Eric Raymond could be both the most moderate of open-source advocates and the most dangerous.

The former president of the Open Source Initiative will suggest partnerships with companies offering proprietary software. But only because he thinks they’ll move the world decisively toward open source. He’s pushed for entrepreneurs and businesses to get involved in open source. But chiefly because he thinks the freedom to share code is more important than freedom from paying for it.

Make no mistake, Mr. Raymond is a true believer. His seminal book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, lays out an elegant case for open-source software.

Now Mr. Raymond is pushing the most dangerous idea of all: that open source is good for more than geeks. And he’s pushing hard. He argues time is running out to win over the iPod generation. To get there, he says the Linux community will need to make “compromises.” For starters: Linux believers will have to reach out beyond “self-absorbed” geeks who learn Klingon and attend science fiction conventions in their spare time.

As an open-source ambassador, he’s prepared to push some uncomfortable notions. “We need to be prepared to go to the rights holders for these proprietary codecs and say, we’ll give you money, give us a license,” he said. “This is something that the Linux community has a huge antipathy to doing because we’ve got all this idealism about open source.”

To get there he’ll cajole, he’ll plead, he may even compromise. But even Mr. Raymond has his limits, calling Microsoft PowerPoint a tool for the “stupid and weak-minded.”

Ah, geeks. We caught up with him, where else, at World Science Fiction Convention in San Diego.

Q: What will it take to get Linux to work as smoothly with something like an iPod as well as an iPod works with a Mac (or at least my Windows machine)?

A: It will take somebody who’s prepared to buy the rights for those technologies on behalf of the Linux community and then distribute them as a product.

Q: So it's not just a technical problem?

A: Well, no. The main problems are actually legal rather than technical. Reverse engineering these codecs is not really difficult; the real problem is that if you distribute them, you get sued.

Q: Got it; so you need a change in attitude on the part of the companies selling these devices?

A: Yes, I think so. What a lot of hardware companies are gradually realizing is that open source is a market builder. It’s a market builder because firstly it means that the universe of people who are prepared to use and enhance your software widens. Secondly, open source is a reassurance that that device is not going to become a means of controlling the user, rather than empowering the user.

Q: So why do you suppose Steve Jobs resists this?

A: The reason is Steve Jobs has a fundamental obsession with good industrial design. I think [Jobs] likes to control the design of the Macintosh at every level, partly because it’s good business, but mostly because essentially what they are selling is elaborate industrial art to people who appreciate elaborate industrial art; and if they don’t control the design at every level, some of that appeal might go away.

Q: Motorola has decided to push in a different direction by developing a version of Linux for Smartphones. What advantages do you see them getting from that?

A: The big one, which has already been pioneered by Nokia and Finland is that open source is a way of laying off a lot of new development expenses on people who are not necessarily inside the organization. The brutal truth is that even the largest hardware vendors these days cannot really afford to hire enough software engineers to do all the development of software that they would like to. So, a very sensible way for them to address that problem is open-source the platform and then encourage other people to do that development, either on a volunteer basis or because doing that development achieves business objectives for them.

Q: And at LinuxWorld, you said that we need to make some compromises to do full multimedia capabilities, like running on iPod so that nontechnical users don’t dismiss this out of hand.

A: Right.

Q: What kind of compromises did you mean?

A: I mean that we need to be prepared to go to the rights holders for these proprietary codecs and say, we’ll give you money, give us a license. This is something that the Linux community has a huge antipathy to doing because we’ve got all this idealism about open source. And in the long run, I think that’s true. I view comprising with the proprietary codec vendors as a tactical move designed to get us larger end-user market shares, so that in the end we can push more things to the open.

Q: And meanwhile, you hope to make someone like Apple or other device makers more comfortable with open source?

A: It’s more like we need to gain lots of market share now so that we could put pressure on them more effectively later.

Q: Speaking of which, there have been multiple delays in the introduction of Microsoft’s Vista operating system. It sounds like you’ve got a big window of opportunity there that can’t last forever. How could you best exploit it?

A: That’s right; my friend Rob Landley and I have done an analysis which we’re going to publish very shortly suggesting that there is a critical window of vulnerability for changing the dominant operating system. And that is probably going to close in 2008.

Q: Wow.

A: The reason we think that they will close them is because we’ve looked back at the history of the industry and we’ve seen that basically the only time that a dominant platform gets toppled is when the hardware platform changes out from under it, and the biggest driver of hardware platform changing out from under it is best with the changes. We saw one change, the 8- to 16-bit transition.

