Copyright © 2005 Wyona Pictures

FUD - Fear Uncertainty Doubt

by Michael Wechner

Abstract (english)

There are all kind of groups/communities: family, basketball team, corporation, country/society. This movie is about capturing the "actuality" of open source communities/groups and establishing a link between Open Source communities and "communities/groups" of our daily life. This movie shall encourage people to ask themselves questions like why do communities exist at all, what makes them work, what keeps them stable. What are the incentives for an individual to colaborate and what are the emotions an individual is living through. How does one become a citizen respectively comitter/member. How do the laws of groups depend on human nature and vice versa. How do the laws depend on the environment we are living in. How can a democracy become a dictatorship. And what if the dictatorship is friendly. And why are surpreme beings respectively gods being created or invented. The fundamental questions of colaboration of people within groups are being elaborated in relation to Open Source communities, but with a link to other groups/communities/societies. The movie does not want to explain, but capture the moment. The Open Source/Free Software Movement is changing rapidly. In about 10 to 20 years people will have forgotton what the fuzz was all about.

Chapters

Introduction
Collaboration
First Encounter
Incentives
Groups and Politics
FUD
Commercialisation
Prospects

TEXT

"The views and opinions expressed within the following interviews are those of the individual speakers and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of WYONA pictures"

Chapter: Introduction


Timecode: 0:00:48
    sally_khudairi
  Obviously we are talking about change. And transformate of change. And how do you get involved with a community that needs to change? People resistant to doing it because change equals fear or change equals pain or change does equal uncertainity we don't know where we gonna' going How do you deal with that as an individual? How do you have individuation of your developments? And risking being alone ...

Timecode: 0:01:32
    ben_hyde
  What would be the answer there? I mean some sort of naive answer is to say, well: There must be a middle ground not too hot, not too cold But I don't know that and I am finding it a very interesting question ...

Timecode: 0:03:37
    sam_ruby
  Dealing with kids has definitely helped a lot of dealing with open source. there are definitely a lot of personalities trying to figure out how to motivate people, that aren't ... that are new to something for example there are some aspects of that and ... just some of the squabbles that come out. I mean any projects of any size can have any personality conflicts ... But I not learned a lot from open source would help me in my familiy that I could think of at least.

Timecode: 0:04:07
    danese_cooper
  Programmers are really interesting people you know, they have to be good puzzlers. They have to have quick minds. And they are often troubled in some interesting ways that is easy for me to fix. You get to tell them stories and be their mother. You are not really their mother but maybe a better version of mum because you kind of get what they work on. And I used to tell people it's like playing Wendy to the lost boys. You know they can tell you about te thing they are working on and you can actually track it.

Timecode: 0:04:45
    brian_behlendorf
  Can I explain what Open Source is to a six year old? That would be tough. Let's see, let me try. Let's say you are six years old and i am giving you a toy. ok. But i am telling you, you can't play with that toy, you can just look at it. Ok. Don't try to like bend it out of shape, don't try to like play it with your other toys. All you can do is look at that toy and maybe do one or two things with it, right. That's the way the world used to work with commercial software, with proprietary software. And still does. Open Source software, right, means, if I give you an open source toy you're allowed to do anything you want with that toy, you can tear it apart, you can build more toys like it and give it to all your friends. You can make and do something brand new that no one else has done. So you get to have a much more, you know, valuable toy then you used to have before. I don't if that would make any sense to a six year old. But that's how i would try perhaps.

Timecode: 0:05:50
    Narrator: eric_wiseman
  In the 1960's and 1970's software programmers were passing source code back and forth between the various computer science laboratories. In the early 1980's, the communities of programmers at the various universities began to break down and many of the programmers were hired by commercial companies who sold proprietary software. Richard Stallman, who was a graduate student at MIT in the 1970's, was angered of the prospects of proprietary software and decided to devote himself to creating free software. Free as in Freedom. In 1985, Stallman created the Free Software Foundation, a tax exempt charity, to support his work and that of his collaborators. Stallman's efforts were neither the first nor the only free software development efforts, but the Free Software Foundation's efforts were probably the most extensive, and the most visible. In 1997, Eric Raymond published an essay entitled The Cathedral and The Bazaar. In the essay, Raymond articulated the reasons why he believed that open source licenses resulted in higher quality and less expensive software. Shortly afterward, a coalition of individuals, led by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens, decided that the free software community needed better marketing. They formed the Open Source Initiative to a) promote the pragmatic benefits to the business community, and b) certify free/open source licenses that meet the Open Source Definition. The political aspect of the word free was replaced by the more pragmatic term Open Source. At a later time Bruce Perens wrote a letter to the community saying: "It's time to talk again about Free Software".

