DEARBORN -- Open-source software advocate Eric S. Raymond, kicking off the 15th MacHack conference here at midnight on Friday with a five-hour keynote speech, had little to say about the Macintosh, but still managed to raise the hackles of Mac programmers -- at least those who were still awake -- with his strong defense of the open-source business model.
Speaking with the zeal of a fundamentalist preacher, Raymond suggested that the Mac hacker culture had different strengths, such as multimedia and graphical user interface expertise, from the GNU/Linux culture.
Raymond also told the nocturnal audience his goal was to begin the process of combining the strengths of both developer cultures to create the best software possible. Raymond was on stage in Cupertino last year when Apple Computer announced that it would make its Darwin OS, the core of Mac OS X, available in an open-source version.
Likening the MacHack crowd to fans at a science-fiction convention, Raymond offered a reprise of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," a talk, originally delivered at Linux Kongress 97, that many regard as the mission statement for the open-source movement.
Out of the cathedral Traditional software development, in Raymond's view, is like a cathedral, as a small number of programmers toil like illuminati to create applications. The programming teams are small because of Brooks' Law, which holds that bugs most commonly appear in the spaces where one programmer's code interacts with another's. Mathematically, it says that N programmers on a project works out to N-squared bugs. Small programming teams increase reliability but also time between releases, with numerous updates and bug fixes in the interim.
However, Brooks' Law doesn't hold in the open-source community, he said. With 40,000 coders working in tandem on Linux, the law would predict billions of bugs in the software. Yet Linux is remarkably stable, Raymond said, and it is often used for mission-critical servers.
Raymond said open-source operates more like a bazaar, where everyone communicates and suggests solutions. Bugs are shallow beasts because so many eyes are looking at the code. Bugs can be difficult to locate, but once they're found, they are often easy to fix.
Raymond also suggested that the immense peer review process in the Linux community is key to the software's stability. Traditional software development has no such skeptical outside peer review and pays for it with regular failures, Raymond said.
Concerns about open source During the event, MacHack attendees expressed concerns about the logistics of managing feedback from unknown sources and whether it's possible to make money in an open-source environment.
Raymond noted that open-source projects always have a core individual or review group that is responsible for the project and sanctions submissions. In addition, there are rules of etiquette about making submissions, and the vast majority of coders working with open-source software don't respond. "Nine-tenths of the universe is dark matter; you only interact with the bright stuff," he said, to laughter from the crowd.
Raymond made less headway with his point about the open-source business model, which holds that the value of software depends on service and support. For example, if a company offers a $250 software package and then goes out of business, that program might end up in the $10 bargain bin. The product is just as useful as it was before, it still cost the same to make, yet the perception of a lack of support reduces its value.
Software, he said, is a service industry, not a manufacturing industry -- a point that did not go over well with the coders who were still present. Many argued that the Mac community is too small to support a service model. Others contended that Mac programmers work to create top-quality code to begin with, which reduces the need for support and lets them reinvest in new software development.
Raymond countered that an open-source approach reduces development costs -- the most expensive part of software production -- by distributing the work among hundreds or thousands of developers. He pointed to the example of the popular Doom game series, whose developer, id software, made a fortune from Doom's 3-D engine while encouraging the program's large development community to create maps, skins and other extensions. As the price of the boxed Doom fell, id was able to sell these add-ons for a considerable profit. Ultimately, Doom went fully open source.
The lesson, he said, is that the value of going open source rises as the price of the boxed software falls.
Raymond had one piece of news: The board of the US Patent and Trademark Office has asked him to become a member of its citizen's advisory committee.
