The Brains Behind Freeware To Meet

Tom Abate
San Francisco Chronicle  

April 2, 1998

The radical heads of the Free Software movement will hold a summit in Palo Alto next Tuesday.

Though they won't brandish M-16s, this gathering of relatively unknown individuals could spark a revolutionary change in the nature of the software industry.

Let me explain.

For years, freeware has run the Internet. The software underpinnings of the global network have been programs written by people who gave them away, for free, or at least for the glory of creating something that others could use.

You may not know this because freeware authors never got rich on stock options. So they couldn't hire publicists to buy them fame, like the current crop of software zillionaires who are forever lionized in the business press. But if you use e-mail, you should thank Eric Allman, author of SendMail, the program that delivers your words over the wires. Larry Wall wrote Perl, the freeware used to organize Web sites, and Brian Behlendorf created Apache, the program that serves up Web pages on demand.

Paul Vixie deserves a real round of applause. He wrote Bind, the program that translates words into numbers, letting us type http://www.sfgate.com/ instead of the string of numbers that really constitutes a Web address.

All these freeware heroes live in the Bay Area, which made it easy for Tim O'Reilly to invite them to the summit (http://www.oreilly.com/). He runs O'Reilly & Associates, a Sebastopol firm that publishes computer books and software.

This summit could turn out to be no more than a stunt to call attention to people whose contributions have been overlooked. But I think the gathering has the potential to change the way software is written and sold, by showing there is an alternative to the control-oriented model epitomized by Microsoft.

You see, every freeware program has spawned a modest business. People sell books, enhanced versions, or custom applications based on freeware. Freeware adherents don't becomes billionaires, but they're not paupers either.

They're creating a new business model, made possible by the Internet, which serves as a virtual workshop, where people can pool their labor, and a bazaar, where anyone can hawk softwares.

In my -- perhaps overly vivid -- imagination, the combined efforts of all these Lilliputian programmers, over time, generates more market power than the Gullivers of the software industry.

Sounds nuts? Then why did the February 2 issue of InfoWorld Magazine name Linux, a free operating system, ``Product of the Year for Best Technical Support?''

A free program, backed by no company, provided better after ``sale'' support than Windows NT. Seems to me like the invisible hand of the market just gave Bill Gates a good, sharp slap.

-- Warning bells: Pacific Bell has asked the California Public Utilities Commission to let it offer long-distance service. I'm sure Pac Bell's army of experts can explain why this is good and just.

Meanwhile, our family's economic expert -- my wife -- is puzzled by our current bill for local calls.

Pac Bell charged us 11 cents a minute to connect our home in San Leandro to a friend in Richmond, 25 miles away. Our long-distance carrier charged us just 10 cents a minute to talk to my mom in Brooklyn, about 2,500 miles away.

I hope the CPUC will have Pac Bell explain this anomaly in the course of deciding whether it will benefit Californians to let the unchallenged local phone monopoly join the dozens of companies that have already lowered long-distance prices through competition.

-- Giga boo boo: Several readers e- mailed me about my error in yesterday's column. I referred to a one megabyte disk drive when I meant one gigabyte. I was only off by a factor of one thousand!

As a result of this blunder, an item meant to criticize manufacturing problems at Iomega Corp. only exposed the flaws in my own word processing machinery.

-- Tagline envy? Darryl Forman of San Francisco said I missed a quip in yesterday's item about high-tech companies' selling excess land. ``I guess you could call it virtual realty,'' she wrote.

Contact Tom Abate at abatesfgate.com or (650) 961-2689.

©1998 San Francisco Chronicle