Many heads are better than one

IDEA N^o 28

OPEN SOURCE

The concept of giving away information existed long before computers. From recipes to storytelling, knowledge-sharing and building on other people’s ideas are a fundamental part of human culture.

Richard Stallman, Open Source pioneer and founder of the GNU Project.

Until the mid-’60s, openness and cooperation typified the software industry. Software was produced collectively, adhering to principles established in the field of academia. This collaborative process led to the birth of both the internet and the Web.

By the ’70s the software industry had developed beyond hardware manufacturers. Specialist companies were challenging the bundled hardwareand-software model. By the early ’80s, led by Microsoft, charging a licence fee for software became the norm. AT&T followed suit. In 1984, it started charging a licence fee for its widely used UNIX operating system, which was originally distributed for free.

Richard Stallman, a programmer at MIT, was incensed. He responded by founding the Free Software Foundation and initiating the GNU Project, a recursive acronym for ‘GNUs Not UNIX!’ His aim was to create a free alternative to UNIX. For Stallman, it was a question of fundamental rights. In his words, ‘Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free speech, not free beer.’ He had sown the seeds of a software revolution.

After a positive start, development of GNU slowed down. The crucial master program that would control the OS, the kernel, was proving elusive. Step forward a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki. In 1991, Linus Torvalds wrote some software to enable his PC to access the university’s UNIX servers. He called it Freax and made the code available for other programmers to use and improve. Renamed ‘Linux’ in honour of its creator, GNU now had its missing kernel.

In 1997, Eric Raymond published an essay called ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’, which told the story of Linux and extolled the virtues of open source. The heart of the essay can be summed up by what Raymond calls Linus’s Law: ‘Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.’ This essay was read with interest by Netscape’s management team. After losing the browser war to Microsoft Explorer, Netscape released its code as open source. Today’s Firefox browser, used by one in five people, is based on open-source Netscape code.

Software like Linux, Firefox, PHP and Apache proves that, often, the best choice is open source, but it is not a one-way street. Some of the most successful companies in the world pursue a licensing model, Microsoft, Apple and Adobe among them. What the open-source movement does is offer a viable alternative.■

Tux, the official mascot of the Linux kernel. Linus Torvalds has been fond of penguins ever since he was bitten by one at Canberra Zoo in 1993, when visiting the Australian UNIX Users Group.