In: Psychology
Question: Summarize the below case study by stating what happened, where it happened, who was involved, and the significance of the event in 300-400 words.
Case Study: Alan Cohen still remembers the
first time he heard the word ” Apache” as an adult, and it wasn’ t
while watching a cowboys-and-Indians movie. It was the 1990s, the
dot-com market was booming, and he was a senior manager for IBM,
helping to oversee its emerging e-commerce business. ”1 had a whole
team with me and a budget of about $8 million, ” Cohen recalled.
”We were competing head-to-head with Microsoft, Netscape, Oracle,
Sun-all the big boys. And we were playing this very big-stakes game
for e-commerce. IBM had a huge sales force selling all this
e-commerce software. One day I asked the development director who
worked for me, ’ Say, Jeff, walk me through the development process
for this e-commerce systems. What is the underlying Web server?’
And he says to me, It’ s built on top of Apache.’ The first thing I
think of is John Wayne. ’What is Apache?’ I ask. And he says it is
a shareware program for Web server technology. He said it was
produced for free by a bunch of geeks just working online in some
kind of open-source chat room. I was floored. I said, ’ How do you
buy it?’ And he says, Tou download it off a Web site for free.’ And
I said, ’Well, who supports it if something goes wrong?’ And he
says, ’ I don’ t know~it just works! ’ And that was my first
exposure to Apache . . .
"Now you have to remember, back then Microsoft, IBM, Oracle,
Netscape were all trying to build commercial Web servers. These
were huge companies. And suddenly my development guy is telling me
that he’ s getting ours off the Internet for free! It’s like you
had all these big corporate executives plotting strategies, and
then suddenly the guys in the mail room are in charge. I kept
asking, ’Who runs Apache? I mean,
who are these guys?’ ”
Yes, the geeks in the mail room are deciding what software they
will be using and what you will be using too. It’ s called the
open-source movement, and it involves thousands of people around
the world coming together online to collaborate in writing
everything from their own software to their own operating systems
to their own dictionary to their own recipe for cola-building
always from the bottom up rather than accepting formats or content
imposed by corporate hierarchies from the top down.
The word ”open-source” comes from the notion that companies or ad
hoc groups would make available online the source code-the
underlying programming instructions that make a piece of software
work-and then let anyone who has something to contribute improve it
and let millions of others just download it for their own use for
free. While commercial software is copyrighted and sold, and
companies guard the source code as they would their crown jewels so
they can charge money to anyone who wants to use it and thereby
generate income to develop new versions, opensource software is
shared, constantly improved by its users, and made available for
free to anyone. In return, every user who comes up with an
improvement-a patch that makes this software sing or dance
better-is encouraged to make that patch available to every other
user for free.
Not being a computer geek, I had never focused much on the
open-source movement, but when I did, I discovered it was an
amazing universe of its own, with communities of online,
come-as-you-are volunteers who share their insights with one
another and then offer it to the public for nothing. They do it
because they want something the market does n’ t offer them; they
do it for the psychic buzz that comes from creating a collective
product that can beat something produced by giants like Microsoft
or IBM, and-even more important-to earn the respect of their
intellectual peers. Indeed, these guys and gals are one of the most
interesting and controversial new forms of collaboration that have
been facilitated by the flat world and are flattening it even
more.
In order to explain how this form of collaboration works, why it is
a flattener and why, by the way, it has stirred so many
controversies and will be stirring even more in the future, I am
going to focus on just two basic varieties of open-sourcing: the
intellectual commons movement and the free software movement.
The intellectual commons form of open-sourcing has its roots in the
academic and scientific communities, where for a long time
self-organized collaborative communities of scientists have come
together through private networks and later the Internet to pool
their brainpower or share insights around a particular science or
math problem. The Apache Web server had its roots in this form of
open-sourcing. When I asked a friend of mine, Mike Arguello, an IT
systems architect, to explain to me why people share knowledge or
work in this way, he said, "IT people tend to be very bright people
and they want everybody to know just how brilliant they are. " Marc
Andreessen, who invented the first Web browser, agreed: "
Open-source is nothing more than peer-reviewed science. Sometimes
people contribute to these things because they make science, and
they discover things, and the reward is reputation. Sometimes you
can build a business out of it, sometimes they just want to
increase the store of knowledge in the world. And the peer review
part is critical~and open-source is peer review. Every bug or
security hole or deviation from standards is reviewed. I found this
intellectual commons form of open-sourcing fascinating, so I went
exploring to find out who were those guys and girls in the mail
room. Eventually, I found my way to one of their pioneers, Brian
Behlendorf. If Apache-the open-source Web server community-were an
Indian tribe, Behlendorf would be the tribal elder. I caught up
with him one day in his glass-and-steel office near the San
Francisco airport, where he is now founder and chief technology
officer of CollabNet, a start-up focused on creating software for
companies that want to use an open-source approach to innovation. I
started with two simple questions: Where did you come from? and:
How did you manage to pull together an open-source community of
online geeks that could go toe-to-toe with IBM?
