OPEN SOURCE EVOLVED AFTER TINKERING WITH ITS 'MEMES'

Saturday, September 20, 2003

Free software got no respect until it reinvented itself as ``open source'' software.

That transformation was one of the case studies Tim O'Reilly presented to the Accelerating Change Conference held at Stanford University last weekend. The conference was the first put on by the Institute for Accelerating Change, and it brought together a lot of technology-minded people who generally agree that their fields are indeed changing faster than ever, but who are not entirely of one mind about how much of that is a good thing.

One major presentation was by Ray Kurzweil, discussing ``Moore's law,'' which has many interpretations but which I'll render roughly as ``computer power doubles every 18 months.'' I've seen that happen. My husband and I bought our first computer, a Wang mini, in 1977; it was the size of a refrigerator and it cost more than our house. Now my cell phone is smarter.

The institute's name is ambiguous, and I asked its founder and president, John Smart, whether it meant studying the way change accelerates, or working to make change accelerate.

Both, he said, but more precisely working to make change accelerate selectively -- that is, to speed up the kinds of changes we approve of, and slow down the kinds we don't.

O'Reilly, who's accelerated a good bit of change himself, heads O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., which publishes computer books -- many of them standards in the field -- puts on conferences, and hosts online forums for people working in the same area. There's one on the programming language Perl, for example, which is so ubiquitous and so useful that O'Reilly calls it ``the duct tape of the Internet.''

He titled his talk ``Popularizing New Memes in the Media,'' so naturally I wanted to hear that one.

A ``meme,'' and the word is new enough that probably some readers haven't encountered it before, is like an idea gene, or the smallest recognizable bit of an idea. The ``meme'' meme is so handy that pretty soon it won't be necessary to explain it (though Word's spellchecker doesn't know it yet).

How do you promote an idea? Figure out what memes are associated with it in the mind of the public (or journalists who inform the public) and replace negative memes with positive memes.

O'Reilly showed a slide with a ``meme map'' for free software. Free software is a movement as much as a product, a moral crusade marching under the banner ``Information wants to be free'' -- meaning both ``liberated'' and ``at no cost.'' Almost since the beginning of widespread computing, it has been a goal of free-software advocates to write programs that are as functional as proprietary ones and give them away, in a form that allows anybody to use or modify them. Many of the world's best programmers have contributed to that effort. In fact, all the software I use on my laptop is free.

An early project was an operating system to replace UNIX, called GNU for ``GNU's not Unix.'' Well, maybe you can sell soft drinks with a slogan like ``the Uncola'' but marketing a high-tech product solely by what it isn't didn't work very well. Free software had a lot of negative memes associated with it, especially in the minds of risk-averse corporate managers.

Free software is just for amateurs, no corporation would use it. It isn't reliable. It's hard to use.

And worst of all, if the software is free, how do you make any money?

So in 1998 O'Reilly organized a freeware summit. What came out of it was not only a new name -- Open Source -- but a new meme map. It showed corporations that previously unbeknownst to them, they were already using open source software, because open source is the infrastructure of the Internet. BIND, which manages domain names, is ``the single most mission critical program on the Internet.'' Sendmail routes almost all e-mail. Apache is the dominant Web server. Linux is more reliable than Windows. And so on.

The map emphasized positive things; open source software gives you control over your own destiny. And there are lots of ways to make money.

The makeover worked. Within weeks, O'Reilly said, media coverage was all about open source, and it had turned positive. It happened at this paper. We published a story about the freeware summit, which was only the second time the phrase ``open source'' appeared in our archives. Since then it has become common.

I'm not sure I like the idea that it is so easy to manipulate coverage. But I'm intrigued by how it was done.