The Origins and Future of Open…

                   The Origins and Future
                   of Open Source Software




                     A NetAction White Paper




                             By Nathan Newman
                            nathan@netaction.org




      NetAction                             Phone: (415) 775-8674
      601 Van Ness Ave., #631               Fax: (415) 673-3813
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In a world where Microsoft increasingly threatens to dominate
computing and the Internet, the strongest potential rival to its
dominance is no longer its traditional commercial rivals but,
surprisingly, a seemingly motley collection of free software tools
and operating systems collectively dubbed "open source" software.
Unlike most commercial software, the core code of such software
can be easily studied by other programmers and improved upon--
the only proviso being that such improvements must also be
revealed publicly and distributed freely in a process that encourages
continual innovation.

From an operating system called Linux, named for a student from
Finland who wrote its core code, to a web server named Apache, put
together as literally "a patchy" set of updates to older software by a
band of volunteer programmers, these open source programs are
emerging not just as inexpensive but as more robust and dynamic
alternatives to commercial software.

While this phenomenon surprises some analysts, it should not
surprise those with some sense of history. Open source software,
largely funded by the federal government, was the wellspring of the
creation of the whole computer industry and to this day still lies at
the heart of how the Internet came into being. Through a
combination of key funding agencies, administrative oversight of
software standards and government purchasing rules, the federal
government had helped stimulate open source software and open
standards for decades. While such software never disappeared, its
prominence was undermined by the privatization of the Internet and
the commercialization of areas of software once dominated by open
source options. Largely, this was due to the fact that in the early
1990s, the federal government pulled back from its commitment to
open standards and support for open source software. This left the
way open for increases in proprietary, incompatible software and
for a company like Microsoft to seek to dominate the computing
world with its own proprietary standard.

If open source software is reemerging as an important force, it is
largely as a reaction against Microsoft itself. Competitors who
themselves have seen their own proprietary alternatives sink under
the Microsoft steamroller have suddenly seen alliances with open
source software as a chance to halt the Windows monopoly. By
itself, this alliance is unlikely to make open source software a real
alternative to Microsoft and, more problematically, the opportunism
of the alliance creates a whole set of tensions that need to be
resolved for open source software to succeed.

What is needed is a revival of a federal government public policy
that supports open source computing and strong standards that can
again support the promise of open source innovation. This article
will look at the past history of the government's support for open
source computing, examine the lessons of its success and the results
of its pullback in the early 1990s, and use this history to outline a
policy program for the future.

How Government Support Launched the Modern Computing
Age 1

One of the earliest threads that led to the Internet and the whole
landscape of post-World War II government support for computing
began with an Atlantic Monthly article right after the war by
Vannevar Bush, a prominent MIT researcher. In that article, he laid
out a vision of collaborative science and computing that would
spark both economic and technological prominence for America.

Under the psychological impact of Russia's Sputnik success in the
1950s, Vannevar Bush's vision began to take shape as the
government sought to regularize its technological research and

1 The history in this chapter derives from a wide range of sources
detailed in the bibliography but an invaluable source is: Hafner,
Katie and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of
the Internet. Simon & Shuster, New York. 1996 along with Rheingold,
Howard. Tools for Thought--The People and Ideas Behind the Next
Computer Revolution. Simon & Shuster. New York. 1985. Other
sources used include: Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the
Computer Revolution. Anchor Press. Garden City, New York. 1984;
Vinton G. Cerf. "Computer Networking: Global Infrastructure for the
21st Century." Copyright 1995 by Vinton G. Cerf and the Computing
Research Association. On the Internet at
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lazowska/cra/networks.html
. Hardy, Henry Edward. The History of the Net. Master's Thesis.
School of Communications, Grand Valley State University.
September 28, 1993; Zakon, Robert Hobbes'. "Hobbes' Internet
Timeline v2.5.
http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html. 1993-
6
spending. Given the political biases in   the U.S. against government
intervention, it seemed inevitable that   the engine for industrial
policy would be defense-related--even     highway and education
spending in the period was defined as     "defense" to achieve
legislative passage.

However, President Eisenhower's personal experience in the military
made him distrustful of the bureaucratic interests in the Pentagon,
which led him to support the creation of new institutions largely
independent of specific military branches. One example was NASA,
which ended up with much of the day-to-day applied research of the
military, while a new agency called the Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA) was created to help coordinate overall R&D
spending. Early in the decade, the National Science Foundation was
created as a separate agency to fund non-military research, although
it would develop a close relationship with the science-based military
agencies.

A key appointment at ARPA came in 1962 when psychologist J.C.R.
Licklider was hired to head a behavior sciences office, an office that
would evolve under Licklider's two-year directorship into the
Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) which would direct
the original creation of the Internet. Licklider in 1960 has written a
manifesto for using computers to enhance research and research
collaboration called "Man-Computer Symbiosis" and would define
the IPTO's office's mandate in research funding. As importantly,
Licklider's university background encouraged him and his
successors to extend ARPA's funding to a range of university
p ro j e c t s.

One key project was a $3 million per year grant to Project MAC at
MIT to encourage the spread of time-sharing computing on the then-
breakthrough minicomputer technology. ARPA would fund six of the
first twelve time-sharing computer systems in the country, which in
turn would help spark the whole minicomputer industry in the
1960s--crucial in the industry and the Boston-area regional
economy then but as crucial to the development of the Internet over
the next decades. Out of Project MAC would largely develop the
early ethos of software and hardware innovation--"hacking" in its
early non-pejorative sense before it became confused with
electronic vandalism--that launched the computer revolution. It was
MIT hackers at Project MAC who largely designed both hardware and
software for DEC's breakthrough PDP-6 timesharing minicomputer.
They would spend endless hours creating and sharing new software
to extend its capabilities beyond the expectations of its creators.

One of the most radical innovations was the SKETCHPAD program by
Ivan Sutherland which allowed the first graphic manipulation of
computer images, thereby allowing users to resize and manipulate
pictures on the computer screen. Ivan Sutherland would go on to
run ARPA and would hire a NASA engineer named Bob Taylor to run
the IPTO office after Licklider. Both would use their positions to
further promote the creation of breakthrough computing and
encourage collaboration across the country.

