I'm a web developer, not a web designer. I use Ubuntu with Sublime Text 2 at both home and work. I use Linux for heaps of reasons:
sudo vi /etc/hoand do it entirely using my keyboard in about 3-5 seconds. In Windows it's stored in some bizarre location in the Windows folder (including in a "drivers" directory!) and takes me longer. If I want to view or edit my FileZilla sitemanager.xml file I can do it in Linux by typingless .fi. On Windows it's in my user folder, under either AppData or Application Data, and then in something like Local or Roaming. I'm confident any log I want to view or config file I want to edit can be done faster in Linux than in Windows. I can open large logs usingsi lesswith minimal load time, whereas in Windows the IDE will likely become unresponsive..
Showing posts with label gnu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gnu. Show all posts
Monday, December 31, 2012
GNU Linux over Microsoft Windows, re: From the perspective of a developer
The following is a copy and paste of a comment made on reddit at this post here. This comment was authored by reddit user named, RyanDwyer. I decided to re-post it here on my blog because I wanted to share an advanced Linux developer's assessment of the advantages that GNU Linux has over Microsoft Windows. RyanDwyer writes:
Monday, March 5, 2012
2600: "More Active Gamers Should Become Activist Hackers"
In this article featured in the Winter 2011/2012 edition of The Hacker Quarterly, Snugglepuff argues that young people should abandon gaming in fantasy worlds and instead et their minds to something more useful like hacking to make the world a better place. Source link.
By: Snugglepuff
snugglepuff (at) operamail (dot) com
I am fortunate to personally know many talented thinkers, many of whom are avid gamers. Some are also particularly brilliant and have solved programmatic problems I can barely understand. Some spend countless hours shut off from the realities of a world they admit is broken to play in a world that mostly isn't. For so many people I associate with, the understanding of a problem and the talent to tackle it with software coexist but remain separated from any effort to do so. Some won't care until a problem reaches them personally, others just don' t give much thought to the idea that problems like corruption, censorship, and the digital divide can be tackled with code.
Far outside the scope of most of the intelligent programmers I know are the growing number of people I know because of my involvement with writing software for privacy activists. Despite having few technical skills, they are passionate about doing anything in their very limited power to make the only world they live in a better one. Armed with nothing but hope and drive, they read and comment on news articles and write letters to their elected officials (and when was the last time you did that?). They spend countless hours blogging and podcasting their ideas into the ether hoping that someone will listen and do something -- anything.
The world is run by machines. They aren't using us as batteries because there's no reason to, with us being so willing to bum coal for them. Decisions are made with data which is or should be transformed into meaningful information and whether that information is accessible or not is less a matter of policy and more a matter of engineering. Elections in democratic countries are won by a fickle "swing vote" of voters with no ideology to predict their vote with. Their decision is composed slowly by a trickle of information about their choices until literal bits of information pull them harder in one direction than others. The control of information by censorship, misinformation, media bias, and lack of basic access to and understanding of technology resources are by and large engineering problems with engineering solutions. In a post-Wikileaks world, to believe that one can't make a serious impact in a world increasingly governed by software as a software developer is completely ridiculous and illustrates a disconnect from reality that seems to grow the longer one escapes from it.
Serious coding takes time. So does serious gaming. Both can be enjoying and frustrating, but ultimately the act of creating something leaves behind it a measurable value of utility that can be shared with the world as infinitely as people can access it. When someone has the ability to do one or the other, that person should realize, with whatever part of their conscience isn't governed by virtual currencies, that they are choosing to neglect the potential use of their skills for more than a few meaningful purposes. If you're already spending your weekends or weeknights helping people help each other, whether by programming or traditional volunteering, good for you. Welcome to the choir! For everyone else, hear ye:
People desperate to see change happen in their lifetimes across the world don't give a shit about your level 60 night e l f. Time is life. If you value your life outside of gameplay, it might be time to start looking for ways to prove that value in the greater context of history. Start hacking.
By: Snugglepuff
snugglepuff (at) operamail (dot) com
I am fortunate to personally know many talented thinkers, many of whom are avid gamers. Some are also particularly brilliant and have solved programmatic problems I can barely understand. Some spend countless hours shut off from the realities of a world they admit is broken to play in a world that mostly isn't. For so many people I associate with, the understanding of a problem and the talent to tackle it with software coexist but remain separated from any effort to do so. Some won't care until a problem reaches them personally, others just don' t give much thought to the idea that problems like corruption, censorship, and the digital divide can be tackled with code.
Far outside the scope of most of the intelligent programmers I know are the growing number of people I know because of my involvement with writing software for privacy activists. Despite having few technical skills, they are passionate about doing anything in their very limited power to make the only world they live in a better one. Armed with nothing but hope and drive, they read and comment on news articles and write letters to their elected officials (and when was the last time you did that?). They spend countless hours blogging and podcasting their ideas into the ether hoping that someone will listen and do something -- anything.
The world is run by machines. They aren't using us as batteries because there's no reason to, with us being so willing to bum coal for them. Decisions are made with data which is or should be transformed into meaningful information and whether that information is accessible or not is less a matter of policy and more a matter of engineering. Elections in democratic countries are won by a fickle "swing vote" of voters with no ideology to predict their vote with. Their decision is composed slowly by a trickle of information about their choices until literal bits of information pull them harder in one direction than others. The control of information by censorship, misinformation, media bias, and lack of basic access to and understanding of technology resources are by and large engineering problems with engineering solutions. In a post-Wikileaks world, to believe that one can't make a serious impact in a world increasingly governed by software as a software developer is completely ridiculous and illustrates a disconnect from reality that seems to grow the longer one escapes from it.
Serious coding takes time. So does serious gaming. Both can be enjoying and frustrating, but ultimately the act of creating something leaves behind it a measurable value of utility that can be shared with the world as infinitely as people can access it. When someone has the ability to do one or the other, that person should realize, with whatever part of their conscience isn't governed by virtual currencies, that they are choosing to neglect the potential use of their skills for more than a few meaningful purposes. If you're already spending your weekends or weeknights helping people help each other, whether by programming or traditional volunteering, good for you. Welcome to the choir! For everyone else, hear ye:
People desperate to see change happen in their lifetimes across the world don't give a shit about your level 60 night e l f. Time is life. If you value your life outside of gameplay, it might be time to start looking for ways to prove that value in the greater context of history. Start hacking.
2600 Reflecting on the Role Hackerdom Played on the Rise of 2011's Social Movements
The following editorial I copied and pasted from the Winter 2011/2012 edition of 2600 The Hacker Quarterly. The source link here is not from the official 2600 website b/c they don't post the articles up online. The source link is from some random site I found with Google.
Original Title: "Movement"
Original Title: "Movement"
2600 Editorial Team
While we can only speculate on what 2012 will bring, it seems fairly certain that 2011 will be remembered as a year when individuals worldwide began to feel empowered and when, more than ever before, the old guard was put on notice that its policies need to adapt and change with the times - or risk becoming extinct.
We've gone on at length before about the value of the individual, how we all have so much more power than we're led to believe, and how it serves the status quo to have us all convinced that we can't possibly make any difference. Our belief in this has never wavered, but it's essential to have it borne out in practice, as the theoretical can only go so far. After the last year, we can point with certainty towards various key examples that show how much individuals can accomplish with a little dedication, coupled with a degree of mastery in the world of technology. We can also point to the reaction these people get from those in charge as proof of the threat they pose to their power structure.
Freedom and empowerment are concepts that, once unleashed, spread quite rapidly. We saw that earlier in the year, as the Arab Spring took hold. I t all started with Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia who became so fed up with the constant corruption and humiliation that made it impossible for him to earn a living that he sacrificed his own life as the ultimate form of protest. The outrage from fellow citizens mushroomed and led to massive protests and the actual fall of the government less than a month later. According to The New York Times, "The protesters, led at first by unemployed college graduates... and later joined by workers and young professionals, found grist for the complaints in leaked cables from the United States Embassy in Tunisia, released by WikiLeaks, that detailed the self-dealing and excess of the president's family." The government had its state-run media to whitewash the news. The people had social networking and cell phones to get and share updates. I t was no contest.
The unrest spread to neighboring countries, leading to significant conflicts in no less than 16 of them, the most significant being Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The tensions had always been there. But once the fuse was lit, there was no turning back.
