Free for All by Peter Wayner (great books to read .txt) 📖

necessary. If Lewis-Moss does his job well, someone who installs Debian on his computer will not have any trouble using X Emacs.

Lewis-Moss's job isn't exactly programming, but it's close. He has to download the source code, compile the program, run it, and make sure that the latest version of the source works correctly with the latest version of the Linux kernel and the other parts of the OS that keep a system running. The packager must also ensure that the program works well with the Debian-specific tools that make installation easier. If there are obvious bugs, he'll fix them himself. Otherwise, he'll work with the author on tracking down and fixing the problems.

He's quite modest about this effort and says, "Most Debian developers don't write a whole lot of code for Debian. We just test things to make sure it works well together. It would be offensive to some of the actual programmers to hear that some of the Debian folks are writing the programs when they're actually not."

He added that many of the packagers are also programmers in other projects. In his case, he writes Java programs during the day for a company that makes point-of-sale terminals for stores.

Lewis-Moss ended up with this job in the time-honored tradition of committees and volunteer organizations everywhere. "I reported a bug in X Emacs to Debian. The guy who had the package at that time said, 'I don't want this anymore. Do you want it?' I guess it was random. It was sort of an accident. I didn't intend to become involved in it, but it was something I was interested in. I figured 'Hell, might as well.'"

The Linux development effort moves slowly forward with thousands of stories like Lewis-Moss's. Folks come along, check out the code, and toss in a few contributions that make it a bit better for themselves. The mailing list debates some of the changes if they're controversial or if they'll affect many people. It's a very efficient system in many ways, if you can stand the heat of the debates.

Most Americans are pretty divorced from the heated arguments that boil through the corridors of Washington. The view of the House and Senate floor is largely just for show because most members don't attend the debates. The real decisions are made in back rooms.

The mailing lists that form the core of the different free software projects take all of this debate and pipe it right through to the members. While some discussions occur in private letters and even in the occasional phone call, much of the problem and controversy is dissected for everyone to read. This is crucial because most of the decisions are made largely by consensus.

"Most of the decisions are technical and most of them will have the right answer or the best possible one at the moment," says Lewis-Moss. "Often things back down to who is willing to do the work. If you're willing to do the work and the person on the other side isn't willing, then yours is the right one by definition."

While the mailing list looks like an idealized notion of a congress for the Linux kernel development, it is not as perfect as it may seem. Not all comments are taken equally because friendships and political alliances have evolved through time. The Debian group elected a president to make crucial decisions that can't be made by deep argument and consensus. The president doesn't have many other powers in other cases.

While the Linux and GNU worlds are dominated by their one great Sun King, many other open source projects have adopted a more modern government structure that is more like Debian. The groups are still fairly ad hoc and unofficial, but they are more democratic. There's less idolatry and less dependence on one person.

The Debian group is a good example of a very loose-knit structure with less reliance on the central leader. In the beginning, Ian Murdock started the distribution and did much of the coordination. In time, the mailing list grew and attracted other developers like Bruce Perens. As Murdock grew busier, he started handing off work to others. Eventually, he handed off central control to Perens, who slowly delegated more of the control until there was no key maintainer left. If someone dies in a bus crash, the group will live on.

Now a large group of people act as maintainers for the different packages. Anyone who wants to work on the project can take responsibility for a particular package. This might be a small tool like a game or a bigger tool like the C compiler. In most cases, the maintainer isn't the author of the software or even a hard-core programmer. The maintainer's job is to make sure that the particular package continues to work with all the rest. In many cases, this is a pretty easy job. Most changes in the system don't affect simple programs. But in some cases it's a real challenge and the maintainer must act as a liaison between Debian and the original programmer. Sometimes the maintainers fix the bugs themselves. Sometimes they just report them. But in either case, the maintainer must make sure that the code works.

Every once and a bit, Debian takes the latest stable kernel from Torvalds's team and mixes it together with all of the other packages. The maintainers check out their packages and when everything works well, Debian presses another CD-ROM and places the pile of code on the net. This is a stable "freeze" that the Debian group does to make sure they've got a stable platform that people can always turn to.

"Making a whole OS with just a crew of volunteers and no money is a pretty big achievement. You can never discount that. It's easy for Red Hat to do it. They're all getting paid. The fact is that Debian makes a good system and still continues to do so. I don't think that there've been that many unpaid, collaborative projects that complex before," says Perens.