Q: Yes.

A: Another at the 16-to-32 bit transition, which was masked a little bit, because in that transition Microsoft succeeded in maintaining its incumbency, but they did it with a different software suite. And then there is a 32-bit to 64-bit transition going on now, which I think is going to be our best window for a long time to achieve majority market share, but the hardware trend curves indicate that the 64-bit transition will probably be over sometime in 2008, and that means that the market’s going to be making its collective decision about the dominant 64-bit operating system probably before that.

Q: And will multimedia be one of the killer apps of a 64-bit desktop world?

A: I think good support for multimedia is. It’s not a sufficient condition for 64-bit desktop dominance; there have to be other pieces in place as well. But I think it’s a necessary condition.

Q:Howimportant is it that you get multimedia apps working before that 2008 deadline?

A: Well, as I said in the panel, whenever I try to pitch Linux to somebody who is under 30 and has grown up with the Internet, the questions I get are things like, Will it work with my iPod? Will it work with iTunes? Will I be able to stream with this media format video? Will I be able, in other words, to use the content that’s out there that’s already published?

Q: How difficult is that currently for the average user to do?

A: Quite difficult; if you are prepared to go to the effort and expend a fair amount of copious work and expertise on it, you can actually then manage to put together most of a full multimedia suite. The problem is, you can't do it legally because most of those codecs have not been licensed for use under Linux. However, as it turns out, here’s one big exception to that. There’s an effort called Linspire you might have heard about. And for complicated reasons, including winning a successful trademark lawsuit against Microsoft, they are the only outfit on the planet that has the ability to distribute a lot of these codecs under Linux completely legally.

Q: Do you see any other companies on the horizon, such as Motorola, doing similar things with Linux?

A:Intel has decided that they are going to open-source the driver code for all of their 3D accelerator graphics adopters.

Q: Tell us more.

A: It’s a big deal because the Intel announcement is going to put tremendous pressure on ATI and nVidia to do more in the direction of open source itself and the question will be, who gets there first.

Q: What opportunities do you see out there for entrepreneurs, for startups, to help bridge the gap that you have identified between the iPod and the desktop or multimedia devices and the desktop?

A: I would just say that I mentioned Linspire before.

Q: Yes.

A: Right, and I will tell you that after I made my comments in that LinuxWorld panel, a few hours later I received an email from the CEO of Linspire, and we had an interesting email conversation. After the World Science Fiction Convention I will be going to... meet the Linspire people and talk with them.

Q: So, you are not at liberty to spill any beans just yet, but there’s an opportunity that Linspire at least is very interested in following up on?

A: I will even go a step forward to say that we are going to explore some possibilities together.

Q: At LinuxWorld you mentioned that proprietary software might be a good thing sometimes.

A: Well it depends on what time scale you are talking about. I have been very consistent since the beginning of my analysis with this sort of thing that I think open-source software comes to mean better outcomes than proprietary software for both producers and consumers. So, I mean in general I think open-source software is better. However, tactical compromises with good proprietary software vendors can increase Linux’ market share.

Q: So that returns us to your first point.

A: It does. It does; what it requires is really so much in change in technical approach, there’s a change in attitude; the community has to really believe that user interface is important, and it has to really believe that certain nontechnical end users who are ignorant and want to remain ignorant, is important.

Q: Great; so those are the technical compromises—the compromises of which you spoke?

A: The specific compromise is the compromise with proprietary software vendors. But, more generally, we need to be willing to take seriously the idea that we are serving the entirety of humanity and not just geeks like ourselves.

Q: Got it. And on that note, how is the Science Fiction Conference, how does it compare to the Linux Conference? It must be a lot of fun.

A: It’s a lot of the same people, actually.

Q: (Laughs)

A: It’s—the amount of overlap between the Linux and Internet hacker subculture and the Science Fiction fandom is extensive. And the fact that it’s extensive is a fact that I am not the first person to notice.

Q: (Laughs) Your fellow Linux advocates discussed broadening the appeal of Linux and moving—trying to get a broader number of people interested. What are your thoughts on that?

A: What I was saying earlier about really deciding on serving nontechnical end users is important. Because, at this point—let’s face it, we basically co-opted the geeks.

Contact the writers: FBhuta@RedHerring.com, SMartin@RedHerring.com, BCaulfield@RedHerring.com

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