The good guys

[Steve]

A band of rebels think that software's secrets should be as free as
the air we breathe. Don't sell Microsoft short - but don't
underestimate the rebels, either.

Josh McHugh
Forbes 8/10/98


IBM'S intellectual property lawyers had never drafted a deal quite
like this one. In April software engineer Yen-Ping Shan was
describing a partnership IBM was proposing with something called the
Apache Group. IBM, all $100 billion worth of it, was courting this
loose confederation of 20 programmers. "Loose" is an understatement.
The programmers, scattered from Palo Alto to Munich, were not
incorporated and had no formal business arrangements. 

IBM wanted to use the Apache Group's software as the cornerstone of
WebSphere, an Internet commerce package IBM planned to release in
June. This was a weird partnership deal because no money was involved.

"Even if you want to pay, there's no one to pay," Shan explained.
"They don't exist, legally." 

Right. A no-money licensing agreement with an entity that had no
legal existence. "So let me get this straight," one IBM lawyer said.
"We're doing a deal with . . . a Web site?" 

Yes, and the Web site was setting the terms of the deal: It must be
non-exclusive. The software's source code-the very intellectual
property that IBM's lawyers are normally paid to keep proprietary-was,
and would remain, freely available to anyone with an Internet
connection. Like it or not, those were the terms IBM had to work with.
The 20 programmers were reluctant to throw in with IBM. "What can we
show you to prove to you we're serious?" Shan asked them at one point.

Finally, the blue-chip giant scraped together a handful of the only
currency that interested Apache's developers: a technical advance for
the software-in programmer parlance, a hack. IBM programmers had
figured out how to make Apache's software run faster on Microsoft's
NT operating system. They offered to show their hack to the Apache
gang and agreed to share future hacks as well. Done deal. The Apache
folk would throw in with IBM in June. 

This raises a couple of questions: 

1. Why was IBM so eager to get the software? 

2. What sort of software was it? 

The answers: 

1. It was a technical marvel that commands more than 50% of the
booming market for Web server software; at the same time, IBM scored
huge coolness points with programmers writing software for the
Internet. 

2. This is liberated software. Not just (as in many cases) free of
charge, but-much more important-free for any programmer to modify,
improve and share with other programmers. Its code was out there for
anyone and everyone to see- and copy. 

Known as "open-source software," "freeware" or "free software," it
may not put Bill Gates and Larry Ellison in Chapter 11, but it could
limit their future profitability. At the very least, it demonstrates a
neat alternative way to produce better software. 

Commercial software is typically delivered in binary form-that is, in
1s and 0s that make sense to a microprocessor but are unreadable even
by advanced programmers. Usually you have to pay for it; sometimes
(with browsers, for example) you get it for free. But either way you
just get the 1s and 0s. 

The truly liberated stuff comes complete with its source code, the
commands written by the author of the program. This gives others an
intimate view of what the developer was doing with the code and how.
It allows those who read the code to make repairs, to customize the
program and to imitate the programming tricks and algorithms when
they write unrelated software. 

Why would programmers give away source code, a potential gold mine?
It's a way to get committed users to chip in their own improvements,
creating a communitarian program much better than any one author or
firm could produce solo. 

But there's an even more important reason for this seeming largesse:
Liberated software has become an intellectual Olympics, where some of
the world's top engineering minds compete-not for venture capital, but
for impressing their peers.

Netscape dipped a toe into the open-source stream when it released
the source code for its Internet browser in March. Within hours a
team of Australian programmers had attached a cryptographic add-on to
enable secure Internet transactions. Other improvements to the
original poured in from all around the world over the next two weeks.
In less than a month, a new version of the browser was posted on the
project's Web site, ready for downloading. 

For their efforts, the Australians were paid handsomely-but not with
money. The programmers, calling themselves the Mozilla Crypto Group,
got paid in respect from the rest of the programming community and in
the satisfaction of turning out an elegant and useful bit of software.
Plus it was a gas. The worldwide notoriety of their hack won't hurt
the fortunes of their Brisbane consulting company, Cryptsoft. 

