Canonical's Closed LandscapeCanonical's Closed Landscape

Something interesting is happening with Canonical's software portfolio. They're offering a new system-management server, but it's not an open source offering. If memory serves, it'll be Canonical's first venture into offering a closed-source product with open-source connectivity. Aberration or evolution?

Background first. The product's full name is Canonical Landscape Dedicated Server, and it's a reworking of an Ubuntu system management service they've previously made available only as a SaaS run-in-the-cloud app. Dedicated Server runs on local hardware, and requires that you buy the service - $8K for the server, one-time, with a subscription cost of $150 for each node. (Guided install courtesy of Canonical is $2K.) Support's extra in top of that, at $2,750 for 24×7 coverage for each system running Landscape. Functionally, it's the same as the cloud-hosted service, but a local implementation may be more appealing to people who are touchy about depending on the cloud. You can also manage both physical and cloud-hosted instances of Ubuntu with it.

What's making people sit up and pay attention is the fact that the server component is not open source. It's a proprietary product. Granted, there are open source implementations of the same idea out there from other Linux vendors -- consider Red Hat's Spacewalk, but it's totally unsupported by the company. And while Canonical is debating the idea of opening up some of Landscape, I wouldn't bet anything more than your last freeway toll on it.

What this means to me is that the idea of the "pure" open source player a la Ingres -- someone who provides all the bits for free and only charges for support and consulting -- is never going to constitute more than a small slice of the open source landscape in the future. Most of it is going to be one variant or another of the open core concept -- a basic platform that's free, with cost-plus pro-level add-ons, maintenance, hosting, support and consulting as the cost generators.

There's no formula for deciding who chooses to be wholly open and who doesn't -- it'll depend on the scope of the project, how radical a departure it is from existing open source, and whether or not it's supported by a company that already has sound footing in selling this stuff. And, ultimately, it's their choice. If they see a future for themselves by providing strategically-sold closed bits to people willing to pay for such functionality, that's a future which means they can guarantee that much more development of the open stuff, too.

information Analytics has published an independent analysis of the next-generation Web applications. Download the report here (registration required).

Follow me and the rest of information on Twitter.