Getting Flat, Part 1

"It's a Flat World, After All", Tom Friedman says. That's the title
of his long essay in this past Sunday's New York
Times magazine. A
few days earlier, his new book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of
the Twenty-First Century, hit the book stores. I have a copy right here
at my left elbow. In support of our local book store, I paid the full
price for the hardcover, which weighs in at close to 500 pages. At
this point I've read most of it, including everything it says about
Linux, GNU/Linux free software and open source.

The World is Flat, which I abbreviate TWIF, in the manner of Eric
Raymond's CaTB, may be the most important book written to date on
all the subjects in the last sentence. First, it makes clear sense of
all those subjects. Second, it puts them in a large and highly
meaningful context--the flat new world--where they clearly have
enormous on-going roles to play. Third, it's already a
bestseller: #3 on Amazon, as of yesterday.

The book is the subject of my July Linux For Suits column in Linux
Journal, which I have been writing for way too long, severely
indulging the patience of Jill Franklin, our Managing Editor. But I
am so jazzed about the subject that I can't stand leaving all my
thoughts about it in the buffer for another three months.
Fortunately, I have enough material to fill ten columns and
SuitWatches. Mercifully, we're limiting our exploration to one print column
and two SuitWatches. This is the first of those. After this essay is
published as a SuitWatch, it will appear as a Linux
Journal Web
site feature. Comments should go there. The same procedure will follow
with Part 2, two weeks from now.

The two-part format also works thematically. The first part deals
with Tom Friedman's treatment of Linux and open source. The second
will deal with the solutions to flat-world challenges he hopes will
come from both large companies and our educational system.

So, on to the first matter.

Tom says the world is being flattened by ten forces, of which open
source is one. Here are the chapter headings that outline his larger
case. Each is labeled a "flattener":

1. 11/9/89 - When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Went
   Up
2. 8/9/95 - When Netscape Went Public
3. Work Flow Software - Let's Do Lunch: Have Your
   Application Talk to My Application
4. Open-Sourcing - Self-Organizing Collaborative
   Communities
5. Outsourcing - Y2K
6. Offshoring - Running with the Gazelles, Eating with
   Lions
7. Supply-Chaining - Eating Sushi in
   Arkansas
8. Insourcing - What the Guys in Funny Brown Shorts Are
   Really Doing
9. In-forming - Google, Yahoo!, MSN Web
   Search
10. The Steroids - Digital, Mobile, Personal and
    Virtual

After the first three, Tom offers a summary titled Genesis: The Flat
World Platform Emerges. Here he says:

We need to stop here and take stock, because at this point--the
mid-1990s--the platform for the flattening of the world has started
to emerge. First, the falling walls, the opening of Windows, the
digitization of content, and the spreading of the Internet browser
seamlessly connected people with people as never before...

When you add this unprecedented new level of people-to-people
communication to all these Web-based application-to-application
work-flow programs, you end up with a whole new global platform for
multiple forms of collaboration. This is the Genesis moment for the
flattening of the world... "It is the creation of this platform, with
these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable
breakthrough that made what you call the flattening of the world
possible," said Microsoft's Craig Mundie...

The next six flatteners represent the new forms of collaboration
which this new platform empowered. As I show, some people will use
this platform for open-sourcing, some for outsourcing, some for
insourcing, and some for in-forming. Each of these forms of
collaboration was either made possible by the new platform or greatly
enhanced by it...

Before I join you in the obvious critiques of this, let's hear out Tom
together, by delving a bit into what he says in his chapter on
Open-Sourcing:

The word "open-source" comes from the notion that companies or ad hoc
groups would make available online the source code--the underlying
programming instructions that make a piece of software work--and
then let anyone who has something to contribute improve it and let
millions of others just download it for their own use for free. While
commercial software is copyrighted and sold, and companies guard the
source code as they would their crown jewels so they can charge money
to anyone who wants to use it and thereby generate income to develop
new versions, open-source software is shared, constantly improved by
its users, and made available for free to anyone. In return, every
user who comes up with an improvement--a patch that makes this
software sing or dance better--is encouraged to make that patch
available to every other user for free.

Not being a computer geek, I had never focused much on the
open-source movement, but when I did, I discover it was an amazing
universe of its own, with communities of online, come-as-you-are
volunteers who share their insights with one and other and then offer
it to the public for nothing. They do it because they want something
the market doesn't offer them; they do it for the psychic buzz that
comes from creating a collective product that can beat something
produced by giants like Microsoft or IBM, and--even more important--to
earn the respect of their intellectual peers. Indeed, these
guys and gals are one of the most interesting and controversial forms
of collaboration that have been facilitated by the flat world, and
are flattening it even more.

The problem here and throughout the book lies in Tom's big-company
frame of reference. As (I can only assume) a Windows user, and as a
widely traveled fellow who no doubt sees approximately everybody in
the world using Windows, he grants Microsoft a degree of importance
it does not deserve, in a domain it did little to develop: namely,
the Net, which is the flat anvil on which all the other flattening
forces he profiles hammer down--with the single exception of open
source.

