Metaconsciousness: Mythology for a Post-Civilized World
Chapter 7 | Contents | Chapter 9
The success of the Netscape open-source initiative was suddenly intertwined with the success, and possibly even the survival of the hacker tribe. In response, Raymond became a Netscape consultant in February, 1998, for the purpose of developing a strategy for bringing success to their initiative. He describes some of the elements of that strategy, along with ancillary measures he and other hackers took to broaden the appeal of what in consequence became widely known as the Open Source movement.1
What the hackers had been producing had mostly gone under the name Free Software,2 following the pioneering work of Richard Stallman3, founder of the GNU Project.4 In the present instance, however, a number of elements emerged as crucial to the success of the Netscape initiative, and crucial to the expansion of the momentary beachhead thereby established for the hacker tribe:
Whether deserved or not, "Free Software" had acquired an association in the popular and trade press as representing hostility to proprietary information in general, and consequently to the interests of the very decision-makers it was now seen as crucial to impress favorably. Additionally, the ambiguity of the word "Free" ("Think 'free speech,' not 'free beer'," explains Stallman) was seen as introducing an element of confusion where clarity was essential. Accordingly, the above initiatives were taken by Netscape and Raymond, and found swift cooperation among large segments of the hacker tribe, including Linus Torvalds, Tim O'Reilly, and Tim's O'Reilly & Associates, a major publisher of hacker manuals.
The immediate objective was to take advantage of the window of opportunity opened by Netscape's decision to go open-source with their browsers, and achieve a foothold of "legitimacy" in "mainstream" perceptions for GNU / Linux, and for the "bazaar style" of software development. If other "mainstream" major players, besides Netscape, could be persuaded to follow suit and similarly adopt some elements of the "bazaar style," and / or port their software to Linux, this would go a long way toward securing a kind of "homeland" for the hacker tribe.
Time was of the essence. You can hold a publicity campaign together only so long before it starts going stale. If you can't achieve tangible results within that time frame, the "window of opportunity" closes, and you're back at "square one," or worse. In the event, Corel Computer announced their Linux-based Netwinder network computer in May, and the database giants Oracle and Informix ported their products to Linux in July. After that, software vendors began porting to Linux on a routine basis. Between July and November, meanwhile, the targeted financial press began to come on-stream with steady coverage, initiated by a piece in The Economist, and a cover story in Forbes, and the perceived solidity of GNU / Linux steadily climbed.6
Conversely, the prototypical "cathedral style" software giant Microsoft began taking increasing alarm at the performance of GNU / Linux, and commenced measures to combat the growing menace. This is documented by what have become widely known as "The Halloween Documents,"7 internal Microsoft memoranda, leaked to Eric Raymond by a Microsoft insider, and immediately published on the Open Source site. They are long, arcane, and prolix; and Raymond's pithy annotations add to their length. They are well worth reading nevertheless, because they provide a unique window into an historical phenomenon from an unintentionally candid point of view, and provide insight into the rich contrasts between the "cathedral" and "bazaar" mentalities. They are also possibly the most eloquent advertisements ever penned for the GNU / Linux operating system, and the "bazaar style" of software development.
Publication of The Halloween Documents breathed new life into the open-source campaign with an explosive resurgence of press coverage, and gave Microsoft a very public black eye by confirming the worst suspicions of Microsoft critics about the lengths to which they were willing to go – or at least consider – in dealing with their competition. The publicly disclosed Microsoft memoranda confirmed, among other things, that the essential long-term strategy at Microsoft was to "de-commoditize" standard protocols – which is an arcane way of saying that Microsoft deliberately "embraces and extends" standard protocols in ways that render them inaccessible to any but Microsoft programmers. Here is a quote from Halloween Document I:
De-commoditize protocols & applications
OSS projects [a Microsoft acronym for "Open Source Software projects"] have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
David Stutz makes a very good point: in competing with Microsoft's level of desktop integration, "commodity protocols actually become the means of integration" for OSS projects. There is a large amount of IQ being expended in various IETF working groups which are quickly creating the architectural model for integration for these OSS projects.8
To which Raymond adds the following annotation:
In other words, open protocols must be locked up and the IETF crushed in order to "de-commoditize protocols & applications" and stop open-source software.
