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Some
of the world’s most celebrated institutions are running their daily operations
on Linux-mounted machines—including Google, Amazon and Reuters
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Against
many economic, production and social norms, open-source software has emerged as
a serious challenger to proprietary software products. Steven Weber’s new book
comprehensively tells the story.
You
perhaps consider, as I do, Titanic and Lord of the Rings as
cinematic marvels. The special effects of both movies were made on machines
running the Linux operating system; the most famous of open-source software
products. And, notably, some of the world’s most celebrated commercial and
non-commercial institutions are running their daily operations on Linux-mounted
machines—including Google, Amazon, Reuters, Merrill Lynch, DreamWorks, the
American Departments of Defense and Energy and the National Security Agency in
the US. What is it in open-source software that has made it such a success?
Steven
Weber’s book, “The
Success of Open Source“,
attempts to explain how the open-source software development process emerged,
what factors make it work and what knowledge we can discern that can be applied
in other, completely different arenas.
But
why is software important? Weber, a political scientist at the University of
California in Berkeley, believes that software is an “essential tool with
which humanity will continue to create wealth and serve itself with more
value.” What is unique about the open-source process is that it is “a
real-world, researchable example of a community and knowledge production
process.” There is thus the possibility of recognizing new perspectives on
problems like social cooperation, and the institutional, political and economic
consequences of the Internet revolution on human societies.
The
Unix Culture
The
open-source process takes its roots from the late 1960s when Ken Thompson, a
programmer at AT&T, wrote in 1969 the ‘kernel’ (or the core program) of
a new operating system he named UNICS (uniplexed information and computing
services), and later modified to Unix. To avoid anti-trust lawsuits that might
result from entering any market other than “phones and telegrams,” AT&T
preferred not to go ahead with the crude operating system or try to tap it for
any commercial gain. Thus, the company started to license the software to
universities and later military agencies that requested it with minimal terms.
“The software came ‘as is’ with no royalties to AT&T, but also no
support and no bug fixes,” wrote Weber. This represented a green light to
users at computer science departments to “share support and bug fixes with one
another because no one at AT&T was going to help them.”
Unix
found its way into the University of California at Berkeley, Rand
corporation (an
American think-tank), University of New South Wales, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), among others, where students and researchers alike were
profoundly modifying the code and developing it jointly and freely.
By
the beginning of 1983, Unix had become a widespread operating system and the
business climate in the US changed, so AT&T decided to rewrite the Unix
license making dramatic changes, including license fees rising up to US$
100,000. Worse yet, users/developers were denied access to the code as well as
the right to modify it.
‘Free’
Like in ‘Free Speech’
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Software
is “a manifestation of human creativity and expression”
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In
1983 a new Xerox laser printer arrived at the artificial intelligence lab of
MIT, where programmer and researcher Richard Stallman worked. But unlike any
other piece of hardware to come to the lab, the software that runs the machine
was withheld. This meant that whenever a paper jam occurred, the lab researchers
couldn’t do what they used to do—tinker with the software to solve the
problem.
Stallman
considered the shift in attitude unethical, and the next year resigned from his
position at MIT to devote his life to free software, founding the Free
Software Foundation
(FSF), a non-profit organization. For Stallman, software was not “just a tool
to run computers. It ultimately was a manifestation of human creativity and
expression,” Weber quoted the FSF's founder. More important still, Stallman
deemed software “a key artifact of a community that existed to solve problems
together for the common good.” He stresses the essence of what Free Software
stands for: “free like in free speech, not free beer,” thus, free doesn’t
mean zero price, rather it means retaining the freedom for users/developers to
see or modify the code as they please.
The
confusion between freedom and zero price remained, however. Then it was Eric
Raymond, an
open-source pioneer, who proposed ‘open-source’ in a conference of the
programmers’ community in 1998. The new term was approved as a more neutral
and business-friendly alternative to the ideology-charged FSF, with its presumed
anti-corporate attitude.
The
open-source community has embraced two radical schemes from the FSF. First was
the four freedoms governing the way programmers (individuals or organizations)
deal with the code. This includes the freedom to run the program for any
purpose; to study how it works; to redistribute copies of it for free or for a
fee that covers distribution costs; and to change and improve the program and
redistribute the modified version so the public can benefit from it. Second was
the General Public License (GPL) that Stallman designed to protect the
contributions of voluntary programmers from being exploited by big corporations.
