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This virtual interview is a patchwork of several emails between Kenn Humborg, Chief Technical Officer of Blue Tree Systems, and Ken Guest.

(KG) > So what is Blue Tree in the business of? Do you have any clients that people may be aware of?

(KH) Blue Tree Systems was founded 4 years ago by two electronic engineering postgraduate students from NUI, Galway. We currently employ eight software developers, mainly producing software for the transportation industry.

Our largest customer is Thermo King Corporation (manufacturers of transport refrigeration equipment for vans, trucks, trailers, containers and bus air conditioning systems). We have developed both shrink-wrap application software that Thermo King sell to their customers and in-house training and presentation tools. We are currently developing a complete hardware/software solution which uses a low-power radio network to provide wireless communication links with vehicle-mounted devices (such as temperature data loggers and the 'smart' controllers in Thermo King's refrigeration units). This system is in field test at the moment and will be launched as product in about 2 to 3 months.

> From previous conversations, I think I know how you use Linux in Blue Tree, one question I have to ask though is why. Is it because Linux is the obvious choice or is it an antiWindows thing?

The first Linux machine we installed was our internet firewall. There were a few factors affecting that decision.

First off, I was not convinced about the out-of-the-box security of NT in such a hostile environment. I didn't know enough about NT to be confident that I'd be able to make it secure enough.

Secondly, I wanted to run quite a few services on this box (including mail, news, WWW cache, web server, ftp server, DNS server). I felt that doing all this with NT would cost quite a bit (in both hardware and software), whereas with Linux, I could use OpenSource software all the way and make use of an older machine which was no longer any use for development.

Thirdly, I had some experience with NT through administering our NT server boxes. Have you ever tried troubleshooting on NT? The only logging available is usually the NT Event Log, and I've yet to find a way of doing a "tail -f" on it!

Fourthly, I can admin my Linux firewall from home, which I can't do with NT (or at least wouldn't be anywhere near as comfortable doing it).

> So you use Linux because NT is an untamable dog? Let me rephrase that. It appears that NT needs comparatively advanced hardware and is resource hungry. Whereas Linux is neither of these and is more stable to use and actually easier to manage (both locally and remotely).

That pretty much sums it up!

The second installation is a test machine setup that allows us to select between numerous OS and application configurations in very little time. We needed the ability to test our software under everything from Windows 3.1 to Windows 98/NT4 with and without MSOffice and in various languages. (Microsoft would like you to believe that developing for Windows is write-one, run anywhere. If you ask me, there are more differences between Winows 95 and NT4 than there are between most Linux distributions!)  It's also important to be able to go back to a well-known configuration when troubleshooting and doing QA.

So, I split a large hard drive into a small (500MB) partition for the OS under test and installed Linux on the remainder. Two trivially simple scripts allow us to save and restore compressed images of the small partition. Developing this solution without Linux would have taken longer and given me much less flexibility.

> And of course there's the old business cliche - time is money.

Absolutely.

> I've read over your email that you sent me when I asked everybody in a commercial environment to get in touch with me and Blue Tree clearly uses Linux a lot. Does the OpenSource versus closed development debate affect you in anyway?

I guess it does... We _are_ a software development company after all :-)

I'm a firm believer in Open Source for infrastructure. Open Source operating systems, mail/web/DNS servers etc are superior in my view. I'd be worried about using closed source software in my firewall, for example. (So that means ssh over pcANYWHERE any day...).

With regard to our own development, it's very unlikely that we would open-source our major products. At a minimum, we would be in breach of NDAs if we did that. However, we are considering opening some of our libraries and components. In fact, we have already released an Open Source COM component, partly as an experiment and partly because I feel we need to give something back to the community.

> What is your reasoning behind this? Is it for financial reasons or are there other advantages to OpenSource software? What is it that makes OpenSource products more superior?

Infrastructure is vital. You can't build solid systems on a fragile foundation. In addition, interoperability is vital. This means infrastructure is almost a 'natural monopoly'. Desktop OSes (and essential Internet services) fall into the category of infrastructure. And nobody really wants to develop for multiple platforms, so the commercial world seems to tend towards a single-OS situation. (I'm talking about the desktop market here. Other markets, such as servers and embedded computing, have very different priorities.) If we are going to have one dominant OS, it should be Open Source. Otherwise, the industry becomes subservient to the will of one dominant company. And we all know that's not a good thing...

So, my main reasons are not financial. I will quite happily pay for a good product. It just happens that I've had fewer problems dealing with Open Source software than with proprietary software. I think that the best Open Source products are those that allow anyone to 'scratch their own itch' and contribute features and fixes to the product, but still have somebody overseeing the whole thing (such as Linus, or the Apache Group) so that the architectural integrity of the product is maintained. I'm sure all programmers out there have, at some stage, looked at a proprietary product and said "it would be really easy to add this useful little feature..." but were powerless to do anything about it. And the product suffers because of this. Marketing departments seem to have completely different ideas about what should go into software compared to what I really want.

> COM. That rings a bell - I take it you develop primarily for Windows platforms? And that PCs running Windows can 'interact' with Linux boxen without any problems?

All our development is for Windows. That's what our customers run. As for Windows-to-Linux interoperability, they get on fine together. Samba is a great tool. And the move to open protocols such as TCP/IP, DNS, SMTP, POP and IMAP in the (once very proprietary) Windows world has been great.

And it works the other way as well. Dave Airlie's pam_smb authentication module allows me to direct all user authentication to our NT domain servers.

