An Interview with John Markoff
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Koman: So you think it's sort of required that there was this activist, make the world better, culture?
Markoff: Well, the hacker culture in general. I think Fred Moore should be the patron saint of the open source movement. That really was what he was all about. He was just dialed a little bit more towards the activist side. The "information should be free" sense of sharing has always been part of the hacker culture. Going all the way back to MIT where software was merely something you used to animate the machine and the culture of sharing was expressed by the fact that the software was stored on paper tapes and shared by putting them in a particular drawer, where anybody could have access to them.
Koman: So you did bring up Gates' infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists. This really encapsulates the split between the proprietary and open source approaches.
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? ...Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3 man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one but us has invested a lot of money in hobby software ... Most directly, the thing you do is theft. ... Bill Gates, General Partner, Microsoft
Markoff: The stake in the ground that I used to end my book was the incident that got Bill to write that letter. I thought that I was going to be able to figure out who stole the tape with Altair BASIC because both Manes and Levy had written about the theft of Altaire BASIC in June 1975 and they both fingered Steve Dompier as the person who did it. So I went up to Montana to talk to Dompier and he's got an alibi.
Dompier said it wasn't him. He had been beta-testing Altair BASIC and Gates had given him a copy, and he actually took me out to his bus and showed me the signed copy of the tape of Altair BASIC and he was keeping a kind of low profile because he had a copy.
Dan Sokel told both Manes and Levy that it was Dompier. I don't know if Dan is telling the truth or not. Sokel, who was a semiconductor-engineering manager for a technology firm in Silicon Valley got a copy of the tape and he made 70 copies and handed them out the next week at Homebrew on the grounds that if you got a copy you made a copy for a friend. Because that was the culture of Homebrew--sharing.
And, it's funny, it took a half year for Gates to find out about this. Things didn't move with the speed they do now. But he wrote that letter I believe in February of '76, calling the hobbyists pirates, keeping him from creating a business.
Koman: And the reaction to that was?
Markoff: Oh, the hobbyists were outraged because they thought he was charging usurious amounts for software that should be inexpensively or freely available. It was at that moment that the split between those two worlds came into clear focus.
Koman: It seems like the hacker ideal went into remission in the great companies of the '70s and '80s and came back--I mean besides Stallman being a constant there--it didn't really come back until the explosion of Linux, right?
Markoff: Yeah, it's kind of interesting where ... you know, why did it go into remission? That's kind of interesting because there was Tiny BASIC around and it had a community of people supporting it. It was totally the open source model and I guess there was no ... I should ask Dennis Allison (creator of Tiny BASIC) about that. I don't have a clear sense of why the Tiny BASIC community died out in the face of Microsoft BASIC. But it's an interesting question. Maybe if the Tiny BASIC people had continued, kind of Stallman-like, to compete against Microsoft the world would have been very different. But that's not what happened. Maybe it's that Gates was successful in bundling and that BASIC came with all the machines.
Koman: This idea of activism and improving the world with technology which is a very sort of '60s idea ... so we have the 1984 ad, we have Think Different. To what degree do these billion-dollar companies continue to tap into the legend of personal computing as a radical act?
Markoff: Yeah, just yesterday I interviewed Steve Jobs and I was asking him what they were going to do with podcasts and if they were going to charge for podcasts and Steve was very adamant on the fact that Apple was going to do it differently, that they were creating ecosystems and they were going to take their slice on the hardware, selling iPods, and that they were not going to try to take a slice of revenue from the content. He said, "We think different."
Jobs in particular is very attached to the counterculture. If you read his Stanford commencement speech--the whole bottom third of it is about the impact the Whole Earth Catalog had on him. He still takes these things pretty seriously, very seriously in fact.
And you know, Apple's done a fair amount to support open source development. They put some of their key technologies in the open source community. Clearly it's to their advantage. There's this virtuous circle that companies like Apple and IBM and Sun are trying to tap into. And you're right, it's the legacy of the '60s, which has otherwise vanished from the face of the earth.
But you do have this sharing economy that has emerged largely because of the internet; the existence of the network makes it so easy to share digital information. And now you're getting these architectures that really enhance cooperation.
You're seeing things like My Web 2.0 and every other example of user-generated content structures that I think ... that sphere is expanding very rapidly and it will have more and more influence and compete directly with the proprietary sphere.