A key part of this was funding for the Augmentation Research Center
(ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute. ARC was run by an
researcher Doug Engelbart whose ideas on use of the computer as an
aid to individual creativity largely paralleled Licklider's. Taylor
pushed through a multi million-dollar grant for computers and staff
for ARC's proposed "augmentation laboratory." Out of ARC's lab
would come an array of researchers who would go on to become
leaders of their own research teams at universities and commercial
R&D divisions across the country.

Engelbart worked from Sutherland's precedent to concentrate on
using the computer to manipulate text and ideas on the screen.
Working with seventeen colleagues and going through three rapid
cycles of hardware revolution, by 1968 he was ready to publicly
demonstrate the results at an engineering conference called the
ACM/IEEE Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. And the
results stunned the audience.

Hooked up by microwave communication to the computers back at
SRI, Engelbart would demonstrate the array of tools developed at
ARC: the first "mouse" used as an input device, a windowing
environment that could rapidly switch between a menu of
information sources and models of information, and word
processing on screen. None of these had ever been seen before and,
in an age when most programmers were still interacting with
computers through punch cards, the idea of word processing was a
revelation2. What was demonstrated was only the showiest example

2 Saffo,Paul. "Racing change on a merry-go-round: MIT Management
in the Nineties" program reports industry overall is not more
productive because of computing technology." Personal Computing
of a set of tools developed to facilitate communication and shared
information-based work among intellectual collaborators. ARC was
already using text-editing to share common data through hypertext
storage (the method of linked pages later used in the World Wide
Web) and ran an electronic mail communication system with
dedicated e-mail distribution lists among the researchers--all of this
years before these innovations would come to the ARPAnet. ARC
would also pioneer video-conferencing years before it was
developed commercially.

What is startling about Engelbart's achievement, often ignored due
to the institutional liquidation of ARC, is how many of the
conceptual computing breakthroughs and initial implementations
were achieved by his team. To name just a few critical to the
networked economy:

·   Pioneering distributed electronic mail and e-mail lists five and
    seven years before ARPAnet.

·   Implementing word processing a decade before it began to
    appear in offices.

·   Designing the mouse as an input device sixteen years before
    Apple introduced it to the world.

·   Creating a windowing environment twenty years before
    Microsoft.

·   Envisioning hypertext-linked documents in a distributed
    environment a quarter-century before the World Wide Web.

All of this was paid for by the federal government due to the vision
of Licklider, Sutherland and Bob Taylor at ARPA. As importantly for
Silicon Valley, this federal investment would contribute to making
the region a magnet for new visionary talent and a wellspring of the
networked economy.

How Free, Open Source Software Created the Internet


v14, n5 (May 25, 1990):67. Saffo details the revolutionary vision of
Engelbart and how little modern business has engaged with the full
thrust of Engelbart's vision.
Out of Project MAC, ARC and other ARPA-funded institutions would
emerge the collaborative network that would shape the Internet and
computing for the next decades. When ARPA decided to network its
various research outlets around the country, it turned to a company
called Bolt Beranek and Newman (BNN), a Cambridge- based firm
made up largely of MIT graduate students and affiliated researchers
(including J.C.R. Licklider at various times). BBN would build the
initial network computers needed for what was dubbed the ARPANET
while UCLA and ARC would take on administrative duties in
managing the network. Four initial "nodes" on the network were
linked in October 1969 and by October 1972, when the ARPANET
was first demonstrated publicly, there were twenty-nine nodes in the
network. What would evolve into the Internet had been born.

ARPA would oversee the creation of an array of software needed to
manage and extend the computer network. The first set of
standards, now known as the "Request for Comments," or RFCs, was
the work of the late Jonathan B. Postel. The first standard network
protocol was created in 1971 to allow a person at one computer to
connect to other computers on the network as if they were local
users. This soon evolved into the standard Transmission Control
Protocol (TCP) which was complemented in 1972 by the File Transfer
Protocol which allowed individual files to be exchanged between
computers. In 1976, ARPA hired Vint Cerf, a Stanford professor and
an original member of the UCLA graduate student group which
helped launch the ARPANET, and Bob Kahn, a former BBN manager
on the project, to create a system for integrating the ARPANET with
other computer networks. By 1977, they had demonstrated the
Internet Protocol (IP) which could be used to integrate satellite,
packet radio and the ARPANET. From this point on, new networks of
computers could be easily added to the network. In 1981, ARPA
funded researchers at UC-Berkeley to include TCP/IP networking
protocols into UCB's popular version of the UNIX operating system,
thereby spreading the Internet standards to computers throughout
the world.

An example of the cross-fertilization of staff and ideas outside the
government was the case of Bob Metcalfe and Ethernet. Bob
Metcalfe had originally designed the interface to connect MIT's
computers to the ARPANET and had been hired in the mid-1970s at
Xerox Corporation's new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which
was headed by Bob Taylor, the former IPTO head who had started
the ARPANET project. Metcalfe was doing ARPA-funded work while
trying to figure out how to cheaply network PARC's experimental
personal computers. Using models from ARPA's project around
radio packet switching, Metcalfe created a system called Ethernet to
exchange information between computers in what would come to be
called Local Area Networks (LANs). Ethernet was crucial for the
expansion of the Internet since local computers could be networked
together and then connected to other networks using the TCP/IP
protocol and local router computers. Xerox would start selling
Ethernet as a commercial product in 1980 (and Metcalfe would
found 3Com to sell networking technology), while PARC head Bob
Taylor donated millions of dollars of Ethernet equipment to
universities to help expand use of networking on campuses.

In all these ways, ARPA helped shepherd open Internet standards
into the 1980s and 1990s when they would be used to radically
expand the network to a wide range of users. In doing so, it was
clear that the professional norms promoted by ARPA and the
community of researchers was critical in order to keep individual
profit-taking from undermining those open standards. As one
example, in 1973 then IPTO head Larry Roberts was hired by BBN to
run a company subsidiary called TELENET that would run private
packet switching networks. In coming to BBN, Roberts carefully
deflected a bid by BBN to take over ARPANET privately. J.C.R.
Licklider, who returned from MIT to ARPA to replace Roberts as
head of IPTO, soon found himself in conflict with his old employer,
BBN, which was refusing to publish the original computer code for
the IMP computer routers which the company had designed. Making
matters worse, BBN was becoming more and more reluctant itself to
fix software bugs faced by the system (no doubt preferring to
concentrate on programming for its for-profit TELENET subsidiary).
Licklider, in the name of the openness of the Net, threatened to hold
up BBN's federal contract funds unless the company released the
code publicly. BBN did so, thereby enhancing--albeit reluctantly--the
tradition of open codes in the development of standards.

