This is about choice.

This is about choice.

- Neo, to The Architect, in The Matrix Reloaded

In the middle of 1995, when the Netscape browser and Linux were both at
versions 1.x, Newt Gingrich told Esther Dyson, "The key to a monopoly is
to get in the middle of an intersection and charge rent." That line
inspired
"A Bulldozer Through
the Intersection", my 1996 interview with Craig
Burton on the occasion of Netscape's acquisition of Tim House and the
LDAP development team from the University of Michigan. Here's how Craig
described the effect LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) would
have on Microsoft's plans to control the Internet:

Microsoft built its entire services strategy on what it thought was
a titanium vise. One side was an object-oriented filesystem called
OSS, which collapsed the directory into the filesystem. This was
Cairo. The other side was a distributed application development
framework called OLE, which they owned lock, stock and barrel. They
would squeeze those together and the Netscapes of the world would
squoosh like jello.

But the Internet blew the jaws of that vise apart. When Microsoft
tightened the jaws of that vice, they bent wide open. The world has
shifted, and Microsoft is not going to dominate it, at least not by
giving people no choice but to use Microsoft. All they can do is
what they've shown they can do extremely well: retool for the new
reality. They have no choice but to embrace the LDAP business and
extend into it. Just like they did with Java.

Ah yes, Java.

The problem with Java was it is embraceable but not extendable, at
least not the way Microsoft tends to extend things. Java was and still
is a cross-platform development and runtime environment, well-suited to
the growing Internet ecosystem. It's also owned and controlled by Sun
Microsystems. When Microsoft extended Java in ways that worked only on
Windows, Sun sued. That was in 1997. There was
a settlement of
some sort in January 2001, but Sun sued Microsoft on antitrust grounds
in 2002. Then, finally, in April of this year, the two companies buried their hatchets as Microsoft agreed
to pay Sun a total of $1.95 billion dollars. The agreement covered
technical collaboration as well as legal issues.

This wasn't your usual settlement worked out between lawyers. Talks
began last summer over golf between Sun's Scott McNealy and Microsoft's
Steve Ballmer, who have been friends and rivals since high school. They
expanded to involve many meetings and phone calls, some involving Bill
Gates himself. The talks expanded beyond antitrust issues to include
patents, which also were covered by the settlement

This also wasn't your usual Barney agreements over technology--one of
those "I love you, you love me" statements backed by no substantive
cause for movement by either party. At the end of negotiations, the two
companies agreed to provide access to each other's server technologies,
including operating system, e-mail and database software. That item
counted for $350 million of the $1.95 billion, but it also allows Sun to
pay Microsoft for incorporating the latter's technologies. Sun will
license communications protocols for Windows, under terms of the Justice
Department consent decree. Microsoft agreed to play nice with Java,
while continuing to support its rogue implementation. And, most
significantly, the two companies committed to make Java and Microsoft's
.Net work together.

After news broke on April 5, rivers of ink and oceans of pixels were
spilled over what the agreement really meant and how "collaboration"
might work between two companies that, until the day before, seemed
ready to spill each other's blood at any cost. Who were the "winners and
losers" here? Was Sun still headed for oblivion? The company also
announced plans to lay off 3,300 people in the same time frame. Clearly,
both companies despised IBM and considered Linux a threat, even though
Sun already had embraced Linux in various ways. What were the new teams
and players? Who were the new warring factions? What were the weapons,
the battlefields?

It's too easy to describe these kinds of things with the boxes of words
provided by sports and war metaphors. A better metaphorical system is
environmental. By looking at computing as a world rather than as a
battlefield or a sports arena, we can see operating systems and
development environments as overlapping ecosystems with larger contexts.

For a little guidance on this, listen to John McPhee in Rising
from the Plains, explaining where most of our iron and steel came from:

Although life had begun in the form of anaerobic bacteria early in
the Archean Eon, photosynthetic bacteria did not appear until the
middle Archean and were not abundant until the start of the
Proterozoic. The bacteria emitted oxygen. The atmosphere changed.
The oceans changed. The oceans had been rich in dissolved ferrous
iron, in large part put into the seas by extruding lavas of two
billion years. Now with the added oxygen the iron became ferric,
insoluble, and dense. Precipitating out, it sank to the bottom as
ferric sludge, where it joined the lime muds and silica muds and
other seafloor sediments to form, worldwide, the banded-iron
formations that were destined to become rivets, motorcars and
cannons. The is was the iron of the Mesabi Range, the Australian
iron of the Hammerslee Basin, the iron of Michigan, Wisconsin,
Brazil. More than ninety percent of the iron ever mined in the world
has come from Precambrian banded-iron formations. Their ages date
broadly from twenty-five hundred to two thousand million years
before the present. The transition that produced them--from a
reducing to an oxidizing atmosphere and the associated radical
change in the chemistry of the oceans--would be unique. It would
never repeat itself. The earth would not go through that experience
twice.