Had Netscape put together a team and thrown money at the project, it
is doubtful it could have produced equal results in so little time. 

Meet Linus Torvalds. The soft-spoken, sandy-haired Finn was a
21-year-old in his second year at Helsinki University in 1991,
tinkering on a PC with an experimental version of the UNIX operating
system. He mentioned the program to an Internet newsgroup. A member
of the newsgroup offered him space to post his program on a university
server. A few people downloaded the program and set to work on it,
then sent the changes back to Torvalds. Someone dubbed it Linux
("Linn-uks"). 

Within a year Torvalds' software had taken on a life of its own. "I
had 5 to 10 people using it. Then that number went to between 100 and
200," says Torvalds. "I didn't know the people anymore." 

Seven years later an estimated 7 million people around the world are
using computers and networks run by Torvalds' creation. It is an
astonishingly versatile piece of programming. 

Engineers have tweaked Linux to run 3Com's handheld PalmPilot
computer. Red Hat Software's version of Linux won the 1996 award for
best desktop computer operating system from trade magazine InfoWorld.
In April researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory used Linux to
run 68 PCs as a single parallel processing machine to simulate atomic
shock waves. 

The do-it-yourself supercomputer cost only $152,000, including labor
(connecting the 68 PCs with cables)-about one-tenth the price of a
comparable commercial machine. It reached a peak speed of 19 billion
calculations per second, making it the 315th most powerful
supercomputer in the world. Three months later it still hasn't had to
be rebooted. 

Torvalds, at 28, is perhaps the most popular programmer on the
planet-and a bona fide celebrity on the Internet. A World Wide Web
search engine finds 7,192 matches for Sun Microsystems' chief
executive, Scott McNealy, 8,580 for Oracle's Larry Ellison, 16,604
for actor Tom Cruise-and 20,419 for Linus Torvalds. One Web site,
"Linus Torvalds Tribute," includes links to other sites titled "Wacky
stuff about Linus," "Linus' Usenet postings" and "Linus to Move to
U.S. in 1997." 

With thousands of programmers working on Linux, the rate of incoming
improvements and new features for the program has accelerated. For all
their resources, an IBM or a Microsoft couldn't have moved faster.
Whereas new versions of typical commercial software products are
issued once a year-or once every three years, in the case of
Microsoft's Windows operating system-new open-source programs like
Linux and Apache are posted monthly, if not more frequently. 

As the Internet grows larger and more diverse in its applications,
software like Torvalds' that adapts to constant change and doesn't
break down will move from being handy to being mandatory. 

For all his cyber-celebrity and the success of Linux, Torvalds isn't
building a $40 million house or buying a fighter plane. Now living in
Santa Clara, Calif. and working for a chip design company, he drives a
green Pontiac that's a dead ringer for your standard rental car. His
favorite dining spot is a low-priced Thai restaurant. 

Torvalds, who lists Albert Einstein and namesake Linus Pauling as his
heroes, explains what motivates him: "There's a strong artistic
element."

These artists call themselves "hackers," but they're a far cry from
the bragging 14-year-olds (also known as "crackers") who grab
headlines trying to break into the Pentagon's computers. In this
community, "hacker" is a term of respect. In the late 1950s MIT
students who loved to tinker with the university's gigantic early
computers started calling themselves hackers. Richard M. Stallman
claims direct descent from them. He started working at MIT's
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as an 18-year-old Harvard student
in 1971. 

Thinking back on those days, Stallman says: "It was a bit like the
Garden of Eden." His eyes, intense and youthful as a college
freshman's, shine out from behind a thicket of tousled hair and a
bushy black beard. "It hadn't occurred to us not to cooperate," he
recalls. 

The fall from grace, or what Stallman calls "pollution," began in
1981, when a company called Symbolics hired away most of the AI lab
members. They stopped turning out freeware and produced instead trade
secrets, hoarded and hidden. 