"My parents met at IBM in Southern California, and I grew up in a
town just north of Pasadena, La Canada, " Behlendorf recalled. "The
public school was very competitive academically, because a lot of
the kids’ parents worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that was
run by Caltech there. So from a very early age I was around a lot
of science in a place where it was okay to be kind of geeky. We
always had computers around the house. We used to use punch cards
from the original IBM mainframes for making shopping lists. In
grade school, I started doing some basic programming, and by high
school I was pretty into computers. . . I graduated in 1991, but in
1989, in the early days of the Internet, a friend gave me a copy of
a program he had downloaded onto a floppy disk, called ’ Fractint.
’ It was not pirated, but was freeware, produced by a group of
programmers, and was a program for drawing fractals. [Fractals are
beautiful images produced at the intersection of art and math. ]
When the program started up, the screen would show this scrolling
list of e-mail addresses for all the scientists and mathematicians
who contributed to it. I noticed that the source code was included
with the program. This was my first exposure to the concept of
open-source. Here was this program that you just downloaded for
free, and they even gave you the source code with it, and it was
done by a community of people. It started to paint a different
picture of programming in my mind. I started to think that there
were some interesting social dynamics to the way certain kinds of
software were written or could be written-as opposed to the kind of
image I had of the professional software developer in the back
office tending to the mainframe, feeding info in and taking it out
for the business. That seemed to me to be just one step above
accounting and not very exciting. "
After graduating in 1991, Behlendorf went to Berkeley to study
physics, but he quickly became frustrated by the disconnect between
the abstractions he was learning in the classroom and the
excitement that was starting to emerge on the Internet.
"When you entered college back then, every student was given an
e-mail address, and I started using it to talk to students and
explore discussion boards that were starting to appear around
music, " said Behlendorf. "In 1992, 1 started my own Internet
mailing list focused on the local electronic music scene in the Bay
Area. People could just post onto the discussion board, and it
started to grow, and we started to discuss different music events
and DJs. Then we said, ’Hey, why don’ t we invite our own DJs and
throw our own events?’ It became a collective thing. Someone would
say, ’ I have some records, ’ and someone else would say, ’ I have
a sound system, ’ and someone else would say, ’ I know the beach
and if we showed up at midnight we could have a party.’ By 1993,
the Internet was still just mailing lists and e-mail and FTP sites
[file transfer protocol repositories where you could store things].
So I started collecting an archive of electronic music and was
interested in how we could put this online and make it available to
a larger audience. That was when I heard about Mosaic [the Web
browser developed by Marc Andreessen. ] So I got a job at the
computer lab in the Berkeley business school, and I spent my spare
time researching Mosaic and other Web technologies. That led me to
a discussion board with a lot of the people who were writing the
first generation of Web browsers and Web servers. "
(A Web server is a software program that enables anyone to use his
or her home or office computer to host a Web site on the World Wide
Web. Amazon. com, for instance, has long run its Web site on Apache
software.
When your Web browser goes to www.amazon.com, the very first piece
of software it talks to is Apache. The browser asks Apache for the
Amazon Web page and Apache sends back to the browser the content of
the Amazon Web page. Surfing the Web is really your Web browser
interacting with different Web servers. )
"I found myself sitting in on this forum watching Tim Berners-Lee
and Marc Andreessen debating how all these things should work, "
recalled Behlendorf. '"It was pretty exciting, and it seemed
radically inclusive. I didn’t need a Ph. D. or any special
credentials, and I started to see some parallels between my music
group and these scientists, who had a common interest in building
the first Web software. I followed that [discussion] for a while
and then I told a friend of mine about it. He was one of the first
employees at Wired magazine, and he said Wired would be interested
in having me set up a Web site for them. So I joined there at $10
an hour, setting up their e-mail and their first Web site-HotWired
... It was one of the first ad-supported online magazines. "
HotWired decided it wanted to start by having a registration system
that required passwords-a controversial concept at that time. "In
those days, noted Andrew Leonard, who wrote a history of Apache for
Salon,com in 1997, "most Webmasters depended on a Web server
program developed at the University of Illinois’ s National Center
for Supercomputing Applications (also the birthplace of the
groundbreaking Mosaic Web browser). But the NCSA Web server couldn’
t handle password authentication on the scale that HotWired needed.
Luckily, the NCSA server was in the public domain, which meant that
the source code was free to all comers. So Behlendorf exercised the
hacker prerogative: He wrote some new code, a ’ patch’ to the NCSA
Web server, that took care of the problem. " Leonard commented, "He
wasn’ t the only clever programmer rummaging through the NCSA code
that winter. All across the exploding Web, other Webmasters were
finding it necessary to take matters into their own keyboards. The
original code had been left to gather virtual dust when its primary
programmer, University of Illinois student Rob McCool, had been
scooped up (along with Marc Andreessen and Lynx author Eric Bina)
by a little-known company in Silicon Valley named Netscape.
Meanwhile, the Web refused to stop growing-and kept creating new
problems for Web servers to cope with. " So patches of one kind or
another proliferated like Band-Aids on bandwidth, plugging one hole
here and breaching another gap there.
