WEBVTT

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Any comments, suggestions and bug reports
regarding the subtitle.
E-mail to: geek@geekbone.org

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I was at the Agenda 2000

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and uh, one of the people who was there
was Craig Mundie,

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who is some kind of
high mucky muck at Microsoft,

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I think uh, vice-president of consumer products
or something like that.

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And uh, I hadn't actually met him

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I, I, I, uh, bumped in to him in an,
in an elevator... in an elevator

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And uh, I looked at his badge and said,
"Oh, I see you work for Microsoft."

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And he looked back to me and said,
"Oh, yeah and what do you do?"

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And I thought he seemed just a sort of a tad dismissive

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I mean, here's the archetypal, you know,
guy in a suit

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looking at a scruffy hacker

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And so I gave him the thousand
yard stare and said,

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"I'm your worst nightmare."

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Wonderview Productions
PRESENTS

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A
J.T.S. Moore
FILM

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REVOLUTION OS

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For most its short, but colorful history,

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the computer industry has been dominated

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by the Windows operating system.

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But that could soon change,

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as Windows faces a strong challenge from Linux

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Silicon Valley has long been the place

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to develop new technology,

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start new companies and get really rich.

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Now The Valley is the front line in a revolution

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fighting for that most
politically incorrect of ideas:

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individual freedom

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Day and night,
a loose confederation of

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hackers and programmers zaps bits pieces of

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computer code around the world as it builds the tools

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to set computer users free

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using open information and
the free exchange of technology

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to achieve its goals.

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This revolution began in the 1980's with

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the Free Software Movement and GNU project.

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And now is most commonly associated

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with Linux and the Open Source Movement.

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What is Linux?

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We do have one sector that taking off today.

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It is the Linux-related sector.

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And I thought this might be
a good opportunity to say,

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"What is Linux?"

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And I'll answer this question for you.

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Many of you probably already know,

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but
There are 12 million users out there

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A computer Operating System
developed by hundreds of

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programmers collaborating on the Internet

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A challenge to Microsoft Windows NT

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Very popular for its speed

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and so this's what the craze is about

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To kind of explain what Linux is you have to

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explain what an Operating System is

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And... the thing about Operating System is
you, I mean...

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you're never ever supposed to see it.

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Because...

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nobody really uses an Operating System,

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people use... programs... on their computer

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And the only mission in life

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of an operating system is to help
those programs run.

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So an operating system never does
anything on its own

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It's only waiting for the programs to

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ask for certain resources

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or ask for the programs to

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connect them to the outside world.

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And then the operating system
comes, steps in and then

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tries to make it easy for people
to write programs

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And, What is Open Source?

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Open Source is a way for people to collaborate

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on software without being encumbered
by all of the problems of intellectual property,

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having to negotiate contracts every time
you buy a piece of software,

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have a lot of lawyers involved.

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In general, we just wanna get software to work

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and we want be able to have

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people contribute fixes to that, etc..

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So we sort of sacrifice some of

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the intellectual property rights

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and just let the whole world
use the software

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Before there could be Linux

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There was Richard Stallman
and the Free Software Movement.

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They think of Richard Stallman as the...

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great philosopher, right.

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And think of me as the engineer

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Richard Stallman is the founding father of
the Free Software Movement.

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Through his efforts to build the
GNU Operating System.

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He created the legal, philosophical and
technological foundation

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for the Free Software Movement.

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Without these contributions,

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it's unlikely that Linux and Open Source

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would have evolved in to their current forms today

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I joined the
MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971,

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I joined... a thriving community of hackers,

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people who loved programming,

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loved exploring the what they could do
with computers.

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And they had developed
a complete Operating System,

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entirely written there.

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And I became one of the team, that

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continued to improve the Operating System,
adding new capabilities

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That was my job, and I loved it, we all loved it.
That's why we were doing it.

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And [clears throat] we called our system

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"the Incompatible Time Sharing System"

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which is the example of the

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playful spirit

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which defines a hacker.

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Hackers are people who enjoy
playful cleverness.

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Well, it first started going wrong

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as the outside world started pressuring us
to have passwords.

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We didn't have any passwords
on our computer.

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And the reason was that the hackers

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who'd originally designed the system

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realized that passwords were a way
the administrators could control all the users.

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And they didn't want to build tools

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you know, locks and keys for
the administrators to control them,

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so they just didn't do it.
They left that out

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And we had the philosophy
that whoever sitting at the computer

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should be able to do whatever he wants

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and somebody else who was there yesterday
shouldn't be controlling what you do today

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When they put passwords onto one of
the machines at MIT

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I and bunch of other hackers didn't like it,

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I decided to try a subversive sort of hack.
[clears throat]

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I figured out how to decode the passwords,

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so by looking the database of encoded passwords

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I could figure out what each person
would actually type to login

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And so I sent messages to people, saying,

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"Hello? I see that you've
chosen the password mumble,

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whatever it was.
How about if you do as I do

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just type Enter for your password

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it's much shorter, much easier to type".

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And... of course with this message I was

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implicitly telling them
the security was really just a joke.

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Anyway, but in addition
I was letting them in on this hack.

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And eventually, A fifth of all
users on that computer joined me

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in using just Enter as their passwords.

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[ Where did the ideas that lead to what is now
called Open Source world?

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How did that begin? Who began that? ]

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It actually began with the start
of computers because at that time

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software was just passed around between people

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And I think it was only like in the
lates 70's or early 80's

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That people started really closing up
their software,

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And saying, "No, you can never
get a look at the source code.

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You can't change the software
even if it's necessary

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for you to fix it, for your own application"

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And... um, you can actually blame
some of that on Microsoft,

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They are one of the real pioneers
of the proprietary software model.

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In the mid 1970's, a group of hackers

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and computer hobbyist in Silicon Valley
formed the "Homebrew Computer Club".

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In the club January 31, 1976 newsletter,

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Bill Gates of the recently formed Microsoft,

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wrote an open letter to the community

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where he made a point by point argument for
the relatively new concept of proprietary software

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up to that point, the practice of computer users
had been to freely pass around software

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with not much thought given to
its ownership

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Known as An Open Letter to Hobbyists,
Bill Gates writes,

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"To me the most critical thing
in the hobby market right now

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is the lack of good software courses,
books and software itself.

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Without good software and an owner
who understands programming,

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A hobby computer is wasted.

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Will quality software be written
for the hobby market?

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Gates goes on to write,
"The feedback we have gotten from

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the hundreds of people who say they are
using BASIC has all been positive.

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Two surprising things are apparent, however.

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1) Most of these "users" never
bought BASIC, and

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2) The amount of royalties we have received
from sales to hobbyists

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makes the time spent on of Altair BASIC
worth less than 2 dollars an hour

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Why is this?

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As the majority of hobbyists must be aware,

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most of you steal your software.

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Hardware must be paid for but software
is something to share.

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Who cares if the people who worked
on it get paid?

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Is this fair?

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One thing you don't do by stealing software

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is get back at MITS for some problem
you may have had

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MITS doesn't make money selling software.

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One thing you do do is prevent
good software from being written.

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Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?

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What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming,

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finding all bugs, documenting his product
and distribute it for free?

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The fact is,

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no one besides us has invested a lot of money
in hobby software.

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What about the guys who resell Altair BASIC?

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Aren't they making money on hobby software?

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Yes, but those who have been
reported to us may lose in the end.

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They are the ones who give
hobbyists a bad name,

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and should be kicked out of any
club meeting they show up at.

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I would appreciate letters from
anyone who wants to pay up,

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or has a suggestion or comment.

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Signed Bill Gates, General partner, Micro-Soft.

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In the late 70's and early 1980's,
Richard Stallman was

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doing Artificial Intelligence research and coding

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at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.

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Richard had a number of negative experiences

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during that period which soured him

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on the whole idea of commercial software.

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[ such as? ]

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uh... some company wanted to work on and
wanted to fix was locked up.

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and he couldn't get the company on the code to let him fix it

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even though it would have been to their advantage to do so.

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And that put me into a moral dilemma, you see?

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Because to get one of the modern computers
of the day, which was the early 80's,

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you would have to get a proprietory
operating system.

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The developers of those systems
didn't share with other people,

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Instead they tried to control the users,

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dominate the users, restrict them.

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Say, if to get the system,

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you have to sign a promise you won't
share with anybody else.

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And to me that was essentially a promise
to be a bad person,

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to betray the rest of the world,

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cut myself off from society
from a cooperating community.

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And I had already experienced what happened
when other people did that to us,

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when they refused to share with us.

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because they had signed these contracts.

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And it hurt the whole lab,

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it kept us from doing useful things before.

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So I just wasn't going to do that.

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I thought,"This is wrong!
I am not going to live this way"

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And from experiences like this
he developed a profound hostility

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to the idea of
intellectual property and software.

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He eventually acted this out
by founding the Free Software Foundation.

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So, I looked for another alternative
and I realized:

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I was an operating system developer.

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If I were to develop another operating system.

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And then as the author,
encourage everyone to share it.

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Say, everyone, " You come and get it,
use this, form a new community"

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Not only could I gave myself a way
to keep using computers without

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betraying other people,
but I'd give it to everybody else, too.

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Everybody would have a
way out of that moral dilemma

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And so I realized this was
what I had to do with my life.

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I actually began the project in January of 1984.

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That's when I resigned for my job at MIT

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to start developing the GNU operating system.

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Now I should explain the name GNU is a hack.

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Because it's a recursive acronym.

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It stands for "GNU's Not Unix".

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You see so the "G" in "GNU" stands for "GNU".

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And what the name means is

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I was developing a system that was like
the Unix operating system,

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but was not the Unix operating system.

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It was a different system.

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We would have to write it completely
from scratch

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because Unix was proprietory.

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We were forbidden to share Unix,

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We couldn't use Unix.
It was useless for a community.

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So we had to write a replacement for it.

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Throughout the 1980s,

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as Richard Stallman was building the GNU project,

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computer scientists from
the University of California at Berkeley

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were developing their own free
operating system.

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Known as Berkeley Unix, or BSD,

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it was based upon the Unix kernel
which had been licensed from AT&T.

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However, due to legal problems with AT&T
and fragmentation of the source code,

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hackers and other non-institutional users
were slow to adopt it

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Well, Unix consisted of a large number of
separate programs

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that communicated with each other.

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So we just had to replace these programs
one by one.

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So what I started doing was
writing a replacement for one program,

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and then another, and then another,

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and then people started joining me,

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because I published an announcement
inviting other people to join me

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to help write these programs.

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And uh... and by around 1991,
we had replaced practically all of them.

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[ What were some of the programs that you ... ]

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Well... we had to... to have a complete system,

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you need to have a kernel, which is the program that

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allocates resources to all the other programs,

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you need a compiler, which translates a program

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from readable source code
that programmers can understand into numbers,

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mysterious numbers
that the computer can actually run.

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you need other programs
that go with the compiler to help do this job.

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you need a debugger.

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you need a text editor.

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you need text formatters.

00:13:51.600 --> 00:13:53.400
you need mailers...

00:13:53.500 --> 00:13:54.800
you need lots and lots of things.

00:13:54.900 --> 00:13:58.500
There are hundreds of programs
in the Unix-like operating system.

00:13:58.900 --> 00:14:00.500
I saw Stallman's announcement.

00:14:00.600 --> 00:14:03.900
Actually I met him in February of 1987.

00:14:04.000 --> 00:14:08.500
He came to give a five-day tutorial
on Emacs at our company.

00:14:08.600 --> 00:14:11.200
And during the day he would explain

00:14:11.300 --> 00:14:13.400
new ways to think about Emacs

00:14:13.500 --> 00:14:16.500
and ways to extend it, enhance it,
and to use the Emacs source code

00:14:17.100 --> 00:14:18.400
uh, for better or worse.

00:14:18.500 --> 00:14:21.700
But in the evening,
he was busily working on this compiler,

00:14:21.800 --> 00:14:24.100
and he had not yet released it to the public,

00:14:24.200 --> 00:14:27.800
so he was uh, being a little bit uh,
careful about

00:14:27.900 --> 00:14:30.300
who, who got to see the source code.

00:14:30.400 --> 00:14:33.800
But I was very eager,
and when he first announced it in June,

00:14:33.900 --> 00:14:35.500
I downloaded it immediately.

00:14:35.700 --> 00:14:37.100
I, I played with it.

00:14:37.200 --> 00:14:39.400
I got some, some pointers from him.

00:14:39.600 --> 00:14:41.200
And when I sent the source code back to him,

00:14:41.300 --> 00:14:42.500
he was very,

00:14:42.600 --> 00:14:47.300
uh, actually amazed that how quickly
I was able to ramp up on his technology.

00:14:47.500 --> 00:14:48.300
Whenever we worked on something
at Stanford or in the university,

00:14:48.300 --> 00:14:52.300
Whenever we worked on something
at Stanford or in the university,

00:14:52.400 --> 00:14:54.200
we would get, mostly at the time

00:14:54.300 --> 00:14:58.200
we were working off machines
from Digital Equipment or Sun, mostly Sun.

00:14:58.400 --> 00:14:59.900
Whenever we would get a Sun machine,

00:15:00.100 --> 00:15:04.500
the first thing we would do is
we would spend literally days

00:15:04.600 --> 00:15:08.600
downloading GNU free software from the Internet,

00:15:08.700 --> 00:15:11.100
building it and installing it on that Sun machine.

00:15:11.300 --> 00:15:14.800
The crucial thing about GNU is that
it's free software.

00:15:15.200 --> 00:15:18.700
And Free Software refers not to price,
but to freedom.

00:15:18.900 --> 00:15:21.200
So think of free speech, not free beer.

00:15:22.200 --> 00:15:24.500
The freedoms that I am talking about

00:15:24.500 --> 00:15:27.500
are the freedoms to make changes if you want to,

00:15:27.600 --> 00:15:30.300
or hire somebody else to make changes for you

00:15:30.400 --> 00:15:32.500
if you're using a software for your business,

00:15:32.600 --> 00:15:36.300
to redistribute copies,
to share with other people,

00:15:36.400 --> 00:15:39.500
and to make improvements and publish them

00:15:39.600 --> 00:15:42.500
so that other people can
get the benefit of them, too.

00:15:42.600 --> 00:15:46.400
And those are the freedoms that distinguish
free software from non-free software.

