Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Technology

Naked eye
A prudish hacker caught me surfing porn and turned the image on my monitor, and my world, upside down.
By Daniel Sieberg
[12/22/99]

The real Y2K crash
Why did stocks that skyrocketed on the promise of "silver bullet" millennium bug solutions fall back to earth?
By Mark Gimein
[12/21/99]

Technology: View from the top
Hold the phone
Robert Tercek and PacketVideo think media convergence is headed for your cell phone.
By John Geirland
[12/20/99]

Something for nothing?
On freebie sites you can't always get what you want, but if you try real hard you just might get something free.
By Lydia Lee
[12/17/99]

Books
Legends in their own minds
Two new books try to lionize warrior-entrepreneurs battling in Microsoft's shadow, but leave us wondering where high tech's heroes are.
By Thomas Scoville
[12/16/99]

Complete archives for Technology

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

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.

Next page | Tribal economics hits the big time