something else 鈥� the 1991 invention of the World Wide Web. The Web was the 鈥渒iller app鈥� of the Internet, the
graphical user interface technology that made it irresistible to a huge population of non-technical end users.

The mass-marketing of the Internet both increased the pool of potential developers and lowered the transaction
costs of distributed development. The results were reflected in efforts like XFree86, which used the Internet-centric
model to build a more effective development organization than the official X Consortium's. The first XFree86 in
1992 gave Linux and the BSDs the graphical-user-interface engine they had been missing. Over the next decade
XFree86 would lead in X development, and an increasing portion of the X Consortium's activity would come to
consist of funneling innovations originated in the XFree86 community back to the Consortium's industrial sponsors.

By late 1993 Linux had both Internet capability and X. The entire GNU toolkit had been hosted on it from the
beginning, providing high-quality development tools. Beyond GNU tools, Linux acted as an basin of attraction,
collecting and concentrating twenty years of open-source software that had previously been scattered across a dozen
different proprietary Unix platforms. Though the Linux kernel was still officially in beta (at 0.99 level), it was
remarkably crash-free. The breadth and quality of the software in Linux distributions was already that of a
production-ready operating system.

A few of the more flexible-minded among old-school Unix developers began to notice that the long-awaited dream
of a cheap Unix box for everybody had snuck up on them from an unexpected direction. It didn't come from AT&T
or Sun or any of the traditional vendors. Nor did it rise out of an organized effort in academia. It was a bricolage
that bubbled up out of the Internet by what seemed like spontaneous generation, appropriating and recombining
elements of the Unix tradition in surprising ways.

Elsewhere, corporate maneuvering continued. AT&T divested its interest in Sun in 1992; then sold its Unix
Systems Laboratories to Novell in 1993; Novell handed off the Unix trademark to the X/Open standards group in
1994; AT&T and Novell joined OSF in 1994, finally ending the Unix wars. In 1995 SCO bought UnixWare (and
the rights to the original Unix sources) from Novell. In 1996, X/Open and OSF merged, creating one big Unix
standards group.

But the conventional Unix vendors and the wreckage of their wars came to seem steadily less and less relevant. The
action and the energy in the Unix community were shifting to Linux and BSD and open-source developers. By the
time IBM, Intel, and SCO announced the Monterey project in 1998 鈥� a last-gasp attempt to merge One Big System
out of all the proprietary Unixes left standing 鈥� developers and the trade press reacted with amusement, and the
project lasted barely a year.

The industry transition could not be said to have completed until 2000, when SCO sold UnixWare and the original
Unix source-code base to Caldera 鈥� a Linux distributor. But after 1995, the story of Unix became the story of the
open-source movement. There's another side to that story; to tell it, we'll need to return to 1961 and the origins of
the Internet hacker culture.


[7] There is a web FAQ on the PDP computers that explains the otherwise extremely obscure PDP-7's place in
history.

[8] This was when a fast modem was 300 baud.

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Origins and history of the hackers, 1961-1995

The Unix tradition is an implicit culture that has always carried with it more than just a bag
of technical tricks. It transmits a set of values about beauty and good design; it has legends
and folk heroes. Intertwined with the history of the Unix tradition is another implicit culture
that is more difficult to label neatly. It has its own values and legends and folk heroes, partly
overlapping with those of the Unix tradition and partly derived from other sources. It has
most often been called the 鈥渉acker culture鈥�, and since 1998 has largely coincided with what
the computer trade press calls 鈥渢he open source movement鈥�.

The relationships between the Unix tradition, the hacker culture, and the open-source
movement are subtle and complex. They are not simplified by the fact that all three implicit
cultures have frequently been expressed in the behaviors of the same human beings. But
since 1990 the story of Unix is largely the story of how the open-source hackers changed the
rules and seized the initiative from the old-line proprietary Unix vendors. Therefore, the
other half of the history behind today's Unix is the history of the hackers.

