第 16 页

encyclopedia ran out of money and resources after two years," wrote Lih. "Editors

with PhD degrees were at the helm of the project then, but it produced only a few

hundred articles. Not wanting the content to languish, Wales placed the pages on a

wiki Website in January 2001 and invited any Internet visitors to edit or add to the

collection. The site became a runaway success in the first year and gained a loyal

following, generating over 20,000 articles and spawning over a dozen language

translations. After two years, it had 100,000 articles, and in April 2004, it exceeded

250,000 articles in English and 600,000 articles in 50 other languages.And according

to Website rankings at Alexa.com, it has become more popular than traditional online

encyclopedias such as Britannica.com."

How, you might ask, does one produce a credible, balanced encyclopedia by way of an

ad hoc open-source, open-editing movement? After all, every article in the Wikipedia

has an "Edit this page" button, allowing anyone who surfs along to add or delete

content on that page.

It starts with the fact, Lih explained, that "because wikis provide the

ability to track the status of articles, review individual changes, and discuss issues,

they function as social software. Wiki Websites also track and store every

modification made to an article, so no operation is ever permanently destructive.

Wikipedia works by consensus, with users adding and modifying content while trying

to reach common ground along the way.

"However, the technology is not enough on its own," wrote Lih. "Wales created an

editorial policy of maintaining a neutral point of view (NPOV) as the guiding

principle . . . According to Wikipedia's guidelines, The neutral point of view

attempts to present ideas and facts in such a fashion that both supporters and

opponents can agree . . .' As a result, articles on contentious issues such as

globalization have benefited from the cooperative and global nature of Wikipedia.

Over the last two years, the entry has had more than 90 edits by contributors from

the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, United States,

Malaysia, Japan and China. It provides a manifold view of issues from the World Trade

Organization and multinational corporations to the anti-globalization movement and

threats to cultural diversity. At the same time malicious contributors are kept in

check because vandalism is easily undone. Users dedicated to fixing vandalism watch

the list of recent changes, fixing problems within minutes, if not seconds. A defaced

article can quickly be returned to an acceptable version with just one click of a

button. This crucial asymmetry tipsthe balance in favor of productive and cooperative

members of the wiki community, allowing quality content to prevail." A Newsweek piece

on Wikipedia (November 1, 2004) quoted Angela Beesley, a volunteer contributor from

Essex, England, and self-confessed Wikipedia addict who monitors the accuracy of more

than one thousand entries: "A collaborative encyclopedia sounds like a crazy idea,

but it naturally controls itself."

Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales is just getting started. He told Newsweek that he is expanding

into Wiktionary, a dictionary and thesaurus; Wikibooks, textbooks and manuals; and

Wikiquote, a book of quotations. He said he has one simple goal: to give "every single

person free access to the sum of all human knowledge."

96

Wales's ethic that everyone should have free access to all human knowledge is

undoubtedly heartfelt, but it also brings usto the controversial side of open-source:

If everyone contributes his or her intellectual capital for free, where will the

resources for new innovation come from? And won't we end up in endless legal wrangles

over which part of any innovation was made by the community for free, and meant to

stay that way, and which part was added on by some company for profit and has to be

paid for so that the company can make money to drive further innovation? These

questions are all triggered by the other increasingly popular form of self-organized

collaboration-the free software movement. According to the openknowledge.org Web

site, "The free/open source software movement began in the 'hacker' culture of U.S.

computer science laboratories (Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT) in the

1960's and 1970's. The community ofprogrammers was small, and close-knit. Codepassed

back and forth between the members of the community-if you made an improvement you

were expected to submit your code to the community of developers. To withhold code

was considered gauche-after all, you benefited from the work of your friends, you

should return the favor."

The free software movement, however, was and remains inspired by the ethical ideal

that software should be free and available to all, and it relies on open-source

collaboration to help produce the best software possible to be distributed for free.

This a bit different from the approach of the intellectual commons folks, like Apache.

They saw open-sourcing as a technically superior means of creating software and other

innovations, and while Apache was made available to all for free, it had no problem

with commercial software being built on top of it. The Apache group allowed anyone

who created a derivative work to own it himself, provided he acknowledge the Apache

contribution.

The primary goal of the free software movement, however, is to get as many people

as possible writing, improving, and distributing software for free, out of a

conviction that this will empower everyone and free individuals from the grip of

global corporations. Generally speaking, the free

97

software movement structures its licenses so that if your commercial software draws

directly from their free software copyright, they want your software to be free too.

In 1984, according to Wikipedia, an MIT researcher and one of these ex-hackers,

Richard Stallman, launched the "free software movement" along with an effort to build

a free operating system called GNU. To promote free software, and to ensure that its

code would always be freely modifiable and available to all, Stallman founded the

Free Software Foundation and something called the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The GPL specified that users of the source code could copy, change, or upgrade the

code, provided that they made their changes available under the same license as the

original code. In 1991, a student at the University of Helsinki named Linus Torvalds,

building off of Stallman's initiative, posted his Linux operating system to compete

with the Microsoft Windows operating system and invited other engineers and geeks

online to try to improve it-for free. Since Torvalds's initial post, programmers all

over the world have manipulated, added to, expanded, patched, and improved the

GNU/Linux operating system, whose license says anyone can download the source code

and improve upon it but then must make the upgraded version freely available to

everybody else. Torvalds insists that Linux must always be free. Companies that sell

software improvements that enhance Linux or adapt it to certain functions have to

be very careful not to touch its copyright in their commercial products.

