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

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

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Copyright Linux Magazine ©1999

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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

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