Domestically, we've witnessed much in the way of stress and hardship, but nothing that comes close to events in other parts of the world. However, while we may not have had security forces killing demonstrators or a repressive regime that tolerates no dissent at all, we, like all humans, have a sense of justice and can only be pushed around so much before something snaps. That appears to have been the case with September's Occupy Wall Street movement, a simple protest inspired by our friends over at Adbusters magazine, which wound up getting bigger and bigger before eventually spreading to hundreds of sites throughout the country and across the world. While the mass media initially mocked, ridiculed, and basically ignored these protests, supposedly due to the lack of a clear list of "demands" from the demonstrators, the movement actually became strengthened as a result. Since there wasn't a clear agenda, anyone who felt that the system wasn't working was able to join and help determine what path to take. Alliances were thus formed that wouldn't have been possible had all of the answers been laid out from the beginning, as would be expected in a typical political movement. It was an unusual tactic, but clearly an effective one. And the media's agenda of ignoring what was going on became painfully visible, which led to more outrage and an eventual about face on their part. Suddenly, the movement became front page news everywhere.
The concept of a group that had no leadership was very similar to that of Anonymous, an online entity which has become increasingly active in the "real world" as well as on the net. The Guy Fawkes masks they embraced were quite visible worldwide at many of the Occupy sites. But anonymity was only an option, not a main ingredient in what was going on. The lack of a hierarchy and the development of the
Occupy Wall Street General Assembly enabled any individual to speak to the crowd through the ingenious use of a "human microphone," created out of necessity due to an arbitrary ban on megaphones. This adaptability and desire to bypass unfair restrictions using clever tactics
is something we're all familiar with in the hacker world.
At press time, there have been a number of violent crackdowns on these groups by the authorities. While all kinds of excuses were given, ranging from health concerns to reports of crimes and illegal activities within the camps (much of which was echoed almost verbatim by mainstream media), many firsthand accounts dispute the degree of such problems. Actions caught on video clearly show that the people targeted were posing no threat to anyone, other than refusing to obey orders. Whenever we see this kind of reaction displayed by an authority figure, we know what it means, whether it's a high school principal expelling a student for some mischief on a computer, a corporation firing an employee for discovering a security hole, or a parent sending their kid to reform school or feeding them drugs because they're "out of control." It means the authority figure is desperately afraid of no longer being in charge of the situation. They begin to act increasingly irrational and they view the individual as the sole source of the problem. This is always the wrong course of action.
Listening to, learning from, and opening a dialogue with an individual is the only way to take positive steps. This is true regardless of how much or how little we agree with what they're saying or doing. For us in the hacker world, this is old news. But what's different is seeing this sort of thing playing out on
a different stage and seeing how those in charge are truly afraid of the kind of dialogue that empowers individuals. That alone is a milestone.
We've also seen tremendous growth in the use of technology by individuals for truly worthwhile goals. While social networking and smart phones were never designed to foment civil unrest, used properly they are invaluable tools in a movement gathering steam. Overseas, people used Facebook and Twitter to quickly organize mass demonstrations before the authorities knew what was happening. Attempts to restrict access to these services backfired badly. In the States, similar tactics were used by demonstrators, with the addition of numerous live video feeds from cities all over the country. When something happened, the whole world could literally be watching. Live. When the crackdown occurred in New York City, there were no less than four separate live streams being fed by people's smart phones, all with surprisingly good video quality and relatively decent audio. Well over 50,000 people were tuned in to these feeds, with many more picking them up from secondary sources. As interest in what was going on swelled, the mass media even joined in, simulcasting these streams since they hadn't been able to get behind the police barricades themselves. The people had literally
become the media.
We've learned a great deal from these events. The hacker world, the ideals of full disclosure, the distrust of governments and corporations, the embracing and manipulation of high tech, the desire for free speech, the empowerment of the individual….these are all intrinsically linked together. It really does all
matter.
But there's a flipside. There will always be people and entities who see all of this as a threat and who will try and control it. That's a battle that will never end and which will be fought in a variety of arenas. We see it every day in the form of corporate copyright abuses, antiquated business practices that fight technological advances, increased government secrecy, or the suspicion that's injected into the populace towards anyone who doesn't quite think, act, or look like everyone else.
In other words, individuals may have shown their ability to manipulate technology in a way that benefits them with these actions of 2011 . But those opposed to this sort of thing have been taking notes and will be better prepared to counter this ingenuity the next time around. As hackers and developers of new technology, we need to always have this on our minds, as the true future of freedom, both here and abroad, can be greatly affected by what we choose to consider as a priority.
While we can only speculate on what 2012 will bring, it seems fairly certain that 2011 will be remembered as a year when individuals worldwide began to feel empowered and when, more than ever before, the old guard was put on notice that its policies need to adapt and change with the times - or risk becoming extinct.
We've gone on at length before about the value of the individual, how we all have so much more power than we're led to believe, and how it serves the status quo to have us all convinced that we can't possibly make any difference. Our belief in this has never wavered, but it's essential to have it borne out in practice, as the theoretical can only go so far. After the last year, we can point with certainty towards various key examples that show how much individuals can accomplish with a little dedication, coupled with a degree of mastery in the world of technology. We can also point to the reaction these people get from those in charge as proof of the threat they pose to their power structure.
Freedom and empowerment are concepts that, once unleashed, spread quite rapidly. We saw that earlier in the year, as the Arab Spring took hold. I t all started with Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia who became so fed up with the constant corruption and humiliation that made it impossible for him to earn a living that he sacrificed his own life as the ultimate form of protest. The outrage from fellow citizens mushroomed and led to massive protests and the actual fall of the government less than a month later. According to The New York Times, "The protesters, led at first by unemployed college graduates... and later joined by workers and young professionals, found grist for the complaints in leaked cables from the United States Embassy in Tunisia, released by WikiLeaks, that detailed the self-dealing and excess of the president's family." The government had its state-run media to whitewash the news. The people had social networking and cell phones to get and share updates. I t was no contest.
The unrest spread to neighboring countries, leading to significant conflicts in no less than 16 of them, the most significant being Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The tensions had always been there. But once the fuse was lit, there was no turning back.
Domestically, we've witnessed much in the way of stress and hardship, but nothing that comes close to events in other parts of the world. However, while we may not have had security forces killing demonstrators or a repressive regime that tolerates no dissent at all, we, like all humans, have a sense of justice and can only be pushed around so much before something snaps. That appears to have been the case with September's Occupy Wall Street movement, a simple protest inspired by our friends over at Adbusters magazine, which wound up getting bigger and bigger before eventually spreading to hundreds of sites throughout the country and across the world. While the mass media initially mocked, ridiculed, and basically ignored these protests, supposedly due to the lack of a clear list of "demands" from the demonstrators, the movement actually became strengthened as a result. Since there wasn't a clear agenda, anyone who felt that the system wasn't working was able to join and help determine what path to take. Alliances were thus formed that wouldn't have been possible had all of the answers been laid out from the beginning, as would be expected in a typical political movement. It was an unusual tactic, but clearly an effective one. And the media's agenda of ignoring what was going on became painfully visible, which led to more outrage and an eventual about face on their part. Suddenly, the movement became front page news everywhere.
The concept of a group that had no leadership was very similar to that of Anonymous, an online entity which has become increasingly active in the "real world" as well as on the net. The Guy Fawkes masks they embraced were quite visible worldwide at many of the Occupy sites. But anonymity was only an option, not a main ingredient in what was going on. The lack of a hierarchy and the development of the
Occupy Wall Street General Assembly enabled any individual to speak to the crowd through the ingenious use of a "human microphone," created out of necessity due to an arbitrary ban on megaphones. This adaptability and desire to bypass unfair restrictions using clever tactics
is something we're all familiar with in the hacker world.
At press time, there have been a number of violent crackdowns on these groups by the authorities. While all kinds of excuses were given, ranging from health concerns to reports of crimes and illegal activities within the camps (much of which was echoed almost verbatim by mainstream media), many firsthand accounts dispute the degree of such problems. Actions caught on video clearly show that the people targeted were posing no threat to anyone, other than refusing to obey orders. Whenever we see this kind of reaction displayed by an authority figure, we know what it means, whether it's a high school principal expelling a student for some mischief on a computer, a corporation firing an employee for discovering a security hole, or a parent sending their kid to reform school or feeding them drugs because they're "out of control." It means the authority figure is desperately afraid of no longer being in charge of the situation. They begin to act increasingly irrational and they view the individual as the sole source of the problem. This is always the wrong course of action.
