Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 21:21:58 -0700
From: Elizabeth Coolbaugh <cool@rdnzl.eklektix.com>
To: Linux Weekly News <lwn@rdnzl.eklektix.com>
Subject: Panel Notes

Last Minute panel, moderated by Eric Raymond

Originally Eric Raymond was scheduled to talk.  From the original
blurb, I didn't remember it being a panel, but apparently either it
was a panel or it became a panel.  Because they added Linus as a guest
speaker, they had to move the talk into the Main Hall at the last
minute.  The staff was cheerful, but definitely stressed about the
last
minute change.

Everything is pretty minimal compared to yesterday.  Only half the
hall is open and only three primary screens are up instead of five or
six.  The stage is fairly bare, with four chairs and the actual
podium.  I skipped the TurboLinux talk for this and Donald Becker's
Beowulf talk is now as well.  I hope these other scheduled talks don't
suffer too much fro the schedule change.  [I later learned that
Donald's talk, at least, was cut short as a result.  Presumably the
exhibitors weren't too happy about the outflux of people as well.]
This room is filling up.  certainly a lot of people have changed their
minds and come.

Before the talk, I was sitting at a table with Dennis, Evan
Leibovitch, Jon and a couple of progammers, one from Loki and one from
Activision.  Linus walked by, on his way from one place or another,
without being stopped or disturbed.  Later, when this talk was
announced, the lines for the talk ended up stretching the length of
the conference center and more.

Okay, the panel members, or at lest some of them, hae come out.
Eric is the moderator, Linus is present, Guido von Rossum is here and
Larry Wall.  Richard Stallman came in just after Eric started his
introduction.

[from here to the end, it is written like a transcription.  However,
it is *not* verbatim, I can't type that fast!  Deviation from what
the speaker said is definitely possible.  Gaps will be present.
An audiotape was made if you want every juicy detail.  Also remember
that "Audience" refers to the person at the mike, so it varies who is
actually speaking ...]

Eric: I wanted to set up a friendly panel session and they turned it
into a rock session.  I give you Larry Wall, Mr. Perl, Richard
Stallman, Mr. Free Software, Guido van Rossum, Mr. Python [ed. he had
a toy python on his lap], Linus, Mr. Linux, and myself, a person of
no consequence whatsoever.

This panel is about "Continuing the Revolution".

We know where we are, at our first real trade show.  The most surreal
thing I've seen is the IBM logo, nine times the size of God, right
next to "Building the Linux community".  We know where we want to be,
in a world of open source software, available to us, doing what people
need and doing it well.  What can we do in the next nine months?  Each
of the panelists will have three minutes to address the topic and
then we'll open the discussion between the panelists, ending with
questions from the audience.  Larry, would you start?

Larry Wall:  I have two basic things to say.  I think the open source
movement has done a lot of good things.  It is getting some good press
here, I think.  Where we are falling down is getting into the
educational system.  They seem to be suckers for anything that is
free, unless it actually free.  [ed.  yes, that is what he said.
Think about it.]  I view the open source movement as the
culmination of the post modern movement.  We need to recognize our
differences, but the ways in which we can cooperate are more
powerful.  We like to fight and the press likes to watch us fight, but
what we have in common is more important.
        
        Eric:  I want to get what each of you need from the other
        tribes.

Richard Stallman: When I founded the free software movement, I wanted
to give people the freedom to cooperate as members of the community.
With commercial operating systems, you don't have the freedom to
cooperate.  A trade show is dedicated to this ideal.  Yet, you can see
someone present a talk on how their commercial software cooperates
with that free system.  Nowadays, the system is so attractive for
technical reasons that people are using it for reasons that have
nothing to do with freedom.  It isn't getting talked about.  That
makes our community broad and shallow.  It doesn't have the commitment
to do the work that remains.  You can get the GNU operating system but
it runs on *most* software but not *all*.  I live without all this
non-free software, but some people say they can't.  All the
distributions have some non-free software.  What I need from the other
groups is for them to be talking about freedom now, because if we want
a free world, we have to talk about freedom now.  Don't think about
domination, think about freedom, it doesn't dominate.