Meanwhile, all these patches were slowly, in an ad hoc open-source
manner, building a new modern Web server. But everyone had his or
her own version, trading patches here and there, because the NCSA
lab couldn’ t keep up with it all.
"I was just this near-dropout, explained Behlendorf. "I was having
a lot of fun building this Web site for Wired and learning more
than I was learning at Berkeley. So a discussion started in our
little working group that the NCSA people were not answering our
e-mails. We were sending in patches for the system and they weren’t
responding. And we said, ’ If NCSA would not respond to our
patches, what’ s going to happen in the future?’ We were happy to
continue improving this thing, yet we were worried when we were not
getting any feedback and seeing our patches integrated. So I
started to contact the other people I knew trading patches. . .
Most of them were on the standards working groups [the Internet
Engineering Task Force] that were setting the first standards for
the interconnectivity between machines and applications on the
Internet. . . And we said, ’Why don’ t we take our future into our
own hands and release our own [Web server] version that
incorporated all our patches?’ "We looked up the copyright for the
NCSA code, and it basically just said give us credit at Illinois
for what we invented if you improve it-and don’ t blame us if it
breaks, " recalled Behlendorf. "So we started building our own
version from all our patches. None of us had time to be a full-time
Web server developer, but we thought if we could combine our time
and do it in a public way, we could create something better than we
could buy off the shelf-and nothing was available then, anyway.
This was all before Netscape had shipped its first commercial Web
server. That was the beginning of the Apache project. "
By February 1999, they had completely rewritten the original NCSA
program and formalized their cooperation under the name "Apache.
"
"I picked the name because I wanted it to have a positive
connotation of being assertive, " said Behlendorf. "The Apache
tribe was the last tribe to surrender to the oncoming U. S.
government, and at the time we worried that the big companies would
come in and ’ civilize’ the landscape that the early Internet
engineers built. So ’Apache’ made sense to me as a good code name,
and others said it also would make a good pun"-as in the APAtCHy
server, because they were patching all these fixes together.
So in many ways, Bellendorf and his open-source colleagues-most of
whom he had never met but knew only by e-mail through their
open-source chat room-had created a virtual, online, bottom-up
software factory, which no one owned and no one supervised. "We had
a software project, but the coordination and direction were an
emergent behavior based on whoever showed up and wanted to write
code, " he said.
But how does it actually work? I asked Behlendorf. You can’ t just
have a bunch of people, unmonitored, throwing code together, can
you?
"Most software development involves a source code repository and is
managed by tools such as the Concurrent Versions System, " he
explained. "So there is a CVS server out there, and I have a CVS
program on my computer. It allows me to connect to the server and
pull down a copy of the code, so I can start working with it and
making modifications. If I think my patch is something I want to
share with others, I run a program called Patch, which allows me to
create a new file, a compact collection of all the changes. That is
called a patch file, and I can give that file to someone else, and
they can apply it to their copy of the code to see what impact that
patch has. If I have the right privileges to the server [which is
restricted to a tightly controlled oversight board], I can then
take my patch and commit it to the repository and it will become
part of the source code. The CVS server keeps track of everything
and who sent in what. . . So you might have ’ read access’ to the
repository but not 'commit access’ to change things. When someone
makes a commit to the repository, that patch file gets e-mailed out
to all the other developers, and so you get this peer review system
after the fact, and if there is something wrong, you fix the bug."
So how does this community decide who are trusted members?
”For Apache, said Behlendorf, "we started with eight people who
really trusted each other, and as new people showed up at the
discussion forum and offered patch files posted to the discussion
form, we would gain trust in others, and that eight grew to over
one thousand. We were the first open-source project to get
attention from the business community and get the backing from
IBM."
Because of Apache’ s proficiency at allowing a single-server
machine to host thousands of different virtual Web sites-music,
data, text, pornography-it began to have "a commanding share of the
Internet Service Provider market," noted Salon’ s Leonard. IBM was
trying to sell its own proprietary Web server, called GO, but it
gained only a tiny sliver of the market. Apache proved to be both a
better technology and free. So IBM eventually decided that if it
could not beat Apache, it should join Apache. You have to stop here
and imagine this. The world’ s biggest computer company decided
that its engineers could not best the work of an ad hoc open-source
collection of geeks, so they threw out their own technology and
decided to go with the geeks! IBM ^initiated contact with me, as I
had a somewhat public speaker role for Apache, said Behlendorf. IBM
said, ’We would like to figure out how we can use [Apache] and not
get flamed by the Internet community, [how we can] make it
sustainable and not just be ripping people off but contributing to
the process. . . ’ IBM was saying that this new model for software
development was trustworthy and valuable, so let’ s invest in it
and get rid of the one that we are trying to make on our own, which
isn’t as good.
