The Computer Industry's Best Kept Secret
by Tim O'Reilly05/01/1998
In April I hosted a meeting of leading free-software developers from the Silicon Valley area. Some of the luminaries participating in what the media has called the "freeware summit" or the "open source summit" included Linus Torvalds (Linux), Larry Wall (Perl), Brian Behlendorf and Sameer Parekh (Apache), John Ousterhout (tcl), Guido van Rossum (python), Eric Allman (sendmail), and Paul Vixie (Bind), and Tom Paquin and Jamie Zawinski of Netscape's free Mozilla project.
The point of the meeting was to start exploring what all of these projects have in common. How is it that many of the most significant innovations in the computer industry are being developed not by big companies or even by venture-funded startups, but by a loose confederation of people who freely share their source code?
The meeting was a first step both in understanding what makes open source software projects successful and in changing the idea that free and open source software are the province of some hacker fringe and not suitable for use in corporate America. In fact, if you look around, you see that free software is the most mission critical software on the Internet. Without Bind, you'd be typing IP addresses instead of domain names. Virtually every email message sent on the Internet is routed by a sendmail server. Over half of the world's web sites run on Apache. Perl is widely used for CGI programming and for site management. And in increasing numbers, web developers use Linux or FreeBSD as their operating system base.
Of course, this is not to say that free software is the only software worth using. As you look through this site and our product index, you'll also see exciting new titles for commercial products including Java, Windows 95 and Windows NT, Photoshop, Director, Oracle, and the PalmPilot.
The point is that, at O'Reilly, we pay attention to the technologies that people really use rather than just the ones that get the most press coverage. And whether we're writing about stopping spam, managing a heterogenous network of Linux and NT machines, or getting the most out of AOL or Windows 95, we cut through the hype and give you information you can really put to use.
Other articles about Open Source software include:
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar --by Eric Raymond
- Freeware: The Heart & Soul of the Internet --by Tim O'Reilly
- Open Source Software--The Real Grassroots Movement!
