In Linux we trust?

Software Magazine, Sept, 1998 by Ann Harrison

"This is bullshit," says free software pioneer Richard Stallman. "The existence of more than one program that people might choose to use doesn't actually hurt anybody." Linux developer Eric Raymond points out that unlike Unix vendors, Linux developers and distributors exchange ideas and information. As soon as a particular approach demonstrates viability, Raymond says it get propagated across all the versions. "Techniques don't propagate across corporate boundaries," he says. "But in the Linux world, you have this powerful centrifugal force in which everyone wants to use the best of what everyone else is doing."

Nicholas Wells, director of marketing for Linux distributor Caldera Inc., agrees that the profusion of Linux variants has created some binary incompatibilities, but he says these are short-lived. He notes that the major Linux distributors have joined the Linux Standards Base project sponsored by Linux International, which he says will create a definition of what a Linux OS should include and ensure compatibility. Wells adds that there is no commercial advantage to breaking the standard because Linux is available free off the Internet.

Wells says the standards committee will also help settle any potential incompatibilities between the KDE desktop product that Caldera distributes, and the GNOME desktop that Red Hat is helping to develop. KDE offers a Windows-style interface, but it's built around a library that is not protected by the GPL license that is unacceptable to many in the open source community. Red Hat refuses to ship KDE and instead is supporting the development of GNOME. Stallman says whether people are running KOE or GNOME for their desktop, or any application on top of them, programs simply need to be able to talk to X-Windows to be compatible.

Wells is optimistic that desktop standards and API programming interfaces can allow applications to work on both desktops. "That will become an issue over the next 12 months, but I think it can be resolved programmatically without much effort," he says.

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Eric Raymond, a Linux programmer and editor of the "The New Hacker's Dictionary," authored the influential essay that prompted Netscape to release the source code to its Communicator browser earlier this year. Raymond's essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," argues that most commercial software is built like cathedrals by small groups of artisans working in isolation. Open source software (OSS), like Linux, is developed collectively over the Internet, which serves as an electronic bazaar for innovative ideas. "It's subversive," says Raymond of OSS, "because it takes all of the 30-year verities that we understand about software engineering and stands them on their head."

Raymond points out that he's a hardcore libertarian who loves free enterprise. But he says that OSS, created in what anthropologists call a "gift culture," is better at producing high quality software because status is gained by giving ideas away. Companies that value secrecy miss opportunities to get wealthier by sharing ideas and creating information pools. "That's a pragmatic statement," says Raymond. "Not an ideological one."