A key part of the success of the Internet was the fact that the public
space of the network harnessed the energy of universities, both paid
staff and volunteers, to provide a continuous stream of open source
software to improve its functionality. The Net itself allowed any new
innovation to nearly instantaneously ricochet across the nation,
even the world, without the friction of the costs of either
distribution or purchase. This "gift" economy allowed new
innovations to be quickly tested and to gain a critical mass of users
for functions which had not even been envisioned by the creators of
the system.

The ethic of shared, open software, what was called the "hacker
ethic3," at MIT's Project Mac, would contribute to both the creation
of the Internet and the spread of computing across the country.
Many early efforts were games like Spacewar and Adventure, but
more serious software became the staples of day-to-day computing
throughout the Internet and beyond. Probably the most pervasive
example was the early use of the ARPANET for electronic mail. Not
even planned as part of its design, email was created as a private
"hack" by BBN engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1972 as a piggyback on
the file transfer protocol. Under the tolerant supervision of ARPA,
use of the Net for email communication soon surpassed computing
resource sharing. Stephen Lukasik, ARPA director from 1971 to
1975, saw the importance of email for long-distance collaboration
and himself soon began virtually directing ARPA from electronic
mail and his 20-lb Texas Instruments portable terminal. Partly
because of Lukasik's own frustration in dealing with the stream of
raw mail, IPTO director Larry Roberts himself wrote the code for the
first mail manager software, called READ. This was soon supplanted
by the popular MSG, which added the first reply function. New free
email managers have been a staple of Internet innovation ever since.
Eric Allman, a student at UC-Berkeley, would create the program
SENDMAIL to assist network managers in directing and processing
this ever increasing email traffic--to this day, Allman's program is
used to direct over 75% of Internet email traffic. Others at Berkeley
created the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND) program which
is used to direct traffic to sites by the site name--like
www.netaction.org--rather than having to use numbers like
199.201.243.200.

While free and open source software continued to enhance the
spread of computer networking, what ultimately brought the
Internet into its own was the "Gopher" software developed at the
University of Minnesota in the early 1990s. Building on the existence

3 The term "hacker" was originally a descriptive term which implied
a shared belief that technical information should, in principle, be
freely available to all users. While some individuals who promoted
this perspective are still actively involved in Internet development,
the term has a different meaning to the current generation of
Internet users.
of individual Internet sites where files and programs could be
retrieved after logging into a particular computer over the network,
Gopher was a piece of software that could be used to create
personalized lists of files from computers all over the Net and allow
computer users to view or retrieve any file chosen from the list.
With this innovation, the Internet became one giant hard drive that
could be organized and presented to a particular set of users in
whatever way made the most logical or aesthetic sense. Gophers
sprang up on computers run by governments, universities,
community organizations and businesses which were beginning to
stake a place on the Net. In a visual way, the Internet's vast
resources could be presented and reached through Minnesota's "All
the Gopher Sites in the World" gopher site. For most commercial
users of service providers like America Online, gophers were the
user's initial contact with the world of the Internet, and this contact
created demand for even more of the content that users knew
existed out of the proprietary walls of those commercial providers.

The next step, and the step that brought the Internet into almost
daily headlines, was the World Wide Web. The Web was initially
designed at the European Particle Physics Lab (CERN) in Geneva,
Switzerland to share information internally--what would be
designated as an Intranet today. However, people quickly saw it as a
useful way of sharing information between computer systems much
like the Gopher software, with the additional advantage of
"hypertext" connections to internal parts of documents. In 1993,
computer science students funded at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications located at the University of Illinois
created Mosaic, the first Web browser that added the display of
graphics to the traditional text display. With an almost unnerving
speed, Web sites exploded across the Internet along with the
browsers needed to view them. It was only with Netscape's creation
of its Navigator software, followed soon by Microsoft's Explorer
software, that secret code and commercial software began to erode
the open source tradition of the Internet--an issue we will return to
later in this paper.

Supervision   and    Standards

If government funding helped support new software as a font of
innovation on the Internet, government supervision helped maintain
the standardization required for easy compatibility between the
wide range of computers increasingly sharing resources on the Net.
Despite odes to the "anarchy" of the Internet, its creation was a
closely supervised anarchy directed to the specifications of
government, yet marshaling the broad professional, volunteer and
eventually commercial resources of the emerging computer elite. In
many ways, the very skill of the government in marshaling those
resources with a light hand is a source of the sometimes rhetorical
amnesia over its role. The smoothness of the Internet's creation and
the building of a broad consensus over its shape created so much
legitimacy for its design that it was seen less as a creation of "the
government"--i.e. "them"--and more as a creation of society as a
whole.

Licklider had actually started this professional network at ARPA in
the early 1960s when he reached beyond traditional experts at
federal agencies and national labs to gather an association of
experts interested in communication technology. He oriented ARPA
to establish contacts with university researchers around the
country, establishing what he presciently called the Intergalactic
Computer Network which helped connect researchers interested in
computer networking.

When ARPANET was created, UCLA was funded to establish a Network
Measurement Center to oversee the evolution of the network. Forty
grad students at UCLA, many of them to become key leaders in both
the public and corporate Internet world, helped run the center and
coordinate with other researchers around developing the standards
for running the ARPANET. The new technology itself helped add a
whole nationwide group of researchers and graduate students in
these deliberations to help mold the evolution of the Internet. This
national body became the Network Working Group (NWG) which
was expanded after the 1972 "debut" conference to become part of
an International Network Working Group to promote international
computer networking.