John Swainson was the senior IBM executive who led the team that
approached Apache (he’ s now chairman of Computer Associates). He
picked up the story: There was a whole debate going on at the time
about open-source, but it was all over the place. We decided we
could deal with the Apache guys because they answered our
questions. We could hold a meaningful conversation with these guys,
and we were able to create the [nonprofit] Apache Software
Foundation and work out all the issues. "
At IBM’ s expense, its lawyers worked with the Apache group to
create a legal framework around it so that there would be no
copyright or liability problems for companies, like IBM, that
wanted to build applications on top of Apache and charge money for
them. IBM saw the value in having a standard vanilla Web server
architecture-which allowed heterogeneous computer systems and
devices to talk to each other, displaying e-mail and Web pages in a
standard format-that was constantly being improved for free by an
open-source community. The Apache collaborators did not set out to
make free software. They set out to solve a common problem-feb
serving-and found that collaborating for free in this open-source
manner was the best way to assemble the best brains for the job
they needed done.
"When we started working with Apache, there was an apache, org Web
site but no formal legal structure, and businesses and informal
structures don’ t coexist well, " said Swainson. "You need to be
able to vet the code, sign an agreement, and deal with liability
issues. [Today] anybody can download the Apache code. The only
obligation is that they acknowledge that it came from the site, and
if they make any changes that they share them back. " There is an
Apache development process that manages the traffic, and you earn
your way into that process, added Swainson. It is something like a
pure meritocracy. When IBM started using Apache, it became part of
the community and started making contributions.
Indeed, the one thing the Apache people demanded in return for
their collaboration with IBM was that IBM assign its best engineers
to join the Apache open-source group and contribute, like everyone
else, for free. "The Apache people were not interested in payment
of cash," said Swainson. "They wanted contribution to the base. Our
engineers came to us and said, ’ These guys who do Apache are good
and they are insisting that we contribute good people. ’ At first
they rejected some of what we contributed.
They said it wasn’t up to their standards! The compensation that
the community expected was our best contribution. "
On June 22, 1998, IBM announced plans to incorporate Apache into
its own new Web server product, named WebSphere. The way the Apache
collaborative community organized itself, whatever you took out of
Apache’ s code and improved on, you had to give back to the whole
community. But you were also free to go out and build a patented
commercial product on top of the Apache code, as IBM did, provided
that you included a copyright citation to Apache in your own
patent. In other words, this intellectual commons approach to
open-sourcing encouraged people to build commercial products on top
of it. While it wanted the foundation to be free and open to all,
it recognized that it would remain strong and fresh if both
commercial and noncommercial engineers had an incentive to
participate.
Today Apache is one of the most successful open-source tools,
powering about two-thirds of the Web sites in the world. And
because Apache can be downloaded for free anywhere in the world,
people from Russia to South Africa to Vietnam use it to create Web
sites. Those individuals who need or want added capabilities for
their Web servers can buy products like WebSphere, which attach
right on top of Apache. At the time, selling a product built on top
of an open-source program was a risky move on IBM’ s part. To its
credit, IBM was confident in its ability to keep producing
differentiated software applications on top of the Apache vanilla.
This model has since been widely adopted, after everyone saw how it
propelled IBM’ s Web server business to commercial leadership in
that category of software, generating huge amounts of
revenue.
As I will repeat often in this book: There is no future in vanilla
for most companies in a flat world. A lot of vanilla making in
software and other areas is going to shift to open-source
communities. For most companies, the commercial future belongs to
those who know how to make the richest chocolate sauce, the
sweetest, lightest whipped cream, and the juiciest cherries to sit
on top, or how to put them all together into a sundae. Jack
Messman, chairman of the Novell software company, which has now
become a big distributor of Linux, the open-source operating
system, atop which Novell attaches gizmos to make it sing and dance
just for your company, put it best: "Commercial software companies
have to start operating further up the [software] stack to
differentiate themselves. The open source community is basically
focusing on infrastructure* (Financial Times, June 14, 2004).
The IBM deal was a real watershed. Big Blue was saying that it
believed in the open-source model and that with the Apache Web
server, this open-source community of engineers had created
something that was not just useful and valuable but "best in its
class. " That’ s why the open-source movement has become a powerful
flattener, the effects of which we are just beginning to see. "It
is incredibly empowering of individuals, " Brian Behlendorf said.
"It doesn’ t matter where you come from or where you are-someone in
India and South America can be just as effective using this
software or contributing to it as someone in Silicon Valley. " The
old model is winner take all: I wrote it, I own it-the standard
software license model. "The only way to compete against that, "
concluded Behlendorf, "is to all become winners. "
Behlendorf, for his part, is betting his career that more and more
people and companies will want to take advantage of the new
flat-world platform to do open-source innovation. In 2004, he
started a new company called CollabNet to promote the use of
open-sourcing as a tool to drive software innovation within
companies. "Our premise is that software is not gold, it is
lettuce-it is a perishable good, " explained Behlendorf. "If the
software is not in a place where it is getting improved over time,
it will rot. " What the open-source community has been doing, said
Behlendorf, is globally coordinated distributed software
development, where it is constantly freshening the lettuce so that
it never goes rotten. Behlendorfs premise is that the open-source
community developed a better method for creating and constantly
updating software. CollabNet is a company created to bring the best
open-source techniques to a closed community, i. e. , a commercial
software company.