All Linux services that require passwords, such as telnet, POP, IMAP and FTP simply pass the supplied password to an NT server for validation. This simplifies things for users, because they only have one password to remember and only one place where they need to change it.

In fact, at the moment, we have a few applications that don't use the NT domain password. Interestingly, they are all Microsoft applications so there is no chance of being able to fix them!

> What software do you use for documentation?

It's mostly Word 95.

> Is there any reason for Word 95, is it that you need to produce documentation for the Windows world of users or is it just an issue of functionality?

Inertia, interoperability and functionality. Word is not a particularly bad word processor (although it falls well short of the mark when dealing with really large documents). For everyday correspondence and writing user manuals, it does the job. In-house developer documentation is generally either Word, HTML or plain text, whichever suits best.

> Given the increasing range of Office related products that are now available for Linux, are they a viable option with regards to producing documentation?

No. All our development in on Windows, so there is no point in having to use Linux for other productivity tools.

> Ah. So Linux is being used pretty much for the infrastructure of development.

Not just for development, but for any infrastructure where it makes sense. At the moment, our main work-horse file server is running NT, and I'm happy to leave it that way. Firstly because it works quite well (although I'd like to compare performance to Linux/Samba running on similar hardware).

And secondly because we're using SourceSafe for source code control. SourceSafe is basically a database, and I wouldn't feel very comfortably running it off a Samba server.

However, because that server is so mission-critical, I don't want to run too much more on it. So say, for example, I wanted to run an internal news server. I could go for Notes or Exchange (which would require another machine) or run INN on Linux. Again, I'd go for the Linux option, because I'd be able to recycle an older machine that is no longer any good for development or running NT.

> Can you see Blue Tree developing Linux software for clients in the distant [near/close/whatever] future?

In the short-to-medium term, I don't think so. Our customers are very much Windows shops (and quite slow to change). In fact, until very recently, everything we did had to be 16-bit and run on Windows 3.1. Now we are moving to 32-bit development, but some products still have to be 16-bit. It will be a long time before these guys move to Linux!

> I'm intriqued by the serial port server that you run on an old 486, what exactly is involved (it just sounds rather unusual to me)?

• Grab an old 486SX25 with 4MB of RAM, 3 ISA slots and 100MB of disk.
• Install a Stallion EasyIO 8-port ISA serial card. Install an old ISA ethernet card.
• Install my portserver software (available from our FTP site). I've now got 10 serial ports accessible from anywhere in our network.
• Next, I modify our in-house Windows comms library to take port names such as "*rterm/hydra.bluetree.ie/external1" as well as old-fashioned names such as "COM1:".
• Now any applications using that library can transparently communicate through those remote ports.

> Would I be correct in inferring from the majority of your answers that you are more than just a Blue Tree employee?

My title is Chief Technical Officer, so I do pretty much everything related to IT here. It's my responsibility to oversee the technical side of software development (choosing developement tools and technologies) and keep our network running as smoothly as possible, at the same time as doing my 'normal' software and hardware development tasks!

> That sounds like more than a full time job!

Sometimes it feels like more than a full time job :-)

> And you aren't a stranger to the ILUG scene either. In fact you gave a talk at the Intersocs conference on 'Using Linux as an Internet Gateway'. What are your opinions on the ILUG - are there any benefits, [in your opinion] of it being in existance?

ILUG is great. It's different things to different people.

Some are interested in the PR aspects and representing Linux and the interests of Linux users to the public, press, business and government.

For me, it's a technical resource. It's a bit like all the comp.os.linux.* newsgroups distilled down to one mailing list. Very few questions go unanswered. And I think ILUG is growing naturally with things such as the presence at Intersocs 98 and the recent Installfests. It's finding its own roles which is much better than the previous attempts to 'define-by-committee' :-)

Additionally, it is invaluable for new Linux users. It's difficult for me to look at this objectively because I'm not a beginner, but my impression is that the mailing list is quite friendly towards beginners. It's important that this is not lost. One of the core qualities of the Linux and Open Source community is its generosity. It's the foundation of the 'gift culture' that Eric Raymond describes. If that goes, everyone will suffer.

> Do you think that your use of Linux in Blue Tree gives a competitive advantage?

Yes. The multi-boot test machine is invaluable. If you ever develop Windows installers, you'll know how useful it is to be able to pull up a fresh installation of, say, Windows 95 Retail Release with Office 4.3 in 3 minutes!

> If a company, without staff aware of Linux, (ie using some version of Windows) were looking to network their machines for filesharing, printing and email what would your recommendation be?

Something like a Cobalt Qube. They just plug it in and off they go. I'd never be comfortable with an NT box with no monitor, but Linux handles the task admirably.

> Would they need a full time Linux admin employee anymore than they would need a full time admin employee for any other choice of server (be it NetWare or some version of Windows)?

I don't think you'd need someone if you get something like a Qube. In any case, the need for a full-time sys admin is pretty much independent of what platform you're running. Eventually, your network grows to a point where in becomes cheaper to hire someone than to pay a consultant every time you want to do something.

That goes for all platforms. The thing with NT is that it looks easy. People think "Hey, this is the same as Windows 95. I can handle this." But just below the surface, it's a completely different beast. I maintain that it takes as much knowledge to run NT properly as it takes to run Linux.

> But more money - both in terms of time lost due to lack of stability and the cost of the system itself.

Actually it's hard to say... The up-front configuration with Linux tends to take longer (and remember time == money). This is a reflection of the work that Microsoft have put into their wizards and other user tools. However, in the long term, Linux tends to require less care and feeding and is more stable.

Once it's set up it just keeps on going...