Tom Friedman's bestseller gets the flat world right, but needs some correction about Linux, free software and open source.
The World is Flat, Tom Friedman says. That's the title of his best-selling book, which came out in April of this year -- around the same time his essay, "It's a Flat World, After All", ran in the Sunday New York Times.
Tom uses a round word -- globalization -- to generalize the world's flattening forces. We're in a third version of globalization, he says. The first was launched by Columbus. In the manner of software developers, Tom numbers that version Globalization 1.0. Running from 1492 to 1800, it was driven by nations seeking resources through imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 ran from 1800 to 2000, and was driven by companies doing roughly the same thing. Now, he says, we're in Globalization 3.0, when the leading leverage comes from individuals and small groups.
The new era differs from previous ones, not just by "shrinking and flattening the world", but by empowering individuals. Where Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were projects of European and American countries and companies, "Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse -- non-Western, nonwhite -- group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part."
Then comes the punch line: "When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids."
He goes on to describe ten flattening forces. The one closest to our concerns in the Linux community, open-sourcing is #4, both causally and chronologically. Before we object, let's hear him out.
The first flattener was 11/9/89, he says. That's when the Berlin Wall fell:
And the wall went down just as the windows went up -- the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a global computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.
The second flattener was 8/9/95, the day Netscape went public. Tom writes,
First, it brought the Internet alive by giving us the browser to display images and data stored on Web sites. Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. In sum, what the Netscape revolution did was bring people-to-people connectivity to a whole new level. Suddenly more people could connect with more other people from more different places in more different ways than ever before.
The third flattener was the work enabled by software that spanned the globe:
The fact that the Y2K work could be outsourced to Indians was made possible by the first two flatteners, along with a third, which I call ''workflow.'' Workflow is shorthand for all the software applications, standards and electronic transmission pipes, like middleware, that connected all those computers and fiber-optic cable. To put it another way, if the Netscape moment connected people to people like never before, what the workflow revolution did was connect applications to applications so that people all over the world could work together in manipulating and shaping words, data and images on computers like never before.
Then he adds,
Indeed, this breakthrough in people-to-people and application-to-application connectivity produced, in short order, six more flatteners -- six new ways in which individuals and companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge.
Those quotes are all from Tom's New York Times essay. In his book, Open-Sourcing is listed as Flattener #4. But in his essay (presumably written later), he places it farther down the list:
One was ''outsourcing.'' When my software applications could connect seamlessly with all of your applications, it meant that all kinds of work -- from accounting to software-writing -- could be digitized, disaggregated and shifted to any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper. The second was ''offshoring.'' I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China. The third was ''open-sourcing.'' I write the next operating system, Linux, using engineers collaborating together online and working for free. The fourth was ''insourcing.'' I let a company like UPS come inside my company and take over my whole logistics operation -- everything from filling my orders online to delivering my goods to repairing them for customers when they break. (People have no idea what UPS really does today. You'd be amazed!). The fifth was ''supply-chaining.'' This is Wal-Mart's specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China. (If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.) The last new form of collaboration I call ''informing'' -- this is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.
Note the chronology, which suggests that Linux was written in a world already flattened by the preceding forces. We know that's not true, of course. Tom does too. In his chapter on open source, he retraces, with the help of Wikipedia (to which he devotes the preceding pages, following opening pages devoted to Apache) a history that begins in 1984 with Richard Stallman and the "free software movement" (the quotes are Tom's), and proceeds to the point when, "In 1991, a student at the University of Helsinki named Linus Torvalds, building off Stallman's initiative, posted his Linux operating system to compete with the Microsoft Windows operating system and invited other engineers and geeks online to try to improve it -- for free."
Tom seems to have missed RMS' original distinction between "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer". Tom sees Linux and other open source projects as beer-free, and hellbent to compete with Microsoft. In fact, he mentions Microsoft nearly every time me mentions Linux. He starts the next paragraph, "Much like Microsoft Windows, Linux..." A few paragraphs later, he adds, "The free software movement has become a serious challenge to Microsoft and some other big global software players." In the next paragraph he says there are three reasons why programmers would write free (as in beer) software: 1) "out of pure scientific challenge, which should never be underestimated", 2) "because they all hate Microsoft for the way it has so dominated the market", and 3) "because they believe that open-source software can be kept more fresh and bugfree than any commercial software, because of the way it is constantly updated by an army of unpaid programmers", and 4) "because some big tech companies are paying engineers to work on Linux and other software, hoping it will cut into Microsoft's market share and make it a weaker competitor all around".
