Michael Tiemann is the brain behind Cygnus, the first company to offer support to Linux and other assorted Free Software programs. He is now involved in open source ‘affairs’ at the OSI. Swapnil Bhartiya discusses the past, present and the future with Tiemann in this exclusive interview.

Swapnil: How did you originally get involved with open source? What was your ‘source’ of inspiration?

Tiemann: The long story can be found in Chapter 1 of a book titled Open Sources: Voices From The Open Source Revolution, published by O’Reilly and Associates.

The short story is that I learned about Free Software while a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and I was so totally captivated by the idea of embedding a LISP interpreter into a text editor (Emacs), that I began tracking other GNU projects. When I started reading, and then soon writing software based on the GNU C compiler in 1987, I found I could do in weeks what other companies took years to complete, and I found it quite fun to do what other companies would charge millions for.

Believing in the free market, I felt these competitive advantages represented a business opportunity, but I did not see how to commercialise the business until 1989, and that was too early. If I had waited until after Linus had released Linux, I would have started a business around that.

Swapnil: What role did Cygnus play in supporting open source adoption and spreading the good word about it?

Tiemann: I believe we played a vital role. We very quickly became an extremely successful company, and were listed on Inc. magazine’s Top 100 fastest-growing private companies. We pioneered the commercial model, we pioneered the VC investment model, and we reported healthy revenue and profit growth at a time when many software companies were retrenching.
 

Swapnil: Could you also recall what the understanding of the general public/industry was of this ‘new’ alternative to the then popular operating systems and software?

Tiemann: The masses mostly had no clue about anything other than Microsoft and Apple. We were very under-the-radar. Within the technical community, Cygnus built a reputation as one of the best (if not the best) engineering teams on the planet. I recall several meetings with multi-billion dollar companies who all conceded that our levels of quality and reliability were like no other vendor. I like to think that we brought to Red Hat in the acquisition, both our reputation and our unique open source engineering practices.

Swapnil: How difficult was it back then to convince people to adopt open source? And how different are things today?

Tiemann: In the early days, people didn’t do it because they wanted to be part of a movement or part of a community. They did it for selfish business reasons: we could deliver two times the performance and value, in half the time. And still there were customers who told us: “I’m sorry—I know that your competitors have consistently failed to meet our quality, performance, and time parameters, and I know they are more expensive. But our management really does not want to go with an unknown company.” This [was even] after we had been in business for five years, and had grown larger than their original, under-performing supplier.

Swapnil: You played a critical ‘role’ in the documentary Revolution OS. How was that experience? Did you open source folks try to promote the documentary?

Tiemann: It was fun, but a few years after the film was shot, it was clear that they focused on the wrong story. The correct story was Red Hat, not VA Linux.

Swapnil: Today people prefer using the term ‘open source’ instead of Linux. What do you think about this sudden shift? What do you see happening in the future?

Tiemann: Linux is just a kernel. Open source defines a movement and a community. I see a bright future for the open source community, just like I see a bright future for representative democracy as a political institution.

Swapnil: A lot of people misuse the term open source—for example, they market their product as open source when the licence they use is not an OSI-approved licence. How does OSI, as a watchdog organisation, handle such issues?

Tiemann: We always try to be low-key about it. We first contact the people who are using the term and explain to them that, “...open source has a defined meaning in the marketplace—use any Web search to see for yourself. Given that expectation, do you want to attract people who are expecting one thing and then try to sell them another?” Up until about a year ago, that worked 99 per cent of the time. Then, when the VC money started flowing like water into companies based on “open source”, all kinds of claims were made by people who didn’t care nearly as much about what the customers thought—only what the VCs believed. However, even the VCs now understand that open source is more than a marketing term, and they have been much more permissive in terms of letting their investments succeed based on the merits of the model rather than the promise of the marketers.

Swapnil: FSF is very strict when it comes to which software licences qualify as Free Software licences and which do not. And they go out of their way to ‘educate’ the masses on what Free Software as a term means. However, somehow over the years, open source as a term has been diluted. What steps do you think OSI should take to ‘educate’ the public on how to evaluate a product as open source or not?

Tiemann: It’s a constant balancing act, and with more than 60 approved licences, it would be impossible to fully answer the question without getting too deep into details. My primary advice is: use the most popular licence you can find (GPL), use the licence used most by the software developers you plan to interface with (which may be GPL, BSD or Apache, etc), and create a new licence only as an absolute last resort.

Swapnil: Microsoft is talking a lot about open source these days. Does the open source community view this as a shift in Microsoft’s outlook, or a way to blunt the OSS movement?

Tiemann: It is too soon to tell. As a 501(c)3 advocacy organisation, we embrace all those who claim to advocate open source, provided they use our marks appropriately, which Microsoft has agreed to do. Many people are very unhappy
about this, but I believe that the OSI cannot preach openness without being open to all, according to its rules.

Swapnil: Today, the GUIs and user-friendliness of some of GNU/Linux distros are arguably more advanced even compared to that of Windows, and they are making inroads into Microsoft’s core domain—the desktop. But Red Hat’s Fedora still has a long way to go when it comes to desktop interface polish. Why is Red Hat not targeting the desktop users? Or, is Red Hat planning to cater only to the enterprise segment for the time being?

