By David Warsh, Globe Columnist, 12/13/98

He had been mowing lawns in suburban Newton after getting his degree in classics from Harvard, according to company legend. Then a friend drafted him to write an instruction manual for the Unix computer operating system. Unix had been written by the telephone company, which was prohibited by an antitrust agreement from selling it. Its authors happily gave the code away to anyone who asked, but nobody at Ma Bell got paid to explain how it worked.

He set up a picnic table at a trade show and went home with a wad of bills the size of a roll of toilet paper. That was Tim O'Reilly's initiation, 20 years ago, to the mysteries of open-source software.

Today, he is sole proprietor of a $35 million-a-year publishing empire with headquarters in the seaside town of Sebastapol, Calif., and offices in Paris, Koln, Germany, Tokyo, and Cambridge. O'Reilly and Associates published far and away the most influential titles among how-to books about the Web -- so well-branded that they rate a special kiosk in many stores.

More to the point, O'Reilly is the proprietor of the view du jour of the Next Big Thing. It may even be the correct one. In a 31-page essay last month he turned his spotlight on the greatest threat to Microsoft's dominion of the market for personal computer and Internet software.

The really, truly Next Big Thing has not much to do with the merger of America Online and Netscape Communications, and their alliance with Sun Microsystems. Instead, he says, it's a social movement known as open-sourcing, meaning the widespread and uncoordinated collaboration of programmers using freely distributed source code and the communications facilities of the Net.

However obscurely named, open-sourcing possesses an economic logic so powerful that O'Reilly thinks it could transform the software industry so completely that, in the end, it would bear a stronger resemblance to the social organization of the scientific community than to, say, the industrial organization of the oil business.

After all, it was the ethos of science -- ''no kings, no priests, just a rough consensus and running code'' in the phrase of one pioneer -- that governed the Internet Engineering Task Force. That obscure peer-selected planning group oversaw the creation of the Internet. It had a natural affinity for ''the rough-and-tumble search for optimal solutions'' that is the essence of the spirit of openness. Its ultimate expression -- so far -- is the ultrademocratic collaborative medium known as the World Wide Web.

If open-sourcing continues to spread -- and O'Reilly shows that the movement already is well under way -- then you can relax in some deep sense about Bill Gates being the greatest threat to the planet after global warming. The transition from the age of software to the age of infoware will be at hand.

The issue surfaced four-square last month in an article O'Reilly wrote about ''The Open-Sourcing Revolution,'' which filled an issue of Esther Dyson's celebrated newsletter, Release 1.0.

This in itself was an example of open sourcing, for ordinarily Dyson's letter is written by Dyson and her hirelings; O'Reilly was doing a guest shot. No money would have changed hands; in a way, that is precisely O'Reilly's point. Such is the ruthless efficiency of the Internet that you, too, can read the piece at www.edventure.com.

release1/1198.html -- for free!

The essence of O'Reilly's argument is that the relentless commodification process at work in computing for 30 years is about to enter a new stage. What yesterday was proprietary and expensive is cheap and widely available today.

Thus in the 1950s and 1960s, IBM dominated through hardware. Software was written by hardware suppliers, or by captive vendors. Barriers to entry were high.

Then the personal computer took the computer out of glass houses and put it on desktops. Suddenly barriers to entry were low. Software entrepreneurs like Gates and Mitch Kapor made fortunes by creating brand names that came to dominate their market applications.

Before long, however, a few software products had become hugely complex, requiring the efforts of thousand of programmers writing for years. Microsoft's Windows NT operating system is a good example. No longer was it possible for a solo programmer to have much influence; he or she needed a venture capitalist and a team.

Enter the code-sharers. The source codes of these huge commercial programs -- their tightly written underlying mainsprings -- are their most jealously guarded secrets, the very heart of their commercial advantage. But the secrecy made it impossible to modify these programs, which were inelastic and often error-prone.

To be sure, the thoroughly open -- and therefore modifiable -- Unix program had been developed at huge expense and then given away by AT&T, starting in the 1970s. But who today could afford to write -- and then simply give away -- operating systems that might challenge the dominance of commercial products?

A Finnish graduate student named Linus Thorvald, for one. In the early 1990s, Thorvald stepped forward with a home-cooked operating system kernel that he distributed freely over the Internet. Within a few years, the Linux system, extensively improved and expanded by hundreds of computer PhDs, was employed by an estimated 7 million users -- most of whom affirm its wide-ranging superiority to Windows NT.

O'Reilly writes, ''The open-source paradigm once again lowers the barriers to entry. You can take somebody else's product and build your own custom version of it. It lets you scratch your own itch . . . If somebody doesn't like a feature, they can add to it, subtract from it, or re-implement it. If they give their fix back to the community, it can be adopted widely very quickly.''

And now Red Hat Software has gone into business distributing a basic Linux package for the bargain sum of $49.95. Bob Young, the chief executive, says his goal is ''to shrink the dollar value of the operating systems market'' from Microsoft's billions to $500 million -- of which he hopes to command the lion's share.

There are other products, O'Reilly notes. The Free Software Foundation's GNU project distributes a set of programmer's tools for open source systems. The Perl language, created by Larry Wall (now an O'Reilly employee) is widely used; so are tcl and Python.

The Apache Group, a dozen core developers and their surrounding user group, has achieved a dominant share among Web servers, despite having no more corporate organization than a shared Web site. Sendmail -- backbone of the Internet's e-mail infrastructure -- is an open system. So is Samba, a ''stealth'' technology that permits administrators to work Linux applications into their Microsoft systems.

None of this is lost on Microsoft, which, after all, has made a series of dramatic and so far successful adjustments to the sudden rise of the Internet. An internal Microsoft memo analyzing the threat posed by Linux and open-source projects in general -- acknowledged authentic by the company -- has turned up on the Web (www.opensource.org/

halloween1.html), extensively annotated by open-source enthusiast Eric Raymond.

Will the open-source argument really overtake the commercial software industry? The deeper beauty of O'Reilly's argument is the parallel he draws between the emergence of open science in the Renaissance and among the community of computer users today. The imperative to share knowledge in order that it be tested is the same in each. ''Where scientists talk of replication, open-source programmers talk of debugging,'' he says. The point is to get it right and move on. He quotes Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler: ''To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.''

Most of us spend our lives and never note that the great delicate apparatus for the production and distribution of knowledge that is science ultimately has nothing to do with the market -- perhaps because so relatively few people are involved. Indeed, the organization of science in certain ways is just the opposite of the marketplace -- it is designed to free some people to pursue their curiosity, wherever it leads. Yet science has made us rich.

If the passion of the large community of geeks, nerds, wonks, and other computer programmers who are interested in solving problems of their world succeeds in freeing themselves from Microsoft's business model, we will benefit similarly -- and so much the worse for Bill Gates.