Linux Magazine (http://www.linux-mag.com) November 1999

                               PHPCon 2002

                      Copyright Linux Magazine ©1999

  FEATURES
  The Joy of Unix
  Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy charts where Linux and free
  software fit into his company's solar system.
  by Eugene Eric Kim

                                                  Joy Interview Opener
                                               ALL PHOTOS © GARY WAGNER

    As one of the creators of Berkeley Unix, Bill Joy knows a thing or
    two about developing and marketing a free operating system. Sun
    Microsystems' chief scientist has survived the Unix wars and has
    watched both his company and its chief competitor, Microsoft, grow
    from tiny start-ups to industry giants. Though he has had a major
    hand in the development of such important Unix technologies as NFS
    (Sun's Network File System), the Berkeley Unix TCP/IP stack, and
    the vi text editor, Joy's current obsession is trying to build a
    thriving development community around Sun's Jini distributed
    computing technology and its not-quite-Open Source software
    licensing model. Joy recently accepted Linux Magazine's invitation
    to dinner, where he gave Publisher Adam Goodman, Executive Editor
    Robert McMillan, and Associate Editor Eugene Kim the lowdown on
    what Sun thinks of Linux and Open Source.

    Linux Magazine: One of the reasons we wanted to talk to you was
    that you have a long history with and a broad perspective on Unix
    and free software. What do you think of Linux? A lot of people talk
    about it as more than just an operating system.

    Bill Joy: It's actually less. It's just a kernel if you want to be
    technical about it. It's politically incorrect to conflate Linux
    with the applications. At least one person will get upset. So to be
    quite precise, it's just the kernel of the OS. When we did Berkeley
    Unix, we were doing the operating system and all of the
    applications.

    In a lot of ways, the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) was on
    the road to being free with source available and many of the things
    that Linux is. But it got hung up in this legal fight between the
    University of California and Unix Systems Labs.

    Those are the accidents of history. Now with Linux, we have this
    new version of Unix written with similar kinds of values that BSD
    had. One of the great strengths of Unix is that it's been rewritten
    and reimplemented several times. Applications with similar names
    and similar functions are widely understood, which allows this
    healthy kind of invention and reinvention to occur.

    LM: So if it weren't for the lawyers, we'd be called FreeBSD
    Magazine?

    BJ: If BSD had been free, there would have been no reason to
    rewrite it. The new thing that happened with Linux was cultural.
    The Internet is now coupling people together in ways that probably
    couldn't have happened before. How else would the developers have
    found each other?

    I did my work in the era of the magnetic tape. We sent Unix in
    source form to thousands of people; they sent us a few hundred
    dollars, because I had to pay for the postage and for the printing
    of the manuals, and that was our network. It was a postal-age speed
    thing. It was not very convenient.

    LM:Were licensing issues as important back then as they seem to be
    now?

    BJ: No. I knew I needed a license for BSD because at some point
    Berkeley was going to discover it. So I just took a license from
    the University of Toronto and modified it a little bit and started
    using that. I figured if I sent people a tape, and there was
    nothing for them to sign, they wouldn't take it seriously.

    When you give things away for free, often people think that's what
    it's worth: Nothing. So charging them a small amount and giving
    them a license to sign actually created a perception of value. I'm
    not saying the tape didn't have value, but an awful lot of stuff
    comes across your desk that you just throw away.

    LM: So, what did your license actually say?

    BJ: I don't remember. It was a one-page thing. I didn't have any
    lawyers look at it and I'm not a lawyer. I just made it up as I
    went along.

    What happened was that at some point we were getting to be big
    enough that we were sending out hundreds of these [Unix tapes] a
    year and charging hundreds of dollars for them. A quarter of a
    million dollars in revenue is a great deal of money for a graduate
    student. Scott McNealy likes to say: "To ask permission is to seek
    denial." And we were operating with that philosophy.

    But there were huge amounts of money involved and we were becoming
    pretty visible. So eventually we decided to send AT&T a letter
    asking them: "Is this okay what we're doing?" And 18 months later
    they sent a letter back: "We take no position." We won't answer
    your question. So that's what it was like to deal with a regulated
    monopoly of lawyers. That same sort of legal structure is what
    caused [AT&T] to license the transistor for nothing.