At play in the groves of academe: 1961-1980

The roots of the hacker culture can be traced back to 1961, the year MIT took delivery of its
first PDP-1 minicomputer. The PDP-1 was one of the earliest interactive computers, and
unlike other machines of the day was inexpensive enough that time on it did not have to be
rigidly scheduled. It attracted a group of curious students from the Tech Model Railroad
Club who experimented with it in a spirit of fun. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer
Revolution [Levy] entertainingly describes the early days of the club. Their most famous
achievement was SPACEWAR, a game of dueling rocketships loosely inspired by the
Lensman space operas of E.E. 鈥淒oc鈥� Smith.

Several of the TMRC experimenters later went on to become core members of the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Lab, which in the 1960s and 1970s became one of the world centers of
cutting-edge computer science. They took some of TMRC's slang and in-jokes with them,
including a tradition of elaborate (but harmless) pranks called 鈥渉acks鈥�. The AI Lab
programmers appear to have been the first to describe themselves as 鈥渉ackers鈥�.

After 1969 the AI lab was connected, via the early ARPANET, to other leading computer
science research laboratories at Stanford, Bolt Beranek & Newman, Carnegie-Mellon
University and elsewhere. Researchers and students got the first foretaste of the way fast
network access abolishes geography, often making it easier to collaborate and form
friendships with distant people on the net than it would be to do likewise with the closer-by
but less connected.

Software, ideas, slang, and a good deal of humor flowed over the experimental ARPANET
links. Something like a shared culture began to form. One of its earliest and most enduring
artifacts was the Jargon File, a list of shared slang terms that originated at Stanford in 1973
and went through several revisions at MIT after 1976. Along the way it accumulated slang
from CMU, Yale, and other ARPANET sites.

Technically, the early hacker culture was largely hosted on PDP-10 minicomputers. They
used a variety of operating systems that have since passed into history: TOPS-10, TOPS-20,
MULTICS, ITS, SAIL. They programmed in assembler and dialects of Lisp. They took over
running the ARPANET itself because nobody else wanted the job. Later, they became the
founding cadre of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and originated the tradition of
standardization through Requests For Comment (RFCs).

Socially, they were young, exceptionally bright, almost entirely male, dedicated to
programming to the point of addiction, and tended to have streaks of stubborn
nonconformism 鈥� what years later would be called 鈥榞eeks鈥�. They, too, tended to be shaggy
hippies and hippie-wannabes. They, too, had a vision of computers as community-building
devices. They read Robert Heinlein and J.R.R. Tolkien, played in the Society for Creative
Anachronism, and tended to have a weakness for puns. Despite their quirks (or perhaps
because of them!) many of them were among the brightest programmers in the world.

They were not Unix programmers. The early Unix community was drawn largely from the
same pool of geeks in academia and government or commercial research laboratories, but the
two cultures differed in important ways. One that we've already touched on is the weak
networking of early Unix. There was effectively no Unix-based ARPANET access until after
1980, and it was uncommon for any individual to have a foot in both camps.

Collaborative development and the sharing of source code was a valued tactic for Unix
programmers. To the early ARPANET hackers, on the other hand, it was more than a tactic
鈥� it was something rather closer to a shared religion, partly arising from the academic
鈥減ublish or perish鈥� imperative and (in its more extreme versions) developing into an almost
Chardinist idealism about networked communities of minds. The most famous of these

hackers, Richard M. Stallman, became the ascetic saint of that religion.

Internet fusion and the Free Software Movement: 1981-1991

After 1983 and the BSD port of TCP/IP, the Unix and ARPANET cultures began to fuse
together. This was a natural development once the communication links were in place, since
both cultures were composed of the same kind of people (indeed, in a few but significant
cases the same people). ARPANET hackers learned C and began to speak the jargon of
pipes, filters and shells; Unix programmers learned TCP/IP and started to call each other
鈥渉ackers鈥�. The process of fusion was accelerated after the Project Jupiter cancellation in
1983 killed the PDP-10's future. By 1987 the two cultures had merged so completely that
most hackers programmed in C and casually used slang terms that went back to the Tech
Model Railroad Club of twenty-five years earlier.



