"...and Mr. Hughes wants to give it to him."

[R. A. Hettinga]

<http://www.linuxjournal.com/print.php?sid=3450>


Linux Journal - The Premier Magazine of the Linux Community

 Guest Editorial
Date: Thursday, July 01, 1999
Topic: Linux Community

 Eric Hughes

 The average Joe wants something for nothing, and Mr. Hughes wants to give
it to him.



I paid for my university education, in that I paid an institution for
access to its faculty and for use of its facilities. The knowledge was
free; all I had to do was take advantage of the fact that it was there for
the learning. I've told many people about things I learned in school. I
didn't need to pay a license fee to tell other people about Hamiltonian
mechanics or Gvdel incompleteness. The academics who created this body of
knowledge published papers and gave away their knowledge. As far as I'm
concerned, I got something for nothing from them.

 Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction and thereby paved the
way for the electricity and electronics industry. The value he captured
from this development was nowhere near all the value he created for
everyone else. Such was his station in life. He made the choice to freely
give his time to the advancement of science. Many others have followed his
example, but nowhere near a majority. Yet this tiny fraction of people has
exerted a significant, disproportional change on the world. Such is the
fate of certain knowledge workers. Get used to it.

 On first blush, software appears to follow this academic pathway. Yet
software has users, who must find the software useful to keep it.
Researchers do not have to make their output useful, just accurate, novel
and potentially useful. To wit, researchers don't have to do market
research. Clearly, software developers don't think they have to understand
their users. Developers need to understand their users only when they
expect to have users.

 The distribution of software clearly follows the model of academic
knowledge--create it once for free, then make the user pay for its
distribution. Yet the creation of software does not mirror the creation of
knowledge quite so accurately. The principle of ``academic freedom'' is
about as antithetical to the principle of ``attaining user benefit'' as
possible. The two just don't fit and can't. The university never had a
monopoly on creating knowledge--or on developing free software--and it
never will. The university, however, does embody the understanding that
some development requires nurturing that cannot be easily obtained
elsewhere. Software development has no such analogous institutions, and it
needs one that is not the university.

 This new institution should be a non-profit, tax-exempt corporation
especially created to pay for the design, construction and delivery of
public software. Let's be obvious about this: giving away software for free
is about as close as possible to the center of the charitable purpose
requirement of a tax-exempt company. Like the university, the staff--no,
let us call them the talent--the talent working at this institution are not
motivated by dreams of entrepreneurial riches, but by the advancement of
the craft. The talent needs to come from a wide variety of disciplines,
essentially all that are present at a for-profit software company. This new
institution will always be in competition with commercial interests for
talent, so it will have to pay for talent accordingly. Talent gets paid,
the institution creates some well-needed feeling of solidity, and regular
folks get free software.

 ``Public software'' is any software that people can obtain and use without
any entanglement with intellectual property issues. Public software also
denotes the ubiquity of the software and the corresponding expectation that
people encounter it frequently. Some open-source software is public
software, some is not. Public software is a concept rooted in the nature of
its end use, not in the means of creating it. All the wrangling over
license terms for derivative works has obscured the obvious point that the
license is in service of some goal; if you don't name your goal, you can't
possibly attain it. I know what my goal is--it is free beer.

 I still can't figure out how the claim that the GNU Public License
encourages free speech is not utterly disingenuous. The GPL is the opposite
of free speech; it's a highly detailed copyright agreement with the purpose
of restricting the expression of derivative works. If I can't keep an
expression to myself, I am restricted. All license agreements begin from
the starting point of complete restriction, that is, total prohibition
against use, and then work forward from that point. The summit of free
speech is public domain expression--if you want to speak it again, go
ahead, and for whatever purpose you care to seek. As much as I am an
advocate of free speech and all other civil rights, my purpose with public
software is not free speech--it's free beer.