Listening to, learning from, and opening a dialogue with an individual is the only way to take positive steps. This is true regardless of how much or how little we agree with what they're saying or doing. For us in the hacker world, this is old news. But what's different is seeing this sort of thing playing out on
a different stage and seeing how those in charge are truly afraid of the kind of dialogue that empowers individuals. That alone is a milestone.
We've also seen tremendous growth in the use of technology by individuals for truly worthwhile goals. While social networking and smart phones were never designed to foment civil unrest, used properly they are invaluable tools in a movement gathering steam. Overseas, people used Facebook and Twitter to quickly organize mass demonstrations before the authorities knew what was happening. Attempts to restrict access to these services backfired badly. In the States, similar tactics were used by demonstrators, with the addition of numerous live video feeds from cities all over the country. When something happened, the whole world could literally be watching. Live. When the crackdown occurred in New York City, there were no less than four separate live streams being fed by people's smart phones, all with surprisingly good video quality and relatively decent audio. Well over 50,000 people were tuned in to these feeds, with many more picking them up from secondary sources. As interest in what was going on swelled, the mass media even joined in, simulcasting these streams since they hadn't been able to get behind the police barricades themselves. The people had literally
become the media.
We've learned a great deal from these events. The hacker world, the ideals of full disclosure, the distrust of governments and corporations, the embracing and manipulation of high tech, the desire for free speech, the empowerment of the individual….these are all intrinsically linked together. It really does all
matter.
But there's a flipside. There will always be people and entities who see all of this as a threat and who will try and control it. That's a battle that will never end and which will be fought in a variety of arenas. We see it every day in the form of corporate copyright abuses, antiquated business practices that fight technological advances, increased government secrecy, or the suspicion that's injected into the populace towards anyone who doesn't quite think, act, or look like everyone else.
In other words, individuals may have shown their ability to manipulate technology in a way that benefits them with these actions of 2011 . But those opposed to this sort of thing have been taking notes and will be better prepared to counter this ingenuity the next time around. As hackers and developers of new technology, we need to always have this on our minds, as the true future of freedom, both here and abroad, can be greatly affected by what we choose to consider as a priority.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Stephen Fry on GNU
In the YouTube video embedded below, in celebration of GNU's 25th birthday, Stephen Fry explains what an operating system is and the two titans in the Free and Open Source Software world: GNU and Linux. This video that I stumbled upon the other day serves as a perfect introduction to Linux and GNU for those who only know about Microsoft Windows. Check it:
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Wired: "Open Source Everywhere"
Source link.
Software is just the beginning … open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. Get ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation.
By Thomas Goetz
2003
Cholera is one of those 19th-century ills that, like consumption or gout, at first seems almost quaint, a malady from an age when people suffered from maladies. But in the developing world, the disease is still widespread and can be gruesomely lethal. When cholera strikes an unprepared community, people get violently sick immediately. On day two, severe dehydration sets in. By day seven, half of a village might be dead.
Since cholera kills by driving fluids from the body, the treatment is to pump liquid back in, as fast as possible. The one proven technology, an intravenous saline drip, has a few drawbacks. An easy-to-use, computer-regulated IV can cost $2,000 - far too expensive to deploy against a large outbreak. Other systems cost as little as 35 cents, but they're too complicated for unskilled caregivers. The result: People die unnecessarily.
"It's a health problem, but it's also a design problem," says Timothy Prestero, a onetime Peace Corps volunteer who cofounded a group called Design That Matters. Leading a team of MIT engineering students, Prestero, who has master's degrees in mechanical and oceanographic engineering, focused on the drip chamber and pinch valve controlling the saline flow rate.
But the team needed more medical expertise. So Prestero turned to ThinkCycle, a Web-based industrial-design project that brings together engineers, designers, academics, and professionals from a variety of disciplines. Soon, some physicians and engineers were pitching in - vetting designs and recommending new paths. Within a few months, Prestero's team had turned the suggestions into an ingenious solution. Taking inspiration from a tool called a rotameter used in chemical engineering, the group crafted a new IV system that's intuitive to use, even for untrained workers. Remarkably, it costs about $1.25 to manufacture, making it ideal for mass deployment. Prestero is now in talks with a medical devices company; the new IV could be in the field a year from now.
ThinkCycle's collaborative approach is modeled on a method that for more than a decade has been closely associated with software development: open source. It's called that because the collaboration is open to all and the source code is freely shared. Open source harnesses the distributive powers of the Internet, parcels the work out to thousands, and uses their piecework to build a better whole - putting informal networks of volunteer coders in direct competition with big corporations. It works like an ant colony, where the collective intelligence of the network supersedes any single contributor.
Open source, of course, is the magic behind Linux, the operating system that is transforming the software industry. Linux commands a growing share of the server market worldwide and even has Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer warning of its "competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry." And open source software transcends Linux. Altogether, more than 65,000 collaborative software projects click along at Sourceforge.net, a clearinghouse for the open source community. The success of Linux alone has stunned the business world.
But software is just the beginning. Open source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open source methods in genomics and informatics, building massive databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of lab research. NASA has adopted open source principles as part of its Mars mission, calling on volunteer "clickworkers" to identify millions of craters and help draw a map of the Red Planet. There is open source publishing: With Bruce Perens, who helped define open source software in the '90s, Prentice Hall is publishing a series of computer books open to any use, modification, or redistribution, with readers' improvements considered for succeeding editions. There are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the same time, a related project, Distributed Proofreading, deploys legions of copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg texts are correct. There are open source projects in law and religion. There's even an open source cookbook.
In 2003, the method is proving to be as broadly effective - and, yes, as revolutionary - a means of production as the assembly line was a century ago.
In the Beginning
Message-ID:
1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi
From: torvalds@klaava.helsinki.fi (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
To: Newsgroups: comp.os.inix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Hello everybody out there using minix-I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Linus
Thousands of coders, hackers, and developers answered Linus Torvalds' call - and helped him build a robust system that continues to pick up steam. Yet what's amazing about Linux isn't its success in the market. The revolution is in the method, not the result. Open source involves a broad body of collaborators, typically volunteers, whose every contribution builds on those before. Just as important, the product of this collaboration is freely available to all comers. Of course, there are plenty of things that are collaborative and free but aren't really open source (Amazon.com's book reviews, for instance). And many projects aren't widely collaborative, or are somewhat proprietary, yet still in the spirit of open source (such as the music available from Opsound, an online record label). Not to mention that, as with any term newly in vogue, open source is often invoked on tenuous grounds. So think of it as a spectrum or - better still - a rising diagonal line on a graph, where openness lies on one axis and collaboration on the other. The higher an effort registers both concepts, the more fully it can be considered open source.
Of course, for all its novelty, open source isn't new. Dust off your Isaac Newton and you'll recognize the same ideals of sharing scientific methods and results in the late 1600s (dig deeper and you can follow the vein all the way back to Ptolemy, circa AD 150). Or roll up your sleeves and see the same ethic in Amish barn raising, a tradition that dates to the early 18th century. Or read its roots, as many have, in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the 19th-century project where a network of far-flung etymologists built the world's greatest dictionary by mail. Or trace its outline in the Human Genome Project, the distributed gene-mapping effort that began just a year before Torvalds planted the seeds of his OS.
If the ideas behind it are so familiar and simple, why has open source only now become such a powerful force? Two reasons: the rise of the Internet and the excesses of intellectual property. The Internet is open source's great enabler, the communications tool that makes massive decentralized projects possible. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is open source's nemesis: a legal regime that has become so stifling and restrictive that thousands of free-thinking programmers, scientists, designers, engineers, and scholars are desperate to find new ways to create.
We are at a convergent moment, when a philosophy, a strategy, and a technology have aligned to unleash great innovation. Open source is powerful because it's an alternative to the status quo, another way to produce things or solve problems. And in many cases, it's a better way. Better because current methods are not fast enough, not ambitious enough, or don't take advantage of our collective creative potential.
Open source has flourished in software because programming, for all the romance of guerrilla geeks and hacker ethics, is a fairly precise discipline; you're only as good as your code. It's relatively easy to run an open source software project as a meritocracy, a level playing field that encourages participation. But those virtues aren't exclusive to software. Coders, it could be argued, got to open source first only because they were closest to the tool that made it a feasible means of production: the Internet.
The Internet excels at facilitating the exchange of large chunks of information, fast. From distributed computation projects such as SETI@home to file-swapping systems like Grokster and Kazaa, many efforts have exploited the Internet's knack for networking. Open source does those one better: It's not only peer-to-peer sharing - it's P2P production. With open source, you've got the first real industrial model that stems from the technology itself, rather than simply incorporating it.