In 1979 the fact that I had strong ties to both the Unix and ARPANET
cultures made me pretty unusual. In 1985 that wasn't unusual any more.
By the time I expanded the old ARPANET Jargon File into the New
Hacker's Dictionary [Raymond91] in 1991, the merger was done. The
Jargon File, born on the ARPANET but revised on Usenet, simply
reflected this.



--Eric S. Raymond





But TCP/IP networking and slang were not the only things the post-1980 hacker culture
inherited from its ARPANET roots. It also got Richard Stallman, and Stallman's moral
crusade.

Richard M. Stallman (generally known by his login name, RMS) had already proved he was
one of the most able programmers alive by the late 1970s at the MIT AI Lab. Among his
many inventions was the Emacs editor. For RMS, the Jupiter cancellation in 1983 only
finished a breakup of the AI Lab culture that had begun years earlier as many of its best went
off to help run competing Lisp-machine companies. RMS felt ejected from a hacker Eden,
and decided that proprietary software was to blame.

In 1983 Stallman founded the GNU project, aimed at writing an entire free operating system.
Though Stallman was not and had never been a Unix programmer, under post-1980
conditions implementing a Unix-like operating system became the obvious strategy to
pursue. Most of RMS's early contributors were old-time ARPANET hackers newly decanted

into Unix-land, in whom the ethos of code-sharing ran rather stronger than it did among
those with a more Unix-centered background.

In 1985, RMS published the GNU Manifesto. In it he consciously created an ideology out of
the values of the pre-1980 ARPANET hackers 鈥� complete with a novel ethico-political
claim, a self-contained and characteristic discourse, and an activist plan for change. RMS
aimed to knit the diffuse post-1980 community of hackers into a coherent social machine for
achieving a single revolutionary purpose. His behavior and rhetoric half-consciously echoed
Karl Marx's attempts to mobilize the industrial proletariat against the alienation of their
work.

RMS's manifesto ignited a debate that is still live in the hacker culture today 鈥� because its
program went way beyond maintaining a codebase, and essentially implied the abolition of
intellectual-property rights in software. In pursuit of this goal, RMS popularized the term
鈥渇ree software鈥�, which was the first attempt to label the product of the entire hacker culture.
He wrote the General Public License (GPL), which was to become both a rallying point and
a focus of great controversy, for reasons we will examine in Chapter 14 (Re-Use). The reader
can learn more about RMS's position and the Free Software Foundation at the GNU website.

The term 鈥渇ree software鈥�; was partly a description and partly an attempt to define a cultural
identity for hackers. On one level, it was quite successful. Before RMS, people in the hacker
culture recognized each other as fellow-travellers and used the same slang, but nobody
bothered arguing about what a 鈥榟acker鈥� is or should be. After him, the hacker culture became
much more self-conscious; value disputes (often framed in RMS's language even by those
who opposed his conclusions) became a normal feature of debate. RMS, a charismatic and
polarizing figure, himself became so much a culture hero that by the year 2000 he could
hardly be distinguished from his legend. Free As In Freedom [Williams] gives us an
excellent portrait.

RMS's arguments influenced the behavior even of many hackers who remained skeptical of
his theories. In 1987, he persuaded the caretakers of BSD Unix that cleaning out AT&T's
proprietary code so they could release an unencumbered version would be a good idea.
However, despite his determined efforts over more than fifteen years, the post-1980 hacker
culture never unified around his ideological vision.

Other hackers were rediscovering open, collaborative development without secrets for more
pragmatic, less ideological reasons. A few buildings away from Richard Stallman's 9th-floor
office at MIT, the X development team thrived during the late 1980s. It was funded by Unix

vendors who had argued each other to a draw over the control and intellectual-property-
rights issues surrounding X windows, and saw no better alternative than to leave it free to
everyone. In 1987-1988 the X development prefigured the really huge distributed
communities that would redefine the leading edge of Unix five years later.