Eric:  Guido, would you like to go next?

Guido: I don't think of myself as a revolutionary, I am more of an
evolutionist.  I can learn from the Linux community.  In response to
Larry Wall's comments, I have put together a proposal for teaching
Python in the schools.  I would be very excited to prepare materials
to teach this free language to people.  If people know more about how
the computer can work, if they know how to program, it can lead to
some of the freedom that people say they want.

Eric:  Linus?

Linus:  I have to admit that I disagree with the notion of this panel.
I have a problem with a revolution in that if you have a revolution,
then afterwards you become the establishment.  We should not try to
dominate.  There is a value to having open source and commercial
software.  I choose to live this way, but I don't need to force my way
of life onto other people. I'm happy with the way is turning out.  I
explain why I use the GPL, but I enjoy working at a commercial company
and the work that pays my mortgage and feeds my kids and it is
producing a commercial product that is proprietary.

Eric:  Is this implying that you'd like to see more cooperation
between corporations and Linux?

Linus: Not exactly.  In response to "coming out party" and "sweet 16" that
I heard yesterday, the first thought that crossed my mind was, but then
will we still be virginal tomorrow? [ed. if there is too much cooperation.]
It is important to bring up the issues of freedom and open source so that
people can make an informed choice.  It is very easy for commercial people
to spend a lot of money to get *their* issues across.

Eric:  What do you want to see in a year?

Linus:  Ask someone else for a while.


Eric:  So we have two people interested in Linux in education, one in
freedom and one determined to be very neutral.

Audience:  What do you want, Eric?

Eric:  I want to live in a world where software doesn't suck.

Richard:  Any software that isn't free sucks.

Linus:  I'm interested in free beer.

Richard:  That's okay, as long as I don't have to drink it.  I don't
like beer.

Eric:  Okay, let's open it to questions from the audience.  Maybe they
can get you guys to say something interesting.

Audience: What do you think about the influence of free software when
you put it into the K12 level?  Might it not introduce ideas that
would percolate up and impact the entire society?  [ed.  complete
paraphrase ... not sure about original phrasing.]

Eric:  Okay, but focus on what we can do for the next year.

Richard:  I think that free software ideas should apply to all
knowledge, including texts.  When you can get them into the schools,
it will help with ethics, character building.  I was taught to share
at school.  If you bring in software, you must share it.

Eric:  Okay, let's try to ground it.  What are you going to do to try
and make this happen over the next year.

Richard:  I would like to see us work on software needed by teachers,
for teaching math or whatever.  There is a ScholarNet project in
Mexico to get a million computers in school.  We are not poorer than
Mexico; we should be able to do that and more.

Larry: I have a problem with that suggestion.  I have four kids in
schools.  The problem is that teachers know less about it than the
kids do.  If the computers are introduced into the schools, it is
going to have to be from the student end, not the teacher end, a
bottom
up subversive thing which we are all used to. I'd like to suggest
that. My child's junior high is already better wired than the high
school.

Eric:  What can we do?

Jay Sulzberger, not on the panel, the gentleman from New York who won
the IDG Linus Torvalds award last night for putting Linux into New
York schools, stood up and started to talk about the "Microsoft
Swindle", the actions of Microsoft where they offer substantial
discounts or free software in order to get a monopoly on school
operating systems.  Eric interrupted him and it went back
and forth a couple of times before he was allowed to speak.

Jay: Say no to allowing Microsoft to force their operating system in
schools.

Audience:  We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more.

Jay:  This cuts across the issues.  It is not okay to allow Gates to
*bribe* schools to get Microsoft into the schools.  

Eric:  Jay, I never said I didn't love you.  This shows that we need
grass roots activists to go to the schools, help them get Linux
installed.

Larry:  In another month, all Gates software will be declared open
source anyway.  (can you say essential services doctrine?)

Guido:  At which point the only issue will be whether or not it sucks.