    So we couldn't actually get an answer from them and it was only
    years later that this whole fracas erupted around who owns the
    code. It turned out their code was as tainted with Berkeley stuff
    as ours was with theirs, so they eventually came to a truce. That's
    what I've heard second hand or just drinking wine with people. So
    there's a very tortured and funny history to all this code.

    LM: Have you ever contemplated what it would have been like if
    you'd released your code under the GNU Public License (GPL) or
    something similar?

    BJ: I don't see what the advantage to it is. The important thing is
    that people have the source code. I actually think it's fine that
    people can take BSD and make improvements to it and reap software
    profit.

    I don't think, given where we were and what we were trying to do,
    that the license made that much of a difference. At Berkeley, we
    had the model that software is the result of your research. The
    university tradition is that when you do research, you publish. So
    not giving people the source code for software meant that you
    weren't publishing your research. A fundamental model of BSD was:
    Software is a result of our research. We'll publish it and other
    people will use it if they choose. If someone commercializes it, I
    don't particularly care, because if you publish research in a
    university, people can commercialize it. That's just the way it is.

    The important thing in my mind is that people share stuff. We've
    done something at Sun -- Community Source Licensing -- which is
    another spin on this. But the fundamental principle in my mind is
    that people get to see the results of other people's work in a way
    that they can stand on shoulders rather than on toes. The details
    can vary; there can be many approaches and they work in different
    contexts.

    I think the GPL is fine. I just don't necessarily agree that it
    will achieve everything that Richard Stallman thinks it will. I'm
    not as religious about this as other people are.

                                                                  Joy 2
                                                                  Joy 1
                                                                  Joy 3

    LM: Just what was your involvement with Sun's Community Source
    License?

    BJ: I was the instigator of it.

    LM: Did you at any point evaluate the GPL for Sun's projects?

    BJ: I can't license all of Sun's intellectual property under the
    GPL, because it just won't work. I don't see any reason why I
    should give somebody who's doing commercial reuse unfettered access
    to stuff that cost me millions of dollars to do. We're spending
    over a billion dollars a year in research. I can't just throw it
    all on the street. Not only because it's worth something, but
    because I'm not convinced people will respect its values -- the
    values I would want to see expressed in the way people used it.

    If I make code available under the GPL, I'll lose control of it.
    The Europeans have this notion of artistic rights, and it seems to
    me an artist -- the person who creates something -- has some right
    over the ultimate use of what they do. Artists' rights also allow
    an artist to get paid on resale of their stuff later. My view is
    that programmers are like artists. I think there's got to be some
    economic reward back to the people who do the creative work that
    turns out to matter.

    The GPL just doesn't solve my business problem at Sun. I would like
    all of our intellectual property to be available in source form,
    but I can't economically do that under the GPL.

    In the object-oriented world [of programming], binaries are almost
    as usable as source because they have clean interfaces and
    boundaries. This whole thing about open source makes much less
    sense once you start talking about [object-oriented programming
    languages like] Java, except to the extent that people don't get
    the boundaries right.

    LM: What about your original implementation of TCP/IP for BSD,
    which was freely available and which became the basis for a lot of
    the other implementations that are out there? It seems that from a
    compatibility standpoint, Java, for example, would have benefited
    from freely available source code in the same way TCP/IP did.

    BJ: The top predator now is Microsoft. We didn't have a top
    predator back when I did TCP/IP. When you have a person with
    unlimited funds who is clearly focused on destroying the value
    proposition of what you're doing, you'd be a fool not to account
    for them in the strategy that you adopted.

    LM: Do you feel that Microsoft might actually try to create
    Microsoft Linux in an attempt to fragment the Linux community?

    BJ: The enemy in terms of fragmentation is usually yourself -- the
    people who know the most about making the software better. It's
    likely to be two separate groups that both decide that they're
    right and they're both going to make it better and just diverge.
    You've seen the history of the family tree of Unix. It's all over
    the map. It's certain to happen to the Linux tree at some point.

    LM: Then why hasn't it happened already?

    BJ: It has. Depending on what we'd say Linux is -- the kernel
    hasn't fragmented, but the distributions have. People's systems
    aren't the same.

    LM: Do you think that the GPL discourages incompatibility by
    requiring people to make their source code freely available?

    BJ: I don't see that it really prevents incompatibility. The only
    thing I know that prevents incompatibility is requiring people to
    be compatible. The GPL permits compatibility. It does not encourage
    it.

    LM: Can you explain Sun's position toward Linux on Sparc? Sun seems
    to be supporting the development effort somewhat.