Management of Internet "addresses," critical for the decentralized
electronic switching network, would be housed at Doug Engelbart's
shop at the Stanford Research Institute in an institution called the
InterNIC. As the NIC, Engelbart would help identify and organize
electronic resources on the Internet for the easiest retrieval. Until
1992 (when the NIC functions were awarded to other companies),
the function of the NIC at SRI would include administration in
assigning IP network addresses and domain names for all servers,
essentially creating the yellow pages for the Internet.4 Surveying the
initial implementation of the ARPAnet in a speech in 1970, Engelbart
could already envision the evolution of the networked community
where, "there will emerge a new 'marketplace,' representing
fantastic wealth in commodities of knowledge, service, information,
processing, storage, etc."5

ARPA would replace the NWG by a more formal Internet
Configuration Control Board (ICCB) in 1979 to extend participation
in the design of the Internet to a wider range of members of the
research community. This was especially important as the ARPANET
expanded to include a range of other government agencies and
bodies and evolved into the diversity of the emerging Internet
community. The ICCB was later replaced by the Internet Activities
Board (IAB) which used a set of ten task forces to include a wide
range of experts in the evolution of the Internet. As the Internet was
privatized in the early 1990s, the private sector (led in many cases
by former researchers for ARPA and its Internet-related funded
projects) created the Internet Society in 1992, and the IAB
reconstituted itself as the Internet Architecture Board and joined the
Internet Society.6

At each step of its development, ARPA and associated government
agencies expanded participation to an ever widening set of experts
and technological leaders who, in turn, would encourage others in
their academic, scientific, community or business realm to support
the effective development of the Internet. As well, the continual
movement of personnel back and forth from academic, government
and (eventually) business positions created a cross-fertilization of
ideas and a loyalty to the emerging network rather than to any
particular organization.

It was the weakening of this government-supervised network of
standards in the 1990s that allowed commercial competition over
standards to undermine open computing, setting the stage for both

4 Baker, Steven. "The evolving Internet backbone--history of the
Internet computer network." UNIX Review v11, n9 (Sept, 1993):15.
5Rheingold,   1985, p. 199.
6 Thereis a more extensive history of this evolution of professional
governance of the Internet in: Kahn, Robert E. "The role of
government in the evolution of the Internet." Communications of
the ACM v37, n8 (Aug 1994):15-19.
the Netscape-Microsoft browser war and for Microsoft's overall
expanding monopoly on standards (issues we will return to later).

UNIX as a Public Standard

If anything illustrates both the gains from government support of
open standards in computing and the dangers from public policy
withdrawing from that support, it is the UNIX operating system.

UNIX was the first operating system developed that was independent
of specific hardware, thereby giving users and programmers
freedom from the dictates of hardware designers. UNIX could be
"ported" to different machines, thereby allowing the same program
to run on completely different hardware. Created at Bell Labs in the
late 60s when AT&T was still barred from the computer business,
UNIX was widely licensed by AT&T, mostly to universities. UNIX was
especially popular with ARPANET programmers working on a wide
variety of computers because they needed to create an integrated
set of software tools for managing their emerging network.

UNIX had developed during the 1970s into a number of lackluster
variations, so in the late 1970s, UC-Berkeley researchers--funded
largely by ARPA--developed an improved version that was dubbed
UNIX 4.1 BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution). Bill Joy, the lead
programmer in the Berkeley UNIX effort, was again funded by ARPA
in 1981 to create a new version of UNIX including TCP/IP networking
protocols. With a minimal licensing fee, Berkeley seeded its UNIX
version with its Internet protocols throughout the university world.

Probably no single private company benefitted more from (and
contributed more to) the open UNIX and Internet standards than
Sun Microsystems, a seller in the early 1980s of new high
performance machines dubbed workstations. Sun would enter, then
dominate, the market for stand-alone workstations that were
beginning to replace time-share minicomputers. Started in 1982,
Sun would be one of the fastest growing companies in history,
making the Fortune 500 within five years. By 1995, the company
would sell 1.5 million high performance computers, used as the core
systems for networking in government, universities, finance and
engineering. And from the first day of operation, every Sun
computer was shipped with UNIX with hardware and software
designed to be hooked up to the Internet. It was on Sun UNIX
machines that much of the Internet would be networked in the
1980s, and it was on Sun Workstations that the first Web browser,
Mosaic, would be designed.

That Sun was committed to open standards reflected the company
founders' emergence out of the milieu of Bay Area graduate
students immersed in the ARPANET. When Stanford M.B.A.'s Scott
McNealy and Vinod Khlosa teamed up with Stanford student Andy
Bechtolsheim, who had developed a new high performance
computer using off-the-shelf components, it was natural for them to
adopt UNIX, the popular university operating system, as the
operating system for their new computer. And it was natural for
them to bring in as a co-founder Bill Joy, the premiere UNIX and
ARPAnet programmer at UC-Berkeley.

Commercial versions of UNIX, however, were splintered between
various incompatible proprietary versions. Far from being a widely
used standard in business that Sun could just hop a ride on, Bill Joy
and the Sun team had to help build a standard and sell private
industry on the gospel of open computing. They took a number of
steps to ensure that the BSD UNIX on Sun's computers was seen as a
real standard. Sun gave away the BSD UNIX and TCP/IP networking
software with every computer they sold. When Sun develop a
Network File System (NFS) in 1984 that enhanced network
computing by making it possible to share files between different
computers, they didn't try to sell this advance as normal software.
Instead, they licensed it to the industry for a nominal licensing fee
and even published the specifications for the software on the usenet
electronic bulletin board so anyone could construct an alternative
to the NFS file system if they wanted to avoid the license fee. Usable
on DOS, VMS and other operating systems, it was a key advance for
networking and increased trust by customers that Sun would be an
honest guardian of the open standards it was promoting on its
hardware. Another key step was made in 1985 when Sun
approached AT&T, allowed back in the computer industry, and
worked out an agreement to merge Sun's Berkeley UNIX with AT&T's
System V, further enhancing the public view of Sun's UNIX as the
standard.

The key for making UNIX nearly universal in corporate and high-end
computing in the late 1980s, though, was decisive action by the
federal government in support of strong UNIX standards. The federal
government itself was faced with a mess of different computer
systems that needed to be networked together. Because of the close
ties of the Department of Defense to university researchers (largely
fostered by ARPA/DARPA), the federal government already had an
affinity for UNIX. So in 1986, the government passed regulations
that no company could bid on any government computer contract
unless their system offered UNIX as an option. This gave Sun a huge
advantage in securing a large slice of the $500 million, five-year
National Security Agency contract then under bid. Sun's and AT&T's
version of UNIX was now the benchmark for selling to the
government and university markets (along with many private
industry customers who would follow the government's lead in
standards). This was reinforced in 1988 when the Air Force declared
DEC's proprietary version of UNIX, called Ultrix, ineligible for
government contracts.

