Notes on the Second Open Source Summit
You can't handle the Truth

Stanley Kubrick is dead. The brilliant film director who realized Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange for the screen chose this particular weekend to shuffle off this mortal coil. Rats. Aside from being an unacceptable loss to the cinema and a complete catastrophe to film buffs everywhere, his passing has also completely distracted me from trying to make some sort of larger sense out of the Second Open Source Summit, held last Friday at the San Jose Museum of Art.

As you might expect from such a gathering of high-profile information-age provocateurs, there were some great moments. The first came almost immediately, when Linus Torvalds -- arriving late -- took the summit's last empty chair the very moment the round-table order of introduction put him in the spotlight. As always, brevity is the soul of wit: "I'm Linus Torvalds", he said quietly, "and I have great timing." And left it at that. It took the rest of the room most of a minute to contain themselves.

And at the risk of undermining my own credibility, I also observed that Tim O'Reilly did a brilliant job of organizing, moderating, and funding the event. Whatever cynical motives had been pinned to him in the days leading up to the conference, it was clear to me he had no interest in controlling the terms of the debate. Rather, the Summit seemed to be more in the tradition of a salon: create a space for the sensibilities to develop, and watch the fun.

So much has been written about Open Source of late; I certainly wasn't in the mood to rehash all the issues already so heavily covered in computer industry reportage. I went to the Open Source Summit in hopes of discovering something new -- to find evidence, perhaps, of where the whole circus might be going.

And I think I found it. The big news in Open Source is the sudden and conspicuous arrival of big business. A number of Summit attendees hailed from Fortune 500s like IBM, Hewlett/Packard, and Silicon Graphics, intent on figuring out a way to ride the Open Source wave. Tom Kalil from the National Economic Council was at the table, for god's sake. Even the more illustrious Open Source theoreticians without commercial affiliations spent a good deal of time outlining diabolical rhetorical strategies to sell the Open Source concept to business. Eric Raymond in particular seems to have refined the practice into a high art.

It was a lively discussion, to be sure. One of the saving graces of the Open Source scene is that most of its vanguard, unlike the majority of mainstream computer industry chieftains, are highly entertaining and self-effacing. But despite my amusement, something about the direction of the debate didn't feel right to me, though I was at a loss why.

There's a scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 when the U.S. space agency discovers a mysterious monolith on the surface of the moon. It's the ultimate sphinx: nobody knows how it got there, or what practical purpose it might serve, but all are dumb-struck by its sheer majesty. There is a dim, unformed recognition of the monument as power-object; a team of space-suited bureaucrats make a pilgrimage to the obelisk for a photo opp, a cargo-cult impulse to align themselves with a force they don't understand.

The Open Source Summit was more than a bit like that. The good news is that Open Source has been officially discovered by the suits; these guys, at least, were taking it quite seriously. The bad news is that, like the cryptic lunar monolith, the business guys still aren't clear on what it is.

The first clue to the cause of my misgiving came during a roundtable discussion about Open Source development techniques. The particular issue in play was the identification of Open Source processes that could be duplicated widely. The discussion was well intended, motivated by a desire to recognize methods that might maximize and focus Open Source energy. That it eventually devolved into a bitch-session on the shortcomings CVS is beside the point; most of the debate revolved around bug-tracking tools.

One of the guys from Corporate America expressed grim reservation towards the informality of the Open Source style of bug tracking and maintenance. In more traditional, proprietary software houses, he asserted, bug-tracking databases almost always overlapped with customer contact databases. And that meant the involvement of legal departments and attorneys, along with the usual corporate principles of due diligence and concealment of posterior. These, it was agreed, would be impediments to the spirit of nimble, flexible collaboration, the very thing supposed to make Open Source work in the first place.

This theme -- the immiscibility of business and Open Source -- repeated itself in several guises over the course of the conference. It even got downright nasty at one point, when one of the Hewlett/Packard guys fixed Eric Raymond squarely in his sights and said, "You don't know what you're talking about. You've never tried to run a business." Another representative of commercial interest, in a misguided attempt at reconciliation, tried to re-cast the spirit of Open Source in the most odious, annoying Harvard Business School-ese you've ever heard. The effect was jarring. Whatever Open Source may or may not be, it became clear at that moment it cannot be encapsulated in the language of the business plan.