A mile and a half west of Stallman's beloved lab, another Harvard
student named Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen had used Harvard's
computers to write an operating system for the Altair 8800 six years
earlier. This creaky machine had a row of red lights as a display and
256 bytes of memory, built around the new Intel 8080 processor and
assembled by electronics buffs. 

Someone snared a copy of Gates' program, made copies and gave it to
fellow hobbyists, who made and handed out their own copies. In the
prevailing atmosphere this wasn't thought of as stealing-but Gates
saw it differently and said so in "An Open Letter to Hobbyists,"
which ran in several of the computer hobby journals of the day. "Most
of you steal your software," Gates wrote. "One thing you do is
prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do
professional work for nothing?" 

Gates eventually prevailed in the realm of personal computers.
Stallman, however, didn't give up without a battle. He retaliated by
sabotaging his former colleagues' sophisticated commercial programs
for powerful computers, singlehandedly hacking up his own versions
and giving them away. "They accused me of costing them millions of
dollars," he says. "I hope it's true." 

In 1984 Stallman started work on GNU, his liberated version of the
widely used UNIX operating system. Several pieces of GNU software are
vital to the operation of Linux. The year after he started GNU
Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation to promote free
software projects. 

Let's face it: Communitarian ideas like Stallman's are unlikely to
sweep the capitalist world. Nevertheless, the rise of the Internet
could be nudging the software industry at least partly in this
direction. In fact, two of the most fundamental pieces of the
Internet are open-source software. BIND is the software that allows
us to type site names like www.yahoo.com instead of the machine
numbers (204.71.177.97) our browsers really need. BIND is freeware
developed originally at Berkeley in the early 1980s. Sendmail, which
routes about 80% of the E-mail that courses over the Internet, is
also open-source software, initially written by Eric Allman in 1981
and now maintained by sendmail.org, an on-line programmer community
that numbers in the thousands. 

But even idealists have to eat, don't they? Yes, replies Stallman,
but they don't have to drive Ferraris. "If you want people to take
out the garbage, you have to pay them," says Stallman, who literally
lived in his office, sleeping in a bed a few feet from his collection
of computers, until MIT made him take a room off campus. "You don't
have to do that to get people to program. The excitement of advancing
the technology is what drives hackers." 

Agreeing, Linus Torvalds points out that programmers are able to make
a handsome living in our society without royalties and the receipts
from IPOs. "If you're good, it's easy to get paid," he says. "Good
programmers are rare enough that people pay them well. A big part of
personal satisfaction is having your work recognized by your peers.
That's fundamental in any human psyche." 

Eric Raymond, editor of The New Hacker's Dictionary (MIT Press, third
edition, 1996), is a Linux programmer whose essay "The Cathedral and
the Bazaar" spurred Netscape to liberate its source code. Somewhat
romantically, Raymond compares hacker culture to the culture of the
Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest described by
anthropologist Marvin Harris in Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches (Random
House, 1974). 

In these tribes, the Kwakiutl and others, the central social event
was the potlatch, where tribal chiefs would gain status-and recruit
new tribe members-by lavishing gifts and feasts on neighboring tribes.
The totem poles these tribes are known for served as elaborately
crafted advertisements for each tribe's prosperity-and hence the
chief's ability to "cause great works to be done." 

Before you scoff, remember that for the superrich, who have far more
money than they ever could spend, further accumulation is a striving
for status rather than a pursuit of additional luxury. Freeware folk
are simply people who chose to accumulate prestige rather than money. 

Do you want to create a cool Web business? Then you will probably
avail yourself of Perl, a language that can be used to scan databases
and documents for certain words or numbers, then display the results
in tabular form. For this contribution to computing you can thank
Larry Wall, a 43-year-old former linguist who created the language
while working on a government-sponsored project at Burroughs. Nobody
collects a royalty on Perl. Wall isn't starving-500,000 copies of his
Perl manuals have sold. But he is unlikely to reach The Forbes Four
Hundred. "To have launched something that becomes bigger than
yourself . . . it's overwhelming," says Wall. 

Erik Troan, Red Hat Software's chief developer, pithily sums it all
up: "For engineers, it's all about the cool hack." Troan's well-paid
job at the Linux reseller lets him work on his passion all day long. 

