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ESR talks in Dublin
egnarts writes "As some people know, ESR gave a talk in Dublin last Thursday, the Irish Times has this perspective on the event. " As always, good to see more and more people taking this stuff seriously, and the meeting sounds like it went really well.
Yep.. good to see. ESR should be praised as much as Linus for GNU/Linux.. :)
Is why ESR has never given a talk in Central Pennsylvania? I mean, isn't Amish country the technology capital of the world?
Sigh.........
No wonder the Irish times was so slow this morning. I atually had to do some work!
That major figures in the whole "Open Source" movement are now doing the talk circuit there is, therefore, only to be expected. What =IS=, perhaps, rather more surprising is that it's taken so long.
I'm going to extrapolate from this event, and say that one or more key figures involved with Linux or "Open Source" will tour India and/or Mexico, within the next year or two.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"... I remember when it seemed totally hopeless and now it seems only partially hopeless."
I'm not sure he could've said it any better! He really understands that just because there is a large following for Linux there are still issue like to make K/Gnome so easy my mother could install it.
"...To put that in perspective that's 10 million lines more of code than the entire bulk of the Star Wars missile defence system that people said was unworkable."
This is kind of scary though. I was out to lunch with a friend on the w2k project and he told me he doesn't see the SRC tree and gets a new page of code with compile errors after each check in!
Justen Stepka
The talk was highly entertaining, but most of the piece was from an interview with ESR rather than about his talk. He didn't spend much time talking about MS, for example, although the occasional, inevitable dig was appreciated by all.
So, the good points:
I knew linux and OSS were popular in Ireland, but I was surprised to be in a large auditorium where everyone laughed at a 'vi vs. emacs' joke.
His talk was based on the stuff we've all read, but that didn't stop it being entertaining and informative.
He went to the pub afterwards, and was charming and entertaining to all, especially my girlfriend.
The bad point:
He went to the pub afterwards, and was charming and entertaining to all, especially my girlfriend.
Free software: "The tribe of hackers, after decades spent in obscurity struggling against hard technical problems and the far greater weight of mainstream indifference and dismissal, has recently begun to come into its own. They built the Internet; they built Unix; they built the World Wide Web; they're building Linux and open- source software today; and, following the great Internet explosion of the mid-1990s, the rest of the world is finally figuring out that it should have been paying more attention to them all along." - ESR's "Why You Should Care"
In computing, you have definitely arrived when you become a three-letter acronym. Eric S. Raymond (ESR) is among a handful of people whose initials are as familiar to the cognoscenti as FAQ, FYI and IRQ. When TCD's Internet Society went to advertise his talk there last week the only headline on the poster was the letters ESR in 240point type.
It was enough, and there was standing room only in the lecture hall. Before he began he asked how many people present wrote software for a living. A show of hands said almost half. These days his world audience is not just the true hackers who knocked the Internet into existence over the last 30 years. Major companies are among the most rapt listeners.
They listen because he is their contact with the hackers and what they have achieved. Listening to him may help to achieve the same quality, resilience and flexibility in their corporate computing projects that ESR's tribe, the hackers, have achieved in theirs.
In fact, he reckons that collaboration of the kind that built the Linux operating system is the only way forward for most major software projects. In a seminal essay The Cathedral & The Bazaar two years ago he set out the basis for this belief.
Basically, he argued that the closed, traditional method of software development (the cathedral) simply cannot compete with the bazaar of open-source development. In the former, the source code "recipe" used to create a program is kept secret and the resulting program is sold as expensively as possible. That model has made Microsoft's Bill Gates the richest man in America.
Open-source, on the other hand, depends on voluntary work by many programmers collaborating over the Internet. They give away not only the resulting binary program, but also the source code used to create it. Every contributor, and every user, can see the innards of the program. If there is a bug they can help to track it down, or to fix it.
