ESR On O'Reilly Summit

Eric S. Raymond wrote in with his summary of the proceedings from the recent O'Reilly Open Source Summit. Click the link below to read his comments on the proceedings.

The following was written by Slashdot Reader, Flautist, and Hacker, Eric S. Raymond

The Open Source Summit report from the anonymous poster using the tag line "You can't handle the truth" got a crucial fact wrong -- and that fact is symbolic of a larger problem with the essay.

It was not, in fact, a guy from HP who flung at me "You've never run a business". It was one of our own; Larry McVoy, a hacker who is a sort of anti-Stallman -- he believes that unless the open-source community accepts direct-revenue-capture licenses we will all come to a horrible end.

The author seems to have filtered his view of the summit through a simplifying myth that regards hackers and businesspeople as poles apart, with all hackers on the "free software" side of the fence and all businessmen either opposed to open source or puzzled by it or out to exploit it in some sinister way.

That simplifying myth has no room in it for Larry McVoy. Nor for the half-dozen or so businesspeople in the room who really seemed to get it. The truth is, I didn't see "hackers vs. suits" at the Summit -- just a whole bunch of people trying in various ways to get a handle on a very powerful and complex phenomenon.

And you know what? Licenses, everybody's favorite subject for doctrinal warfare, *were never even discussed*. They just weren't a big issue. My sense was that everybody there understood the basic hacker-community social contract that the OSD expresses and accepted it -- *even the suits*. All the hot questions were posed at a higher level; so we've got this social contract, we know why it clobbers the hell out of closed-source methods, now what do we do with it?

Mr. "You can't handle the truth" apparently had some trouble assimilating it himself. I saw no evidence that anyone there was incapable of "getting it", and I saw no justification for alarmist fox-in-the-henhouse metaphors.

Some plain truth: businesspeople can't "crush" us because, fundamentally, they can't do *anything* to us except throw money or refrain from throwing money. They can't erase all our source archives. They can't stop tens of thousands of people from writing code every day for reasons that are outside the ken of material-scarcity economics. They can't prevent the open-source community from evolving in any cultural direction it damn well pleases. As well try to cut water with a sword...

The only way I can account for the tone of Mr. YCHTH's essay (or the less sophisticated rantings of J. Random Slashdotter) is by supposing that a lot of hackers have a sort of need to feel persecuted, a need to cast themselves as the little guy in a David vs. Goliath drama with eschatological stakes.

Reality is much more complicated than that. This Goliath (big business) hasn't got the slightest damn interest in persecuting us, he just wants to figure out how our nifty sling works. And it's safe to tell him, too, because big guys are relatively lousy with slings and we'll always be better than he is at it.

We are much more likely to "corrupt" business than it is to "corrupt" us.