I interviewed Irving Wladawsky-Berger twice: once for Rebel Code, soon after IBM announced its support for GNU/Linux - arguably one of the key moments in the corporate acceptance of open source - and once for the Guardian, shortly before he retired from IBM. On both occasions he was a pleasure to talk to.
And now I find another reason to like the chap:
One of my favorite films is the 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet.
Me too, me too.
One of the key moments in the rise of open source was IBM's announcement on 10 January 2000 that it would be supporting GNU/Linux across all its hardware. This seal of approval from Big Blue suddenly made free software respectable.
A the time of writing Rebel Code, I spoke to several people from IBM, all of whom seemed really clued up about the deeper implications of open source, how and why it worked, and how companies could work with it and benefit from it. I was really impressed.
And now I read this:"At some point you become so shrill and beyond what's required that you lose the audience and the audience moves on to something else," he said.
"We'll have to see what finally evolves through the [GPL] process, it's going through an update and the Free Software Foundation has a particular view of free software. Free software is a wonderful thing but there's also a business model."
"We think there are other licensing techniques, the Apache license and others are somewhat less onerous. We use them ourselves. We don't use the GPL for reasons of its restrictions," Mills said.
That was Steve Mills, as in IBM Software General Manager. Seems like the message hasn't quite got through there, Steve. Pity: I obviously need to revise my view of IBM.
There's a great feature in Inc. about Firefox and its boss, the self-styled Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker, whom I interviewed for Rebel Code many moons ago.
Unfortunately, I can't say I really enjoyed it: I was an email away from writing something similar myself....
For some reason, the idea of open source film is one that exerts a strong fascination on people. I've written about it before, and here's another one:The Digital Tipping Point film project is an open source film project about the big changes that open source software will bring to our world. Like the printing press before it, open source software will empower average people to create an immense wave of new literature, art, and science.
...
The first DTP film will follow my individual personal growth from being an attorney who feared computer technology to being a community activist who picks up technology tips while shooting this movie, and brings that technology back to a local public school.
So far, so dull, you might think. But more interestingly:We will make as many films as the open source film community would like to make. The DTP project will actually be many, many films made about free open source software. We are giving away our footage under a Creative Commons license on the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection.
There's another aspect to this. The 300 or so hours of interviews that have been conducted for this film will form an invaluable record of some of the key people in the open source world, a resource that future historians will be able to tap.
Which reminds me: I really must put online the hundreds of hours of interviews that I did for Rebel Code six years ago: it would make an interesting foil to the present material.
When I was writing Rebel Code, which describes the birth and rise of free software from Richard Stallman's initial idea for GNU, I was lucky. I needed something suitably dramatic to provide the other book-end, and IBM kindly provided this with the announcement on 10 January 2000 that itintended to make all of its server platforms Linux-friendly, including S/390, AS.400, RS/6000 and Netfinity servers, and the work is already well underway.
It's hard now to remember a time when IBM didn't support open source, so it's interesting to see this announcement that the company aims to push even deeper into the free software world. Quite what it will mean in practice is difficult to say, but on the basis of what has happened during the last six years, it should definitely be good for the open source world.
Lars Wirzenius is not as well known a he should be, for he more than anyone was both witness and midwife to the birth of Linux. Along the way, he garnered an interesting tale or two about that young chap Linus, his fellow student at Helsinki University. Some of these he kindly passed on to me when I was writing Rebel Code.
I'll never forget the interview, because it was conducted as he was walking along, somewhere in Helsinki, and somewhat breathlessly. The sense of movement I received down the line was quite a physically disconcerting experience.
This memory flooded back to me when I came across this link on OSNews about Lars' current project. As his "log" - not "blog" - explains:I wanted to know how good Linux, or more specifically Debian with GNOME, is for the uninitiated, or more specifically, for someone who has been using Windows for a number of years, and switches to Linux. I'm specifically uninterested in the installation experience.
To see what it is like, I recruited a friend of mine, and gave her my old laptop with Linux pre-installed and pre-configured. She has agreed to try switching all her computer use to Linux, and tell me about any problems she has. We'll do this for several months, to make it realistic. Anyone can suffer through a week in a new computer.
Of course: why hasn't this been done more often? It's precisely what the GNU/Linux community needs to know to make things better. Reviews by journalists are all very well, but you can't beat in-depth, long-term end-user experience. Wizard idea.
