Tim,

The arrival of your invitation to the Open Source Conference encouraged me to follow through on a question that's been nagging at me since I read of Red Hat's going public... I follow with much interest the open source "movement"--and this development seems real significant to me. How do you see Red Hat's going public (and I hear that Caldera is contemplating it too) contributing to this--is it enhancing the progress by adding resources (and notoriety not yet seen for this company by the general populace)? Do you see involving "equity owners" an evolutionary step that will facilitate the betterment of the whole movement? I know competition is good, but is there a threat of splintering this "movement" if one company gets the upper hand ?

-- John

John,

Boy, this is a tough question. I don't think any of us knows the answer. Big money could distort the open source market in a significant way. It sure did that to the Internet standards process... Companies like Netscape (and then Microsoft) turned HTML and friends into a battleground, to the detriment of users. The only thing that protected protocols like HTTP and SMTP was the presence of open source implementations (Apache and Sendmail) with dominant market share. As that kind of thing goes by the way side, we could see some major fragmentation. And it is certainly true that if a company like Sendmail, Inc. is acquired or fails to meet its financial targets in ways that give control to the financiers rather than the hackers, that bastion of standards could certainly be undercut. (To be honest, though, there wasn't much choice, since without funding, sendmail's dominance would likely have fallen by the wayside as companies like Microsoft aimed squarely at the internet email server market.)

One of the key things to realize is the importance of open standards (as well as open source). Rather than seeing open source as the enemy of proprietary software, I try to persuade people on both sides of the fence that there is a complementarity. Even the most proprietary companies, like Microsoft, should see how much they gain from a truly independent developer community (which can only flourish in an open standards environment), and support that community for their own benefit! Cisco, which is as competitive a company as you can find, has realized this. While they are fiercely proprietary, they also realize that they have benefitted enormously from the open world of TCP/IP and the Internet, and they have always been a big supporter of the internet standards process. I'm hopeful that we can find a balance between open and proprietary, rather than going in fierce swings between openness and innovation on the one hand, and proprietary stagnation on the other.

But companies forgetting that openness gave them their original turbocharged start is not the only danger we face. We could also see a flight of talent from the open source community as people see their friends and former colleagues getting very rich. People are going to be thinking first of starting companies, and only second of giving their code away. And once you start a company with someone else's money, it's hard to stick to your ideals, because you have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders, and that makes it difficult to take the long view that Open Source requires. (Right now, it's easy to say that open source and business aren't inconsistent, but chances are good that the financiers will back off from open source principles at the first sign of trouble.)

I've strongly suggested to some of the companies planning to go public on the back of the Open Source movement that they set aside a percentage of their stock in some kind of foundation that would give grants to open source programmers--something like a cross between the Nobel prize (for prior work) and the MacArthur fellowships (for current work)--so that there would be a clear reward for some of the people who've made Linux et-al possible. Red Hat's invitation for hackers to participate in the IPO is a good start, but I don't think it's right since it still lets some people who happen to be in the right place at the right time surf the wave, but doesn't necessarily encourage the continuation of the open source development model. I've urged Red Hat and others to consider something like this. They've been intrigued but so far I haven't seen any sign that this is actually going to happen.

We also need to see a much greater recognition of the key role of university computer science departments. Like every other industry, the computer industry needs institutions that support the free interchange of information. Universities have always played this role. But if you look at some of the major university sponsored projects -- Berkeley UNIX and Berkeley networking, X, Mach, and so forth -- you don't see a lot of activity these days. The rewards of going commercial are so disproportionate that it's hard to make the choice to stay on the research and shared information side of the fence.

--Tim

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