Frequently Asked Questions about Free for All


Q: So what's your favorite part of the book?
A: The part where the Borg is blown apart. Well, not exactly. But that's kind of how it ends, in a metaphorical sense. I enjoyed closing the book with my predictions for how and why the open source model will eventually trump the proprietary model. It was the last chapter I wrote and by then I was convinced.

Q: How did you fail?
A: In thousands of ways. The free software/open source world is so big and so multi-faceted that no one will ever understand it in one lifetime. It's like New York City. There are 8 million stories in that town. We don't even know how many people have installed Linux or the various GNU tools.

Q: What have you left out?
A: I wish I had done more with the GNOME project and the quest for a good, clean user interface. The world of perl and the artistic license are hardly touched. The open source writing and documentation is often surprisingly good. While the programmers seem to occupy the center of the universe, the folks who do more organizing than programming are often more responsible for the success. These are just the first ones that come to mind. I wish I had gotten a discussion of these facets into the book.

Q: What's your biggest regret?
A: The treatment of Richard Stallman. He really was the founder of the movement. I've heard that some predict he will be regarded as one of the most important philophers of the 20th century. I think this is probably going to prove to be true. But the book doesn't really talk much about him until the 8th or 9th chapter.

Q: How did this happen?
A: Well, I wanted to bring the uninitiated into the story and the only thing most people know about computers is that they run Microsoft. So I started with the Microsoft trial. By the time I started throwing in details and dealing with that narrative, he got bumped back. Then it was too late.

This is really the price you pay for success. Thomas Edison created the movie projector, but the whole story of the movies is much bigger than him. Stallman also gets dwarfed by his own success. There's just so much going on in the realm he created that the beginnings just get short shrift.

Q: What about the narrative?
A: It's not the strongest part of the book. One friend told me that the book read more like a bunch of loosely connected essays. I have to confess that I think there's some truth to what he said.

In my defense, I want to cite General Charles de Gaul who remarked that it was impossible to run a country that makes more than 300 kinds of cheese. There are thousands of bright people in the free software world who are going in their own directions. How do you get a straight line out of that?

Q: Is it too much of a nerd book?
A: I hope not. The issues of copyright and control are going to be at the center of the most important wars of the first part of the 21st century. If we get them wrong, we're going to be serfs to big corporations who will control all of the ideas by binding them up as intellectual property. The issues that are being worked out in the free software world are intimately tied to the rights and freedoms we hold in cyberspace.

We're already well on the way to becoming cyborg units. It's only a matter of time before the browsers get built into the brain. We need to wonder whether this cyborg will live like Jefferson's gentleman farmer or some cog in the movie "Metropolis".