Timecode: 0:07:41
    sally_khudairi
  I think because it's not just one thing or one type of people, or one type of culture, or type of language or one way of thinking. Or one appraoch to doing things. That to me was actually really interesting with communities. The challenge is how do people work together. The challenge is to see how, if somebody has an idea that's very strong, how do you work together in a cooperative way. Instead of having someome coming in take tutorial and say this where I am coming from, this is what is interesting to me.

Chapter: Collaboration


Timecode: 0:08:12
    danese_cooper
  Collaboration is the whole thing. And so, if there's one thing that we could teach those kids it would be ... if they were forced to work collaboretively on developping projects instead of in ways that try to measure them against each other I think that would be a good thing to learn. But the hard knocks of what the business world is really like I don't know any way to do that besides having them actually live it. I have never seen a kid come out of school have a good picture of that. Sometimes you see kids that are sort of overcorrected in the other direction you know, everything is about profit, profit is the only important thing. That's not it either. There's definitely a middle ground.

Timecode: 0:08:58
    sally_khudairi
  You can make a lot of money out of technology that can solve a lot of companies problems. So looking at it where you're blending something that's very, very innovative in an open environment where people are saying, ok I am going to open up my kimono and i am going to show to everybody, what we have, how can you approve this, that to me was very, very surprising to see. Working in the web to the point that everybody was showing everybody their work was amazing and very refreshing at the same time. In fact to have the ability to built something and pop it up and get immediate response was so refreshing and wonderful. And highly unusual for my background.

Timecode: 0:09:33
    danese_cooper
  In fact this is the way how you get stuff done. And in almost every endeavour that I can think of it's collaborative. You literally can't be just one person. If Linus had tried to write the whole kernel it would have failed.

Timecode: 0:09:47
    sam_ruby
  I think things owned by a community will outlast anything owned by an individual. Individuals need change and the like. If you have a project where one individual is dominating the this project is ultimately going to be doomed to the whimps of that one individual. If that individual changes its mind or looses interest or whatever, the project may die. And I have been involved in projects where I was the individual. Gump was my creation and while I was the most active committer on it it died whether I was interested or not. And it actually took me backing down and have other people stepping up that made Gump successful.

Timecode: 0:10:30
    roy_fielding
  It takes more effort to create an Open Source project than it would just by doing it ourself. Generally speaking. What you get out of an open source project isn't so much the developer time as it is a different perspective. And a longer term interest than you might have internally as a company. There are only twelve or so people any given time in the entire history of the Apache group that were ever active on the project. So that's not a huge development team but because you have so many interest involved and so many people who are willing to comment on the project, that when a developer makes a small change that seems like a good idea, you have twenty or so experts on technology, and if not on that specific module, they are experts on programming or some other aspect of performance, they'll critique it right away. Because their interest is to keep the product in good shape. And they don't have the social barrier of critiquing each others software that you have frequently in companies.

Timecode: 0:11:40
    sam_ruby
  Technically I can go into a project and write most of the code myself in many cases But that's not always the right answer. The answer is to leave a large part of things undone, so that people who have a need, who actually feel like they want to go fix it and you encourage them to fix it themselves and even if the fixes themselves are not they way you'd necessarily have done it at least you get them participating in what they feel to be ownership. So getting people to feel ownership is the key.

Timecode: 0:12:08
    greg_stein
  That has a direct effect on how you interact with people in the real world, not just via the keyboard. In my business life I'm a manager and I think being able to talk with people on a team and get them all to sort come to a consensus like we do in a community is much better than telling them what to do and so I think, notion of consensus building and coorporation, really is a benefit for anybody.

Timecode: 0:12:38
    sally_khudairi
  It has changed my approach. I work with people very differently now. I expect more open collaboration, I expect open communication, I expect people to be upfront and you don't get that in every industry. Talk to a lawyer, obviously they are not going to reveal everything of what they are doing. But I think that's is leaving the world a better place. Opening up trust, opening up communication. Whether it's in technology or otherwise. I think that's absolutely relevant. I see myself as a standard bearer I'll be happy to carry that through and it's infecting different parts of my life whether it's professional or otherwise so you leave the world a better place than you became into it.

Timecode: 0:13:13
    henri_bergius
  You actually can feel that you are doing good things for the community, for the human society. For example we have worked with some projects in developing countries like in South Africa, where we have helped the local NGOs and aid agencies to be more efficient by using open source software and that kind of things are important.

Timecode: 0:13:40
    ken_coar
  I have been the victim of proprietary software so many times that I can see the value of the open methodology. That comes right down to, if nothing else, if you don't like it, fix it yourself. And it gives you the ability to do that.