When Perens took over at Debian he brought about two major changes. The first was to create a nonprofit corporation called Software in the Public Interest and arrange for the IRS to recognize it as a bona fide charitable organization. People and companies who donate money and equipment can take them off their taxes.

Perens says that the group's budget is about $10,000 a year. "We pay for hardware sometimes. Although a lot of our hardware is donated. We fly people to conferences so they can promote Debian. We have a trade show booth. In general we get the trade show space from the show for free or severely discounted. We also have the conventional PO boxes, accounting, phone calls. The project doesn't have a ton of money, but it doesn't spend a lot, either."

The Debian group also wrote the first guidelines for acceptable open source software during Perens's time in charge. These eventually mutated to become the definition endorsed by the Open Source Initiative. This isn't too surprising, since Perens was one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative.

Debian's success has inspired many others. Red Hat, for instance, borrowed a significant amount of work done by Debian when they put together their distribution, and Debian borrows some of Red Hat's tools. When Red Hat went public, it arranged for Debian members to get a chance to buy some of the company's stock reserved for friends and family members. They recognized that Debian's team of package maintainers helped get their job done.

Debian's constitution and strong political structure have also inspired Sun, which is trying to unite its Java and Jini customers into a community. The company is framing its efforts to support customers as the creation of a community that's protected by a constitution. The old paradigm of customer support is being replaced by a more active world of customer participation and representation.

Of course, Sun is keeping a close hand on all of these changes. They protect their source code with a Community Source License that places crucial restrictions on the ability of these community members to stray. There's no real freedom to fork. Sun's not willing to embrace Debian's lead on that point, in part because they say they're afraid that Microsoft will use that freedom to scuttle Java.

19.2 APACHE'S CORPORATE CORE

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The Apache group is one of the more businesslike development teams in the free source world. It emerged in the mid-1990s when the World Wide Web was just blossoming. In the early years, many sites relied on web servers like the free version that came from the NCSA, the supercomputer center at the University of Illinois that helped spark the web revolution by writing a server and a browser. This code was great, but it rarely served all of the purposes of the new webmasters who were starting new sites and building new tools as quickly as they could.

Brian Behlendorf, one of the founders of the Apache group, remembers the time. "It wasn't just a hobbyist kind of thing. We had need for commercial-quality software and this was before Netscape released its software. We had developed our own set of patches that we traded like baseball cards. Finally we said, 'We had so many paths that overlap. Why don't we create our own version and continue on our own.'"

These developers then coalesced into a core group and set up a structure for the code. They chose the basic, BSD-style license for their software, which allowed anyone to use the code for whatever purpose without distributing the source code to any changes. Many of the group lived in Berkeley then and still live in the area today. Of course, the BSD-style license also made sense for many of the developers who were involved in businesses and often didn't want to jump into the open source world with what they saw as Stallman's absolutist fervor. Businesses could adopt the Apache code without fear that some license would force them to reveal their source code later. The only catch was that they couldn't call the product Apache unless it was an unmodified copy of something approved by the Apache group.

Several members of the group went off and formed their own companies and used the code as the basis for their products. Sameer Parekh based the Stronghold server product on Apache after his company added the encryption tools used to protect credit card information. Others just used versions of Apache to serve up websites and billed others for the cost of development.

In 1999, the group decided to formalize its membership and create a not-for-profit corporation that was devoted to advancing the Apache server source code and the open source world in general. New members can apply to join the corporation, and they must be approved by a majority of the current members. This membership gets together and votes on a board of directors who make the substantive decisions about the group.

This world isn't much different from the world before the corporation. A mailing list still carries debate and acts as the social glue for the group. But now the decision-making process is formalized. Before, the members of the core group would assign responsibility to different people but the decisions could only be made by rough consensus. This mechanism could be bruising and fractious if the consensus was not easy. This forced the board to work hard to develop potential compromises, but pushed them to shy away from tougher decisions. Now the board can vote and a pure majority can win.

This seriousness and corporatization are probably the only possible steps that the Apache group could take. They've always been devoted to advancing the members' interests. Many of the other open source projects like Linux were hobbies that became serious. The Apache project was always filled with people who were in the business of building