Linux For SuitsLinux For SuitsAugust 2001
Back in May, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Senior VP Advanced Strategies, made a very strategic move: he gave a speech at NYU's Stern School of Business that announced the terms by which Microsoft was cracking open — barely — its source code. He called the company's new licensing model "shared source". (I just wrote "scared source" by mistake, which tells you where my mind is headed.)
The fact that Microsoft would start rapping about any kind of source code, and modify it with a fresh new euphemism — shared — caused immediate tissue rejection in the hacker cultural body. Leading hackers so certain of their own Truth that they refuse to appear on each other's t-shirts were suddenly gathered around their collective keyboards to craft a single response that would say, in polite terms, "Embrace and extend this, dude."
The result was an open letter published on Bruce Perens' site (Perens.com), and signed by Bruce and a quotariat of free software and open source luminaries: Richard Stallman, Eric S. Raymond, Guido Van Rossum, Tim O'Reilly, Larry Augustin, Bob Young, Larry Wall, Miguel de Icaza and Linus Torvalds. (An anonymous coward on Slashdot wrote, "It's like a human Beowulf cluster!") While critical and challenging to Microsoft, its bottom line was open and inviting:
We urge Microsoft to go the rest of the way in embracing the Open Source software development paradigm. Stop asking for one-way sharing, and accept the responsibility to share and share alike that comes with the benefits of Open Source. Acknowledge that it is compatible with business.
Free Software is a great way to build a common foundation of software that encourages innovation and fair competition. Microsoft, it's time for you to join us.
Mundie responded with a piece in CNET that framed his argument in terms of economics, manufacture and the PC's popularity:
... this is more than just an academic debate. The commercial software industry is a significant driver of our global economy. It employs 1.35 million people and produces $175 billion in worldwide revenues annually (sources: BSA, IDC).
The business model for commercial software has a proven track record and is a key engine of economic growth for many countries. It has boosted productivity and efficiency in almost every sector of the economy, as businesses and individuals have enjoyed the wealth of tools, information and other activities made possible in the PC era.
Then he took on the GPL -- the Free Software Foundation's General Public License:
In my speech, I did not question the right of the open-source software model to compete in the marketplace. The issue at hand is choice; companies and individuals should be able to choose either model, and we support this right. I did call out what I believe is a real problem in the licensing model that many open-source software products employ: the General Public License.
The GPL turns our existing concepts of intellectual property rights on their heads. Some of the tension I see between the GPL and strong business models is by design, and some of it is caused simply because there remains a high level of legal uncertainty around the GPL-- uncertainty that translates into business risk.
In my opinion, the GPL is intended to build a strong software community at the expense of a strong commercial software business model. That's why Linus Torvalds said last week that "Linux is never really going to be a rich sell."
This isn't to say that some companies won't find a business plan that can make money releasing products under the GPL. We have yet to see such companies emerge, but perhaps some will.
He added,
What is at issue with the GPL? In a nutshell, it debases the currency of the ideas and labor that transform great ideas into great products.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as provocation in the voice of boilerplate — or worse, as what one überhacker called "a declaration of war on our culture." But neither of those responses are useful to folks caught in the middle — the IT professionals my Linux Journal column calls "suits".
As it happened Eric Raymond and I were both guests on the May 14 broadcast of The Linux Show. When conversation came around to the reasoning behind open source rhetoric, Eric said this:
We used the term open source not to piss off the FSF folks, but to claim a semantic space where we could talk about issues without scaring away the people whose beliefs we wanted to change.
This has been an extremely successful strategy. Even if IT folks don't agree about what "open source" means, it's still a popular topic. If markets are conversations (an idea that has some pretty good traction) everybody who inhabits the open source semantic space is involved in the market. But conversing is not the same as believing. Remember Eric's last seven words. Most of the people talking about open source are still people whose beliefs we want to change.
Changing other people's beliefs isn't like changing your shoes. It's like changing other people's shoes. There's a lot of convincing to do. Even if the other guy's shoes are ugly and uncomfortable, they're still familiar to him. And in this case, familiar doesn't cover it. In the IT world, Microsoft's platforms, software and tools are the prevailing environment. Of course, we used to say the same thing about IBM. Things do change.
Microsoft is very good at making things change. Bill Gates is a notorious poker player, and Craig Mundie's whole strategy here looks like a poker move. He's saying "we'll see your source and raise you one shared". What was our response? As a unit, nothing. The Beowulf Cluster broke up over the usual disagreemnets. It wasn't pretty.
