SCN: XCF

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

========================

Berkeley's Experimental Computing Club has produced some of the 
Net's most cherished software.  

(Ed Frauenheim, Salon.com)---Not long after the infamous Internet 
Worm nearly crippled the Net in November 1988, a University of 
California at Berkeley student was called to a U.S. government 
hearing in Maryland.  

Phil Lapsley, co-founder of a student club at Berkeley called the 
eXperimental Computer Facility, had played an important part in the 
drama by helping to diagnose the worm and come up with a cure. 
The worm had taken advantage of a weakness in a popular version 
of the Unix operating system produced at Berkeley. Now officials 
from the National Computer Security Center and other government 
agencies were asking him about the episode -- and getting an earful. 
 

The young hacker blasted the federally funded Lawrence Livermore 
Lab for taking itself offline during the outbreak -- a move that didn't 
stop the infection but did cut the lab off from remedies sent from 
elsewhere on the Net. His criticism wasn't entirely welcome, says 
Lapsley.  

"This one woman from the Department of Energy said, 'Forgive me, 
but we're supposed to believe you? You're some undergraduate 
from Berkeley.'"  

"I said to her, 'Whose computer operating system do you run?'" 
recalls Lapsley, "and she said, "Well, Berkeley's.' She sat down 
and I sat down."  

The episode neatly captures the spirit of the XCF, an organization 
that has directly or indirectly produced some of the most powerful 
and innovative open-source software of the past 15 years. The 
confident -- some might say cocky -- XCF undergraduates helped 
slay the Internet Worm, produced one of the first-ever Web browsers 
and developed two programs essential to the ecology of free 
software -- the GTK tool kit (a set of tools useful for creating 
graphical user interfaces) and the GIMP, a Photoshop clone. 
Members of the XCF have also contributed code to the Gnutella file-
trading project, a software program that many observers believe will 
be the successor to Napster.  

"It's almost like it's our duty to create cool things for the world," 
says Spencer Kimball, who co-wrote both the GIMP and the Unix 
versions of Gnutella.  

All these achievements fit within the broader Berkeley record of 
producing free software critical to the rise and expansion of the 
Internet. Students in the XCF have added to the legacy created by 
well-known pioneers like Bill Joy, Kirk McKusick, Eric Allman and 
Sam Leffler. The success of the XCF's lesser known hackers also 
offers some lessons worth considering. In contrast to the common 
perception that the act of programming is a solitary endeavor 
performed by lone cyber-cowboys, the XCF worked best when 
hackers were constantly poking their noses into each other's code. 
And not all that politely, either -- the XCF has a proud tradition of 
brutally honest peer review.  

However, there is some question as to the future of the XCF. All 
members but one will be graduating this year, and it's unclear 
whether future generations of Berkeley hackers will choose to gather 
in the hallowed XCF office. But the XCF has only its own success to 
blame. By helping to create software that made the virtual world rich 
and robust, it may have paved the way for its own real-world 
demise. The Internet now facilitates a vastly larger community of 
cooperating programmers than any single club can provide. And the 
open-source movement that so many XCF programmers have 
played a role in is now untethered to any geographic or physical 
limitation.  

The XCF office is located on the ground floor of Soda Hall, a jade 
green building housing UC-Berkeley's computer science 
department. It's roughly 20 by 30 feet, and computer guts spill out 
onto a series of cluttered tables that are also dotted with intact 
machines and monitors. Posters cover the walls, including one that 
reads: "Need Unix Help? Have Programming Questions? The 
Doctors Are In." A futon with a ratty orange blanket is crammed into 
one corner, next to a bathroom.  

The office, used now by about eight current XCF members, gives a 
visitor little room to move about. But that very lack of space is one 
clue to the origin and culture of the club. UC-Berkeley has long 
suffered a shortage of rooms. When the university reorganized its 
turf in the mid-1980s, the existing computer center available to 
undergraduate hackers was set to be shut down. So Phil Lapsley 
and nine other computer enthusiasts wrote a proposal to establish 
an undergraduate-run facility that would both offer computer help to 
campus members and produce useful software projects.  

The university agreed to the proposal, and in 1986 the XCF was 
born. Lapsley was the first director. He says his motivation for 
starting the club came from picking up coding tricks from other 
hackers at the earlier computer center.  

"It just dawned on me, 'My God, if you can just get all these people 
together in the same place, you can drastically increase how quickly 
people can learn,'" he says.  