Other workstation and corporate computer makers would do a
complete turnaround in 1987 and 1988 and begin promoting their
own "open computing" UNIX systems--all with the built-in Internet
protocols that would set the stage for the commercial explosion of
the Internet in the 1990s.

Unfortunately, this was also the period of government withdrawal
from strong support for computing standards and the result was the
development of different UNIX standards, as Sun, Hewlett Packard
and other companies lined up behind different variants in
commercial warfare. This fragmentation of UNIX standards was soon
mirrored in the war between Netscape and Microsoft over Internet
standards that followed the government's withdrawal from defense
of those standards.

Breakdown of Open Computing on the Internet

It was with the World Wide Web that the Internet broke into national
consciousness and where Netscape Communications would become
the central Bay Area firm around which a slew of new Silicon Valley
companies would form. But unlike Sun, which rode public UNIX
standards to rapid growth, Netscape began its life with a direct
assault on the original government-based standards created by the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). In this,
Netscape would play a three-cornered game against both the NCSA
and Microsoft, who it knew would quickly be coming in with its own
controlled standards. Netscape's success would be based on the
virtual withdrawal of the government from any serious intervention
on behalf of Internet standards.
The initial Web "browser," Mosaic, was created at the University of
Illinois at Champaign-Urbana where the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) was located. The National
Science Foundation had officially funded the NSFnet "backbone" of
the Internet to link five major supercomputing centers, including
NCSA, and NCSA's software development group had concentrated for
years on high-performance information-sharing and collaboration
software. Even before Mosaic, the NCSA had back in 1985 created
software "clients" for PCS and Macs, called Telnet, to allow people to
access and use computers connected to the Internet as if the user
were locally based. A different computer center at Illinois was
responsible, as well, for the popular Eudora client for electronic
mail on PCs and Macs. The NCSA had worked to create a graphics-
based collaborative tool for sharing documents called Collage, so it
was natural for them to create a team to develop a graphics-based
version of the Web "HyperText Markup Language" (HTML) protocols
created by CERN in Europe.7 The result of this forty-member team
was Mosaic, first introduced on the UNIX platform in January 1993,
with Macintosh and PC versions introduced in August 1993.
Copyrighted by the University of Illinois, Mosaic could be
downloaded for free by individuals and by companies wishing to use
the Internet for internal communications.

However, the NCSA did not want to become a help desk for
commercial applications, so in August 1994, the University of
Illinois assigned future commercial rights for licensing NCSA Mosaic
to Spyglass, Inc., a local company created by NCSA alumni to
commercialize NCSA technology. The goal was for university
researchers to continue developing longer-term technology and
standards to be incorporated into browsers, while Spyglass would
help license the technology to companies addressing immediate
customer needs such as support, speed, and security. Spyglass began
widely licensing Mosaic to computer companies including IBM, DEC,
AT&T, NEC, and Firefox Inc., who was working to integrate Mosaic
standards into Novell networking software for the personal
computer.8


7 Michalski, Jerry. "O pioneers!". RELease 1.0 v94, n1 (Jan 31,
1994):5 (8 pages).
8 Stevens, Tim. "NCSA: National Center for Supercomputing
Applications." Industry Week v243, n23 (Dec 19, 1994):56-58 and
Watching Mosaic from the Bay Area, Silicon Graphics CEO Jim Clark,
a veteran of the UNIX standards wars, understood how much money
could be won if a company could take control of the standards of
this new Internet tool. So Clark left his company and set out to
destroy Mosaic and replace its government-backed standards. He
met with Marc Andreesen, a member of the Mosaic team who had
been hired at a Bay Area Internet security firm called Enterprise
Integration Technologies. Out of that meeting in April 1994 was
born Mosaic Communications Corporation (later to be called
Netscape). With Clark putting up the capital, Andreesen recruited
five other Mosaic team members from NCSA to design what they
called in-house Mozilla, the Mosaic-Killer. In six months, Clark's
team had created a powerful browser, which the team called
Netscape. It had easy-to-navigate features and loaded graphic images
faster than NCSA's Mosaic. But Netscape did something else--it
included the ability to display text formatting that did not even exist
in the HTML standards embedded in the NCSA Mosaic browser. This
meant that Web pages designed to work with Netscape would not be
readable by all the other Mosaic-based browsers. This would
encourage people to use Netscape browsers and, as Netscape
developed them, would encourage Web designers to pay Netscape
for the server software that developed Web pages using their
modified standards. It was in this later market of selling Web design
tools costing from $1,500 to $50,000 where Netscape intended to
make their money.9

And then Clark and Andreesen compounded their fracturing of the
NCSA standard by giving their version away over the Internet. The
University of Illinois had demanded that Clark's company pay for a
license before selling their version. Clark later said that he refused
because the university was demanding an ongoing per-copy royalty:
"I didn't tell them, but we had intended to allow people to download
it, and they were going to charge me. The amount varied, but
nothing is innocuous when you're talking tens of millions of


Patch, Kimberly. "Spyglass takes on Mosaic licensing: will focus on
support and security." PC Week v11, n34 (August 29, 1994):123.
9 Accounts of Netscape's startup from: Holzinger, Albert G.
"Netscape founder points, and it clicks." Nation's Business v84, n1
(Jan 1996):32; Nee, Eric."Jim Clark." Upside v7, n10 (Oct 1995):28-
48.
people."10 The point of the licenses by Illinois had been, along with
collecting a little revenue, to control the standards and make sure
that the only free version available was the official NCSA standard.
Netscape would essentially "dump" its version onto the Internet,
thereby undercutting the rest of the commercial browser
companies, which couldn't duplicate Netscape's actions because
they were fairly paying per copy license fees. So Netscape, being the
sole enhanced commercial browser flooding the Internet, was able
to destroy NCSA-led standards and take over standards creation
itself.