"CollabNet is an arms dealer to the forces flattening the world, "
said Behlendorf. "Our role in this world is to build the tools and
infrastructure so that an individual-in India, China, or
wherever-as a consultant, an employee, or just someone sitting at
home can collaborate. We are giving them the toolkit for
decentralized collaborative development. We are enabling bottom-up
development, and not just in cyberspace... We have large
corporations who are now interested in creating a bottom-up
environment for writing software. The old top-down, silo software
model is broken. That system said, ’ I develop something and then I
throw it over the wall to you. You find the bugs and then throw it
back. I patch it and then sell a new version. ’ There is constant
frustration with getting software that is buggy-maybe it will get
fixed or maybe not. So we said, ’Wouldn’t it be interesting if we
could take the open-source benefits of speed of innovation and
higher-quality software, and that feeling of partnership with all
these stakeholders, and turn that into a business model for
corporations to be more collaborative both within and without?’
"
I like the way Irving fladawsky-Berger, IBM’ s Cuban-born vice
president for technical strategy and innovation, summed
open-sourcing up: "This emerging era is characterized by the
collaborative innovation of many people working in gifted
communities, just as innovation in the industrial era was
characterized by individual genius. "
The striking thing about the intellectual commons form of
open-sourcing is how quickly it has morphed into other spheres and
spawned other self-organizing collaborative communities, which are
flattening hierarchies in their areas. I see this most vividly in
the news profession, where bloggers, one-person online
commentators, who often link to one another depending on their
ideology, have created a kind of open-source newsroom. I now read
bloggers (the term comes from the word "Weblog") as part of my
daily information-gathering routine. In an article about how a tiny
group of relatively obscure news bloggers were able to blow the
whistle that exposed the bogus documents used by CBS News’ s Dan
Rather in his infamous report about President George W. Bush’ s Air
National Guard service, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post wrote
(September 20, 2004), "It was like throwing a match on
kerosene-soaked wood. The ensuing blaze ripped through the media
establishment as previously obscure bloggers managed to put the
network of Murrow and Cronkite firmly on the defensive. The secret,
says Charles Johnson, is ’open-source intelligence gathering.’
Meaning: ’We’ve got a huge pool of highly motivated people who go
out there and use tools to find stuff. We’ve got an army of citizen
journalists out there. ’ "That army is often armed with nothing
more than a tape recorder, a camera-enabled cell phone, and a Web
site, but in a flat world it can collectively get its voice heard
as far and wide as CBS or The New York Times. These bloggers have
created their own online commons, with no barriers to entry. That
open commons often has many rumors and wild allegations swirling in
it. Because no one is in charge, standards of practice vary wildly,
and some of it is downright irresponsible. But because no one is in
charge, information flows with total freedom. And when this
community is on to something real, like the Rather episode, it can
create as much energy, buzz, and hard news as any network or major
newspaper.
Another intellectual commons collaboration that I used regularly in
writing this book is Wikipedia, the user-contributed online
encyclopedia, also known as "the people’s encyclopedia. " The word
"wikis" is taken from the Hawaiian word for "quick. "Wikis are Web
sites that allow users to directly edit any Web page on their own
from their home computer. In a May 5, 2004, essay on YaleGlobal
online, Andrew Lih, an assistant professor at the Journalism and
Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong, explained how
Wikipedia works and why it is such a breakthrough.
"The Wikipedia project was started by Jimmy Wales, head of Internet
startup Bomis.com, after his original project for a volunteer, but
strictly controlled, free encyclopedia ran out of money and
resources after two years, " wrote Lih. '"Editors with PhD degrees
were at the helm of the project then, but it produced only a few
hundred articles. Not wanting the content to languish, Wales placed
the pages on a wiki Website in January 2001 and invited any
Internet visitors to edit or add to the collection. The site became
a runaway success in the first year and gained a loyal following,
generating over 20,000 articles and spawning over a dozen language
translations. After two years, it had 100, 000 articles, and in
April 2004, it exceeded 250, 000 articles in English and 600, 000
articles in 50 other languages. And according to Website rankings
at Alexa. com, it has become more popular than traditional online
encyclopedias such as Britannica. com. "
How, you might ask, does one produce a credible, balanced
encyclopedia by way of an ad hoc open-source, open-editing
movement? After all, every article in the Wikipedia has an "Edit
this page" button, allowing anyone who surfs along to add or delete
content on that page.
It starts with the fact, Lih explained, that "because wikis provide
the ability to track the status of articles, review individual
changes, and discuss issues, they function as social software. Wiki
Websites also track and store every modification made to an
article, so no operation is ever permanently destructive. Wikipedia
works by consensus, with users adding and modifying content while
trying to reach common ground along the way.
"However, the technology is not enough on its own, " wrote Lih.
"Wales created an editorial policy of maintaining a neutral point
of view (NP0V) as the guiding principle. . . According to
Wikipedia’ s guidelines, The neutral point of view attempts to
present ideas and facts in such a fashion that both supporters and
opponents can agree . . . ’ As a result, articles on contentious
issues such as globalization have benefited from the cooperative
and global nature of Wikipedia. Over the last two years, the entry
has had more than 90 edits by contributors from the Netherlands,
Belgium, Sweden, United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, United States,
Malaysia, Japan and China. It provides a manifold view of issues
from the World Trade Organization and multinational corporations to
the anti-globalization movement and threats to cultural diversity.