00:15:46.700 --> 00:15:50.500
These are the freedoms that
enable people to form a community.

00:15:50.600 --> 00:15:52.100
If you don't have all these freedoms,

00:15:52.100 --> 00:15:54.900
you're being divided and
dominated by somebody.

00:15:55.900 --> 00:15:59.000
My first experience contributing to free software

00:15:59.000 --> 00:16:03.000
came in late 1989, early 1990.

00:16:03.200 --> 00:16:06.200
I was working as a graduate student
at Stanford University

00:16:06.400 --> 00:16:08.600
on Computer Aided Design tools.

00:16:08.700 --> 00:16:10.800
One of the pieces I needed was a tool

00:16:10.900 --> 00:16:12.500
called a parser generator.

00:16:12.800 --> 00:16:14.800
Well, the Free Software Foundation

00:16:14.900 --> 00:16:18.300
under Richard Stallman
created a great tool called "bison".

00:16:18.500 --> 00:16:22.400
I needed a tool that worked with C++.
Bison worked with C.

00:16:22.900 --> 00:16:26.100
I modified bison to create something
called "bison++".

00:16:26.200 --> 00:16:28.700
And it's a tremendous feeling of empowerment

00:16:28.800 --> 00:16:31.900
be able to take a piece of software that was available

00:16:32.000 --> 00:16:36.500
and create what you needed
in a very short piece of time by modifying it.

00:16:36.700 --> 00:16:39.100
I put it back on the Internet

00:16:39.200 --> 00:16:40.900
and I was amazed at the number of people

00:16:41.000 --> 00:16:42.900
that picked it up and started using it.

00:16:43.000 --> 00:16:47.000
In fact, I remember going to, uh job interviews,

00:16:47.300 --> 00:16:50.100
I, at various times, considered
just going out getting a job.

00:16:50.300 --> 00:16:52.100
And I'd gone to a job interview.

00:16:52.200 --> 00:16:53.600
And I was talking to one of the people,

00:16:53.700 --> 00:16:56.500
and I started asking them about what tools they used,

00:16:56.600 --> 00:16:59.000
and they said, "Gee, we used bison++!"

00:16:59.100 --> 00:17:01.400
and I said, "Oh, I am the author of bison++!"

00:17:01.600 --> 00:17:06.100
Free Software generally does have a copyright.

00:17:06.200 --> 00:17:08.800
It does have an owner.

00:17:08.900 --> 00:17:10.000
And it has a license.

00:17:10.100 --> 00:17:11.900
It is not public domain.

00:17:12.000 --> 00:17:14.600
If we put the software in the public domain,

00:17:14.700 --> 00:17:17.900
somebody else would be able to make
a little bit of changes

00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:20.900
and turn that into a proprietory software package,

00:17:21.000 --> 00:17:23.800
which means that
the users would be running our software,

00:17:23.900 --> 00:17:26.800
but they wouldn't have freedom to cooperate and share.

00:17:27.500 --> 00:17:31.200
To prevent that, we use a technique called "Copyleft".

00:17:31.500 --> 00:17:34.700
The idea of Copyleft is that
it's "Copyright" flipped over.

00:17:35.500 --> 00:17:37.200
And what we do is, we say,

00:17:37.300 --> 00:17:39.200
this software is copyrighted

00:17:39.300 --> 00:17:43.600
and we, the authors give you permission
to redistribute copies,

00:17:43.700 --> 00:17:45.200
we give you permission to change,

00:17:45.300 --> 00:17:46.900
we give you permission to add to it.

00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:48.700
But when you redistribute it,

00:17:48.800 --> 00:17:52.500
it has to be under these terms,
no more and no less.

00:17:52.600 --> 00:17:54.800
So that whoever gets it from you

00:17:54.900 --> 00:18:00.200
also gets the freedom to cooperate
with other people, if he wants to.

00:18:00.300 --> 00:18:03.800
And then, in this way everywhere the software goes,

00:18:03.900 --> 00:18:05.500
the freedom goes, too.

00:18:05.600 --> 00:18:07.900
And it becomes an inalienable right

00:18:09.000 --> 00:18:11.600
to cooperate with other people and form a community.

00:18:11.800 --> 00:18:15.100
[ And so, what is that? the license?
what was that... ]

00:18:15.200 --> 00:18:17.200
Well, Copyleft being a general idea,

00:18:17.300 --> 00:18:20.300
in order to use it, you have to have specific example.

00:18:20.400 --> 00:18:24.100
The specific example we use for
most GNU software packages

00:18:24.200 --> 00:18:27.100
is the GNU General Public License,

00:18:27.200 --> 00:18:31.200
a particular document and legalese
which accomplishes this job.

00:18:31.500 --> 00:18:34.200
A lot of other people use that same license,
for example,

00:18:34.300 --> 00:18:37.700
Linus Torvalds uses that license for Linux as well.

00:18:38.700 --> 00:18:42.200
Well, the license I use is the
GNU General Public License.

00:18:42.300 --> 00:18:44.200
That's the one Richard Stallman wrote.

00:18:44.300 --> 00:18:48.200
And I think it is really astounding contribution.

00:18:48.300 --> 00:18:52.300
Uh, it's one of the few software licenses
that was written

00:18:52.600 --> 00:18:56.000
from the standpoint of the community rather than

00:18:56.100 --> 00:18:59.900
from the standpoint of um, protecting a company

00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:05.500
or um, as is the case with MIT and BSD license

00:19:05.700 --> 00:19:09.400
performing the goals of
a government grant program.

00:19:09.500 --> 00:19:12.500
Uh, and the GPL is really unique in that.

00:19:12.600 --> 00:19:16.000
It's not just a license.
It's a whole philosophy that,

00:19:16.100 --> 00:19:19.100
I think, motivated the open source definition.

00:19:19.200 --> 00:19:23.500
I don't hide that a lot of what I do came from Stallman.

00:19:27.900 --> 00:19:31.900
A crucial step in the growth of GNU/Linux
and the Free Software movement

00:19:32.000 --> 00:19:35.600
was the creation of businesses
based upon the software and philosophy.

00:19:35.800 --> 00:19:38.300
Grown zero for the beginning of
the business face

00:19:38.400 --> 00:19:41.500
was the Electronics Research Lab
at Stanford University.

00:19:41.800 --> 00:19:45.100
Known as ERL, the lab was the place for the first GNU

00:19:45.200 --> 00:19:47.500
and Linux business founder inspiration.

00:19:47.600 --> 00:19:49.600
So right here was where ERL was.

00:19:50.100 --> 00:19:53.200
That would have been the entrance
over there next to the uh,

00:19:53.300 --> 00:19:55.600
electrical engineering McCullough building.

00:19:55.700 --> 00:19:59.500
As you walk in, you come in,
you walk down the hallway, down here.

00:20:00.500 --> 00:20:03.600
My office would have been about, about here.

00:20:03.700 --> 00:20:07.000
and then right across the hall,
from that was Michael Tiemann's office.

00:20:07.700 --> 00:20:11.700
Michael Tiemann took uh.. and
started a company, Cygnus Software

00:20:11.700 --> 00:20:16.600
with the idea was to sell consulting
and services around the GNU Free Software

00:20:16.600 --> 00:20:19.000
and, well Michael's done very well with Cygnus.

00:20:19.000 --> 00:20:23.000
Well uh, I spend a lot of
time working out uh,

00:20:23.000 --> 00:20:25.000
how we were going to make money

00:20:25.000 --> 00:20:27.000
and in the original GNU manifesto

00:20:27.000 --> 00:20:30.000
which is the last chapter
of the GNU Emacs manual.

00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:32.000
Stallman proposed a number of different

00:20:32.000 --> 00:20:33.800
possible ways to make money.

00:20:33.800 --> 00:20:35.800
Form the beginning of the
Free Software movement

00:20:35.800 --> 00:20:37.000
I had the idea that there's

00:20:37.000 --> 00:20:39.000
room in it for business to be done.

00:20:39.000 --> 00:20:41.700
One of the advantages of Free Software is that, there's

00:20:41.700 --> 00:20:45.000
a free market for any kind of service or support.

00:20:45.000 --> 00:20:47.000
So if you are using software in your business,

00:20:47.000 --> 00:20:49.000
and you want good support,

00:20:49.000 --> 00:20:52.000
you have a choice of people to go to for it,

00:20:52.000 --> 00:20:54.000
you have a choice of businesses... that

00:20:54.000 --> 00:20:57.000
are in the business of
providing you with support.

00:20:57.000 --> 00:20:59.000
So they are going to have to in general give you

00:20:59.000 --> 00:21:02.000
good support or you go to somebody else.

00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:04.000
With proprietory software,

00:21:04.300 --> 00:21:07.000
support is a monopoly, there is one company,

00:21:07.000 --> 00:21:09.600
typically, that has the source code

00:21:09.600 --> 00:21:11.500
and only they can give you support

00:21:12.100 --> 00:21:15.300
so typically, you are at the mercy of a monopoly.

00:21:15.300 --> 00:21:17.600
That's the case, for example with Microsoft.

00:21:17.600 --> 00:21:20.900
So no wonder the support is so bad.

00:21:20.900 --> 00:21:22.500
The benefits of Free Software were

00:21:22.500 --> 00:21:25.200
tremendous but the cost of supporting it internally

00:21:25.800 --> 00:21:27.800
uh, and made managers very very nervous and

00:21:27.800 --> 00:21:31.500
so the fundamental idea I had was
if we can build a model

00:21:31.500 --> 00:21:35.500
that could deliver two to four times the support

00:21:35.500 --> 00:21:39.000
and uh, and uh, and hand holding capability

00:21:39.000 --> 00:21:41.100
that an internal engineer could provide.

00:21:41.100 --> 00:21:44.100
And we could do it at 1/2 to 1/4 of the cost

00:21:44.100 --> 00:21:46.300
that would meet the test of wether or not

00:21:46.300 --> 00:21:47.900
people would actually buy.

00:21:47.900 --> 00:21:50.400
And by about the Fall of that year, we had

00:21:50.400 --> 00:21:52.300
all the things worked out about who

00:21:52.300 --> 00:21:53.900
needed on the technical team, what

00:21:53.900 --> 00:21:55.800
the terms the sale would be, what

00:21:55.800 --> 00:21:57.600
the key price point were, and we

00:21:57.600 --> 00:22:01.600
actually received our incorporation in Nov of 1989.

00:22:02.200 --> 00:22:04.800
One of the most difficult things in starting our company

00:22:04.800 --> 00:22:06.400
was actually finding a name for it.

00:22:06.400 --> 00:22:09.000
I explained this to one of my friends

00:22:09.000 --> 00:22:10.400
"we're having difficulty"

00:22:10.400 --> 00:22:12.900
and he returned an e-mail message

00:22:12.900 --> 00:22:16.800
that basically just had a bunch of words
with the name "GNU" in it.

00:22:16.800 --> 00:22:21.600
And "Cygnus" was the one that
looked least obnoxious and least obscene.

00:22:22.100 --> 00:22:24.600
I can say very clearly that Cygnus

00:22:24.900 --> 00:22:28.600
was the first business that specialized in Free Software.

00:22:28.800 --> 00:22:32.100
Cygnus supported Free Software,

00:22:32.100 --> 00:22:36.100
filled a very essential niche because
we had this great software,

00:22:36.100 --> 00:22:40.100
you could get it for nothing but
you couldn't get support - they made their money

00:22:40.300 --> 00:22:42.200
by charging for support.

00:22:42.200 --> 00:22:45.900
The GNU project started by building a toolkit,

00:22:45.900 --> 00:22:50.800
a basic development tool such as
a C compiler, a debugger, a text-editor,

00:22:51.100 --> 00:22:54.500
and uh, other necessary apparatus.

00:22:54.500 --> 00:22:59.000
And their intention was eventually to
develop a kernel to sit underneath those

00:22:59.200 --> 00:23:01.600
and be the center of the operating system.

00:23:01.600 --> 00:23:05.400
By about 1990 they had successfully
developed that toolkit,

00:23:05.400 --> 00:23:09.400
and it was in wide use on great many variants of Unix.

00:23:09.500 --> 00:23:12.100
But there was still no free kernel.

00:23:12.100 --> 00:23:16.100
The kernel happened to be
one of the last things we started to do

00:23:16.400 --> 00:23:18.400
and we had started it not long before.

00:23:19.400 --> 00:23:22.400
And that's when Linus Torvalds came along.

00:23:22.400 --> 00:23:25.700
"Lin-us" or "Line-us"? What's the exact,
do you prefer the pronunciation?

00:23:26.000 --> 00:23:28.600
um.. When I speak Swedish it's "Lee-nus";

00:23:28.600 --> 00:23:31.000
when I speak Finnish it's "Leen-ous";

00:23:31.000 --> 00:23:32.800
when I speak English it's "Line-us".

00:23:32.800 --> 00:23:35.600
And I really don't care how people pronounce my name.

00:23:35.600 --> 00:23:38.400
But "Linux" is always "Linux".

00:23:38.400 --> 00:23:42.800
He developed a kernel, and got it working
faster than we got ours working,

00:23:43.400 --> 00:23:45.900
and got it to work very nicely and solidly.

00:23:45.900 --> 00:23:47.800
His kernel is called "Linux".

00:23:48.300 --> 00:23:51.500
The initial goal was my very personal goal

00:23:51.500 --> 00:23:55.100
to be able to run a similar environment on my computer

00:23:55.500 --> 00:23:59.300
that I had grown used to at, at the university computers.

00:23:59.900 --> 00:24:05.300
And I could not find anything that suited me for that.

00:24:05.700 --> 00:24:09.400
So having been doing computers for all my life basically.

00:24:09.400 --> 00:24:12.500
At that point I decided that I'll do my own.

00:24:13.000 --> 00:24:17.000
Most of the inspiration early on came from, from SunOS

00:24:17.600 --> 00:24:21.900
which was what um,
I was using at the university at the time.

00:24:21.900 --> 00:24:23.000
[ Which University? ]

00:24:23.000 --> 00:24:24.700
University of Helsinki in Finland.

00:24:25.600 --> 00:24:30.100
From 1991 to about 1993 was really

00:24:30.400 --> 00:24:32.700
I guess the infancy period of Linux.

00:24:32.700 --> 00:24:36.400
That was when it was still only alpha or beta quality;

00:24:36.400 --> 00:24:38.800
it was relatively unstable.