Audience:  Richard, how do you feel about support?

Richard:  I'm in favor of it.  I'm not anti-business, I'm
anti-some-businesses.  A parallel might be the effort to prevent
business that make paper from  dumping poisons into the river.
Efforts to stop them weren't anti-business or even anti- the paper
industry.  I'm against companies that poison good will. 

Audience:  For Richard, if someone were to do a Linux distribution
based on the Berkeley kernel and C library, would you be against it?  

Richard:  I'm in favor of it; it would be BSD/GNU.

Audience:  And Linus, what would you think of it?

Linus:  I've always been fairly open to whatever is done in user space
because I really don't care.  I think that is fairly common, that you
have your own area of specialty.

Richard:  I think that if you put everything from Linux except the
kernel together with the BSD kernel, you have the combination of what
you started with.  [ed.  I may have missed too much of this paragraph
to be useful ...]

Audience: Larry, I didn't understand your T-shirt, the one that you
are wearing.  Could you explain?

Larry:  It is from the last hackers conference.  It spells hackers on
the back and silicon is the fourteenth element. [ed.  Very geeky
T-shirt
:-).  I approve]

Larry:  I think Tom is working on a Perl/Linux.

Audience:  I think it is more important what we do with what we have
rather than how we get it. [ed.  more and more opinion ... Eric asked
him if he had an opinion rather than a monologue.  He said he was
getting to that.  When he got to it, his question was, "Do you
agree".  The audience groaned.  It was hard to pick up the thread,
but we moved back to the issue of working with companies or not.]

Larry:  I'm a post modernist, I agree with everybody.

Linus:  I disagree with the whole statement where you pit these people
against each other.  IBM is out to make money, I'm out to make money.
Getting into whether or not you are proprietary is a waste of time.
These are personal issues.  

Richard:  You are misrepresenting this.  Proprietary software is based
on government enforcement.

Audience: We are getting locked out of areas because of software
patents.  We are locked out of specific areas for the next twenty
years.
What are we going to do about it?  I like this trade shows, but the
strenght of free software is its ability to help people, like the kids 
in Mexico, not that it can help corporate America make money.
What can we do with trade shows so that they help people as well,
rather than just help corporations?

Richard:  What we need is a change in patent law.  Three years ago, 
congress passed a law that doctors aren't restricted by patent
infringements in surgery.  Let's get a change to the law that prevents
patent infringements when working with computer software.  If we
retain consciousness about these issues, we'll have millions of people
to direct towards their Congressmen to get the law changed.

Eric:  Are you suggesting we work with commercial vendors to do this?

Richard:  That is one suggestion.  As a second suggestion, we ...
[ed.  yes, I got behind.  I believe the second suggestion was again to 
promote the awareness of the issues of free software, convert people,
etc., as described above.]

Linus:  I agree that the patents as they stand now are a real problem.
Something should be done to make changes to the laws, either making
software patents a non-issue by not granting them or making them
unenforceable.  I don't know how to do that in the next nine months.
Start writing your letters now and if they get enough, maybe they
won't think you're a crackpot.  We need a level-headed person to
be an advocate for this.

Eric: Bruce [to Bruce Perens in the audience], do you want to be the
advocate for that?

Bruce:  I'm not a level-headed person, but I don't mind getting up and
talking about it.  Have someone else run the office, though.

Eric: Personally, I don't often talk about social good because when I
hear other people talk about social good, that's when I reach for my
revolver.  When I hear social good, I expect the next words to be
"give me your wallet".  I think the best way is the indirect way, talk
to corporations, make people powerful with free software, inculcate
ideas and that will do the most social good.

Richard:  Bruce didn't say that there was a conflict between business
and social good.  Working with companies is an opportunity, yes, but
we have to be careful about what we want to work with them on.
Business is not the be-all and end-all.  We need to recognize what is
help and what is really not.  See the difference between IBM who is
really contributing, and others who are pushing proprietary offerings,
not contributing.

Eric:  Then let's be specific.  What can we do?