Although Red Hat is very much a for-profit company, it keeps the
faith by making the Linux source code-and any source code its
programmers add-available with the software. If some of Red Hat's code
is sloppy, the users can make it better-and, ideally, share the fix
with the world. 

Sendmail creator Eric Allman started Sendmail, Inc. last November.
Allman seems to have a more corporate-looking haircut than many of
his shaggy programmer peers-until you glimpse the narrow 14-inch braid
tucked under the back of his button-down collar. Allman is confident
that as long as the code stays open and the information keeps flowing
between the company and the community, he and Sendmail, Inc. can
avoid the "sellout" tag. He makes a living for his company by selling
easy-to-use versions of the program, along with support and service
contracts, to corporations who would rather use the phone than hack
their own fixes. 

The company has closed its second round of venture financing, raising
$6 million. It has an asset that cannot be quantified for the balance
sheet: free helpers. More than 5,000 people downloaded a prototype of
Sendmail to test the software, try to break it, and fiddle with the
source code. Not many software companies can mobilize 5,000 testers. 

Apache, the group that IBM coveted, is an example of the informality
that rules in the freeware world. Brian Behlendorf, 25, helped to
start it all. Back in 1991 he was organizing all-night techno dance
parties known as "raves." "The first day 50 people signed up. I knew
there was something there." At one rave on Bonny Doon beach near Santa
Cruz, Calif. 3,000 people showed up. The only promotion was via
E-mail and word of mouth. 

After finding a job building Wired magazine's Web site through a rave
acquaintance, Behlendorf decided the Web server software he was using
needed improvement. He made a few of his own, then posted the new
version, with source code, on the Internet. Code contributions poured
in and thus was born Apache, which today serves up more than 50% of
the Internet's Web sites, including those of Internet top dog Yahoo!.
Apache knocked Netscape's closed-source Web server out of the running
for the cornerstone of IBM's Web commerce package. 

Freeware is still on the fringe of the software industry, but it's a
pretty substantial fringe. As more businesses of every sort come to
depend on the Web, access to source code will become more important.
Why? It can mean the world to a programmer or the person running your
company's Web site. "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"
demands Robert Young, Red Hat Software's chief executive. 

Intel Corp. is certainly not ignoring the freeware community. On this
Bastille Day Intel cosponsored a Linux "tech talk" at the Santa Clara
convention center, attended by roughly 1,000 programmers and systems
administrators. The hook: Someone had hacked Linux to simultaneously
harness four of Intel's Xeon processors, introduced to the world about
two weeks earlier. 

Intel engineer Sunil Saxena sat elbow-to-elbow on a panel with Linus
Torvalds and was hounded by audience members about releasing early
specifications on Intel's upcoming chip, Merced, to the Linux
community. Torvalds, smiling broadly, came to the frazzled Intel
man's aid. "Don't worry," he said, quieting the hooting crowd. "When
Merced comes out, we'll get it running in a couple of weeks. It's a
done deal." 

Intel has good reason to court the freeware crowd: The more popular
non-Microsoft operating systems become, the less Microsoft can push
Intel around. 

In addition to IBM and Netscape, most of the big software companies
are taking a keen interest in open-source software. Corel has recoded
its applications and office software suite to run on Linux and is
selling a computer that uses Linux as its operating system. Computer
Associates International has written a version of its database
software for Linux, and Oracle Corp. is rejiggering its products to
do the same. 

No, Bill Gates' fortune is not at risk, but as Microsoft comes to
rely increasingly on selling software for corporate networks and the
Internet, it will have to reckon with the spreading manifestations of
liberated software. In January Microsoft shelled out $400 million for
Hotmail, a Web-based free E-mail service, bringing aboard 9.5 million
accounts-all running on Apache. 

Maybe in the end this even benefits Microsoft. Bill Gates'
juggernaut looks a lot less like a real monopoly in a world where
plenty of good software is free. Justice Department, please note. 

copyright 1998 Forbes Inc.





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