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Technology
AUUG2K Conference & Tutorials
Enterprise Security, Enterprise Linux
Australian National University, Canberra
25-30 June 2000
Opening Address
OPEN SOURCE - OPEN MIND
Wednesday 28 June 2000
The most profound endorsement of the power of open source software
development of late has come from the lips of none other than Bill Gates.
Now, don’t panic. You haven’t missed a big news story. Bill has not had a
conversion on the information superhighway to Demascus and posted the code to Windows on
the Internet.
But there has been a subtle change in Gates’ rhetoric when he talks about
competitive threats to Windows. Not so long ago, Gates hardly mentioned the word Linux.
Instead he spoke dismissively of Unix, a 20 something year old operating system designed
to run a dead category of computing, mini-computers.
But of late, Gates has started to mention Linux by name.
Now, like all decent politicians, Bill Gates knows the power of language. By talking
about Unix, he wanted to make it sound as though this was a clunky, old-fashioned
out-of-date piece of software that could not hold a candle to Windows.
His concession to the use of the word Linux might be inspired just by an attempt to
combat the Justice Department’s efforts to nail Microsoft under anti-trust laws. But
I prefer to think that it is an acknowledgement of the power of open source software
innovation and development.
Because, let’s face it, Linux IS based on an old operating system designed to run
an almost defunct category of computing. But the effort of an unknown number of people has
taken that old software created one of the hottest software platforms of the past decade.
Linux and Windows represent more than just a contrast in styles. It is competition between
two complete distinct approaches to developing intellectual property. The richest company
in the world and its in house army of software engineers – thousands and thousands of
the brightest people it can find – secluded away in secretive labs around leafy
Redmond.
And a loose community of hackers driven by curiosity and a set of ambitions as diverse
as the number of people working on the code.
Linux is today’s brightest example of what human beings do best. Collaborate. But
it is only one example. And while the term open source development might be new, this
method of creating information products has been around for as long as people have been
able to communicate.
One example. At home I have a book called The Professor and the Madman about the
writing of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 19th
century. We have grown up to think of dictionaries as prosaic, everyday items, but in its
day this was a staggering project – to codify and define nothing less than the entire
English language and its development throughout the ages.
This project took about 70 years from start to finish. It was co-ordinated and compiled
centrally, but the editors invited readers of English to send in definitions that they
found in books published over the centuries.
In other words, the raw stuff of the dictionary was put together through a vast,
dispersed network of interested people. An open source project if ever there was one!
I like the way the OED example forces us to think afresh about what open source means
and what it can embrace. Looked at from this point of view, community sites such as The
Well and SlashDot are really open source content development sites.
These sites might be centrally owned, and they might even be able to be bought and
sold. But the true value on them does not sit in the hands of a Packer or a News
Corporation. The owners don’t try to buy all the future output of the people posting
content to the sites by trying to sign them up as employees.
People come and contribute to these sites because they like these places and the people
and ideas they encounter there.
This is the spirit of the Internet. It is a place of free expression, open ideas, wild
thinking and pushing boundaries. History shows that it is the times and the places where
these human characteristics are given their fullest expression that result in the most
profound and exciting breakthroughs in science and culture. How thrilling is it that we
live in an age where those characteristics exist not in a physical place, but in a virtual
place – cyber space – that we can all visit?
But we can only visit them if we are allowed. If the Howard Government and its
Information Technology Minister Richard Alston have demonstrated one thing in their terms
of office, it is that they either don’t understand or are afraid of the intellectual
freedom inherent in cyberspace.
Some say that their efforts to curtail the ability of Australians to roam the World
Wide Web are irrelevant because they are doomed to failure.
Sadly, I disagree.
The greatest risk is not in individual pieces of shoddy legislation in themselves,
although each of them comes with its own harmful consequences.
My greatest fear is what these pieces of legislation do in their entirety. A bill
censoring pornography on the Internet that applies completely different standards to those
that exist offline. A bill handing over chunks of the digital spectrum to a few,
privileged mates of the Government. An attempt to prevent people from gambling online,
while the privileged few maintain their vastly profitable offline franchises.
All these actions communicate to us one message. The Internet is not ours. We can not
use it as we wish, and we can not decide what parts of it we will let our children use.
The Government will tell us what we can do, and they will tell us who we will pay to use
it.
Our backward, fearful Government looks on the Internet with an eye more akin to that of
China than the leading Western economies. And all the while, those countries that unleash
their population to play and explore in cyberspace race ahead in developing new ideas, new
approaches and new ambitions to education, commerce, cultural expression and human
relations.
John Howard won’t be remembered as the man who unchained our hearts. He will be
remembered as the man who tried to chain our minds.
Thankfully, it is my conviction that he will fail. He might sooner turn back the tide
than convince Australians not to enjoy this new, great age of international collaboration.
