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NF: Okay. Just out of curiosity, what are you running on your desktop these days?

BY: On my desktop, I run Apple Macintosh OS X. I could not bring myself to go to Windows, of course. And one of the little known facts -- 'cause, you know, I'm a skinny guy who wears glasses, everyone assumes that I'm an engineer by training -- I'm an old typewriter salesman, by training. So maintaining my own Linux desktop was just something that I didn't have the training to do. So I actually went and sat down with a bunch of the guys at Red Hat; this was back in 2002 and asked them what I should run, given that I was not going to, you know, I didn't have the Red Hat engineering team to support me anymore. And their answer was that I should go to the Mac OS X BSD-based operating system because it would give me most of the advantages of Linux without imposing the need to be my own sys admin.

Having said that, that's just my case. Of course, all the engineers at Lulu are all using Linux-based desktops, and Linux is hugely powerful and Red Hat, of course, is hugely successful on the server side. And that's of course where our use of open source and Red Hat has primarily been focused.

NF: What about, so what are your feelings on Linux desktop these days? I guess, you probably don't spend a lot of time evaluating it personally?

BY: No, but what's interesting is a view I held and now that I'm not a director of Red Hat, I suppose I'm allowed to say this again. And unless Red Hat disagrees with me then I don't want to speak for Red Hat. This is a Bob Young opinion and not a Red Hat opinion.

NF: Right.

BY: But it is that -- do you remember way back when Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison -- this is '95 -- announced the network appliance and said that intelligence would remain on the server and that we were all going to start using appliances to access all of the content and the functionality on the server and we're gonna get out of this mode where you had to have a system administrator for every 20 operating system users? Or you had to turn your users of PCs into system administrators themselves, because, you know, these were complicated pieces of technology and it was easy to break something, to do something wrong in it, and so you had to have a whole team of sysadmins.

McNealy and Ellison's vision was to make an appliance that wasn't adaptable; that make the server the adaptable piece in it. And suddenly, the casual user of some piece of computing technology wouldn't have to become a computer expert in order to use the technology. So if you're a lawyer, you should be an expert in the law, you shouldn't necessarily have to become an expert in Windows, you know, desktop technology just to do your legal work. And that was the vision of network appliance.

I'm convinced that that is still, and we're beginning to see it. The future of Linux on the desktop which is, and this is actually interesting enough, it's historically true, as well. Operating systems typically don't displace existing technology if they become popular, it's because they become the popular solution on the new technology model. So, you know, Digital Equipment Companies, VMS operating system did not become popular on IBM mainframe computers. It became popular because Digital convinced the world to move towards minicomputers, and it became the most popular operating system on the minicomputers that Digital was responsible for. And in the same way, Windows, you know -- Microsoft did not convince the world to unplug VMS and put, you know, sort of a Mac OS -- not Mac OS. MS-DOS, MS-DOS on Digital minicomputers.

They convinced the world to put MS-DOS on this new technology model, being the PC. It was again, for Linux, to try and convince the world to unplug MS-DOS and Windows off of their perfectly good PCs and put Linux on it instead, that's a hard thing to do. But if the network appliance vision of the future comes true, then it makes perfect sense too, that open source operating systems such as Red Hat, or Slackware -- whatever -- would become the dominant operating system on that kind of appliance. And that's actually what we're seeing. Best single example is the Tivo box on your desktop, on your set top, on top of your TV which is a network appliance. As in it's an appliance, it's not something you asked to program or, you know, install software on; it comes as an appliance. It does its thing. And of course, it runs Linux as its operating system.

NF: Do you think that the home PC is a phenomenon that's going to continue for the next, you know, say 10 years out?

BY: Yes. In the same way, though, when you think about that people are still selling mainframe computers, so, but it will become a smaller percentage of the total number of computers we carry around with us. So, in the late '80s or through the '90s, PCs were where the bulk of the dollars went to when you were buying computer functionality. Today, the bulk of the dollars are going to things like the Treo that I've got in my pocket. Things like digital cameras that I can plug into my PC. Things like my car. You know the map tool that I get in my rental cars, you know, that tell me when I'm getting lost in a new city or how to stop getting lost. These are all computers that are not PCs, they are all network appliance like computers, and that's where the bulk of technology dollars are going today.

NF: You mentioned earlier in the interview that you looked around for things to spot through an open source. So, are there any areas where you see things missing in open source or where there needs to be more development focused?

