💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 98.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:55:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-05)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
2007-06-06 10:52:40
The Spreading Grass-Roots Threat to Microsoft
By Mark Leibovich
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 3, 1998; Page A01
In an overflowing lecture hall, the prophet is preaching to a group of
students. He has a droopy mustache and red-rimmed eyes and he lurches around
the room, interspersing his gospel with giggly asides. His audience of
University of Texas computer scientists sits quietly and rapt, some rocking in
their chairs the way Bill Gates does.
"Okay, so here's how we're going to take over the world," the prophet says.
His name is Eric Raymond, and he is leading a grass-roots crusade that few
Americans have heard of, a crusade that is building at the hardest core of the
technology world -- in computer labs, Internet chat rooms and hacker
conventions.
Here, not in a Washington courthouse or Silicon Valley cubicle, lies what may
be the purest threat to Microsoft's domination of the software industry.
Raymond, 40, is a full-time evangelist for "open-source" software, an
idealistic concept once confined to the computing fringes, but one that has
forged dramatic mainstream inroads in recent months. It dictates that software
makers should grant access to their products' embedded "source code," or
"digital DNA" -- the basic formula that makes them work. This would be somewhat
akin to Coca-Cola Co. releasing its formula.
If adopted on a large scale, its proponents say, open-source would allow a vast
body of technical talent -- nourished and connected by the Internet -- to
tinker with and improve software's underlying recipe.
Software would become more reliable, Raymond tells audiences. Why? Because, in
a closed company world, its creation is often not subject to independent peer
review. This is why computers crash so often. Conversely, open-source provides
a broad and rigorous universe of peers to root out problems.
In this collaborative environment, creativity would flourish. New business
models would form. And Microsoft would be forced to assimilate or succumb.
At least that's the idea. It might seem utopian in a computing industry
governed by intellectual property laws. But in recent years, successful
companies have emerged that specialize in open-source products. Linux, an
operating system attributed to Finnish engineer Linus Torvalds and enhanced
through open-source collaboration, has become one of the fastest-growing
software phenomena among fervent techies. Some major computing brands have
adopted open-source formats. Microsoft is betraying fear of the movement in
internal memos.
And Eric Raymond has evolved from a childhood pariah to a hacker cult figure to
an unlikely industry player who is being consulted by some of Wall Street's
biggest investors.
Last month, Raymond received a call from a Merrill Lynch & Co. vice president
inviting him to preach open-source to a group of 70 institutional investors.
"With any luck, Microsoft's stock will drop the next day," he tells his Austin
audience, which applauds. "I can dream, can't I?"
Raymond readily notes that Microsoft itself is not the "root of evil." Rather,
it is "a symptom of closed-source disease."
Nonetheless, every revolution needs a villain. And in a psychological context,
Microsoft -- and Gates -- represents a bully figure that has recurred as a
theme of Raymond's life.
Raymond's only encounter with Gates took place in 1982. Raymond, then in his
early twenties, was watching Microsoft's young CEO at a Philadelphia computing
conference. He summoned the courage to ask a question.
Gates dismissed the question and turned it into a joke, Raymond recalls. The
audience laughed, and Raymond slumped back into his seat, feeling small and
shamed.
"I remember thinking, 'Damn you,' " Raymond says of the Gates exchange. "I said
to myself, 'I'm going to become the kind of person that you can't casually blow
off like that.' "
After his speeches, Raymond is often swamped by fans, some seeking autographs.
They are usually male. (Of 250 who attended two Texas speeches last month,
eight were women.) While mainly indifferent to Microsoft's antitrust battles,
they are intent on toppling the software empire by different means.
Microsoft is fighting an entire mind-set it can't quash like it quashes
companies, says Wesley Felter, a 20-year-old computer scientist, after the
Austin speech. He wears a T-shirt bearing a quote by Linus Torvalds. "World
Domination," the T-shirt says. "Fast."
As Raymond greets his followers, he is ecstatic. They are his intellectual,
social and cosmic lifeline, his fellow "hackers," a term that demands some
clarification. Contrary to popular terminology, a "hacker" does not commit
digital mischief, explains Raymond, who edited the 1991 book "The New Hacker's
Dictionary." "Those are 'crackers.' Hackers build things, crackers break them."
