Within five years Microsoft will become a fervent supporter of open
source
Nine years ago, when this column first appeared, the internet was
still a novelty as far as business was concerned. Those firms that
had access to an internet account used it principally for e-mail
and accessing Usenet. Just as there was no spam in that Edenic
time, so too, incredibly, there was no Netscape.
Even though it has all but disappeared today, Netscape remains the
iconic company for the golden years of the internet, the one that
produced the key product, its Navigator web browser, first released
in October 1994.
The other astonishing absence was Microsoft. As Netscape became the
defining dotcom, Microsoft was still denying that the internet
would ever catch on. I remember being told in 1995 by a senior
Microsoft executive that the internet was too difficult for
ordinary users and would never emerge from the academic world where
it began.
Microsoft started changing its mind around the time that it
launched Windows 95. Originally, this appeared without a web
browser - despite what the company likes to say about the
"integration" of Internet Explorer with Windows. But Windows 95 did
include TCP/IP functionality from the start. This made it easy to
run the wide range of free internet tools that were available in
the mid-1990s - things bearing names such as Archie, Gopher and
Wais, which seem exotic today but were part of the rich online
ecology of the time.
That richness was later destroyed, but not by the usual villain of
the piece, even though Bill Gates and his team maintained a highly
ambivalent attitude to this strange new online world for some
years. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that alongside Netscape,
Microsoft did more than any other company to make the internet
popular among general users, largely because of the TCP/IP code
included in Windows 95 and Windows NT.
Ironically, the spirit of the early days of the mainstream internet
was lost largely because companies such as Netscape and Microsoft,
websites such as Yahoo and Amazon.com, and perhaps even columns
like Getting Wired, were too successful in convincing people of the
potential of this new medium.
As a result, a self-feeding spiral of investor enthusiasm began
that culminated in utterly absurd valuations being placed on
dotcoms that had surreal business plans, little revenue and not the
slightest hope of ever making a profit.
As greed infected swathes of Western society - from the gullible
small investors to the staggeringly rapacious venture capital
firms, and not forgetting the cynical merchant banks that
facilitated the whole process - the driving force behind the
internet shifted from the anoraks to the suits. The great engine of
internet originality - the reliance on "rough consensus and running
code" to produce the best solution for the community - was
sabotaged by companies driven by their selfish hunger for
"eyeballs".
But the true internet did not die: it simply moved back into the
labs and bedrooms where it had first arisen. For the real internet
revolution was driven not by share options, but by sharing -
specifically, the sharing of free software. I have told the story
of this extraordinary phenomenon in my book,
Rebel Code, which offers a kind of distillation of the hundreds
of Getting Wired columns that have appeared over the past
decade.
Proof of the centrality of that tradition is the fact that
practically every aspect of the internet depends even today on free
software: Bind for the name system, Sendmail for e-mail, Apache for
the web, Perl and PHP for e-commerce and content. The continuing
advance of open source is evident - and not just in terms of the
rising market share for GNU/ Linux and the rest.
The ideas behind free software - and hence those that powered the
heady early days of the internet - are so ineluctable, that even as
powerful a company as Microsoft is being forced to
adopt them. Indeed, I predict that within the next five years
Microsoft will follow in the footsteps of IBM to become a fervent
supporter of open source, and hence the ultimate symbol of the
triumph of the internet spirit.