The Cathedral & The Bazaar analysed hacker culture and gave its members a new consciousness about their work. More significantly, it was the springboard for a massive marketing push into the mainstream for open software. Since it came out, Netscape has made its browser open source, IBM has taken the opensource Apache web-server on board, one major software company after another has made its software run on Linux.
It's not easy to interview someone who has already covered the relevant issues at length and very lucidly in his writing. There are of course the tech equivalents of the sort of questions that rock stars or footballers get asked: The first computer he set hands on was a Univac 1108 mainframe, back in 1968, by the way.
Then there is the chance to indulge curiosity. He is a hacker and proud of it, but has the battle for the proud meaning of that word been lost to the much more widespread one of computer vandal? "Actually, I think we're in better shape than we were five years ago. I remember when it seemed totally hopeless and now it seems only partially hopeless." He says that greater awareness of the World Wide Web and of the culture behind it has done a lot to rescue the word.
On his role of accidental revolutionary in the uptake of open source he's deadpan, and characteristically funny. "It's been pretty much as I expected. Some good, some bad and a job that needed to be done. . . some very amusing moments. At Atlanta Linux showcase, last month, for the first and I hope the last time in my life I was actually mobbed by screaming groupies. This is an experience everyone should have once - exactly once."
And there's the inside take on what it feels like to be instrumental in a revolution in thinking. Was he surprised at the speed with which so many traditional computer companies came around to releasing their programs for Linux? "Yes I have been surprised. The rate of change has generally been not generally faster than I expected, but just a little faster than I expected. Like the big database manufacturers flipped over about three months before I expected it.
"The other thing that's been surprising about the process is that I naively expected that business people in general would be very slow to get it but quick to act once they got it. Instead, it's been the other way around. A lot of business people have gotten it fairly quickly but have taken a long time executing on that knowledge."
One reason he considers himself an accidental revolutionary is that his insights in The Cathedral & The Bazaar could as easily have been formulated by someone else years earlier. He says he has only just figured out why this didn't happen, even though the basic information was available. "My tribe was not motivated to look into the systematics of what it was doing because we had a hypothesis about why we wrote better code that satisfied us. Of course we wrote better code - we're geniuses!"
Once the infectious laugh has died down he says that his first encounter with Linux jolted him out of many firmly held beliefs about how good software should be created. "Because of my shocking experience with Linux, I was the first person to consider the possibility that our superior genius just might not be the whole story."
Then there's the news of the day. Asked what the likely end of the US government case against Microsoft will be, he says: "I'm going to make a bold prediction. I think Microsoft as we know it is going to die before the final appeal, the final verdict, in the antitrust suit comes down."
He gives a talk on "the seven bullets Microsoft has to dodge to survive the next 18 months" and "of these the most important is the fact that the price of hardware is dropping like a rock, while Microsoft's requirement for revenues to sustain the rise in its stock price is perpetually rising. This means that every quarter Microsoft has to claim a larger and larger share of its business partners' margins.
"That's not a trend that can be continued indefinitely. There are already signs that Microsoft is pricing itself out of its own markets. . . As Microsoft's increasing requirement for margins collides with the decreasing average cost of hardware, the breakpoint in the market below which PC integrators can't make any money is going to rise. When that breakpoint rises past the price of the average consumer PC: game over.
"I think that's going to happen before the final verdict in the anti-trust lawsuit."
Closer in time is the launch of Windows 2000, now three months away, which he has predicted will be a train-crash. He sees no reason to change his mind. "The train-wreck is already in progress. It's slipped for two years. And the major management consultancies have caught wise. They're telling all their Fortune 500 customers `don't touch this thing when it comes out in February - if it comes out in February.' You don't want to go near it - outfits like the Gartner Group and DH Brown are saying - until service pack 1 comes out which won't be until June or July.
"We're not going to see substantial Windows 2000 adoption - if we see it - until the fall of the year 2000. And that's assuming that it doesn't turn out to be a mess. Which I think it will be. The amusing statistic about Win- dows 2000 is that according to Microsoft's own press releases it has 35 million lines of new code in it. Never mind the old modified code. To put that in perspective that's 10 million lines more of code than the entire bulk of the Star Wars missile defence system that people said was unworkable."
