By David Warsh, Globe Columnist, 02/28/99
The expected outcome of the government's Microsoft antitrust suit has been, all along, the Sudden Twist - a moment of astonishment when, as in the traditional staging of Pirandello's play ''Six Characters in Search of an Author,'' a lighting change abruptly shifts attention from one corner of the stage to another.
After all, this is what happened the last time the government went to court in an antitrust case this big. Bill Gates himself got his big break in business in the early 1980s only after the Justice Department had distracted IBM Corp. from its normal competitive practices for a decade.
Almost overnight, IBM's Goliath became vulnerable and Gates's little David of a firm grew into a bigger, badder version of Goliath. Mightn't an entrant from an unexpected quarter in the technology derby, aided by the full-court government press against Microsoft, achieve the same thing again?
Sure enough, the sudden rise of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s could have clobbered Gates when he failed to quickly recognize its overwhelming significance. He recovered just in time, before little Netscape had achieved an insuperable lead by giving its browser away. Is he ready for the next surprise?
The last few years have seen a steady rise to prominence of a rival to Microsoft's Windows operating system known as Linux. From the user's point of view, Linux's great virtue is that, unlike Microsoft's Windows NT, it doesn't crash. Never mind that it is virtually free. It is as reliable as thousands of software engineers can make it, sifting among themselves for the most technically elegant fixes for the inevitable imperfections of its early versions. Its only drawback compared to Windows: for a while longer, it will be somewhat more difficult to install and use.
From the point of view of hardware manufacturers and software developers, the rise of the Linux system is, well, more complicated. For behind Linux are a series of deep social and technological developments with far-reaching ethical overtones known for the moment as the Open Source movement. Its signal characteristic? It is a not-for-profit community, at least not for big profits, much like the highly collaborative professional community that built the Internet itself.
Just over a year ago, the movement didn't have a name - or rather it had a number of names, all derived from the various legal shadings undergirding the distribution of its products: freeware, free software, shareware, and open software. Each term implied a certain degree of control over the source code (the mainspring) of the program; each concealed a conviction about the appropriate relationship between the computer community and the business world.
Then in January 1998, Netscape said that it would make available for free the source code for its Navigator, thereby making it easy for others to write software to connect up to the Web-browsing tool, even to propose changes to Navigator's design. Netscape allowed that it had been persuaded to do so by a paper called ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar.''
Other people have made more fundamental contributions to the Open Source movement than software engineer Eric Raymond, author of the paper. There is Linus Torvalds, for example, the inventor of Linux. Richard Stallman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been preaching the gospel of free software since 1981. Harvard's Scott Bradner and others of the Internet Engineering Task Force showed how a loosely organized committee could maintain the open standards that made the Internet possible.
But no one has been more imaginative than the 41-year-old Raymond in describing the ethos of the strange new community that has grown up around the Internet. Not since peer-reviewed modern science emerged in the 17th century has there arisen anything quite like it. Out of habit from his college days at the University of Pennsylvania, Raymond sometimes adopts the language of cultural anthropology. But he functions more as a live-wire journalist, in the manner of George Gilder or Esther Dyson. Technology reporter Dale Dougherty calls him ''the evangelist.''
Raymond had been around the Open Source movement for 10 years when, in early 1993, he tumbled onto the little operating system that was Linux. The original Linux program - its ''kernel'' - was written in 1991 by Torvalds, then a 21-year-old undergraduate at the University of Helsinki. (Finland has the highest per capita Internet participation in the world.) Torvalds was building a system from scratch to be compatible with the widely used Unix operating system, hence his program's name.
He himself had been named for Linus Pauling, the great chemist; Unix had been developed by AT&T in the 1970s, and then simply given away to universities, for the company was prohibited by antitrust decree from selling copies.
Torvalds' 10,000 lines of code were designed to make a personal computer function especially dependably and accessibly at an elementary level. He posted them on the Internet with an invitation to others to help. Soon suggestions and improvements of various sorts were flooding in: ''patches,'' in the lingo of the programmers.
''Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew,'' Raymond has written. ''I believed that the most important software systems (operating systems and really large tools), need to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta released before its time.''
''Linus Torvald'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.''
Hence Raymond's epistle, ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar.'' Its central insight is that peer review and rapid evolution are the path to software reliability when the whole Internet world is the talent pool, because large numbers of persons are willing to work for prestige or the sheer thrill of the chase. The piece is about the length of a magazine article. He simply put it on the Web.
You can find it there in its newest edition, along with a wonderful parody (''The Circus Midget and the Dinosaur Turd''), a second paper on intellectual property rights (''Homesteading the Noosphere''), and the beginnings of a third on software economics (''The Magic Cauldron''). Find it at www.opensource.
org. Skim the well-organized information, and then click to Raymond's paper (you'll find it under ''links'').
On Raymond's home page you will find most of what you want to know about the code warrior - and then some. His day job is as technical director of the Chester County (Pa.) InterLink, a nonprofit organization that provides free Internet access to citizens of the county. His book, the ''New Hackers Dictionary,'' was first published in 1991 and is still in print. His black belt in Tae Kwon Do, his poetry and music, his libertarian politics, his love of guns, his extensive resume in live-action role-playing games, his glossary of science fiction terms are there. Raymond is a second-generation nerd: His father worked around the world for Sperry Univac, one of the early computer companies.
Linger on opensource.org site and you'll find a good account of a meeting in Palo Alto, Calif., that took place last year. Raymond and a half-dozen other spin-doctors from the Linux community got together to hash over the opportunity provided by Netscape's announcement - and the opportunity it afforded to address the corporate world, however indirectly.
''We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that had been associated with `free software' in the past and sell the idea strictly on the pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. `Open Source,' contributed by Chris Peterson [of the Foresight Institute] was the best thing we could come up with,'' writes Raymond.
(What you can't find on the Web, apart from all the fragments, is a really comprehensive account of the movement. For that you need ''Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution'' from O'Reilly Books, which lists for $24.95. Fourteen innovators, including Torvalds, Stallman, and Bradner describe developments from various perspectives - technical, legal, and social. Raymond contributes a useful history and an afterword. For a rave review, see www.slashdot.com, the best spot on the Web for news of this sort.)
Thus during the last year, Linux in particular and the Open Source movement in general have crept steadily forward into the larger culture: Forbes, the new and different Technology Review (which brought Raymond to Cambridge for breakfast last week), The Economist, Science, the Sunday magazine of The New York Times. Often the argot of ''Star Wars'' is adopted: It is rebels vs. the Evil Empire.
Linux has been making rapid business strides. Red Hat Software has begun selling shrink-wrapped copies of Linux for the give-away price of $40, undergirt by promises of continuing support. Greylock Capital Management, a celebrated Boston venture capital firm, has in turn invested in Red Hat. IBM has pledged to support Linux for its servers and systems as well.
What will happen? Stay tuned! The more exuberant are already burying Microsoft (''The Last Dinosaur and the Tarpits of Doom.'') Others think Sun Microsystems, which did more than just about any other company to push Unix into the corporate world, could be the chief victim of Linux's bourgeoning success.
And, of course, other forces will continue to dog the world's richest man. The sudden emergence of the Open Source movement after 20 years of inexorable rise is a reminder that there are other fundamental forces at work in the world besides money.
This story ran on page D01 of the Boston Globe on 02/28/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
