Showing posts with label brian behlendorf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brian behlendorf. Show all posts

03 March 2009

CollabNet Comes Out of the Shadows

CollabNet has a fascinating history that goes back to 1999, when Collab.Net launched SourceXchange:


a site where companies can post proposals for programming work and solicit bids from open source coders. It is intended to form the first of a series of projects exploring new business models based on open source, and which collectively make up Collab.Net. A list of those involved reads like a roll call of the leading players in the open source industry. Employees include Frank Hecker, who played a major role in convincing Netscape to take its browser open source, and James Barry, who helped convert IBM to Apache. Alongside [co-founder Brian] Behlendorf, Tim O'Reilly and Marc Andreessen are board members, and investors in a $35 million round of funding closed in June 2000 included Dell, HP, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Sun and TurboLinux....

On Open Enterprise blog.

20 October 2008

The Real Story Behind GNU/Linux

If the prospect of another week stretching out before you is getting you down, I've got good news. There's a post about GNU/Linux that is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face. It's a real stonker - try this for a start....

On Open Enterprise blog.

14 February 2008

What Davos Can Teach Us

The World Economic Forum is a fairly disgusting dance of power and money, but even in this context intelligent observers can learn something useful. For example, here are Brian Behlendorf's thoughts on the problems of getting people to understand and engage with true openness:

On the downside: twice, I mentioned ODF vs. OOXML in conversations with people, and each time, there was a lack of awareness of the issue. I really don't want to embarrass them so I won't name names, but they were people who really should have known; one was a leader of a business that has been around for years and has serious document management and longevity issues, the other a government official who was charged with preserving his country's culture but sadly non-technical. In both cases, the initial response was along the lines of "this is a mess that you techies have created, I expect you to clean it up", as if it was simply a matter of defects in code that a company like Microsoft would be cleaning up quickly. If it turned out that valuable company data from 1993 were in a Word file format that couldn't be properly read by Office 2008, then they'd simply hire someone or a firm to dive in and repair it by hand. I believe I brought both of them around to understanding how it's not just a matter of bugfixing or outsourcing the problem, that it is a knowlege and institutional threat, and the role they need to play as informed customers in pressuring vendors to do the right thing. But, Microsoft's judo-move with OOXML of appearing to do the "right" thing that isn't actually right in practice has more power than I think you or I would wish were true.

28 February 2006

Open Source, Opener Source

Brian Behlendorf is an interesting individual: one of those quietly-spoken but impressive people you meet sometimes. When I talked to him about the birth of Apache - which he informed me was not "a patchy" server, as the folklore would have it, just a cool name he rather liked - he was working at CollabNet, which he had helped to found.

He's still there, even though the company has changed somewhat from those early days. But judging from a characteristically thought-provoking comment reported in one of ZDNet's blogs, he's not changed so much, and is still very much thinking and doing at the leading edge of open source.

In the blog, he was reported as saying that he saw more and more "ordinary people" being enfranchised as coders thanks to the new generation of programming models around - notably Ajax and the mashup - that made the whole process far easier and less intimidating.

If he's right, this is actually a profound shift, since ironically the open source model has been anything but open to the general public. Instead, you had to go through a kind of apprenticeship before you could stalk the hallowed corridors of geek castle.

If open really is becoming opener, it will be no bad thing, because the power of free software depends critically on having lots of programmers, and a good supply of new ones. Anything that increases the pool from which they can be drawn will have powerful knock-on effects.

27 January 2006

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hacker

Today is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Most people know him as one of the world's greatest composers: a child prodigy, creator of over 600 works, and – if you believe some of the wilder rumours - fatally poisoned at the age of 35 by a rival composer. Few, though, are aware that Mozart was also a hacker.

Computers may not have existed in the eighteenth century, but the musical machines called orchestras and choirs are conceptually identical to synthesisers, which are themselves specialised music computers. Just as programming code specifies how a computer should act (and a MIDI file controls a synthesiser), so musical code – in the form of a score – directs what instruments and voices should do and when.

Conductors are largely superfluous in all this (at least for Mozart's music): they do not create the output, which is specified by the score. All they do is interact with the score “loaded” on the orchestral or choral machine, in the same sense that someone might interact with a video game loaded on a console. The incidental nature of humans in the performance of classical music is shown by some pieces that Mozart wrote at the end of his life for a clock with built-in mechanical organ. Here the scores completely determined the audio output: there was no human intervention once the music had been converted to a kind of piano roll – a forerunner of the punch cards employed a century and a half later by the early commercial mainframe computers.

