Apostle to the Gentiles

True believers, moralists, radicals, and revolutionaries have a way of coming off as a bit intense, at times even extreme. Stallman is no excep­tion. For every time that he insisted that he wasn’t opposed to commer­cial software, he stated twice that he stood for free software.

But movements never stand still. They either become increasingly radical or they work themselves closer to the mainstream. In the case of free software, the latter occurred. A group of stalwarts decided to recast their ideas in more mainstream terms. Michael Tiemann, for one, noted that though “on the surface, [The GNU Manifesto] read like a socialist polemic,... I saw a business plan in disguise.”⁹ Nevertheless, he con­ceded that most people who read something that sounds like a socialist polemic see socialism—not business plans. And with Bill Gates breath­ing down your neck encouraging you to find socialism, you’re likely to find it.

In early 1997, a few of these pragmatists decided to change the sales pitch. Eric Raymond, in particular, had become concerned that Stall­man’s emphasis on freedom was putting off “conservative business people.” Now, Raymond is hardly a conservative business person—he describes himself as both an “anarchist” and a “gun-nut,”¹⁰ a combina­tion that makes me more than a bit nervous—but he was able to notice that Stallman’s ideas weren’t playing particularly well among the mon­eymakers of the tech world. The word free both confused and spooked too many people. Raymond set out to coin a marketable phrase that cap­tured many of the same concepts as “free software.” He settled on “open source.”

Raymond’s hacking prowess and The New Hacker’s Dictionary (first published in 1991) had long since qualified him as a demigod.

demigod n. A hacker with years of experience, a world-wide reputation, and a major role in the development of at least one design, tool, or game used by or known to more than half of the hacker community. To qualify as a genuine demigod, the person must recognizably identify with the hacker community and have helped shape it.¹¹

By early 1997, though, Raymond’s greatest influence was emanating from his essays.¹² A Brief History of Hackerdom set him up as the anthropological chronicler of hacker culture. But it was his essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” (later the book title of his collected essays) that truly began to move his work beyond the rather cloistered confines of hackerdom and into the Real World. This essay addressed an issue that had long haunted hackerdom: the apparent lack of empirical support for Stallman’s ideas.

By 1997, many people knew about free software, the FSF, the politi­cal discourses that surrounded it, and the software projects developed by its adherents. But no one took the movement terribly seriously—at least not in the commercial arena. Most folks viewed it as a collection of anarchists, socialists, and radical libertarians who lacked the social graces necessary to leave the computer lab. No one was particularly sur­prised that this talented if offbeat crowd had developed some good soft­ware. But the movement’s products targeted mainly hackers; its focus remained on reputation-building within a narrow community, not on serving consumers who dwelt in the Real World.

Real World n. 1. Those institutions at which “programming” may be used in the same sentence as “FORTRAN,” “COBOL,” “RPG,” “IBM,” “DBASE,” etc. Places where programs do such commercially necessary but uninspiring things as generating payroll checks and invoices. 2. The location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming. 3. A bizarre dimension in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which a person’s working hours are defined as 9 to 5....

And so, once again, an offbeat academic from Cambridge, Massa­chusetts, had devised an extreme philosophy, insisted that software marketing was a political statement, left his university to be completely unconstrained by its capitalist taints, started a movement, attracted a fol­lowing, and occasionally came up with a point that proved to be useful at the margins. No big deal. This sort of thing happens all the time.

Of course, the founding academic insisted that his ideas were not out­landish. Stallman contended that his approach to software development would lead to better, less expensive, more useful software than anything that a proprietary software company could develop. He spent over a decade pushing this idea. But he faced the one problem that most often trips up movements born of philosophical purity: it wasn’t working. The free-software movement was developing small-scale hacker tools. The world of proprietary software was redefining the way that people across the world lived and worked. By the mid-1990s, it seemed clear which development model was likely to have the greatest long-term impact. Well-funded proprietary software had relegated free software to a devel­opmental niche.

Then along came Linux. Suddenly, the world’s second most important platform was a free software project. And to those who were really

paying attention, the situation was even stranger. A free-software project called Apache dominates the back rooms of the Web; roughly 60 percent of all Web servers worldwide use it today.¹⁴ Even back in 1997, when most people had just started noticing the Web, roughly 40 percent of all Web servers were already running Apache. People began to wonder if this movement was more important than just a dream of a crackpot aca­demic backed by a couple of kids.

Linux is subversive. Who would have thought even five years ago (1991) that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet?

Certainly not I. By the time Linux swam onto my radar screen in early 1993, I had already been involved in Unix and open-source development for ten years.... I thought I knew how it was done.

Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew. I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most impor­tant software (operating systems and really large tools... ) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.

Linus Torvalds’s style of development—release early and often, delegate every­thing you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resem­ble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches... out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a dis­tinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world not only didn’t fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders.

By mid-1996 I thought I was beginning to understand.¹⁵

And with that inkling of an understanding, Raymond set out to explain two different concepts to two divergent, yet equally skeptical, markets. On the one hand, he had to convince the already faithful that his shift in emphasis wouldn’t undermine their values. On the other, he also became the apostle to the gentiles, explaining the miracles of free- software—now-open source—development to a hostile business world.

Fortunately for Raymond, he was not alone in either task. Bruce Perens, a long-time free-software activist who had already developed a “social contract” for Linux users, helped Raymond found the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The OSI adapted Perens’s guidelines—already quite popular throughout the community—into the Open Source Definition (OSD).

Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:

1. Free Redistribution

... The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

2. Source Code

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form Deliberately obfuscated source code is not

allowed.....

3. Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

4. Integrity of The Author’s Source Code...

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups...

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

... For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

7. Distribution of License

The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product...

9. The License Must Not Restrict Other Software

...

10. No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.¹⁶

The OSD is not a software contract; it’s a set of guidelines for contract designers to consider when developing or adopting open-source con­tracts. The OSI offers certification to software projects whose underly­ing contracts adhere to the OSD’s rules.

While a number of the OSD’s rules continue to generate debate among both hackers and IP scholars, its most significant feature may be an omis­sion: Copyleft isn’t required. The OSI chose to make copyleft optional to better accommodate squeamish conservative business people afraid that a low-level programmer who incorporates a few open-source sub­routines into a large proprietary product could force them to reveal their IP—analogous to the fear that some low-level programmer might steal a competitor’s trade secret and open your company to massive liability, and no harder to police with standard due diligence. Nevertheless, forces antithetical to open-source development had sowed the fear of copyleft throughout the private sector. Raymond, Perens, and the rest of the OSI’s founders decided that copyleft was too controversial a provision to require; much to Stallman’s chagrin, they dropped it before making their overtures to the business community.