    BJ: Right. Well, the customer's always right. If the customer wants
    Linux, that's great -- then we should give it to them. Sparc is the
    hardware that we make, and we're supportive of and very glad that
    people in the Linux community have done the hard work that they
    need to do.

    We treat each of our divisions as entirely separate businesses, and
    I don't necessarily know what's going to be important in the long
    run. People have now figured out that companies that are a little
    more chaotic in this way actually are better adapters to
    environmental changes, and I think it's one of the reasons Sun has
    done so well. We don't try to get everybody signed up to one credo.
    We do not have one ironclad set of rules. We allow this kind of
    diversity internally.

    LM: Sun is providing machines for Linux developers. What else is it
    doing to support Linux?

    BJ: I don't actually know. I'm more involved in Java and Jini. The
    company's very large -- we have like 30,000 people -- and I
    probably get involved with about half of the R&D. The Solaris stuff
    I have the least to do with.

    Sun wins if somebody has a Linux machine with Java because that
    improves the Java community. Sun wins if it's a Sparc. That's even
    better. To be honest, if it was Solaris, Sparc, and Java, that
    would be even better. But we're not infinitely greedy here.

    The old Macy's model was if they didn't have what you wanted,
    they'd send you to the store that did, even if it was a competitor.
    If you come to us, we don't expect that we're going to solve all of
    your problems. You may want Apache on Linux on x86, and we'll do
    the best to operate in that environment because there may be some
    reason that's beyond our ability to affect that that's the right
    answer for you.

    So to be customer-driven is to accept that and to contribute what
    you can. We just did this big deal with Apache to put more Java
    stuff in Apache. So we're coming at it from all directions.

    LM: You're referring to the Jakarta project, where Sun agreed to
    donate its JavaServer Pages (JSP) and other Java Web server-related
    source code to the Apache project and have it released under the
    Apache license.

    BJ: That was a local business decision; I'm glad that they did
    that.

    LM: But you still have the same concerns about standardization,
    compatibility, and so forth?

    BJ: Which I think the Apache community should have also. To the
    extent that Apache is a platform, and you want to have it be a
    healthy platform, you want the platform to be stable. But, I'm not
    opposed to limited cases depending on other licensing mechanisms.

    I would always rather have a legal thing to fall back on to enforce
    compatibility. Think of contractual enforcement as sort of the
    right-wing approach, and community licensing as more left-wing.
    We've taken a step to the center. We expect in most cases the
    community to enforce compatibility, but in the limited case of a
    rogue, I want the ability to enforce a legal contract, because I
    don't see any reason why I shouldn't have that ability. In the left
    wing, amongst ourselves, we can argue about these things, but in
    reality, most of the commercial guys are so far to the right that
    we already seem radical by being in the middle.

    It's innovation and sharing versus centralized control. It's
    basically the Romans versus the Greeks. That's what it comes down
    to. Microsoft is the Roman model, and the other people are
    basically the Greek model. That's the real root of it.

    LM: Isn't that the same situation with Java? With Jini?

    BJ: No. Because the Java source code has always been widely
    available. That's never been the issue. You can download it
    yourself. Even under the old license, we basically had a clickable
    license to download all this stuff.

    Basically, we think that it's much better to work together than to
    not work together. That's not a very complicated value. Microsoft
    thinks: "anything you do, you compete with us." I think that if you
    don't necessarily like what we do, we'll find some other way to
    work together. There are not enough of us IT professionals anyway.

    LM: Speaking of Microsoft, have you ever meet Bill Gates?

    BJ: Oh yeah. Mostly in the eighties. I met him in the early 1980s.

    LM: So would you consider him someone you know fairly well
    personally?

    BJ: No. That would be a stale evaluation of him.

    LM: So you believe he's changed?

    BJ: I believe it's possible that he has so I can't speak to his
    current state. I haven't seen him since -- the last time I talked
    to him was probably five years ago.

    LM: Is Linux the major force pushing against Microsoft?

    BJ: I think Java is probably the major force pushing against
    Microsoft right now. I think Linux is a threat but Java's a bigger
    threat.

    LM: Do you see Linux as a threat to Sun at all?

    BJ: No. More Unix is better. Anything that isn't Microsoft is
    better. Anybody who buys a Linux machine has a lot better chance of
    buying a Solaris machine as their next machine or buying a Sparc
    machine running Linux or buying Java. The probabilities are greater
    for all those cases.

