My brother-in-law is a self-described nerd. Now, let’s be clear. We’re not talking about some adolescent with bad skin, a pocket protector, and a penchant for looking at naughty pictures on the Internet. Oh, no. For Steve, the word “nerd” is a stamp of distinction used to describe the top of the technical food chain. You see, Steve spends much of his time jetting about the planet, installing voice and data networks. And when things hiccup, he’s the guy they send to customer sites to solve the multifarious mysteries no one else wants to touch. He may also, from time to time, look at naughty pictures on the Internet, but that’s a private matter.

Now, nerds are generally pretty tightly wound, but these days Steve is animated and excited. Of course, it’s sometimes hard to tell when a nerd is excited. (A rule of thumb: The animated nerd is the one who is typing fastest.) But when I last spoke with him, his eyes sort of glazed over and he started speaking in acronyms, rhapsodizing about liberation and the coming demise of Microsoft, so I knew something was up.

What has Steve all atwitter is nothing less than the prospect of software emancipation: freedom from operating systems and applications for which the source code is unavailable; freedom from high purchase cost and the endless expense of forced upgrades; freedom from unfixed bugs; freedom from single-source expensive support; freedom from strategic whiplash when vendors abruptly change direction, abandoning your application. Freedom from the anxiety that a software vendor will go out of business. Freedom, as Steve is wont to describe it, from the tyranny of Microsoft.

“I’ve gotten off the software upgrade treadmill,” announced Steve, eyes burning with euphoric delirium. “I no longer pay my yearly tithe to the Pope of Redmond!”

“That’s heresy,” I said, momentarily caught up in his evangelical fervor. Not so much heresy, it turns out, as uncommon generosity and a revolutionary approach to the development and dissemination of software as reflected in the growing Open Source movement. “Open Source” is a trademark of the Open Source Initiative and was coined by Eric S. Raymond, quantum nerd and resident guru of the free software community. The Open Source folks, it must be noted, take themselves very seriously. They believe they are the vanguard of an ambitious drama that casts nerds as

revolutionaries. Since the movement is loosely formed, of necessity so are its objectives, but among them is the desire to reclaim the computer from the corporation. They propose to do that by providing superior software at little or no cost: a product of community development where source code is made available through the Internet to whoever has the ability and interest to tweak it.

In the words of its advocates, “Open source promotes software reliability and quality by supporting independent peer review and rapid evolution of source code.” The author of the code may still retain copyright, but it is largely cosmetic because the code is released in a way that gives the user the most freedom possible, which includes the right to modify and distribute it. The process, in some circles, is therefore thought to be seditious because it challenges the notion of intellectual property rights and transfers power from the software provider to the software user.

The theory is that having the best brains in the world voluntarily developing, testing, and improving software because they want it for their personal or company use, or because they like to outdo one another, or simply because they are incredibly intelligent and talented people who wish to contribute their ideas, will result in better, cheaper, more reliable, safer, and more widely supported software. It’s collaboration on a grand scale, with rapid changes, quick bug fixes, and increased security because the code is undergoing constant public review rather than having weaknesses masked until a hacker finds them. In contrast, advocates point to the impact closed-source software has had on fixing the Y2K problem. Open source, they also note, eliminates licensing problems and, therefore, legal liability.

I could see why the Pope of Redmond would not be a big booster. On the surface, open source seems impractical if not laughable. But wait. UNIX users will recognize Linux, currently the fastest-growing operating system in the world, as a product of open source. Its popularity has industrywide implications. “Linux is subversive,” writes Raymond in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” a detailed analysis of the differences and virtues of open source development versus the ponderous construction of proprietary software. “Who would have thought even five years ago that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all across the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet?”

Steve, my open source zealot brother-in-law, raves about the operating system. “Linux has grown from a very limited, unstable hobby project to the best-of-class UNIX implementation for i386, PPC, Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, and Acorn-based systems,” he crowed.

Honestly, Steve says things like that. Best of all, it’s downloadable at no charge. “Free,” as Steve pointed out, “is a very powerful marketing concept. Would you rather buy a Microsoft server solution for around $5,000 or run Linux for free when Linux will do the same job, do it better, and run on less powerful hardware?”

The Pope will not be pleased. While Linux is considered the flagship of open source successes, it is just the tip of the open source iceberg that threatens to rip apart the exposed hull of the software industry. The infrastructure of the Internet, advocates point out, was built on free software, which has survived and flourished at a growth rate that would rival bacteria. Apache, the most common and fastest-growing Web server, coincidentally began shipping for the AS/400 in January; Sendmail runs on probably 80 percent of mail servers and quite possibly routes nearly every piece of email that crosses the Internet; Perl is an open source scripting language used in “live” content on the Web; and Domain Name System (DNS), arguably the most mission-critical piece of software on the Internet, converts user-friendly domain names to decidedly user-hostile but machine-friendly IP addresses.

And there are other products: Samba, which makes a UNIX box look and act like an NT server, and Netscape’s renamed Web browser, Mozilla, to name just two.

Increasingly, application providers (including Oracle, Informix, and InterBase databases, WordPerfect and the Corel office suite, Applix’s Applixware and the Star Division’s StarOffice suites) are porting their products to open source operating systems. Nevertheless, the Open Source crowd is going after the desktop market, and Steve predicts that “in five years, most if not all horizontal market software will have an open source alternative available.”

Not a comforting prediction for the one, true, infallible software company. Some of the industry’s biggest players are peering at the oncoming Open Source wave and are clamoring either to ride or squelch it. Sun has jumped on the Linux bandwagon, and IBM is a member of the Apache Group. There are persistent, if unsubstantiated, rumors that Linux is being ported to the AS/400 and 3090 platforms. If so, IBM may be seeking to leverage the growing availability of open source software to increase hardware sales.

The allure of free software, of course, is not new. Certainly, the AS/400’s success was built on an elegant operating system bundled with assorted “free” bells and whistles. To entice developers, IBM also makes free software available through its AS/400 Partners in Development program. That, in itself, is a small thing, but it is illustrative of one of the probable outcomes of the Open Source movement: the downward push on software profitability that further commodifies the industry. Good for buyers, bad for sellers: a fact not lost on Microsoft.

Microsoft’s internal analyses of Open Source, leaked to Eric Raymond and dubbed by him “The Halloween Papers,” suggest that the software giant is concerned. “Linux can win as long as services/protocols are commodities,” the report states. And this admission: Open Source “poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long-term developer mindshare threat.”

“Intrinsic parallelism?” It’s worse than listening to Steve. The existence of an altruistic intellectual community is, not surprisingly, remarkable to Microsoft. The report further cautions, “The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing. More importantly, OSS evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale.”

It is too early to predict the lasting impact Open Source will have on the industry. There is no immediate likelihood that the AS/400 is going Open Source; IBM has too great an investment in its proprietary operating system. But we may see Linux running on the Integrated PC Server (IPCS) at some point in the future. Clearly, however, the movement is having some impact. And if my brother-in-law can be believed, the fun is just commencing.

“In the beginning,” said Steve, “the geeks ran the computers...and it was good. Then, the businessmen and marketeers took over and screwed it up. Well, the geeks are taking the computers back!”

And to think I married his sister.

Victor Rozek has been in the data processing industry since 1975. His experience includes seven years with IBM in operations management and systems engineering. Victor can be reached at rozek@ midrangecomputing.com.