Chris DiBona on the history of open source free software, live from DrupalCon Boston

Google and open source
PingVision

Laura Scott:

We've done most of our growth in the past year

Television sucks
the web sucks
but on the web you get to pick what you want

open source world is part of the answer

popsci session and coming

Chris DiBona

I've been overly influenced by my six year old...

Open Source is Magic

instead of my usual boring, Google is awesome presentation

most of my gray hair came from my first summer of code

Leslie handles a lot of what I used to do

we also handle compliance, acquisition

What is Open source?

• licensed under open source initiative approved licenses?
  there are a lot of crappy open source licenses approved by

you can ignore the unpopular ones -- not GPL or Apache
you're sitting all by yourself if you use them

you can use each other's code if you use the popular ones

Public domain is not a license.

It isn't magical.

Moral rights clause of

Technically he can't release things under open source code.
He actually can't release his (moral) righ

Ori (Pekelman pronounced OH-RI) - "open source works in France"

he releases a piece of code

Where did the magic come from?

Kirk Mcusic
Thompson

First Unix Machine

gave a talk at Perdue
developed a new operating system
Kirk checked it out

that's where, in a lot of ways, open source

Berkely Computer Science Dept.

all these pretty amazing things
a lot of people don't think about the contributions of that school

why didn't BSD take off the way Linux did? Largely because they were being sued by AT&T.

Also:
1980, Richard Stallman
printer delivered to MIT

Stata, before it was the crazy building
Rogers who allowed Stallman to hang out

Richard did two pages a second

PDP11 built into one of the first laser printers
300 DPI

was going to be 360
but they couldn't afford more memory

Richard's like, what if i just make my

i fixed your problem, here's a patch
and Xerox said you have to sign this, this, this, and this

and he said, I wrote this patch

and he said, well, I'll just give it to them

and that upset him

how sucky that you

so he said the logical thing to do is to create my own operating system

you can fault

so he wrote a lot of really cool programs, many of which we still use today

and codified the terms of the GPL

he also felt a keen loss as all of his friends went

all coding on Drupal, happy as clams,

we're going to take Drupal into a company and we're going to lock it up, and you'll never seen the code before

because it's open source you would just

back then the Lisp companies didn't just leave, they

and all that was left at MIT was a skeleton of what was there before

so people like Richard are sitting there,

he fixed that by starting the GPL ad
more or less

1998

IBM, Oracle recognize Linux, release Database products that can run on it.

Larry Ellison's speech "black is white, stupiditiy is "
"Through my database, Linux is now good"

Still a big event for open source

Microsoft notices Linux too. But ... is a little busy with that whole Netscape thing.

"Open source is desperate and pathetic."
- hail mary pass for a failed company
- not about open source, but about Microsoft kicking their butt.
What we knew
- Netscape was on the rocks.
- There was some hail mary to it...
- Had more to do with Jamie Z. than anything

more the individual actions of Jamie Z(olinski) than anything else

Then we started hearing this.

"Open source is unsupported"

"No one knows this" (counting us in the audience)

this is happening, I'm sitting in a conference with 4,000 people
and someoe up front saying "I don't know if Linux has the support it needs"

So when

So then they started saying:

"Open source is expensive to maintain."

Shit rolls downhill.
So the dishwasher gets ...
Where was I going with this?

"Open source is insecure"

It's ALL software

if you've ever used a

if you work for a large company... how's

Software treats people pretty

Software is insecure.

Popular, leading open source software packages are more secure than similarly popular proprietary software.

Because insecure software becomes unpopular fast in open source-- faster than proprietary.

Products not responsive to their

OpenBSD is used in gateways, firewalls, where security is really important.

"Linux is a cancer"
- Steve Ballmer

these are quotes man

Dude... Wait, what? (LolCat)

open source is made of meat
people
who don't want to waste their time writing yet another stupid linked list function, or ope

Why do people write (rewrite) open source code?

Intellectual Curiosity Stimpulation 44.9%
Skills improvement (41.3%)
Work needs (33.8)
Open Source Idealism
Non-work Functionality
Professional Status (17.5%(
Reputation building within open source
Dislike distrust of proprietary software (11.1%)

not coded by leacherous hippies
(slide with leading open source devs with devs)
ok, This is true.

Open source is inevitable
who is getting crussed?

Coherent
SCO
Compiler vendors
workstation companies
Anyone who sold a web server, web browser
EXCEPT Microsoft

Open source is good for you

Who got in front of it: Red Hat,

have you ever used weblogic, Documentum, or Vingette? after you use these professionally, you run to get more

Open source is a little too fast, too good.

Also a problem for consultants, as people who hate the software pay larger fees.

Acquia has challenges.

Open source is fast
- updates
- bug fixes
- more responsive to questions and queries
- this is actually a problem for consulting companies, mind you

you're more responsive than proprietary companies

we tried to learn at Google

OpenSSL
secure socket layer used by Apache and others and the internal Google server (not open source, but uses open source libraries)

People

Google has 10, 17 computers maybe
if we had to pay a license fee for every machine we run it on
not going to tell you how much because you can do linux or something

saves google from having to write our own kernel and compilers -- though we have large teams contributing to both.

MySQL, what you don't know, is there's another company started by ex-MySQL guys who are also doing very well
Jeremy Kohl's company, some other Dolphin metaphore
in po

Free
as in beeras infreedom to do what you want with it
as in free to go away
as in free to release your own patches
(like Google releasing our mysql patches -- call it SQL or sequel, the core does both)

we found out that mysql wasn't that interested in the patches we did in 4 for replication
we released the patches ourselves
and a lot of people adopted
we created a subcommunity

open source is all around

Every device you own
Every car, plane, or train you ride
Nearly every email sent
Nearly every site you visit
Every DNS you translate
Every time you visit Google

GCC in iPod

Open source runs the internet:
70% mail
65% web servers
90% DNS lookups

anyone of you tried to cut a deal with a university or external technology provider
sharing is the most painful thing you can do in a company

Open source is magically easy to use
- very easy to bring into the company
only have to figure out each license once.
common licenses saves

your using a lot of google contributed or funded code for lots of stuff you use

There's

What does Drupal have to do with Google?

If we can

You don't have to trust.

The internet and open source are so intimitely connected.

If open source hadn't existed, the internet couldn't be what it is today-- the internet would have to created

Resolution