Timecode: 0:14:00
    greg_stein
  In the US we are very used to paying for software, because a lot of big software companies are based here. But there are so many more people around the world that, you know, it's just not possible.

Timecode: 0:14:10
    henri_bergius
  Before open source became mainstream mostly software was really a centralized economy. All the software was produced in the United States and it was shipped globally. But with open source it's becoming more localized in the sense that organizations or companies really making the decisions building the software are the local ones. So there are the companies in Switzerland, in Finland and in Georgia that really make things. It's not something that get's pushed down from Silicon Valley.

Chapter: First Encounter


Timecode: 0:14:47
    ben_hyde
  When I started programming back in the 60s there was software which you could get under...now we know you'd really have to think of what kind of licence you were going to get it under. But at that time it just seemed that you were getting it for free. And there was plenty of software like that around, particularly in the university environments. Lots of the software that i used during that period you know, was basically free. You just got it from someone at the university or the hardware vendor would have a lot of software that had been contibuted by users around the hardware and alike. I would say that the first time that it started to become meaningful to contribute back to the original version of the software, that probably didn't start to happen in a useful way until the 80s. Because in the 70s you could send patches back to the vendor and he might send them back to the user that had contributed that but it would be very tedious and it wouldn't work. In the 80s when you started to have the internet in universities and had the e-mail, then you could start to send patches or comments or suggestions back to the authors, or to the author, usually an author.

Timecode: 0:16:15
    brian_behlendorf
  I was you know, pretty young when it all started and i was just doing what actually seemed like every one else way doing. Certainly Apache didn't invent the concept of people working together over the internet to write software. That was how the internet was built. It was built through standards bodies like the ITF, which were radically inclusive standards bodies. These were groups of engeneers and students and other people or anybody who had an interest in deciding how the DNS standards works or SfTP standards, could join these mailing lists and work on these open standards. And often the same people who wrote the standards worked software to implementing them, like "Sandmail" and "bind" and even in some ways "unix" itself. It wasn't really open source until much later but in the early days it was written by academia. It was written by people sharing code and sharing information online and that seemed to be the best way to do that. So really when we showed up on the scene in 1995, we were 15 years behind the curve. It had been well established that working together online was the right way to do it.

Timecode: 0:17:33
    sally
  As the web master for the world wide web consortium, that was my title, i owned the world's first web server. So the ?seron server and the ?seron website was something that i inherited. It was running Apache eventually, we had done a migration to Apache, but i didn't know who was invilved with it. And at the time it was the Apache group, so it was a very very small group of people very informal. And i heard that the Apache Software Foundation was going to actually incorporate as a foundation. And i said if you're going to go out to the public you can't go out without me. You need someone to help you with publicising this. This is a huge thing for the industry and there was a lot of interest in Apache at the time but you know, who's going to represent you and who's going to do your communications for you? And so i came on board.

Timecode: 0:18:25
    roy_fielding
  I was working as a graduate student in UC ?? and i was doing work on statistics and got bored out of my mind. And so started looking for other things to do. At the time the web was a new toy. It wasn't seriousely used and the idea we had was to do a tool for maintenace for the web. So what happened i learned pearl language and started working with some very early web related scripts by Askin Newstras ? who's a blue bostrian whasksmith? i'm not sure. But anyway i actually met him here in Switzerland, in Geneva. Basically what i did was take his early scripts, open source scripts that he'd developped and i put them together into a library called ?/pearl. Basically it was the first real web pearl library for pearl, who was also the first one independent of the ?seron library. The C-based, a programmers' library. And as a result that got me involved in essentially the protocal developement of the web, in terms of being to be able to understand what the standards mean. Trying to find out better ways to explain them because at the time there were all losely documented hypertexted. And also interacting with different developers in open source project.

Timecode: 0:19:45
    sam_ruby
  In 1999 i was exploring indi? script languages with Java and Servoits? and i was experimenting with websperes and ? phb. I'd started to get that working. And i made a post to the phb mailing list saying i have some idea on how to integrate Java in phd. And i put one post out of the mailing list saying: i have some ideas on how to do this. I'd had previous experience with common?, had a common interface to phb. So i said ok, i think i can do something similar for Java. And the first response i got was where's? the cvs account. So imediately i was given the responsability that i could do whatever i felt like. I had never used cvs in the past, my first experience was i just said i got an idea. And they said here go on with it. Which was rather shocking to me. Just be given the keys to go fix whatever i wanted. For about three or four months i worked rather sourly re-aranging ? the phd and it's still part of the product.

