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

the web. While some might miss the small-town kind of feel of the early years, the corporate structure is bringing more certainty and predictability to the realm. The people don't have to wear suits now that it's a corporation. It just ensures that tough decisions will be made at a predictable pace.

Still, the formalism adds plenty of rigidity to the structure. An excited newcomer can join the mailing lists, write plenty of code, and move mountains for the Apache group, but he won't be a full member before he is voted in. In the past, an energetic outsider could easily convert hard work into political clout in the organization. Now, a majority of the current members could keep interlopers out of the inner circle. This bureaucracy doesn't have to be a problem, but it has the potential to fragment the community by creating an institution where some people are more equal than others. Keeping the organization open in practice will be a real challenge for the new corporation.

T-SHIRTS

If there's a pantheon for marketing geniuses, then it must include the guy who realized people would pay $1 for several cents' worth of sugar water if it came in a shapely bottle blessed by the brand name CocaCola. It might also include the guy who first figured out that adding new blue crystals to detergent would increase sales. It is a rare breed that understands how to get people to spend money they don't need to spend.

The next induction ceremony for this pantheon should include Robert Young, the CEO of Red Hat Software, who helped the Linux and the open source world immeasurably by finding a way to charge people for something they could get for free. This discovery made the man rich, which isn't exactly what the free software world is supposed to do. But his company also contributed a sense of stability and certainty to the Linux marketplace, and that was sorely needed. Many hard-core programmers, who know enough to get all of the software for free, are willing to pay $70 to Red Hat just because it is easier. While some may be forever jealous of the millions of dollars in Young's pocket, everyone should realize that bringing Linux to a larger world of computer illiterates requires good packaging and hand-holding. Free software wouldn't be anywhere if someone couldn't find a good way to charge for it.

The best way to understand why Young ranks with the folks who discovered how to sell sugar water is to go to a conference like LinuxExpo. In the center of the floor is the booth manned by Red Hat Software, the company Young started in Raleigh, North Carolina, after he got through working in the computer-leasing business. Young is in his fifties now and manages to survive despite the fact that most of his company's devotees are much closer to 13. Red Hat bundles together some of the free software made by the community and distributed over the Net and puts it on one relatively easy-to-use CD-ROM. Anyone who wants to install Linux or some of its packages can simply buy a disk from Red Hat and push a bunch of keys. All of the information is on one CD-ROM, and it's relatively tested and pretty much ready to go. If things go wrong, Red Hat promises to answer questions by e-mail or telephone to help people get the product working.

Red Hat sells their disk at prices that range from $29.95 to $149.95. That buys the user a pretty box, three CD-ROMs including some demonstration versions of other software, all of the source code, a manual, and some telephone or e-mail support. That is pretty much like the same stuff that comes in software boxes from a normal company. The manual isn't as nice as the manuals produced by Apple or Microsoft, but it's not too bad.

The big difference is that no one needs to buy the CD-ROM from Red Hat. Anyone can download all of the software from the Net. A friend of mine, Hal Skinner, did it yesterday and told me, "I just plugged it in and the software downloaded everything from the Net. I got everything in the Red Hat 6.0 distribution, and it didn't cost me anything."

Of course, Red Hat isn't hurt too much by folks who grab copies without paying for them. In fact, the company maintains a website that makes it relatively easy for people to do just that. Red Hat didn't write most of the code. They also just grabbed it from various authors throughout the Net who published it under the GNU General Public License. They grabbed it without paying for it, so they're not really put out if someone grabs from them.

The ability to snag GPL'ed software from around the Net keeps their development costs much lower than Sun, Apple, or Microsoft. They never paid most of the authors of the code they ship. They just package it up. Anyone else can just go find it on the Net and grab it themselves. This pretty much guarantees that Red Hat will be in a commodity business.

To make matters worse for Red Hat, the potential competitors don't have to go out onto the Net and reassemble the collection of software for themselves. The GPL specifically forbids people from placing limitations on redistributing the source code. That means that a potential competitor doesn't have to do much more than buy a copy of Red Hat's disk and send it off to the CD-ROM pressing plant. People do this all the time. One company at the exposition was selling copies of all the major Linux distributions like Red Hat, Slackware, and OpenBSD for about $3 per disk. If you bought in bulk, you could get 11 disks for $25. Not a bad deal if you're a consumer.

