Problems in the Environment of Unix
The old-time Unix culture has largely reinvented itself in the
open-source movement. Doing so saved us from extinction, but it also
means that the problems of open source are now ours as well.
One of these is how to make open-source development economically
sustainable. We have reconnected with our roots in the collaborative,
open process of Unix's early days. We have largely won the technical
argument for abandoning secrecy and proprietary control. We have
thought of ways to cooperate with markets and managers on more equal
terms than we ever could in the 1970s and 1980s, and in many ways our
experiments have succeeded. In 2003 the open-source Unixes, and their
core development groups, have achieved a degree of mainstream
respectability and authority that would have been unimaginable as
recently as the mid-1990s.
We have come a long way. But we have a long way to go yet. We
know what business models might work in theory, and now we can even
point at a sporadic handful of successes that demonstrate that they
work in practice; now we have to show that they can be made to work
reliably over a longer term.
It's not necessarily going to be an easy transition. Open
source turns software into a service industry. Service-provider firms
(think of medical and legal practices) can't be scaled up by injecting
more capital into them; those that try only scale up their fixed
costs, overshoot their revenue base, and starve to death. The choices
come down to singing for your supper (getting paid through tips and
donations), running a corner shop (a small, low-overhead service
business), or finding a wealthy patron (some large firm that needs to
use and modify open-source software for its business purposes).
In total, the amount of money spent to hire software developers
can be expected to rise, for the same reasons that mechanics' hourly
wages go up as the price of automobiles drops.[162] But it is going to become
more difficult for any one individual or firm to capture a lot of that
spending. There will be many programmers who are well off, but
fewer millionaires. This is actually a sign of progress, of
inefficiencies being competed out of the system. But it will
represent a big change in climate, and probably means that investors
will lose what little interest they have left in funding software
startups.
One important subproblem related to the increasing difficulty
of sustaining really large software businesses is how to organize
end-user testing. Historically, the Unix culture's concentration on
infrastructure has meant that we have not tended to build programs
that depended for their value on providing a comfortable interface for
end-users. Now, especially in the open-source Unixes that aim to
compete directly with
Microsoft and
Apple, that is changing. But end-user interfaces need to be
systematically tested with real end users — and therein lie some
challenges.
Real end-user testing demands facilities, specialists, and a
level of monitoring that are difficult for the distributed volunteer
groups characteristic of open-source development to arrange. It may
be, therefore, that open-source word processors, spreadsheets, and
other ‘productivity’ applications have to be left in the
hands of large corporate-sponsored efforts like OpenOffice.org that
can afford the overhead. Open-source developers consider single
corporations to be single points of failure and worry about such
dependencies, but no better solution has yet evolved.
These are economic problems. We have other problems of a more
political nature, because success makes enemies.
Some are familiar.
Microsoft's
ambition for an unchallengeable monopoly lock on computing made the
defeat of Unix a strategic goal for the company in the mid-1980s, five
years before we knew we were in a fight. In mid-2003, despite
having had several growth markets it was counting on largely usurped
by Linux, Microsoft is still the wealthiest and
most powerful software company in the world. Microsoft knows very
well that it must defeat the new-school Unixes of the open-source
movement to survive. To defeat them, it must destroy or discredit the
culture that produced them.
Unix's comeback in the hands of the open-source community, and
its association with the freewheeling culture of the Internet, has
made it newer enemies as well. Hollywood and Big Media feel deeply
threatened by the Internet and have launched a multipronged attack on
uncontrolled software development. Existing legislation like the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act has already been used to prosecute
software developers who were doing things the media moguls disliked
(the most notorious cases, of course, involve the DeCSS software that
enables playing of encrypted DVDs). Contemplated schemes like the
so-called Trusted Computing Platform Alliance and Palladium
threaten[163] to make open-source development
effectively illegal — and if open source goes down, Unix is very
likely to go down with it.
Unix and the
hackers and the
Internet against
Microsoft and
Hollywood and Big Media. It's a struggle we need to win for all our
traditional reasons of professionalism, allegiance to our craft, and
mutual tribal loyalty. But there are larger reasons this struggle is
important. The possibilities of politics are increasingly shaped by
communication technology — who can use it, who can censor it,
who can control it. Government and corporate control of the content
of the nets, and of what people can do with their computers, is a
severe long-term threat to political freedom. The nightmare scenario
is one in which corporate monopolism and statist power-seeking, always
natural allies, feed back into each other and create rationales for
increasing regulation, repression, and criminalization of digital
speech. In opposing this, we are the warriors of liberty —
not merely our own liberty, but everyone else's as well.