Chapter: Incentives


Timecode: 0:20:55
    ken_coar
  I would be less than honest if i didn't admit that part of it is the attraction of the potential for fame and glory. People who get to know me for what i do and what i believe in more in this environement as they would for instance inside hp or some other big company. But i think it's part of it. There's some things that i believe very very strongly. Where i am now, i have, the positions i'm in now, i can have an impact in, not imposing those belives on anyone, but in making sure that they represent it. And basically the belives involve fair treatment.

Timecode: 0:21:55
    sam_ruby
  I like social engeneering as well as technical engeneering. Writing code, i enjoy that very much and i'll do that simply as a diversion....??????. So that's how i'd have a diversion. But what gets me excited about most projects, is the social engeneering. How to do things so that more people feel involved and actually want to participate. I actually view that also with engeneering. Just as much as technical engeneering.

Timecode: 0:22:21
    danese_cooper
  I think as long as i feel like it's doing good, i mean i'd like there to be a day in my lifetime when free technology is available prevaisibly enough, that is really is available to most of the worls and there is less of a divisual divide effect. I could see, you know, finding something else to do at that point.

Timecode: 0:22:47
    sally
  My history has been, you know, from a web user going to the consortium and saying you guys have an image problem. What you're doing is great, and if you are who you really say you are, people need to know about you as not just a matter of having the television saying it's just good enough for us and our friends. There's standards involved wether it's standard with a capital s, or de facto standard. Common use, people want to get involved with that. How do you do that? So if i can help make that more accessible i think i'm doing my part.

Timecode: 0:23:14
    greg_stein
  Some of the stuff that i have done has really changed things for people. The web ? i've done, working on ucvs, on subversion, each of those projects, i see people using them. And so you know, it's interesting. The things that i've done i can go wahh, you know. People are using that stuff. Does it really change, so the landscape? A revolutionary is really somebody who makes a drastic change. I think i've been doing it more incrementally.

Timecode: 0:23:50
    kit_blake
  I think real radicals and real revolutionary are extreme personalities who do extreme things. And i'm not in that group. I push the envelope slightly but i'm not out there beyond this.

Timecode: 0:24:07
    ken_coar
  If you consider revolutionary someone who wishes to change the current order, then if you consider the current order to be closed software paradigm, then yes I am a revolutionary.

Chapter: Groups and Politics


Timecode: 0:24:35
    ben_hyde
  What is an open source projetc but a group of people who've decided to form a group around the common cause of solving some particular problem? Or what's a square dancing club but a bunch of people who've decided to get together and do square dancing together because that's fun for them and they need others to do it and alike? One of the things i think when i think of the group, is i think that probably the most important thing is that you need to encourage the formation of groups of all size. And that you need to encourage participation in many groups, that you can be part of many groups. Not just the family, or not just the nation, not just your ethnic group, but many things and i think that at some level this is what modernity is about.

Timecode: 0:25:35
    ken_coar
  If you get more than ten people together the first thing they're going to do is form a comitee. A comitee is the only known form of life with twenty legs and no brain. It's a natural thing, we have a tendency to burocrate burocracy in order to regulate our lives. Because it's an aspect of working together, you come up with rules to keep people from getting too much friction against each other. And then you get people who want to add rules so that only people who believe the same thing as they do and think the way they do are allowed. That's the sort of thing you have to fight against.

Timecode: 0:26:15
    bertrand_delacretaz
  Yeah, as soon as you have people and groups you have politics. And it depends on the willingness of the people to stay together.

Timecode: 0:26:30
    ben_hyde
  Much of my view of open source has been that it's a natural progression of a social structure that arises out of the increasing amount of communication. There's always communication in all of this complicational substrate. And that's just enabled mechanisms that i was aware of as early as the 90s to become much more formalised. Much more for the..?

Timecode: 0:26:58
    ken_coar
  At the beginning you have a small number of very large reflexion points. At the next generation you have a large number of smaller ones. And the next generation you have even more reflexion points. I think that's the sort of thing that's happeneing. Yes, we have at the beginning a few very powerful, very loud voices, and it is growing. More people are getting involved. The individual fact is probably less, but the overall curve is larger through their efforts.
voice of Michi
Timecode: 0:27:38
    sally
  I think the sustaining of community is important. In many of my clients and careers and jobs i've had over the past decade in technology has been interesting because in many instances i've been the ongoing woman in the team. Especially on a management level. And the role i find myself playing unintentionally, you know it happens that hey guys we need someone to get folks to communicate, let's talk to each other. Let's do a little bit more of the social elements outside, let's go and have lunch together once in a while. Instead of being in front of a computer communicating with each other on IM with a wall in between you, and helping breaking down those lines of communication. Yeah, i think there is a software side to it. The challenge also was competing on a men's environment has forced me at least to, you know, the testosteron is pumping a lot more than i would think, and i'm pretty agressive as it is??. So to be in a situation in order to compete, is taking on masculine qualities. I find a lot of women a more supportal, like marketting, public relations and those types of things. Female programmers? Female developpers? a lot less frequent.

