Open Source Software Convention 2000: A Comfy, Seamless World Continued

Keynote #2: Gregory Benford, Science-Fiction Author

Dr. Gregory Benford is well-known for writing thoughtful, consistent science fiction novels and science books. He's not well-known for work in computing (though he claims to have written the first computer virus and predicted the whole anti-virus software industry). Still, he painted an interesting portrait of where the world of programming is heading, and how programmers should deal with that future.

The future he described is dominated by a "comfy culture" that he already sees developing today. People generally want things that make their lives easier and safer; they want "rounded edges" because people tend to hurt themselves when they run into pointy objects. Software will evolve, just like biological entities do, and the software that makes people most comfortable, which helps them enjoy their lives the most, is the software which will survive. (If you want to stretch the metaphor, you can think of open-source programs as species which let others look through their DNA code and copy whatever genetic material might be useful...) Unfortunately, intrusive software - software that steals what you consider private information, or shouts advertisements at you - will also survive, as long as corporations pay for it.

It's up to the rank-and-file programmers, he said, to guide the course of software evolution. Ideally, people should only write programs that they would want to use. He urged listeners not to write software that compromises privacy, but to write privacy-enhancing software instead. Not to write intrusive software which benefits only software providers; but to write software that maximizes benefits for the user - "stand for software that expands human horizons." There will always be people writing "bad" software - viruses, censorware, etc. - for money, ideals, or spite. It's up to self-motivated hackers to write the counter-programs.

He ended with a warning about the digital divide - not the divide in the United States, but the divide between technologically advanced and technologically primitive countries. As was the case towards the end of the Roman Empire, the have-nots on the outside of the information revolution will want what the haves have on the inside. If we don't want to constantly defend ourselves from those on the outside, we'd better make sure that hardware, software, and access get a lot cheaper, and are made available to those that currently can't afford them.

Lunchtime Press Briefing/Reporter Roundtable

At a reporter roundtable, Tim O'Reilly (founder of the publishing company that organized the conference) led a discussion on the "story" of open-source software. Until a few years ago, the story didn't really exist for the public. Open-source software couldn't be easily quantified, and didn't have any advocates trumpeting its successes. Nobody was buying it, because there was nothing to buy; without a dollar figure or a corporation to attach to it, the industry press ignored it. But technologies like Perl, Apache, sendmail, and bind were being used by millions of people every day, through the websites they visited and the email they sent. The people just didn't know it, because they never had to pay for it, or install it.

Now the open-source story is an easier one to follow (thanks, in part, O'Reilly's conferences). Open-source software helped build the Internet; now there are Internet sites, like collab.net (run by panelist Brian Behlendorf), that help geographically-dispersed open-source workers collaborate on interesting projects. According to Behlendorf, most of the innovation occurring today - low-level innovation in terms of coding schemes, as well as industry-changing paradigm shifts - are happening in dorm rooms and in programmer's home offices. collab.net hopes to spread and encourage such innovation.

Shifting from the idea of producing open-source software, Tim O'Reilly brought up the idea of open-source "performance." Websites are, essentially, open-source applications. As Paul Everitt of Digital Creations said, "Yahoo! is an open-source success story." The point is: sites like Yahoo and MP3.com don't release software under an open-source license, but they are essentially interfaces to Apache, Perl, Linux, FreeBSD, and whatever other backend technology they depend on. The important applications these days are not the backend software; they're the content and communications that the software enables. And open-source developers will need to recognize that what they do is judged not on how well it works internally, but how well it works with the rest of the world - how well it enables that content and communication.

After 4 years of Perl conferences, and 2 years of Open Source Conventions, almost everyone in the computer industry has heard of open-source software; and they know that they're using it, remotely, with pretty much every email message they send or website they visit. Given that most open-source software has tended to be service-oriented, it has a head start over proprietary software in the shift to a service economy. But the various open-source projects will have to integrate together even better than before to expand their role in the smooth functioning of the Internet.

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