Hackers are the most ardent of computer users, not content to master certain
crafts but striving for full and near-spiritual immersion.
The history of the open-source movement is linked to entrenched hacker ethics.
In the first days of the Internet, the 1960s, a spirit of cooperation pervaded
computing. Consistent with Western scientific traditions -- and the academic
and research settings where the Internet began -- the earliest hackers were
encouraged to build on the creations of their peers.
But as computing has grown into a multitrillion-dollar industry, the ethic has
been supplanted by proprietary rules and cutthroat competition. To many
hackers, Microsoft is the embodiment of all that has soured in the computing
realm -- both technically and socially.
After his UT speech, Raymond invokes the military theorist Sun Tzu to describe
his strategy against Microsoft. "Supreme excellence in warfare is not winning
battles. Supreme excellence in warfare is breaking the enemy's will without
fighting," he says. "We have to drive Microsoft's PR apparatus crazy by
convincing them that for everything they say and do, we will be all over them."
Recent example: In late October, Raymond received a leaked internal memo
written by a Microsoft engineer named Vinod Valloppillil. The memo -- its
authenticity confirmed by Microsoft -- concludes that open-source "pose[s] a
direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft." It assesses the
potential destructive power of open-source software and suggests means by which
Microsoft can combat this "threat." A second memo -- leaked to Raymond the next
day -- focused on Linux.
Raymond dubbed these "The Halloween Documents" and promptly circulated them on
the Internet.
Until recently, Microsoft has been mostly quiet on open-source. But at its
antitrust trial, the company has mentioned Linux as a serious and emerging
competitor. Cynics suggest that Microsoft is exaggerating these concerns -- and
purposely leaking its memos -- to create the perception that it does not in
fact have a software monopoly.
Microsoft officials deny this. "We recognize Linux as a serious competitor,"
says Ed Muth, a Microsoft group manager, who adds that the company is "working
to understand the sociology of this so-called open-source movement."
"This is less about technology than other kinds of attitudes," he says. "Open
source is a very different approach to software than ours. We feel that it is
less likely to satisfy customers in the long term."
Such dismissiveness delights Raymond. It shows Microsoft is complacent.
Likewise, it casts Raymond in an underdog role from which he derives
inspiration. He sees his life as a procession of David-vs.-Goliath struggles,
beginning in the schoolyard.
"I had a miserable childhood," says Raymond, who was born with cerebral palsy.
"Being a short kid with a limp was not the easiest thing in the world. Children
can be vicious." He retreated to the outcast existence of a computer nerd.
In addition to these social burdens, in his teenage years Raymond was saddled
with the belief of some mentors that he was a math prodigy. "They might have
been right, too, but I wasn't able to deal with it," Raymond says. He left the
University of Pennsylvania after 2 1/2 years and never returned.
Today Raymond loves guns. He owns three, shoots at a range near his home and
maintains "Eric's Gun Nut Page" on his home page. He is also a black belt in
Tae Kwon Do. "I needed to become the kind of person for which the horrible
memories of my childhood would not have crippling power," says Raymond. On
political matters, he calls himself a "gonzo libertarian." This conforms to his
computing ideology as well. "Open-source is a way to give power to individuals
and deny coercive power to the government and monopolistic corporations," he
says.
At the crux of Raymond's adult evolution has been his immersion in hacker life.
It is a community of rules, customs, taboos and factions, and Raymond views
himself a "tribal anthropologist" within it.
"Eric has a way of explaining what we're doing and why we're doing it," says
Guido van Rossum, the inventor of a programming language called Python and a
prominent figure among open-source proponents. Van Rossum, a gawky Dutchman who
now lives in Reston, invited Raymond to address a group of Python software
developers in Houston last month.
Until January of this year, Raymond had been proselytizing in the limited
confines of the hacker community. But then came a seminal event in open-source
history: Netscape Communications Corp. announced it would release the
source-code for the next version of its popular browser software. "By giving
away the source code . . . we can ignite the creative energies of the entire
Net community," Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale said in a statement that day.
Netscape officials say their decision was guided in part by an essay Raymond
wrote early in 1997. Titled "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," the essay is an
oft-invoked manifesto in the open-source community. It posits that a free
"bazaar" of hackers communing over the Internet can build better software than
any closed "cathedral" such as Microsoft.