Timecode: 0:28:45
    roy_fielding
  People are affected by their pre-groups they associate with and certainly open source is a very strong pre-group. Once people get over that initial feeling of not wanting to expose their work to others, it happens eventually because, as they get involved in the communication and mailing list they begin to see not so much other people's acceptance about the code, but other people exposing worse code that they would ever develop themselves. So it's kind of a wierd effect that when you can see it's so easy for you to find fixes in other people's codes, it no longer becomes as much of a concern that your own code may have problems in it.

Timecode: 0:29:37
    sam_ruby
  If you have to get to the point where you write down specific rules, you have to do this, that and the other and you got specific rules and guidelines and whatever you are almost at the point of admiting defeat. What you got are rules are there to put in place for when people don't trust one another. And so that they can say her's the boundaries that i can depend on alike. And when you lose that basic bit of trust, most things are gone. What makes Apache work is that people who trust one another are working in the same direction. In one person vision project is doomed to failure. What you need is a community. And if you end up having a group of people where two or three disparate communities start forming and it's not just one individual on the outside, but two, three different groups, often the radiance? will just be that they'll go their separate paths. And when you're given the opportunity to do that, sometimes one of the two paths pears out.

Timecode: 0:30:35
    ken_coar
  Principals that we, i suppose at base?? is the ability to fork. So if the organisation becomes too high bound and people just getting caught up in its own rules, and not being productive any more. They are able to take the code, and the community, and their ideas, and form their own organisation that they can run the way they think is right. Thomas Jefferson said something along the lines of, "he who lights his candle from mine darkens me not at all".

Timecode: 0:31:18
    ben_hyde
  Open source is full of evry smart people. And there isn't a lot of scarcity along the ground in ressources, and i guess there's a lot of room to solve problems in. So it sure wouldn't make lots of stumbles but i'm thourough optimistic that's it's all going to, that we will find ways to solve the problems that face us. And we do. We regularly run into problems, and these are the problems that naturally come upon institutions as they grow.

Timecode: 0:31:47
    sally
  I think part of the challenge with that is that you have not just a technical element that you're solving, you have a big cultural element that you're solving. An open source community in Asia is going to have a very different feeling than an open source community in the United States, Europe, South Africa, you know. I think that that's acultural thing associated with it. Who sets the rules? Is there a global? The challenge is that, how do you continue to have people there without chaos happening? How do you it so that you encourage people to participate but who sets the rules? Who says this is good and not good? I don't know.

Chapter: FUD


Timecode: 0:32:30
    ken_coar
  "Well i heard about this open software stuff and wasn't that responsible for Al Gore losing the election?" "Gosh, that open software stuff man, didn't they use that to poison all those kids with tobacco?"

Timecode: 0:32:49
    Narrator: eric_wiseman
  FUD is an abreviation for Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. The term FUD was first defined by Gene Amdahl, after he left iBM in 1970 to found his own company. He described FUD as the fear, uncertainty and doubt that IBM sales people installed in the mind of potential customers who might be considering competitors' equipement or software. The new hackers dictionary edited by Eric Raymond describes this tactic as "good things will happen to people who stuck to IBM, but dark shadows doom ? over the future of competitors' equipement or software". The term fud is now used in many contexts. The new hackers dictionary defines this general usage as any kind of desinformation used as a competitive weapon. For example in politics, this tactic is often employed in an attempt to alter public opinion about a particular issue or opposition group.

Timecode: 0:33:55
    ken_coar
  Ken Coar: Fear Uncertainty and doubt only affect thoses who haven't formulated their own convictions. And believe in them inwardwardly?.

Timecode: 0:34:11
    ben_hyde
  You know so you're the phone company and you do a little org, and everything is great, and you're providing, you know, telephone services to billions of people and everybody's talking to their mothers and it's a wonderful thing. And deals are being made and people are talking to their mothers, love is happening. And meanwhile some technology is marching along. And it's allowing radios to do everything you do, and it's allowing wires that the power company has to do the same thing you do, and alike, and this is all getting kind of frightening because suddenly technology is about to wash up on your beach and destroy your castle. And this makes you very sad. And so at that point you're afraid and you're thinking about what to do and you turn to your install base and you say not to worry, we will take you into the future. Because the future is bright, and we're going to take you there, we'll take care of you not to worry. And you do it personally because you're afraid of the future.

