SAN DIEGO -- One of the difficulties of holding a conference devoted to a certain ethic -- for example, the open-source ethic -- is that after a little while it begins to feel like every speaker is preaching to the choir.
The people attending the O'Reilly Open Source Convention going on here this week think that open software is the way to engineer the future. For the most part, the speakers are telling them they're right. What's the point of all this manufactured glee, one wonders?
And yet if you see the smiles on these people's faces when some tech bigwig says his big company also uses open software, and that they're switching over to it at an increasing rate, it's easy to see why coders like to come to these things: Glee, even if it's pre-fab, lets you know you're on the right track in life.
And of course, it's no small thing when a big company says it's got a substantial stake in open source. For example, when W. Phillip Moore, a systems administrator at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, delivered a half-hour speech on why commercial software gives him nightmares and why he's much more comfortable with the free stuff -- that's a big deal, the coders realized.
"We don't sell software," Moore said. "Software is a means to an end for us, and nobody in the commercial software world can do what we want."
Open-source software is Wall Street's dirty little secret, Moore said. For some reason, none of the financial companies like to admit that they use Perl, Linux and Apache, but all the firms are teeming with it because it's the only way to get software to conform to the varying needs of a big business. (Tim O'Reilly, the conference's sponsor, speculates that the firms don't tell anyone about their use of open source because each considers it a competitive advantage.)
"With open software, I can make small changes to the code without having to go back to the company. We spend frightening sums of money on commercial stuff, and we have been repeatedly burned by the companies," Moore said.
So what's gone wrong? Many things, he said. Commercial software firms are slow to fix bugs. They have paltry support.
"Sometimes you call the 800-number and the person on the other end can't even spell the product you need help for," he quipped. Or the company goes out of business, and a firm is left holding some software it doesn't have the legal right to fix.
"The open stuff is so much more of a pleasure to work with," Moore said. "We find ourselves moving from commercial to open source for a lot of our internal infrastructure -- Apache for the Web, Linux in place of our Sun machines."
And as an added bonus, Morgan Stanley is saving money -- so much money that they're able to hire open-source developers on a contract basis to add features to their systems, features which are fed back into the open code of the product. "This way we can just pay the developers," Moore said. "We don't have to pay the marketers, the sales department, packaging."
The coders were elated with Moore's presentation -- and why shouldn't they be? He was saying everything they knew in their hearts to be true.
But that kind of faith in a movement can be problematic, as was evidenced when Fred Baker -- a "fellow" at Cisco and the former head of the Internet Engineering Task Force -- raised some "concerns" he had with open software.
While noting that "a lot of the actual technology that built the Internet was open source," Baker made the point that in order to keep a software project "stable," it must inevitably be managed by a commercial company. "Managed development is the key to a quality product," he said.
But nobody gave him the time of day. All afternoon Wednesday, you could hear people grousing about Baker's talk.
Why? Because Baker is full of it, a greedy corporate shill who -- like all those company yes-men -- is intent on crushing the open movement?
That's not likely -- he chaired the Internet Engineering Task Force, and he knows computers, and what works and what doesn't work in tech. He doesn't have a personal interest in crushing the open movement. And he did have a point -- many open projects are managed by commercial companies, and it shouldn't be inflammatory to say so.
So what accounted for the coders' very adverse reactions? They were blinded by their love for open source -- and that kind of thing, no matter how happy it makes you, can't be good for a movement.