The world of computing has changed profoundly in the past nine years.
The new world we live in now has base conditions that were absent when
Sun and Microsoft were forming in the late 70s and remained absent
until the late 90s. These new conditions are both global and personal
in scope and meaning, because they involve the Internet on one hand and
personal computing on the other.

Today's world primarily consists of the Net itself. It has grown to
consume and subsume the phone system, computer networks and everything
else that serves to connect people and devices. The lithification of the
Net is analogous to the formation of banded iron from the Archaeon seas.
And it has been precipitated by countless individuals as well as the
large companies that issue statements and make headlines.

The Net grew because it embodies the principles of NEA: Nobody owns it,
Everybody can use it and Anybody can improve it. Linux and the whole
LAMP suite (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python and so on) have been
symbiotes in the Net's ecosystem from their beginnings. They have
contributed immeasurably to the Net's growth and to its ability to
support countless activities. Like it or not, Linux is part of the
solution both Sun and Microsoft must embrace as they try to figure out
what they'll do together.

Sun always has had a deep understanding of networking. This was manifest not only
in slogans such as "the network is the computer", but also in Sun's early
advocacy of the Net and the Web. I learned about both for the first
time from John Gage of Sun.

Microsoft always has understood personal computing just as deeply. No
company has done more to make computing personal--or continues to do
more today--than Microsoft.

It makes sense to see both companies come together at this point in
time, but not because of anything either company happens to be doing
right now. Instead, it makes sense because the Net is growing thicker
and more solid. Its infrastructure includes more and more useful and
ubiquitous protocols and other standards originating in the resourceful
work of allied individuals, rather than in any company's corporate
agenda. For example, while Microsoft makes a big deal about Web services
in its propaganda about .Net, RSS and other systems for deploying
practical Web services have been developed and deployed by other
companies large and small--and by countless individuals whose
leadership comes from themselves and one another. The Web services market
today is a conversation no company can dominate.

The same thing is happening even inside corporate development processes.
Although Sun has yet to respond positively to calls by IBM and Eric S.
Raymond (in separate open letters) to open source Java, the overall
evolution of Java is in an open direction that cannot be reversed. The
same goes not only for .Net but for the development of Longhorn,
Microsoft's next major operating system. The most interesting and engaged voices
coming from Microsoft these days are not those of its leaders but of
its rank & file technologists. Robert Scoble, whose Web log is read by
thousands every day, is a Longhorn evangelist who clearly
does his best to engage the market in constructive conversation.
Robert's boss, Lenn Pryor, who describes himself in one of his Web logs
as "a punk ass kid from D.C.", put together a site called
Channel 9 that's based on the principles of
The Cluetrain
Manifesto and the teachings of a certain Linux
Journal senior editor.

The real story about the Sun-Microsoft deal also was told by CEOs of
both companies at the time of the announcement, although it received scant
attention in the sports and war coverage that followed. One exception
was The Wall Street Journal, which put it this way:

the economic pressures of the past few years have slowed the
spigot of corporate spending on technology, prompting stiffer
competition among vendors and giving corporate buyers leverage to
insist that warring suppliers make their products work together.
"The customer is in charge," Mr. McNealy says simply in explaining
his rapprochement with Microsoft.

That realization, a truism in more-mature industries, turned out to
be the most powerful force in persuading the companies to make peace.

The market, comprised of countless individuals who had grown tired of
closed systems that wouldn't interoperate, has been only more and more
empowered by the Network, by Linux and by other creations that
primarily were the results of Demand rather than Supply. The message was
simple: "Battling environments cannot survive in a world where any and
all of us can solve our own problems. Our biggest problems for many
years have been vendor 'solutions' that don't interoperate and that
create dependencies customers don't want. If you don't help solve those
problems, we'll keep solving them for ourselves. We all have bulldozers
now, and we know how to use them."

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.