Free for All - Peter Wayner (the false prince series .txt) 📗

other hand, is a big free-for-all in both senses of the phrase. The code circulates for everyone to grab, and only those who need it dig in. There's no great connection between programmer and user. People grab software and take it without really knowing to whom they owe any debt. I only know a few of the big names who wrote the code running the Linux box on my desk, and I know that there are thousands of people who also contributed. It would be impossible for me to pay back any of these people because it's hard to keep them straight.

This vast mass of contributors often negates the value and prestige that comes from writing neat code. Since no one can keep track of it all, people tend to treat all requests from unknown people equally. The free source world tends to have many equals, just because there's no hierarchy to make it easy for us to suss out each other's place. Corporations have titles like executive vice president and super executive vice president. The military labels people as private, sergeant, or major. There are no guideposts in the free software world.

Still, good contributions pay off in good reputations. A bug fix here and a bug fix there might not build a name, but after a year or two they pay off. A good reputation opens doors, wins jobs, creates friendships, and makes it possible to interest people in new projects.

The free source world is also a strange mirror image of the hierarchies that emerge after a season of tribal potlatch ceremonies. In the tribes, those who receive great gifts are required to return the favor with even greater ones. So the skillful hunters and gatherers give good gifts and receive something better in return. The rich get richer by giving away their bounty. The less skillful end up at the bottom of the list. The free source world, on the other hand, spreads its riches out to everyone. There are many modest programmers who enjoy the source code of the great programmers, and there may be billions of non-programmers who also tag along. Many major websites run on free OSs alone. Who knows which cheap Internet tools will come along in the future? The poor get lifted along at no great cost to the economy. The charity is broadcast to everyone, not narrowcast to a few.

The efficiency goes deeper. There's a whole class of products for the home that are much fancier and sophisticated than what people need. One company near me sells perfectly usable nonstick pans for $2.95. A fancy department store sells hefty, industrial-grade pans that do the same thing for more than $100. Why? They make great gifts for people getting married. This wedding-industrial complex adds needless accoutrements, doodads, and schmaltz just to give products enough cach to make them great gifts.

The free source world, on the other hand, has no real incentive to generate phony, chrome-plated glitz to make its gifts acceptable or worthy enough of giving. People give away what they write for themselves, and they tend to write what they need. The result is a very efficient, usable collection of software that helps real people solve real problems. The inefficiency of the wedding-industrial complex, the Father's Day-industrial complex, the Christmas-industrial complex, and their need to create acceptable gifts are gone.

Of course, there's also a certain element of selfishness to the charity. The social prestige that comes from writing good free software is worth a fair amount in the job market. People like to list accomplishments like "wrote driver" or "contributed code to Linux Kernel 2.2" on their r sum . Giving to the right project is a badge of honor because serious folks doing serious work embraced the gift. That's often more valuable and more telling than a plaque or an award from a traditional boss.

Rob Newberry is a programmer at Group Logic, a small software house in northern Virginia where I once did some consulting. His official title is "Director of Fajita Technology," and he is sometimes known as "The Dude," a reference to a character in the movie /The Big Lebowski/. Technically, his job is building and supporting their products, which are used to automate the prepress industry. One of their products, known as Mass Transit, will move files over the Internet and execute a number of automated programs to them before moving them on. Printers use them to take in new jobs, massage the data to their needs by performing tasks like color separation, and then send the jobs to the presses. This work requires great understanding of the various network protocols like FTP of NFS.

Newberry is also a Linux fan. He reads the Kernel list but rarely contributes much to it. He runs various versions of Linux around the house, and none of them were working as well as he wanted with his Macintosh. So he poked around in the software, fixed it, and sent his code off to Alan Cox, who watches over the part of the kernel where his fixes belonged.

"I contributed some changes to the Appletalk stack that's in the Linux Kernel that make it easier for a Linux machine to offer dial-in services for Macintosh users," he said in an article published in Salon. "As it stands, Mac users have always been able to dial into a Linux box and use IP protocols, but if they wanted to use Appletalk over PPP, the support wasn't really there."

Newberry, of course, is doing all of this on his own time because he enjoys it. But his boss, Derick Naef, still thinks it's pretty cool that he's spending some of his programming energy on a project that won't add anything immediately to the bottom line.