    If I look at the graph of what percentage of customer dollars I'm
    likely to get next, it's much higher if they start with Linux than
    if they start with Windows. So in all cases, I'd rather win and get
    Sparc/Solaris/Java as the solution. But Linux/Sparc/Java would be
    my second choice.

    LM: Do you know of a company named VA Linux Systems?

    BJ: I met somebody who said they were working for them. I don't
    track the Linux community, though.

    LM: What do you think about the business models being built around
    Linux?

    BJ: I understand that people think they're going to build a
    business on the service model, but the truth is customers don't
    want to pay for that, so I don't get it. I don't know how it's
    going to work. People don't like to pay for service.

    The whole proposition with Linux is that nobody can control the
    operating system. Some invisible hand controls it; a community
    controls it. Any individual company can't affect where it goes. How
    is everybody going to use this in a sense? The Linux companies are
    hobbled by it because if you say they can add value, then I say
    it's going to fragment Linux.

    If you accept the proposition that they can't fragment it, then you
    also are saying that they can't really differentiate themselves.
    Because other than tuning it up a little bit, to differentiate
    would cause fragmentation.

    I would argue that for most people the performance is going to be
    more than they're going to need anyway. I'm not sure performance
    differentiation is going to be that significant. So I'm not exactly
    sure how these companies will differentiate themselves technically.

    LM: Have you ever considered making the Solaris source code more
    freely accessible?

    BJ: Yeah. The difficulty is that it's got a lot of third-party
    stuff that's licensed under funny terms. So I think it will be
    really healthy for both the Solaris and Linux communities to work
    more closely together.

    LM: Think that will ever happen?

    BJ: It already is. We run a lot of Linux binaries, and we're trying
    to find ways to work together. Merging isn't a goal. I think Linux
    and Solaris have different goals. Linux is not worried about
    providing MVS class or VM370 or whatever IBM-class services for
    corporate data centers. That's not the center of the Linux
    community.

    LM: But there are certainly areas of overlap.

    BJ: That's okay. It gives people a choice, and that's not a bad
    thing, right? I still prefer to win. I'm not saying we're not
    competitive, but I'd still rather have it be Linux than NT. If
    there's two Unix choices and one Microsoft, that improves our
    chances.

    LM: Do you think it's likely that parts of the Solaris operating
    system will be individually released as open source software?

    BJ: I think that would be a good thing. There are logistic issues.
    You have to spend money to do that and it's hard work. In return,
    you get the value that the source code's available so the customer
    can become more self-reliant. I think self-reliance is a good
    thing.

    LM: Were you in favor of Sun's decision to move to AT&T Unix with
    Solaris?

    BJ: It was hard to do a deal with AT&T and it was hard to work with
    them. It was a very close call and I went into Scott's office and I
    said to him: This is a really close call and I can make the deal
    happen if you want. There are pluses and minuses. Personally I
    think it's a plus because I think a unified Unix community is
    better than one that's not, and I'm concerned about this. But I
    also think it would be okay if we decide to go our own way. It's
    your call. It's a CEO call.

    LM: Do you see similarities between the development community and
    the cultural community that's surrounding Linux right now and the
    community that surrounded BSD when you were developing it?

    BJ: No. Our community was so small. It was Robert Elz and the
    people at Berkeley and the people at Bell Labs. There was one guy
    in Austria and one in Australia. No one else contributed much of
    substance that I recall.

    LM: Do you believe that the BSD guys in general have a different
    philosophy toward software development then the Linux guys do?

    BJ: No. I think that if you exclude device drivers, you'd find that
    there's a bit of a myth operating here; that a whole lot of people
    wrote the system. It was actually a small number of people.

    LM: In BSD or in Linux?

    BJ: Both cases. We have this myth that distributed development
    works, but it's a slight bit of a lie in that a small number of
    bright people can create an operating system. It does take a lot of
    people to write all of the device drivers. That's true. But that
    doesn't necessarily mean we can coordinate the programming of
    hundreds of people writing C code. I don't know if that's true or
    not, and I personally don't think Linux proves it. I don't think
    Apache proves that. That's the myth that people have propagated.
    Maybe it's true, but if you called me as an expert witness, I would
    testify that it has not been true in my experience.

    LM: Is there something to the notion that the people working on BSD
    are more exclusive than the Linux community?

