On 'Shared-Source' by Michael Tiemann

This is the transcript of a speech given by Mr. Tiemann at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, July 2001.

Esse Quam Vederi -- that is the motto of the state of North Carolina, and for those of you who learned languages like Perl in High School instead of Latin, it means "To Be, Rather Than To Seem".

I claim that to build an architecture of trust, it is better to be open than to seem open, better to be trustworthy than to seem trustworthy. Such an architecture is vital to creating the enabling and governing technologies that will help us build the next generation computing platforms, while a lesser architecture will merely crash and burn, stunting economic opportunities for all when it collapses.

This debate is important because it is about the future of software (the increasing substance of technology), it is about the increasingly important aspect of technology as it relates to our economy, and if Lawrence Lessig is correct, it is also about the code-as-law that will ultimately govern us. As technologists, as a business seeking fair competition, and as citizens who desire to live in a world where freedom is protected, that as long as Microsoft insists on writing code, we want to see them at least do it right. This is why we believe it is so important to be clear about what /is/ being offered, not what was promised, or what seemed to be offered, or what was claimed to have been delivered.

Of all the choices, open source makes it easier to be than to seem. From this perspective, there is no reality to Microsoft's Shared Source license, although it /seems/ to offer something new. Shared Source is a misnomer, like the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is neither alternative (it is mandatory) nor is it minimum (it specifies paying the maximum of two possible taxes). When preparing for this debate, one question kept coming up: why would Microsoft try this new, and high-profile deception when the sum total of its prior deceptions were already earning $1B/month? What are they really trying to fix?

The answer goes back to October 31, 1998 and the Halloween Documents. There are a lot of smart people in the OSS community, which by including the free software community therefore includes at least one genius. There are a lot of smart people here in at the conference today. But I must concede to my worthy opponent that there are a lot of smart people at Microsoft, too. I don't know who was the first one at Microsoft to see, as I did, that OSS--including software covered by the GPL--could be the basis of a business model powerful enough to legitimately compete against Microsoft, but she was probably one of Microsoft's smartest. Then a second smart person, then a third clued in. A document was written and circulated and, intentionally or otherwise, leaked. The Halloween Documents, illuminated by Eric Raymond, demonstrated that a fair number of people within Microsoft began to get it: that OSS was a better model, delivering advantages and benefits that Microsoft could not achieve with their proprietary model alone, period. Hat's off to the smart people at Microsoft!

There are many OSS projects, and many licenses that govern them. If we look at them as a body, the GPL is the spine. In the licensing debate, many focus on the dimension of free vs. proprietary, but they often miss the dimension of strong vs. weak protection of intellectual property. Microsoft writes strong proprietary licenses. The GPL is a strong free license, much like the 1st Amendment is a strong law protecting free speech in the United States.

Microsoft has benefitted, albeit illegally, from the application of strong licenses governing its own software. Red Hat has benefitted, as have our customers and the community, from the strong protections of the GPL, which ensures that our investments, our participation, cannot be used in a way that excludes us from competing in the market. If the GPL did not provide the strong protection of the GPL, which ensures that our investments, our participation, cannot be used in a way that excludes us from competing in the market. If the GPL did not provide the strong protection of freedom, and guarantees of freedom, we could not have made the investments we made for fear that somebody else, with more money and market power might embrace and extend and extinguish us. Instead, we are healthy, we've met or exceeded our EPS number each of the 8 quarters we've been a public company, and we announced a profit one year ahead of the schedule we communicated during our IPO roadshow. Who says the GPL is bad for business?

Back to 1998 and the Halloween documents...1998 was such a long time ago--three years is a very long time--especially in the open source world. While we (Red Hat) were participating in a revolution that's resulted in an unprecedented adoption of open source and free software, I think there was another revolution going on...inside Microsoft. A revolution fueled by the technical superiority of the open source model /and/ by the recognition of larger economic considerations by smart people inside Microsoft.

When Microsoft bought HotMail, they not only became one of the largest free email service companies, but they also ran one of the larger FreeBSD server deployments in the world. When they tried to switch to Windows, it just crashed. FreeBSD worked, Windows crashed. FreeBSD worked, Windows crashed. Sooner or later--if you're smart enough--the light bulb goes on: OSS is better. Would you believe the story that HotMail's sysadmins are grumbling "I wish I could dump this FreeBSD junk and move to Windows!"? No? I wouldn't either.

But the revolution was not confined to what Microsoft consumed. They began to produce as well. Smart people at Microsoft started to write code and specifications that were actually useful, XML being one shining example. So, I want to thank the revolutionaries at Microsoft for their good work--Thank you!

As an entrepreneur and as an executive, I know what it's like to run a company--both the good and the bad. Before Cygnus was acquired by Red Hat, we had our own revolution to contend with. Outside investors who didn't understand our model (some people really do have more money than brains) tried to inject proprietary software into our company. We tried to rationalize this hybrid model. We set up internal barriers. We partitioned the company. We crafted corporate emails full of executive-speak designed to make everything seem consistent, even if it was not. Having written some of these vile documents myself, I can now recognize their smell when somebody puts one under my nose. I learned: Esse Quam Vederi.

Whatever it seems, this "Shared Source" thing has nothing to do with building community outside of Microsoft. Would you ever share source with a monopolist? What then is Shared Source? I claim it is not so much a license as it is a treaty, crafted by executives trying to buy time while they put down the internal rebellion that is Microsoft's own civil war.

History has taught us the dangers of getting too involved in another's civil war. Craig, you were brave to come to the Open Source Conference, and maybe in doing so you are proving that you are one of Microsoft's smart people, too. I offer you this for you to report back: we acknowledge and appreciate the smart people at Microsoft who are helping the cause of OSS by writing good software with sensible licensing terms. And I will also offer this: when Microsoft is ready to sign off on the GPL and encourage its use to help us build a better, more transparent, more trustworthy architecture for computing, one that empowers individuals, promotes free and equal competition, and enables freedom at higher levels so that others can build applications with confidence, we will be happy to invite Microsoft to join our party, and you can bet that on that day, there will be plenty of free software and free beer. When that happens, we can all be glad that we've replaced the winner-takes-all mentality with an "everybody wins" model. After all, that's really what developers and customers want. That's really what everybody wants.

Shared Source? Esse Quam Vederi.