Timecode: 0:35:25
    sally
  I learned foreign technology obviousely because i'd never heard of it before in the creative space. But you know, a lot of companies use that as their main marketing strategy, saying let's scare everybody into wanting to our solutions. Scaring everybody into dropping everything they're doing, looking for cover, running to us.

Timecode: 0:35:36
    ken_coar
  The open software methodology hits them where they live. They make their money out of basically bullying their customers. Convincing their customers that they are the one true way. If you have a hundred different developpers working on a hundred different products that compete with yours, you can't buy them all off. They come up like grass. If you have like, you know, five close competitors, there are good chances you could buy them off. So that you remain, the big knowers?.

Timecode: 0:36:13
    ben_hyde
  You know one of the subtext that runs all through this, is that there are vasted interests in the economy. Who provide some vital service or another. And have solved some sociatal problems that need to be solved, and they have solved it. And as a result they own economic power around that. And one of the problems that those economic entities have, if you think of them as being like a creature in nature, is that they would like to survive into the next time frame. And one of the things that threatens their survival in the next time frame is technological change. Open source is a way to rude around those bottlenecks if those places turn out to be too stargy, to move forward, or unable to move forward. But that doesn't mean that we're imuned to the same syndroms. That we, you know, we get to a place where we have a solution and a huge install base and now we have the problem that this huge install base has expections that we'll take care of them. That we will see to helping them get into the furture. So they come to us, so they say, well what about the future? And that's a very strange syndrom because that project at that point is kind of going: oh, no, we're bored you know. We've got onto something more interesting. And all the users are going to go: wait a minute, i'm in big trouble here. I got to get to the future and you've left the road?

Timecode: 0:38:00
    brian_behlendorf
  I think in the old world, the old proprietary software model, you had to scare your customers away from your competitors. These guys were always cut through. It was very much like political campains. That was the way that everyone operated, it was a very cut through kind of environement. There was no reward for companies really to work together. You know especially if they were competitors. In the open source world, there is a reward for competitors to work together. Even though IBM and Sun and Bluecode and Spikesource and Covalands and all these companies often compete with each other for the same customer, they need to work together. And if they spread fud around either of their parties, the run the risk of being ostracised. They run the risk of finding that they can't participate in their collaboration and benefit from it. I hope i'll see companies spread less fud, when they're part of the open source world because they know they need to work with each other and that just destroys relashionships.

Timecode: 0:39:11
    sally
  That happens on a commercial base as individually fear, uncertainty and doubt, obviousely, when you're talking about change. And transformative change. And how do you get along when you're involved in a community that needs the change to grow. People are resistant to doing it because change equals fear or fear of change equals pain, or change does equal uncertainty, you know, we don't know where we're going to go. How do you deal with that as an individual within a community? How do you have individuation of your developements, and risking being alone? I think at the end of the day, for an open source community member, you either leave the community start your own or do something different. Commercially the applications the capacity for driving people to use your product based on fud has been tremendous.

Timecode: 0:39:58
    danese_cooper
  Because open source was started by developpers for developpers, there's a tendency to focus on developper contribution as the most important contribution. And i'm not sure that that's necessarily serving the open source movement. I talk to developpers all the time. Who are bitter that cooperations have went? to defray, the use of communicaties are getting so big, that governments are starting to get involved. They're upset about all that because they wanted again to create a laywer-free, marketing-free zone. Where they could just you know rely on the technology. And i feel badly for them because they think that is going to be more than that and that's probably going to chase some of them away, because that's really not what they were looking for. I think that open source in a way is an attempt by some developpers to find that neverland again, where they never have to deal with another laywer, or another marketter, markettier we call them in California. They never have to be told that something they've written is brilliant but needs to be crippled to make it sellable.

Chapter: Commercialisation


Timecode: 0:41:11
    patrice_bertrand
  I like the idea that we are all building a common software ressources that we all share and we're all adding to it and it gets to be larger and more and more sophisticated and we're all working on, building the same wealth of software technology.

Timecode: 0:41:42
    danese_cooper
  That impulse to make the technology as good as it can be, and not worry so much about the profit is i think a lot of where open source came from. And in a sense it's a neverworld, because the profit always enters into it. And (un?) fortunately for better or worse. Since the gift economy collapsed whenever it did, you know, money and the exchange of money turns out to be an important facette of human endavour, it just is. And following the money, finding out how to make the people with the money believe that doing it in a way that helps everybody is going to help them ultimately more than doing it the other way. The magic of open source is that it's kind of forcing companies to do better things that they might otherwise had done. And i think that that's really an interseting side effect.