"He's plugged into that community and mailing lists a lot more," explains Naef. "There are other people here who are, too, but there are all these tools out there in the open source world. There's code out there that can be incorporated into our computer projects. It can cut your development costs if you can find stuff you can use."

Of course, all of this justification and rationalization aren't the main reason why Newberry spends so much of his time hacking on Linux. Sure, it may help his company's bottom line. Sure, it might beef up his r sum by letting him brag that he got some code in the Linux kernel. But he also sees this as a bit of charity.

"I get a certain amount of satisfaction from the work. .. but I get a certain amount of satisfaction out of helping people. Improving Linux and especially its integration with Macs has been a pet project of mine for some time," he says. Still, he sums up his real motivation by saying, "I write software because I just love doing it." Perhaps we're just lucky that so many people love writing open source software and giving it away.

LOVE

It's not hard to find bad stories about people who write good code. One person at a Linux conference told me, "The strange thing about Linus Torvalds is that he hasn't really offended everyone yet. All of the other leaders have managed to piss off someone at one time or another. It's hard to find someone who isn't hated by someone else." While he meant it as a compliment for Torvalds, he sounded as if he wouldn't be surprised if Torvalds did a snotty, selfish, petulant thing. It would just be par for the course.

There are thousands of examples of why people in the open source community hate each other and there are millions of examples of why they annoy each other. The group is filled with many strong-minded, independent individuals who aren't afraid to express their opinions. Flame wars spring up again and again as people try to decide technical questions like whether it makes more sense to use long integers or floating point numbers to hold a person's wealth in dollars.

Of course, hate is really too strong a word. If you manage to pin down some of the people and ask them, point blank, whether they really hate someone, they'll say, "No." They really just don't like a few of that person's technical decisions. These points of friction fester and turn into what might more commonly be called hate.

These technical debates are terrible tar pits for the community, and they eat up the energy. The debates turn frustrating because they have the strange distinction of being both technically important and utterly trivial. Everyone would like to just sail through life and not worry about tiny details like the type of integer used in a calculation. There are millions of these decisions that take up time that might be better spent imagining grand dreams of a seamless information noosphere that provides the wisdom of the ages in a simple graphical interface. But every programmer learns that it's the details that count. NASA lost a spacecraft when some programmer used English units instead of the metric system. So the work needs to get done.

Occasionally, the fights get interesting. Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens are both great contributors to the open source movement. In fact, both worked together to try to define the meaning of the term. Perens worked with the community that creates the Debian distribution of Linux to come up with a definition of what was acceptable for the community. This definition morphed into a more official version used by the Open Source Initiative. When they got a definition they liked, they published it and tried to trademark the term "open source" in order to make sure it was applied with some consistency. It should be no surprise that all of that hard work brought them farther apart.

In early April 1999, soon after Apple Computer joined the free source world by releasing some of the source code to their operating system, Raymond and Perens found themselves at each other's throats. Raymond had worked closely with Apple on developing their license and blessed it soon after it emerged. Apple was so pleased that it put Raymond's endorsement on their web page. The decision was a big coup for the open source movement and strong proof that corporations were embracing the movement. Big executives from big companies like Apple were knocking on the open source movement's door. Raymond thought the victory would bring more attention to the cause.

Others thought Raymond had given away the farm. Perens and many others looked at the license and spotted a small clause that seemed dangerous. The license for their open source code could be withdrawn at a moment's notice. Someone pointed out that it would be a real bummer to do lots of work on Apple's system and then find out that some neb-nosed lawyer at Apple could just pull the license. No one wanted to take that chance. Flame wars erupted and Perens started publicly disagreeing with Raymond. To Perens, the Apple license just wasn't open enough to be called "open source."

Raymond didn't take this too well. He had worked hard to build a strong coalition. He had worked hard to convince corporations that open source was much more than a way for teenagers to experiment with communism while they were living on their parents' dime. He wanted the open source world to be a smoothly running, suave machine that gracefully welcomed Apple into its fold. Now his buddy Bruce Perens was effectively aping Lloyd Bentsen's famous putdown of Dan Quayle: "I've known open source; I've worked with open source; and Eric, this license isn't open source." His whole announcement was supposed to unroll with the clockwork precision of great corporate PR, and now someone had lobbed a grenade.

Raymond fired back a terse e-mail that said, "If you ever again behave like that kind of disruptive asshole in