00:24:38.800 --> 00:24:41.600
Although, even then it was a good deal more stable

00:24:41.600 --> 00:24:45.600
than a lot of what are now called
"production" operating systems.

00:24:45.600 --> 00:24:49.600
Linus used the traditional
tried-and-true method of writing one program

00:24:50.500 --> 00:24:52.500
that does the job,

00:24:52.700 --> 00:24:54.800
and he got it to work.

00:24:54.800 --> 00:24:58.500
quickly in fact faster than
I would have thought was possible.

00:24:58.500 --> 00:25:01.500
The term for it is "monolithic",

00:25:01.500 --> 00:25:09.400
which means that basically
the OS itself is one entity, indivisible.

00:25:11.100 --> 00:25:13.400
uh, while in the microkernel,

00:25:13.400 --> 00:25:15.900
the, the operating system kernel is actually

00:25:17.600 --> 00:25:20.700
uh, just a collection of servers that

00:25:20.700 --> 00:25:23.500
do different things and then they have a common protocol

00:25:23.500 --> 00:25:25.700
for doing communication between themselves.

00:25:26.200 --> 00:25:31.800
[ So why is that... the GNU project that's had
so much lead-time, that's been doing this,

00:25:31.800 --> 00:25:35.100
Why...Why is it that he was able to kinda
come in at the tail end so to speak ]

00:25:35.100 --> 00:25:40.800
Well we actually started the
GNU Hurd not long before he started Linux.

00:25:41.700 --> 00:25:45.700
And it happened though we chose a design
that's a very advanced design

00:25:46.300 --> 00:25:48.300
in terms of the power gives you

00:25:48.300 --> 00:25:50.900
but also turns out to be very hard to debug.

00:25:51.600 --> 00:25:57.300
We decided to divide up the kernel
which traditionally had been one program,

00:25:57.300 --> 00:25:59.600
to divide it up into a lot of smaller programs

00:25:59.600 --> 00:26:03.600
that would send messages to
each other asynchronously to, to communicate.

00:26:05.600 --> 00:26:09.500
The problem is that, that style of programming

00:26:09.500 --> 00:26:11.800
has a great deal of potential for bugs,

00:26:11.800 --> 00:26:14.700
which are often very hard to
figure out because they depend on...

00:26:14.700 --> 00:26:22.100
does this program send this message
before or after this one sends that message...

00:26:22.300 --> 00:26:27.300
And the result was:
it took us years to get the thing to work.

00:26:28.300 --> 00:26:31.700
[ What is Linux's relationship to the GNU project? ]

00:26:32.700 --> 00:26:39.100
Well there's relationships to GNU
on kind of multiple levels.

00:26:39.600 --> 00:26:43.600
One is just the philosophical level of thinking that

00:26:44.200 --> 00:26:46.700
"making your source open is a good idea".

00:26:47.300 --> 00:26:51.300
When Linus developed the kernel
he wasn't doing it for the GNU project.

00:26:51.300 --> 00:26:52.800
He did it independently.

00:26:52.800 --> 00:26:56.200
And he released it independently
and we didn't know about it.

00:26:56.200 --> 00:26:58.500
But some of the people who did know about it

00:26:58.500 --> 00:27:01.000
decided to look for what else they could find

00:27:01.000 --> 00:27:04.300
to put together with that kernel to
make a whole system.

00:27:04.300 --> 00:27:08.300
They looked around, and lo and behold
everything they needed was already available.

00:27:08.500 --> 00:27:09.500
They looked around, and lo and behold
everything they needed was already available.

00:27:09.800 --> 00:27:11.600
"What good fortune!" they thought.

00:27:11.600 --> 00:27:13.900
But actually there was no chance about it.

00:27:13.900 --> 00:27:17.900
They had found all the pieces of the
GNU system which was missing just the kernel,

00:27:18.700 --> 00:27:20.600
so when they put all that together

00:27:20.600 --> 00:27:24.600
really they were fitting
Linux into the gap in the GNU system.

00:27:25.200 --> 00:27:26.400
But they didn't know that.

00:27:26.800 --> 00:27:30.800
There's a lot of these programs

00:27:31.500 --> 00:27:34.600
um, done by the Free Softwares Foundation,

00:27:34.600 --> 00:27:36.800
and done by other people like Linux.

00:27:36.800 --> 00:27:40.800
And there's a symbiosis between
Linux and the programs

00:27:40.900 --> 00:27:44.700
that the programs run on Linux and at the same time

00:27:44.700 --> 00:27:47.100
and they take the advantage of Linux as a platform,

00:27:47.100 --> 00:27:50.700
while Linux takes the advantage of the programs

00:27:50.700 --> 00:27:52.700
by just being able to use them.

00:27:52.700 --> 00:27:54.300
[ What...What programs? ]

00:27:54.700 --> 00:27:56.100
umm...

00:27:56.100 --> 00:27:59.100
The main one is actually the GNU C Compiler.

00:27:59.700 --> 00:28:03.300
Which... Without a C compiler
it would not have been possible

00:28:03.300 --> 00:28:09.500
to make Linux or most of the open progress available.

00:28:10.500 --> 00:28:12.700
Linux uses the GPL,

00:28:12.700 --> 00:28:17.400
and I agree with a kind of philosophy behind the GPL.

00:28:18.500 --> 00:28:23.200
That said the GPL itself is not a very pretty document

00:28:23.200 --> 00:28:27.800
which is probably just because
no lawyerese can ever be very pretty.

00:28:33.800 --> 00:28:37.800
I'd been playing around with Linux for actually

00:28:38.000 --> 00:28:41.300
late '92 or early '93 for about a year.

00:28:41.300 --> 00:28:45.900
before I decided that it was to the point
where actually had everything that I needed

00:28:46.200 --> 00:28:48.300
to really replace a Sun Workstation.

00:28:48.300 --> 00:28:52.300
And I was looking for a way to
have a Unix workstation at home

00:28:52.400 --> 00:28:56.400
at the time we used Sun Sparc Stations
in the office at Stanford.

00:28:57.900 --> 00:29:00.400
Those machines cost us about 7,000 dollars.

00:29:00.400 --> 00:29:02.900
Now I desperately wanted a Unix machine at home!

00:29:02.900 --> 00:29:05.600
There's always a this thought
you get as you get a graduate student

00:29:05.600 --> 00:29:06.900
"Gee... if I could work at home!

00:29:06.900 --> 00:29:08.800
Then I would be so much more productive,

00:29:08.800 --> 00:29:11.900
I would graduate sooner because
I would finish my thesis sooner"

00:29:12.500 --> 00:29:16.000
Well, Well, is it true? Well, you can judge.

00:29:16.000 --> 00:29:19.800
You know most people end up spending a lot of their time

00:29:19.800 --> 00:29:21.300
becoming more productive so that

00:29:21.300 --> 00:29:24.500
they ever actually worked on their thesis
they'll finish it in a day.

00:29:24.500 --> 00:29:26.200
It takes a while sometimes.

00:29:26.200 --> 00:29:28.500
So I decided that I wanted a Unix machine at home.

00:29:28.500 --> 00:29:32.500
And I went out there I was able to
use Linux together with the PC.

00:29:32.700 --> 00:29:36.500
For about 2,000 dollars, I put together a system.

00:29:36.500 --> 00:29:39.400
That was one and a half to two times faster

00:29:39.400 --> 00:29:42.100
than that 7,000 dollars Sun Sparc Station.

00:29:42.100 --> 00:29:43.800
It was absolutely amazing.

00:29:43.800 --> 00:29:46.800
I had one and a half to two times the speed,

00:29:46.800 --> 00:29:49.500
at a third to fourth the price.

00:29:49.500 --> 00:29:50.800
Light bulbs went off.

00:29:50.800 --> 00:29:53.000
I knew there was an opportunity here.

00:29:53.000 --> 00:29:57.000
This was the chance to really do something
better than what Sun has done

00:29:57.100 --> 00:29:59.700
around open source and Linux.

00:30:00.100 --> 00:30:03.300
I called it Linux originally as working name.

00:30:03.300 --> 00:30:06.800
And that was just because Linus

00:30:06.800 --> 00:30:08.000
and the it has to be there.

00:30:08.000 --> 00:30:10.100
It's Unix. It's like a law.

00:30:11.400 --> 00:30:14.000
And...what happened was that...

00:30:14.000 --> 00:30:17.800
I initially thought that I can't call it Linux publicly,

00:30:17.800 --> 00:30:20.100
because it is just too egotistical.

00:30:20.100 --> 00:30:22.400
And that was before I had a big ego. Right?

00:30:22.400 --> 00:30:26.700
They thought they were taking a whole bunch
of components putting them around Linux

00:30:27.400 --> 00:30:30.400
So they ended up calling the whole thing
"A Linux System"

00:30:31.000 --> 00:30:33.100
and somehow that term caught on.

00:30:33.100 --> 00:30:34.600
And the result is

00:30:34.600 --> 00:30:38.600
there are now ten million people using

00:30:38.600 --> 00:30:40.100
this variant of the GNU system...

00:30:40.100 --> 00:30:42.400
the GNU/Linux operating system.

00:30:42.800 --> 00:30:44.500
And most of them don't know it.

00:30:44.800 --> 00:30:48.800
[ Some people advocate it be described as GNU/Linux.

00:30:49.200 --> 00:30:52.300
I mean what's your thought on
that? I would say, justify or... ]

00:30:52.300 --> 00:30:57.600
Well, I think it's justified but it is justified
if you actually make GNU distribution of Linux.

00:30:58.000 --> 00:31:05.100
The same way that I think that Red Hat Linux
is fine or SuSE Linux, or Debian Linux.

00:31:06.000 --> 00:31:09.000
Uh, because if you actually make your
own distribution of Linux

00:31:09.000 --> 00:31:10.800
You get to name the thing.

00:31:10.900 --> 00:31:14.900
But calling Linux in general "GNU Linux"
I think, is just ridiculous.

00:31:16.800 --> 00:31:18.600
I got involved in Fall '93.

00:31:19.100 --> 00:31:25.100
Because I was sent a copy of the first CD-ROM
commercial Linux distribution,

00:31:25.100 --> 00:31:28.500
which was called Yggdrasi produced by Adam Richter.

00:31:28.900 --> 00:31:30.600
And I got a copy because...

00:31:30.600 --> 00:31:34.500
I had been myself writing Free Software for
a long time since the early 80's.

00:31:34.500 --> 00:31:37.100
I was actually one of the
early GNU contributors myself.

00:31:37.900 --> 00:31:39.800
And I was absolutely astonished,

00:31:39.800 --> 00:31:41.300
I was completely astonished.

00:31:41.300 --> 00:31:45.300
Because I've been a software engineer
for nearly 15 years at that point.

00:31:46.000 --> 00:31:48.200
And according to all the rules I knew...

00:31:48.200 --> 00:31:51.900
about controlling complexity,
keeping a project group small,

00:31:51.900 --> 00:31:54.700
having closely managed objectives.

00:31:54.700 --> 00:31:57.000
Linux should have been a disaster, and it wasn't.

00:31:57.000 --> 00:31:59.100
Instead, it was something wonderful,

00:31:59.100 --> 00:32:02.400
and I was determined to figure out
how they were getting a way with that.

00:32:04.500 --> 00:32:07.900
In order for Linux to grow beyond
the world of the computer programmer

00:32:07.900 --> 00:32:11.900
It needed a use and application
that made it a must-have technology

00:32:12.600 --> 00:32:13.900
That threshold was crossed

00:32:13.900 --> 00:32:17.700
with the development of a program
that made complex websites possible

00:32:18.200 --> 00:32:20.600
That program is the Apache web server.

00:32:21.300 --> 00:32:24.600
The killer app of Linux was undoubtedly
the Apache web server.

00:32:25.200 --> 00:32:27.100
If you look at the history of Linux,

00:32:27.100 --> 00:32:28.800
the adoption curve of Linux and
the adoption curve of the Internet

00:32:28.800 --> 00:32:31.600
the adoption curve of Linux and
the adoption curve of the Internet

00:32:31.600 --> 00:32:33.100
exactly track each other.

00:32:33.100 --> 00:32:38.100
1993, which was when the Apache
web server project really got started,

00:32:38.100 --> 00:32:41.700
was also the beginnings of the popular ISP explosion

00:32:41.700 --> 00:32:45.500
when the Internet first became a mass market commodity

00:32:45.500 --> 00:32:47.900
and the idea of web-based electronic commerce

00:32:47.900 --> 00:32:50.300
and, and mass communication became real.

00:32:50.900 --> 00:32:54.100
I think it was one of the first applications
that caused people to go

00:32:54.100 --> 00:32:56.000
"Well, if I install Linux."

00:32:56.000 --> 00:32:59.000
I get some tangible benefit from doing so, right?

00:32:59.500 --> 00:33:02.800
I mean, clearly there were a lot of
interesting applications on Linux

00:33:02.800 --> 00:33:04.700
at, at the time, this being maybe
two or three years ago,

00:33:04.700 --> 00:33:06.600
when the root thing really started to take off

00:33:06.600 --> 00:33:09.300
but there wasn't a driving, you know,

00:33:09.300 --> 00:33:10.600
you could almost say business case

00:33:10.600 --> 00:33:13.500
for someone to use Linux versus using NT

00:33:13.500 --> 00:33:16.800
until, I think, Apache and
a lot of the things that plugged into Apache

00:33:16.800 --> 00:33:18.300
enhanced Apache

00:33:18.300 --> 00:33:21.300
I mean, when you want to go out and build..
go out to build a server farm

00:33:21.800 --> 00:33:23.600
It was much more cost effective

00:33:23.600 --> 00:33:24.200
cost effective

00:33:24.200 --> 00:33:29.100
real dollar returns to build it on Linux and Apache
than was to build it on IIS and NT

00:33:29.100 --> 00:33:31.500
even if it meant that you have to
spend a little bit of money

00:33:31.500 --> 00:33:33.100
to train your staff to learn how to use that or

00:33:33.100 --> 00:33:34.800
to find people who were people who
were knowledgeable.

00:33:34.800 --> 00:33:35.900
But the good news was that

00:33:35.900 --> 00:33:37.600
the knowledge wasn't very expensive

00:33:37.600 --> 00:33:39.300
because there were all those college students out there

00:33:39.300 --> 00:33:42.700
who'd been using Linux for a long time
and were very familiar with it.