For younger readers of this blog, the name Andy Tanenbaum may not mean much. But for oldies such as myself, it is highly redolent of those epic days when Linux was but a fledgling kernel, and taunts like "your mother was a hamster" and "Linux is obsolete" were thrown down like gauntlets.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Tanenbaum for my book Rebel Code, and it was fascinating to learn how close he came to creating what we now call GNU/Linux with his Minix. But Tanenbaum failed to do one crucial thing that Linus did almost without thinking: to let go. Understandably, as a professor of computer science Tanenbaum wanted to keep control of his teaching materials. But that one, tiny, reasonable brake was enough to stunt the growth of Minix and lend wings to Linux when it appeared in 1991.
Tanenbaum is still teaching, at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (another Dutch story, then - must be the Rembrandt Effect), and I was interested to note this piece about some of his recent work on developing an anti-RFID device. Good to see him still moving forward in his work. (Via openspectrum.info.)
It's well known that lots of big companies are using open source; but do they really get all this communal effort, contributing back to the pool stuff? Not according to this interesting report, which finds that most of the heavy coding is still done by the passionate solo programmers.
I can't say I'm surprised: as I found when I interviewed most of the top open source hackers for Rebel Code, at the heart of what they do is joy - no other word for it. And joy is not something you bang your shin against much in mega-corporations.
There's a piece in the Guardian about OpenStreetMap's Isle of Wight effort. I was struck by this wonderful quotation:
The weekend drew around 40 people. By Monday, OpenStreetMap's founder Steve Coast estimated that more than 90% of the island's roads had been recorded. When asked if volunteers used OS [Ordnance Survey] maps, Coast says: "No. It's a taboo." Someone who did pull out an OS map was told to put it away immediately.
Which is precisely analogous to Richard Stallman's attitude when he started GNU, his project to create a benevolent Doppelgänger of the Unix operating system. This is what he told me for Rebel Code:"I certainly never looked at the source code of Unix. Never. I once accidentally saw a file, and when I realised it was part of Unix source code, I stopped looking at it." The reason was simple: The source code "was a trade secret, and I didn't want to be accused of stealing that trade secret," he says. "I condemn trade secrecy, I think it's an immoral practice, but for the project to succeed, I had to work within the immoral laws that existed."
An interesting story in The New York Times about the courtroom battle between the EU and Microsoft. It makes beautifully clear how one human story trumps any number of dry legal expositions, however detailed and cogent the evidence they present.
Certainly, it was a shrewd move wheeling out Andrew Tridgell. I had the pleasure of interviewing Tridge for my book Rebel Code, and his boyish enthusiasm for hacking positively beamed through the conversation, undiminished by the journey from his native Australia. Indeed, he presents a fascinating contrast to some of the other bigs of the free software world, for example the driven and messianic Stallman or the sardonic and by nature rather shy Linus.
For all its patent faults, Amazon.com is one of my favourite sites. It has repeatedly done the right thing when mistakes have been made with my orders, to the extent that I can even forgive them for doing the wrong thing when it comes to (IP) rights....
So I was interested to see that Amazon.com now lets users add tags to items: I first noticed this on Rebel Code, where some public-minded individual has kindly tagged it as open source, free software and linux. Clicking on one of these brings up a listing of other items similarly tagged (no surprise there). It also cross-references this with the customers who used this tag, and the other tags that are used alongside the tag you are viewing (a bit of overkill, this, maybe).
I was even more impressed to see a ProductWiki at the foot of the Rebel Code page (it's rather empty at the moment). This is in addition to the author's blog (which I don't have yet because Amazon insists on some deeply arcane rite to establish I am really the Glyn Moody who wrote Rebel Code and not his evil twin brother from a parallel universe). Mr. Bezos certainly seems to be engaging very fully with the old Web 2.0 stuff; it will be interesting to see how other e-commerce sites respond.
Google has acquired Measure Map, a service that tracks visitors and links to blogs. This is of double interest to me.
First, because like all that pathetic crew known to the wider world as bloggers, I am hopelessly addicted to learning who has visited and linked to my blog (this sad human need will surely form the basis of several killer business applications - if only I could think of them...).