At the company's invitation, Raymond flew to Silicon Valley and consulted with
Netscape -- on a volunteer basis -- to ease the transition to open source.
"Prior to that, I had been content to toil in hacker obscurity," Raymond says.
But Netscape's decision was an unprecedented event -- a major commercial
technology company adopting open-source.
"Finally, my people had gotten the breakthrough we've been waiting for." Now
Raymond felt someone needed to devote full energy to "open-source evangelism."
He felt suited.
"I'm one of those rare hackers that has the brain chemistry to be extroverted,"
says Raymond in an interview at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Malvern,
Pa. It also helps that his lawyer wife, Catherine, can help support him
financially.
When not out preaching open-source, Raymond plots strategy from his home, a
modest, mid-'60s ranch imbued with essence of ripe kitty litter. In his spare
time, he operates a nonprofit Internet service provider that offers free Net
access to underprivileged users in the Philadelphia area. He works on a large
Linux-compatible workstation from VA Research, a Silicon Valley personal
computer maker that specializes in Linux applications. It is worth $12,000, but
was custom-made by VA Research free of charge because Raymond is a high-profile
user (in the same way Nike gives Michael Jordan free sneakers).
Raymond fields several hundred e-mails a day from open-source disciples and
corporate technical officers. Perhaps his most valuable asset is his skill at
giving introverted technologists the rhetorical tools to explain themselves.
"I'm trying to teach hackers a language to use to convey their model of the
world to people who wear suits," he says.
"Reliability" is open-source's key selling point, he tells audiences. As proof,
open-source believers say, Linux crashes far less often than proprietary
operating systems. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," Raymond
writes in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."
Furthermore, Raymond tells audiences, open-source creates a dynamic "gift
culture." Programmers create features and repair bugs in return for the
prestige it brings them. It is akin, he says, to rich people making
philanthropic donations.
Only the elite can participate -- the economic elite in philanthropy, the
technical elite in software improvement -- but the broader community is still
served in the end.
Of course this elitism represents a major roadblock as well: Open-source
products such as Linux are generally far too complicated for average computer
users. Raymond concedes this, but says as software improves through open-source
teamwork, products will become more user-friendly.
"Does this mean we're all going to starve?" a UT student asks Raymond.
No, in an open-source universe, programmers will not end up flipping burgers,
he assures the student.
Indeed, there is money to be made in open-source, says Raymond. Giving away
source code does not preclude commercial viability. On the contrary,
open-source greatly reduces a company's research, development and distribution
costs.
Raymond calls himself a "happy capitalist," which puts him at odds with more
utopian elements of the movement. He has clashed often with Richard Stallman, a
legendary Boston hacker who prefers the term "free software" and believes
Raymond's marketplace concerns miss the point.
"Where Eric focuses on merely practical goals," Stallman writes in an e-mail,
"I'm concerned primarily about what kind of society we are going to live in."
"Free software is a matter of liberty, not price," he declares on his Web site.
Raymond says: "Most hackers don't have a problem with capitalism. But they do
have a problem with closed-source resulting in bad engineering results."
Some open-source advocates have accused Raymond of promoting himself too
aggressively. He has also been criticized for excessive deification of Torvalds
("Linus is God, I am the prophet," he says) and vilification of Microsoft.
Raymond denies that obliterating Microsoft is his goal. He is more ambitious
than that. If Microsoft is destroyed in his revolution's path, "it's just a
fringe benefit," he says.
Even so, open source remains a radical notion in many corporate realms.
"Intellectual property laws have been around a long time," says Paul Everitt,
CEO of Digital Creations, a Fredericksurg, Va., software company that has
adopted open-source.
Last month he traveled to Houston to hear Raymond speak. "I'm trying to learn
if the success of this movement is inevitable or if we're just tilting at
windmills," he said. Everitt said Raymond's then-upcoming conference call with
Merrill Lynch institutional investors could be "an inflection point" in
open-source history.
The call took place Nov. 18. Raymond says it went very well -- enough so that
he was invited to make a return appearance and to join Merrill Lynch's
technology advisory board.
Coincidence or not, shares of Microsoft dropped $2.12 1/2 that day.
? Copyright The Washington Post Company