Linus: Being ethical is kind of corrupting.  Get the idea across and
get people thinking about it and suddenly they will convert to it.
Look at what has happened in the last year, the whole issue of free
software wasn't being talked about in the media.  A year later, the
concept of open source has gone from something really strange to
something where journalists now say, "Oh, well, but that's obvious".
That's really nice, because you don't get into an argument.  You show
them the better way and they will follow.

Larry: Business understands the idea of giving something to our kids
for posterity, but the reason that I thought of education in the first
place in that I think of it as metaphor for the third world.  I think
there are a billion potential perl programmers in China.  Now they can
use their ideographs for variables.  That's what I do to "dominate"
China.  I don't know if we can argue to businesses that giving
something to our children is the same thing as giving to the third
world.  Shall we bypass business and give directly to the third world?

Richard:  It is happening already.  Help it out and give your old
computers to the third world.

Eric:  There is a concrete suggestion. Take your old computers and
give them away instead of recycling them, but slip Linux on them in
the process.

Richard:  I have to disagree (I'm the most disagreeable person you'll
ever meet).  We have farther to go with media coverage to get the help
we need to cover our needs.

Audience: I used to be in marketing and Linux saved my sorry ass, so
thank you.  For someone walking into CompUSA, there isn't a visible
Linux presence.  An average person can't get Linux unless they have a
geeky friend to install it for them.  Perhaps we should look at this.
Can we eat up the information on the Windows disk to make Linux
friendly for the end user? 

Eric:  What you can do in the next nine months to make Linux more
friendly for the end-user?

Richard: GNOME 1.0, which was announced today.  Contribute to that,
there is still more to be done.  Computers shouldn't just be for
hackers, it should be for everyone.  Are you suggesting that there
should be something in Linux to read what is under Windows to make
Linux analogous? 

Larry:  Similar to my awk to perl translater 

Audience:  The only way to succeed is to be better.

Eric?  Okay, but what is the plan?

Linus:  Do we need to do that much?

Audience:  What do we have to do till my mother prefers to use Linux?

Audience reponse:  nine months

Linus: It is a basic fact of life that people are afraid of computers.
That is going away, but people don't like to do installations, it is
like doing brain surgery on yourself.  Either install it for them or
buy from a vendor that pre-installs.  That's happening.  We need the
office suites, plus KDE or GNOME.  The technical side, we don't need
to worry about.  We need to make sure the box is ready to use right
out of the box.

Eric:  Support your pre-installers.

Richard:  But check to see which ones will only install free software
and support those.

Larry: If we want something nice to get born in nine months, then sex
has to happen.  We want to have the kind of sex that is acceptable and
fun for both people, not the kind where someone is getting screwed.
Let's get some cross fertilization, but not someone getting screwed.

Eric:  One last question.

Audience: I've made an observation that Richard's goals come from him
wanting good software.  [ed.  Richard disagreed, the speaker gave an
example of what he meant] You mention about software not working
right.  Good software comes from free software.  Guido and Larry hvve
done this.  Linus has done this.  Some people have a problem with
this.  Let's work with them on hybrid solutions to get better software
created, which will require open source.  Convince them that it won't
hurt them to give away their ideas.

Richard:  I'm not just here to complain [Eric: he's done lots of
software, folks], but because we've shown how much we can do, we don't
have to be desperate to work with companies or compromise our goals.
Let them offer and we'll accept.  We don't have to change what we're
doing to get them to help us.

You can take a single step towards a goal, then another and then
more and more and you'll actually reach your goal.

Or, you can take a half measure that means you don't ever take another
step and you'll never get there.


Eric:  Since there are a lot of non-techies here, maybe this needs to
be said, if it weren't for Richard Stallman, none of us would be here
today.  [Applause, standing ovation]  I've been teasng Richard a lot,
so I thought I should say that.

I've been told to tell you that IBM has a 32 processor
supercomputer running open source software.  Sounds impressive.

Richard:  The open source booth is also at the back, with a football
game and a ...

[The end]