"There's a reason we love barn raising scenes in movies. They make us feel great. We think, 'Wow! That would be amazing!'" says Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Yale studying the economic impact of open source. "But it doesn't have to be just a romanticized notion of how to live. Now technology allows it. Technology can unleash tremendous human creativity and tremendous productivity. This is basically barn raising through a decentralized communication network."
An Experiment in Open Source
At 37, Jimmy Wales has already established his legacy on the Internet. Seven years ago,Wales
Wales
The first attempt came in 1999 with Nupedia, an encyclopedia project with great ambitions and what proved to be fatally onerous oversight. Aspiring contributors had to apply for access; each article was peer-reviewed and professionally edited. An entry had to make it past seven or eight hurdles before being posted onto the Nupedia site. "After two years and an amazing amount of money,"Wales
So in 2001, he tried again.Wales Wales
So what motivates Wikipedia contributors? Pretty much the same things behind any open source project: a dash of altruism, a dose of obsessive compulsiveness, and a good chunk of egotism. It lets users have a hand not just in shaping the debate, but in designing the product. Some are genuinely motivated by the greater good, or find it satisfying to apply their professional knowledge to a broader audience, pro-bono style. And some get to prove how smart they are.
Not to say mischief-makers don't lurk out there. Wikipedia has banned several ne'er-do-wells from the site, and some areas have been locked down - the front page, for instance, because,Wales
There's some satisfaction in the fact that the technology behind Wikipedia is the same one that's baffled Britannica for years. The old-guard encyclopedia has never figured out how to adapt to the digital era. In 1998, Britannica stopped updating its print version and focused on its CD-ROM, then last year revived the print version. In 1999, it launched a free site online; two years later, switched to a paid version. The struggles aren't unique, but they illustrate how a proprietary model built on traditional notions of intellectual property can be undone by irresistible forces.
NowWales Wales
Harnessing the Means of Innovation
Business gurus have a term for what drove Wikipedia: innovation! It's a flaccid buzzword these days, deflated by a decade of leadership seminars and management bibles. But when you look at what's innovative about open source, think Tom Paine, not Tom Peters.
Open source embodies an ethos as fruitful and resilient as the closed capitalism Bill Gates represents: the spirit of democratic solutions to daunting problems. It's the creed of Emerson, who preached independent initiative and advocated a "creative economy." It's the philosophy of William James, whose pragmatism dictated that "ideals ought to aim at the transformation of reality." It's the science of Frederick Taylor, who proved that distributing work could exponentially boost productivity and replace "suspicious watchfulness" with "mutual confidence." It's the logic of Adam Smith, whose notion of "enlightened self-interest" among workers neatly presages the primary motivation for many open source collaborators.
Finding the roots of open source in Taylor and Smith is especially significant because the approach isn't, as some insist, anticommercial or anticorporate. Rather, it is a return to basic free-market principles. The open source process fosters competition, creativity, and enterprise. And just as Taylor and Smith provided the intellectual grounding for the revolution in mass production, open source offers the mechanism to mass innovation.
While the assembly line accelerated the pace of production, it also embedded workers more deeply into the corporate manufacturing machine. Indeed, that was the big innovation of the 20th-century factory: The machines, rather than the workers, drove production. With open source, the people are back in charge. Through distributed collaboration, a multitude of workers can tackle a problem, all at once. The speed is even greater - but so is the freedom. It's a cottage industry on Internet time.
Just as the assembly line served the manufacturing economy, open source serves a knowledge-based economy. Facilitating intellectual collaboration is open source's great advantage, but it also makes the method a threat. It's a direct challenge to old-school R&D: a closed system, where innovations are quickly patented and tightly guarded. And it's an explicit reaction to the intellectual property industry, that machine of proprietary creation and idea appropriation that grew up during the past century and out of control in the past 30 years - now often impeding the same efforts it was designed to protect.
Copyright and patents have an admirable purpose: They give creators the right to exploit their creations for a limited time. Then these innovations enter the public domain. If it made sense that copyrights and patents protected products, it makes sense that, in today's economy, they protect ideas and concepts, too.
But the balance and fair-mindedness that made the American system hum like a well-tuned Briggs & Stratton is now clogged up with opportunism. Copyright protections that originally lasted 14 years now drag on for nearly a century, leaving the public domain a barren ground. Particularly since the mid-1990s, when the US Patent and Trademark Office began recognizing business methods, intellectual property has become more than just guarding what you've made. Trademark, copyright, and patents are now offensive weapons. The result often impedes, rather than encourages, innovation. Intellectual property has grown infuriating in its excesses, such as Netflix's recent patenting of something as simple as a subscription model for DVD rentals.
Perversely, this is just how the law wants it. The courts and the patent and trademark offices exist to protect property, be it physical or intellectual - slap on "All Rights Reserved" and reap the rewards. But it's annoyingly difficult to share something - to open intellectual property to a wide audience. The conventional legal system simply isn't built to handle "Some Rights Reserved."
Open source flips this paradigm around. Now there are dozens of licenses, from Stallman's General Public License to Creative Commons' ShareAlike agreement, that let open products exist in a proprietary world. Under these licenses, to use political scientist Steven Weber's terms, property is something to be distributed rather than protected. The owners are more guardians than guards.
The first and most likely places for open source to flourish are at the extremes of IP. The method can craft better, more open versions of bad business models and inefficient markets. But the imitative projects, the ones that replicate proprietary products using better means, are just the gimmes. In the long term, open source will apply outside IP-dominated industries. Weber suggests corporate R&D as a natural starting point; the oil industry, for instance, could enlist outside chemists to collaborate on better oil refining techniques.
As technology reduces the costs of replication and distribution to nearly nothing, the open source approach could catalyze stagnant sectors of the economy - or, better yet, create new economic sectors. "Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill," says Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus in 1982, cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990, and now heads the Open Source Applications Foundation. (See Mitch Kapor Reinvents Your Inbox.) "In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well. If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology."
Open Source as a Weapon
A decade ago, Michael Eisen slogged through swamps inCosta Rica Darwin
Yet if biology is in a renaissance, there are still relics of a medieval age. Most aggravating to Eisen is the state of scientific publishing. It affronts him. And he wants to destroy it.
His weapon is open source. Unlike Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, who didn't set out to take down Britannica, Eisen has the publishing community squarely in his sights. Open source, says Eisen, who dabbles in Perl programming, can give rise to a new distribution model for scientific research.
"The guiding principle of science has been that freely available material is more useful; it's more likely to generate better science," Eisen says. But freely available is not the same as free of charge. Science journals, with their historically narrow readerships, often charge thousands for a subscription. One of the biggest disseminators is Elsevier, the science publishing unit of an Anglo-Dutch media conglomerate, which distributes some 1,700 academic journals, from Advances in Enzyme Regulation to Veterinary Parasitology.
"The whole premise for that model just evaporated with the Internet," Eisen continues. "Technology now makes openness possible; it's maximum openness. The rules of the game have changed, but the system has failed to respond." So Eisen and two colleagues - Stanford biochemist Pat Brown and Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel laureate in medicine and president of theMemorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York
Instead of charging universities thousands to subscribe to PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine, as the library's two peer-reviewed journals will be called, PLOS instead will charge contributing authors a $1,500 fee to cover costs. (Harvard and other universities typically pay on behalf of their faculties, and the library will waive the fee in special cases.) In addition to hiring editorial staffs, PLOS will distribute the work among a pool of fellow academics. In time, the library will become a storehouse of publicly available scientific research, a resource that, like Linux, will only improve with time. And whereas the old model traditionally had scientists signing away their copyright to the journal, the library will use a license that leaves copyright with the author but allows for unlimited use by third parties, provided credit is given to the author.
"The openness will make the data more useful," says Eisen, pointing to the annual $57 billion in taxpayer-funded scientific and medical research that isn't available to the public. And then there's the irony that academic institutions get charged for work they did in the first place. "How does it make sense for the universities to give away the copyright to their research and then pay to get access to it again?"
The library follows in the steps of efforts such as BioMed Central, a London-based open-access publisher of online scientific journals. Though BioMed is a valuable repository of all sorts of research - everything from proteomics to psychiatry - it has yet to make a significant dent in the major journals' hold on big research. That's the obstacle PLOS faces, too: convincing scientists that the new publication will have authority. Publishing in Science or Nature means your paper matters, and it provides a yardstick for tenure and promotion decisions. PLOS has already earned credibility by hiring the former editor in chief of Cell and lining up contributors from Harvard,Princeton , Yale, and the National Institutes of Health for the first issues of PLOS Biology, set to debut October 13. The team hopes such star power will help put any issues of credibility to rest.
