Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
As dot-com mania sends shares in open-source companies soaring, the movement searches its soul.
Dec 23, 1999 | Talk about your sore winners. Before the first day of trading for VA Linux had even ended, free software programmers were already kvetching about whether the astonishing stock market ascent of the company might spell eventual doom for their world. Never mind that VA Linux, which specializes in selling hardware pre-installed with Linux-based operating systems, was on its way to the most successful public offering ever, with a 698 percent gain on opening day. In the world of free software -- a world in which money was never the primary motivation for hacker labor -- a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there do not automatically add up to happiness.
As we come to the end of free software's most amazing year ever (at least as measured in terms of market capitalization), angst is in the online air. Questions are being asked that can't easily be dismissed. Will the huge financial worth of the founders of companies like Red Hat and VA Linux end up disillusioning small-time developers? These companies must now keep their shareholders happy -- will the goal of keeping stock prices high interfere with code design decisions that used to be based on purely pragmatic factors? And what happens if Red Hat and VA Linux stock goes down in flames? Will free software's rise to world domination be derailed?
Substitute whatever phrase you want for "free software": "open source," "GNU/Linux" or even just "Linux" will suffice. Indeed, the easiest observation to be made about this most recent outbreak of IPO madness is that the word "Linux" now enjoys the same semantic status as previous Internet economy buzzwords like "push" or "portal" or everyone's favorite: "dot-com." Just whisper the magic incantation and the venture capitalists, investment bankers and day traders will come a-running. Many, if not most, of these bandwagon jumpers can hardly be expected to have much faith in or even knowledge of the potential technical superiority of the open-source software development model. They don't care that the source code is freely available to all comers -- they just want to get their buy orders in on time.
Even if reasonable answers can be offered to the questions posed by worried skeptics, rational observers can be excused for thinking that today's delirious Linux euphoria might not necessarily be a good thing. Sooner or later, dot-com mania must be headed for a fall -- whenever you see this many lemmings gathered together in one place, you just know a steep cliff has got to be nearby. Could the rush to invest in companies which base their business models on free software be the last straw? Certainly, many observers who have long looked askance at the last few years of Internet insanity have seized upon the VA Linux IPO as just the latest, freakiest example of how crazy things are getting. So why not be nervous? Free software, once the domain of anonymous geeks concerned only with their code, has been sucked into the vortex of the dot-com maelstrom. How can it possibly come out unscathed?
The short answer is that it just doesn't matter. Free software can take care of itself. But the long answer starts like this: Sure, Wall Street and the day traders are absurdly overhyping Linux, but they are also unwittingly hyping the deep structure of what makes the Internet work for all of us -- they are pouring billions of dollars into the principle that great things can happen if you share your source code with the general public.
If, in the long run, Red Hat and VA Linux never earn a dime, and stockholders start pulling their hair out and analysts begin announcing downgrades, the world in general still stands to benefit immensely. That's because, right now, companies like Red Hat and VA Linux are substantially increasing the amount of software that belongs to the whole world. Software that solves problems, leverages creativity and intelligence, and, bottom line, is free. The companies may go away, but the software won't. What we are currently seeing, in essence, is the largest-scale bilking of the "free market" ever perpetrated, for the purpose of creating a common infrastructure of software tools that will be to the lasting benefit of all humanity. Merry Christmas, everyone.
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