Unlike the situation with Sun Microsystems, where the government
would decisively support open government-based UNIX standards,
the federal government did nothing to support NCSA's standards.
Other companies and analysts would immediately condemn
Netscape's actions as a monopolistic move11, but the government
made no investigations into possible monopoly practices, no lawsuit
alleging intellectual property infringement, no announcements that
the federal government would use only NCSA-approved codes in
government Web sites, no announcements that it would refuse to
buy any Web servers (i.e. Netscape's) based on such non-standard
formatting, and no signal from the government at all that they
would oppose Netscape's takeover of the standards. Instead, the
University of Illinois, after a bit of public grumbling, threw in the
towel. They signed an agreement with Clark in December 1994 that
allowed Netscape to be sold without a license for the minor
concessions that the words "Mosaic" be removed from the firm's
title and that no mention of Mosaic be made in marketing the
browser.12

In a perverse way, Clark and Netscape would justify their destruction
of the government standards based on the expected weakness of the
government in defending them. They predicted that Microsoft would
soon use its dissemination of the operating system to take control of


10 Nee,   Oct 1995.
1 1 Steinert-Threlkeld,Tom. "The Internet shouldn't be a breeding
ground for monopolies--Mosaic Communications' NetScape
giveaway could be prelude to market dominance." InterActive Week
v1, n2 (Nov 7, 1994):44.
12 University of Illinois and Netscape Communications reach
agreement." Information Today v12, n3 (Mar 1995):39.
standards if Netscape didn't do so first through free distribution.
Argued Clark:

      At some level, standards certainly play a role, but the real
      issue is that there is a set of people, a set of very powerful
      companies out there, who don't play the standards game.
      For the standards game to work, everyone has to play it,
      everyone has to acknowledge it's the game. Companies
      such as Microsoft aren't going to sit around and wait for
      some standards body to tell them. If your philosophy is to
      adhere to the standards, the guy who just does the de
      facto thing that serves the market need instantly has got
      an advantage.13

Netscape, having seized leadership of Web standards, would try to
redeem its reputation by working with the old Internet fellowship of
engineers embodied in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
and the more recent World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) based at
MIT and run by CERN's Tim Berners-Lee, who came to MIT in late
1994.

And as Microsoft entered the game with its own Internet Explorer
browser to appear on every Windows desktop, the grumblings over
Netscape's occasional forays into proprietary advantage would
lessen as the alternative fear of Microsoft taking over the whole
computing world loomed. Having come late to the Internet,
Microsoft initially directly licensed Mosaic browser technology from
Spyglass in December 1994--a license netting Spyglass about $13.1
million. But when Microsoft began giving its browser away at the
end of 1995, the rest of Spyglass's licensing revenue (amounting to
$20 million) disappeared as the browser war settled into a two-
company fight between Netscape and Microsoft.14

In the end, Netscape would argue that the beloved public village of
standards was threatened by Microsoft, and Netscape had only
destroyed the village in order to try to save it. With the government
withdrawing from its role in defending standards, such a standards
war was inevitable.


13 Nee,   ibid. 1995
14 Lohr, Steve. "Spyglass, a Pioneer, Learns Hard Lessons About
Microsoft" New York Times. March 2. 1998.
Why the Government Withdrew from Defense of Open
Standards

So why the withdrawal by the government in the first place? The
retreat of federal involvement has been based on a combination of
ideological opposition, private industry desires, and the
disappearance of a stable government bureaucracy able to assume
the role of regulator. This has left Internet development increasingly
in the hands of self-interested companies seeking commercial
advantage rather than maximum innovation and compatibility for
consumers.

The ideological assault on federal involvement in further
developments of the Internet is strongly related to the end of the
Cold War and the withdrawal of the "national security" basis for
much of the federal government's economic involvement since
World War II. It was probably not a coincidence that ARPA director
Craig Fields, criticized for ARPA's involvement in trying to direct the
development of high technology, was fired by the Bush
Administration in 1989--the same year as the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While the Clinton administration made some gestures in asserting a
public interest in the development of what they called the National
Information Infrastructure, privatization proceeded apace. What
limited funds the Clinton Administration allocated for encouraging
community and local government development of the Internet was
vociferously opposed by conservatives in Congress and, with the
Republican takeover of the Congress in 1994, those funds were
initially zeroed out and in the end sharply limited, even as local
need for the funds exploded with the expansion of the Net.

As for Internet standards, criticism had already been leveled against
the University of Illinois and NCSA for attempting to manage the
expansion of the World Wide Web15 and, in the context of Newt
Gingrich's anti- government message, there was probably even less
support for government regulation of standards.

Private industry had significantly benefited from government
spending on the Internet in the period when it was not commercially
viable and the government was the main market for Internet-related
computer services. However, as a private market for Internet

15 Messmer,Ellen. "Spyglass captures Mosaic licensing." Network
World v11, n35 (Aug 29, 1994):4.
services appeared around the structure of the Internet, private
industry has seen strong government involvement as a threat to
corporate control of information markets. Companies that had
started life as extensions of the government saw the opportunity for
independence and extremely high profits as the government's role
receded. The success of government intervention in nurturing new
economic sectors is often rewarded by the creation of a private
sector interest in blocking further government action.

Similarly, the success of the private sector helped fragment and
undermine the ability of key government agencies to successfully
promote the public's interest. Partly, this is due to ideological
opposition from business, which politically sought to curtail the
power of the public sector as the private sector expanded
commercially. With Defense involvement in high technology under
assault, and Republicans trying to abolish the Commerce
Department where most of the NII programs have been coordinated
in the Clinton administration, there has been little chance to
consider the long-term potential for public servants watching their
political backs.16 Also significant was the movement of ARPA
employees from public service to private companies now pushing
for limiting the federal role. From Bob Metcalfe, who became rich
through founding 3Com, to Vint Cerf, who has become a major
spokesperson for MCI, the founders of ARPANET who initially
cultivated the ethic of freely sharing information and software are
now fighting for profit share and private ownership of intellectual
property.

