Business as Unusual

By Wes Peters

Open source licenses have been in the news a lot lately.  

Between rumors of updates to the ubiquitous Gnu Public License (GPL) to the open source release of Solaris and the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) from Sun have fueled new discussion on this old topic, raising issues of whether we really need hundreds of slightly different licenses, and renewed interest in one or a very few open source licenses that can easily be understood by businessmen.

While remaining skeptical as to whether most businessmen really care about licensing at all, I am curious to learn how (or if) all this open source licensing and software have translated into the business world?  Let’s take a tour through some corners of the open source business you may not be familiar with.

A few months ago I was casting about for a small system to use as a mail server for a handful of users, preferably one that would run NetBSD.  I found a number of interesting single boards, but those generally require a lot of system level engineering to build an enclosure, power supply, etc.  There are the ever-present Mini-ITX motherboards and some off the shelf cases available, but they present no real challenge and still have quite a power draw.  What I really wanted was an existing appliance-like product that could be re-purposed, or perhaps just upgraded, to meet my needs.  I was willing to consider relatively odd solutions, such as a hard drive with a CF interface, so long as the end result would be reliable for 24x7 operation.

The first item I came across was a long discussion about some custom firmware for a Linksys wireless access point.  The access point does not seem to have much available in the way of storage assets, so probably isn’t a great candidate for a mail server.  There is a thriving software development community that has built up around this device and similar ones that are based on a Broadcom reference platform, and the OpenWrt open source project has become a focal point for these developments.

Some of these units do have USB controllers, which means with the correct software could probably be made to use a USB hard drive for storage, probably meeting most of my needs.  On the other hand, my little mail server didn’t need to be a wireless access point or a router, so this wasn’t a perfect candidate.  The many various sites dedicated to Linksys Linux distributions did lead me in two associated and interesting directions, however.

In addition to the wireless access point, Linksys makes a small network storage device with an interesting twist: it has no disk.  This NSLU2 is a tiny little box with an ethernet port and a USB port.  You attach the storage via USB and it serves up disk space via SMB/CIFS and NFS.  Yes, it runs Linux, and miracle of miracles Linksys actually obeys the GPL and distributes the source for all of their systems.  Linksys does not, of course, provide technical support for products with modified firmware, but will support the machines as long as firmware provided by Linksys is installed.

While poking around Google learning more about the NSLU2 I found quite a few similar devices.  Well-known companies like Netgear and IOmega and lesser-known companies like Synology are jumping into the network storage arena.

Searching further I stumbled across a reference to a storage appliance sold without a hard drive but with Linux in flash, with a Linux software development kit.  Chasing this lead, I quickly found quite a thriving community and an interesting business model surrounding this little machine.  It is produced by Revolution, a new brand created by Buffalo Technology specifically to provide open source development and support.  The product is called KuroBox, and is essentially the Buffalo LinkStation Network Storage Center sold with no hard drive.  

The aspect of the KuroBox that truly fascinates me is how Buffalo have embraced the open source community.  Rather than just meeting the letter of the GPL as Linksys has done, or ignoring it and not complying as far too many other companies have done, Buffalo has created a new business model in selling the KuroBox to open source aficionados.  The Revolution brand offers full source code, precompiled binaries, support forums, and even help on understanding how to properly redistribute KuroBox code under the GPL.  Rather than just throwing open source into their product, they have open sourced the business.

 So what does this have to do with my search for an itty bitty box that will run NetBSD?  I have found a web page that I think shows NetBSD booting on a KuroBox, but I don’t have any details because the page is written in Japanese.  If someone wants to translate that page with the permission of the original author, I can provide a web site for it and let Daemon’s Advocate readers know about it.

Not that Linux is inadequate to run a simple mail server, but it’s just not BSD, y’know?

Let’s Get Really Small