Open Source Luminaries at Each Others' Throats Again

Computergram International, April 13, 1999

By Rachel Chalmers Long-standing tension between the Open Source Initiative's Eric S Raymond and Bruce Perens, author of the Open Source Definition, has erupted into a nasty squabble on a public mailing list. Raymond and Perens both claim the "Open Source" trademark. Perens claims he registered the trademark before resigning from the OSI, which he helped to found.

Raymond says the trademark still belongs to the OSI. Perens has criticized Raymond on several occasions, most recently for being too hasty to endorse Apple's Public Source License (APSL) and for complaining about the difficulty of his self-appointed job. Raymond has apparently taken all this personally. "If you ever again behave like that kind of disruptive asshole in public, insult me, and jeopardize the interests of our entire tribe, I'll... find a way to make you regret it. Watch your step," he wrote to Perens. Perens forwarded Raymond's email to the debian- devel mailing list, an online forum for contributors to the Debian Linux distribution. "The police have been notified," Perens told the list, "because I know that Eric is a firearms enthusiast, for my own protection, I feel the best strategy is for me to publicize the threat widely." Later, Perens followed up with this note: "Eric says he only meant to threaten me with 'defamation of character', not with any kind of violence. Thus, I think I'll just let this issue drop now." But Raymond would not be silenced. "I did not use the phrase 'defamation of character' nor any semantic equivalent thereof," he wrote in a "Factual correction" to Perens, via the list. "[On the other hand], the intent of my threat certainly was that I would make Bruce look like a fool and an asshole. I invite readers to judge for themselves whether this would constitute defamation of character or not." Defenders of the pair argue that the spirited exchange is no nastier than what you'd expect to see between comparable rivals in the commercial world, such as Oracle's Larry Ellison and Microsoft's Bill Gates. Even so, spare a thought for Steve Milunovich and Chris Shilakes of Merrill Lynch, who spent Monday trying to convince press and analysts, via a conference call, that those in the open source community can conduct themselves like adults. Fortunately for them, Jon "maddog" Hall of Linux International, Bob Young of Red Hat Software Inc and Tony Iams of DH Brown & Associates behaved with exemplary courtesy - and left the guns at home. All three tackled the apparent paradox of the free software industry, or as Hall put it: "How in the world do you make money out of free software?" He identified services, hardware, peripheral components and education as the big opportunities. Bob Young admitted that in 1993 and 94: "I was one of the great skeptics of this phenomenon, because where was the economic model? By 95 I had turned around completely, because all the evidence suggested that even though there didn't seem to be an economic model, there had to be one. The number of users had doubled every year, technology had improved every year and applications had grown more sophisticated." Ironically, it is this former skeptic's software company that has gained the most from Linux's surging popularity. Now if only the evangelists can ease up on the bar-room brawls.