 The crucial reason the GPL has achieved such limited success in scope is
that its purpose is to benefit programmers who want access to code, not to
benefit outside customers. Whatever benefit an outside customer gains is
ancillary to the benefit to programmers. This observation also explains why
most GPL code is in development tools and environments. To be blunt, the
GPL is a selfish contract for selfish purposes which cannot possibly be
generalized.

 The open-source model, by contrast, is a technique in search of goals.
Open Source encompasses the goals of the GPL, and indeed found some of its
initial inspiration there. Yet Open Source also encompasses other disparate
goals, such as those for Mozilla. I want to promote Open Source, but as
part of my desire to promote public software. My goal is compatible with
Open Source, but I seek Open Source not to promulgate its own merits, but
as an enabler of public software. Indeed, I fear sometimes that the Open
Source movement may fall to the hazard that is the core selfishness of the
GPL. In an attempt to seek openness, its promoters may forget that,
whatever benefit they derive from access to code, they must place benefits
to users first. By avoiding that hazard, I am confident good results will
come from the hubbub of activity surrounding Open Source. I wish them well,
but their effort is not identical to mine. My effort is toward public
software.

 The natural venue for the release of public software is the new
institution. The value of any software derives in large part from the
solidity and gravity of the organization that creates it. Ferreting out
those expectations about the future which affect the net present use value
of software is another essay. Let me observe, without justification, that
people overwhelmingly prefer code that is stable, architecture that is
well-designed, products that can be repaired and upgraded, and companies
that will endure. Most people lack the means to evaluate technical merit in
software. Even more people prefer to do things other than evaluate
software. For almost everybody, one's expectations about the institution
stand in as a proxy for all that thinking. Since I want public software to
become ubiquitous, I want the new institution to ship product.

 I have not yet mentioned sustainability of the new institution, because
concerns about sustainability are concerns about means, not about goals. A
coherent and organizing focus on what needs to be accomplished has been
lacking; instead, we have had endless fretting about how to do it--whatever
this ``it'' is. For all of its faults, at least Richard Stallman elucidated
a clear goal for the GPL: ``Make all source code everywhere usable by me
personally.'' A selfish goal, but at least it roused the mutually
self-interested to action. I cannot name another general goal that has
inspired more coherent effort in this area. There has been much agreement
about techniques, but I have seen no successor--in goals--to the free
software manifesto and the GPL.

 Nor do I want a single successor. I want to see many inspirations for
creative technical work. Some may overlap; some may conflict--this is of no
matter. I want to see manifestos that exult in the clarity of their vision.
I want to see new approaches conceived in the understanding of the
obstacles to victory. Here, for example, is one such possible goal for
Linux:

 I want Linux to be the only conceivable choice for every commercial and
personal use of operating systems. I want universal device support, instant
installation, zero administration and a completely correct implementation.

 We will know we have succeeded when Microsoft's market capitalization
suddenly drops to exactly its cash balance.

 No institution can survive on a single goal, for when that goal is
accomplished, the purpose of the institution fades. The life spring of an
institution, that whence all material support arises, is the stream of
specific purposes that passes through it. Universities achieve this with
tenure and academic freedom. The new institution, for its existence and its
continuation, requires this same kind of stream of purposes. I want
software for nothing; thus I require cooperation with others.

 Given my goal of just-use-it-ware, I propose the means of a new
institution. As a means to a means, we now have to examine the grungy
underbelly of institutional sustainability. Or, to wit, who pays? If you
grant the desirability of the goal (no-fee software) and the usefulness of
the means (the new institution), then we need not become spooked when we
discover sustainability is hard. Once we know our goal, we may persevere in
seeking it and not be distracted by less attractive or undesirable goals.

 The first, almost too-obvious place to look for resources is the existing
network of public and government money that funds such non-profit endeavors
as public broadcasting and particle accelerators. No one can do this alone.
Who would give a few million dollars to a hastily organized bunch of
technical guys who look suspiciously like the ``Hacker Development
Environment League''? If the point of the institution is software that
benefits the public directly as a whole (and not indirectly, with
compilers), then we need representatives on the board who are believable
and legitimate to the various constituencies who might provide funding.
That means people outside the computer industry.