Now, I don't want to beat up on Tom (although that's probably already happened by the time this is published). He's an open-minded guy. Many of the points in his book are questions rather than answers. His book isn't about Linux or open source. His main insights about the flat new world don't rest on a textbook-correct understanding of Linux or open source. But those are our topics, and Tom isn't going to stop talking about them. So, in the spirit of Wikipedia (which Tom likes a great deal), let's answer a few of the questions his account raises, then move on to the rest of the flat-world subject, about which he seems quite right, and to which our community has much to add.
First, most open source software, including Linux, is created to solve practical problems, not to compete with commercial software. As Eric S. Raymond put it in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, it has use value rather than sale value. In his chapter titled "The Manufacturing Delusion", he enlarges on that distinction:
The use value of a program is its economic value as a tool, a productivity multiplier. The sale value of a program is its value as a salable commodity. (In professional economist-speak, sale value is value as a final good, and use value is value as an intermediate good.)
When most people try to reason about software-production economics, they tend to assume a `factory model' which is founded on the following fundamental premises:
1. Most developer time is paid for by sale value.
2. The sale value of software is proportional to its development cost (i.e., the cost of the resources required to functionally replicate it) and to its use value.
In other words, people have a strong tendency to assume that software has the value characteristics of a typical manufactured good. But both of these assumptions are demonstrably false.
First, code written for sale is only the tip of the programming iceberg. In the pre-microcomputer era it used to be a commonplace that 90% of all the code in the world was written in-house at banks and insurance companies. This is probably no longer the case -- other industries are much more software-intensive now, and the finance industry's share of the total must have accordingly dropped -- but ... there is empirical evidence that approximately 95% of code is still written in-house.
In the pre-flat world, most of the world's code was not only written inside of companies, but was useless outside of them as well. Open source is changing that, dramatically.
Right now there are perhaps a hundred thousand open source projects, judging from the roster at SourceForge alone. Most of those are horizontal: good for use in many different kinds of systems, companies, circumstances. This is most obviously the case with the LAMP suite (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python, PostgreSQL, etc.). What we have now (and didn't have as recently as, say, a year ago), is a surfeit of commodity open source building material. Imagine a vast Home Depot filled with the software equivalents of mixing cement, plumbing fixtures, lumber, electrical supplies, nails, screws, bolts, fasteners, tie-downs, and the rest of whatever you need to build whatever you want. Now think of all the business made possible by all those cheap or free commodities.
It's no coincidence that the software industry is already thick with "architects", "designers" and "builders". As with the construction industry, far more business will be done because of commodity supplies than with commodity supplies. As I've said before (and repeat now for the sake of Tom and his readers), the software industry is growing up. It will finish becoming mature when it is as flat as the construction industry is today. (More about that below.)
Here's another new development: re-usable vertical open source software. This is software that's open-sourced by an industry leader, so others in the same industry can benefit by it. This not only enlarges the industry, but maintains the first-mover advantage of the company open-sourcing its software. The first example of this is OpenAdapter, which was open-sourced by Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), a large European investment bank. That move, along with his public advocacy of strategic open source use, got DrKW's J.P. Rangaswami named CIO of the year in 2003 by Risk Waters.
When you lose the manufacturing delusion, you can start seeing how open source is the opposite of anti-commercial. For example, Digium open-sourced its Asterisk PBX software to enlarge the VoIP (voice over IP) and office phone hardware markets. VoIP is a brand new industry, while the PBXes and office phone system industries have been around forever, dominated in recent decades by NEC, Siemens, Toshiba, AT&T and Panasonic. Look up PBX on Google and Asterisk comes up first. Siemens only makes the first page by advertising in the right margin there. Look up asterisk and you'll find at least ten companies, including Digium, operating in the market Asterisk makes possible.
Another example is SugarCRM, which open-sourced their software to modernize the whole stodgy CRM (Customer Relationship Management) category. As SugarCRM puts it on their Open Source page,
Modern open source based software companies are built on business models that are much more efficient and cost effective in building software, distributing software and acquiring customers. They spend far less on marketing and sales and far more on engineering and quality. Since the open source project is such an effective marketing mechanism, open source companies can keep their sales and marketing costs low. Revenues are plowed back into the product development. Our prices are a fraction of what CRM vendors charge today – your money funds real product development. Very, very little goes to fund our marketing costs.
Ten companies other than SugarCRM show up in the first two pages of a Google search for the name. Eight have ads selling CRM services made possible by SugarCRM's presence in the marketplace. Only one, Salesforce.com, is a recognizably large company. The rest are small, and clearly very aggressive. They are adapted to a world flattened by open source.
