure out how to collect its dues sometime. Although that reference was to the Chinese consumer's preference for pirated Windows CDs, recent moves by the company and user opinion all indicate the company is in the `collecting' stage now. For CE companies committed to Microsoft technologies, it involves high expenses with the certainty of higher expenses in the future.

The alternative: Open Source and the Linux way of development. True, this involves a learning curve and, for products in the near future, the Linux way may not be the fastest. In the long term, however, development through the Linux community and under the GPL is the only likely alternative to becoming a Microsoft partner. As open source becomes mainstream, even fashionable, more and more companies are learning what it takes to operate under the GPL and how to still keep their intellectual property (IP) intact. It has been amply demonstrated that the Linux model is stable, and suitable for companies with long product pipelines.

CE companies and many other OEMs in a variety of industries are finding that with increasing software content in their products, the best way to differentiate themselves is by concentrating on developing the software that best enhances their core competence. It is only by concentrating on end-user experience and outsourcing the development of generic product functionalities that they can value-add, hold intellectual property, and differentiate themselves from the competition.

The costs of choosing either Microsoft or Linux will have to be paid. In the case of Linux, though, it will only have to be paid once.

That will be in the currency of a learning curve, as developers and managers get up to speed on the choices they have in working under the GPL.

As CE companies make their choices, independent software vendors in India and elsewhere too will have to quickly figure out how to cater to their markets. To get into the really profitable IP-driven revenue-stream, they will have to realise that as customers commit to one or the other course, they too will have no choice but the Linux way of development. Or choose Microsoft technologies and subsume their IP ambitions to Microsoft. To be sure, choosing Microsoft will mean easier plug-and-play kind of software development, especially when dealing with legacy Microsoft technologies.

Also, the Redmond company has tied up with a number of content creators and distributors - a fact that device-makers are rapidly discovering to be a necessity as more and more devices become multi-functional and content and distribution become key. However, many are the OEMs preferring to use Linux and they are working with each other, for instance, Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, Hitachi, IBM, NEC, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics and Sharp.

This involves not just familiarising oneself with new technologies but also learning to work, create, identify and protect IP under the GPL.

A word of caution

The freedom from licensing itself may be sufficient reason to choose the Linux model.

However, as Linux advocate and consultant Atul Chitnis cautions, it is important that OEMs understand how things work before they dive into this new world. Critics of Linux and open source critics use the IP angle to create confusion about the suitability of Linux for software development involving IP.

Linux is not free of licences and cannot be treated as freeware. Linux is licensed under the Gnu General Public Licence, which means that if you distribute a program governed by it, you must also make available the source code for that program, complete with the same freedoms which you received when you got the code. IP cannot be created on modified programmes, only on code that is not previously licensed.

That is the secret of successful Linux deployment by OEMs, according to Chitnis. IP protection is possible for work done on unmodified embedded Linux platform, for instance.

Of course the open source community does not favour such a use but neither is it expressly prohibited by the terms of the GPL. These, and such other strategies, will have to be explored by companies wishing to take advantage of the Linux way.

Picture by Shaju John

priya@thehindu.co.in

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