00:33:42.700 --> 00:33:45.900
If you look at the trend curves in web servers

00:33:45.900 --> 00:33:49.600
Apache has steadily been gaining
a market share ever since

00:33:49.600 --> 00:33:52.100
it's up to something like 66% now

00:33:52.100 --> 00:33:55.300
It's steadily clobbered
all of the closed source competition

00:33:55.300 --> 00:33:59.700
And that's because it's more reliable
it's more flexible, it's more extensible

00:33:59.700 --> 00:34:03.000
It does what webmasters actually need

00:34:03.200 --> 00:34:06.000
and the combination of Apache and Linux

00:34:06.000 --> 00:34:08.300
found its way into a great many commercial shops.

00:34:09.200 --> 00:34:13.800
Essentially, Apache became the application
that motivated Internet service providers

00:34:13.800 --> 00:34:17.800
and e-commerce companies to choose Linux
over Microsoft's Windows.

00:34:19.000 --> 00:34:22.100
It would probably runs best on Linux and on FreeBSD

00:34:22.100 --> 00:34:25.700
and the reason is the
communities around those operating systems

00:34:25.700 --> 00:34:30.100
are also the communities that
contribute the most back to Apache, right?

00:34:30.100 --> 00:34:34.100
And there were also the operating systems
that Internet service providers

00:34:34.100 --> 00:34:35.900
started using very heavily as well

00:34:36.500 --> 00:34:39.400
and Internet service providers really liked Apache

00:34:39.400 --> 00:34:40.800
because it allowed them to do

00:34:40.800 --> 00:34:44.100
a lot of different things
that some of the commercial web servers didn't

00:34:44.100 --> 00:34:48.100
such as the ability to host more than
one web site on a single box, which clearly

00:34:48.200 --> 00:34:50.800
if you are an ISP and you would have 40,000 users

00:34:50.800 --> 00:34:52.000
and they all want their web site

00:34:52.000 --> 00:34:53.600
it's gonna be pretty important to you.

00:34:54.900 --> 00:34:57.200
one of the key factors in the growth of Linux was

00:34:57.200 --> 00:35:00.000
the creation of companies that
specialized in the distribution

00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:02.100
and support of the Operating System itself

00:35:02.300 --> 00:35:05.700
Among these companies,
Red Hat Software is the best known.

00:35:05.700 --> 00:35:09.100
Red Hat started as a product of Marc Ewing

00:35:09.100 --> 00:35:10.700
while he was working at IBM.

00:35:10.700 --> 00:35:12.700
He wanted a little better Linux distribution

00:35:12.700 --> 00:35:14.100
he started playing around,

00:35:14.100 --> 00:35:18.100
found out he uh, he spent more time
maintaining his Linux distribution

00:35:18.300 --> 00:35:21.300
than he did uh,
than he did working on his new project.

00:35:21.300 --> 00:35:25.000
So he uh, sort of started the distribution himself

00:35:25.000 --> 00:35:26.600
He met up with Bob Young,

00:35:26.600 --> 00:35:29.500
who at the time was running company called
ACC Bookstore

00:35:29.500 --> 00:35:32.900
which was a mail-order PC Unix uh, catalog

00:35:32.900 --> 00:35:34.800
And Bob kind of knew he wanted something,

00:35:34.800 --> 00:35:36.900
you know, more his own to market,

00:35:36.900 --> 00:35:39.300
rather than reselling other people's products

00:35:39.300 --> 00:35:42.400
And he was fairly good at marketing, and...

00:35:42.400 --> 00:35:43.800
Mark knew he needed some marketing help

00:35:43.800 --> 00:35:46.800
because he was very good at the technical parts,
so they kinda got together

00:35:46.800 --> 00:35:51.100
I started working with Red Hat in May of 1995,
basically right out of NC State.

00:35:51.100 --> 00:35:56.100
along with Eric Troan who, me and him
combined make up employees #4 and #5.

00:35:57.000 --> 00:36:01.000
We actually reported to work in an apartment
that Mark Ewing used to live in

00:36:02.300 --> 00:36:06.200
We took it over as kind of
the development part of Red Hat software

00:36:06.200 --> 00:36:10.100
and stayed that way till about November of 1995 when...

00:36:10.300 --> 00:36:12.900
a toilet we had in the apartment kind of exploded,

00:36:12.900 --> 00:36:14.300
flooded our downstairs neighbor

00:36:14.300 --> 00:36:17.400
and she got little upset and...

00:36:17.400 --> 00:36:19.600
the apartment folks found out
we were running a business there

00:36:19.600 --> 00:36:21.700
instead of actually living there the same time

00:36:21.700 --> 00:36:23.100
So they decided to throw us out.

00:36:23.100 --> 00:36:25.300
So at that point, we had about a week to go find

00:36:25.300 --> 00:36:27.600
our first office, which we did

00:36:27.600 --> 00:36:29.600
and get ourselves moved in a hurry

00:36:40.100 --> 00:36:45.100
We started going in again '95 or so
to the venture capital firms,

00:36:45.100 --> 00:36:48.000
asking, saying, there's something happening here.

00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:50.100
There's a great business opportunity,

00:36:50.100 --> 00:36:54.100
to build the next Sun for open source.

00:36:54.300 --> 00:36:57.500
Well, the venture capitalists looked at this and said

00:36:57.500 --> 00:37:00.000
"Gee, you are selling systems

00:37:00.000 --> 00:37:02.100
the software is free. This is kind of scary.

00:37:02.100 --> 00:37:04.600
We're not sure that we want to put money in. And...

00:37:04.600 --> 00:37:08.000
by the way, we funded other systems companies

00:37:08.000 --> 00:37:10.900
and it hasn't really panned out. We are scared."

00:37:13.100 --> 00:37:16.200
I came to the US about 3 years ago,

00:37:16.200 --> 00:37:18.500
and the reason really was that I'd been spending

00:37:19.800 --> 00:37:22.800
like 6 or 7 years at Helsinki University.

00:37:22.800 --> 00:37:27.100
and decide it was time to see the real world
and not just university life.

00:37:27.100 --> 00:37:32.100
Especially this area had a lot of the most
interesting work being done.

00:37:33.600 --> 00:37:35.400
So I just decided that...

00:37:35.400 --> 00:37:39.400
let's try to move half way across the world,

00:37:39.900 --> 00:37:41.100
and give this a try.

00:37:41.100 --> 00:37:43.100
And it's turned out pretty well.

00:37:43.100 --> 00:37:46.000
[ Ah...you see this as temporary or long term? ]

00:37:46.500 --> 00:37:49.100
Well, we saw it as temporary at first.

00:37:49.100 --> 00:37:53.100
And I think it's certainly looking like
it's turning into long term.

00:37:53.400 --> 00:37:56.900
Our youngest daughter is
both US and Finnish citizen,

00:37:56.900 --> 00:37:58.400
because she was born here

00:37:59.000 --> 00:38:03.000
and the older one is speaking
both Swedish and English, so...

00:38:27.200 --> 00:38:31.200
The next major event was one that
I had directed hand in.

00:38:31.300 --> 00:38:34.100
I wrote a paper, called
"The Cathedral & the Bazaar".

00:38:34.100 --> 00:38:37.800
which was my observations,
my anthropological analysis

00:38:37.800 --> 00:38:40.100
of what it was that made
the open source world work.

00:38:40.100 --> 00:38:45.400
We didn't call it that then. We were still
using the term "Free Software" primarily.

00:38:45.400 --> 00:38:48.100
So it was my observation of
what made the Free Software world work

00:38:48.100 --> 00:38:52.400
and why we were able to
produce extremely high quality software

00:38:52.900 --> 00:38:56.900
in spite of constantly violating all of
the standard rules of software engineering

00:38:57.800 --> 00:39:00.500
In that paper, I was setting up a contrast

00:39:00.500 --> 00:39:02.700
between two different styles of development,

00:39:02.700 --> 00:39:04.400
two opposed styles of development.

00:39:04.400 --> 00:39:10.000
One, which is the
conventional closed development style,

00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:12.500
which I called the "Cathedral" style.

00:39:12.500 --> 00:39:15.800
In that one, you have
tight specification of objectives.

00:39:15.800 --> 00:39:21.100
Small project groups which are run
in a fairly hierarchical authoritarian manner.

00:39:22.300 --> 00:39:24.800
And you have long release intervals

00:39:25.600 --> 00:39:28.500
On the other hand,what I identified
is happening in the Linux world

00:39:28.500 --> 00:39:34.100
was a much more peer to peer decentralized,
market or bazaar-like style,

00:39:34.500 --> 00:39:36.100
which has a very short release intervals

00:39:36.100 --> 00:39:41.100
and constant solicitation of feedback from people
who are formally outside of the project.

00:39:41.100 --> 00:39:45.100
A very intense peer review process.

00:39:45.400 --> 00:39:48.100
And the startling thing was that the more I looked at this,

00:39:48.100 --> 00:39:52.100
the more it seemed that trading away
all the supposed advantages

00:39:52.900 --> 00:39:55.000
of conventional closed development,

00:39:55.000 --> 00:39:59.000
for that one single advantage
of massive independent peer review

00:39:59.000 --> 00:40:03.000
actually seemed to win,
actually seemed to get you good results.

00:40:06.500 --> 00:40:08.400
The reason Netscape is important is

00:40:08.400 --> 00:40:13.300
that they were the first large company
to participate in open source.

00:40:13.300 --> 00:40:15.100
We had Cygnus providing support,

00:40:15.100 --> 00:40:17.700
but we didn't really have much business.

00:40:17.700 --> 00:40:21.500
And Netscape went open source essentially
as a way to fight Microsoft.

00:40:21.500 --> 00:40:25.300
Which was giving away Internet Explorer,

00:40:25.300 --> 00:40:29.300
but not letting anyone else have the source code,
not letting companies collaborate.

00:40:30.300 --> 00:40:32.000
Working as part of the sales force, I got a bit of,

00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:34.400
I got a good idea of.. of why people bought our software

00:40:34.400 --> 00:40:38.400
and what it took to make our software successful
in the marketplace against competitive products.

00:40:39.800 --> 00:40:41.100
However, the problem was,

00:40:41.100 --> 00:40:44.700
we were seeing, as that, as time went on,

00:40:44.700 --> 00:40:48.100
our software was uh,

00:40:48.100 --> 00:40:51.900
being competed against by other
people's software, particularly Microsoft's

00:40:51.900 --> 00:40:55.700
and as time went on, the price of our software had to drop

00:40:55.700 --> 00:40:57.800
because other people were giving their software away

00:40:57.800 --> 00:41:00.800
at no charge or at little charge.

00:41:00.800 --> 00:41:03.000
Now the real problem was that they feared

00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:06.500
Microsoft would achieve a monopoly lock on the browser market

00:41:06.500 --> 00:41:10.300
and they would then use that monopoly lock to

00:41:10.300 --> 00:41:11.900
pervert actually,

00:41:11.900 --> 00:41:15.900
the HTTP and HTML standards that the web depends on.

00:41:15.900 --> 00:41:19.900
And once they had turned those
standards in to lock in devices,

00:41:19.900 --> 00:41:23.900
they could then use that control
to drive Netscape out of the server market,

00:41:24.300 --> 00:41:26.600
which was where it was making its real money.

00:41:26.600 --> 00:41:29.500
My concern was that as time went on,

00:41:31.000 --> 00:41:33.300
Netscape's business would be threatened,

00:41:33.300 --> 00:41:37.100
by the fact that we didn't have enough people
to do what we needed to do as a company

00:41:37.100 --> 00:41:41.000
in order to keep our software viable in the marketplace.

00:41:41.500 --> 00:41:45.300
The Netscape release happened in early 1998.

00:41:45.300 --> 00:41:49.300
And uh, I was told later, I had no idea at the time,

00:41:50.300 --> 00:41:52.600
that it came about as a direct result of

00:41:52.600 --> 00:41:55.400
the right people having read
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

00:41:55.900 --> 00:41:59.600
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar",
the paper by Eric Raymond,

00:41:59.600 --> 00:42:05.200
was a significant influence on
Netscape's decision to release source code.

00:42:05.900 --> 00:42:08.100
It came as a complete shock to me.

00:42:08.100 --> 00:42:10.300
I wasn't really ready for the thought

00:42:10.300 --> 00:42:12.500
that I was changing the world even by accident.

00:42:13.200 --> 00:42:17.200
However he was not by any means
the only influence on that decision.

00:42:17.500 --> 00:42:19.700
Uh, and not necessarily the most important one,

00:42:19.700 --> 00:42:21.400
when all is said and done.

00:42:21.400 --> 00:42:23.600
As I said, Netscape,

00:42:23.600 --> 00:42:27.600
Netscape had already been talking about
releasing source code for quite some time before

00:42:28.300 --> 00:42:30.200
anyone ever heard of Eric's paper.

00:42:30.600 --> 00:42:32.600
Linux Congress in early 1997,

00:42:32.600 --> 00:42:35.600
which was the first place that I gave that paper.

00:42:35.900 --> 00:42:39.900
And one of the people who heard it was
Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly and Associates.

00:42:40.400 --> 00:42:43.300
And uh, he thought it was pretty intriguing

00:42:43.300 --> 00:42:47.300
and he asked me to give it at
his first PERL conference, which was uh..

00:42:47.300 --> 00:42:49.900
later that year, in Fall of 97.

00:42:50.600 --> 00:42:52.500
And apparently what happened, I was told later,

00:42:52.500 --> 00:42:55.000
although I had no idea that this was happening at the time,

00:42:55.400 --> 00:43:01.500
uh is that some people from Netscape actually
heard the paper at the PERL conference

00:43:01.500 --> 00:43:05.500
and took those ideas back to Netscape and
they kind of lit a fire there.

00:43:05.600 --> 00:43:09.600
The role of my paper was essentially
to make the internal case at Netscape, uh

00:43:09.700 --> 00:43:13.700
to make the business case for
why Netscape should release its source code.

00:43:13.900 --> 00:43:17.500
The paper was called
"Netscape Source Code As Netscape Product".

00:43:18.200 --> 00:43:22.200
uh.. a strange title,
essentially what the title meant was that

00:43:22.800 --> 00:43:24.000
In my opinion we needed to

00:43:24.100 --> 00:43:27.900
think of source code not just as something
that was used in creating our products,

00:43:27.900 --> 00:43:30.100
but as something that was a product in its own right.