Timecode: 0:42:35
    patrice_bertrand
  For many proprietary solutions 80% of the price that the end user pays for a license goes to marketting efforts. It's very often the case for like US products and they build a salesforce in, or European countries and they hire highly-paid people to go and conquer larger counts customers like this. And this costs a lot and maybe 20 or maybe 30 % of what the end user pays finally goes back to the developper teams in the uS.

Timecode: 0:43:21
    sally
  What has changed? A lot has changed. A lot of good things have changed. Apache, it's interesting because open source in general has become much more common. A lot more companies are saying ok, it's not just a matter of a bunch of our developpers who are gigging in a closet coming up with something that's cool. There's actual commercial applicability towards it. You can't really make money of the open source movement. What you can do is have market share. And that clic happened with companies saying: There's something there for us. We might not own all the doors, we might not own all the machines, we might not have all the entire software solution. But what we do have, is we have the developper community, we have the users, we have the market based that way, we have market loyalty. Very intersting because all of a sudden the money that they're spending on marketing can be reduced. Maybe it's not, but can be reduced because there's so much more viral application. Someone comes up with a cool idea, also spreading around the world much fast. Before it used to be just developpers and individuals and now we're having companies'governements who are getting involved, China, open source requirements. It's amazing to see that.

Timecode: 0:44:22
    henri_bergius
  It's good that open source is becoming more wide spread, it's good that more companies are doing it. Seeing it as a strategic alternative. I mean of course, it also means that there's competition, if you provide a comodity service. If you are just a linux guru, or linux expert, you know how to set up a network with linux and all that stuff. There's going to be a bunch of companies that will offer competing services, but if you are more specialised you are actually a contributor in some project then you will probably have some ? against this.

Timecode: 0:45:02
    kit_blake
  I do expect unfortunately some dilution of the open source idea. For a lot of the companies in the middle, the practical companies, it all comes down to what do the cost end up?. Where do they end up at the end of the year? And it's something that we always explain to customers when we're selling the idea of open source, it's not free. There's lots of other costs that are associated with it and at the end of the year, there's sizable number there. So i expect that a lot of companies and organisations will...the open source license? Yes, there's certain benefit to that in terms of longevity and survivability of the code, but most of them are looking more at the short term, and that is what is the number at the bottom line at the end of the year.

Timecode: 0:45:48
    brian_behlendorf
  So i think companies entering open source, it makes sense it's the right thing. Personally speaking i've always wanted to see people make a living and be able to pay enough to have a place to live and raise a family doing the things that they love. And if open source developpers can write open source software and be able to give it away, and still get paid a salary, i feel like what's better than that? That's like the best.

Timecode: 0:46:25
    sally
  Open source is sexy, to say we're Apache funleague. This is now a new thing for people, because they say hey, that's a marketing, that's a component we can use to our advantage, why not do that? Open source is very sexy now, people now know what lamp?architectures are. Who would have thought? You know like to see something like linux in fortune magazine it's amazing but it's saying, you know, that it's an underground movement that's changed, revolutionised the way the industry is happening. How can companies not figure out not to jump on that?

Timecode: 0:46:55
    greg_stein
  The origins of open source are really in the hobbyists. People at school, people in their dinn, and office and homes and just having fun on the computer, seeing what they can create, what they can craft with their developement. That's never going to go away, so no matter how much a corporation might want to sponsor, contribute or try to affect control, there's always going to be a very large element opposed to that. They can't do anything to control those hobbyists.

Timecode: 0:47:28
    roy_fielding
  If for example half the people working on a project are doing it for free, in their spare time, and the other half of the people are doing it on behalf of a company, and they're getting paid hourly for it. The interest level isn't entirely about the software itself. It's more finishing a task for work. There become different social conflicts that happen inside an open source project. And there has to be ways to balance that. Both internly, that people who are working in open source project have to be aware of that. First of all they have to be aware that everyone who's involved in participating have their own reasons for participation. They don't all have to be altruistic.

Chapter: Prospects


Timecode: 0:48:11
    sally
  Kids are hands on with computers all the time now, i don't think people have a problem with computers, or maths, or anything like that that they had in the past. I think generationally maths was a "male" thing, and the more formal structured linear sciences. Science in general was considered to be more of a man's domain. So and women would do pretty things like arts and write and be more froufrou, and i think that's changing. I think women in science have really had to prove themselves. But we have strong, very strong wonderful women in science. As we do maths, i don't think there should be a differenciator between the two but it's there. But i think more kids are going to come up and i don't think it's going to matter as much. Kids are much more relaxed and much more selfconfident. So we will get them, there'll be younger, but there'll be there.