What he misses is that the practices, values, traditions, standards,
protocols and products that created the Net also are those of what we
now call the Free Software and Open Source movements. Yes, commercial
interests were involved. Paul Kunz of the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center (SLAC) gives an excellent talk (see Resources) about the history of the World
Wide Web, of the role played by high energy physics laboratories
(including SLAC and CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee created the Web) and
of the roles played by largely uncredited commercial interests, such
as IBM (with BITNET), NeXT (providing the machines on which the Web
first ran) and Digital Equipment Corp. (With machines and various
Decants). In summary, he says, "Use of the backbone remains free, and
ARPANET open-source culture persists."

Let's face it: if it were up to commercial interests alone, Microsoft
especially, the Net we now know never would have come into being.
Instead we'd have a forest of silos such as the one that still comprises
the instant messaging "market", where few of the silos--notably
Apple's and AOL's--communicate with one another. One small encouraging
development: Apple's iChat now supports Jabber's IETF-sanctioned XMPP protocol.

So the credit emphasis is a bit off.

Yes, the fall of the Berlin Wall was enormously important. And so was
Netscape's browser. Tom says, "As browsing and the Internet in
general grew, Netscape wanted to make sure that Microsoft, with its
huge market dominance, would not be able to shift these Web protocols
to proprietary standards that only Microsoft's servers would be able
to handle."

He credits the "alphabet soup" protocols--TCP/IP HTTP, FTP, SSL,
POP--with due importance; but then places extraordinary emphasis on
Netscape's role in commercializing and securing the ubiquity of
those and other protocols. Kudos to the Netscape folks withstanding,
there was an intentionality behind those protocols and many other
Net standards that receives insufficient credit, because no vendor makes
a big deal about them. That's because these protocols were products
of hacker culture. "We hackers were actively aiming to create new
kinds of conversations outside of traditional institutions", Eric
Raymond says. "This wasn't an accidental byproduct of doing neat
techie stuff; it was an explicit goal for many of us as far back as
the 1970s. We intended this revolution."

Tom also falls into the common trap of assuming that open source is
fundamentally, rather than secondarily or peripherally, in
competition with commercial software, especially Microsoft's. Once
trapped, it's easy to characterize open source vs. Microsoft as
another sports contest between market leaders. Although some
competition does exist, there is far more symbiosis in the real world where we
find countless Windows clients making use of open-source
infrastructure and open-source products, as well.

In his open source chapter, Tom shows that he does understand open
source quite deeply, especially for a non-technical journalist. He
writes," As I will repeat often in this book: There is no future for vanilla
for most companies in the flat world. A lot of vanilla making in
software and other areas ins going to shift to open-source
communities. For most companies, the commercial future belongs to
those who know how to make the richest chocolate sauce, the sweetest,
lightest whipped cream...." He then goes on to quote Novell chairman
Jack Messman from a Financial Times story: "Commercial software
companies have to start operating further up the [software] stack to
differentiate themselves. The open source community is basically
focusing on infrastructure."

He also credits open source with a contagious value system:

The striking thing about the intellectual commons form of
open-sourcing is how quickly it has morphed into other spheres and
spawned other self-organizing communities, which are flattening
hierarchies in their areas. I see this most vividly in the news
profession, where bloggers, one person online commentators... have
created a kind of open-source newsroom.

He goes on to treat Wikipedia with all due open-source respect,
pointing out, among many other things, that its launch followed Jimmy
Wales' failed attempt to create a "voluntary, but strictly controlled
free encyclopedia".

One witnesses the power of Wikipedia in the section that follows,
where Tom gets into the free software movement: "In 1984, according
to Wikipedia, an MIT researcher and one of these ex-hackers, Richard
Stallman..." After which Linux becomes GNU/Linux. In this section,
Tom doesn't deviate much in his account from the free software canon.

But then he gets into vendor sports again:

The free software movement has become a serious challenge to Microsoft
and some other big global software players...

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 Microsoft 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 bug free 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, hooping it will cut into Microsoft's market share
and make it a weaker competitor all around...

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...

And he goes on to tell the Firefox story. From there to the end of
the chapter, he presents the other-hand response from Microsoft,
wrapping with this:

As The Economist mused (June 10, 2004), "some zealots even argue that
the open-source approach represents a new post-capitalist model of
production."

That may prove true. But if it does, then we have some huge global
governance issues to sort out over who owns what and how individuals
and companies will profit from their creations.

So it looks as though Microsoft has convinced him, at least for now, that
open source is somehow anti-business or anti-capitalism, when it is
neither.

The fact is, or will be, far more money will be made because of open
source than will be made with open source--or with any of the
infrastructural (in Tom's words, vanilla) software it replaces. Think
of open-source infrastructure as a huge, flat cake on which you
can build a vast new market for any kind of topping you like. A cake
which, by the way, only gets bigger.

We have another word for that cake, one I know Tom likes: a
marketplace. The open-source marketplace isn't for open-source goods.
It's for what you can build on them and with them. There's no
telling how big that market will be. We do know, though, that it's flat and seems
to go on forever in all directions.
Resources
"It's a Flat World, After All"

Tom Friedman

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Chaucer's Books

CaTB

Paul Kunz

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual

Doc Searls (doc@ssc.com) is Senior Editor of
Linux Journal and writes the monthly Linux for Suits column.
He also presides over
Doc Searls' IT Garage,
which is published by SSC, the publisher of Linux
Journal.