 As a rule of thumb, the university takes one-third of each grant to
support the institution. This is simply the necessary overhead to have an
institution and not just a group of researchers. Rather than worrying about
the shibboleth of ``efficiency'' of the grant allocation, accept that the
very existence of the institution is of separate efficacy. The institution
creates value--value in solidity, value in stability, value in
longevity--that individuals and informal groups can never provide. The
total value of software is far more than the actual running code. Software
of uncertain provenance and indeterminate future is mostly worthless. If
you disbelieve this, go look at market share estimates. Put an institution
behind that same code and it suddenly becomes valuable. To be generous,
maybe one-quarter of the total value of software comes from the product. We
can get the other three-quarters value from an institution and pay for the
institution with only half the money we spend directly on talent. Still
worried about efficiency? Three times the value for half the money, and
institutional maintenance is looking six times more productive than the
talent.

 It's not that the developers are unproductive. The mythos of the hacker
community rests in the power of a small number of programmers to change the
world. When put this way, the effort is discrete and the change is
instantaneous. In other words, the formulation is one of magic, not of
economics. Extensive change comes only from sustained effort by numerous
people with aligned goals. Unless there are people who nurture the project
without interruption, these efforts at change wither and become of no
consequence. Those who have set their lives around the mythos of the
magical coder urgently need assistance in completing their work. I believe
in this mythos. I do not identify it as magical in order to kill it, but
rather to feed it. The new institution I advocate herein is a completion of
the creative spark at the heart of all good software.

 The activity here is not merely inventing such mechanisms and analyzing
them, but also mounting experiments. The institution needs fiscal solidity
in order to have the confidence to attempt new forms of support.

 A first, concrete funding goal would be to build an endowment fund. Rather
than endowing a chair in which a single researcher sits, I want to endow a
table around which a release committee shall meet. Here's a specific
beginning goal for such a new institution: a $25 million endowment for the
Linux Release Table. The residual investment income would be adequate for
five members of the table, two paid interns and two administrative staff
members, all full-time positions. This table would not do any technical
work, but would coordinate planning, architecture, development and release.
Now this table could not possibly encompass the breadth of activity
generated from a ubiquitous, dominant Linux; clearly, more people and more
money and more structures would be necessary. Yet this first endowment
could be the seed of a full set of institutional structures surrounding
Linux.

 The focus on endowed tables for release is one of the lessons learned from
the open-source world and from Java. Namely, who matters more than how--the
party who releases new versions of a product matters more than how the
license terms read. The new institution needs to focus strategically on
branding and compatibility as keystones to generating value for users. No
matter what the licenses for intellectual property are, the association of
the institution with the product is the critical element in delivering the
value of the institution. Branding is the manifestation of this association
and is the initial point of its delivery. Compatibility prevents pollution
of the brand and thereby ensures its longevity. Trademark licensing enables
control of the brand and subsequent control over compatibility. Sun has
masterfully demonstrated with Java how to pull off this trick. How much
better if one of the new institutions had pulled it off instead!

 I have suggested a new institution; I also suggest a new idea for an
institution. A mature field of public software creation could not subsist
on a single organization of this new type. No initial efforts in creating
these new institutions should be taken as an excuse to defer one's own
effort away from building a ``competing'' institution. The principle of the
new institution is public and cooperative, not singular and nepotistic. I
should hope for jockeying for position between institutions, only as a
convivial process of mutual betterment.

 The average Joe wants something for nothing. With knowledge and
information, we can come as close as possible to this ideal. Let the
scarcity economists haggle over flesh. We won't appreciably change GDP
figures. The new institution is an exercise in abundance economics. Free
knowledge and information add untold real wealth to the world. Let our
revenge upon scarcity be that its limitation upon wealth become miniscule.


Eric Hughes (eric at sac.net) was one of the founders of cypherpunks, and has
been worried about software infrastructure ever since. He is Chief
Technology Officer of Signet Assurance Company, LLC, a development company
soon to announce its first products and services.



-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'