BY: How do you answer that?

NF: I mean, personally, I can think of a few things I'd like to see improve but I'm curious where you're...

BY: Yeah. The broad answer is there can never be enough. So it doesn't matter how many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars are going into building better open source applications. It would be nice to see even more dollars going into building open source applications. And the challenge we're up against is the proprietary software industry is so big and so lucrative; a business model that, you know, we're playing a fair amount of catch-up. Microsoft have, however, many tens of billions of dollars to dump into their R&D effort.

We, on the other hand, have equally large numbers of dollars but not as easily focused. So the bulk of the open source engineering is coming from the engineers using the code. So it fits. The bulk of the engineering that's being done at GE or at Southwest Bell or at Boeing; building tools that they and similar users across the Internet need to use. The dollars that IBM and Red Hat and Novell are putting into engineering open source projects or MySQL or you know, these kind of guys is actually the smaller part of all the resources that are being put into building open source tools.

So, the short answer is, yeah. But to try and give you a specific example, I'd sort of duck on that one. I'm not really sure. I can think of a hundred examples of things that could use more investment. I can't think of -- I wouldn't want to prioritize, so one of my favorites is some of the tools that Lulu are using. We would love to see Postgres, get further investment and get some better tools, for example, commerce shopping cart tool built in an open source model so that we didn't have to build our own commerce and shopping cart tools at Lulu. In order to have open source commerce and shopping cart, you know, there's a million and one proprietary shopping cart tools we could buy. There aren't that many very good open source shopping cart tools we could buy.

NF: Are there any new projects that have come out of Lulu that you're sponsoring that we could find like on, you know, SourceForge or anything like that?

BY: Yes, is the short answer. But I'm not gonna speak to them because I'd probably make a hash of the story. Keep in mind that I'm the typewriter salesman in this thing.... Just as an example, there's a project called, that was called Tiki pro, I think it's just changed its name. And it's a content management tool that we use quite actively, and that we are stressing; as in we're looking for functionality beyond what the original project was offering. And so we've been investing in that project, in some of the project leaders across the Internet to try and move that project forward faster so that we could get the benefits out of some of these content management features that would save us again from having either to build our own or to consider proprietary solutions.

NF: Back earlier this summer again. Eric Raymond made a comment that got reported pretty widely, which was that we don't need the GPL anymore. Any comments on that idea?

BY: Yeah. I couldn't disagree more. And again, keep in mind, I'm not picking a fight with Eric 'cause I have a huge amount of respect for Eric. He is one of the most valuable members of the community; and unlike a lot of the members of the open source community who get quite ideological about things, and when they disagree with another member of the community, they tend to get emotionally caught up in their disagreements. I'm more than happy to disagree in a very friendly, supportive, you know -- this is my friend and I'm allowed to disagree with him. Wait, so don't present this as anything other than me disagreeing with an interpretation of a friend of mine and it is simply that this, and Eric and I are approaching this from different perspectives.

Eric's looking at it from a legal, implementable point of view. And there is no question that the GPL is a badly structured piece, uh, legal document. And it's badly structured because it's not just a legal document, it's also a statement of ideology. But I'm a sales guy, so I don't actually care about the details of things. I care about their impact. And what makes the GPL so valuable is not how it's written or what it legally enforces, it's the fact that it's a brand.

The moment you say your software project is GPL, everyone knows exactly what that means and they don't have to read your license to understand whether you're sneaking in the back door, or whether you have some sort of ulterior motive to what you're doing. If it's GPL-ed, it is GPL-ed and we all know what GPL means. So I would strongly argue just the reverse: that we will never outgrow the GPL. And that the GPL will continue to be the dominant open source licensing model, not because the GPL is the best license, but because it is the standard license.

So to argue against the GPL is like trying to argue against MS-DOS. If by saying we need a better operating system, arguing against MS-DOS in the late '80s, early '90s, because everyone knew we needed a better operating system than MS-DOS for the PC. But everyone also knew that MS-DOS was the standard. If you built your software to run on MS-DOS, it would run on hundreds of millions of personal computers around the world. If you built your software to run on "a better operating system" than MS-DOS, say the BeOS, you were addressing a market that might have had a few thousand installed computers.