And to those who label PLOS something only a league of anticommercial academics could dream up, Eisen has a swift retort. "It's the ultimate free market - the free market of ideas," he says. "We don't prohibit commercial use, we encourage it. If you want to gather our articles about a particular topic and sell it as a book, great, go ahead. As far as we're concerned, that's a good way of getting information out there. The problem with scientific publishing right now is that it's a monopoly. This is an attack on a specific business model that is not serving science well."
Building a Hybrid
At any given time, odds are Monsanto is in court over intellectual property. The agriculture and biotech giant is suing rival companies for infringing on technology. It's suing researchers for unlicensed use. And it's suing farmers for stealing seeds - filing 75 or so lawsuits in the past five years alone, most notably against Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian cause célèbre accused of using Monsanto grain without a license; his case goes before the Canadian Supreme Court in January. This constant litigation is a necessary cost of doing business; patents, after all, must be protected, or their value can be lost. But it also reflects a demanding way of doing business, one that's expensive, time-consuming, and - as the Schmeiser case attests - not always good for PR.
For a different approach, consider Cambia, the Center for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture, a biotech nonprofit based inAustralia Santa Cruz , California Jefferson finds Cambia increasingly hamstrung by the biotech industry's reliance on patents, cross-license agreements, and trade secrets. "So much of what we want to do is all tied up in somebody's intellectual property," he says. "It's a complete sclerotic mess, where nobody has any freedom of movement. Everything that open source has been fighting in software is exactly where we find ourselves now with biotechnology."
SoJefferson tapped open source methods to skirt the restrictive licenses of companies like Monsanto. On a broad scale, Cambia built an exhaustive collaborative database, open to all, of 300,000 patents covering agricultural technologies - an essential resource for researchers navigating through proprietary waters. And as a more precise effort, Cambia is developing a gene-transfer technology that will, Jefferson hopes, work better than the proprietary methods currently available. The group is following Torvalds' model, incubating the core technique before turning it over to a network of users - both nonprofit and corporate - with a liberal licensing arrangement. "Anybody can tweak it, learn from it, twiddle with it," Jefferson says. "We want to invent a better way but bind everybody to share the improvements. Some might call them work-arounds; we call them work-beyonds."
Corporations have been part of the problem forJefferson , but they're also part of the solution. Open source offers biotech companies a cheaper way to do research. "The corporations have been locked in a zero-sum game," Jefferson says. "It costs them a fortune to buy and lock up a product or a technology. And if they don't, a competitor will get it and they'll have no access to it. So it's a real change in the status quo we're proposing. We're reducing the obstacles for everybody so big companies won't view this as antithetical to their own progress."
Jefferson is onto something. Open source is often framed as an attack on the corporate world at large. But in fact, the open source approach can be a boon for companies. Licensing from a trusted collaborative project saves money and leaves the technology open to further development. By showing corporations that a closed, defensive approach to intellectual property can be less efficient than liberal licensing, Cambia and a few other open source efforts are leading the way to the mainstream.
In this light, where corporations are part of the model, open source suddenly becomes something less marginal and more ingenious. It forces industry to reckon with openness rather than hide behind intellectual property. In driving down the cost of software or encyclopedias or biotechnology, open source is unleashing billions in capital otherwise put to woefully inefficient ends. Just because it's not about making money first doesn't mean it won't make money second (just ask the folks who bought their mansions with Red Hat shares).
"Open source can build around the blockages of the industrial producers of the 20th century," says Yale's Benkler. "It can provide a potential source of knowledge materials from which we can build the culture and economy of the 21st century."
If that sounds melodramatic, consider how far things have come in the past decade. Torvalds' hobbyists have become an army. Britannica's woes are Wikipedia's gains. In genetics and biotech, open source promises a sure path to breakthroughs. These early efforts are mere trial runs for what open source might do out in the world at large. The real test, the real potential, lies not in the margins. It lies in making something new, in finding a better way. Open source isn't just about better software. It's about better everything.
By Thomas Goetz
2003
Cholera is one of those 19th-century ills that, like consumption or gout, at first seems almost quaint, a malady from an age when people suffered from maladies. But in the developing world, the disease is still widespread and can be gruesomely lethal. When cholera strikes an unprepared community, people get violently sick immediately. On day two, severe dehydration sets in. By day seven, half of a village might be dead.
Since cholera kills by driving fluids from the body, the treatment is to pump liquid back in, as fast as possible. The one proven technology, an intravenous saline drip, has a few drawbacks. An easy-to-use, computer-regulated IV can cost $2,000 - far too expensive to deploy against a large outbreak. Other systems cost as little as 35 cents, but they're too complicated for unskilled caregivers. The result: People die unnecessarily.
"It's a health problem, but it's also a design problem," says Timothy Prestero, a onetime Peace Corps volunteer who cofounded a group called Design That Matters. Leading a team of MIT engineering students, Prestero, who has master's degrees in mechanical and oceanographic engineering, focused on the drip chamber and pinch valve controlling the saline flow rate.
But the team needed more medical expertise. So Prestero turned to ThinkCycle, a Web-based industrial-design project that brings together engineers, designers, academics, and professionals from a variety of disciplines. Soon, some physicians and engineers were pitching in - vetting designs and recommending new paths. Within a few months, Prestero's team had turned the suggestions into an ingenious solution. Taking inspiration from a tool called a rotameter used in chemical engineering, the group crafted a new IV system that's intuitive to use, even for untrained workers. Remarkably, it costs about $1.25 to manufacture, making it ideal for mass deployment. Prestero is now in talks with a medical devices company; the new IV could be in the field a year from now.
ThinkCycle's collaborative approach is modeled on a method that for more than a decade has been closely associated with software development: open source. It's called that because the collaboration is open to all and the source code is freely shared. Open source harnesses the distributive powers of the Internet, parcels the work out to thousands, and uses their piecework to build a better whole - putting informal networks of volunteer coders in direct competition with big corporations. It works like an ant colony, where the collective intelligence of the network supersedes any single contributor.
Open source, of course, is the magic behind Linux, the operating system that is transforming the software industry. Linux commands a growing share of the server market worldwide and even has Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer warning of its "competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry." And open source software transcends Linux. Altogether, more than 65,000 collaborative software projects click along at Sourceforge.net, a clearinghouse for the open source community. The success of Linux alone has stunned the business world.
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The Ideals of Open Source
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SHARE THE GOAL
Open source projects succeed when a broad group of contributors recognize the same need and agree on how to meet it. Linux gave programmers a way to build a better, leaner operating system; Woochi gives wine lovers an encyclopedia as refined as they are.
SHARE THE WORK
Projects can be broken down into smaller tasks and distributed among armies of volunteers for execution. Tim O�Reilly, whose namesake company runs the Open Source Convention, calls this the �architecture of participation,� and it is the irresistible genius of open source, a tool that no corporate model can match for the sheer brainpower it yokes. But architecture demands structure: a review process that screens for the best contributions and avoids the �fork� � that horrible prospect that a project will split into a multitude of side projects.
SHARE THE RESULT
Open source etiquette mandates that the code be available for anyone to tweak and that improvements to the code be shared with all. Substitute creation for code and the same goes outside of software. Think of it as the triumph of participation by the many over ownership by the few. � T.G. | |
But software is just the beginning. Open source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open source methods in genomics and informatics, building massive databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of lab research. NASA has adopted open source principles as part of its Mars mission, calling on volunteer "clickworkers" to identify millions of craters and help draw a map of the Red Planet. There is open source publishing: With Bruce Perens, who helped define open source software in the '90s, Prentice Hall is publishing a series of computer books open to any use, modification, or redistribution, with readers' improvements considered for succeeding editions. There are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the same time, a related project, Distributed Proofreading, deploys legions of copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg texts are correct. There are open source projects in law and religion. There's even an open source cookbook.
In 2003, the method is proving to be as broadly effective - and, yes, as revolutionary - a means of production as the assembly line was a century ago.
