104 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1058-6180/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE Think Piece Of all the developments in the recent history of comput- ing, none has attracted such widespread attention as the emergence of the open-source software movement. In part, this is due to the remarkable successes of such open-source projects as Linux, Sendmail, and Apache. Versions of the GNU/Linux operating system are used by 40 percent of large American corporations, 65 percent of the world’s Web servers run Apache, and Sendmail manages 80 percent of the world’s email. Even traditional commercial vendors such as IBM, Apple, and Novell have jumped on the open- source bandwagon; the Macintosh OS X operating system is based on a BSD derivative, and IBM recently announced a $1 billion commitment to open-source development. 1 Despite these apparent successes, however, the lessons of the open-source movement are not necessarily those that its proponents might hope or imagine. They suggest more about new methods and questions for historians to grapple with than obvious conclusions about a new “one best way” to manage software development. The various meanings of “openness” At its most basic, open source refers simply to software that is made publicly available as uncompiled source code. Such openness is unusual but hardly unprecedent- ed. There can be compelling reasons for making source code available, even in competitive commercial environ- ments in which intellectual property rights are generally fiercely protected. After all, secrets are just one way of pro- tecting intellectual property; there are others, equally common and effective. In popular usage, however, the designation of open source is often used to refer to software that is not just open but also free. Free software, in this case, refers to software source code that is both publicly available and free (mostly) of license and copyright restrictions. In gen- eral, the only restrictions imposed are designed to assure that it continues to remain unrestricted. Finally, software that is free (of licensing restrictions) is often also made available free of cost. Most often when people talk about open-source software they are referring to projects that are simultaneously open, free, and free of charge. The appeal and power of open-source software goes beyond these notions of openness and freedom, however. The open-source philosophy is as much about process as it is product. Although advocates argue that open-source methods produce the best software in technical terms (in large part because it can harness the many eyes of a larger community to develop, test, and debug software), these methods are also the best in a larger social, moral, and political sense. As Steven Weber suggests in his excellent book The Success of Open Source, “Technical discussions [in the open-source community] on how things should work and should be done are intimately related to beliefs about and reflections on social practices” 2 Open-source projects represent an idealized vision of democracy in action—run by volunteers and organized only on an informal, ad hoc basis; decisions are made by consensus rather than decree. Project participants are independent agents—often wide- ly distributed geographically—who communicate largely through email and newsgroups. There are no scheduled meetings, no rigid job descriptions or organized division of labor, no managerial hierarchies or process controls. In short, open-source development projects seem to ignore almost all the supposed lessons of modern indus- trial manufacturing. By radically altering the social and political organization of software development, open source seemingly solves some of the most intractable problems that have plagued the software industry over the last several decades. Theological debates about the intricacies of intellectual property law and licensing schemes aside, the open-source movement is about new ways of managing complex development projects. Increasingly, this applies not only to software; the open- source model has been extended (in theory) to include a wide range of problem domains. It is easy to see why the open-source movement has attracted so much popular and scholarly attention. It is at once political, social, and technical. By freely giving away valuable intellectual property, open-source devel- opers turn on its head one of the fundamental assump- tions that neoclassical economists make about basic human motivation. As seemingly self-organizing com- munities, they suggest interesting new ways for ethnog- raphers and political scientists to think about the process of self-governance. Also, as part of the anti-Microsoft movement, they represent hope to those who resent large corporate monopolies and the constraints (and expens- es) of propriety software systems. For programmers and engineers feeling trapped by cubicles and bureaucracy, open source is an opportunity for creativity, autonomy, and self respect. For everyone else, open source offers up colorful stories full of eccentrics, underdogs, and 20-year- old billionaires. In many ways, the open-source move- ment has become a kind of Rorschach blot in which everyone sees what they are already looking for. Open Source’s Lessons for Historians Nathan L. Ensmenger University of Pennsylvania continued on p. 102