00:43:30.500 --> 00:43:33.200
Something that customers might use, other people might use.

00:43:33.700 --> 00:43:36.500
I then looked at what the business models might be

00:43:36.500 --> 00:43:39.400
if we released source code for our products.

00:43:39.400 --> 00:43:41.100
How would we license them?

00:43:41.100 --> 00:43:45.100
How do we sell products in this environment?

00:43:46.400 --> 00:43:49.600
Then I looked at the competition, particularly Microsoft.

00:43:49.600 --> 00:43:52.200
What would they be likely to do
if we released source code?

00:43:52.200 --> 00:43:54.800
Was there some way they could
use our source code against us?

00:43:54.800 --> 00:43:58.800
I used Eric's paper as an example of
how distributed development could work,

00:43:59.600 --> 00:44:03.400
how a company could develop software not
just using their own people,

00:44:03.400 --> 00:44:06.200
but also working with people on the Internet.

00:44:07.300 --> 00:44:10.900
And that's why I included a reference to
Eric's paper in my paper.

00:44:11.200 --> 00:44:12.700
Once my paper was circulated,

00:44:12.700 --> 00:44:15.100
the people who read my paper would naturally enough

00:44:15.100 --> 00:44:18.100
find a reference to Eric's paper
and read that as well.

00:44:18.100 --> 00:44:20.700
[ And who was involved in
making that happen at Netscape? ]

00:44:21.700 --> 00:44:25.100
Primarily the person who made the
actual decision was Jim Barksdale.

00:44:25.900 --> 00:44:28.000
And this turned out to be important later.

00:44:28.000 --> 00:44:30.800
That our big win, the big score

00:44:30.800 --> 00:44:34.400
that gave us mainstream
visibility and credibility with investors

00:44:34.400 --> 00:44:38.400
came not because of bottom up evangelism
from a bunch of engineers,

00:44:38.500 --> 00:44:41.600
but because one strategist at the top

00:44:41.600 --> 00:44:43.900
saw the potential power of this method and

00:44:43.900 --> 00:44:46.800
then essentially imposed that vision
on everyone underneath him.

00:44:47.900 --> 00:44:51.100
When I completed the paper,
I first gave a copy to Mark Andreessen,

00:44:51.100 --> 00:44:55.100
who was co-founder of Netscape and
was at the time one of,

00:44:55.100 --> 00:44:56.900
on the senior management team at Netscape.

00:44:56.900 --> 00:45:00.900
Mark then gave a copy of the paper to several
other people within Netscape management,

00:45:01.000 --> 00:45:03.100
including Jim Barksdale.

00:45:03.100 --> 00:45:06.200
I'm not sure exactly when Jim and
the other senior managers

00:45:06.200 --> 00:45:08.300
made the actual decision,

00:45:09.000 --> 00:45:11.300
I believe it was in early January sometime.

00:45:11.400 --> 00:45:15.900
Netscape actually announced that it was gonna
release the source code on Jan 22nd,

00:45:16.400 --> 00:45:19.900
the same time it was going to give
Communicator away for free.

00:45:20.300 --> 00:45:23.000
When Netscape decided to release the source code,

00:45:23.000 --> 00:45:25.400
people sort of got a wake up notice and said

00:45:25.400 --> 00:45:28.900
"Hey, maybe there is something to this idea
of releasing source code

00:45:28.900 --> 00:45:32.400
and doing development with people
outside your company."

00:45:33.400 --> 00:45:38.200
So Netscape's decision brought a lot of
public attention to the idea of Free Software,

00:45:38.200 --> 00:45:40.500
what became known as Open Source,

00:45:40.500 --> 00:45:43.000
and brought a lot of attention to
the Linux operating system,

00:45:43.000 --> 00:45:47.000
which was one of the most prominent examples of
Open Source software at that time.

00:45:52.500 --> 00:45:55.800
This is our first office, Mountain View, California.

00:45:55.800 --> 00:45:58.200
We moved here in early 1995.

00:45:58.200 --> 00:46:00.100
This is 4,000 square feet.

00:46:00.100 --> 00:46:06.700
It was an incredible leap of faith for us to
move out and take the company to our own office.

00:46:06.700 --> 00:46:09.700
Now what's really important about this place

00:46:09.700 --> 00:46:13.300
is that this is the office
where the term "Open Source" was invented.

00:46:13.300 --> 00:46:18.000
If you walk in to an executive's office
and say "Free Software",

00:46:18.300 --> 00:46:22.100
OK, If you're lucky, the response
you'll get is something like,

00:46:22.100 --> 00:46:28.600
"hmm, hmm, Free Software, must be
cheap, shoddy, worthless."

00:46:28.600 --> 00:46:32.600
Uh, and if you're not lucky,
it has associations with, uh.

00:46:34.000 --> 00:46:38.000
with the Free Software Foundation's
wholesale attack on intellectual property rights,

00:46:38.400 --> 00:46:41.000
which regardless of what
you think about the ethics of that,

00:46:41.000 --> 00:46:45.000
it's lousy marketing, it's not something
that businesses want to hear.

00:46:45.500 --> 00:46:47.900
So Eric Raymond knew there was a problem.

00:46:47.900 --> 00:46:50.100
We'd been calling this Free Software,

00:46:50.100 --> 00:46:54.100
but people took the term "Free"
and associated with "Free of charge",

00:46:54.500 --> 00:46:57.200
they thought they couldn't make money or couldn't sell,

00:46:57.200 --> 00:46:59.100
which is exactly the wrong concept.

00:46:59.100 --> 00:47:04.700
We wanted to get across the idea the software
was open and that the source code was available.

00:47:04.700 --> 00:47:07.000
Very important pieces.

00:47:07.000 --> 00:47:10.700
We had this meeting at the VA offices
in Mountain View, where Eric,

00:47:10.700 --> 00:47:17.200
myself, and Christine Peterson from Foresight Institute
joined us as well as some other people.

00:47:17.200 --> 00:47:20.100
Christine Peterson was there by phone. uh..

00:47:22.000 --> 00:47:25.600
Jon "Mad dog" Hall was also there by phone. uh..

00:47:26.400 --> 00:47:30.300
And then Todd Anderson, who later worked for
SuSE for a while was there.

00:47:30.300 --> 00:47:33.300
Sam Ockman who now runs Penguin Computing was there.

00:47:33.300 --> 00:47:36.700
He was uh.. He was an employee of VA at the time

00:47:36.700 --> 00:47:39.600
Well, we came up with the concept of Open Source,

00:47:39.600 --> 00:47:42.900
we called Linus in fact and asked Linus if he liked it.

00:47:42.900 --> 00:47:46.100
He was interested, He liked it.

00:47:46.100 --> 00:47:48.600
Eventually we came up with something that replaced "Free Software".

00:47:48.600 --> 00:47:50.200
That was the beginning of Open Source.

00:47:50.200 --> 00:47:52.300
[ How did you chose words "Open Source"? ]

00:47:53.100 --> 00:47:57.100
You know, I think Christine Peterson was
the person who really came up with the idea.

00:47:57.500 --> 00:48:04.300
Uh, we wanted, again, the idea
that the source code was out there and it was open.

00:48:04.300 --> 00:48:05.700
There weren't many choices.

00:48:07.800 --> 00:48:11.800
Well, since the fist three recipients have
spoken for the Open Source movement,

00:48:12.800 --> 00:48:16.300
I think I should speak about
the Free Software movement.

00:48:16.300 --> 00:48:19.800
The Open Source movement,
focuses on practical advantages

00:48:19.800 --> 00:48:22.500
that you can get by having a community of users

00:48:22.500 --> 00:48:26.500
who can cooperate on interchanging and improving software.

00:48:26.600 --> 00:48:30.400
I agree completely with the points they make about that.

00:48:30.400 --> 00:48:34.900
The reason why my views are different,
while I am in the Free Software movement

00:48:34.900 --> 00:48:37.000
rather than the Open Source movement,

00:48:37.000 --> 00:48:40.000
is that I believe there's something
more important at stake.

00:48:40.000 --> 00:48:45.000
That freedom to cooperate with other people,
freedom to have a community...

00:48:45.000 --> 00:48:47.200
is important for our quality of life.

00:48:47.200 --> 00:48:51.200
It's important for having a good society
that we can live in.

00:48:51.300 --> 00:48:57.300
And that that is in my view, even more important
than having powerful and reliable software.

00:48:57.800 --> 00:49:01.800
But I think some of the people in
the Free Software camp...

00:49:02.600 --> 00:49:06.000
are a little scared by the commercialization.

00:49:08.000 --> 00:49:12.000
And uh, you know,
of course a rebel is put off by success.

00:49:12.300 --> 00:49:15.900
uh.. I think that commercialization is very important.

00:49:15.900 --> 00:49:18.700
We want to mainstream this software,

00:49:18.700 --> 00:49:23.900
and I work with Richard Stallman
who's the gray haired man of Free Software,

00:49:25.400 --> 00:49:28.400
uh, on a regular basis, and I don't feel

00:49:28.400 --> 00:49:31.900
I have any philosophical differences.

00:49:31.900 --> 00:49:35.000
me as author the Open Source definition and

00:49:35.000 --> 00:49:40.300
he is originator of free software as an organized thing,

00:49:41.800 --> 00:49:44.800
except for one thing.
Richard thinks that all software should be free,

00:49:44.800 --> 00:49:49.500
and I think that free software and
non-free software should coexist.

00:49:49.500 --> 00:49:51.200
That's the only difference we have.

00:49:52.000 --> 00:49:54.800
Uh, we decided early on that what we needed,

00:49:54.800 --> 00:49:58.800
a..a definition, we needed a kind of
meta-license to define the term "Open Source".

00:49:59.000 --> 00:49:59.800
a, a definition, we needed a kind of
meta-license to define the term "Open Source".

00:49:59.800 --> 00:50:03.600
And what we came up with is a document called
"The Open Source Definition".

00:50:03.600 --> 00:50:08.800
It's derived from the Debian Free Software guidelines
that were originally written by Bruce Parens.

00:50:09.300 --> 00:50:12.600
I'd written the original draft of that, uh,

00:50:12.600 --> 00:50:16.100
discussed it for a month with the Debian developers

00:50:16.100 --> 00:50:18.800
Debian is a Linux distribution

00:50:18.800 --> 00:50:22.000
And made it their project policy

00:50:22.000 --> 00:50:24.900
And Eric and I decided to relabel

00:50:25.700 --> 00:50:27.800
what we'd written for Debian

00:50:27.800 --> 00:50:29.100
as The Open Source definition

00:50:29.100 --> 00:50:31.400
and to say Open Source is a software

00:50:31.800 --> 00:50:34.300
that gives you a list of nine rights

00:50:34.300 --> 00:50:36.600
which is in the Open Source definition.

00:50:37.600 --> 00:50:40.400
The first right is Free Redistribution

00:50:40.400 --> 00:50:42.800
This doesn't mean Free as in no price

00:50:42.800 --> 00:50:45.000
It means liberty

00:50:45.800 --> 00:50:48.600
Um, you have to be free to redistribute

00:50:48.600 --> 00:50:50.100
your software to someone else

00:50:50.100 --> 00:50:52.300
And actually no price is a side effect

00:50:52.300 --> 00:50:55.600
You can charge for that redistribution or not

00:50:55.600 --> 00:50:57.800
It has to come with source code

00:50:58.100 --> 00:51:01.500
So that someone can maintain a program.

00:51:01.500 --> 00:51:04.200
If they go from a PC to a Mac for example

00:51:04.600 --> 00:51:07.600
they can change the software.

00:51:07.600 --> 00:51:10.000
Derived Works have to be possible

00:51:10.000 --> 00:51:12.700
If someone has to improve your program

00:51:12.700 --> 00:51:18.000
um, they should be able to distribute the result

00:51:18.000 --> 00:51:21.500
uh, There is a provision about integrity

00:51:21.500 --> 00:51:22.800
of the author's source code

00:51:23.000 --> 00:51:27.900
which says that the author can sort of
maintain their honor

00:51:27.900 --> 00:51:29.700
and if you make a change

00:51:30.100 --> 00:51:32.400
you might have to change the name of the program

00:51:32.400 --> 00:51:35.100
or mark out your change very clearly

00:51:35.100 --> 00:51:38.500
so that your change doesn't reflect on the author

00:51:38.500 --> 00:51:42.300
There is no discrimination against people or groups.

00:51:42.400 --> 00:51:44.200
Uh, the example I usually use is

00:51:44.900 --> 00:51:47.400
You can't stop an abortion clinic

00:51:47.400 --> 00:51:50.600
or an anti-abortion activist from using the software

00:51:50.600 --> 00:51:54.200
There is no discrimination against fields of endeavor

00:51:54.600 --> 00:51:57.400
And that means the software has to be usable

00:51:57.600 --> 00:52:00.900
in a business as well as in a school

00:52:00.900 --> 00:52:04.400
The license has to be distributable

00:52:04.500 --> 00:52:05.500
In other words

00:52:05.700 --> 00:52:08.900
I have to be able to give that license to someone

00:52:08.900 --> 00:52:12.300
and that license then should work

00:52:12.300 --> 00:52:15.000
if that someone gives it to yet a third person

00:52:15.000 --> 00:52:18.800
The license can't be specific to a product

00:52:18.800 --> 00:52:20.000
in other words

00:52:20.000 --> 00:52:25.200
if I distribute my software on a Red Hat system

00:52:25.200 --> 00:52:26.800
the license can't say

00:52:26.800 --> 00:52:30.500
you can't distribute this on a SuSE or Debian system

00:52:30.500 --> 00:52:34.000
The license can't contaminate other software

00:52:34.000 --> 00:52:40.400
So if I distribute this on a CD with another program

00:52:40.400 --> 00:52:43.600
It can't say that other program must be free

00:52:43.600 --> 00:52:46.500
otherwise you can't distribute my software

00:52:46.500 --> 00:52:49.200
And then the only other part of

00:52:49.200 --> 00:52:50.400
the Open Source definition

00:52:50.400 --> 00:52:53.200
is a list of licenses that were accepted

00:52:53.200 --> 00:52:57.100
And the ones that we started with were the GPL

00:52:57.100 --> 00:53:00.200
which was actually the example for a lot of

00:53:00.200 --> 00:53:03.700
what's in the Open Source definition in the BSD license

00:53:03.700 --> 00:53:07.700
because software for BSD system pre-existed Linux

00:53:13.500 --> 00:53:17.300
I think the next moment that I thought
was really pivotal

00:53:17.300 --> 00:53:19.500
was when the database vendors flipped over

00:53:19.500 --> 00:53:21.500
which happened about three months sooner

00:53:21.500 --> 00:53:22.600
than I expected to

00:53:22.600 --> 00:53:25.000
and actually happened in late July early August

00:53:25.000 --> 00:53:29.000
commitments to do one ports from Oracle and

00:53:29.300 --> 00:53:32.100
and Sybase and the other key database vendors.