So, on one side of the floor, Young had a flashy booth filled with workers talking about what you could get if you paid $50 or more for Red Hat's version 6.0 with new enhancements like GNOME. Just a few hundred feet away, a company was selling ripoff copies of the same CDs for $3. Any company that is able to stay in business in a climate like that must be doing something right.

It's not much different from the supermarket. Someone can pay $1 or more for two liters of Coca-Cola, or they can walk over a few aisles and buy Kool-Aid and raw sugar. It may be much cheaper to buy the raw ingredients, but many people don't.

Young is also smart enough to use the competition from other cheap disk vendors to his advantage. He can't do anything about the GPL restrictions that force him to share with knockoff competitors, so he makes the best of them. "When people complain about how much we're charging for free software, I tell them to just go to CheapBytes.com," he said at the Expo. This is just one of the companies that regularly duplicates the CDs of Red Hat and resells them. Red Hat often gets some heat from people saying that the company is merely profiting off the hard work of others who've shared their software with the GPL. What gives them the right to charge so much for other people's software? But Young points out that people can get the software for $3. There must be a rational reason why they're buying Red Hat.

Of course, the two packages aren't exactly equal. Both the original and the knockoff CD-ROM may have exactly the same contents, but the extras are different. The Red Hat package comes with "support," a rather amorphous concept in the software business. In theory, Red Hat has a team of people sitting around their offices diligently waiting to answer the questions of customers who can't get Red Hat software to do the right thing.

In practice, the questions are often so hard or nebulous that even the support team can't answer them. When I first tried to get Red Hat to run on an old PC, the support team could only tell me that they never promised that their package would run on my funky, slightly obscure Cyrix MediaGX chip. That wasn't much help. Others probably have had better luck because they were using a more standard computer. Of course, I had no trouble installing Red Hat on my latest machine, and I didn't even need to contact tech support.

The Red Hat packages also come with a book that tries to answer some of the questions in advance. This manual describes the basic installation procedure, but it doesn't go into any detail about the software included in the distribution. If you want to know how to run the database package, you need to dig into the online support provided by the database's developers.

Many people enjoy buying these extra packages like the manual and the support, even if they never use them. Red Hat has blossomed by providing some hand-holding. Sure, some programmers could download the software from the Internet on their own, but most people don't want to spend the time needed to develop the expertise.

When I say "Red Hat software," I really mean free source software that Red Hat picked up from the Net and knit into a coherent set of packages that should be, in theory, pretty bug free, tested, and ready for use. Red Hat is selling some hand-holding and filtering for the average user who doesn't want to spend time poking around the Net, checking out the different versions of the software, and ensuring that they work well together. Red Hat programmers have spent some time examining the software on the CD-ROM. They've tested it and occasionally improved it by adding new code to make it run better.

Red Hat also added a custom installation utility to make life easier for people who want to add Red Hat to their computer.[^12] They could have made this package installation tool proprietary. After all, Red Hat programmers wrote the tool on company time. But Young released it with the GNU General Public License, recognizing that the political value of giving something back was worth much more than the price they could charge for the tool.

[12]: Er, I mean to say "add Linux" or "add GNU/Linux." "Red Hat" is now one of the synonyms for free software.

This is part of a deliberate political strategy to build goodwill among the programmers who distribute their software. Many Linux users compare the different companies putting together free source software CDROMs and test their commitment to the free software ideals. Debian, for instance, is very popular because it is a largely volunteer project that is careful to only include certified free source software on their CD-ROMs. Debian, however, isn't run like a business and it doesn't have the same attitude. This volunteer effort and enlightened pursuit of the essence of free software make the Debian distribution popular among the purists.

Distributors like Caldera, on the other hand, include nonfree software with their disk. You pay $29.95 to $149.95 for a CD-ROM and get some nonfree software like a word processor tossed in as a bonus. This is a great deal if you're only going to install the software once, but the copyright on the nonfree software prevents you from distributing the CD-ROM to friends. Caldera is hoping that the extras it throws in will steer people toward its disk and get them to choose Caldera's version of Linux. Many of the purists, like Richard Stallman, hate this practice and think it is just a not very subtle way to privatize the free software. If the average user isn't free to redistribute all the code, then there's something evil afoot. Of course, Stallman or any of the other software authors can't do anything about this because they made their software freely distributable.

Young is trying to walk the line between