 |
| Free electronic version available. (1.2meg in PDF) |
| Printed copies available for $8 (s/h inc.) |
| Amazon has some used copies. |
| Read the Table of Contents |
| Read the FAQ about Free for All |
| When this book was first published, I wrote this explanation about why it wasn't free. Now it
kind of is. |
| Other Books by Peter Wayner |
| Visit the Creative Commons , the authors of the license covering the book's redistribution. |
| Contact the author: p3@wayner.org |
| Errors and Corrections |
Q: What's this book about?
A: How a bunch of programmers figured out that they could create wonderful software by giving it all away.
Q: Is it about Linus Torvalds?
A: Not really. He's an important guy, but most of the book is about the thousands of other people who are part of the movement.
Q: The book is more than two years old now. What's changed since you published it?
A: When I started the book in 1999, I realized that the free software movement was starting to make real waves. By the time the book was published in 2000, I felt like the center of gravity of the industry moved from Microsoft to open source software in much the same way that it moved from IBM to Microsoft sometime in the 1980's.
Now, in 2002 Linux is part of the mainstream and it's proving to be a real threat to Microsoft. They just can't keep raising prices without driving people into the hands of free software. If they don't keep raising prices, they don't have the growth in revenue that drives the stock price and rewards the employees.
Q: Everyone seems to think that Microsoft effectively won their court case, even after the first judge ruled against them. What does this mean for open source software?
A: Surprisingly little. The judicial system moves too slowly to decide these questions and the marketplace has already shifted away from Microsoft tools. Microsoft may be relatively unfettered by the judicial system, but there is little they can do to stop people from using their computers as they so choose.
Open source software is owned by everyone. It can't be bought off, taken off the market or destroyed when a company goes out of business. That's why it's so attractive to managers and users who want stability. It won't be going away and there's no way you'll have to start paying a yearly subscription fee.
Q: Has the market really shifted away from Microsoft? They've still got a pretty big marketshare, don't they?
A: Most of their market dominance is fading. All that's left is the desktop and that's becoming a smaller and smaller part of the world of computing. Really. The biggest and best websites like Yahoo and Google rely heavily if not exclusively on open source software. Many of the hot new devices like the Tivo run Linux underneath the hood. Apple has made their own separate peace with the movement and moved their proprietary interface onto an open foundation. Big enterprise accounts are switching to Linux because they know that most of the employees don't need all of the power and flexibility of Windows/Office. The cost savings are dramatic and Microsoft can't continue to beat people up. Managers may be fooled by buzzwords, but everyone understands price.
Q: What has astounded you?
A: How quickly Linux and open source went from radical notions to part of the landscape. No one thinks twice about running a server on Apache. No one asks about licenses or wonders if this is all just too good to be true. People quickly figured out that it's okay for software to be part of the commonweal and it's okay for everyone to benefit from it. There's no need to explain it anymore.
Q: What does the future hold for Linux?
A: Somewhere in the middle of the book (pg 279), I asked who was wealthier, Bill Gates or some open source software programmer? One may have billions, but the other had a machine that didn't crash. If you measure wealth by the ability to hold a wedding on a virtual private island in Hawaii, the billions might be a better choice. But if you use the ability to read your email without a devastating crash as a metric, well, I think you might choose open source.
Q: Wealth is sort of a paradox?
A: Here's another funny point. I joked that a hacker wasn't impressed with money in a bank account because bank accounts are just bits written in a computer file and changing them is easy. Building a useful operating system is hard .
Alas, parody has a bad habit of transforming itself into the truth. The new scandals from the corporations show that companies were pretty much just making up the numbers. If the stockholders wanted revenues to double, someone send the money on a few more round trips and everyone was happy. Voila. It turns out that creating money is almost as easy as editing a file, at least until someone catches on. Writing good software, however, continues to be hard.
Q: So what's this mean for open source and free software?
A: Hmm. It's not exactly clear, but they seem to be part of the counter-monetary revolution. People and businesses are discovering that money isn't always the best vehicle for delivering stable, rock-solid software. It sure helps at times, but it fails in others. The levels of cooperation and interaction aren't always fascilitated by cash.
Q: Surely there are limits to this counter-monetary revolution?
A: Of course. Programmers still need to be able to eat and make a living. Money is a great tool for standardizing trading with non-programmers. The need for it is not going to go away just because software is easy to socialize in a big common pool of bits. This will always be a real challenge for the open source world.
Q: Is it really a revolution?
A: Perhaps that's a bit strong. The open source community is effectively evolving or rediscovering a technique for providing a fragmented alliance. It's sort of a post-modernist corporation that binds together a group without the rigorous strictures of Dilbert-land.
In the old days, you paid big bucks and hoped that IBM, Microsoft, Honeywell or whomever would take care of you. Now, you can hire a few guys and get them to use open source software. You're still buying into a platform and choosing a direction, but now you have control over who works for you. If they're not doing the job, you can fire them and hire a few more open source guys. This kind of flexibility is attractive to both customers and the programmers who love the liberties of free agency.
Q: Doesn't this vision tend to build a commodity marketplace?
A: Commodity businesses have gotten a bad rap recently. They may be tough places to work, but they have the advantage of being real businesses. You can't say that about eggbeater.com. Well-structured marketplaces moving commodity items make customers happy and every one in business knows that ultimately it comes down to happy customers.
Q: So what do you see for the future of open source software?
A: Oh, in the past I would have spun off a list of rosy predictions. Now, I think it's like saying, "What do you think of the future of indoor plumbing?" Open source software is now part of the infrastructure of the world. It's infra dig. We don't really need to be concerned about open source per se because that debate is past just like the debate about indoor plumbing. There will be chatter about Mozilla versus Gecko just like people talk about low-flow toilets, but the big questions are finished. Folks like Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Linus Torvalds, and thousands of other great programmers were right. It is the best way to develop many kinds of software.
Q: So what does this mean for the book?
A: Ah, I've talked myself into a hole. If there's no debate, there's no reason to read the book. Well, if you buy into that world view, I can tell you that the electronic version of the book is now fairly priced.
On the other hand, history is important. You can read this text as a snapshot of what the world was like just a few years ago. One Slashdot review said, "I mentioned that I'm recommending it to my father, for the simple reason that this is one of the few books I've seen which are down-to-earth readable but still meaty enough to walk away from with a satisfied feeling." So if you're still looking for ways to make sense, you might want to download the book.