Tiemann: Red Hat had invested considerably on the desktop since before I joined. I myself use the Red Hat Corporate Desktop to do my daily work, which includes filling out expense reports, booking flights, etc. I testified in 2001 what I
believed would be suitable remedies to permit true competition in the desktop market, but the US judge presiding over the case took Mircosoft’s position, not mine. Just this year, the European Court of First Instance found that many of the statements I made in my testimony were not remedied after all, and their decision to hold Microsoft accountable was a somewhat Phyrric victory.

Many people are still not satisfied that competition is unfettered, and it makes little sense to talk about the viability of our desktop solution when the desktop marketplace itself remains defective.

RHEL 5 already has a client version that targets the enterprise workstations. Instead of polishing this client version, Red Hat has announced the Red Hat Global Desktop initiative. What is the need for such an offering, and how is it different? I’d like to answer that question in a subsequent interview, when we have some progress to report.

Swapnil: Of late, we have been noticing that Red Hat remains absent at major open source events. What is the reason?

Tiemann: The cost/benefit of such events does not work in Red Hat’s favour. Instead, we have created the Red Hat Summit, an event that can be far more effective because it begins with the premise of using our software (true for at least 80 per cent of the commercial market), and moves forward from that point. This allows us to make much better use of our technical resources, who support the event. Generic events that do not presume any platform decision means we must keep our best resources idle while people evaluate competing platform claims, which is not a good use of our time. Red Hat does sponsor other events, such as the IP Symposium event we co-sponsored with IIT Mumbai and IIT Delhi. That was a very successful event.

Swapnil: The mobile platform is emerging as a significant platform globally. Today more people access the Internet through mobile phones than PCs. How is Red Hat viewing this opportunity? Is it planning to offer anything in the mobile space? If not, are you not missing out on a huge market?

Tiemann: Red Hat plays a significant role in the infrastructure of the mobile device market, and we will continue to play to our strengths.

Swapnil: Why and how did the OSI come into existence and how critical is its presence today for the open source movement?

Tiemann: The idea of the OSI came together when a group of like- minded people got together for a meeting at the Foresight Institute. There was a general opinion that as successful as Cygnus was at selling commercial support for Free Software (our tag line was “We make free software affordable”), it would never be commercially mainstream with the term ‘Free’. We brainstormed about different things we could call it, and when somebody said “open source”, Eric Raymond said words to the effect “That’s it! We can stop looking.”

Swapnil: What was the need of the OSI when a body like the FSF was already around? Would it not be good to strengthen the FSF and not create more parallel bodies that could create confusion among the public?

Tiemann: The FSF promoted software freedom as its primary mission. There was a sense that for the commercial community there was a need for an organisation that could say: “The benefits of freedom are increased profits and innovation. Here’s how to best compete with these freedoms in your software.” Consider the environmental movement today: companies finally realised that the less they waste (pollution is a form of waste) the more they can report as profits. Now, large-scale companies are cleaning up their production methods, not only because it’s better for the environment, but because it’s better for the bottomline as well. The OSI shows companies how to profit from software licensed with OSI-approved licences.

What procedure does the OSI follow to credit a software with an open source licence?

The process is described at http://opensource.org/docs/certification_mark.html#approval The short story is that one must send a properly formatted e-mail with all the explanations as to why a new licence is being submitted. If the submission meets our administrative criteria, the OSI board requests a discussion on license-discuss@opensource.org. We seek community involvement because “Many eyes make all bugs shallow” and it helps to keep us from approving licences we should not, and also because we see ourselves as community representatives. When the community speaks for itself, it makes it easier to represent its interests. After the discussion converges to a recommendation, the board takes a vote, and either approves, rejects, or defers the decision for more discussion.

Swapnil: Allegedly, a lot of ‘badgeware’ licences have been approved by the OSI in the recent past. What’s your take on that?

Tiemann: I would disagree with that statement. We recently approved the CPAL, which includes a provision by which no badge need be displayed at all.

Swapnil: Microsoft had also submitted two of its shared source licences for the OSI’s approval, which were initially rejected by the board. What were the reasons?

Tiemann: They were not formally rejected. Comments came from the community that the names of the licences were not reflective of the terms of the licence. Microsoft saw the objections and to their credit, changed the names to be more faithful. With the names changed, the community had no remaining complaints with the licences themselves, though many harbour deep mistrust of Microsoft, the company. Nevertheless, we saw our role and responsibility to evaluate the licences, so we set aside the complaints about the company and voted to approve.

Swapnil: What did the OSI ask Microsoft to incorporate?

Tiemann: To my recollection, it was primarily the names.

Swapnil: Was there any bargaining between Microsoft and the OSI for the approval?

Tiemann: There was no special bargain. Microsoft followed the process, the community followed the process, and the board followed the process. It is the same for every licence that has been submitted to the OSI for approval.

The interview was originally published in an Indian Linux magazine - LINUX For You.

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