University administrators gave the XCF a half-dozen Sun 
Microsystems workstations -- a coup at the time. The scarcity of 
powerful machines all but forced early XCFers to work together. 
Lapsley and Kurt Pires, another co-founder, came up with a course 
to teach fellow undergraduates the C computer language, which 
wasn't offered by the university. The XCFers also helped one 
another figure out how to make their programs tighter, more elegant 
and more efficient.  

The XCFers weren't just tinkering around for fun. They were also 
under the gun to come up with programs that improved computing at 
the university, if not the entire world. That translated into a club 
admissions policy requiring would-be XCFers to propose a 
significant project. The pressure to keep the office also contributed 
to the culture of frank feedback. Often, XCFers spent more time on 
club projects than class work, and those who slacked off on their 
XCF work were asked to move on.  

About one member a year would drop out, Lapsley recalls.  

"I was one of the ones who got slapped around a lot," says Jim 
Griffith, an early XCFer. "But it's really hard to complain about being 
slapped down like that when it's done in the pursuit of making you a 
better engineer."  

Griffith, 34, now works as a software engineer with Go.com, after 
spending five years with a map-related programming firm. That work 
drew on his XCF project, a graphical representation of U.S. Census 
data. He credits the XCF for significantly improving his skills.  

"By the time I left, I knew more about Unix than just about anybody 
at Berkeley who wasn't in the XCF," he says.  

It might not be a big stretch to say Griffith and other XCFers knew 
more about Unix than most people in the world in the late 1980s. 
Berkeley was ground zero for Unix expertise, having gained that 
distinction by spearheading the development of the BSD Unix 
operating system for the Defense Department. The Pentagon wanted 
a commonly accessible, free operating system for the research 
organizations linked together on Arpanet -- the Internet's 
predecessor.  

Berkeley professor Bob Fabry had secured the contract for the work 
in the mid-1970s. He set up the Computer Science Research Group, 
which was spearheaded by Bill Joy and later by another graduate 
student named Kirk McKusick.  

One of the hallmarks of the CSRG was welcoming coding 
improvements to Unix from a wide community of programmers 
throughout the world. McKusick says coders working together 
proved vital to the work.  

"That was one of CSRG's lasting legacies," he says. "We set up a 
model that showed you could get 300 to 400 people to work 
together."  

Lapsley was one of those people when he first got to Berkeley -- and 
the Internet Worm caper offered a perfect example of how 
cooperation could work. Lapsley and Pires were used to the 
occasional undergraduate trying to hack into their machines, and 
had set up the equivalent of trip-wire programs that would alert them 
to suspicious activity. So they noticed the worm hitting their 
machines at the beginning of the attack, the evening of Nov. 2. Peter 
Yee, another XCFer, quickly sent out an e-mail to the hardcore 
techies then on the pre-World Wide Web version of the Internet. Part 
of Yee's e-mail was later quoted in Life magazine's year-end issue: 
"We are under attack."  

But the XCF and the CSRG quickly went to battle stations. Members 
of both groups worked in concert to dissect the virus' code, analyze 
it and write patches to neutralize it. Over the course of a few days, 
those vaccines were zapped out to panicking system administrators 
nationwide.  

The Army, the Navy and the state of Florida all asked the XCFers for 
help. After staying up all night the evening of the attack, Lapsley 
walked back to his apartment dazed but proud.  

"I remember being aware how this really momentous thing had 
happened, and the XCF was at the heart of it," he says.  

The worm victory wasn't the only significant contribution by early 
XCFers. A club member named Pei Wei created Viola, one of the 
very first Web browsing programs. Lapsley also developed NNTP, a 
technology that still helps Internet users access Usenet 
newsgroups, and the hackers came up with some computer game 
advances, including an early multiuser Internet game called "xtrek" 
and an air-traffic control simulation.  

After the early years of the XCF, both the club's membership and 
production level ebbed and flowed. But another fertile period 
emerged in the mid- to late 1990s, when the XCF, led by Spencer 
Kimball and Peter Mattis, coauthors of the GIMP, proved that open-
source software could compete with top-of-the-line proprietary 
applications.  

The impetus for creating the Unix-based image-manipulation 
program was partly necessity, Mattis recalls. "I wanted to make a 
Web page at the time, and I couldn't," says Mattis. "It was that 
simple."  

But the project was anything but easy. It took the pair about two 
years. In the middle of the effort, Mattis decided he needed a better 
set of user interface software tools. So he wrote the GTK program, 
which in turn became a vital piece of code for building GNOME, one 
of the leading contenders for the role of a user-friendly desktop 
environment for Linux-based operating systems. Both the GIMP and 
GTK are now included in the standard versions of the Linux-based 
operating system distributed by Red Hat, TurboLinux and other 
major Linux providers.  