At the same time malicious contributors are kept in check because
vandalism is easily undone. Users dedicated to fixing vandalism
watch the list of recent changes, fixing problems within minutes,
if not seconds. A defaced article can quickly be returned to an
acceptable version with just one click of a button. This crucial
asymmetry tips the balance in favor of productive and cooperative
members of the wiki community, allowing quality content to prevail.
" A Newsweek piece on Wikipedia (November 1, 2004) quoted Angela
Beesley, a volunteer contributor from Essex, England, and
self-confessed Wikipedia addict who monitors the accuracy of more
than one thousand entries: "A collaborative encyclopedia sounds
like a crazy idea, but it naturally controls itself. "
Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales is just getting started. He told Newsweek
that he is expanding into Wiktionary, a dictionary and thesaurus;
Wikibooks, textbooks and manuals; and Wikiquote, a book of
quotations. He said he has one simple goal: to give "every single
person free access to the sum of all human knowledge."
Wales’ s ethic that everyone should have free access to all human
knowledge is undoubtedly heartfelt, but it also brings us to the
controversial side of open-source: If everyone contributes his or
her intellectual capital for free, where will the resources for new
innovation come from? And won’ t we end up in endless legal
wrangles over which part of any innovation was made by the
community for free, and meant to stay that way, and which part was
added on by some company for profit and has to be paid for so that
the company can make money to drive further innovation? These
questions are all triggered by the other increasingly popular form
of self-organized collaboration-the free software movement.
According to the open knowledge. org Web site, "The free/open
source software movement began in the ’hacker’ culture of U. S.
computer science laboratories (Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon,
and MIT) in the I960’ s and 1970’ s. The community of programmers
was small, and close-knit. Code passed back and forth between the
members of the community-if you made an improvement you were
expected to submit your code to the community of developers. To
withhold code was considered gauche-after all, you benefited from
the work of your friends, you should return the favor. "
The free software movement, however, was and remains inspired by
the ethical ideal that software should be free and available to
all, and it relies on open-source collaboration to help produce the
best software possible to be distributed for free.
This a bit different from the approach of the intellectual commons
folks, like Apache.
They saw open-sourcing as a technically superior means of creating
software and other innovations, and while Apache was made available
to all for free, it had no problem with commercial software being
built on top of it. The Apache group allowed anyone who created a
derivative work to own it himself, provided he acknowledge the
Apache contribution.
The primary goal of the free software movement, however, is to get
as many people as possible writing, improving, and distributing
software for free, out of a conviction that this will empower
everyone and free individuals from the grip of global corporations.
Generally speaking, the free software movement structures its
licenses so that if your commercial software draws directly from
their free software copyright, they want your software to be free
too.
In 1984, according to Wikipedia, an MIT researcher and one of these
ex-hackers, Richard Stallman, launched the "free software movement"
along with an effort to build a free operating system called GNU.
To promote free software, and to ensure that its code would always
be freely modifiable and available to all, Stallman founded the
Free Software Foundation and something called the GNU General
Public License (GPL). The GPL specified that users of the source
code could copy, change, or upgrade the code, provided that they
made their changes available under the same license as the original
code. In 1991, a student at the University of Helsinki named Linus
Torvalds, building off of Stallman’ s initiative, posted his Linux
operating system to compete with the Microsoft Windows operating
system and invited other engineers and geeks online to try to
improve it - for free. Since Torvalds’ s initial post, programmers
all over the world have manipulated, added to, expanded, patched,
and improved the GNU/Linux operating system, whose license says
anyone can download the source code and improve upon it but then
must make the upgraded version freely available to everybody else.
Torvalds insists that Linux must always be free. Companies that
sell software improvements that enhance Linux or adapt it to
certain functions have to be very careful not to touch its
copyright in their commercial products.
Much like Microsoft Windows, Linux offers a family of operating
systems that can be adapted to run on the smallest desktop
computers, laptops, PalmPilots, and even wristwatches, all the way
up to the largest supercomputers and mainframes. So a kid in India
with a cheap PC can learn the inner workings of the same operating
system that is running in some of the largest data centers of
corporate America. Linux has an army of developers across the globe
working to make it better. As I was working on this segment of the
book, I went to a picnic one afternoon at the Virginia country home
of Pamela and Malcolm Baldwin, whom my wife came to know through
her membership on the board of World Learning, an educational NGO.