But it's just as well. Two of the original signers told me they felt the letter was skewed "from the pragmatic to the ideological." If so, Mundie read the letter well, because the ideology is exactly what his response attacked — although the better verb would be baited.
A year ago voiced my suspiction that baiting was exactly Microsoft's defense in the antitrust case. It was clear that the only way Microsoft could beat the rap was by baiting Judge Jackson into making mistakes that would give the defense a winnable case in Appeals Court.
It's looking like I was right.
So: are they baiting us
here? You betcha. But this time Microsoft is appealing to its customer base, which is roughly the entire IT community.
The baiting strategy becomes clear when you look at this diagram from the Free Software Foundation's philosophy page. From the perspective of both Microsoft and its customers, the one thing that's easy to understand (not right or wrong, just easy) is in the upper right. By aiming insults at the GPL in the lower left, Microsoft hopes everybody in the Free/Open communities will rush to defend what those outside those communities have the most trouble understanding: the FSF's belief that software should not be owned.
In other words, they want us to join a "debate" in which we all defend the one thing we can't stop arguing about amongst ourselves — and then re-branding something they were doing anyway, using some of our own language. It's a very smart strategy.
Should we attack back?
We need to be careful. When Microsoft decided to release a free browser, Marc Andreessen said "In a fight between a bear and an alligator, what determines the victor is the terrain. What Microsoft just did was move into our terrain." Today Microsoft is wearing alligator shoes.
And now the bear sits in our semantic space, talking trash.
So let's do a little dumpster diving, shall we? Here's Steve Ballmer talking about Linux in January:
I think you have to rate competitors that threaten your core higher than you rate competitors where you're trying to take from them.
He adds:
It puts the Linux phenomenon and the Unix phenomenon at the top of the list. I'd put the Linux phenomenon really as threat No. 1.
He goes on to say Sun and Oracle are "second tier" rivals, adding, "I'd put AOL probably maybe at that level or a half-step down."
Then just a few days ago Ballmer offered this wild conflation of open source, Linux and licensing:
The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.
At the tactical level, all this stuff is pure red herring. There's nothing wrong with taking the bait (it certainly doesn't hurt to correct errors when they arrive by the truckload). But at a deeper level we're looking at a company that is "threatened" at its "core," but not by another company. It's threatened by a phenomenon.
That phenomenon isn't just about source code. It's also about another subject hackers brought up — one that Microsoft's customers and users understand very well — and Microsoft still doesn't. That subject is the bazaar.
This is why we need to embrace and extend the most precious thing that Microsoft has and we don't, which is customers. Why? Because it's their hearts and minds we need to win, and Microsoft is busy ignoring them.
Look back at Mundie's text. Note that his point of view is not co-located with customers, but with the commercial software industry. Big difference. Yes, commercial software companies do face a choice among many different business models and licensing schemes, including the GPL. But this "debate" isn't just about business models. Nor is it the exclusive concern of Supply. It's also about Demand.
To Microsoft, this "debate" is between Supply and Supply — one "shared" and one "open". But there is a much bigger context here, and that's the relationshiip between Supply and Demand. Microsoft — like all industrial giants — naturally wants to own demand. To dominate it. To control it. That's the goal of all this talk about "competition" and "innovation."
something here
| What we call "consumerism" today is actually producerism: a relationship between the largest producers and billions of consumers that is roughly the same as that between ants and aphids. |
Before the Industrial Age, markets really were markets, not just abstracted "forces." A market was also not a region, a demographic, a "target" or anything else for which it now serves as a synonym.
"targets" or any of the other modern business nouns for which Instead markets were unmistakably what they always were, and what hacker brought back into the business conversation. They were bazaars.
What we call "consumerism" today is actually producerism: a relationship between the largest producers and billions of consumers that is roughly the same as that between ants and aphids. The name for that relationship is "marketing," and obviously Microsoft is exceptionally good at it. In spite of the company's constant talk about "competitiveness" and "innovation," the one thing it does extremely well is pay attention to users' wants, behaviors and appetites.