Much like Microsoft Windows, Linux offers a family of operating systems that can be

adapted to run on the smallest desktop computers, laptops, PalmPilots, and even

wristwatches, all the way up to the largest supercomputers and mainframes. So a kid

in India with a cheap PC can learn the inner workings of the same operating system

that is running in some of the largest data centers of corporate America. Linux has

an army of developers across the globe working to make it better. As I was working

on this segment of the book, I went to a picnic one afternoon at the Virginia country

home of Pamela and Malcolm Baldwin, whom my wife came to know through her membership

on the board of World Learning, an educational NGO. I mentioned in the course of lunch

that I was

thinking of going to Mali to see just how flat the world looked from its outermost

edge-the town of Timbuktu. The Baldwins' son Peter happened to be working in Mali

as part of something called the GeekCorps, which helps to bring technology to

developing countries. A few days after the lunch, I received an e-mail from Pamela

telling me that she had consulted with Peter about accompanying me to Timbuktu, and

then she added the following, which told me everything I needed to know and saved

me the whole trip: "Peter says that his project is creating wireless networks via

satellite, making antennas out of plastic soda bottles and mesh from window screens!

Apparently everyone in Mali uses Linux. . ."

"Everyone in Mali uses Linux." That is no doubt a bit of an exaggeration, but it's

a phrase that you'd hear only in a flat world.

The free software movement has become a serious challenge to Microsoft and some other

big global software players. As Fortune magazine reported on February 23, 2004, "The

availability of this basic, powerful software, which works on Intel's ubiquitous

microprocessors, coincided with the explosive growth of the Internet. Linux soon

began to gain a global following among programmers and business users . . . The

revolution goes far beyond little Linux . . . Just about any kind of software [now]

can be found in open-source form. The SourceForge.net website, a meeting place for

programmers, lists an astounding 86,000 programs in progress. Most are minor projects

by and for geeks, but hundreds pack real value . . . If you hate shelling out $350

for Microsoft Office or $600 for Adobe Photoshop, OpenOffice.org and the Gimp are

surprisingly high-quality free alternatives." Big companies like Google, E*Trade,

and Amazon, by combining Intel-based commodity server components and the Linux

operating system, have been able dramatically to cut their technology spending-and

get more control over their software.

Why would so many people be ready to write software that would be given away for free?

Partly it is out of the pure scientific challenge, which should never be

underestimated. Partly it is because they all hate Micro-

soft for the way it has so dominated the market and, in the view of many techies,

bullied everyone else. Partly it is because they believe that open-source software

can be kept more fresh and bugfree than any commercial software, because of the way

it is constantly updated by an army of unpaid programmers. And partly it is because

some big tech companies are paying engineers to work on Linux and other software,

hoping it will cut into Microsoft's market share and make it a weaker competitor all

around. There are a lot of motives at work here, and not all of them altruistic. When

you put them all together, though, they make for a very powerful movement that will

continue to present a major challenge to the whole commercial software model of buying

a program and then downloading its fixes and buying its updates.

Until now, the Linux operating system was the best-known success among open-source

free software projects challenging Microsoft. But Linux is largely used by big

corporate data centers, not individuals. However, in November 2004, the Mozilla

Foundation, a nonprofit group supporting open-source software, released Firefox, a

free Web browser that New York Times technology writer Randall Stross (December 19,

2004) described as very fast and filled with features that Microsoft's Internet

Explorer lacks. Firefox 1.0, which is easily installed, was released on November 9.

"Just over a month later," Stross reported, "the foundation celebrated a remarkable

milestone: 10 million downloads." Donations from Firefox's appreciative fans paid

for a two-page advertisement in The New York Times. "With Firefox," Stross added,

"open-source software moves from back-office obscurity to your home, and to your

parents', too. (Your children in college are already using it.) It is polished, as

easy to use as Internet Explorer and, most compelling, much better defended against

viruses, worms and snoops. Microsoft has always viewed Internet Explorer's tight

integration with Windows to be an attractive feature. That, however, was before

security became the unmet need of the day. Firefox sits lightly on top of Windows,

in a separation from the underlying operating system that the Mozilla Foundation's

president, Mitchell Baker, calls a 'natural defense.' For the first time, Internet

Explorer has been losing market share. According to a worldwide survey conducted in

late November by OneStat.com, a company in Amsterdam that analyzes the Web, Internet

Explorer's share dropped to less than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in

May. Firefox now has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing."

It will come as nosurprise that Microsoft officials are not believers inthe viability

or virtues of the free software form of open-source. Of all the issues I dealt with

in this book, none evoked more passion from proponents and opponents than open-source.

After spending time with the open-source community, I wanted to hear what Microsoft

had to say, since this is going to be an important debate that will determine just

how much of a flattener open-source becomes.

Microsoft's first point is, How do you push innovation forward if everyone is working

for free and giving away their work? Yes, says Microsoft, it all sounds nice and chummy

that we all just get together online and write free software by the people and for

the people. But if innovators are not going to be rewarded for their innovations,

the incentive for path-breaking innovation will dry up and so will the money for the

really deep R & D that is required to drive progress in this increasingly complex

field. The fact that Microsoft created the standard PC operating system that won out