How is the open-source movement different today than, say, 1999?

I think we're more sober now than we used to be. There was a period during the dot-com boom in '99 when I think a lot of people were in some danger of getting distracted by the prospect of lots of easy money. And of course that prospect has gone away now, which is all right if that has the effect of re-concentrating us on the work.

I think also we have a lot more credibility in the global 1,000 and the business press than we had in '99. We've gotten more success stories under our belt. We've got more people who've considered the pro-open-source argument carefully and decided they agree with it. As witnessed by what happened last year when there was some danger that Microsoft was going to go into a full-bore propaganda campaign against us.

If they had done that in mid 1998, just after the Mozilla disclosure, they might have buried us. I was worried about that. I was seriously worried that that was a possibility, that they would turn on the hype machine before we had enough success stories and enough corporate backing to be able to counter that. What happened in early 2001 demonstrated that we had already achieved enough mainstream credibility and recruited enough backers inside the establishment, as it were, that when Microsoft tried it it just bounced. And that's a significant difference from '99.

Mainstream credibility is important to you and the OSI, isn't it?

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The thing that I've always kept in mind, and the reason I founded the OSI in the first place is this: if you want to change the world, you have to co-opt the people who write the checks.

Maybe it sounds pretentious to say this, but most of the people who do this mostly care about art, not about money. If that weren't the case they'd be off doing something else. Mind you, I'm not saying that it's necessarily better to care about art than about money, I'm just making an observation about the motivations of the people who do this.

What's the future for the "bazaar" open-source model?

I see that continuing to succeed, in a way that's separate from the debate about business models. The reason I'm very sure that will be the case is because of the scaling problems that software development is having as machines grow more capable and software grows more complex.

The fundamental problem here is that machines roughly double in capability every eighteen months, and as you know, the size of the average software project in lines of code tends to be double that. That's a real problem, because bugs generally arise from unanticipated interactions between different pieces of code in a project. And that means that the number of bugs in the project tends to rise with the square of the number of lines of code. That means that as projects get larger, and their bug density increases, the verification problem gets worse, and it doesn't get worse linearly, it gets worse quadratically.

The reason I'm confident that the bazaar model, the open-source model, will continue to thrive and claim new territory, is because all of the other verification models have run out of steam. It's not that open sourcing is perfect, it's not that the many-eyeballs effect is in some theoretical sense necessarily the best possible way to do things, the problem is that we don't know anything that works as well. And the scale of problems with other methods of QA (quality assurance) is actually increasing in severity as the size of projects goes up. On the other hand, open-source development, open-source verification, the many-eyeballs effect, seems to scale pretty well. And in fact it works better as your development community gets larger.

If you want to go to a really fundamental analysis, what we're perpetually rediscovering on a scale of complexity is that centralization doesn't work. Centralization doesn't scale, and when you push any human endeavor to a certain threshold of complexity you rediscover that.

That recalls the argument of a few weeks ago about whether Linus Torvalds should get an assistant. That's another illustration of the problem. Centralization doesn't scale even when the center is Linus.

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