The Net restored countless markets to their natural state: one our community accurately calls the bazaar. In a bazaar — a real market — Supply and Demand have equal power. At some level — perhaps at the top — Microsoft knows this, and respects it. But the producerist mentality dies hard. Look at how the words "user" and "consumer" are used in Microsoft's .Net white paper. Look at what is implied by the term "experience." This is aphid-farming at work. It happens to be highly concerned and respectful; but it's clear the company is still farming aphids here. This becomes clearer in Microsoft's Hailstorm white paper. Here are the first four opening paragraphs:
Over the past 25 years, information technology has provided incredible value for users and businesses. Even so, there is room for significant improvement. Individual applications and devices are narrowly focused and ignore the rest of our world. People today are forced to adapt to their technology, when the technology should be adapting to them.
People are frustrated and confused. Sometimes it seems that every program, every Web site, every device has its own set of rules. For instance, entering a friend’s new phone number into your PC requires a particular sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks. But to enter that same information into your Palm Pilot, Pocket PC, or cell phone, you have to learn a completely different interface – right down to relearning how to draw the letters of the alphabet!
People are not in control of the technology that surrounds them. We have important data and personal information scattered in hundreds of places across the technology landscape, locked away in applications, product registration databases, cookies, and Web site user tracking databases. Having a friend’s phone number programmed into your cell phone doesn’t make the number available to your PC-based email application: those two technologies are unable talk to each other.
This isn't just an opportunity to mock Microsoft's condescension. (And let's not be too quick: they've done pretty well with it so far.) It's an opportunity to side with the one thing Microsoft still doesn't quite understand: the bazaar.
This doesn't mean siding with Demand. It means siding with the place where Supply and Demand meet to talk shop and do business. Microsoft is already in this place, big time. The Burlington Coat Factories of the world are very few and far between. The vast majority of enterprises in the world are saturated with Microsoft stuff. Moreover, they depend on it. Most importantly, they understand it. Eric Raymond might be right when he says "software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry." But that delusion is still common wisdom in the IT business and has been for decades.
So when Craig Mundie attacks the GPL, he knows few in his vast constituency will disagree with him about the Importance of Intellectual Property Rights. He's talking apple pie here. Should we force him to defend what his constituency basically agrees with? Especially when that constituency trusts Microsoft's Good Intentions about as far as they can throw Mt. Ranier?
Indeed, the "licensing structures" Mundie talks about conceive code as capital: as a manufactured good. Concepts like "intellectual property" are easy to understand and argue about as long as one continues to conceive of that property in material terms. But code is not material, and no amount of lawmaking or marketing can make it material.
The deepest fact in this matter is not that software wants to be free, but that code wants to be public. Meanwhile too many of our laws and business practices cannot comprehend this simple fact. It's too far below their immediate concerns. Like the core of the Earth, it's nice to have but too deep to appreciate.
The problem for Microsoft is that it lives in a world increasingly built with public code that oozes like lava out of the free and open ground below everybody. We're making a whole new world here, but we're doing it together. And that includes Microsoft, which in fact does contribute to common infrastructure. SOAP is a good example.
Indeed, much good has been produced by what Mundie calls the "commercial software model" or it wouldn't have customers. But the Net on which all of business increasingly relies is not a product of that model, even though business is certainly involved.
What free/open hackers know and Craig Mundie doesn't (yet), is that there is much to the nature of code that can neither be comprehended nor represented by the conceptual system Mundie employs. At a deeper level -- the nature of software itself -- the principles of business don't apply for the same reason that the principles of mechanics don't apply to chemistry, even while mechanics depends on chemistry as a deeper principle. You'd rather make a clock out of iron than sodium.
Business needs more of that public infrastructure. It needs programs, operating systems, device drivers, file formats and protocols that everybody can use because nobody owns them. So do commercial developers and their customers: all of Supply and all of Demand. But those terms are too abstract. Think of the entire mess as a bazaar.
If we embrace the whole software bazaar, we can open hearts and extend minds. If we refuse to share the cursor, we cease to represent the bazaar. At that point the choice is between a cathedral and a cult.
If we respond by using "proprietary" as an epithet, we'll lose. "It takes two to tango," one commercial developer wrote to me in the midst of all this. "If Microsoft ever chose an enemy who was willing to share the cursor, they would finally have met their match. It hasn't happened yet. Your friends are still saying 'It's All About Us' which is complete bullshit. They never talk about anyone but Microsoft and themselves."
Links:
Mundie's speech: <http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp>
Perens' response: <http://www.perens.com/Articles/StandTogether.html>
Mundie''s response: <http://www.internetnews.com/intl-news/article/0,,6_766141,00.html>
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. His next book will be Real Markets: What They Are and How They Work.