Let my software go!

Let my software go!: By Andrew Leonard. Netscape was desperate for a new strategy against Microsoft. Eric Raymond, hacker guru, had one. An interview with the author of 'The New Hacker's Dictionary.'

By Andrew Leonard

Mar 30, 1998 | The first time I met Eric Raymond, the co-author of "The New Hacker's Dictionary," he flamed me hairless after I sent him e-mail seeking clarification of a point of research for a project I was working on.

"It sounds to me like you're way out of your technical depth here," his message concluded. "Any real hacker would have known the answer to your question without having to think. Get expert help, or you are likely to produce a book full of breathless nonsense."

Ouch. Stung, I flamed back, and for several days we traded e-mail invective before getting down to serious business. As Raymond told me later, I had run head on into his "idiot filter" -- a technique he used to keep the clueless at arm's length. Eric Raymond's idiot filter is usually set pretty high.

My next encounter with Raymond came last fall, while I was reporting a story about the Apache Web server project and the free software movement. Raymond is an influential advocate of the principle of free software -- which declares that the best way to produce quality software is to give the world free access to the underlying source code. Raymond's essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is one of the most eloquent explications of the theory that software design is best served by having a community of independent hackers work together in an atmosphere of complete openness. This time around, my exchange with Raymond was completely civil -- I was inquiring about something he loved, something he passionately believed in. No flaming necessary.

Finally, I met him face to face, and discovered a man positively brimming with energy and ebullience. On April 1, Netscape -- swayed, company officials say, by many of Raymond's arguments in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" -- officially joined the free software movement by releasing the source code to Navigator 5.0. To mark the occasion, Raymond left his home in Malvern, Pa., and journeyed out to Silicon Valley -- both to attend the release party and to participate in a "free software summit" that included nearly all of the most significant players in the free software game.

I took the opportunity to drive down to Mountain View and take him out to lunch. When I picked him up at the office he was temporarily working out of, I commented that right now must be an exciting time for him. Without a trace of irony, the 40-year-old hacker icon replied, "Oh yes -- for my culture and my people, this is the moment we've been waiting for for 20 years."

My culture and my people. The words are grandiose, but the extravagance is not unjustified. Raymond isn't Moses -- the free software movement doesn't have any one leader -- but the Netscape announcement has indeed given the hard-core geeks of the world a glimpse at the Promised Land. And no one defines the parameters "hard-core" and "geek" more efficiently than Eric Raymond.

A self-described neo-pagan libertarian who enjoys shooting semi-automatic weapons, Raymond fits the classic stereotype of the hacker almost too well. Hackers tend to think they know better; free software libertarian hackers tend to think they know best of all. As Raymond told me with pride: "I'm an arrogant son of a bitch."

The world of hackerdom is full of arrogant sons of bitches, to be sure, but computers are more to Raymond than just a playground to flaunt his ego. In jokingly referring to his "Napoleon complex," Raymond also told me he suffers from congenital cerebral palsy. That condition encouraged him to look upon computers as a realm in which he could exercise the kind of control denied him in the physical world.

How did you find out that Netscape had embraced the ideas in your essay?

On January 23rd, 1998, I was sitting at my machine, hacking away, fat, dumb and happy, and somebody sent me e-mail that said, gee Eric, I think you better go take a look at this Web page. I think somebody has been reading your paper. So I fired up my browser and sent it to the Netscape press release announcing [the release of the Navigator 5.0 source code]. And I looked at it and I thought, how interesting! Because not only did I immediately see that this was the break my culture had been waiting for for 20 years -- but I also saw that a lot of the phrasing looked strangely familiar, as though someone had taken my paper and run it through the marketing meat grinder. An hour later, I got a phone call from Netscape's chief of PR, and she gave me a 20-minute spiel which broke down to, yup, you have something to do with this, all of our top people read your paper and they loved it and [Netscape CEO] Jim Barksdale is out giving your name to reporters right now.

How did that make you feel?

Well, I hung up the phone, stumbled around in a daze for a while and then sat down, re-engaged my brain and started thinking. Several things were immediately clear to me. Thing No. 1: This is a colossal opportunity. For a very long time, for 20 years, as long as I've been involved with Unix and with GNU software and all that stuff -- since back when the Internet was 500 techies in a sandbox and the rest of the world didn't know or care who we were or what we were doing -- we knew we had a better way to do things in our software designs and operating systems and the way that we shared work with each other. But we couldn't get anybody to listen.

Netscape doing this creates a window of opportunity for us to get our message into corporate boardrooms. The flip side of that is that if Netscape tanks, no one is going to listen to us for another decade.