From...

September 2, 1999
Web posted at: 4:00 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT)

by Vicki Brown

MESSAGE BOARDS:     Linux

(IDG) -- First there was The Perl Conference. That was back in 1997. It went so well that in 1998 there we were treated to a repeat performance at Perl 98. But this time, on the last day of that show, there was a hint of things to come: Open Source Developer Day.

Where does a conference go from there? What's the next level of improvement? Try this year's O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention (held August 20-24 in Monterey, CA) -- 4 days of open source bliss.

The Open Source Convention featured not only Perl, but simultaneous conference tracks for Apache, Linux, Python, Sendmail, Tcl/Tk, and even an Open Source Business. The premise was simple: if it's a major open source project, it was represented at this year's conference.

Rules for revolutionaries

One of the keynote speeches at the conference was Guy Kawasaki's "Rules for Revolutionaries -- Some Practical Advice for the Open Source Movement." Guy Kawasaki has been chief evangelist of Apple Computer and CEO of garage.com. He has started two software companies and been an angel for three others.

I've heard Kawasaki give this talk several times, and I always enjoy it. It's always slightly different, as he makes an effort to tailor the talk to the audience.

Tim O'Reilly, president of O'Reilly & Associates and the host for the convention, provided some introductory remarks to explain his choice of Kawasaki as a keynote speaker. According to O'Reilly, we are experiencing many changes in the open source community, and one of the problems as a project gets bigger is that it moves into the spotlight.

Kawasaki is an appropriate speaker for an open source convention because he has seen what happens during the transition from idealism to real-world business. He can share insights and ideas with those of us just now entering the spotlight.

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In case you've never heard Kawasaki's Rules for Revolutionaries, they are (in Top 10 format):

1. Set your perspectives right: Jump to the next curve.
2. Eat like a bird; poop like an elephant: (Take in information at hundreds of times your body weight; when you have digested it, spread it around.)
3. Don't worry, be crappy: Version 1 means never having to say you're sorry.
4. Churn, baby, churn: It's okay to ship version 1, but there had better be a 1.1, a 2.0, a 3.0...
5. Enable people to test drive your revolution.
6. Make evangelists, not sales: Turn people into "raging inexorable thunder lizards" for your product.
7. Let a thousand flowers bloom: Support use of your product in unintended ways.
8. Think digital; act analog: Software is a (digital) means to an end; the end (analog) is the customer.
9. Never ask people to do something you yourself wouldn't do: Keep the customer in mind.
10. Do not let the bozos grind you down: The more the bozos try to grind you down, the more it means you're on to something.

From BSD to CSL

Another keynote speaker was someone well known to Sun users (and old hands with Unix) -- Bill Joy. Some might question the choice of Joy; Sun isn't exactly known as an open source company. But is responsible for the BSD Unix distributions 20 years ago, and he distributed the source for ex, vi, and other BSD programs.

Again, Tim O'Reilly justified his choice: Joy is one of the fathers of the open source movement. The developers at Berkeley created much of what we use today; the contributions of BSD Unix to current technology is often taken for granted.

Joy began with a retrospective of how he chose Berkeley for his graduate studies, what Berkeley was like in those days (minimal funding, no hardware), and the state of computer science research at the time. A big issue was, "is software research?" If the source code represents the results of your research, it should be published.

In the early 1980s with Joy onboard, Sun pioneered the notion of "open systems" with public interfaces. Implementations were proprietary, but source was available. Not quite our idea open source, but a major advance over the systems of the time.

More recently, Sun formulated a new approach to licensing. Called community source licensing (CSL), it draws from both proprietary (private property) and open source ("the commons") licensing models. The approach, which is best described as "stewardship," combines the best of both worlds. Features include: