Open source software braces for another big year

By JAMES NICCOLAI
IDG News Service, 03/08/99

SAN JOSE - After a year of high profile gains for open source software, around 50 developers gathered at their second annual open source summit meeting here last week where they talked about where their movement is headed and how they can keep it growing.

The event drew an impressive roster of attendees including Larry Wall, creator of the Perl language, Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server Group and Eric Allman, who wrote the original Sendmail program, which allows e-mail to move around the Internet.

The one-day summit was a chance for developers to meet face to face-many collaborate over the Internet and rarely meet in person-and to devise ways to make open source a more visible and trusted method of software development. The consensus at a press conference to discuss what went on during the summit's closed-door workgroups seemed to be: We've achieved a lot, but there's more to do.

Open source refers to software for which the source code is distributed freely, usually on the Internet, allowing developers to tinker with it and make improvements that can be built back into the original program. Companies such as Pacific HiTec make money by selling open source software on CD-ROMs along with technical support and other services.

The 1990s can be viewed as the decade of the open source operating system with the emergence of programs such as Linux and Free BSD. The future, however, will see exciting developments in open source applications, predicted Eric Raymond, author of an influential paper on open source software called, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."

The applications won't be like today's desktop software, instead they'll be complex Internet applications that allow businesses to offer online services such as those offered by Amazon.com and eBay, said Tim O'Reilly, founder and president of O'Reilly & Associates, a publishing firm which sponsored the summit.

"This is an area with a tremendous amount of innovation right now," O'Reilly said.

One action item the developers decided on involved figuring out how to turn anecdotal evidence about the financial savings of using open source software into some sort of scientific study. "We've made a lot of claims about what we can do, now we issue a challenge to analysts to go and figure out a way to measure it," he said.

The group of developers also managed to come to terms with the fact that open source-traditionally seen as antithetical to the corporate way of doing things-is suddenly being touted as the next big thing by some of the world's largest software companies.

"What we were trying to do here is to find a consensus that this was a good direction to go in and that there weren't any fundamental problems, and I think we pretty much agreed on that," Behlendorf said.

Corporate sponsorship makes it easier to distribute bug fixes and upgrades to users who aren't close to the core developer community. It also increases the profile of open source and throws a bit of money in the direction of open source developers, many of whom have day jobs and program code at night, the developers said.

"Now, instead of sitting in monasteries writing code for nothing, people are starting to throw a few dollars at us," said Chip Salzenberg, a contributor to Perl and a director of the Open Source Initiative board.

While Linux is one of the more visible outgrowths, a host of other programs-many of which were written more than a decade ago-provide the underpinnings of the Internet. Last January, Netscape surprised the industry by turning its Communicator browser into an open source product. Since then Corel, Oracle, Informix and more recently IBM have said they would port software products to Linux.

Both last year's and this year's summits were held in the U.S., however, open source is a truly global movement with developers in far-flung countries working together over the Internet to build programs, the developers said.

"The fact that this is a very international effort is manifested in the code-our tools have stronger international support than you will get ordinarily from proprietary software," Raymond said.

Altogether, some 50 developers spent the day in closed workshops talking about how to bring open source to the attention of venture capitalists and chief information officers and how to work better together to improve programs. They also discussed ways to secure funding and become more competitive.

"The fact that (the summit) is happening at all, the fact that people in these sub-tribes see a need to come together and speak to each other says something in itself" about the way open source is developing, Raymond said.