More generally, though, hacking is a state of mind, a way of understanding and exploring the world, independent of a particular technology (and not to be confused with “cracking”, which is the correct name for the kind of digital smash and grab too often in today's headlines). Richard Stallman, perhaps the greatest hacker of modern times, has defined the essence of hacking as “playful cleverness” - as good an encapsulation of Mozart's genius as any.

The cleverness showed itself early. Mozart started learning the piano when he was three, began composing when he was five, and wrote his first symphony and opera at the age of eight and 11 respectively. Like many top coders, he frequently worked out everything in his head before consigning it to paper at a single sitting (often just hours before a deadline – again, just like some programmers), and usually without the need for revisions (that is, bug-free). He could also multi-task: he is supposed to have written one of his finest works during a game of skittles.

Like any red-blooded hacker, Mozart adored mathematics as a child (and gambling as an adult), found word-play irresistible (email would have been perfect for him) and loved setting himself puzzles. His Musical dice game uses dice throws and pre-composed short fragments of music to form compositions created by random numbers; the challenge was writing fragments that would fit together whatever the throws. At one point in his opera Don Giovanni, in addition to the main orchestra accompanying the singers, there are three more orchestras on stage, each playing completely different music. It all fits together so perfectly that most opera lovers are unaware of the compositional tour-de-force they are witnessing.

Mozart's playfulness was a key facet of his character. The musical form he seems to have enjoyed writing most – opera buffa – is simply Italian for “funny opera”. In several concertos composed for a horn-playing friend, Mozart added jocular comments to the music - “Slowly, Mr Donkey”; “Breathe!”; “Go on!”; “Oh, filthy swine!” - an early example of commented code. He sometimes employed different coloured inks in a score, rather as modern programming tools do to differentiate various elements. Another piece, called A musical joke, includes notes that are blatantly wrong. If the musicians play them as written, they sound incompetent; if they play the “right” notes, they have failed to perform the piece as the composer intended, and so are indeed incompetent.

Significantly, Mozart was a big fan of a key hacking concept known as recursion, whereby something refers to itself to create a kind of infinite loop. For example, a core hacking project started and led by Stallman is called “GNU”, an acronym for “GNU's Not Unix”, which uses itself in its own explanation. (Recursion is another example of playful cleverness).

Recursive music is created by employing a delayed version of a tune as its own accompaniment. Formally, this is known as a “canon” (simpler versions, like the song “London's burning”, are called “rounds”), and Mozart wrote dozens of them, mostly for himself and his friends to sing at purely private performances. They are notable not only for their fine music, but also for the texts Mozart chose to set: “Lick my bum” is one memorable line that crops up more than once. Today's hackers, too, enjoy dubious lyrics, and have an earthy turn of phrase: the injunction “RTFM” - often thrown at hapless newbies - does not stand for “Read The Flipping Manual”.

Another notable characteristic of hackers is their fondness for science fiction. Overt references to Star Wars may be thin on the ground in Mozart's works, but many of his operas written in the older, “serious” style are based on the same eternal themes of good versus evil and love versus duty that lie at the heart of George Lucas's epic.

The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once suggested that any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; the corollary is that magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently-advanced technology. So Mozart's last opera, The Magic Flute - full of other magical objects, too - is, from this viewpoint, a work of science fiction. It is also a Masonic opera, steeped in mysterious symbols and rituals that will be nonetheless be familiar to the hackers who participate in MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), where characters join guilds, complete quests and seek to gain experience points - just like the hero in The Magic Flute.

The close links between music and hacking run both ways, and many of today's top coders are highly musical. Richard Stallman – whose dedication to the cause of freedom is positively Beethovenian - carries with him a soprano recorder wherever he travels. The profoundly-religious and frighteningly-cerebral Donald Knuth – a kind of hacker J.S.Bach - was moved by his love of music to have an 812-pipe baroque organ built in a specially-designed room in his house. Appropriately enough, Knuth's life-work is called The Art of Computer Programming (Bach called his The Art of Fugue). Representing a different musical tradition, Brian Behlendorf, the prime mover behind the Apache Web server program that runs two-thirds of the Internet, DJs ambient and dub music. And it is well known that for most hackers the crucial first step when they start working is to fire up some particularly loud and inspirational music on their computer. Mozart would have approved.