X was one of the first large-scale open-source projects to be developed by
a disparate team of individuals working for different organizations spread
across the globe. E-mail allowed ideas to move rapidly among the group
so that issues could be resolved as quickly as necessary, and each
individual could contribute in whatever capacity suited them best.
Software updates could be distributed in a matter of hours, enabling every
site to act in a concerted manner during development. The net changed the
way software could be developed.



--Keith Packard





The X developers were no partisans of the GNU master plan, but they weren't actively
opposed to it, either. Before 1995 the most serious opposition to the GNU plan came from
the BSD developers. The BSD people, who remembered that they had been writing freely
redistributable and modifiable software under the BSD license years before RMS's
manifesto, rejected GNU's claim to historical and ideological primacy. They specifically
objected to the infectious or 鈥渧iral鈥� property of the GPL, holding out the BSD license as
being 鈥渕ore free鈥� because it placed fewer restrictions on the re-use of code.

It did not help RMS's case that, although his Free Software Foundation had produced most of
the rest of a full software toolkit, it failed to deliver the central piece. Ten years after the
founding of the GNU project, there was still no GNU kernel. While individual tools like
Emacs and GCC proved tremendously useful, GNU without a kernel neither threatened the
hegemony of proprietary Unixes nor offered an effective counter to the rising problem of the
Microsoft monopoly.

After 1995 the debate over RMS's ideology took a somewhat different turn. Opposition to it
became closely associated with both Linus Torvalds and the author of this book.

Linux and the pragmatist reaction: 1991-1998

Even as the HURD effort was stalling, new possibilities were opening up. In the early 1990s
the combination of cheap, powerful PCs with easy Internet access proved a powerful lure for
a new generation of young programmers looking for challenges to test their mettle. The user-

space toolkit written by the Free Software Foundation suggested a way forward that was free
of the high cost of proprietary software development tools. Ideology followed economics
rather than leading the charge; some of the newbies signed up with RMS's crusade and
adopted the GPL as their banner and others identified more with the Unix tradition as a
whole and joined the anti-GPL camp, but most dismissed the whole dispute as a distraction.

Linus Torvalds neatly straddled the GPL/anti-GPL divide by using the GNU toolkit to
surround the Linux kernel he had invented and the GPL's infectious properties to protect it,
but rejecting the ideological program that went with RMS's license. Torvalds affirmed that
he thought free software better in general but occasionally used proprietary programs. His
refusal to be a zealot even in his own cause made him tremendously attractive to the majority
of hackers who had been silently uncomfortable with RMS's rhetoric, but had lacked any
focus or convincing spokesperson for their skepticism.

Torvalds's cheerful pragmatism and adept but low-key style catalyzed an astonishing string
of victories for the hacker culture in the years 1993-1997, including not merely technical
successes but the solid beginnings of a distribution, service and support industry around the
Linux operating system. As a result his prestige and influence skyrocketed. Torvalds became
a hero on Internet time; by 1995, he had achieved in just four years the kind of culture-wide
eminence that RMS had required fifteen years to earn 鈥� and far exceeded Stallman's record
at selling 鈥渇ree software鈥� to the outside world. By contrast with Torvalds, RMS's rhetoric
began to seem both strident and unsuccessful.

Between 1991 and 1995 Linux went from a proof-of-concept surrounding an 0.1 prototype
kernel to an operating system that could compete on features and performance with
proprietary Unixes, and beat most of them on important statistics like continuous uptime. In
1995, Linux found its killer app; Apache, the open-source webserver. Like Linux, Apache
proved remarkably stable and efficient. Linux boxes running Apache quickly became the
platform of choice for ISPs worldwide, capturing about 60% of websites[9] and handily
beating both of its major proprietary competitors.

