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The Spreading Grass-Roots Threat to Microsoft

2007-06-06 10:52:40

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.