As for the future of software being open, even in the sort of desktop applications that have always been closed, he has no doubts. "We're going to reach a point, as hardware prices plummet, where it's not going to be economical for system integrators to put any software on their machines that isn't free."
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
Why is it that everything interesting happens in Ireland when I'm not there.
Concerts, prominent Open Source speakers giving talks. As soon as I go home, poof, they've all gone, until the next time I go to university.
.
Just not fair
I'm going to sulk now.
I am glad a reference was made to the name of his article though because otherwise I wouldn't have had a clue who he was.
Personally I don't think his article really told us anything we didn't know already either. He simply got around to putting it down on paper.
I certainly don't consider myself part of what he refers to as 'my tribe'.
Long live Linus who has produced something really substantial.
[OS as in "Open Source". :-)]
Interesting how ESR predicts that MS is going to collapse before the antitrust lawsuit gets settled. Personally I'm not that confident of that -- "bad" as MS may be, they aren't dumb, and I'm sure they'll figure out a way to survive. But I agree with ESR that MS won't be quite what it is today. My prediction is that MS will just slowly pale into insignificance. It won't be a dramatic, overnight thing, it will be more of a gradual decline as MS drops from its currnet monopoly position into "just another company". But regardless, I must admit I'm happy that the oppressive monopoly, the buggy OS's, and the closed, blackbox software that tries to be "smart" when it's not (like the annoying way Word makes illogical lists and screws up your formatting, and you don't have the source code so that you can fix the stupid behaviour), will soon be all over.
Also interesting is ESR's prediction that open source will soon be globally adopted. Although I like that prospect, I'm afraid it sounds too good to be true. I've always believed that to do something well, your central goal must be focused on that thing. This is why Open Source is successful: the people who do it do it because their goal is to make good software more than anything else. But when Open Source gets into the commercial sector, the bottomline is more $$$ than anything else. If making good software is a lesser priority than making $$$, eventually software quality would be sacrificed for $$$. Perhaps ESR is right, and Open Source will be adopted by everybody. But I fear that day, lest the original quality, robustness, and just the pure fun of it all, may that day come to an end.
But of course, I may just be paranoid... perhaps there will be a "balance" between people who do Open Source for $$$ and those who do it for quality, so that on one side, you have the commercial sector publicizing and making $$$ to support Open Source, and on the other side, you have the hacker group who aren't into the $$$ but they're still adding improvements to the "less than best" code produced by the commercial sector. So there will be a kind of "equillibrium" that prevents code quality from degrading due to $$$ having higher priority, and OTOH retains Open Source in the mainstream, as opposed to just being a niche culture that it started in, by monetary contributions from the commercial sector.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
May be slightly off-topic, but I was glad to read that someone in the media knows how to use the word "hackers". At least I can be sure that the Irish press are getting the word used correctly. Now we just need it correctly used over hear. Kudos to the Irish for being receptive to ESR!
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Me too! yay!
He went to the pub afterwards, and was charming and entertaining to all, especially my girlfriend.
;-)
Maybe if she still had bright pink hair he wouldn't have charmed her so much
ESR is really nice to get on with, and he's obviously very used to people contradicting his opinions - he has a credible comeback for any argument the audience had for him...and I felt that he liked the audience testing his conclusions and beliefs 100%. Despite being in a pub with 50 Irish geeks, he said "I don't drink - it doesn't mix well with the two things I like most - Guns and Women".
It was a great talk, and I can't wait for the RMS talk in the spring.
The talk was fantastic. He never stooped to Microsoft bashing, but when asked, he convincingly drove home the very why he thought MS would be come irrelevent: it's happened before!
Eric told us a story, of the three ages of networking.
The first age, from about the mid-sixties until some way into the seventies, networks were a big experiment. IP was around, but TCP wasn't - the top layer was NCP.
