Gun-slinging programmer preaches open computer way

Every software company would like to own the software that runs the Internet, but a US libertarian "gun nut" and martial arts expert called Eric Raymond stands in their way. "If the Microsoft ninja attack squad comes calling, I'll be ready for them," he says, laughing heartily.

Judging by the so-called "Halloween documents" - Microsoft's leaked analysis of the freely-distributed operating system, Linux, which Mr Raymond published on his website last year - they're more afraid of him thanhe is of them. "If ever there was an example of a company staring at the future and seeing its own Vietnam, the Halloween documents are definitely it," he says.

Mr Raymond's sudden rise to fame made him the star speaker at Britain's first Linux & Open Source Conference in London last week. He had been invited in his role as self-appointed leader of the "open-source" movement, whereby computer programs are developed co-operatively by enthusiastic users, instead of by hirelings in monolithic corporations. For this to be possible, the "source code" that makes up the program - the codes that companies like Apple, IBM and Microsoft guard jealously as their "crown jewels"- has to be published openly, usually on the Internet, where anyone can read it. To participate, companies that live by selling software have to give it away, though they can still charge for all kinds of services.

It sounds an unlikely recipe for success, but "open source" is a rapidly-growing force. Linux, a Unix-compatible operating system, is "open source". Apache, the market-leading Internet server software for sending Web pages to browsers, is "open source", as are most of the programs used to run the Internet. And it was one of Mr Raymond's papers - The Cathedral and the Bazaar, delivered at the Linux Kongress 97 - that inspired Netscape to publish the source code of its Navigator Web browser last year.

The impact of this speech "was as much a surprise to me as it was to everyone else", says Mr Raymond, because it was based on the tradition of "hacker culture" (where a hacker is a computer programming enthusiast, not someone who breaks into computers). Mr Raymond and his friend and colleague Mr Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, had been saying similar things for years. However, Mr Raymond was saying them in a new way to a new audience: one that, thanks to its experience with Linux, actually believed that free software could work.

"What I did was give the Internet hacker culture a rhetoric, a language, about its practices that it had not had before," Mr Raymond says. "I didn't invent these methods; I didn't change reality on the ground. What surprised me was that, by happy accident, that rhetoric was readily comprehensible to people outside the hacker culture. Fortune 500 executive could understand it."

With the grass-roots "opensource" movement starting to attract commercial attention, Mr Raymond seized his chance to become, in his own words, "its travelling evangelist and carnival barker: Get Your Open Source Right Here! My thought was that in order to prevent this being a fluke, a one-off event, someone needed to go out there and explain to the world why they needed to pay attention," he says. "But my role shouldn't be over-interpreted. People like Linus Torvalds and his dotty band of kernel hackers are much more important than I am." (Mr Torvalds wrote the small operating system core at the heart of Linux, with much of the rest coming from the Free Software Foundation's GNU system.)

With the help of advocates such as Mr Bruce Perens, who worked for a GNU/Linux distributor called Debian, Mr Raymond formed a non-profit organisation called the Open Source Initiative, trade-marked the Open Source name, and published a 10-point definition of Open Source software. "It doesn't just mean access to the source code," he says. When companies make software "open source", they also have to allow rivals to modify it and incorporate it into their own programs.

Mr Raymond's message to software buyers is that they should use open-source software because it is more reliable, and cheaper and easier to maintain.

"The way we get reliability in software is by independent peer review: by lots of people looking at and checking the code. That works, and it's apparent from over 30 years of experience with software engineering that nothing else works," he says. "Open-source software is cheaper not because it's (probably) free, but because it's easier to maintain: the cost of fixing bugs or software errors is shared by all the programmers and companies who use the code.

"But both of these [advantages] pale into insignificance next to the big one, which is strategic business risk," says Mr Raymond. "If you allow your company to become dependent on `closed source', you've put yourself in a position where your strategic business systems are hostage to the whims of a monopoly supplier. Now is that software going to be changed in response to your business plan, or in response to the monopoly vendor's needs? If you ask the question in that way, it pretty much answers itself."

Naturally the monopoly suppliers have different ideas. Mr Oliver Roll, director of marketing at Microsoft UK, says: "The good thing about `open source' is that it's a great learning environment for [software] developers, who can dynamically share their skills. But in a business sense, it doesn't offer what the vast majority of our customers require: a stable, common platform with lots of applications, and a road-map on which they can bet their IT infrastructure and business processes."

Mr Raymond claims that IBM, the world's largest computer company, is a supporter and has released lots of "open-source" code recently.

But Mr Tony Occleshaw, marketing manager for IBM's European software business, says not. He agrees that IBM has contributed code to Apache, an existing open-source program, and IBM's "relatively independent" Java operation, AlphaWorks, shares code because that is the way the Java development community works. But IBM is still "formalising its approach" to open source.

Mr Occleshaw says: "It's probably about 60 or 90 days before we go public with our position as a corporation. Which of our products should we volunteer as open source? How should we support our customers? It's almost like going back 20 years. The corporates wonder who's going to support them: what's the infrastructure behind all these things?

Mr Raymond has helped put the open-source software movement on the industry agenda, but many questions remain. Can open source deliver the thousands of applications programs that are needed? If it can, will they be usable by ordinary people? Linux, Apache and other programs show that open source can deliver reliable programs, but they can be hard to use.

"That is a weakness for us," Mr Raymond admits. "Although I'm confident that Linux will become dominant in the server space, I'm less definite about when I think it will become dominant on the desktop. Achieving majority market share on the desktop requires that we learn how to sytematically address the usability problem, and we don't have a history of doing that really well."

But surely the real threat comes not from software houses but from the big companies who are moving in to exploit electronic commerce. Aren't they going to take over the internet?

"Only if we let them, and we're not going to," Mr Raymond replies.

Comparing the hacker community to the craft guilds of earlier ages, Mr Raymond says that the people these companies have to hire to run their Internet systems "are at least as loyal to their culture as they are to their employers. Often they're quite a bit more loyal to their cultures and their colleagues than to an employer they're only going to be working with for another few months.

"It's kind of fruitful to view the whole Linux phenomenon, and everything I've been doing, as the Internet's response to the threat of outside control," says Mr Raymond.

"Something that not everyone understands is that the Internet really does have its own culture, and it's a pretty well established one. The people who make it up are not very happy about anybody else running their network, whether it's a government or a large corporation. It's our network, we want to run it our way."