00:53:32.100 --> 00:53:33.400
[ And why was that critical? ]

00:53:33.400 --> 00:53:35.500
because we knew that in order for

00:53:35.500 --> 00:53:37.800
the open source story to be credible

00:53:37.800 --> 00:53:40.500
and especially in order for the Linux story
to be credible,

00:53:40.500 --> 00:53:43.500
we'd have to get commitments from
independent software vendors

00:53:43.500 --> 00:53:47.000
to do ports of their applications to these platforms

00:53:47.000 --> 00:53:49.600
and I was actually kind of worried

00:53:49.600 --> 00:53:52.000
I thought that we were in a window of vulnerability

00:53:52.000 --> 00:53:55.400
between the time that we announced
the open source campaign

00:53:55.400 --> 00:53:57.200
and the database vendors flipped over

00:53:57.200 --> 00:53:59.800
that was the point in which hostile action

00:53:59.800 --> 00:54:03.500
by Microsoft or other close-source software companies

00:54:03.500 --> 00:54:04.800
that was the point in which

00:54:04.800 --> 00:54:07.300
a serious marketing bleeds might have suck us

00:54:07.300 --> 00:54:11.300
but once the big database vendors flipped over

00:54:11.300 --> 00:54:13.800
that opened the way for other ISVs

00:54:13.800 --> 00:54:15.700
that started the snow ball effect going

00:54:15.700 --> 00:54:17.800
Every six months or so

00:54:17.800 --> 00:54:19.400
I would come back to the venture capitalists

00:54:19.400 --> 00:54:21.100
I would show them the new numbers

00:54:21.100 --> 00:54:23.200
showing more and more people adopting Linux

00:54:23.200 --> 00:54:25.000
and new people porting, new users

00:54:25.000 --> 00:54:26.600
and I'd show them our customer list

00:54:26.600 --> 00:54:29.900
And our customer list was getting much more impressive

00:54:29.900 --> 00:54:32.500
It was people like Cisco that were beginning to appear

00:54:32.500 --> 00:54:35.000
people like, you know, those dot-com companies

00:54:35.000 --> 00:54:37.400
were started to show up on our customer list

00:54:37.400 --> 00:54:40.000
and eventually the venture capitalists

00:54:40.000 --> 00:54:42.000
you know, they kept looking at it

00:54:42.000 --> 00:54:43.800
they kept saying "Oh, we can't quite do it"

00:54:43.800 --> 00:54:47.000
Finally, Linus appeared on the cover of Fortune

00:54:47.000 --> 00:54:49.300
There was something happening with Open Source

00:54:49.300 --> 00:54:53.300
Well, at that point, the venture capitalists
couldn't ignore it

00:54:53.700 --> 00:54:56.600
they just got sick of hearing about Linux everywhere

00:54:56.600 --> 00:54:58.500
and they got tired of me, just, you know

00:54:58.500 --> 00:55:01.900
showing it to them every,
at that point it was almost every week

00:55:01.900 --> 00:55:04.500
So they uh, they decided it was time to invest,

00:55:04.500 --> 00:55:06.300
that there was something happening

00:55:06.300 --> 00:55:09.800
I announced Open Source to the world on the Internet

00:55:09.800 --> 00:55:13.200
I did a lot of the early... administrative the work of

00:55:13.200 --> 00:55:16.700
starting the Open Source Initiative

00:55:16.700 --> 00:55:18.500
and I think six months later

00:55:18.500 --> 00:55:21.000
I was reading the words Open Source

00:55:21.000 --> 00:55:23.600
in the news all the time

00:55:23.600 --> 00:55:25.900
And I was totally astounded

00:55:25.900 --> 00:55:27.100
And a year later, I believe

00:55:27.100 --> 00:55:31.100
Microsoft was talking about releasing some source code

00:55:32.200 --> 00:55:34.400
And someone in the press asked Steve Ballmer

00:55:34.400 --> 00:55:37.000
if they were going to open source their code

00:55:37.000 --> 00:55:38.500
and Steve Ballmer said,

00:55:38.500 --> 00:55:42.500
"Well, Open Source means more than
just releasing the source code"

00:55:42.800 --> 00:55:45.400
And I realized that he had read my document

00:55:45.400 --> 00:55:48.200
and understood it and was now telling
the press about this

00:55:48.600 --> 00:55:51.600
Now if you are like just a guy on the net

00:55:51.600 --> 00:55:53.900
who's not doing this for a job at all

00:55:53.900 --> 00:55:55.700
and you sort of write a manifesto

00:55:55.700 --> 00:55:58.000
and it spreads out through the world

00:55:58.000 --> 00:55:59.000
and a year later

00:55:59.000 --> 00:56:02.100
the vice president of Microsoft is talking about that

00:56:02.100 --> 00:56:05.400
You'd think you were on drugs, wouldn't you?

00:56:05.400 --> 00:56:07.100
But that's what really happened

00:56:13.000 --> 00:56:17.000
The Local Users Groups
tend to be more than an issue of

00:56:18.900 --> 00:56:21.000
building a social network

00:56:22.200 --> 00:56:27.800
especially getting people familiarized with the issues

00:56:29.400 --> 00:56:33.400
also just acting as a kind of supporting network

00:56:33.600 --> 00:56:38.900
for people who do not, for example, have the ability

00:56:38.900 --> 00:56:42.100
to pay for commercial support network

00:56:42.100 --> 00:56:44.700
So one thing they're doing in this area

00:56:44.700 --> 00:56:46.600
for example, is they're making these.

00:56:46.600 --> 00:56:48.700
I think it's once a month

00:56:48.700 --> 00:56:52.400
They're having install feasts, which mean that

00:56:54.100 --> 00:56:57.100
getting Linux installed on their machines

00:56:57.100 --> 00:56:58.600
or have some issue, I mean

00:56:58.600 --> 00:57:00.000
maybe they've installed Linux

00:57:00.000 --> 00:57:02.600
but want to set up the network in a specific way

00:57:02.600 --> 00:57:04.700
can actually bring in their machines

00:57:04.700 --> 00:57:05.800
to this users group meeting

00:57:05.800 --> 00:57:09.400
And there's a lot of people there willing to help

00:57:09.400 --> 00:57:13.400
who may have seen the same problem before.

00:57:22.400 --> 00:57:24.100
Well, actually things aren't so well.

00:57:24.100 --> 00:57:27.300
I tried it earlier myself. I had problems.

00:57:27.300 --> 00:57:29.700
And so I came to this install feast world.

00:57:29.700 --> 00:57:31.400
All the gurus abound.

00:57:31.400 --> 00:57:35.300
Hopefully I'll have better luck getting it in.

00:57:35.300 --> 00:57:38.100
Instead of having, uh, sending e-mails, or

00:57:38.100 --> 00:57:40.000
writing to news groups on the Internet

00:57:40.000 --> 00:57:42.500
and waiting several days for the answers sometimes

00:57:42.500 --> 00:57:45.500
it's easy to come here and find other people

00:57:45.500 --> 00:57:46.700
who might know about your problem

00:57:46.700 --> 00:57:48.600
and may be able to help you

00:57:48.600 --> 00:57:49.700
And hopefully within a few hours

00:57:49.700 --> 00:57:51.900
you have your machine installed

00:57:51.900 --> 00:57:55.900
Originally I wanted to it install on
uh, my larger laptop

00:57:56.100 --> 00:57:57.800
and I just did a search on the net

00:57:57.800 --> 00:58:01.800
and found where there were resources to get help

00:58:02.400 --> 00:58:04.100
And um, I'm here today

00:58:04.100 --> 00:58:07.800
cause I'm trying to put Linux on
this little guy right here.

00:58:07.800 --> 00:58:10.100
just a Toshiba Libretto

00:58:10.100 --> 00:58:12.700
It's not a easy thing in the world to do

00:58:12.700 --> 00:58:15.300
because it's a weird piece hardware, So...

00:58:15.300 --> 00:58:17.300
Any chairs right here?

00:58:29.200 --> 00:58:31.000
I think that Department of Justice case

00:58:31.000 --> 00:58:33.000
has made people aware of the fact that

00:58:33.000 --> 00:58:36.000
you should at least look for alternatives to Microsoft.

00:58:36.000 --> 00:58:40.000
and maybe Microsoft isn't the American dream after all

00:58:40.100 --> 00:58:42.000
and that kind of shifting perception

00:58:43.300 --> 00:58:45.100
you can very clearly see

00:58:45.100 --> 00:58:49.100
that people just took Microsoft for granted

00:58:49.600 --> 00:58:52.000
and maybe they're still buying Microsoft but at least

00:58:52.000 --> 00:58:54.900
they're kind of more aware of the issue these days

00:58:54.900 --> 00:58:57.600
Microsoft actually uses Linux as defense

00:58:57.600 --> 00:58:59.000
They used Linux to ground a claim

00:58:59.000 --> 00:59:00.000
that they don't have a monopoly

00:59:00.000 --> 00:59:03.100
because Linux could essentially

00:59:03.100 --> 00:59:05.000
push them off their catbird any time.

00:59:05.000 --> 00:59:07.800
It was a very ingenious argument,
totally specious

00:59:07.800 --> 00:59:09.600
because it didn't

00:59:09.600 --> 00:59:11.800
do anything to answer the charge

00:59:11.800 --> 00:59:13.400
that they had previously engaged in

00:59:13.400 --> 00:59:16.100
bullying and very anti-competitive practices.

00:59:16.100 --> 00:59:17.700
but it was clever of them

00:59:17.700 --> 00:59:20.200
And, in an event, the judge didn't buy it

00:59:22.500 --> 00:59:25.100
While ordinarily we in the Linux community are
rather worried about

00:59:25.100 --> 00:59:27.500
letting Microsoft become the issue,

00:59:27.500 --> 00:59:32.700
but there was a Slashdot article
about December of '98

00:59:32.700 --> 00:59:38.500
where a fellow named Matt at the noodle
had pointed out that...

00:59:38.500 --> 00:59:41.500
the of Australia has managed
to receive a refund for

00:59:41.500 --> 00:59:45.500
the unused copy of Windows that
came with his computer.

00:59:45.500 --> 00:59:50.000
So he declared the 19th of January, was January?

00:59:50.000 --> 00:59:52.400
err, no, It was February. It was February.
Oh, I'm sorry, the 19th the February...

00:59:52.400 --> 00:59:54.500
he declared 19th the February
Windows Refund Day.

00:59:54.500 --> 00:59:56.800
and he encouraged everyone to go to
the computer manufacturers,

00:59:56.800 --> 00:59:59.800
and return their unused copies of Windows...

00:59:59.800 --> 01:00:03.000
as it was specified in the
Windows End-User License Agreement.

01:00:03.000 --> 01:00:06.100
It's important to remember that
in the License itself, it says that

01:00:06.100 --> 01:00:11.000
you can receive a refund if you don't use the software,

01:00:11.000 --> 01:00:14.000
and that the manufacture is bound by law to do this...

01:00:14.000 --> 01:00:16.000
or it was bond by contract.

01:00:16.000 --> 01:00:19.000
and we found if you called up
these manufactures, they basically said...

01:00:19.000 --> 01:00:21.200
"Stop bothering me." and keep hanging up on you.

01:00:21.200 --> 01:00:24.200
We didn't really wanna sort of giving out our location,

01:00:24.200 --> 01:00:27.400
or where we were going to meet, until...

01:00:27.400 --> 01:00:28.400
you know, at the very last seconds.

01:00:28.400 --> 01:00:31.800
What we did is, we have people meet
at the place where we could control

01:00:31.800 --> 01:00:33.500
in the different towns around here.

01:00:33.500 --> 01:00:37.000
So I was the San Jose marshal, and I believe Nick you were...

01:00:37.000 --> 01:00:39.400
I was..., Rick Moen and I did San Francisco.

01:00:39.400 --> 01:00:39.900
Right

01:00:40.000 --> 01:00:44.000
and so we had the maps there and we
handed them off everybody who was coming.

01:00:44.000 --> 01:00:48.000
Well, we actually met at a Denny's
That's just outside of the Foster City limits...

01:00:48.000 --> 01:00:49.600
Foster City city limits,

01:00:49.600 --> 01:00:53.000
which meant also just outside of
Foster City Police jurisdiction,

01:00:53.000 --> 01:00:56.600
which meant any, any instances
that happened at the meeting point

01:00:56.600 --> 01:00:58.900
happened in the jurisdiction of San Mateo,

01:00:58.900 --> 01:01:02.500
and if they told us they get lost, we'd say,
"Fine, we are going to Foster city. Bye."

01:01:02.500 --> 01:01:06.000
It's sort of the Dukes of Hazzard method of
avoiding the cops, so...

01:01:07.500 --> 01:01:11.000
Well actually, originally we marched
on the other side of this building.

01:01:11.000 --> 01:01:15.000
We marched around and up onto the parking
structure that's up there,

01:01:15.000 --> 01:01:17.900
and that's where Microsoft had a reception
laid out for us with

01:01:17.900 --> 01:01:20.000
drinks
and a big sign that said...

01:01:20.000 --> 01:01:22.400
"Microsoft Welcomes the Open Source Community".

01:01:22.400 --> 01:01:26.400
and the local news cameras got shots of
Eric Raymond and Microsoft representative.

01:01:27.500 --> 01:01:30.400
Microsoft's story seems to mostly be that...

01:01:30.500 --> 01:01:35.000
...this was not an issue for Microsoft,
rather from the OEMs.

01:01:35.000 --> 01:01:38.300
So we all needed to go back to our
computer manufacturers and try yet again

01:01:38.300 --> 01:01:40.400
to try and get refund from them.