I mentioned in the course of lunch that I was thinking of going to
Mali to see just how flat the world looked from its outermost
edge-the town of Timbuktu. The Baldwins’ son Peter happened to be
working in Mali as part of something called the GeekCorps, which
helps to bring technology to developing countries. A few days after
the lunch, I received an e-mail from Pamela telling me that she had
consulted with Peter about accompanying me to Timbuktu, and then
she added the following, which told me everything I needed to know
and saved me the whole trip: ’’Peter says that his project is
creating wireless networks via satellite, making antennas out of
plastic soda bottles and mesh from window screens! Apparently
everyone in Mali uses Linux. . . ”
’’Everyone in Mali uses Linux. ” That is no doubt a bit of an
exaggeration, but it’s a phrase that you’d hear only in a flat
world. The free software movement has become a serious challenge to
Microsoft and some other big global software players. As Fortune
magazine reported on February 23, 2004, ’’The availability of this
basic, powerful software, which works on Intel’ s ubiquitous
microprocessors, coincided with the explosive growth of the
Internet. Linux soon began to gain a global following among
programmers and business users . . . The revolution goes far beyond
little Linux . . . Just about any kind of software [now] can be
found in open-source form. The SourceForge. net website, a meeting
place for programmers, lists an astounding 86, 000 programs in
progress. Most are minor projects by and for geeks, but hundreds
pack real value ... If you hate shelling out $350 for Microsoft
Office or $600 for Adobe Photoshop, OpenOffice. org and the Gimp
are surprisingly high-quality free alternatives. ” Big companies
like Google, E*Trade, and Amazon, by combining Intel-based
commodity server components and the Linux operating system, have
been able dramatically to cut their technology spending-and get
more control over their software.
Why would so many people be ready to write software that would be
given away for free?
Partly it is out of the pure scientific challenge, which should
never be underestimated. Partly it is because they all hate
Microsoft for the way it has so dominated the market and, in the
view of many techies, bullied everyone else. Partly it is because
they believe that open-source software can be kept more fresh and
bugfree than any commercial software, because of the way it is
constantly updated by an army of unpaid programmers. And partly it
is because some big tech companies are paying engineers to work on
Linux and other software, hoping it will cut into Microsoft’ s
market share and make it a weaker competitor all around. There are
a lot of motives at work here, and not all of them altruistic. When
you put them all together, though, they make for a very powerful
movement that will continue to present a major challenge to the
whole commercial software model of buying a program and then
downloading its fixes and buying its updates.
Until now, the Linux operating system was the best-known success
among open-source free software projects challenging Microsoft. But
Linux is largely used by big corporate data centers, not
individuals. However, in November 2004, the Mozilla Foundation, a
nonprofit group supporting open-source software, released Firefox,
a free Web browser that New York Times technology writer Randall
Stross (December 19, 2004) described as very fast and filled with
features that Microsoft’ s Internet Explorer lacks. Firefox 1.0,
which is easily installed, was released on November 9. ”Just over a
month later, " Stross reported, ”the foundation celebrated a
remarkable milestone: 10 million downloads.” Donations from
Firefox’ s appreciative fans paid for a two-page advertisement in
The New York Times. ”With Firefox, " Stross added, ”open-source
software moves from back-office obscurity to your home, and to your
parents’, too. (Your children in college are already using it.) It
is polished, as easy to use as Internet Explorer and, most
compelling, much better defended against viruses, worms and snoops.
Microsoft has always viewed Internet Explorer’ s tight integration
with Windows to be an attractive feature. That, however, was before
security became the unmet need of the day. Firefox sits lightly on
top of Windows, in a separation from the underlying operating
system that the Mozilla Foundation’s president, Mitchell Baker,
calls a ’natural defense.’ For the first time, Internet Explorer
has been losing market share. According to a worldwide survey
conducted in late November by OneStat. com, a company in Amsterdam
that analyzes the Web, Internet Explorer’ s share dropped to less
than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in May. Firefox now
has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing. "
It will come as no surprise that Microsoft officials are not
believers in the viability or virtues of the free software form of
open-source. Of all the issues I dealt with in this book, none
evoked more passion from proponents and opponents than open-source.
After spending time with the open-source community, I wanted to
hear what Microsoft had to say, since this is going to be an
important debate that will determine just how much of a flattener
open-source becomes.
Microsoft’ s first point is, How do you push innovation forward if
everyone is working for free and giving away their work? Yes, says
Microsoft, it all sounds nice and chummy that we all just get
together online and write free software by the people and for the
people. But if innovators are not going to be rewarded for their
innovations, the incentive for path-breaking innovation will dry up
and so will the money for the really deep R & D that is
required to drive progress in this increasingly complex field. The
fact that Microsoft created the standard PC operating system that
won out in the marketplace, it argues, produced the bankroll that
allowed Microsoft to spend billions of dollars on R & D to
develop Microsoft Office, a whole suite of applications that it can
now sell for a little over $100.