Well, the same principle with GPL. You write, you license your open source project as a GPL project, everyone knows what it means. Anyone who might want to contribute can contribute without reservation, without having to get a lawyer out to read the license and to try and understand why the comma in the 13th paragraph, whether that comma had significance or not. The GPL, we all know what the failings of the thing are. But we also know that it's the standard.

NF: What do you think of the efforts to rewrite the GPL? Any thoughts on the coming version, GPL 3?

BY: Not really. Because I'm not a lawyer and I have not been involved in the project. It's both good news and bad news. If they do it well, it'll be a great thing because it'll address some of the weaknesses in the GPL. If they do it badly, they could screw up a really good thing. So, on the one hand, I'm nervous; on the other hand, I'm optimistic. But I have to admit, I haven't been staying up with it at all.

NF: Anything else in the tech industry, either open source or otherwise you find really exciting these days?

BY: Yeah. The thing I find exciting is the Internet itself. As an entrepreneur, I look at the Internet as being the Wild West. And so a lot of people are starting to look at the Internet as being this established, you know, sort of a stable environment that, you know, that all the big opportunities, you know, that were out there, were out there in the 1990s and now it's time to get a job working for Yahoo! or Google if you want to work on the Internet because there's no real opportunity for the little guy anymore. And my take on it is just the reverse. It's that the big guys on the Internet today are gonna look small compared to the big guys on the Internet 10 years from now. And that they will be named, they'll be household names on the Internet 10 years from now that you and I have yet to hear of today.

It looks a little bit like the PC industry back in the late 1980s when the big names were people like Ashton-Tate and WordPerfect and, you know, the list goes on and on -- 3Com. And today you're going, "Whatever happened to those guys?" And meanwhile, guys who were trivial players in the mid '80s -- Dell were only founded in something like 1985 -- are now the dominant players. And yet, in 1985-86, everyone in the industry thought of it as a very mature industry. I see the Internet being where the PC was in 1986. The other thing is open source. There was a statistic -- I'm sure you saw it; I think it was out of Gartner -- talking about how 56% of all software programmers were working in open source tool these days. Did you see that number?

NF: Yeah.

BY: Single, most significant statistic I've seen in open source in a long time because where the engineers are is where the innovations come from. And Microsoft worked like dogs in the 80s to get all the software programmers to program for Windows. And if all the programmers are starting to program in and around open source, then it's only a matter of time before open source tools continue to get better and continue to get more widely deployed. It's no longer a question of 'if,' it's simply a question of 'when.' Because once the programmers have voted with their feet, you know the rest of it just kind of happens almost automatically.

NF: The lure of open code is just too great to ignore.

BY: That's right! It improves your ability to build better tools because you're not guessing at what's going on inside the database or inside the Web server. You're actually looking at the code and when you build your application on top of it, you're not guessing at whether you're doing the right thing. You can actually watch the code cycle through and you can go, "Jeez, now I see why it hiccupped on line 56." You're not guessing at it anymore and that's simply a dramatically better way of building tools, especially building Internet-based tools than trying to do it on proprietary software where you actually don't know what's going on.

NF: I guess it brings us back to why Microsoft is trying to figure out just how much they can open without giving up their licensing.

BY: That's right, that's right. It's very encouraging, I guess, in a nice way to see Microsoft on the defense. I picked up a newspaper in Toronto the other day and a little ad on the top, the masthead of the business section, I think it was. I think they called them, "earlug" advertisements; so you have, you know, things like "Business Section" across the top and little ads on each side of the business section. And this little ad was "Windows vs. Linux: Get the facts -- www.Microsoft.com/getthefacts" or something. And I'm going, "Wow." Can you imagine 10 years ago Microsoft even admitting that Linux existed and now they are buying ad space in conventional media outlets like daily newspapers in order to try and fight Linux? It's Eric Raymond's line, I think he stole it from Gandhi, which is, "First, they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win," or something. Clearly, in stage number 2 of that progression.

NF: Do you have any other thoughts or anything you'd like to say I haven't brought up?

BY: No, Joe. I really appreciate your interest in the story. The key theme to my leaving Red Hat had nothing to do with Red Hat and everything to do with Lulu. On the one hand, of course, my own personal reasons to get out of bed in the morning, which is I'm an entrepreneur by, not just by training but by instinct. And Lulu's -- it's a lot more fun to get out of the bed in the morning these days, focusing on Lulu, than it is going to play golf or, for that matter, going to Red Hat board meetings even though I love Red Hat and I take a huge amount of pride in what those guys are achieving.

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