    BJ: That's an us-versus-them thing.These things just get amplified.
    I don't think these people vary from each other by much. They just
    identify with some group, and that's a human-nature thing.

    BSD is older. It doesn't need as much hacking. So if you're a new
    person learning how to hack, BSD was not as good a place to go. It
    didn't need as much work. Linux grew up with the Internet. By the
    time the Net came along, BSD didn't need the same level of work and
    wasn't as amenable to getting people interested in it.

    When you already have several million lines of code, it's not as
    much fun to work on. Linux was a great thing because it allowed a
    lot of people to get involved in learning about operating systems
    by helping to finish this system. That process of creating
    something is the process of creating a community.

    So Linux came along at the great, perfect time in a perfect,
    incomplete state for lots of people to participate in. It was still
    small enough that people could read the code. On the other hand,
    BSD was already mature, and the things that needed to be done to it
    were hard enough that it made it difficult for any person to come
    and participate.

    So BSD wasn't as amenable to parallel innovation because the bar to
    participating was pretty high and the code base was too large. When
    I started on Unix, the source code could be listed in ten or twenty
    thousand lines as a 50-page or 100-page book.

    If I came in today and wanted to do something with Solaris, I'd be
    overwhelmed. I can't have the kind of impact I had on Unix with
    Solaris. The second-generation people coming into the Linux
    community are going to have the same problem.

    LM:: What inspired you to write vi?

    BJ: What happened is that Ken Thompson came to Berkeley and brought
    this broken Pascal system, and we got this summer job to fix it.
    While we were fixing it, we got frustrated with the editor we were
    using which was named ed. ed is certainly frustrating.

    We got this code from a guy named George Coulouris at University
    College in London called em -- Editor for Mortals -- since only
    immortals could use ed to do anything. By the way, before that
    summer, we could only type in uppercase. That summer we got
    lowercase ROMs for our terminals. It was really exciting to finally
    use lowercase.

    LM: What year was that?

    BJ: '76 or '77. It was the summer Carter was president. So we
    modified em and created en. I don't know if there was an eo or an
    ep but finally there was ex. [laughter] I remember en but I don't
    know how it got to ex. So I had a terminal at home and a 300 baud
    modem so the cursor could move around and I just stayed up all
    night for a few months and wrote vi.

    LM: So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like everybody
    says?

    BJ: No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because
    you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a
    300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny
    commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a
    modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an
    upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow.

    9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So
    the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive
    when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that
    computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands
    this anymore.

    The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were
    essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms.
    They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by
    comparison, with infinitely fast screens.

    So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and
    all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War
    II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can
    just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.

    It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was
    written for a world that doesn't exist anymore -- unless you decide
    to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400
    baud, in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at
    2400 baud. It used to be perfectly usable at 1200 baud. But these
    days you can't use the Web at 2400 baud because the ads are 24
    kilobytes.

    LM: Do you still use vi?

    BJ: No, because I mostly use Netscape.

    LM: To write code?

    BJ: I mostly do e-mail. The last code I wrote of any substance, I
    wrote in vi.

    LM: Did you have a sense back in those days -- even in the furthest
    region of your mind -- that you were working on something that
    would eventually build an industry or change the world?

    BJ:No.

    LM: At what point did it occur to you? At what point did you look
    around and say: Whoa?

    BJ: I probably constantly under-estimated it.

    LM: You must have realized that it was happening at some point in
    your career.

    BJ: I think the Web was a "wow" for me because my dad was using it.
    [laughter]

    LM: You said earlier that Sun would like to work more with the
    Linux community. Do you have any thoughts on how something like
    that might happen?

    BJ: We have Linux mode on Solaris and there's Solaris mode on
    Linux. We've done analysis on both sets of APIs and what
    commonality they have. If the Linux community believes it's okay
    for there to be other choices, then that's kind of a prerequisite
    to working with somebody who's different. It's okay that there's
    another version of Unix out there and total world domination is not
    our goal.

    LM: Are there opportunities to do things with Linux that Sun was
    never able to do as a company? For example, Unix never got the
    desktop. Or at least, Sun was never really able to bring Unix to
    the desktop.

    BJ: That was our whole business for years.

    LM: Right, but Microsoft owns the desktop right now. It's not meant
    as a cut against Sun. It's just a fact that Unix is basically a
    server operating system.

    BJ: We haven't given up. We're doing Java clients now.