This acquisition places another company offering similar services, Technorati, squarely in Google's sights. It also makes Technorati rather more desirable to Google's rivals - no names, no pack drill, but you know who you are. Which brings me neatly to the second reason why this move is of interest to me, since I have an interview with Technorati's founder and CEO, Dave Sifry, in the Guardian today, which touches on many of these points.
I first interviewed Dave some six years ago, when I was writing Rebel Code. At that time, he was riding the dotcom wave with his earlier company, Linuxcare. This had come up with the wizard idea of offering third-party support for all the main open source programs that were widely used in business at the time. As a result, it had mopped up just about every top hacker outside the Linux kernel - people like Andrew Tridgell, the creator of Samba, a program that allows GNU/Linux machines to interoperate with Windows networks by acting as a file and printer server.
There is a certain irony in the fact that Google will now be a competitor to Sifry's Technorati, since in two important respects Linuxcare anticipated a key Google practice: mopping up those hackers, and then encouraging them to work on ancillary projects on company time.
Sifry's explanation back in 2000 of the logic behind this approach throws some interesting light on Google's adoption of the idea:
Number one, it encourages us to get the best developers in the world. When you are actually telling people, hey, I want you to work on open source software while you're at work, , that is pretty unique. And then once you get some [of the best coders], you end up getting more. Because everybody wants to work with the best people. Number two is, the more good open source software that's out there, the more people who are using open source software [there are]. And guess what, that means the more people who are going to need the services of a company like Linuxcare. Number three, when you encourage people to work on open source software while they're at work, you end up getting leaders and teams of open source engineers who now work for your company. And then lastly, but by no means least, it's great PR.
This story has so many interesting elements in it that it's just got to be true.
According to Business Week, Oracle is poised to snap up no less than three open source companies: JBoss, Zend and Sleepycat Software. JBoss - which calls itself the "professional open source company", making everyone else unprofessional, I suppose - is one of the highest-profile players in this sector. Not least because its founder, the Frenchman Marc Fleury, has a tongue as sharp as his mind (you can sample his blog with this fab riff on genomics, Intelligent Design and much else).
His controversial remarks and claims in the past have not always endeared him to others in the free software world. Take, for example, the "disruptive Professional Open Source model" he proudly professes, "which combines the best of the open source and proprietary software worlds to make open source a safe choice for the enterprise and give CIOs peace of mind." Hmm, I wonder what Richard Stallman has to say about that.
JBoss has been highly successful in the middleware market: if you believe the market research, JBoss is the leader in the Java application server sector. Oracle's acquisition would make a lot of sense, since databases on their own aren't much fun these days: you need middleware to hook them up to the Internet, and JBoss fits the bill nicely. It should certainly bolster Oracle in its battle against IBM and Microsoft in the fiercely-fought database sector.
While many might regard the swallowing up of an ambivalent JBoss by the proprietary behemoth Oracle as just desserts of some kind, few will be happy to see Zend suffer the same fate. Zend is the company behind the PHP scripting language - one of the most successful examples of free software. (If you're wondering, PHP stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" - employing your standard hacker recursive acronym naming convention).
Where JBoss is mostly key for companies running e-commerce Web sites, say, PHP is a core technology of the entire open source movement. Its centrality is indicated by the fact that it is one of the options for the ubiquitous LAMP software stack: Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP or Perl or Python. The fact that Oracle will own the engine that powers PHP will be worrying for many in the free software world.
About Sleepycat, I can only say: er, who? - but that's just ignorance on my part. This article explains that Sleepycat's product, Berkeley DB, is actually the "B" in LAMP. Got that? The Sleepycat blog may throw some more light on this strange state of affairs - or maybe not.
Whatever the reason that Oracle wants to get its mitts on Sleepycat as well as Zend and JBoss, one thing is abundantly clear if these rumours prove true: Oracle is getting very serious about open source.
In the past, the company has had just about the most tortuous relationship with open source of any of the big software houses. As I wrote in Rebel Code, in early July 1998, an Oracle representative said "we're not seeing a big demand from our customer that we support it" - "it" being GNU/Linux. And yet just two weeks later, Oracle announced that it was porting Oracle8 to precisely that platform. This was one of the key milestones in the acceptance of free software by business: no less a person than Eric Raymond told me that "the Oracle port announcement...made the open source concept unkillable by mere PR" - PR from a certain company being a big threat in the early days of corporate adoption.