The GPL, a special license enforced by copyright laws, states that everyone is
free to use-modify-distribute the code as long as they pass back to the
community any modifications they make to the original code. This way, any code
based or built on code licensed by the GPL becomes itself ‘GPLed’.
The
Process or the Code?
Weber
believes that however great the open-source products are, the process employed
to produce them is far more important.
The
first step in understanding this process is to know what motivates programmers
to voluntarily contribute their time and mind space to projects that will not
bring them any (direct) financial gain. The author cites a 2001 survey by the
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) that aimed to segment programmers participating in
open-source projects based on what motivates them. About a third of the
respondents were “believers” who believed the code should remain open. About
a fifth were “professionals” who said working on such projects helps with
their jobs. A quarter of the respondents were “fun-seekers” participating
mainly for intellectual stimulation, and about a fifth were
“skill-enhancers” seeking to gain learning and experience from open-source
programming.
But
supposing the open-source code is a product freely available for the taking,
then conventional economics tells us that everyone would prefer a free ride
rather than developing the product. After some time the product would disappear
or at least lose its “scarcity” value and the system (or the open-source
process) would unravel backwards and vanish—which obviously is not the case.
What
helps sustain the open-source process is that each participant prefers to
contribute positively in search of a benefit rather than just piggybacking on
the work of others. And we can’t even consider those who only use open-source
products developed by others—as downright free-riders. It is in their interest
to have efficient programs, thus they continually give feedback on the bugs they
stumble upon; which is an added-value contributing to the whole process.
Trial
and Error
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Linux
Torvalds, a Finnish programmer, wrote the kernel of the Linux operating system
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In
open-source everyone is free (and encouraged) to take the code and build on it
using a different and innovative path— a process called “forking” in the
community's vernacular. But forking appears only occasionally. How does the
open-source community drive progress with neither too frequent forking that may
lead to incompatible versions of the programs nor too rare forking that could
result in an innovation impasse?
The
open-source community used its intuitive trial-and-error method to come up with
unconventional solutions. With the release of earlier versions of Linux, the
emphasis of Linus Torvalds, the Finnish programmer who wrote the kernel of the
operating system, was directed at leveraging the large numbers of programmers in
fixing bugs in order to release stable versions. Yet, he soon spotted the need
among many developers to use their energy in innovating new services for the
system rather than debugging the existing code. Torvalds solved this by starting
the tradition of making available two versions of the open-source products at
the same time. One is stable and almost bug-free for users, the other is
experimental for developers. This solution helped the innovations in the
open-source products to run hand-in-hand with the debugging and stabilizing
activities.
Meanwhile,
programmers found the choice of forking the code and starting over less
appealing. And thus consistency of products like Linux or Apache (the dominant
open-source software managing interaction between your Web browser and servers
hosting Web sites) was maintained.
Misconceptions?
A
widespread fallacy about open-source communities is the idea that they are
hostile to copyrights. (Part of the reason is that Richard Stallman famously
called the GPL license ‘copyleft’). Weber argues against this
perception: “open-source intellectual property aims at creating a social
structure that expands, not restricts, the commons.” Thus, the author
considers the open-source process a platform of contributions and learning
depending on copyrights to be based on distribution; not exclusion.
While
the logic behind the current copyright laws is that having a right to a property
gives me the privilege of excluding you from benefiting from it, the open-source
copyrights are based on distribution—where a sustainable value creation
process results from distributing the code freely. And we can see signs of the
viability of this new copyright paradigm in some successful companies that have
figured out ways to make money out of the open-source products without
restricting or putting a premium on the code itself. IBM, for instance, is
making money from open-source by selling software customization and maintenance
services. Also, it manufactures customized hardware servers for Linux and
releases them at competitive prices, compared with other vendors who charge
clients for both the software and the hardware components.
So,
will open-source software knock down proprietary software companies? Not
exactly. Weber says that contrary to claims by both proprietary and open-source
software advocates “that their worldview was self-evident, obvious and an
inevitable consequence of the material forces and constraints that exist in
computing…neither proprietary nor free software is ‘blind destiny’. Both
continue to exist in a kind of software industry ‘dualism’.”
* Note from the editor: all information in
this article is based on information from Steven
Weber’s book, “The
Success of Open Source.”
**
Waleed El-Shobaky is an Egyptian journalist. You can reach
him at: shobakky@yahoo.com.
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