In the Beginning
Message-ID:
1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi
From: torvalds@klaava.helsinki.fi (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
To: Newsgroups: comp.os.inix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Hello everybody out there using minix-I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Linus
Thousands of coders, hackers, and developers answered Linus Torvalds' call - and helped him build a robust system that continues to pick up steam. Yet what's amazing about Linux isn't its success in the market. The revolution is in the method, not the result. Open source involves a broad body of collaborators, typically volunteers, whose every contribution builds on those before. Just as important, the product of this collaboration is freely available to all comers. Of course, there are plenty of things that are collaborative and free but aren't really open source (Amazon.com's book reviews, for instance). And many projects aren't widely collaborative, or are somewhat proprietary, yet still in the spirit of open source (such as the music available from Opsound, an online record label). Not to mention that, as with any term newly in vogue, open source is often invoked on tenuous grounds. So think of it as a spectrum or - better still - a rising diagonal line on a graph, where openness lies on one axis and collaboration on the other. The higher an effort registers both concepts, the more fully it can be considered open source.
Of course, for all its novelty, open source isn't new. Dust off your Isaac Newton and you'll recognize the same ideals of sharing scientific methods and results in the late 1600s (dig deeper and you can follow the vein all the way back to Ptolemy, circa AD 150). Or roll up your sleeves and see the same ethic in Amish barn raising, a tradition that dates to the early 18th century. Or read its roots, as many have, in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the 19th-century project where a network of far-flung etymologists built the world's greatest dictionary by mail. Or trace its outline in the Human Genome Project, the distributed gene-mapping effort that began just a year before Torvalds planted the seeds of his OS.
If the ideas behind it are so familiar and simple, why has open source only now become such a powerful force? Two reasons: the rise of the Internet and the excesses of intellectual property. The Internet is open source's great enabler, the communications tool that makes massive decentralized projects possible. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is open source's nemesis: a legal regime that has become so stifling and restrictive that thousands of free-thinking programmers, scientists, designers, engineers, and scholars are desperate to find new ways to create.
We are at a convergent moment, when a philosophy, a strategy, and a technology have aligned to unleash great innovation. Open source is powerful because it's an alternative to the status quo, another way to produce things or solve problems. And in many cases, it's a better way. Better because current methods are not fast enough, not ambitious enough, or don't take advantage of our collective creative potential.
Open source has flourished in software because programming, for all the romance of guerrilla geeks and hacker ethics, is a fairly precise discipline; you're only as good as your code. It's relatively easy to run an open source software project as a meritocracy, a level playing field that encourages participation. But those virtues aren't exclusive to software. Coders, it could be argued, got to open source first only because they were closest to the tool that made it a feasible means of production: the Internet.
The Internet excels at facilitating the exchange of large chunks of information, fast. From distributed computation projects such as SETI@home to file-swapping systems like Grokster and Kazaa, many efforts have exploited the Internet's knack for networking. Open source does those one better: It's not only peer-to-peer sharing - it's P2P production. With open source, you've got the first real industrial model that stems from the technology itself, rather than simply incorporating it.
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Open Source We Love
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OPEN SOURCE FILM
Not coming to a theater near you: Nothing So Strange, the open source movie. The plot involves a Bill Gates assassination, and the footage is open to editing by all. nothingsostrange.com/open_source
OPEN SOURCE RECIPES
The Open Source Cookbook is a Slashdot-born project that�s collected dozens of recipes begging for improvement. Head chef Matthew Balmer has version 0.5 on the way. ibiblio.org/oscookbook
OPEN SOURCE Π
Calculating Pi is a collective effort to nail down the decimal places of this mathematical constant. For number geeks who think programmers have all the fun. projectpi.sourceforge.net
OPEN SOURCE PROPAGANDA
From the slightly paranoid folks at PR Watch comes Disinfopedia. Ranging from public relations firms to corporate �grassroots� groups, this directory of propaganda is surprisingly thorough. disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml
OPEN SOURCE CRIME SOLVING
The Doe Network is an international effort tackling unsolved disappearances and tracking down unidentified victims. In four years, Doe claims to have solved nearly 100 cases. doenetwork.org
OPEN SOURCE CURRICULUM
The Open Textbook Project is building free textbooks in a range of subjects, using the principles of distributed collaboration and open access. The result will be low-cost, high-quality texts. otp.inlimine.org | |
"There's a reason we love barn raising scenes in movies. They make us feel great. We think, 'Wow! That would be amazing!'" says Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Yale studying the economic impact of open source. "But it doesn't have to be just a romanticized notion of how to live. Now technology allows it. Technology can unleash tremendous human creativity and tremendous productivity. This is basically barn raising through a decentralized communication network."
An Experiment in Open Source
At 37, Jimmy Wales has already established his legacy on the Internet. Seven years ago,
The first attempt came in 1999 with Nupedia, an encyclopedia project with great ambitions and what proved to be fatally onerous oversight. Aspiring contributors had to apply for access; each article was peer-reviewed and professionally edited. An entry had to make it past seven or eight hurdles before being posted onto the Nupedia site. "After two years and an amazing amount of money,"
So in 2001, he tried again.
So what motivates Wikipedia contributors? Pretty much the same things behind any open source project: a dash of altruism, a dose of obsessive compulsiveness, and a good chunk of egotism. It lets users have a hand not just in shaping the debate, but in designing the product. Some are genuinely motivated by the greater good, or find it satisfying to apply their professional knowledge to a broader audience, pro-bono style. And some get to prove how smart they are.
Not to say mischief-makers don't lurk out there. Wikipedia has banned several ne'er-do-wells from the site, and some areas have been locked down - the front page, for instance, because,
There's some satisfaction in the fact that the technology behind Wikipedia is the same one that's baffled Britannica for years. The old-guard encyclopedia has never figured out how to adapt to the digital era. In 1998, Britannica stopped updating its print version and focused on its CD-ROM, then last year revived the print version. In 1999, it launched a free site online; two years later, switched to a paid version. The struggles aren't unique, but they illustrate how a proprietary model built on traditional notions of intellectual property can be undone by irresistible forces.
Now
Harnessing the Means of Innovation
Business gurus have a term for what drove Wikipedia: innovation! It's a flaccid buzzword these days, deflated by a decade of leadership seminars and management bibles. But when you look at what's innovative about open source, think Tom Paine, not Tom Peters.
Open source embodies an ethos as fruitful and resilient as the closed capitalism Bill Gates represents: the spirit of democratic solutions to daunting problems. It's the creed of Emerson, who preached independent initiative and advocated a "creative economy." It's the philosophy of William James, whose pragmatism dictated that "ideals ought to aim at the transformation of reality." It's the science of Frederick Taylor, who proved that distributing work could exponentially boost productivity and replace "suspicious watchfulness" with "mutual confidence." It's the logic of Adam Smith, whose notion of "enlightened self-interest" among workers neatly presages the primary motivation for many open source collaborators.
Finding the roots of open source in Taylor and Smith is especially significant because the approach isn't, as some insist, anticommercial or anticorporate. Rather, it is a return to basic free-market principles. The open source process fosters competition, creativity, and enterprise. And just as Taylor and Smith provided the intellectual grounding for the revolution in mass production, open source offers the mechanism to mass innovation.
While the assembly line accelerated the pace of production, it also embedded workers more deeply into the corporate manufacturing machine. Indeed, that was the big innovation of the 20th-century factory: The machines, rather than the workers, drove production. With open source, the people are back in charge. Through distributed collaboration, a multitude of workers can tackle a problem, all at once. The speed is even greater - but so is the freedom. It's a cottage industry on Internet time.
Just as the assembly line served the manufacturing economy, open source serves a knowledge-based economy. Facilitating intellectual collaboration is open source's great advantage, but it also makes the method a threat. It's a direct challenge to old-school R&D: a closed system, where innovations are quickly patented and tightly guarded. And it's an explicit reaction to the intellectual property industry, that machine of proprietary creation and idea appropriation that grew up during the past century and out of control in the past 30 years - now often impeding the same efforts it was designed to protect.
Copyright and patents have an admirable purpose: They give creators the right to exploit their creations for a limited time. Then these innovations enter the public domain. If it made sense that copyrights and patents protected products, it makes sense that, in today's economy, they protect ideas and concepts, too.
But the balance and fair-mindedness that made the American system hum like a well-tuned Briggs & Stratton is now clogged up with opportunism. Copyright protections that originally lasted 14 years now drag on for nearly a century, leaving the public domain a barren ground. Particularly since the mid-1990s, when the US Patent and Trademark Office began recognizing business methods, intellectual property has become more than just guarding what you've made. Trademark, copyright, and patents are now offensive weapons. The result often impedes, rather than encourages, innovation. Intellectual property has grown infuriating in its excesses, such as Netflix's recent patenting of something as simple as a subscription model for DVD rentals.
