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Home Sweet Home... |
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The anti-trust suit gave Netscape a welcome breathing space. It looked as though the DoJ action would distract Gates's attention for a while. But nobody in his right mind would regard it as anything more than a temporary respite. Anti-trust suits had a habit of dragging on for years. The case was complex, involving not just competitive and anti-competitive practices but also the intricacies of operating system and browser design. Microsoft was contesting it vigorously, and had the resources and determination to fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Indeed it was said that Gates had once threatened to move his entire operation to some offshore jurisdiction with less stringent anti-trust concerns where he could do as he damn well pleased. And with his kind of money he could buy a small country. In the meantime Internet Explorer 4.0 was on the streets. By ticking a box during the installation process, you could cause it to integrate seamlessly with your Windows desktop. For Netscape the central problem remained: how could they give their product a chance of remaining the de-facto standard when they were no longer the dominant player in the market? The answer, of course, was staring them in the face, though it took them ages to tumble to it. And the funny thing is that, in the end, they got it off the Net, in an essay written by a hacker of whom most Netscape Board members had probably never heard. His name was Eric Raymond. -oOo- Eric S. Raymond is an ebullient, rumpled, slightly messianic figure who looks and sounds like the media stereotype of a computer hacker. Within the computer business he was known originally for The New Hacker's Dictionary, an indispensable bible which he conceived and published on his own. He is a gifted programmer who describes himself as "a neo-pagan, libertarian, arrogant son of a bitch" with a "Napoleon complex" and a penchant for semi-automatic weapons. Close inspection of his writings suggests and a deep suspicion of Microsoft and all its works and pomps. Raymond's essay had the enigmatic title "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", and it was published only on the Net. Its subject was the question of how to create complex software that is stable and dependable. This is one of the great questions of our time. We live in a world increasingly dependent on software (as the Millennium Bug crisis cruelly revealed), and yet we have great difficulty producing computer programs that are bug-free and reliable. This was not so much of a problem in the early days when software had to be compact in order to fit into the limited memory space of early computers. But nowadays RAM is dirt cheap and we are enslaved to programs like operating systems, browsers, air-traffic control systems, word-processors even, which are fantastically complex, intricate, bloated products - with millions of lines of code and billions of possible interactions. And reliability is not the only problem which has grown with increasing complexity. Another is the difficulty of producing software to specification, on time and within budget. Creating huge programs like Windows NT or Communicator 4 effectively requires the industrialisation of programming, with large project teams, division of labour and heavy-duty project management. The trouble is that programming is an art or a craft, not a science, and it doesn't lend itself readily to industrialisation. Most programmers see themselves as craftsmen (or women) and behave accordingly. Managing them is like herding cats - possible in theory, exceedingly difficult in practice. For decades, the canonical text on software project management was Frederick Brooks's The Mythical Man-month. Brooks headed the team which wrote the operating system for the IBM 360 range of mainframe computers and his book is a wonderfully elegant, thought-provoking reflection on what he learned from that harrowing experience. Its strange title, for example, comes from the observation that adding extra programmers (man-months) to a team that is falling behind schedule invariably results in the enlarged team falling even further behind. (The reason, which is obvious when you think about it, is that some of the time that should be spent programming goes into briefing the new guys and into the communications overhead of a bigger team.) Brooks's approach to software production is what has ruled the industry for thirty years. His governing metaphor was the building of Reims cathedral. "The joy that stirs the beholder", he wrote of that great edifice, "comes as much from the integrity of the design as from any particular excellences. As the guidebook tells, this ingenuity was achieved by the self-abnegation of eight generations of builders, each of whom sacrificed some of his ideas so that the whole might be of pure design. The result proclaims not only the glory of God, but also His power to salvage fallen men from their pride". This metaphor - software produced by the self-abnegation of individual programmers in deference to an overarching, grand design - was what Raymond was questioning in his essay. It was the 'cathedral' of his title. His argument was that the approach was doomed to failure as software became more complicated, and that its limitations were being more cruelly exposed with every succeeding release of operating systems and applications. Companies like Microsoft and Netscape could no longer control the monsters they were creating. Even more importantly, they could not assure their reliability. However elegant the cathedral metaphor might seem in theory, when