I asked Rajesh Jain, a veteran technology entrepreneur, how this looks from India. He replied,
What the likes of Google and Yahoo did for consumers, a new generation of companies needs to do for SMBs in the emerging markets. They are the engines for these economies. Software will power these companies. Thus far, because they couldn't afford software, piracy or non-consumption was the only option. Both bad. Now, there will be an alternative -- thanks to open-source and broadband (the same telecom technologies that got built out in the last 10 years). Software engines built on open-source to power business growth. And make these SMBs more competitive in the global marketplace. Combine what Friedman talks of and add to that the entrepreneurs of the East with cutting edge technology built around teleputers, open-source and broadband -- and you will find companies from the East "flattening" others. Maybe I am exaggerating, but there is now a real opportunity for these companies. Look at the Korean companies who have piggybacked on their nation's adoption of high-tech. Look at the market caps of some of the top Indian software services companies. (in comparison to their US counterparts). The opportunities are there for these countries and companies (and individuals).
It is also time to get past the notion that Linux's origins were anti-anything, much less anti-Microsoft. In fact, Linus launched Linux as an alternative to a nearly-forgotten operating system called Minix. Here's how Linus opened the email by which the world found out about Linux:
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons among other things).
From the beginning Linus has denied antipathy toward Microsoft, even when he joked for awhile about "world domination". To this day, he denies interest in pretty much everything outside the kernel. In an October 2002 talk, he said:
I only do kernel stuff. I did user level stuff about 10 years ago--only because without it the kernel isn't usable. I don't know what happens outside the kernel, and I don't much care. What happens inside the kernel I care about.
Linus' work is squarely in the mainstream of a hacker tradition that dates from the early 1960s. That tradition is arcane and vernacular. It isn't in the fancy tradition of commercial development, which puts a premium on attractive, sellable, finished work. Instead, hacking is mostly concerned with a) having fun and b) doing useful work. The title of Linus' autobiography, "Just for Fun, makes the first point clear. Here's what I say about the second point in The New Vernacular (Linux Journal, April 2001):
Vernacular architecture is the opposite of what (Stewart) Brand calls "Magazine Architecture": architecture as art, rather than as craft. Here's the difference, according to Henry Glassie: "If a pleasure-giving function predominates, it is called art; if a practical function predominates, it is called craft." It's hard to imagine anything more crafty and practical than a command line interface.
Stewart Brand finds a lot of craft in what he calls "Low Road" buildings, which tend to be "low visibility, low-rent, no-style." He says, "Most of the world's work is done in Low Road buildings...and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings, taking full advantage of the license to try things."
So it's hardly a coincidence that Brand's ideal Low Road building is MIT's Building 20, where "The Tech Model Railroad Club on the third floor, E Wing, was the source in the early 1960s of most of the first generation of computer 'hackers' who set in motion a series of computer technology revolutions (still in progress)."
We tend to think of revolutions as rapid, but the revolution that started in MIT's building 20 is predates Moore's Law, which first published in 1965. It also predates the software industry by almost a generation. Any way you look at it, the hacker subculture has served as a cultural foundation for computing for a very long time. It has also persisted in a comparatively stable form while commercial fashions and revolutions have come and gone, again and again. I'm not saying UNIX does not have a commercial side; just that its cultural foundations are deeper than commerce.
I bring up vernacular architecture and Low Road construction because both been flat from the beginning, everywhere in the world. What we are witnessing in the globalization of software is the triumph of the vernacular over the fancy, the flexible over the rigid, the cheap over the expensive, the practical over the ideal.
Not the free over the commercial. "Free as in freedom" also means "free as in markets". The markets built on free software will be much more open, and therefore much larger, and much more innovative, than the markets built on commercial software that isolates customers on private platforms.
Microsoft's problems aren't with Linux, or with free software, or with open source. They're with its leaders' unwillingness to adapt to a world where those are the prevailing market-makers.
Today all the world's global markets live on the Net -- which Craig Burton (as I often point out), describes as a globe comprised of individuals, all zero distance from each other across the void in the middle. The flat net is round just like the flat Earth is round. The difference is distance. The round Net is a three-dimensional zero. One reason it got that way is because no company could jump in the middle of that zero and improve it.
Tom is right to give credit to Netscape, to Global Crossing, to Cisco, to the dot-com bubble, and even to Microsoft, for helping flatten the world. But we should acknowledge the values, practices, standards and technologies that made the flat world possible in the first place. For the most part, those didn't come from big companies. The Net and the Web's protocols (notably TCP/IP and HTTP) can be traced to CERN, in Switzerland, where scientists needed to collaborate and share information with other scientists around the world.