Perversely, this is just how the law wants it. The courts and the patent and trademark offices exist to protect property, be it physical or intellectual - slap on "All Rights Reserved" and reap the rewards. But it's annoyingly difficult to share something - to open intellectual property to a wide audience. The conventional legal system simply isn't built to handle "Some Rights Reserved."
Open source flips this paradigm around. Now there are dozens of licenses, from Stallman's General Public License to Creative Commons' ShareAlike agreement, that let open products exist in a proprietary world. Under these licenses, to use political scientist Steven Weber's terms, property is something to be distributed rather than protected. The owners are more guardians than guards.
The first and most likely places for open source to flourish are at the extremes of IP. The method can craft better, more open versions of bad business models and inefficient markets. But the imitative projects, the ones that replicate proprietary products using better means, are just the gimmes. In the long term, open source will apply outside IP-dominated industries. Weber suggests corporate R&D as a natural starting point; the oil industry, for instance, could enlist outside chemists to collaborate on better oil refining techniques.
As technology reduces the costs of replication and distribution to nearly nothing, the open source approach could catalyze stagnant sectors of the economy - or, better yet, create new economic sectors. "Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill," says Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus in 1982, cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990, and now heads the Open Source Applications Foundation. (See Mitch Kapor Reinvents Your Inbox.) "In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well. If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology."
Open Source as a Weapon
A decade ago, Michael Eisen slogged through swamps in
Yet if biology is in a renaissance, there are still relics of a medieval age. Most aggravating to Eisen is the state of scientific publishing. It affronts him. And he wants to destroy it.
His weapon is open source. Unlike Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, who didn't set out to take down Britannica, Eisen has the publishing community squarely in his sights. Open source, says Eisen, who dabbles in Perl programming, can give rise to a new distribution model for scientific research.
"The guiding principle of science has been that freely available material is more useful; it's more likely to generate better science," Eisen says. But freely available is not the same as free of charge. Science journals, with their historically narrow readerships, often charge thousands for a subscription. One of the biggest disseminators is Elsevier, the science publishing unit of an Anglo-Dutch media conglomerate, which distributes some 1,700 academic journals, from Advances in Enzyme Regulation to Veterinary Parasitology.
"The whole premise for that model just evaporated with the Internet," Eisen continues. "Technology now makes openness possible; it's maximum openness. The rules of the game have changed, but the system has failed to respond." So Eisen and two colleagues - Stanford biochemist Pat Brown and Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel laureate in medicine and president of the
Instead of charging universities thousands to subscribe to PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine, as the library's two peer-reviewed journals will be called, PLOS instead will charge contributing authors a $1,500 fee to cover costs. (Harvard and other universities typically pay on behalf of their faculties, and the library will waive the fee in special cases.) In addition to hiring editorial staffs, PLOS will distribute the work among a pool of fellow academics. In time, the library will become a storehouse of publicly available scientific research, a resource that, like Linux, will only improve with time. And whereas the old model traditionally had scientists signing away their copyright to the journal, the library will use a license that leaves copyright with the author but allows for unlimited use by third parties, provided credit is given to the author.
"The openness will make the data more useful," says Eisen, pointing to the annual $57 billion in taxpayer-funded scientific and medical research that isn't available to the public. And then there's the irony that academic institutions get charged for work they did in the first place. "How does it make sense for the universities to give away the copyright to their research and then pay to get access to it again?"
The library follows in the steps of efforts such as BioMed Central, a London-based open-access publisher of online scientific journals. Though BioMed is a valuable repository of all sorts of research - everything from proteomics to psychiatry - it has yet to make a significant dent in the major journals' hold on big research. That's the obstacle PLOS faces, too: convincing scientists that the new publication will have authority. Publishing in Science or Nature means your paper matters, and it provides a yardstick for tenure and promotion decisions. PLOS has already earned credibility by hiring the former editor in chief of Cell and lining up contributors from Harvard,
And to those who label PLOS something only a league of anticommercial academics could dream up, Eisen has a swift retort. "It's the ultimate free market - the free market of ideas," he says. "We don't prohibit commercial use, we encourage it. If you want to gather our articles about a particular topic and sell it as a book, great, go ahead. As far as we're concerned, that's a good way of getting information out there. The problem with scientific publishing right now is that it's a monopoly. This is an attack on a specific business model that is not serving science well."
Building a Hybrid
At any given time, odds are Monsanto is in court over intellectual property. The agriculture and biotech giant is suing rival companies for infringing on technology. It's suing researchers for unlicensed use. And it's suing farmers for stealing seeds - filing 75 or so lawsuits in the past five years alone, most notably against Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian cause célèbre accused of using Monsanto grain without a license; his case goes before the Canadian Supreme Court in January. This constant litigation is a necessary cost of doing business; patents, after all, must be protected, or their value can be lost. But it also reflects a demanding way of doing business, one that's expensive, time-consuming, and - as the Schmeiser case attests - not always good for PR.
For a different approach, consider Cambia, the Center for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture, a biotech nonprofit based in
So
Corporations have been part of the problem for
In this light, where corporations are part of the model, open source suddenly becomes something less marginal and more ingenious. It forces industry to reckon with openness rather than hide behind intellectual property. In driving down the cost of software or encyclopedias or biotechnology, open source is unleashing billions in capital otherwise put to woefully inefficient ends. Just because it's not about making money first doesn't mean it won't make money second (just ask the folks who bought their mansions with Red Hat shares).
"Open source can build around the blockages of the industrial producers of the 20th century," says Yale's Benkler. "It can provide a potential source of knowledge materials from which we can build the culture and economy of the 21st century."
If that sounds melodramatic, consider how far things have come in the past decade. Torvalds' hobbyists have become an army. Britannica's woes are Wikipedia's gains. In genetics and biotech, open source promises a sure path to breakthroughs. These early efforts are mere trial runs for what open source might do out in the world at large. The real test, the real potential, lies not in the margins. It lies in making something new, in finding a better way. Open source isn't just about better software. It's about better everything.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Bashing Microsoft 'like kicking a puppy,' says Linux Foundation chief
Linux has already defeated Microsoft, Linux Foundation chief says
By Jon Brodkin, Network World
April 05, 2011 01:31 PM ET
Two decades after Linus Torvalds developed his famous operating system kernel, the battle between Linux and Microsoft is over and Linux has won, says Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.
With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer, Linux has outpaced Microsoft in nearly every market, including server-side computing and mobile, Zemlin claims.
"I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore," Zemlin said. "They used to be our big rival, but now it's kind of like kicking a puppy."
While Microsoft's stock has stagnated over the past decade, open source torchbearer Red Hat has soared, Zemlin notes. And Linux software is everywhere, he says, as proponents of the open source project prepare to celebrate its 20th year of existence.
"I think that on the 20th anniversary, it's worth reflecting back on where we came from," Zemlin said in an interview with Network World. Linux had a "humble start as a project for a college student in Helsinki, to something today that runs 70% of global equity trading, something that powers, really, the majority of Internet traffic, whether it's Facebook, Google or Amazon."
Linux can be found in consumer electronics devices, like Sony televisions and camcorders, the Amazon Kindle, and in smartphones and tablets as part of Google's Android. Linux leads the market from the tiniest embedded systems to the largest supercomputers, with more than 90% of the Top 500 supercomputing sites in the world running Linux.
"Linux has come to dominate almost every category of computing, with the exception of the desktop," Zemlin said.
Windows still powers roughly 9 out of 10 traditional desktops, with the rest going to Mac and Linux. Linux's failure to capture desktop share is "disappointing to many," Zemlin admitted. But "the good news is the traditional PC desktop is becoming less important, and areas where Linux is very strong in terms of client computing are becoming more important."
That, of course, is a reference to smartphones and tablets, where Microsoft has struggled to unseat Apple and Google's Android. However, a recent IDC research note predicted that Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 devices would overtake the iPhone in worldwide market share by 2015.
When asked about this prediction, Zemlin responded with what can best be described as several seconds of hysterical laughter. "Oh my God, Steve Jobs! Short Apple stock!" he joked.
Zemlin's optimism stems from the success of Android, which uses a kernel derived from Linux. Android devices are now more widely used than the iPhone, and HP's webOS is also a viable mobile contender using Linux.
Zemlin believes that as smartphones and tablets draw people away from their desktop PCs and laptops, Microsoft's hold on the computing market will diminish. "Today people use smartphones more, in many ways, than they may use their traditional PC," Zemlin said. "In that case, Linux really does have dominant market share through things like Android or other versions of Linux that are out there in the mobile space." (See also: "Most Android, iPhone apps violate open source rules.")