The Return of Open Source Computing

So in the midst of UNIX wars, browser wars and commercial
competition, the emergence of open source software as a more and
more accepted part of the computing environment comes as
something of a surprise. The catalyst is Microsoft, or rather the
reaction of Microsoft's Silicon Valley competitors to the Seattle-
based company's monopolistic practices. The problem for Silicon
Valley firms, despite the pride in the geography-driven technology
innovation of the region, is that such proximity does not

16 SeeHellerstein, Judith. "The NTIA needs to rethink its role in the
new telecommunications environment." Telecommunications
(Americas Edition) v30, n8 (Aug 1996):22 for the trials of the NTIA
agency in the Clinton administration.
automatically create the standards that propel economic growth,
especially in the absence of a firm alliance with government.
Technology firms have tried to create substitutes for government
through private consortia like CommerceNet and other standards
bodies, but none have the core of public-interested officials that
government can wield to transcend particularistic company
concerns in favor of the public interest.

The reality is that despite the Internet's success, many of the firms
in the region continually struggle with the danger of proprietary
technologies upsetting the trust needed to sustain the collaborative
model that has fueled the growth of firms in the region. At the top
of the list of dangers is of, course, Microsoft. Microsoft used a
combination of its early alliance with IBM and hardball tactics to
build its proprietary operating system monopoly on the desktop.
From that base, Microsoft would extend its proprietary standards
into the market for large-scale business computing, formerly the
province of mainframes or UNIX-based network servers. While the
Internet at first appeared as a danger to Microsoft, even a dagger at
its throat, Microsoft also saw that success in molding those
standards in a proprietary direction could extend the company's
control throughout the whole world of corporate computing.

Microsoft responded with a combination of in-house software
applications and developer tools optimized for its proprietary
standards, creating an all-pervasive computing environment that
promised any corporation that its needs would be met. The
Microsoft solution might be less innovative than any particular
competitor, but Microsoft's very completeness and pervasiveness
across all sectors of computing would make up for its rigidity.

In fact, Microsoft's rigidity could be an advantage when compared
to the weak standards that pervaded the UNIX corporate
environment by the 1990s. After the heyday of the 80s when
government purchasing requirements had enforced a broad UNIX
standard on the industry, the industry had divided into warring UNIX
camps and left customers uncertain that their needs would be met
in the fragmented UNIX environment. By 1997 Microsoft NT
computer servers were outselling UNIX servers.17 It was clear that
in the absence of strong standards and government support for such

17 McGarvey,   Joe. "Intranets, NT Shape Server Market." SoftBase. Jun
1, 1997.
standards, proprietary models had a decided advantage in yielding
the market stability and monopoly rents that a company like
Microsoft could reap.

Even as Silicon Valley firms sought to finesse innovation from the
economic pressure of Windows competition, the UNIX wars made
clear that strong open standards were the key to the region
competing economically against proprietary steamrollers like
Microsoft. Consortia like CommerceNet built around Internet
standards were the first step in the process, but companies like Sun
and Netscape saw the need for broader solutions that would expand
open standards from the operating system to the tools used by
programmers. The Java language, with its promise that any program
would be able to run on any computer, no matter its hardware or
operating system, became a part of that strategy.

With the need to generate stronger global support for its standards,
Netscape took the unprecedented step in March 1998 of publicly
revealing its browser source code--the usually top-secret guts of any
program. Netscape invited developers to modify the code and even
resell their own version as long as any modifications to the code
were republished publicly and made according to the terms of their
license, and subject to coordination by the development team at
Mozilla.org. Faced with the onslaught of Microsoft's proprietary
approach, Netscape decided that the regional commercial
commitment to developing standards was insufficient. It needed to
marshal the resources of the global programming community, and it
needed to open its code to gain the kind of trust needed to ensure
their support.

The idea, harking back to the original ARPANET vision, was to invite
the participation of the whole Net community in developing the
tools and standards embedded in the browser software. "It's no
longer Netscape alone, pushing the client software forward, but now
it's really the whole Net," said Bob Lisbonne, Netscape's senior vice
president for client products at the time. "For Netscape, this gives us
a way to engage the creative, innovative abilities of literally orders
of magnitude more people than we could ever--really any
commercial software company could ever afford to just put on their
payroll.18" With hacker enthusiasts lauding the decision, thousands

18 Kornblum,
           Janet. "Netscape sets source code free." News.Com.
March 31, 1998.
of developers would download the source code within the first day
and major modifications of Navigator were released onto the Net
within weeks by independent developers from all over the country.
The idea was that Netscape could release existing modifications in
its continual upgrades of both browser and server software. What it
lost by giving up control of its code, it would make up through
selling customized business versions and server software, and by
preventing Microsoft's control of standards which would be
Netscape's deathnell.

Netscape's action highlights the continued importance of public-
interest-oriented software development. This type of software has
survived much of the privatization of the Internet. Most
dramatically, despite the focus on the Microsoft-Netscape rivalry,
the most popular Web server on the Internet was neither company's
but rather a free, open source server called Apache. After the NCSA
developed its Mosaic browser software and its original server
software, the NSCA as part of the government privatization had
ceased aggressively updating its software. Instead, a geographically
dispersed group of software programmers, some at universities and
some in private business, began collaborating in 1995 to update the
NCSA server to increase its power and manageability. Most of the
programmers participated out of altruism. The result was a Web
server that in 1997 was used in 44 percent of Internet sites,
compared to just 16 percent that used Microsoft and 12 percent
using Netscape's software. And that list of sites included McDonalds,
UUNET Technologies, HotWired, Yahoo Inc., CSB, the FBI and IBM,
which passed over its own Lotus Domino server in favor of Apache
when it put its "Big Blue-Gary Kasparov" chess match on the
Internet.19 Similarly, one of the favorite Web programming
languages is a free and open language named perl which has
similarly been modified and improved through a global network of
collaborators coordinated by programmer Larry Wall.

Netscape also announced that it would begin making all its software
applications available in the Linux operating system, a freeware
version of UNIX that has become the fastest expanding operating
system in the world with three to nine million copies on computers
around the world. Linux was described by Wired magazine in 1997


19 Moeller,
          Michael. "Fort Apache: freeware's spirit outshines
commercial products." PC Week v14, n23. June 9, 1997.
as "[Window] NT's most serious competitor, the only viable
alternative to the Microsoft monoculture."20

Remarkably, Linux was born in 1991 by a student at the University
of Helsinki in Finland whose first name, Linus, led to the naming of
the language. At that point, a whole series of free and open source
UNIX tools had been developed by programmers connected to GNU
(a self-referencing title standing for GNU is Not Unix) foundation,
itself founded by one of the original MIT hackers, Richard Stallman,
who objected to the increasing commercialization of university
research. Stallman and his fellow GNU hackers had, rightly, feared
that despite the fact that popular UNIX standards like Sun's were
broadly distributed, they still remained under private ownership and
could and would be used for proprietary advantage under the right
(or wrong) circumstances. Which is what happened by the early 90s.