The one thing Torvalds did not offer was a new ideology 鈥� a new rationale or generative
myth of hacking, and a positive discourse to replace RMS's hostility to intellectual property
with a program more attractive to people both within and outside the hacker culture.

The author of this book inadvertently supplied this lack in 1997 as a result of trying to
understand why Linux's development had not collapsed in confusion years before. The
technical conclusions of the author's papers [Raymond01] will be summarized in Chapter 17

(Open Source). For this historical sketch, it will be sufficient to note the impact of the paper's
central formula: 鈥淕iven a sufficiently large number of eyeballs, all bugs are shallow鈥�.

This observation implied something nobody in the hacker culture had dared to really believe
in the preceding quarter-century: that its methods could reliably produce software that was
not just more elegant but more reliable and better than our proprietary competitors' code.
This consequence, quite unexpectedly, turned out to present exactly the direct challenge to
the discourse of 鈥渇ree software鈥� that Torvalds himself had never been interested in mounting.
For most hackers and almost all non-hackers, 鈥淔ree software because it works better鈥� easily
trumped 鈥淔ree software because all software should be free鈥�.

The paper's contrast between 鈥榗athedral鈥� (centralized, closed, controlled, secretive) and
鈥榖azaar鈥� (decentralized, open, peer-review-intensive) modes of development became a
central metaphor in the new thinking. In an important sense this was merely a return to
Unix's pre-divestiture roots 鈥� one could view it as McIlroy's 1991 observations about the
positive effects of peer pressure on Unix development in the early 1970s and Dennis
Ritchie's 1979 reflections on fellowship cross-fertilizing with the early ARPANET's
academic tradition of peer review, and with its idealism about distributed communities of
mind.

In early 1998, the new thinking helped motivate Netscape Communications to release the
source code of its Mozilla web browser. The press attention surrounding that event took
Linux to Wall Street, helped drive the technology-stock boom of 1999-2001, and proved to
be a turning point in both the history of the hacker culture and of Unix.


[9] Current and historical webserver share figures are available at the monthly Netcraft Web
Server Survey.

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The open-source movement: 1998 and
onward.

By the time of the Mozilla release in 1998, the hacker community could best be analyzed as
a loose collection of factions or tribes that included Richard Stallman's Free Software
Movement, the Linux community, the Perl community, the Apache community, the BSD
community, the X developers, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and at least a
dozen others. These factions overlap, and an individual developer would be quite likely to be
affiliated with two or more.

A tribe might be grouped around a particular codebase that they maintain, or around one or
more charismatic influence leaders, or around a language or development tool, or around a
particular software license, or around a technical standard, or around a caretaker organization
for some part of the infrastructure. Prestige tends to correlate with longevity and historical
contribution as well as more obvious drivers like current market- and mind-share; thus,
perhaps the most universally respected of the tribes is the IETF, which can claim continuity
back to the beginnings of the ARPANET in 1969. The BSD community, with continuous
traditions back to the late 1970s, commands considerable prestige despite having a much
lower installation count than Linux. Stallman's Free Software Movement, dating back to to
the early 1980s, ranks among the senior tribes both on historical contribution and as the
maintainer of several of the software tools in heaviest day-to-day use.

After 1995 Linux acquired a special role as both the unifying platform for most of the
community's other software and the hackers' most publicly recognizable brand name. The
Linux community showed a corresponding tendency to absorb other sub-tribes 鈥� and, for
that matter, to co-opt and absorb the hacker factions associated with proprietary Unixes. The
hacker culture as a whole began to draw together around a common mission 鈥� push Linux
and the bazaar development model as far as it could go.

Because the post-1980 hacker culture had become so deeply rooted in Unix, the new mission
was implicitly a brief for the triumph of the Unix tradition. Many of the hacker community's
senior leaders were also Unix old-timers, still bearing scars from the post-divestiture civil
wars of the 1980s and getting behind Linux as the last, best hope to fulfil the rebel dreams of
the early Unix days.