Timecode: 0:48:57
    kit_blake
  I have a strong feeling of déjà-vu. It's the open source...there's an awful lot of parallels with the excitement of the sixties when the people at Woodstock and what do they call it? the summer of love. They thought that they were forming a new society and 10 years later there were some fundamental changes but i wouldn't call it a new society. I think it's the same with open source.

Timecode: 0:49:19
    brian_behlendorf
  I think we're seeing the software industry move away from this factory kind of style model to one that is just much more prevasive inside of all these other industries. And very services kind of orientated. So any way i think that that shift is a shift in favour of open source. Because it's a shift in favour of collaborating around common technologies. You still want to have...like if you were an insurance company, you still want to have a little bit of software you keep to yourself that allows you to compete against other insurance companies. But by and large most of the software that you use is plumbing, it's comodity. It's very simple, so why not share that with a bunch of other people out there and work on that, improve on that with other people out there?

Timecode: 0:50:04
    danese_cooper
  In the developping world, there isn't enough innovative contribution happening. Coming out of big economies like India and China and Brazil. Brazil is starting to get there. It's because they're busy boot strapping themselves. Well i understand the need to boot strap, i do, i get it that you got to start from nowhere you know, after living in Marocco for two years. Convincing them that donating to a commons, would enhance their personal reputations and maybe make them more employable, seems to be a good way to get them involved. But it's really troubling to them that any potentially leveragable?, innovation of ressource would be given away for free. It really bothers them that there isn't a weaping of benefit before them. The freeness occurs you know and i ... it's a challenge because i'm convinced that we will all die, we and the open source movement will die of volunteer fatigue if we don't get some of those large economies to not only leverage our work but also to contribute. It's my current crusade, trying to get them to do that.

Timecode: 0:51:13
    ken_coar
  Fame and Glory, sincere belief in what i'm doing, the chance to make a difference, that's always a good one, you know. Would you rather do something that you believe in, where you can actually make things better, as opposed to something you believe in but nobody will notice. I suppose it feeds back into the fame and glory aspect. But there's a certain personal satisfaction you can take from saying: gosh, you know, things are better and i did it.

Timecode: 0:51:44
    sally
  I don't know if i'm going to stay in technology forever. I didn't come from this space, but it's changed my life profoundly and if there's something i can do to help ???and get to the next level, if there's something i can do to help premiate another group or help improve it somehow i'm happy to do that. But those hobbyists that you mentioned they will create soemthing new and they're doing it. More people are doing blogging and even blogging is? people are going to the next thing after that so... I don't know what it's going to be but i'm sure i'll be there.

Timecode: 0:52:16
    kit_blake
  I really care deeply about open source and the whole collaboration, the people we work with, the community or scene. I'll be very sorry if some day, some time from now, a year, three years, it's hard to say how fast the cycle will be, if that doesn't exist any more. In the sense that it does now. On the other hand it's inevitable. It's a life cycle, you can't stop your cat from getting any older. That happens and so i accept the situation but i still find it sad.

Timecode: 0:53:00
    sam_ruby
  We've got more things that we could possibly grow into than we can absorb in any one time so it's a good problem to have.

CREDITS

F U D - Fear Uncertainty Doubt

Directed and produced by Michael Wechner
Edited and co-produced by Marcel Ramsay
Narrated by Eric Wiseman

Interview Crew, Zürich, OSCOM 4

Director of Photography Siamak Parhizi
1st Camera Assistant Vanessa Meister
2nd Camera Assistant Thomas ComiottoSimon Litwan
Interviewer Michael Wechner

Interview Crew, Las Vegas, ApacheCon 2004

Director of Photography Marcel Ramsay
1st Camera Assistant Gregor Imboden
Interviewer Michael Wechner

Postproduction

Film Editor Marcel Ramsay
Sound Mixer Roman Bergamin

Music

It's over (padded re-mix) by The Devoted Few
My Pal by Peabody
Mr Webber by The Devoted Few

Special Thanks To Interview Subjects

Arje Cahn
Ben Hyde
Bertrand Delacretaz
Brian Behlendorf
Chalu Kim
Christian Stocker
Danese Cooper
Erik Hatcher
Greg Stein
Gregor Imboden
Henri Bergius
Ken Coar
Kit Blake
Patrice Bertrand
Roy Fielding
Sally Khudairi
Sam Ruby
Stefano Mazzocchi

Also Special Thanks To

Nick Carr and NONZERO records
Family Wiseman
Ben Ambar
Marcel Ramsay
Karin Brucker

A Michi Ramsay Film
Copyright © Wyona Pictures
All Rights Reserved