An audience with a `trouble-making philosopher`

Were you to encounter Eric Steven Raymond in the street, it is unlikely that you would assume he is a particularly high-profile person. However, a glance at Raymond`s resume, net worth, writings, or high-profile history would quickly change your opinion.

""If you want to change the world you have to cooperate with the people who write the cheques."

Eric Raymond, co-founder, the open-source movement

Known as a co-founder of the modern open source software movement, Raymond has clout in the high-end of the software community. He is using his reputation to "build bridges between the hacker culture and everyone else in suites".

"If you want to change the world you have to cooperate with the people who write the cheques," says Raymond. "In the past the hacker community has been noticeably poor."

Raymond officially entered the open source world in 1996, when he launched his own open source development project, destined to become Fetchmail, the Unix-based mail system. Following Linus Torvald`s lead, Raymond developed and maintained an open source community to help him with the project.

Judging by his paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (published by O`Reilly), the project was more of an experiment to help Raymond understand how an open-source community works, rather than the need to develop the product.

"I anatomise a successful open source project, Fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux," Raymond states in the introduction to the paper.

Reading his works, it soon becomes apparent that Raymond is not merely a developer. He describes himself as a "wandering anthropologist and trouble-making philosopher. I ask interesting questions, and help people think more clearly."

"If the justice department does break Microsoft up into an application and operating system division, I expect the half-life of the OS division to be about three weeks."

Eric Raymond, co-founder, the open-source movement

He adds that, despite his anthropological and philosophical quests, he continues to code to maintain his "street-cred". He also sees himself as a theoretician - analysing what he sees around him - and an evangelist for the open source movement.

Raymond makes sweeping predictions for open source, some of which sound tall in the extreme. One of the more noteworthy is the predicted demise of Microsoft`s Windows operating system, which he expects to occur next year.

"If the justice department does break Microsoft up into an application and operating system division, I expect the half-life of the OS division to be about three weeks," he states. Once the application division does not have to support only Windows, Raymond believes it will port its products over to alternative operating systems, thus negating the need for Windows entirely.

"I think that Microsoft is going to collapse before that," he continues. "Their licensing model only makes sense with an environment of expensive hardware."

Raymond believes that once PCs reach the $300 mark, the price of Microsoft products will no longer be sustainable by original equipment manufacturers. "The only viable candidate will be Linux."

""[Microsoft`s] licensing model only makes sense with an environment of expensive hardware."

Eric Raymond, co-founder, the open-source movement

He expects the crash to occur early- to mid-2001. "Microsoft knows this too," he says. He sees the .Net and application service provision strategy as a refocus away from the operating system.

Responding to the often-made claim that a company like Microsoft can provide better service and support to the user, Raymond states that, with the software giant, the customer is "on the wrong side of the monopolistic relationship".

"You start to lose control of your business, while the lock-in gets worse and worse," he says. While a security fix takes hours to days to deliver in the open source environment, Raymond believes that closed development takes weeks to months, "and sometimes never!"

He also believes that closed development allows vendors to routinely lie about security problems, which open source vendors are unable to do.

Raymond believes that in five to seven years time, the open source model will reach its equilibrium, with only about 5% to 15% of code remaining closed. Most of the closed code will reside in vertical markets and at the top end of the application stack.

"We will see a thin layer of customisation on top of an open source infrastructure," predicts Raymond. The recent release of the StarOffice source by Sun Microsystems is one example he cites as the open infrastructure we will see. Proprietary business rules will still allow companies their strategic advantage.

Raymond estimates that there are about 750 000 open source developers worldwide today, and believes that only about a third of those are in the US. "The community is much more distributed than most people think."

Open source has recently been targeted in the media as a good alternative for Third World countries, as, in countries like Kenya, the average per-capita income is less than $250, while Windows costs around $100 and Microsoft Office as much as $800 (according to a recent report on Wired). Open source is picking up in Africa, with SA listed as the 24th largest Linux user base in the world, according to the Linux User Project.

"For the Third World, they have a choice of either paying exorbitant licensing fees or getting it for free," comments Raymond.