Press Roundtable. From left: Dick Hardt (ActiveState), Marco Boerries (Sun), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly)
Open Source Software Convention 2000: A Comfy, Seamless World
09/05/2000
by Edward Piou
This past July in Monterey, California, almost 2000 open-source technologists gathered for the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention. Two keynote speakers and a panel of open-source company business leaders provided some particularly compelling visions of where open source is heading. We're heading, it appears, towards a world of seamless integration, where content and application logic can be plucked from multiple sources to develop personalized computer environments; where software that makes life easier for us replicates and evolves, but is constantly under attack; where how open-source software interfaces with the rest of the world is more important than its internal workings.
Andy Hertzfeld got the open-source religion in 1998, when Netscape open-sourced its browser. This makes him, and the company he co-founded - Eazel, dedicated to making Linux more usable - relative newcomers to the movement. But he's put in his dues elsewhere in the computer industry, having joined Apple Computers in the late 1970s, where he worked on both the Apple II and the original Macintosh.
Hertzfeld gave numerous - and amusing - examples of the lengths to which innovators like Steve Wozniak, working in the 70s and early 80s, would go to tweak their computer systems, in a search for better performance or just more knowledge. One of the more impressive stories started with Wozniak creating a series of complex software copy-protection schemes, as well as the means to break them; and culminated with the Woz trying (unsuccessfully) to use the heat of a clothing iron to break his ultimate encryption scheme.
Much as the availability of source code lets open-source programmers alter and improve software, open standards and relatively cheap components let the early hardware hackers build, improve, and reconfigure machines to their hearts' content. The early hackers also shared a basic desire with today's open-source programmers: they bought components and built computers because they wanted machines for themselves, that they could take home and use on their own terms. There's a clear parallel in the way many of today's greatest open-source projects grew from one programmers' desire for useful, robust, and affordable software.
In putting together Eazel, Hertzfeld took another step with open source which mirrors his early days at Apple. Working at Apple, Andy and his compatriots moved beyond building computers for themselves; their goal was to build hardware and software simple enough for their non-technical friends and family. At Eazel, he and his team are developing software that will make Linux usable to a wider range of users, and may help it win the desktop war with Microsoft.
His keynote did contain a note of warning. While hackers can drive technology forward, it's business models that drive industries. Microsoft dominates the computer industry because it recognized, early on, that selling software was the wave of the future. IBM's opening up of the PC architecture made a lot of technical innovation possible; but software sales ended up determining the kind of experience people get from their computers.
A similar paradigm shift is happening today. The dominant technology business model will move from selling software to providing seamless networked services. Seamless networked services doesn't mean using web-based mail, chat rooms, and remote calendaring systems; it means letting users combine pieces of different remote applications and services to build their own local environment. Microsoft's announcement of its .NET initiative shows that they "get it." The ideas in .NET aren't new ones, and Microsoft may not be able to deliver on their promises; but they recognize the paradigm shift, and the open-source community must do so too to survive and thrive.
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.
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.
Press Roundtable. From left: Dick Hardt (ActiveState), Marco Boerries (Sun), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly)
Press Roundtable. From left: Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly), Paul Everitt (Digital Creations/Zope), Andy Hertzfeld (Eazel), Brian Behlendorf (collab.net, Apache)
Dr. Gregory Benford
Dr. Gregory Benford talking to Tim O'Reilly, after Benford's keynote
Jon Orwant moderating the Internet Quiz Show
Larry Wall plays the autoharp
Elaine Ashton at the Content Management BOF
Chris Petrilli, Zope programmer (standing) at the Content Management BOF
Edward Piou is an ahref.com producer and runs ep Productions, Inc., a development company based in the Washington, D.C. area.
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