This seemed to be the gravest and most observable tension: the mainstream software industry has observed that Open Source is a powerful way of getting big things done. But they don't understand why. And it may be that they're incapable of getting it. To paraphrase a line of dialogue from a film not directed by Stanley Kubrick, maybe they can't handle the truth.

Much has been written in recent decades about the market value of trust. The larger story seems to be that trust is the highest efficiency; when two parties trust each other to do their best and live up to their agreements -- made most likely, some would argue, by the context of superseding community values --  the engines of commerce run at peak performance. But businessmen are very often untrustworthy (surprise!), and thus markets do not operate at maximum efficiency.

The continuing question in management circles is how to quantitatively represent and value trust on the corporate balance sheet. The most probable answer is that -- on a macro level, at least -- you can't. All but the very smallest markets and transactions are incapable of recognizing the value of trust. So laws are substituted as proxy. Businessmen sign contracts so that when one side doesn't live up to a promise, the other side sues, and the courts punish. It's not nearly as effective as a real community, but it'll have to do.

This suggests to me that one of the reasons Open Source works -- and why business doesn't "get it" -- is that its practitioners have all implicitly pledged allegiance to a higher standard of trust and shared values. Call it the Hacker Code of Ethics, if you will. Open Source is more than anything else a way of getting everyone on the same side of the table, working together on the same problems, for the collective good of the computing community. And it works. The efficiencies in software development made possible by the Open Source framework are truly awesome. Who would ever have foreseen that a loosely-knit band of enthusiasts -- many of them amateurs, some of them teenagers -- might present an imminent threat to the digital powers that be?

To business, it's at least as unexpected as a monolith on the moon. What seems to have happened is that open sourcers have demonstrated the marginal utility of a kind of trust heretofore unknown to the marketplace, one for which there is no description in the standard business lexicon.

You can see it most plainly in the ways in which industry has stumbled in embracing Open Source -- too late, some would say, and for the wrong reasons. At first, the business community dismissed Open Source as digital effluvia emanating from hobbyists. As Open Source grew in strength, the business world told itself increasingly elaborate and delusional fairy tales about why it could continue to ignore the phenomenon. Now that Linux is within percentage points of out-shipping NT, their dawning awareness is driven by skull-thumpingly overwhelming evidence. But the arrival of Open Source in the mainstream -- as a philosophy, as a way of life -- may be positioned squarely in the collective blind spot of business. They don't understand trust, they will try to substitute law, and they may find the magic of Open Source has slipped through their fingers in the attempt. Worse still, they may crush it.

Ultimately, Open Source is about letting go. Business is about grabbing up. Introducing business interests to the gentle, open culture of Open Source may be like introducing the fox to a resident of the chicken coop. The fox does not see years of potential omelettes; he sees only a one-time dining opportunity.

This would be, to most of us who have spent any time observing computing, an all-too-familiar ending: big business co-opts and destroys all that is good and true and noble about the human spirit. But while Kubrick's death puts me in a directorial frame of mind, I can think of at least one happier ending to this movie -- though it may test my audience's suspension of disbelief: maybe this is the beginning of something different, something wonderful. Maybe Open Source will be the beginning of a grand new adventure for the business community. Maybe, like the monolith in 2001, it will set in motion a chain of events that will propel commercial interests into territory they are at present hard-pressed to understand.

Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Besides, I suspect the real ending will have much less dramatic appeal. Early in the Open Source Summit, Linus Torvalds observed that "everybody wants to be Yahoo", with a P/E ratio of sixty zillion, but that "there is honor is being a simple utility company. Everybody is reaching for the stars, and they don't see the apple right in front of their face."

It may well turn out there's no Yahoo-scale fortune to be made in an Open Source business venture. Open Source is, by many accounts, maddeningly difficult to sell to venture capital these days, if that's any bellwether. But this commercial intractability may be Open Source's final salvation; business may leave the movement relatively unreconstructed when it becomes clear that Red Hat is not Yahoo. That established, open sourcers can continue to go about the business of being the first spontaneously organized, anarchist digital utility company.

To most true Open Source devotees, such an economic comedown will not matter. Their sentiments -- like the true hacker's -- might better be summed up by Alex from Kubrick's Clockwork Orange: "… and just what would you do with the big, big money?"