Then networking got popular and companies like DEC and IBM and countless others brought out their own proprietary protocols. And you had to choose. And if you chose DECnet over another, you were making a bet that DECnet would eventually succeed and the others would fail, because they were all incompatible and you could only talk with other DECnet users.
So the market split into a series of monopolies where the cost of moving from one protocol to another was way too high to justify the advantages. And like in any monopoly situation, prices proceeded to rise.
And then along came this strange little open standard called TCP. Because it was open, it started to spread, and because it spread, prices started to fall.
So while the costs of the proprietary systems were continually rising, the cost of running a TCP network kept falling, until the difference was greater than the cost of transitioning - at which point the bottom fell out of the proprietary protocol market! (and ESR practically leaped off the stage, and I nearly fell out of my chair).
And so it's not just that it looks like open systems will prove themselves over closed systems - it's that it's already happened.
That's just one small part of an amazing talk. I've never seen anyone who really believes in Open Source as strongly as he does, or argue its merits as coherently. If you listen to him for a while you can't help but think a little differently about things when you leave.
Dave
--
It's very interesting to see ESR predict the demise of Windows 2000, has he tried the latest candidate release? Or is this simply well wishing from his part? I find this extremely amusing since if a similar statement was issued by someone in the Microsoft camp then it would be considered "FUD" "The seven bullets linux must dodge to survive" Can you imagine the outrage and the shouts of "Troll! Fud!" ? The only valid point I'll give him is the price of Microsoft products. Linux is the only way of the future? Well we know that ESR has already stated that BeOS is doomed to die(tm) as it is evil(tm) closed source. Do the *BSDs also fall into that category now?
...he brought over a whole load of guns!!
(Calm down, it's a joke!)
Eric has definitely arrived! Whenever I don't know what something is, I just check askjeeves. ESR is there as a TLA is all it's glory.
I remember a year ago, hearing ESR speak at my local LUG. And, yes he's still asking the question "how many people write software for a living?" What particularly impressed me from his talk at our LUG was his comment that he "wanted to be known for his TLA." Well, his desire certainly has come true and asking Mr. Jeeves "Who is ESR?" certainly got me the right answer.
Way to go, ESR!
Later on this week, TCD Netsoc will be putting an MP3 of the talk on our website.
Juan Flynn Netsoc PRO.
First hand report, from the fourth row. The Irish Times article (no wonder I couldn't get much of a response from ireland.com) covered his subject matter fairly nicely, so I won't go into that. ESR gave an excellent talk, and people were highly entertained. Most people wanted the talk to go on longer... there were plenty of good questions and good answers, most notably one guy who maintained that wealth implies exploitation, which ESR got quite annoyed about, and shouted, Lorax-like, "I reject your premise!"
If he gives a talk here again, I'm there.
Or those braids she had before the pink hair, although I have to admit I thought they were quite nice ;-)
(This thread is getting kinda creepy we better stop now)
Ok, who the hell are you people/person? Damned cyber stalkers after me again...
By the way, I got bored over the weekend and dyed it red.
Um, to keep this post from being totally off topic, the talk was excellent, and they aren't exaggerating in the article when they say it was standing room only. Apparently it was the biggest turn-out for a TCD netsock event ever. Wow.
At the point where Linux becomes easy enough to use for office workers, IHVs are going to start bundling it to save themselves $80 a box. Corel Linux may be the distribution that makes this possible, or perhaps the next RedHat. How can you possibly absorb $80 per unit on a product that costs $400? It's a real problem for Microsoft; don't underestimate it.
Now, if Sun lets IHVs bundle StarOffice without licensing fees, I don't need to tell you what kind of a threat that represents to Microsoft Office revenues.
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page.
and a few days before ESR was here in zurich (switzerland) and i missed it. :(
/ch/open group is heading in the right direction. screw those "migrate from unix to nt"-courses! ;)
but its a good thing our