NOT the Majority Opinion

The BBC web site has a very interesting interview with O’Reilly. Some of it follows. (For the full article go to the link at the end).

Tim O'Reilly: Proprietary software grew up, starting really in the 1980s, as an alternative and that became the dominant model with the rise of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and the like. But then a set of people said, we like it the way it was where we just gave our stuff away. So you had a bit of revolt against the commercialisation of software which started with Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation which was founded in 1984.

Go Digital's Bill Thompson: There was a difference between the ideology of free software, like Richard Stallman, and open source, which is more permissive generally?

Tim: That's right. What happened was over time this more pragmatic group was a large threat. A lot of the visibility was being given to the ideological people and in 1997 there was a bit of popular open source programming language called Perl created by a guy named Larry Wall.

Libre vs gratis

We had a meeting which at the time we called the Freeware Summit - this is in early 1998 - and at that time we'd started discussing the fact that this term free software had a pejorative connotation. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux said, I didn't realise that in English free has two meanings - it has libre and gratis - that's very confusing.

Bill: People like it gratis, definitely.

Tim: That's right. Linus is from Finland and so he didn't quite understand the nuances. The real characteristic of open source is really part of a broader social movement even than just software. Yes, you have this rigid definition that says, OK if you have software that is licensed under these terms it can be called open source, but you also have related activities such Wikipedia.

Bill: This is the free online encyclopaedia that anyone can contribute to so you can go to the Wikipedia website and if you see a mistake you can fix it or if you know more about a subject you can add.

Tim: That's right so a lot of the ideas of open source are really, I think, in a way fundamental to the internet era.

Bill: It's a kind of philosophy to an extent.

Tim: I have this thesis that geeks, if you like - programmers and early adopters of all stripes - actually show us a lot about the future. These are people who are comfortable with technology and they're often the first to plumb its depths and push it to its edges and they can tell you a lot about the shape of the future.

On the edge

So, for example, take wi-fi. You guys go out there and there's wi-fi in Starbucks. Well, when wi-fi was introduced, it was introduced as a local area network technology.

Bill: Is something similar happening in say some voice-over internet for telephony where people are making phone calls over the net. Do you see the same thing happening there?

Tim: Absolutely. The geeks are out there on the front edge.

Bill: But nobody would argue with the philosophy of something like open source if it means effectively, things for free - everyone is very happy about that. But if open source is such a wonderful idea why is it that a single company has managed to dominate software and the software market with products and a product that people have to pay for that has made one individual the richest man in the world?

Tim: I think there are a couple of things. I believe that the human motive to share is very powerful. The human motive to profit is also very powerful and I think that the profit motive and the sharing motive are not exclusive. Bill Gates, while he was extracting value from software, was also doing a huge amount to make computer hardware cheap and ubiquitous. And in some ways you can look at, I think, an alternation of periods of commoditisation and then consolidation of value and a new layer. A Harvard business school professor, Clayton Christensen calls it the law of conservation of attractive profit. For example, in the computer industry, IBM was a monopoly, even stronger than Microsoft is today, making enormous amounts of money. Then they made a big mistake. They introduced this commodity PC. They didn't realise how successful it would be and that took all the value out of hardware. And what Microsoft realised was that the value didn't go away, it got driven to this new layer of software. And what I think is happening today is that open source is commodifying the software industry in the same way that the IBM PC commoditised computer hardware and now where is the value going? It's not going away either. And this is one of the ironies. Virtually every talk I give I say, how many of you used Linux, and depending on the audience, I'll get a scattering of hands or a lot of hands. And then I ask them well how many of you use Google and they all raise their hands. And I say, well what are you missing? I say, what you're missing is that when I asked you that question, what software do you use, you think of what is sitting on the computer in front of you. But what's actually happened is that Linux and other free software has become the flesh of this new system out there, the internet, and all the applications that are on top of the internet are effectively Linux applications.

Bill: So when you go onto Google, Linux is behind that?

Tim: Yes, that's right. Linux is behind Google.

Bill: But, with respect, does anyone really care?

Tim: Let me put it this way - the people who understand these kinds of dynamics in the industry become very rich because, just like Bill Gates became really rich, exploiting what IBM failed to understand, namely the software was going to become very valuable. Sergey Brin and Larry Page now have become very rich. And people like, Pierre Omidyar who founded eBay, and Jeff Bezos who founded Amazon, have become very rich realising that this new commodity software infrastructure allowed them to build these enormous new services that were incredibly valuable on top of that free

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4372728.stm