Open source has come on by leaps and bounds since then, and these moves by Oracle are not nearly so momentous - at least for free software. But I wonder whether the otherwise canny Larry Ellison really knows what he's getting into.
Until now, Oracle has mainly interacted with open source through GNU/Linux - that is, at arm's length. If it takes these three companies on board - especially if it acquires Zend - it will find itself thrown into the maelstrom of open source culture. Here's a hint for Mr Ellison: you don't get to assimilate that culture, whatever you might be thinking of doing with the companies. You either work with it, or it simply routes around you.
Yes, I'm talking about forks here: if Oracle misplays this, and tries to impose itself on the PHP or JBoss communities, I think it will be in for a rude surprise. To its credit, IBM really got this, which is why its embrace of open source has been so successful. Whether Oracle can follow in its footsteps, only time will tell.
But the rumoured acquisitions, if they go ahead, will have one other extremely significant effect. They will instantly add credibility, viability and desirability to a host of other second-generation open source companies that have grown up in the last few years. Free software will gain an immediate boost, and hackers will suddenly find themselves in great demand again.
Given the astonishing lift-off of Google's share price, and the palpable excitement surrounding Web 2.0 technologies (and the start-ups that are working on them), the hefty price-tags on open source companies being bandied around in the context of Oracle have a feeling of déjà-vu all over again: didn't we go through all this with Red Hat and VA Linux a few years back?
You don't have to be clairvoyant - or an oracle - to see that if these deals go through, the stage is well and truly set for Dotcom Delirium 2.0.
For me, one of the most exciting chapters of Rebel Code to write was that called, rather enigmatically, "Mozilla Dot Party", which described the genesis of the open source browser Mozilla.
Thanks to the extensive historical records in the form of Usenet posts, I already had a pretty good idea where GNU/Linux came from, but the reasons behind the dramatic decision of Netscape - the archetypal Web 1.0 company - to release its crown jewels, the code for its browser Navigator, as open source, were as mysterious as they were fascinating (at least insofar as they went beyond blind despair). So the chance to talk with some of the key people like Eric Hahn and Frank Hecker, who made that happen, and to begin to put the Mozilla story together for the first time was truly a privilege.
But it was only the start of the story. My chapter finished in April 1999, at the point where another key actor in the story, Jamie Zawinski, had resigned from Netscape, despairing of ever seeing a viable browser ship. (Parenthetically, his self-proclaimed "gruntle" and blog are some of the most entertaining geek writing out there. His "nomo zilla" forms the basis for the closing pages of my Mozilla chapter.)
What I didn't know at the time was that Mozilla would eventually ship that browser, and that from the original Mozilla would arise something even more important for the world of free software: Firefox. Unlke Mozilla, which was always rather a worthy also-ran - fiercely loved by its fans, but largely ignored by the vast majority of Net users - Firefox showed that open source could be both cool and populist.
Given this background, I was therefore delighted to come across (via Slashdot) chapter 2 of the story in the form of a fascinating entry in the blog of Ben Goodger, the lead engineer of Firefox. What is particularly satifying is that he begins it in early 1999 - at precisely the moment that mine stops. Is that art or what?
The ever-acute Doc Searls reports on the CES keynote from Intel CEO Paul Otellini. Given Searls' position as an alpha blogger, it was inevitable that this was a live, minute-by-minute blog - and yes, it did include the obligatory moan about the missing WiFi connection.
But what is really important about this posting is that it makes plain VIIV's role as the platform that broadcasters and music companies - with indispensable help from a willing Intel and Microsoft - will use in their latest attempt to take complete control of content.
I already knew in 2000 that all this was coming. I knew because Eben Moglen, the legal brains behind the free software movement, and an extremely wise, articulate and modest man, told me so when I was writing Rebel Code:
Let's think of the Net for a change as a collection of pipes and switches, rather than thinking of it as a thing or a space.
There's a lot of data moving through those pipes, and the switches determine who gets which data, and how much they have to pay for it downstream. And of course those switches are by and large what we think of as digital computers.
The basic media company theory at the opening of the twenty-first century is to create a leak-proof pipe all the way from production studio to eyeball and eardrum. The switch that most threatens that pipe is the one that at the end. If the switch closest to your eyeball and eardrum is under your complete technical control, the whole rest of the aqueduct can be as leak-proof as you like, and it won't do them any good. And the switch is under your control, of course, if the software is free software.
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