LinuxWorld 2003: Where Open Minds Party

The theme of LinuxWorld this year is “Where Open Minds Meet”. The show in San Francisco not only means big business, it’s also the biggest bash of the year for the Linux crowd.

It’s also reassuring to see the major players, under the spotlight of LinuxWorld, rally to counter the bullying attempts of SCO and to affirm the protection of freedom provided by the GPL.

However, even as platinum players like IBM, HP, Sun, Red Hat, Intel, CA and Oracle expand the market for this jewel of the free software movement, the other character of Linux and open source peeks now and then from behind the shiny counters, logos and equipment. Linux is still a grassroots, bottom-up effort. It’s as if IBM, HP, Sun and the others are just along for the ride: the drivers of Linux are still you and I!

Sure, many of the products and services showcased at LinuxWorld this year are packaged and wrapped and sold just like their proprietary cousins.

But it’s only the products and services that have been sold, not Linux. At a deeper level, Linux is a process not a product. In fact, Linux is just one expression of a larger dynamic at work - a dynamic that takes many iterations, even generations to play out.

This larger dynamic is the development of software and technology infrastructure through open collaboration and step-wise progression. The process of developing this infrastructure is reflected in the technology incubators of Silicon Valley and well beyond, not only at Stanford and Berkeley, HP and IBM, but also in all the creative engineers and thinkers at companies, labs, and other organizations, from Silicon Valley to Silicon India.

Linus Torvalds may work for Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), but OSDL does not own his creation Linux. Even Linus will claim no proprietorship beyond his own “Linus tree”: you and I are welcome to start our own trees!

Ironically, it is somewhat self-limiting for companies like Sun or Microsoft to settle for “just” owning their products. As soon as they enforce narrow ownership, the inspiration that creates their products is likely to disappear and seek other avenues of expression. Sun has eagerly sought to re-ignite innovation in its proprietary products by incorporating open source technologies like GNOME into Solaris and by spawning projects like “Mad Hatter”. Even Microsoft was at LinuxWorld this year promoting its own vision of “shared source” designed to protect its IP yet counter the perception of lack of openness. But such efforts may merely stunt the growth they are intended to foster.

That’s because community processes such as Linux and open source turn the product paradigm inside out. Instead of a company and its partners combining to develop products for a market, it’s the market that develops the products. Open source companies become co-drivers. They become facilitators and service providers. They can package, distribute and even retain ownership of at least their part of the results. But it’s an open party. Each of their contributions is available for others to take and innovate with and to use to progress the infrastructure for everyone.

So LinuxWorld 2003: party on!