A former Microserf adds: only half of the reason MS sends people to the W3C working groups relates to a desire to improve RFC standards. The other half is to give MS a sneak peak at upcoming standards so they can "extend" them in advance and claim that the 'official' standard is 'obsolete' when it emerges around the same time as their 'extension'.9
Or as Raymond puts it elsewhere, "No wonder hackers often refer to Microsoft's strategy as 'protocol pollution'; they are reacting exactly like farmers watching someone poison the river they water their crops with!"10
Microsoft is thus a typically civilized outfit, neither better nor worse than countless other civilized organizations at perpetual war with every entity on Earth not cooperative with their agendas of exploitation, plunder, and control. It is a story as old as civilization itself, told and retold in endless variety, yet always to the same catastrophic effect: "Roll over and play dead, or we'll destroy you!"
The truly remarkable story here is the story of the hacker tribe, which possibly for the first time in five thousand years exhibits signs of having the street-smart savvy required to stand up to civilization, and thrive in the face of its most vicious predations. The story hasn't entirely played out, yet the signs to date are propitious.
This performance is extraordinary. I believe it is a straw in the wind – at least – and may indicate a major sea change in the course of human events.
The point of all this – in case you may have mislaid the thread of the discussion – is: given that civilization doesn't work and is sweeping all entangled in its coils over the Cataract and into the Abyss, the most urgent "mission – for those who choose to accept it," and wish to avoid the catastrophic destiny of civilization, is to find a way to higher ground, entirely away from the "mainstream." In general, as already discussed, the way away from civilization, must lie among the patterns of the tribe, which have evolved over the course of millions of years, and work very well – in most circumstances. The patterns of pre-civilized tribes have not worked very well, however, when confronted by civilization itself, and have been routinely destroyed or crippled wherever they have been found by civilized peoples. The performance to date of the hacker tribe exhibits indications of being a possible exception to this five-thousand-year-old rule. Accordingly, I speculate that the bazaar style of software development pioneered by the hacker tribe may represent a straw in the wind pointing a viable way to higher ground for those who have reached the point of decision to walk away, if possible, from civilization.
Here, our path diverges, in a sense, from that of Eric Raymond – not due to disagreement, but due only to a difference of emphasis. Raymond is a hacker, and his primary concern is quite properly the evolution of the hacker tribe and the "bazaar style" of software development. I am not a hacker, and my primary concern is with the survival and ongoing evolution of the human experiment on Earth. The two are entirely compatible, yet are not entirely congruent.
I expect the open-source movement to have essentially won its point about software within three to five years [Raymond wrote]. Once that is accomplished, and the results have been manifest for a while, they will become part of the background culture of non-programmers. At that point it will become more appropriate to try to leverage open-source insights in wider domains.11
It has been "three to five years" or so since Raymond wrote those words, and perhaps now is the time to begin applying "open-source insights in wider domains." And perhaps it is also appropriate that this be undertaken largely by non-hackers. The question on the agenda paper then becomes, "What elements, if any, of hacker culture in general, and of the 'bazaar style' of software development in particular, are applicable to circumstances outside the domain of software development?"
_____________________________________
1. The Open Source Definition resides on-line at www.opensource.org/docs/definition_plain.html.
2. See www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.
3. See www.stallman.org/.
4. See www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html.
5. See www.debian.org/social_contract. Source: "The Revenge of the Hackers," Raymond, 1999, pp. 205-9.
7. On-line at www.opensource.org/halloween/.
8. Halloween Document I, boldface emphasis added.
10. "Homesteading the Noosphere," Raymond, 1999, p. 115.
11. "Beyond Software?," Raymond, 1999, p. 227.
Metaconsciousness: Mythology for a Post-Civilized World
Chapter 7 | Contents | Chapter 9