    LM: Why do you think that Unix was never successful on the desktop?

    BJ: Because Microsoft had a person who was very greedy and who was
    very brutal in his business dealings and was handed a monopoly by
    IBM due to ineptness. They had several opportunities to rein this
    guy in and the management blew it. So the IBM monopoly got
    transferred basically due to blunders. Microsoft is a direct
    successor to the IBM mainframe monopoly. The corporate guys
    coalesced around the PC standard because it came from IBM. Not
    because it was any good.

    LM: But does something like Linux offer Sun an opportunity to
    rectify past mistakes? For example, there are windowing systems
    being developed for Linux that need ...

    BJ: We've had windowing systems, several of them, for many years.
    The presence or absence of a windowing system didn't win or lose
    the war. We have had CDE and Open Windows and X-Windows and NeWS.

    We've had applications too. We've had all of these things. I
    suggest that the desktop war was not won based on technical merit,
    but on business decisions. Microsoft came along and took over the
    apps base with Office. Office locked people in to the point where
    corporation don't feel they can change their desktops, not because
    they're locked to Windows but to Microsoft Office.

    Now what's happening is the wind is blowing hard for the companies
    to put everything on the Net. Make the browser the access point for
    the desktops. So the desktop is really becoming a browser. But the
    people -- the companies -- still have these Microsoft Office
    hairballs that nobody likes. Have you seen a good review of Office
    2000? Everybody hates it. But Office is what locks up the desktop.

    LM: There is a lot of talk about Linux possibly conquering the
    desktop.

    BJ: It's easier to talk about than to do. The Macintosh is easy to
    use, and it even has Office. What's the difference between Linux
    and a Macintosh? If Linux with future apps is going to be good
    enough, why aren't more people buying Macs?

    LM: You think this is a fight that's already been fought,
    basically?

    BJ: No, I'm not saying you can't find a way to win. It's just that
    I haven't heard what it is. Given a sufficient number of people who
    care and an ability to be flexible about the way you achieve your
    objective, Linux might get there. You have to find a way around
    some of these things that are preventing people from switching.

    These guys at Microsoft are very aggressive business people, and
    they have been very successful as aggressive business people. I
    don't think they've been very successful at building good products.
    I think history will judge their products to be the lowest-quality
    consumer products ever built and manufactured in any scale.

    It's similar to how Detroit got itself to where they manufactured
    incredibly low-quality cars, which coincided in history with GM's
    maximum market share. What happens is monopolists don't tend to
    value product quality. Very high market share is what they value.

    As GM's market share was declining, it always talked about getting
    back market share. Why didn't they talk about making products that
    people wanted to buy that were high quality? That was the problem.
    I heard Steve Ballmer [President of Microsoft]say this in a speech:
    "Our number one goal is maximizing our market share." Excuse me.
    Market share should be a consequence of your goal. That can't be
    the goal.

    The goal is to build great products. I have an infinite respect for
    Steve Jobs because whatever else you say about him, his passion is
    to build a great product. Good things come from that. Bad things
    come from a focus on market share. So the Linux community should
    have as its goal to build the greatest operating system. Its goal
    should not be, "Beat Microsoft." Because that's a market-share
    goal. That's a very, very destructive, counterproductive goal.

    LM: Do you think there are any other goals the Linux community
    should pursue?

    BJ: Make it the best product it can be. Figure out who you want it
    to be for and build it to serve that community -- if it's for
    yourself, that's okay. Make it the best hobbyist -- in the best
    sense of the word -- operating system. Linux to me is like amateur
    radio was to radio. Amateur radio developed all the radio
    technology. Linux is developing some good technology, and these
    people are hobbyists. Probably some Latin root of the word
    "hobbyist" means people who love something and care about it. So
    it's a sense of love and caring for reasons that are noneconomic.

    It's like amateur astronomers. In essence, it's amateur in the
    highest sense of the word, having the highest affinity to caring
    that it's always the best. And tinkering and all this kind of
    stuff, that's a very positive value.
      ______________________________________________________________

  Eugene Eric Kim writes, programs, and consults on a freelance basis.
  He is the author of CGI Developer's Guide(Sams.net 1996), and is
  currently writing a book on the history of free software. He can be
  reached at [email protected].

         Linux Magazine (http://www.linux-mag.com) November 1999

                               PHPCon 2002

                      Copyright Linux Magazine ©1999