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dictionary to their own recipe for cola-building always from the bottom up rather

than accepting formats or content imposed by corporate hierarchies from the top down.

The word "open-source" comes from the notion that companies or ad hoc groups would

make available online the source code-the underlying programming instructions that

make a piece of software work-and then let anyone who has something to contribute

improve it and let millions of others just download it for their own use for free.

While commercial software is copyrighted and sold, and companies guard the source

code as they would their crown jewels so they can charge money to anyone who wants

to use it and thereby generate income to develop new versions, open-

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source software is shared, constantly improved by its users, and made available for

free to anyone. In return, every user who comes up with an improvement-a patch that

makes this software sing or dance better-is encouraged to make that patch available

to every other user for free.

Not being a computer geek, I had never focused much on the open-source movement, but

when I did, I discovered it was an amazing universe of its own, with communities of

online, come-as-you-are volunteers who share their insights with one another and then

offer it to the public for nothing. They do it because they want something the market

doesn't offer them; they do it for the psychic buzz that comes from creating a

collective product that can beat something produced by giants like Microsoft or IBM,

and-even more important-to earn the respect of their intellectual peers. Indeed,

these guys and gals are one of the most interesting and controversial new forms of

collaboration that have been facilitated by the flat world and are flattening it even

more.

In order to explain how this form of collaboration works, why it is a flattener and

why, by the way, it has stirred so many controversies and will be stirring even more

in the future, I am going to focus on just two basic varieties of open-sourcing: the

intellectual commons movement and the free software movement.

The intellectual commons form of open-sourcing has its roots in the academic and

scientific communities, where for a long time self-organized collaborative

communities of scientists have come together through private networks and later the

Internet to pool their brainpower or share insights around a particular science or

math problem. The Apache Web server had its roots in this form of open-sourcing. When

I asked a friend of mine, Mike Arguello, an IT systems architect, to explain to me

why people share knowledge or work in this way, he said, "IT people tend to be very

bright people and they want everybody to know just how brilliant they are." Marc

Andreessen, who invented the first Web browser, agreed: "Open-source is nothing more

than peer-reviewed science. Sometimes people contribute to these things because they

make science, and they discover things, and the reward is reputation. Sometimes you

can build a business out of it, sometimes they just want to increase the store

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of knowledge in the world. And the peer review part is critical-and open-source is

peer review. Every bug or security hole or deviation from standards is reviewed."

I found this intellectual commons form of open-sourcing fascinating, so I went

exploring to find out who were those guys and girls in the mail room. Eventually,

I found my way to one of their pioneers, Brian Behlendorf. If Apache-the open-source

Web server community-were an Indian tribe, Behlendorf would be the tribal elder. I

caught up with him one day in his glass-and-steel office near the San Francisco airport,

where he is now founder and chief technology officer of CollabNet, a start-up focused

on creating software for companies that want to use an open-source approach to

innovation. I started with two simple questions: Where did you come from? and: How

did you manage to pull together an open-source community of online geeks that could

go toe-to-toe with IBM?

"My parents met at IBM in Southern California, and I grew up in a town just north

of Pasadena, La Canada," Behlendorf recalled. "The public school was very competitive

academically, because a lot of the kids' parents worked at the Jet Propulsion

Laboratory that was run by Caltech there. So from a very early age I was around a

lot of science in a place where it was okay to be kind of geeky. We always had computers

around the house. We used to use punch cards from the original IBM mainframes for

making shopping lists. In grade school, I started doing some basic programming, and

by high school I was pretty into computers... I graduated in 1991, but in 1989, in

the early days of the Internet, a friend gave me a copy of a program he had downloaded

onto a floppy disk, called 'Fractint.' It was not pirated, but was freeware, produced

by a group of programmers, and was a program for drawing fractals. [Fractals are

beautiful images produced at the intersection of art and math.] When the program

started up, the screen would show this scrolling list of e-mail addresses for all

the scientists and mathematicians who contributed to it. I noticed that the source

code was included with the program. This was my first exposure to the concept of

open-source. Here was this program that you just downloaded for free, and they even

gave you the source code with it, and it was done by a community of people. It

started to paint a different picture of programming in my mind. I started to think

that there were some interesting social dynamics to the way certain kinds of software

were written or could be written-as opposed to the kind of image I had of the

professional software developer in the back office tending to the mainframe, feeding

info in and taking it out for the business. That seemed to me to be just one step

above accounting and not very exciting."

After graduating in 1991, Behlendorf went to Berkeley to study physics, but he quickly

became frustrated by the disconnect between the abstractions he was learning in the

classroom and the excitement that was starting to emerge on the Internet.

"When you entered college back then, every student was given an e-mail address, and

I started using it to talk to students and explore discussion boardsthat were starting

to appear around music," said Behlendorf. "In 1992,1 started my own Internet mailing

list focused on the local electronic music scene in the Bay Area. People could just

post onto the discussion board, and it started to grow, and we started to discuss

different music events and DJs. Then we said, 'Hey, why don't we invite our own DJs

and throw our own events?' It became a collective thing. Someone would say, 'I have

some records,' and someone else would say, 'I have a sound system,' and someone else

would say, 'I know the beach and if we showed up at midnight we could have a party.'