Microsoft would admit that there are number of aspects of the
open-source movement that are intriguing, particularly around the
scale, community collaboration, and communication aspects, " said
Craig Mundie, the Microsoft chief technology officer. "But we
fundamentally believe in a commercial software industry, and some
variants of the open-source model attack the economic model that
allows companies to build businesses in software. The virtuous
cycle of innovation, reward, reinvestment, and more innovation is
what has driven all big breakthroughs in our industry. The software
business as we have known it is a scale economic business. You
spend a ton of money up front to develop a software product, and
then the marginal cost of producing each one is very small, but if
you sell a lot of them, you make back your investment and then plow
profits back into developing the next generation. But when you
insist that you cannot charge for software, you can only give it
away, you take the software business away from being a scale
economic business. "
Added Bill Gates, ”You need capitalism [to drive innovation. ] To
have [a movement] that says innovation does not deserve an economic
reward is contrary to where the world is going. When I talk to the
Chinese, they dream of starting a company. They are not thinking, ’
I will be a barber during the day and do free software at night. ’
. . . When you have a security crisis in your [software] system,
you don’ t want to say, ’Where is the guy at the barbershop ?’
"
As we move into this flat world, and you have this massive
Web-enabled global workforce, with all these collaborative tools,
there will be no project too small for some members of this
workforce to take on, or copy, or modify-for free. Someone out
there will be trying to produce the free versions of every kind of
software or drug or music. "So how will products retain their
value?’’ asked Mundie. "And if companies cannot derive fair value
from their products, will innovation move forward in this area, or
others, at the speed that it could or should?” Can we always count
on a self-organizing open-source movement to come together to drive
things forward for free?
It seems to me that we are too early in the history of the
flattening of the world to answer these questions. But they will
need answers, and not just for Microsoft. So far-and maybe this is
part of the long-term answer-Microsoft has been able to count on
the fact that the only thing more expensive than commercial
software is free software. Few big companies can simply download
Linux off the Web and expect it to work for all their tasks. A lot
of design and systems engineering needs to go around it and on top
of it to tailor it to a company’ s specific needs, especially for
sophisticated, large-scale, mission-critical operations. So when
you add up all the costs of adapting the Linux operating system to
the needs of your company and its specific hardware platform and
applications, Microsoft argues, it can end up costing as much as or
more than Windows. The second issue Microsoft raises about this
whole open-source movement has to do with how we keep track of who
owns which piece of any innovation in a flat world, where some is
generated for free and others build on it for profit. Will Chinese
programmers really respect the rules of the Free Software
Foundation? Who will govern all this?
’’Once you start to socialize the global population on the idea
that software or any other innovation is supposed to be free, a lot
of people will not distinguish between free software, free
pharmaceuticals, free music, or free patents on car designs, ”
argued Mundie. There is some truth to this. I work for a newspaper,
that is where my paycheck comes from. But I believe that all online
newspapers should be free, and on principle I refuse to pay for an
online subscription to The Wall Street Journal. I have not read the
paper copy of The New York Times regularly for two years. I read it
only online. But what if my daughters’ generation, which is being
raised to think that newspapers are something to be accessed online
for free, grows up and refuses to pay for the paper editions? Hmmm.
I loved Amazon. com until it started providing a global platform
that wasn’ t selling only my new books but also used versions. And
I am still not sure how I feel about Amazon offering sections of
this book to be browsed online for free Mundie noted that a major
American auto company recently discovered that some Chinese firms
were using new digital-scanning technology to scan an entire car
and churn out computer-aided design models of every part within a
very short period of time. They can then feed those designs to
industrial robots and in short order produce a perfect copy of a GM
car - without having to spend any money on R & D. American
automakers never thought they had anything to worry about from
wholesale cloning of their cars, but in the flat world, given the
technologies that are out there, that is no longer the case.
My bottom line is this: Open-source is an important flattener
because it makes available for free many tools, from software to
encyclopedias, that millions of people around the world would have
had to buy in order to use, and because open-source network
associations-with their open borders and come-one-come-all
approach-can challenge hierarchical structures with a horizontal
model of innovation that is clearly working in a growing number of
areas. Apache and Linux have each helped to drive down costs of
computing and Internet usage in ways that are profoundly
flattening. This movement is not going away. Indeed, it may just be
getting started - with a huge, growing appetite that could apply to
many industries. As The Economist mused (June 10, 2004), ’’some
zealots even argue that the open-source approach represents a new,
post-capitalist model of production.”
That may prove true. But if it does, then we have some huge global
governance issues to sort out over who owns what and how
individuals and companies will profit from their creations.
in the given case study, the time when there was an emergence of the e commerce markets has been mentioned. This is the time of the 1990s where there was a boom of the dot com market. Alan Cohen was the senior manager at IBM and had a a comeplete team ready with an $8 million plan, he remembers that that was the time of complete competition between oracle, Netscape, Microsoft etc.
As he asks his manager about the development process, he learns that it is built on top of a free ware and that there was no one to fix or take responsibility about the same. He was he was baffled by the fact that where the competitions were trying to put up websites with their hard work, IBM was taking it up for free. His manager stated that this was a form of open source movement. There hadn’t been a legal structure with apache, neither was there a responsible person to take any stand regarding apache.
He had not seen such open sourcing, though tracing back his days at university he acknowledges that. There were people who used to do open sourcing. It was for him to understand that open sourcing software has been put up so as to free the normal people from the commercial giants. The main issue has been commercialisation of something that was required by everyon. Revolutions were brought about by apache and open platforms like Wikipedia that allowed information access to everyone.