By the late '90s, university pressure on the XCF to produce or 
perish lessened. But the tough-love atmosphere continued. "Even if 
you did the greatest work you've ever done, people still would point 
out why it sucked," says Kimball, who co-founded a Web portal-
building firm called Wego with another XCFer.  

XCFer Alice Zheng says the critical culture didn't repel potential 
members. Instead, the harsh feedback helped feed the club's coding 
quality, just as it had in earlier years. "Having an environment 
where you get direct feedback is important, because you don't get 
that anywhere else" says Zheng, who is now getting her Ph.D. in 
artificial intelligence at Berkeley.  

Zheng, Kimball, Mattis and others would spend as much as 80 
percent of their time in the XCF office. And they came to see 
themselves as an elite breed apart.  

"It had the highest concentration of motivated and capable 
individuals that I've ever seen," Zheng says.  

Excessive self-esteem? Perhaps. But XCFers from that era have an 
impressive track record. Of even greater significance, though, may 
be the role Gene Kan and Kimball have played in the success of file 
sharing software Gnutella. Gnutella, briefly released by AOL 
subsidiary NullSoft this spring and then yanked by corporate higher-
ups, has been reverse-engineered by open-source programmers 
and disseminated throughout the Internet. As a potential example of 
the future of the Net -- distributed file-sharing that depends on no 
central server for its operation -- Gnutella could be hugely 
influential.  

Kimball and Kan wrote a version of Gnutella for Unix. They also 
maintain a major Gnutella Web site and Kan has served as the 
primary spokesman for the software. From this bully pulpit, Kan has 
called Gnutella a defense against excessive government or 
corporate censorship.  

"We're headed toward a world where corporations control our lives -- 
control the flow of ideas and the freedom to think," he says.  

Kan's statement provides a link between two strands of Berkeley 
history over the past four decades: free-speech political activism 
and computer programming advances. Of course, the XCF isn't as 
famous as Mario Savio's Free Speechers or Bill Joy's BSD Unix 
programmers. But the plucky student-run group does draw 
accolades from those who know its work.  

Chris DiBona, the "Linux community evangelist" for VA Linux 
Systems and head of the Silicon Valley Linux Users' Group, 
applauds both the GIMP and GTK. "Those are phenomenal projects 
with really great thinking behind them," he says. DiBono estimates 
that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies of the 
programs are in circulation.  

XCF members "are a legend," says Christos Papadimitriou, who was 
acting chairman of Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer 
sciences department earlier this year. "They are forward-looking, 
activist and fiercely independent."  

On the other hand, the XCF's high opinion of itself can irk some 
students in the computer science department.  

"There's the XCF's pride," says Daniel Silverstein, of the broader 
Computer Science Undergraduate Association. "There's also, 
'What's the XCF been doing since the GIMP?'"  

Not much, admits current XCFer Eric Wagner. In recent years, the 
club has focused on more personal projects, often having to do with 
hardware. Members built a special MP3 player used during a Las 
Vegas road trip and also hacked into the XCF office climate-control 
system.  

Wagner will be the only XCFer next year and is busy recruiting. 
That's hard to do, though. Wagner says one problem is the ease 
with which student coders can do all their programming work online 
from home. And those hardcore Berkeley computer heads wanting to 
share programming tricks can now turn to the Web for a ready-made 
community. Sourceforge.net, for example, is home to more than 
81,000 programmers working on 11,000 projects. Those who turn to 
Sourceforge can join or launch software projects small and large.  

This type of online collaboration, of course, owes indirectly to XCF 
accomplishments: building trust in the Net by killing the Internet 
worm and reinforcing enthusiasm for the free-software movement 
with GTK, the GIMP and Gnutella. Yet it's quite possible the XCF's 
success may lead to its extinction. Still, Wagner is determined to 
preserve the club.  

"This has such a history," says the 20-year-old. "It'd be a shame if it 
dies just because I didn't work hard enough."  

Whatever happens next in the annals of the XCF, Lapsley looks 
back on his now-grown baby with a father's satisfaction. Currently 
the vice president of engineering of a Berkeley biometrics 
technology firm, the 34-year-old says he's glad the XCF has 
produced valuable open-source software and improved people's 
lives along the way.  

He got a particular kick from discovering that GIMP files end in the 
letters ".xcf." "It made me so proud," he says. "That's really cool."  

Copyright 2000 Salon.com 





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