Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Berkeley's Experimental Computing Club has produced some of the Net's most cherished software.
Dec 4, 2000 | Not long after the infamous Internet Worm nearly crippled the Net in November 1988, a University of California at Berkeley student was called to a U.S. government hearing in Maryland.
Phil Lapsley, co-founder of a student club at Berkeley called the eXperimental Computer Facility, had played an important part in the drama by helping to diagnose the worm and come up with a cure. The worm had taken advantage of a weakness in a popular version of the Unix operating system produced at Berkeley. Now officials from the National Computer Security Center and other government agencies were asking him about the episode -- and getting an earful.
The young hacker blasted the federally funded Lawrence Livermore Lab for taking itself offline during the outbreak -- a move that didn't stop the infection but did cut the lab off from remedies sent from elsewhere on the Net. His criticism wasn't entirely welcome, says Lapsley.
"This one woman from the Department of Energy said, 'Forgive me, but we're supposed to believe you? You're some undergraduate from Berkeley.'"
"I said to her, 'Whose computer operating system do you run?'" recalls Lapsley, "and she said, "Well, Berkeley's.' She sat down and I sat down."
The episode neatly captures the spirit of the XCF, an organization that has directly or indirectly produced some of the most powerful and innovative open-source software of the past 15 years. The confident -- some might say cocky -- XCF undergraduates helped slay the Internet Worm, produced one of the first-ever Web browsers and developed two programs essential to the ecology of free software -- the GTK tool kit (a set of tools useful for creating graphical user interfaces) and the GIMP, a Photoshop clone. Members of the XCF have also contributed code to the Gnutella file-trading project, a software program that many observers believe will be the successor to Napster.
"It's almost like it's our duty to create cool things for the world," says Spencer Kimball, who co-wrote both the GIMP and the Unix versions of Gnutella.
All these achievements fit within the broader Berkeley record of producing free software critical to the rise and expansion of the Internet. Students in the XCF have added to the legacy created by well-known pioneers like Bill Joy, Kirk McKusick, Eric Allman and Sam Leffler. The success of the XCF's lesser known hackers also offers some lessons worth considering. In contrast to the common perception that the act of programming is a solitary endeavor performed by lone cyber-cowboys, the XCF worked best when hackers were constantly poking their noses into each other's code. And not all that politely, either -- the XCF has a proud tradition of brutally honest peer review.
However, there is some question as to the future of the XCF. All members but one will be graduating this year, and it's unclear whether future generations of Berkeley hackers will choose to gather in the hallowed XCF office. But the XCF has only its own success to blame. By helping to create software that made the virtual world rich and robust, it may have paved the way for its own real-world demise. The Internet now facilitates a vastly larger community of cooperating programmers than any single club can provide. And the open-source movement that so many XCF programmers have played a role in is now untethered to any geographic or physical limitation.
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