On the tablet front, though, Apple's iPad is far and away the leader, which poses a problem to those who prefer open source technologies.
"Apple is your worst enemy and your best friend if you're an open source guy," Zemlin said. "Apple in many ways has done a lot of good things for open source and for Linux. It changed the definition of what client computing is. That has been good for Linux. Apple also has a lot of open source components within their products and tends to work very well, in some cases, with the open source community. But I'm not going to argue that they don't have a very closed system as well."
Linus Torvalds started developing the Linux kernel in 1991 as an open source alternative to Unix. Combined with the GNU software created by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, it forms the core of many operating system distributions. (See also: "Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free software movement founder.")
Depending on one's point of view, Linux began either on Aug. 25, 1991, when Torvalds posted a message saying he was creating a free operating system as "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu," or on Oct. 5, 1991, when the first Linux code was released. Linux enthusiasts will celebrate both dates, but the main activities will take place Aug. 17-19 at the LinuxCon North America conference in Vancouver, Canada. The Linux Foundation is also holding a big event this week in San Francisco, the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.
The Linux Foundation, of which Torvalds is an employee, is dedicated to accelerating adoption and development of Linux, and bringing people together to collaborate and boost technical innovation around the kernel. Created in 2007 and based in San Francisco, the foundation counts as its members and financial supporters many of the biggest names in the tech industry, including IBM, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, Google, HP, Red Hat and dozens of others.
"It's basically everybody but Microsoft," Zemlin said. "We get money from corporations and we get money from individuals who just believe in Linux and use it day in and day out."
Despite Zemlin's sunny outlook, he notes there are still challenges. Patent lawsuits and legal uncertainty might prevent some people from adopting open source, even though these problems aren't unique to open source, Zemlin said. "We have to educate producers of products how to comply with open source licenses in a low-cost and efficient way. That's a challenge," he said.
And, of course, there is that issue that Microsoft still dominates the desktop software market. When asked why Linux has failed to build desktop share, Zemlin said, "There was this monopolist who just kept everybody else out of the marketplace."
Others, like GNOME creator Miguel de Icaza, have argued that Linux and open source developers "don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop."
But while Microsoft has sold 300 million Windows 7 licenses and reported record second-quarter revenue of nearly $20 billion, Zemlin said Linux people aren't giving up on the desktop market just yet.
For one thing, the desktop operating system itself is becoming less important as people do more and more of their work in the browser, he notes. In the future, you just may need a browser running on top of a lightweight operating system. While Microsoft's Internet Explorer runs only on Windows, major open source browsers such as Chrome and Firefox run on Windows, Mac or Linux.
"The reality is that the fat lady hasn't sung yet," Zemlin said. "Operating systems in general are like huge tides that ebb and flow very slowly over time, it's almost glacial. It takes time for people to realize that they may not need that set of computing requirements for the desktop anymore, and get used to different ways of using a computer."
Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin
Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/040511-linux-vs-microsoft.html?page=2
By Jon Brodkin, Network World
April 05, 2011 01:31 PM ET
Two decades after Linus Torvalds developed his famous operating system kernel, the battle between Linux and Microsoft is over and Linux has won, says Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.
With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer, Linux has outpaced Microsoft in nearly every market, including server-side computing and mobile, Zemlin claims.
"I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore," Zemlin said. "They used to be our big rival, but now it's kind of like kicking a puppy."
While Microsoft's stock has stagnated over the past decade, open source torchbearer Red Hat has soared, Zemlin notes. And Linux software is everywhere, he says, as proponents of the open source project prepare to celebrate its 20th year of existence.
"I think that on the 20th anniversary, it's worth reflecting back on where we came from," Zemlin said in an interview with Network World. Linux had a "humble start as a project for a college student in Helsinki, to something today that runs 70% of global equity trading, something that powers, really, the majority of Internet traffic, whether it's Facebook, Google or Amazon."
Linux can be found in consumer electronics devices, like Sony televisions and camcorders, the Amazon Kindle, and in smartphones and tablets as part of Google's Android. Linux leads the market from the tiniest embedded systems to the largest supercomputers, with more than 90% of the Top 500 supercomputing sites in the world running Linux.
"Linux has come to dominate almost every category of computing, with the exception of the desktop," Zemlin said.
Windows still powers roughly 9 out of 10 traditional desktops, with the rest going to Mac and Linux. Linux's failure to capture desktop share is "disappointing to many," Zemlin admitted. But "the good news is the traditional PC desktop is becoming less important, and areas where Linux is very strong in terms of client computing are becoming more important."
That, of course, is a reference to smartphones and tablets, where Microsoft has struggled to unseat Apple and Google's Android. However, a recent IDC research note predicted that Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 devices would overtake the iPhone in worldwide market share by 2015.
When asked about this prediction, Zemlin responded with what can best be described as several seconds of hysterical laughter. "Oh my God, Steve Jobs! Short Apple stock!" he joked.
Zemlin's optimism stems from the success of Android, which uses a kernel derived from Linux. Android devices are now more widely used than the iPhone, and HP's webOS is also a viable mobile contender using Linux.
Zemlin believes that as smartphones and tablets draw people away from their desktop PCs and laptops, Microsoft's hold on the computing market will diminish. "Today people use smartphones more, in many ways, than they may use their traditional PC," Zemlin said. "In that case, Linux really does have dominant market share through things like Android or other versions of Linux that are out there in the mobile space." (See also: "Most Android, iPhone apps violate open source rules.")
On the tablet front, though, Apple's iPad is far and away the leader, which poses a problem to those who prefer open source technologies.
"Apple is your worst enemy and your best friend if you're an open source guy," Zemlin said. "Apple in many ways has done a lot of good things for open source and for Linux. It changed the definition of what client computing is. That has been good for Linux. Apple also has a lot of open source components within their products and tends to work very well, in some cases, with the open source community. But I'm not going to argue that they don't have a very closed system as well."
Linus Torvalds started developing the Linux kernel in 1991 as an open source alternative to Unix. Combined with the GNU software created by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, it forms the core of many operating system distributions. (See also: "Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free software movement founder.")
Depending on one's point of view, Linux began either on Aug. 25, 1991, when Torvalds posted a message saying he was creating a free operating system as "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu," or on Oct. 5, 1991, when the first Linux code was released. Linux enthusiasts will celebrate both dates, but the main activities will take place Aug. 17-19 at the LinuxCon North America conference in Vancouver, Canada. The Linux Foundation is also holding a big event this week in San Francisco, the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.
The Linux Foundation, of which Torvalds is an employee, is dedicated to accelerating adoption and development of Linux, and bringing people together to collaborate and boost technical innovation around the kernel. Created in 2007 and based in San Francisco, the foundation counts as its members and financial supporters many of the biggest names in the tech industry, including IBM, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, Google, HP, Red Hat and dozens of others.
"It's basically everybody but Microsoft," Zemlin said. "We get money from corporations and we get money from individuals who just believe in Linux and use it day in and day out."
Despite Zemlin's sunny outlook, he notes there are still challenges. Patent lawsuits and legal uncertainty might prevent some people from adopting open source, even though these problems aren't unique to open source, Zemlin said. "We have to educate producers of products how to comply with open source licenses in a low-cost and efficient way. That's a challenge," he said.
And, of course, there is that issue that Microsoft still dominates the desktop software market. When asked why Linux has failed to build desktop share, Zemlin said, "There was this monopolist who just kept everybody else out of the marketplace."
Others, like GNOME creator Miguel de Icaza, have argued that Linux and open source developers "don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop."
But while Microsoft has sold 300 million Windows 7 licenses and reported record second-quarter revenue of nearly $20 billion, Zemlin said Linux people aren't giving up on the desktop market just yet.
For one thing, the desktop operating system itself is becoming less important as people do more and more of their work in the browser, he notes. In the future, you just may need a browser running on top of a lightweight operating system. While Microsoft's Internet Explorer runs only on Windows, major open source browsers such as Chrome and Firefox run on Windows, Mac or Linux.
"The reality is that the fat lady hasn't sung yet," Zemlin said. "Operating systems in general are like huge tides that ebb and flow very slowly over time, it's almost glacial. It takes time for people to realize that they may not need that set of computing requirements for the desktop anymore, and get used to different ways of using a computer."
Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin
Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/040511-linux-vs-microsoft.html?page=2
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