"The tribe of hackers, after decades spent in obscurity struggling against hard technical problems and the far greater weight of mainstream indifference and dismissal, has recently begun to come into its own. They built the Internet; they built Unix; they built the World Wide Web; they're building Linux and open- source software today; and, following the great Internet explosion of the mid-1990s, the rest of the world is finally figuring out that it should have been paying more attention to them all along." - ESR's "Why You Should Care"
In computing, you have definitely arrived when you become a three-letter acronym. Eric S. Raymond (ESR) is among a handful of people whose initials are as familiar to the cognoscenti as FAQ, FYI and IRQ. When TCD's Internet Society went to advertise his talk there last week the only headline on the poster was the letters ESR in 240-point type.
It was enough, and there was standing room only in the lecture hall. Before he began he asked how many people present wrote software for a living. A show of hands said almost half. These days his world audience is not just the true hackers who knocked the Internet into existence over the last 30 years. Major companies are among the most rapt listeners.
They listen because he is their contact with the hackers and what they have achieved. Listening to him may help to achieve the same quality, resilience and flexibility in their corporate computing projects that ESR's tribe, the hackers, have achieved in theirs.
In fact, he reckons that collaboration of the kind that built the Linux operating system is the only way forward for most major software projects. In a seminal essay The Cathedral & The Bazaar two years ago he set out the basis for this belief.
Basically, he argued that the closed, traditional method of software development (the cathedral) simply cannot compete with the bazaar of open-source development. In the former, the source code "recipe" used to create a program is kept secret and the resulting program is sold as expensively as possible. That model has made Microsoft's Bill Gates the richest man in America.
Open-source, on the other hand, depends on voluntary work by many programmers collaborating over the Internet. They give away not only the resulting binary program, but also the source code used to create it. Every contributor, and every user, can see the innards of the program. If there is a bug they can help to track it down, or to fix it.
The Cathedral & The Bazaar analysed hacker culture and gave its members a new consciousness about their work. More significantly, it was the springboard for a massive marketing push into the mainstream for open software. Since it came out, Netscape has made its browser open source, IBM has taken the opensource Apache web-server on board, one major software company after another has made its software run on Linux.
IT'S not easy to interview someone who has already covered the relevant issues at length and very lucidly in his writing. There are of course the tech equivalents of the sort of questions that rock stars or footballers get asked: The first computer he set hands on was a Univac 1108 mainframe, back in 1968, by the way.
Then there is the chance to indulge curiosity. He is a hacker and proud of it, but has the battle for the proud meaning of that word been lost to the much more widespread one of computer vandal? "Actually, I think we're in better shape than we were five years ago. I remember when it seemed totally hopeless and now it seems only partially hopeless." He says that greater awareness of the World Wide Web and of the culture behind it has done a lot to rescue the word.
On his role of accidental revolutionary in the uptake of open source he's deadpan, and characteristically funny. "It's been pretty much as I expected. Some good, some bad and a job that needed to be done. . . some very amusing moments. At Atlanta Linux showcase, last month, for the first and I hope the last time in my life I was actually mobbed by screaming groupies. This is an experience everyone should have once - exactly once."
And there's the inside take on what it feels like to be instrumental in a revolution in thinking. Was he surprised at the speed with which so many traditional computer companies came around to releasing their programs for Linux? "Yes I have been surprised. The rate of change has generally been not generally faster than I expected, but just a little faster than I expected. Like the big database manufacturers flipped over about three months before I expected it.
"The other thing that's been surprising about the process is that I naively expected that business people in general would be very slow to get it but quick to act once they got it. Instead, it's been the other way around. A lot of business people have gotten it fairly quickly but have taken a long time executing on that knowledge."
One reason he considers himself an accidental revolutionary is that his insights in The Cathedral & The Bazaar could as easily have been formulated by someone else years earlier. He says he has only just figured out why this didn't happen, even though the basic information was available. "My tribe was not motivated to look into the systematics of what it was doing because we had a hypothesis about why we wrote better code that satisfied us. Of course we wrote better code - we're geniuses!"
Once the infectious laugh has died down he says that his first encounter with Linux jolted him out of many firmly held beliefs about how good software should be created. "Because of my shocking experience with Linux, I was the first person to consider the possibility that our superior genius just might not be the whole story."
Then there's the news of the day. Asked what the likely end of the US government case against Microsoft will be, he says: "I'm going to make a bold prediction. I think Microsoft as we know it is going to die before the final appeal, the final verdict, in the antitrust suit comes down."
He gives a talk on "the seven bullets Microsoft has to dodge to survive the next 18 months" and "of these the most important is the fact that the price of hardware is dropping like a rock, while Microsoft's requirement for revenues to sustain the rise in its stock price is perpetually rising. This means that every quarter Microsoft has to claim a larger and larger share of its business partners' margins.
"That's not a trend that can be continued indefinitely. There are already signs that Microsoft is pricing itself out of its own markets. . . As Microsoft's increasing requirement for margins collides with the decreasing average cost of hardware, the breakpoint in the market below which PC integrators can't make any money is going to rise. When that breakpoint rises past the price of the average consumer PC: game over.
"I think that's going to happen before the final verdict in the anti-trust lawsuit."
Closer in time is the launch of Windows 2000, now three months away, which he has predicted will be a train-crash. He sees no reason to change his mind. "The train-wreck is already in progress. It's slipped for two years. And the major management consultancies have caught wise. They're telling all their Fortune 500 customers `don't touch this thing when it comes out in February - if it comes out in February.' You don't want to go near it - outfits like the Gartner Group and DH Brown are saying - until service pack 1 comes out which won't be until June or July.
"We're not going to see substantial Windows 2000 adoption - if we see it - until the fall of the year 2000. And that's assuming that it doesn't turn out to be a mess. Which I think it will be. The amusing statistic about Win- dows 2000 is that according to Microsoft's own press releases it has 35 million lines of new code in it. Never mind the old modified code. To put that in perspective that's 10 million lines more of code than the entire bulk of the Star Wars missile defence system that people said was unworkable."
As for the future of software being open, even in the sort of desktop applications that have always been closed, he has no doubts. "We're going to reach a point, as hardware prices plummet, where it's not going to be economical for system integrators to put any software on their machines that isn't free."
fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie
ESR's essays have been published by O'Reilly & Associates in The Cathedral & the Bazaar - musings on Linux and open source by an accidental revolutionary.
ESR's home page, including many of his essays: www.tuxedo.org/"esr