Note that I'm talking about individuals here. Not about companies. Nor about countries. They matter, but Tom is right: their eras have passed.
What we need is for both to get out of the way. As an American, I'm rooting for Rajesh and his colleagues in India. I don't see myself, my country, or any of my country's companies, in competition with him, with his companies, or with his country. Or, if I do, it's not like it's a Huge Deal. As a citizen of the flat new world, I see Rajesh's success as one that happens zero distance from my own. And I agree with what Rajesh says here about the prospects:
I think (Tom Friedman) and others are, if anything, underplaying the impact of what is happening in "the flat world." One has to live here to see the potential and impact. At a micro-level, each day may seem like yesterday, but just as the grains on the chess board (power of 2...) add up, the changes are putting countries like India and China on a powerful and irreversible growth track. Because the people in these countries are now starting to genuinely feel that "tomorrow will be better than today." And optimism can be a huge force multiplier.
...the next big innovations and opportunities are going to come from the East. If I look at computing and software, I see a future where teleputers (to use a phrase from George Gilder) in the form of thin clients and mobile phones will be used to provide access to all of the content and applications from centralised servers. A decade ago, only an IBM or one of the tech biggies could have been expected to build something like that. Today, thanks to open-source and Linux, so can people like me! And that's exactly what we are seeking to do. Centralise content and data, and make them available via multiple channels -- PCs or thin clients, and mobile phones. In fact, the mobile phones will be an equal participant to the computer in the business process -- they are the "laptop of the East."
Tom says we're coming into a time of crisis for American companies, schools, and families. Not because we are especially threatened by successes elsewhere in the world, but because we're complacent here in the U.S. Worse, we feel entitled. That's why we're falling behind.
He sees parents as the responsible parties:
Helping individuals in a flat world is not only the job of governments and companies. It is also the job of parents. They too need to know in what world their kids are growing up and what it will take them to get there. Put simply, we need a new generation of parents ready to administer tough love: There comes a time when you've got to put away the Game Boys, turn off the television set, put away the iPod, and get your kids down to work.
But what kind of work?
I know from countless conversations with Linux geeks and other breeds of techies that most of the knowledge on which they rely wasn't learned in school. Much of it is pulled off the Web. Or gathered from friends and co-workers, often scattered around the world. Mostly it was gained by their own curiosity and drive. Hackers are highly resourceful about learning what they need to know.
Kids are born curious. The job of parents and educators is to keep schools and other influences (such as television) from crushing that curiosity. In the words of the great teacher John Taylor Gatto, their job is to remove from the child's path everything that "keeps the child's inherent genius from gathering itself".
Clearly nothing prevents the gathering of genius more than the homogenizing influence of popular culture, and the narcotic we call television. Fred Allen called TV "chewing gum for the eyes" more than half a century ago, and he's more right today than he was back then. In those days, there were only three networks, all of which felt an obligation to offer at least some high-culture programming. While you'll find educational programming on any well-stocked cable line-up today, you still have to ask, Is any of this better than I'm going to find right now, on my own initiative, in a book or on the Web? In most (though admittedly not all) cases, the answer is no.
TV can be a drug for people of any age, but in large doses it plainly numbs the minds of kids. Though I doubt I'll live to see it (I turn 58 this month), I am sure some day we will look back on massive TV consumption the way we now look back on drunk driving and ubiquitous cigarette smoking: as an unhealthy practice which, for a few dumb decades, was the norm.
In his chapter on Parenting, Tom observes that most of the students going to California Institute of Technology come from public schools. Caltech president David Baltimore says, "I give parents enormous credit for this, because these kids are all coming from public schools that people are calling failures. Public education is producing these remarkable students -- so it can be done. Their parents have nurtured them to make sure they realize their potential. I think we need a revolution in this country when it comes to parenting around education."
Tom adds, "I am not suggesting that we militarize education, but I am suggesting that we do more to push our young people to go beyond their comfort zones, to do things right, and to be ready to suffer some short-term pain for longer gain."
Good advice. Becoming a fully empowered human being, however, is not just about pain and gain, and not just about school. It's about learning to live in the natural world, no matter how flat and small we make the virtual one.
When Tom's essay and book came out, I must have received half a dozen emails from friends, demanding I read one, the other, or both. Since then, no other subject has stimulated more conversation between my wife and myself, and our friends. I'll let one of those friends, Adele Menichella, have the last word:
Stimulate the love of culture, history, and the creative powers of Earth and you encourage children who grow up connected to the round world, and who can successfully traverse the flat.