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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
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<title>Open Source Summit LG #28</title>
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<H4>
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"Linux Gazette...<I>making Linux just a little more fun!</I>"
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<P> <HR> <P>
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<center>
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<h1><font color="maroon">Open Source Summit</font></h1>
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<H4>By <a href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com">Eric Raymond</a></H4>
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<P> <HR> <P>
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On April 7th, 1998, a select group of the most influential people in the
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Open Source community gathered in Palo Alto to meet each other, consider the
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implications of Netscape's browser source release, and discuss where the
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Open Source movement is headed (and, especially how it can work with the market
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rather than against it, for the benefit of both).
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<p>
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The summit was hosted by O'Reilly & Associates, a company that has been
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symbiotic with the Open Source movement for many years. Linux's own Linus
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Torvalds attended. The inventors of all three major scripting
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languages were present: Larry Wall (Perl), John Ousterhout (Tcl) and
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Guido Van Rossum (Python). Eric Allman (Sendmail) and Paul Vixie
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(BIND/DNS) were present, representing their own projects and the BSD
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community. Phil Zimmerman, the author of PGP, was there too, as was
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John Gilmore, a co-founder of Cygnus and the Electronic Frontier
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Foundation. Brian Behlendorf spoke for the maintainers of
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Apache. Jamie Zawinski and Tom Paquin represented Netscape and
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mozilla.org. For my semi-accidental role in motivating the Netscape
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source release with ``The Cathedral and the Bazaar'', I also had the
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honor to be among those invited.
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<p>
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We met from 8:30AM to 5PM, following up with a well-attended press
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briefing. It was invigorating just to be around the amount of
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intelligence and accomplishment there, and a bit sobering to realize
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how absolutely critical their work has become--not just to the
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hacker culture but to the world expecting the Internet
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to become the vital communications medium of the next century.
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<p>
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One of the most important purposes of the meeting was simply to permit
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everyone to meet face to face, shake hands, look in each others' eyes and
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hear each others' voices. Many of us had never actually met each
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other before, despite having been in e-mail conversations for
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many years. Tim O'Reilly felt (correctly, I think) that Net contact
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has not been quite enough as a community builder; that the
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opportunities and challenges we face now require an attempt to build
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more personal trust among the chieftains of the major Open Source
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tribes.
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<p>
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In that, I think, the meeting was very successful. But it also
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certainly dealt with substance as well. We discussed different
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perspectives on the Open source/free software phenomenon and different
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definitions of it. One of the meeting's important results was a general
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agreement that, in all the variant definitions, <i>public access to
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source</i> was the most important and only absolutely critical common
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element.
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<p>
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We discussed the vexing issue of labels, considering the implications
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of ``freeware'', ``sourceware'', ``open source'', and ``freed software''.
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After a vote, we agreed to use ``Open Source'' as our label. The
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implication of this label is that we intend to convince the corporate
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world to adopt our way for economic, self-interested, non-ideological
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reasons. (This is the line of attack I've been pursuing though
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<A HREF="http://www.opensource.org">www.opensource.org</A> and many recent interviews with the national press.)
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<p>
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We talked about business models. Several people in the room are facing
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questions about how to ride the interface between the market and the
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hacker culture. Netscape is approaching this from one side; Scriptics
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(John Ousterhout's Tcl company) and Eric Allman's commercial Sendmail
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launch are approaching it from the other. No one is certain yet what will
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work, but we were able to identify common problems and some possible
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strategies for attacking them.
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<p>
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We talked about development models--the various ways in which
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projects are organized, the strengths and weaknesses of each model, and
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what our individual experiences have been.
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There were no magic insights, but again it seemed helpful to
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recognize common problems.
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<p>
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We all understood this meeting could be only a beginning. Late in the
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day we developed a tentative agenda for a larger follow-up conference
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which O'Reilly may host later in the year. We hope to bring other
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key people from the Open Source community in on that follow-up--one of
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the last things Tim asked us to think about
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was who should have been with us, but was not.
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<p>
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The day ended with a well-attended press briefing at which all of us
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answered questions from Bay Area and national reporters--some got the
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message, some didn't. For every one that genuinely wanted to
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understand the logic of the Open Source approach, there was another
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who repeated ``lets-you-and-him-fight'' questions about Microsoft.
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Still, the first burst of publicity about our gathering (it is two days later
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as I write) has been very positive.
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<p>
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We are entering a very exciting time. In the wake of the Netscape
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release, the Open Source community, has achieved a visibility it never
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had before. We're making friends in new places and meeting new
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challenges. The larger world we're now trying to persuade to adopt
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our way doesn't care about our factional differences; it wants to know
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what we can do for it that is valuable enough to motivate a major
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change in the ground rules of the software industry.
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<p>
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To do that persuading, we'll need to pull together as one community
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more than we have in the past. We--not just the Linux community but
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the BSD people, the Perl, Python and Tcl hackers, the
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Internet infrastructure people and the Free Software
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Foundation--will need to present one face and speak one language
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and tell one story to that larger world.
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<p>
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That is, ultimately, why this meeting was so important. All of us came
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away with a better sense of what that story is and how each of the
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major tribes fits into it. Just the fact that we faced the reporters
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(and, by extension, the rest of the world) together was a very
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powerful statement. The summit was a good beginning--one to build
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on in the coming months.
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<!--===================================================================-->
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<P> <hr> <P>
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<center><H5>Copyright © 1998, Eric Raymond <BR>
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Published in Issue 28 of <i>Linux Gazette</i>, May 1998</H5></center>
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