The community of GNU programmers and users sought a non-
proprietary UNIX alternative to escape the new UNIX standards wars
between competing commercial providers. What this network of
free software developers lacked was the core of the operating
system, called a "kernel," which would tie all the GNU UNIX tools
together into an alternative to the commercial UNIX competitors.
Linus Torvalds wrote that kernel and from his university post would
use the Internet to coordinate improvements in this new operating
system with help from hundreds of enthusiasts around the globe.

Based on what GNU called "copyleft" principles, the Linux operating
system could be distributed freely or packaged with documentation
and sold for modest amounts backed by technical support by
companies like Red Hat, Caldera and Cygnus Solutions. Extremely
popular in developing nations like South Africa, Cuba, India and the
Philippines, Linux also began to eclipse other forms of UNIX in the
U.S. partly because of its price but also because many people
considered it technically the best operating system in existence.
Linux was the first operating system to include Java capability, so
every increase in Java programs adds to its functionality.21



20 Glyn  Moody. "The Greatest OS That (N)ever Was." Wired. August
1997.
21 Sullivan, Eamonn "Freedom is priceless, even when it's free." PC
Week v13, n47. Nov 25, 1996.
Netscape's source code unveiling, and its announced support for
Linux, throws into relief the different economies of trust that
separate proprietary standards and open source standards. With
proprietary standards like Microsoft's, everyone trusts (or fears)
that Microsoft will enforce whatever standards it dictates from its
company-specific development. The result is that hardware and
software partners on such proprietary efforts develop products
anywhere to their uniform standard. Alternatively, collaborators on
open source software can increasingly use the Internet to build trust
based on altruism and the hacker ethic of achievement without
needing to share any geography--the extreme example being Linus
Torvalds direction of the evolution of Linux. Without expectation of
financially capturing the social benefits of their creation, they are
free to innovate without restriction. On the other hand, with more
diffuse commercial standards, collaborators need the repeated
interactions and day-to-day commercial interactions of shared
geography, like Silicon Valley, to generate financial gain while
assuring that multiple collaborators all profit from innovation.

With Microsoft's proprietary approaches gaining ground, Netscape
and other Silicon Valley actors reluctantly saw their alternative
commercial standards losing ground and saw an alliance with the
global open source software model as necessary for survival. They
would forgo some profits in order to maintain the priority on
innovation that gives them an advantage in the remaining
commercial aspects of technology development.

A range of new partners to Linux and other open source software
have emerged. Corel--maker of the WordPerfect wordprocessor--
announced it would be releasing a full suite of office applications
for Linux. Inprise (formerly Borland) announced that its Interbase
database server would be ported to Linux. IBM announced that its
next set of Web tools, called WebSphere Application Server, would
fully support the Apache web server. IBM also announced it would
join the Apache Group of collaborative developers and be
contributing code to improve the Apache server. Sendmail creator
Eric Allman has created a startup business to sell easy-to-use
administrative tools to support the core free Sendmail program.
Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, IBM, and Silicon Graphics have all
indicated plans to install and support Linux for their hardware
customers. Lotus will release a version of its Domino and Notes
collaborative software for Linux later in 1999.
Where to Go from Here--Ending the Microsoft Monopoly

So with all this good news, open source software might seem to be
an antidote to the threat of Microsoft's monopoly. At least that was
the argument Microsoft executives were making in court in January.
Of course, even Microsoft's in-house political magazine, Slate, noted
the irony that everything the executives described about "Windows'
impending obsolescence and its rivals' virtues [was] exactly the
opposite of what Microsoft tells consumers and corporate
clients."22

Microsoft may play up the marginal danger of Linux to its market
share, but the sobering reality is that Microsoft server sales are still
growing faster than the overall market growth-- increasing
Microsoft's market share. Linux is growing, but mostly at the
expense of commercial versions of UNIX, whose growth has
essentially dropped to a standstill of only 4% in 1998. And neither
Linux nor a rejuvenated Apple is undermining Microsoft's complete
domination of the desktop market.

While many of Microsoft's competitors are collaborating in support
of Linux, they are just as likely--especially with a little Microsoft
incentive--to fall out into competing camps that might easily divert
Linux or other open source software into a competing muddle of
standards. Just as the UNIX wars served Microsoft, a similar split in
the future could easily knock Linux out as a strong competitor to
the centrally-controlled standards of Windows.

However, the limited success of Linux and other open source
software does have implications for the Microsoft antitrust trial. The
availability of open source software is not an excuse to find
Microsoft innocent of the wholesale monopolistic abuses that the
trial has exposed. But it may become one of the remedies that the
court and other government agencies use to rein in Microsoft's
monopoly power.

Many, including NetAction, have proposed remedies to Microsoft's
monopoly abuses, from breaking up the company into multiple
competing units to court-ordered limits on its licensing agreements
to forcing Microsoft to reveal its source code to prevent in-house
coders from having advantages over competitors in non-OS markets.

22 Saletan,   Wiliam "Microsoft plays dead." Slate January 29, 1999.
While such government restrictions are likely necessary, none of
them speak to the issue of creating a strong viable alternative to
Microsoft. As Mitch Stoltz notes in "The Case for Government
Promotion of Open Source Software," the federal government
already spends billions of dollars on software research, purchases
and implementation. If it marshaled those resources in support of
open source solutions, it would achieve not only many of the clear
advantages open source software delivers but would undermine the
Microsoft monopoly at the same time. If the government demands
uniform standards for Linux and other open source software for
government purchases, this will go a long way toward preventing
fragmentation of standards throughout the open source universe.

Many critics of the Microsoft suit raise reasonable concerns that a
purely negative, restrictive approach to punishing Microsoft might
inhibit innovation at the company without necessarily creating a
viable competitor. Promoting open source software is the positive
policy option that the government should employ to encourage the
sort of innovation and competition that is needed to truly end the
Microsoft monopoly.