it came to the gritty practice of producing complicated pieces of software, the approach simply didn't work. There had to be a better way. And of course there is. It's the Open Source approach. "The central problem in software engineering", Raymond later told an interviewer, "has always been reliability. Our reliability, in general, sucks. In other branches of engineering, what do you do to get high reliability? The answer is massive, independent peer review. You wouldn't trust a scientific journal paper that hadn't been peer reviewed, you wouldn't trust a major civil engineering design that hadn't been independently peer reviewed, and you can't trust software that hasn't been peer reviewed, either. But that can't happen unless the source code is open. The four most critical pieces of infrastructure that make the Internet work -- Bind, Perl, Sendmail and Apache -- every one of these is open source, every one of these is super reliable. The Internet would not function if they weren't super reliable, and they're super reliable precisely because throughout their entire history people have been constantly banging on the code, looking at the source, seeing what breaks and fixing it". The metaphor Raymond chose to capture the essence of the constructive free-for-all that is the Open Source movement was the bazaar. The greatest example of its power is probably Linux, the UNIX-inspired free operating system which has spread like wildfire through the computing world in the last few years because of its remarkable reliability and stability . In his essay, Raymond drew extensively on his own experience of developing a piece of e-mail software within the Open Source tradition, speculated on why people working in this tradition are so co-operative and outlined some maxims about how to create great software and avoid the traps of the cathedral approach. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is one of those seminal documents that appears once in a generation and articulates what thousands of people have been thinking but never managed adequately to express. What got to me, of course, was the fact that Raymond had managed to distill, in a sense, the wisdom of the Net. This is the greatest co-operative enterprise in the history of mankind, he was saying. There is no intellectual problem on earth it cannot crack. Its collective IQ is incalculable. So why don't we use its power? -oOo- Someone at Netscape -- we don't know who -- saw Raymond's essay, and passed it round. Some Board members -- again we don't know how many -- read it. And as they brainstormed their way to a corporate survival strategy, the force of Raymond's argument bore down on them until in the end they saw the point. They decided to set their browser free -- to release the source code under an open-source licence and let the Net do the rest. On January 22, 1998 Netscape Communications Corporation issued a Press Statement announcing its decision to make the source code for the next generation of Communicator available for free licensing on the Internet. "This aggressive move", said the company, "will enable Netscape to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet by incorporating their best enhancements into future versions of Netscape's software". "By giving away the source code for future versions", said Jim Barksdale, Netscape's president and chief executive officer, we can ignite the creative energies of the entire Net community and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market. Our customers can benefit from world-class technology advancements; the development community gains access to a whole new market opportunity; and Netscape's core businesses benefit from the proliferation of the market-leading client software". Afterwards, they threw a party at some joint in Mountain View, the town where Andreessen settled after he left NCSA and where Jim Clark found him. As people danced and drank and talked, a giant back-projection screen displayed the strangest sight - incessantly scrolling lines of typescript, millions of lines of it, mostly incomprehensible. It was, of course, the code. Or, as hackers say, the Source -oOo- I spent most of that day in London at a seminar and knew nothing about the decision. Afterwards I had dinner with a friend. We talked about the Net, among other things, and about this book. I got the last train back to Cambridge and arrived exhausted, acutely conscious of the fact that I had a newspaper column to write before I could get to bed. As I sat down to write, my e-mail system signalled that it had something for me. It was a two-line message from my dinner companion. The first was the URL of the Press Statement. On the second line there were three words: "Netscape's coming Home!". I sat there in the dark digesting the astonishing decision that Barksdale, Andreessen & Co. had made, stunned by the enormity of what they had done. And what came to mind then had nothing to do with share prices or Internet futures or corporate strategy or all the other things that drive Silicon Valley and the industry, but a fragment of T.S. Eliot's poem, Little Gidding. "We shall not cease from exploration", it reads,
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This is an excerpt from A Brief
History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet by John Naughton Copyright notice: © 1999 by John Naughton. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.K. and international copyright law and agreements, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that John Naughton and Weidenfeld and Nicolson are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of John Naughton. |
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