01:01:40.400 --> 01:01:42.100
We responded to them saying, you know,

01:01:42.100 --> 01:01:46.100
that we tried that and it's not possible,
we need Microsoft to take action at this point.

01:01:46.400 --> 01:01:49.000
And they just repeated the tag line
over and over again...

01:01:49.000 --> 01:01:52.000
"you need to go to the OEMs and manufacturers
and get your refunds there."

01:01:52.500 --> 01:01:58.000
We had about 150 people,
probably half of voyage had signs and such, so..

01:01:58.500 --> 01:02:02.000
Well, we ended up actually right
in this courtyard here.

01:02:02.500 --> 01:02:06.000
Basically we originally met, gathered outside,

01:02:06.000 --> 01:02:11.000
various people sent groups in,
people from FreeBSD camp sent a couple of folks in.

01:02:11.000 --> 01:02:15.000
We had Eric Raymond and Christ
actually tried to go up eventually.

01:02:15.300 --> 01:02:17.600
They had blocked the elevator off to us.

01:02:17.600 --> 01:02:18.800
[ Where are the offices? ]

01:02:18.800 --> 01:02:21.000
The offices are right up here on the 9th floor.

01:02:23.000 --> 01:02:25.100
We got some really nice parts out of it.

01:02:25.300 --> 01:02:26.500
and we think as a result

01:02:26.500 --> 01:02:30.500
Toshiba made a possible for you to buy
laptop without the operating system on it.

01:02:31.200 --> 01:02:33.000
So, it's a small victory, but...

01:02:33.100 --> 01:02:37.100
Well, even now, companies such as IBM and...

01:02:37.200 --> 01:02:39.500
a lot of other computer manufacturers
are allowing you...

01:02:39.500 --> 01:02:42.100
now to buy machines that don't have
Windows on them.

01:02:51.000 --> 01:02:53.800
When I was a kid and I went to school,

01:02:53.800 --> 01:02:56.100
the teachers will try to teach us to share.

01:02:56.100 --> 01:02:58.100
They said if you bring some candy,

01:02:58.100 --> 01:03:01.200
you can't eat it all yourself, you
got to share with other kids.

01:03:01.200 --> 01:03:06.800
But now the administration says teachers
should be teaching kids to say yes to licensing.

01:03:06.800 --> 01:03:09.800
If you bring some software to school,
"Oh! No, don't share it...

01:03:09.800 --> 01:03:13.800
...sharing means you're pirate,
sharing means you will be put in jail."

01:03:14.000 --> 01:03:18.000
That's not the way society should work.
We need the good will,

01:03:19.000 --> 01:03:23.000
the willingness to help other people
at least when it's not too hard,

01:03:23.300 --> 01:03:25.500
because that's the basis of society,

01:03:25.500 --> 01:03:28.000
that's the fundamental resource.

01:03:28.000 --> 01:03:31.900
They give us a society instead of
a dog-eat-dog jungle.

01:03:31.900 --> 01:03:33.100
[ So what about people say if that if

01:03:33.100 --> 01:03:36.200
you have rampant piracy and eliminate
the profit motive and...

01:03:36.200 --> 01:03:38.000
...and creative works, software.
Will not... ]

01:03:38.000 --> 01:03:41.000
Well, they were on both counts. For one thing,

01:03:41.000 --> 01:03:45.000
people are making a profit from
developing Free Software,

01:03:45.000 --> 01:03:49.800
but for another, the freedom to
have a community is more important.

01:03:50.000 --> 01:03:53.800
[ People that look at, casually at
Open Source Free Software and think...

01:03:53.800 --> 01:03:57.000
Well, because you are supposed to
share and do it for people's good will,

01:03:57.000 --> 01:03:59.400
Doesn't that seem someone communist.
What's your response? ]

01:03:59.400 --> 01:04:03.200
Absolutely nonsense,
it makes me really angry when people do that.

01:04:03.200 --> 01:04:08.000
Well, back in, back in 1989,
actually communism would have been a compliment.

01:04:08.200 --> 01:04:10.600
the word people were using at that time
was "crazy",

01:04:10.600 --> 01:04:12.500
and I want them to use capitalism.

01:04:12.500 --> 01:04:16.000
Communism is an ideology that forces people to share.

01:04:16.100 --> 01:04:19.700
If you don't share, you get thrown in jail or killed.

01:04:19.900 --> 01:04:26.000
In 1990, we got a visit from a director
of an institute in uh, the Moscow University,

01:04:26.100 --> 01:04:30.000
and actually I saw him in Helsinki just 2 weeks ago,

01:04:31.200 --> 01:04:33.000
but in an event, he came by,

01:04:33.200 --> 01:04:37.000
and Richard Stallman had suggested
that he visit Cygnus,

01:04:37.000 --> 01:04:41.000
because he was interested in and
understanding how the Free Software model...

01:04:41.000 --> 01:04:46.100
might apply to stimulating entrepreneurial
innovation in Russia of all places,

01:04:46.300 --> 01:04:50.300
and we had been kind of secretive
about our business plan,

01:04:50.500 --> 01:04:53.200
because you know, we were not really
sure it's gonna work,

01:04:53.200 --> 01:04:56.000
we didn't want to look too stupid if it failed.

01:04:56.000 --> 01:04:58.300
But I was very very open with him.

01:04:58.300 --> 01:05:02.200
The more I told him,
the more he started to shake his head like this,

01:05:02.400 --> 01:05:06.000
and I finally said, you know, "What's wrong?"

01:05:06.000 --> 01:05:11.000
And he said, "This sounds to much like communism
to be successful in Russia."

01:05:13.000 --> 01:05:17.000
You got to go a Gulag and end up in a mass grave
with a bullet in the back of your head.

01:05:17.000 --> 01:05:21.000
Open Source is not communism
because it does not force people.

01:05:23.000 --> 01:05:26.000
Carl Marx did not invent helping your neighbor.

01:05:27.800 --> 01:05:31.800
It's not communist to have a commons,

01:05:31.900 --> 01:05:38.600
A commons existed long before communism as
a philosophy of government.

01:05:39.400 --> 01:05:41.500
there are many commons in our lives,

01:05:41.500 --> 01:05:43.600
For example, we drive on the highway,

01:05:43.600 --> 01:05:47.000
something it is maintained for our common good.

01:05:47.000 --> 01:05:51.000
Actually labeling our business model...

01:05:51.600 --> 01:05:53.700
means that it misses the point a little bit.

01:05:53.700 --> 01:05:54.800
whether it's communist, or whether it's capitalist,

01:05:54.800 --> 01:05:58.400
the label doesn't matter, the real question is,

01:05:58.400 --> 01:06:02.000
how much value can you deliver,
how scalable is the business,

01:06:02.000 --> 01:06:05.300
what kind of problems,
what kind of of rate of innovation can you sustain.

01:06:05.300 --> 01:06:09.000
and then, however you want to label that,
it's really up to you.

01:06:10.400 --> 01:06:13.600
The Revolution goes Prime Time.

01:06:37.600 --> 01:06:39.100
A lot of people described,

01:06:39.100 --> 01:06:42.000
that August LinuxWorld as
"Linux's coming-out party",

01:06:42.000 --> 01:06:46.000
Linus Torvalds was very funny about this,
he said, "What? Was Linux gay?"

01:06:48.000 --> 01:06:51.000
But some people said
"Yeah, that was our debutante ball."

01:06:51.600 --> 01:06:52.700
That was when the...

01:06:52.700 --> 01:06:56.700
Linux Gods, and the hardware hackers
really got it together with the suits.

01:07:06.800 --> 01:07:09.800
At 3pm on August 10th 1999,

01:07:09.800 --> 01:07:13.400
Linus Torvalds delivered the keynote
address to the LinuxWorld.

01:07:13.400 --> 01:07:17.900
The crowds of 6000 people began lining up at 12 noon.

01:07:37.500 --> 01:07:40.000
Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome Larry Augustin...

01:07:40.000 --> 01:07:45.800
LinuxWorld Conference Chair and President and
CEO of VA Linux Systems.

01:07:54.000 --> 01:07:57.000
These guys have to clap, I pay them.

01:07:57.000 --> 01:08:01.300
Thank you all for being here,
looks like it's been a great show so far.

01:08:01.300 --> 01:08:07.600
If you'll indulge me for a moment, I'm going to
try to avoid the glare of the lights.

01:08:07.800 --> 01:08:11.000
I still think there's lots of people,
even though this is the 2nd show,

01:08:11.000 --> 01:08:14.500
I still think there's lots of people
who don't quite get...

01:08:14.500 --> 01:08:17.000
...what it is that's so exciting about Linux.

01:08:17.000 --> 01:08:19.000
So there is a great show going
on next door,

01:08:19.000 --> 01:08:21.700
there's huge exhibits and everything,

01:08:21.700 --> 01:08:26.600
but it's the people out here
that are real contributors, not those companies.

01:08:26.600 --> 01:08:29.500
The person on next I know you all know,

01:08:29.500 --> 01:08:32.400
so I don't have to give anything in the way
as introduction.

01:08:32.400 --> 01:08:36.000
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Linus Torvalds.

01:08:36.000 --> 01:08:39.000
Linus

01:08:44.000 --> 01:08:45.000
Thanks.

01:08:48.000 --> 01:08:50.000
Calm down.

01:08:55.500 --> 01:08:57.500
Calm down.

01:08:57.500 --> 01:08:59.000
Say "oooo".

01:08:59.000 --> 01:09:00.000
yes.

01:09:00.200 --> 01:09:03.600
I don't want to just give one
of my normal talks,

01:09:03.600 --> 01:09:05.100
because I find them boring,

01:09:05.100 --> 01:09:09.100
probably by now most of you find them boring
too because you've heard them like 10 times.

01:09:10.000 --> 01:09:12.700
But after the technical updates,
we will actually try...

01:09:12.700 --> 01:09:17.200
...whether we can do a question and
answer session with 5,000 people,

01:09:17.300 --> 01:09:20.000
or how many of you there are there.

01:09:21.000 --> 01:09:23.200
and it may not actually work out,

01:09:23.200 --> 01:09:26.900
because one of the 5,000 people is really loud.

01:09:26.900 --> 01:09:28.000
The one thing I will do,

01:09:28.000 --> 01:09:32.000
which I always do in all my talks is
the gratitude thing,

01:09:32.400 --> 01:09:35.500
I want to kind of acknowledge the fact that...

01:09:35.500 --> 01:09:38.000
...I'm obviously not been alone in doing Linux.

01:09:38.000 --> 01:09:40.000
RHAT IPO: On August 11, 1999

01:09:40.000 --> 01:09:43.700
Red Hat Software became
the first Linux company to go public.

01:09:43.700 --> 01:09:45.700
Red Hat, up 228%

01:09:45.700 --> 01:09:48.800
this the IPO the everybody was waiting for.

01:09:48.800 --> 01:09:51.300
They of cause are behind
the Linux operating software.

01:09:58.000 --> 01:10:02.000
Morgan J.T., I know

01:10:03.000 --> 01:10:04.000
All I've gotten today,

01:10:04.000 --> 01:10:07.400
are comments about
what the stock prices all morning,

01:10:07.400 --> 01:10:10.900
you know it was 41, it was 42, it was 47,

01:10:10.900 --> 01:10:13.800
it is 53, it is 51...

01:10:13.800 --> 01:10:17.600
Every machine as far as I can tell
on the show floor

01:10:17.600 --> 01:10:21.600
is pointed to their e-trade accounts or their
broker accounts, they know the Red Hat's price

01:10:22.400 --> 01:10:24.900
I can't believe this.

01:10:24.900 --> 01:10:26.700
I just heard 53.

01:10:26.700 --> 01:10:27.700
Oh, boy.

01:10:27.700 --> 01:10:29.700
Hang on, I didn't buy it.

01:10:29.700 --> 01:10:31.100
You didn't buy?

01:10:31.100 --> 01:10:33.300
No, no, I didn't buy.

01:10:33.300 --> 01:10:35.000
I should've buy, but uh...

01:10:35.000 --> 01:10:36.600
No no, that's great.

01:10:36.600 --> 01:10:38.100
If it's... if it's....

01:10:38.100 --> 01:10:39.400
You guys don't know?

01:10:39.400 --> 01:10:40.500
Well, you know

01:10:40.500 --> 01:10:42.800
Red Hat being successful as just being said

01:10:42.800 --> 01:10:46.300
It legitimizes Linux
So it's much easier for us to go out

01:11:03.000 --> 01:11:06.000
Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) ...
on the Red Hat IPO

01:11:06.000 --> 01:11:08.000
It's kind of been a little bit divided.

01:11:08.000 --> 01:11:09.000
You've got a lot of people

01:11:09.000 --> 01:11:10.000
that are pretty hardcore and

01:11:10.000 --> 01:11:11.300
And they are a kind of offended by that

01:11:11.300 --> 01:11:14.400
you know, cause they worked really hard,
they are not really getting...

01:11:14.400 --> 01:11:16.900
maybe they fair share out of that.

01:11:16.900 --> 01:11:18.100
Some people do get ticked.

01:11:18.100 --> 01:11:19.200
and you know the thing

01:11:19.200 --> 01:11:21.400
that you see that on a lot of mailing lists
on the Slashdot you'll read, you know

01:11:21.400 --> 01:11:27.200
This guy is really mad because he didn't
get chance to, he's didn't get a chance to do...

01:11:28.300 --> 01:11:29.700
to get stock from Red Hat

01:11:29.700 --> 01:11:34.700
He didn't get a chance to get...
to get a job from this other company, you know.

01:11:35.200 --> 01:11:38.700
But the, the kind of the shocking secret
there is that,

01:11:38.700 --> 01:11:41.800
Most the really hardcore guys,
you know, they don't care so much.

01:11:41.800 --> 01:11:43.600
The guys that are kind of really down in trenches.

01:11:43.600 --> 01:11:46.000
They're writing this code because
they need this code.

01:11:46.300 --> 01:11:48.400
If we could invite Richard Stallman

01:11:48.400 --> 01:11:51.800
who is the founder of
the Free Software Association

01:11:51.800 --> 01:11:53.700
and Tim Ney, who's the managing director.

01:11:53.700 --> 01:11:57.000
Here we go. Hahahahaha

01:11:57.000 --> 01:11:59.200
Ah, here it is.