By 1993, the Internet was still just mailing lists and e-mail and FTP sites [file

transfer protocol repositories where you could store things]. So I started collecting

an archive of electronic music and was interested in how we could put this online

and make it available to a larger audience. That was when I heard about Mosaic [the

Web browser developed by Marc Andreessen.] So I got a job at the computer lab in the

Berkeley business school, and I spent my spare time researching Mosaic and other Web

technologies. That led me to a discussion board with a lot of the people who were

writing the first generation of Web browsers and Web servers."

(A Web server is a software program that enables anyone to use his or her home or

office computer to host a Web site on the World Wide Web. Amazon.com, for instance,

has long run its Web site on Apache software.

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When your Web browser goes to www.amazon.com, the very first piece of software it

talks to is Apache. The browser asks Apache for the Amazon Web page and Apache sends

back to the browser the content of the Amazon Web page. Surfing the Web is really

your Web browser interacting with different Web servers.)

"I found myself sitting in on this forum watching Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen

debating how all these things should work," recalled Behlendorf. "It was pretty

exciting, and it seemed radically inclusive. I didn't need a Ph.D. or any special

credentials, and I started to see some parallels between my music group and these

scientists, who had a common interest in building the first Web software. I followed

that [discussion] for a while and then I told a friend of mine about it. He was one

of the first employees at Wired magazine, and he said Wired would be interested in

having me set up a Web site for them. So I joined there at $10 an hour, setting up

their e-mail and their first Web site-HotWired ... It was one of the first ad-supported

online magazines."

HotWired decided it wanted to start by having a registration system that required

passwords-a controversial concept at that time. "In those days," noted Andrew Leonard,

who wrote a history of Apache for Salon.com in 1997, "most Webmasters depended on

a Web server program developed at the University of Illinois's National Center for

Super-computing Applications (also the birthplace of the groundbreaking Mosaic Web

browser). But theNCSA Web server couldn't handle password authentication onthe scale

that HotWired needed. Luckily, the NCSA server was in the public domain, which meant

that the source code was free to all comers. So Behlendorf exercised the hacker

prerogative: He wrote some new code, a 'patch' to the NCSA Web server, that took care

of the problem." Leonard commented, "He wasn't the only clever programmer rummaging

through the NCSA code that winter. All across the exploding Web, other Webmasters

were finding it necessary to take matters into their own keyboards. The original code

had been left to gather virtual dust when its primary programmer, University of

Illinois student Rob McCool, had been scooped up (along with Marc Andreessen and Lynx

author Eric Bina) by a little-known company in Silicon Valley named Netscape.

Meanwhile, the Web refused to stop growing-and

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kept creating new problems for Web servers to cope with." So patches of one kind or

another proliferated like Band-Aids on bandwidth, plugging one hole here and

breaching another gap there.

Meanwhile, all these patches were slowly, in an ad hoc open-source manner, building

a new modern Web server. But everyone had his or her own version, trading patches

here and there, because the NCSA lab couldn't keep up with it all.

"I was just this near-dropout," explained Behlendorf. "I was having a lot of fun

building this Web site for Wired and learning more than I was learning at Berkeley.

So a discussion started in our little working group that the NCSA people were not

answering our e-mails. We were sending in patches for the system and they weren't

responding. And we said, 'If NCSA would not respond to our patches, what's going to

happen in the future?' We were happy to continue improving this thing, yet we were

worried when we were not getting any feedback and seeing our patches integrated. So

I started to contact the other people I knew trading patches. . . Most of them were

on the standards working groups [the Internet Engineering Task Force] that were

setting the first standards for the interconnectivity between machines and

applications on the Internet... And we said, 'Why don't we take our future into our

own hands and release our own [Web server] version that incorporated all our patches?'

"We looked up the copyright for the NCSA code, and it basically just said give us

credit at Illinois for what we invented if you improve it-and don't blame us if it

breaks," recalled Behlendorf. "So we started building our own version from all our

patches. None of us had time to be a full-time Web server developer, but we thought

if we could combine our time and do it in a public way, we could create something

better than we could buy off the shelf-and nothing was available then, anyway. This

was all before Netscape had shipped its first commercial Web server. That was the

beginning of the Apache project."

By February 1999, they had completely rewritten the original NCSA program and

formalized their cooperation under the name "Apache."

"I picked the name because I wanted it to have a positive connotation of being

assertive," said Behlendorf. "The Apache tribe was the last tribe

to surrender to the oncoming U.S. government, and at the time we worried that the

big companies would come in and 'civilize' the landscape that the early Internet

engineers built. So 'Apache' made sense to me as a good code name, and others said

it also would make a good pun"-as in the APAtCHy server, because they were patching

all these fixes together.

So in many ways, Bellendorf and his open-source colleagues-most of whom he had never

met but knew only by e-mail through their open-source chat room-had created a virtual,

online, bottom-up software factory, which no one owned and no one supervised. "We

had a software project, but the coordination and direction were an emergent behavior

based on whoever showed up and wanted to write code," he said.

But how does it actually work? I asked Behlendorf. You can't just have a bunch of

people, unmonitored, throwing code together, can you?

"Most software development involves a source code repository and is managed by tools

such as the Concurrent Versions System," he explained. "So there is a CVS server out

there, and I have a CVS program on my computer. It allows me to connect to the server

and pull down a copy of the code, so I can start working with it and making

modifications. If I think my patch is something I want to share with others, I run