01:12:00.000 --> 01:12:04.800
Now, Richard, I saw you playing your recorder
at, in Paris at that Linux conference

01:12:04.800 --> 01:12:06.200
But I didn't have audio tracks.

01:12:06.200 --> 01:12:08.400
So would you them to add audio to their, uh...

01:12:08.400 --> 01:12:10.400
Video downstream next time

01:12:10.400 --> 01:12:12.600
Uh..I don't have any control over that

01:12:12.600 --> 01:12:16.600
unfortunately those things can
only be done with non-free software.

01:12:20.100 --> 01:12:23.400
We give you the award, and before you say a word,

01:12:23.400 --> 01:12:28.300
we'll have a Tim and yourself hold up
a little representation of the contribution

01:12:28.500 --> 01:12:30.800
towards the Free Software Association.

01:12:30.800 --> 01:12:34.800
So, very ironic things have happened,

01:12:35.200 --> 01:12:38.000
but nothing to match this

01:12:38.000 --> 01:12:41.600
Giving the Linus Tovarlds award
to the Free Software Foundation

01:12:41.600 --> 01:12:45.600
is sort of like giving the
Han Solo award to the rebel fleet.

01:12:50.200 --> 01:12:56.000
You see, some of you may not realize how far
that analogy goes.

01:12:57.800 --> 01:13:01.300
But actually let me tell you
how this, how we got here.

01:13:01.300 --> 01:13:02.800
see what happened this.

01:13:02.800 --> 01:13:05.400
15 years ago, if you wanted to use a computer,

01:13:05.400 --> 01:13:09.400
the only way you could do it
was to, was with proprietary software,

01:13:10.300 --> 01:13:13.000
software that divides and subjugates the users.

01:13:13.000 --> 01:13:14.900
And most people just...

01:13:14.900 --> 01:13:16.200
A lot of people didn't like it.

01:13:16.200 --> 01:13:17.700
But they saw there's no alternative.

01:13:17.700 --> 01:13:21.500
But some of us were determined
to make an alternative.

01:13:21.500 --> 01:13:25.500
And we said we're gonna develop
a free operating system,

01:13:25.600 --> 01:13:27.400
a free software operating system

01:13:27.400 --> 01:13:33.100
that will give users the chance to have freedom
while they use their computers.

01:13:33.700 --> 01:13:36.300
Now a lot of people said, "Well, it's a nice idea

01:13:36.300 --> 01:13:38.600
but it's so hard, you'll never get it done,

01:13:38.600 --> 01:13:42.500
so I don't wanna participate,
I don't believe you can ever get it done."

01:13:42.500 --> 01:13:45.300
But luckily not everybody said that.

01:13:45.300 --> 01:13:49.200
And clearly, we knew
we would eventually get the kernel done.

01:13:49.200 --> 01:13:50.500
But as it happens.

01:13:50.500 --> 01:13:53.600
somebody else did a better kernel before we did.

01:13:53.600 --> 01:13:57.200
Now in the old days, we had an overall strategy

01:13:57.200 --> 01:14:00.800
from calling people's attention
to the importance of freedom

01:14:00.800 --> 01:14:04.800
To the freedom they can have, or not have,
when they use a computer.

01:14:05.500 --> 01:14:07.600
Well what can we do about it?
As far as I can tell,

01:14:07.600 --> 01:14:13.600
the only workable way of trying to
change this make that strategy work again

01:14:14.000 --> 01:14:19.800
is to, spread the word that the operating system
you're using is actually the GNU system.

01:14:19.900 --> 01:14:22.100
Somewhat modify of cause.

01:14:23.200 --> 01:14:25.100
And when people know this,

01:14:25.100 --> 01:14:28.600
they'll take a look at the reasons
we developed this system.

01:14:28.600 --> 01:14:30.500
They'll think about these issues.

01:14:30.500 --> 01:14:33.300
And some of them will decide they agree.

01:14:33.300 --> 01:14:36.600
So I ask people,
please tell the people this is the GNU system.

01:14:36.600 --> 01:14:40.600
It's the combination of the GNU and Linux
so we can call it GNU/Linux

01:14:46.600 --> 01:14:49.900
[ So Larry, when you were at Stanford 
8 or 9 years ago during your Ph.D

01:14:49.900 --> 01:14:51.600
did you ever think in this position? ]

01:14:51.600 --> 01:14:52.500
No

01:14:52.500 --> 01:14:53.900
[ All kidding aside. ]

01:14:53.900 --> 01:14:55.800
No I had no idea honestly

01:14:55.800 --> 01:14:58.600
[ What did you think you would be
when you were finished up with your Ph.D? ]

01:14:58.600 --> 01:15:00.000
You know that's a good question,

01:15:00.000 --> 01:15:02.300
I really didn't have a good idea, I mean.

01:15:02.300 --> 01:15:05.600
Here we are, on this huge show floor.

01:15:05.600 --> 01:15:08.600
There are people just going crazy about Linux.

01:15:08.600 --> 01:15:12.000
We had 6,200 people crammed into a room

01:15:12.000 --> 01:15:15.300
to see the Linux, Linus speak last night.

01:15:15.300 --> 01:15:16.900
Here we are, with, you know,

01:15:16.900 --> 01:15:19.600
all of these huge venders all over the show.

01:15:19.600 --> 01:15:22.700
I..It's, just, you have no idea that
this is gonna happen.

01:15:22.700 --> 01:15:25.500
I mean this is just this little operating system
that were happy with.

01:15:25.500 --> 01:15:27.500
that few people cared about, you know,

01:15:27.500 --> 01:15:29.500
I thought I'd have a nice little
consulting business.

01:15:29.500 --> 01:15:30.900
And here I am suddenly,

01:15:30.900 --> 01:15:33.400
with all of this huge show going on.

01:15:33.400 --> 01:15:34.400
It's just incredible.

01:15:34.400 --> 01:15:37.600
I mean, a year ago, you could look and say,
you know, this is gonna be big

01:15:37.600 --> 01:15:39.400
and everyone standing at the show going

01:15:39.400 --> 01:15:41.800
"You know the show was big last year,

01:15:41.800 --> 01:15:44.800
is it gonna, is it gonna be as big as this year?"

01:15:44.900 --> 01:15:46.100
The you remind them

01:15:46.100 --> 01:15:48.300
"You know, last year was only 6 month ago."

01:15:48.400 --> 01:15:50.300
And then they go "Oh, , Linux time".

01:16:17.000 --> 01:16:19.200
So leading up to the IPO, uh...

01:16:19.200 --> 01:16:25.200
we had arrived actually in San Diego
on Tuesday night

01:16:25.500 --> 01:16:29.500
We spent Wednesday morning meeting investors
in San Diago.

01:16:29.900 --> 01:16:31.300
We flew up to San Francisco

01:16:31.300 --> 01:16:35.200
spent Wednesday afternoon meeting
investment firms in San Francisco

01:16:35.200 --> 01:16:36.100
VA Linux Selected
December 9, 1999, as the day
for its stock to begin trading.

01:16:36.100 --> 01:16:39.500
then on the Thursday morning of the IPO is

01:16:39.500 --> 01:16:42.000
when our stock would be traded publically.

01:16:42.000 --> 01:16:45.800
So it was nice we had ended
the tour in San Francisco

01:16:45.800 --> 01:16:49.700
because we could go to the credits suite's
trading desk the next morning

01:16:49.700 --> 01:16:51.600
to watch the public offering.

01:16:51.600 --> 01:16:55.600
And in San Francisco being close
enough to the company, and to our families,

01:16:55.600 --> 01:16:59.600
we could invite people up to
actually join us in the first trade.

01:16:59.600 --> 01:17:02.700
So I invited my wife and we invited Linus and Tove,

01:17:02.700 --> 01:17:06.200
and a number of other friends and people
who worked in the company in to join us.

01:17:06.200 --> 01:17:07.700
Whenever we invite Linus and Tove,

01:17:07.700 --> 01:17:10.800
they have uh, two young children,

01:17:10.800 --> 01:17:12.800
and I have a daughter, Andrea.

01:17:12.800 --> 01:17:14.300
And we always bring the kids along

01:17:14.300 --> 01:17:16.300
so we went in to the credit suite's trading floor

01:17:16.300 --> 01:17:18.700
with all these traders and there are these 3 year old kids

01:17:18.700 --> 01:17:21.000
running around and chasing each other
around the show floor,

01:17:21.000 --> 01:17:22.000
around the trading floor.

01:17:22.000 --> 01:17:27.200
So Linus and I walked in and
we walked up in to the trading floor

01:17:27.300 --> 01:17:28.600
and everyone was very excited.

01:17:28.600 --> 01:17:31.800
And we kept asking them, well
"Hows it going? Are things going ok?".

01:17:31.800 --> 01:17:34.600
And they said, "Oh, it's.. uh, we're really excited,

01:17:34.600 --> 01:17:35.800
I think things are going well.

01:17:35.800 --> 01:17:39.400
We don't wanna, We don't wanna say,
We don't wanna jinx anything."

01:17:39.400 --> 01:17:43.400
We walked in and it was a big screen TV showing CNBC.

01:17:44.000 --> 01:17:48.000
And it was amazing to us,
but the theme for the day was Linux.

01:17:48.100 --> 01:17:50.500
Now we have an IPO that's gonna go today.

01:17:50.500 --> 01:17:52.700
And when I mean go, it is going to go.

01:17:52.700 --> 01:17:54.700
The estimates I'm hearing are staggering.

01:17:54.700 --> 01:17:58.200
But watch VA Linux Systems. It goes at 12:40 today.

01:17:58.200 --> 01:17:59.900
The symbol is L-N-U-X.

01:17:59.900 --> 01:18:03.500
A provider of large scale computer
servers and workstations,

01:18:03.500 --> 01:18:05.700
specially designed for the Linux operating system.

01:18:05.700 --> 01:18:11.800
The original range on this IPO was
11 to 13 dollars, then 21 to 23, then 28 to 30.

01:18:12.000 --> 01:18:15.300
Priced at 30, and the estimates I'm hearing
I don't wanna repeat

01:18:15.300 --> 01:18:16.600
because I don't have a confirmation.

01:18:16.600 --> 01:18:21.500
But if they're true, they will blow you're mind
when this stock takes off at 12:40.

01:18:21.500 --> 01:18:23.900
I turned to Linus and I said "Gee, did you ever think,

01:18:23.900 --> 01:18:29.100
you know, you'd walk in here some day and
Linux would be THE theme on CNBC?".

01:18:29.700 --> 01:18:32.400
and Linus said in his joking way said "Oh Absolutely!".

01:18:32.800 --> 01:18:36.300
So we walk in and they show us
the buy and sell orders coming in..

01:18:36.300 --> 01:18:38.300
and it's incredible.

01:18:38.300 --> 01:18:41.900
We're seeing numbers like
320 dollars, 340 dollars a share.

01:18:42.500 --> 01:18:44.400
And I'm just in complete shock.

01:18:44.400 --> 01:18:49.700
You know, this is over 10 times
where we priced the offering. It was incredible.

01:18:50.000 --> 01:18:54.000
And I remember Linus just kind of,
sort of patting me on the back and saying,

01:18:54.000 --> 01:18:58.000
you know "Relax..." and it was
pretty exciting to see that.

01:18:58.000 --> 01:19:00.900
We were, it was just amazing. We were stunned.

01:19:01.300 --> 01:19:04.300
We were lucky that we were able to
get back to the offices,

01:19:04.300 --> 01:19:08.100
we'd been in San Francisco
so we could come back to VA's offices

01:19:08.100 --> 01:19:10.600
to, to see everyone in the office for the IPO.

01:19:10.600 --> 01:19:15.500
When we got back, we had uh,
everyone was obviously very excited.

01:19:16.100 --> 01:19:18.800
The IPO had done just tremendously well.

01:19:18.800 --> 01:19:22.400
We had a little party that we put together.

01:19:22.400 --> 01:19:24.100
It was interesting, while we were celebrating

01:19:24.100 --> 01:19:26.600
there were plenty of people that were still trying to work.

01:19:26.600 --> 01:19:30.400
I recall cries of "Be quiet!",
"We're on the phone!", "We're Working!",

01:19:30.400 --> 01:19:34.100
Uh, as we uh, as we went in to the offices.

01:19:34.100 --> 01:19:37.900
One of the things I did was
I gave the road show presentation

01:19:37.900 --> 01:19:39.700
for the employees back at the office,

01:19:39.700 --> 01:19:42.800
so they could have an idea of
what we'd been telling investors,

01:19:42.800 --> 01:19:46.400
and understand exactly what we'd uh,
put together for them.

01:19:46.400 --> 01:19:55.100
But again the story of the day is VA Linux,
now up 766% to 235 dollars to 265.

01:19:55.300 --> 01:19:57.700
Sue, the best performing IPO ever.

01:19:57.700 --> 01:20:03.200
Here it goes, Sycamore Networks was uh,
priced at 38 dollars, surged to $270.

01:20:03.500 --> 01:20:05.800
This has just beat it. And by the way..

01:20:05.800 --> 01:20:09.800
[ How do you feel about potentially billions
of dollars of wealth being created

01:20:10.000 --> 01:20:14.000
from your creation,
that you're not directly cashing out? ]

01:20:14.600 --> 01:20:18.000
So, if I hadn't made Linux available, I mean,

01:20:18.000 --> 01:20:21.300
I wouldn't have gotten any money that way either.

01:20:21.300 --> 01:20:24.200
So I mean, It's a win-win situation.

01:20:24.200 --> 01:20:31.000
Uh, just the fact that there are
a lot of commercial companies

01:20:31.100 --> 01:20:37.000
means that there are a lot of Linux people
who used to work on Linux kind of on the side.

01:20:37.500 --> 01:20:40.200
And now they get paid for
doing what they wanted to do.

01:20:40.200 --> 01:20:44.800
And that helps me in the sense that
I wanted them to work on Linux anyway.

01:21:06.400 --> 01:21:11.700
The whole GNU project is really one big hack.

01:21:12.200 --> 01:21:16.200
It's one big act of subversive playful cleverness,

01:21:16.200 --> 01:21:22.300
to change society for the better, because
I'm only interested in changing it for the better,

01:21:22.400 --> 01:21:26.600
but in a clever way.

01:21:26.800 --> 01:21:30.800
Hi, we're the GNU/Stallmans, and this is
"The Free Software Song"