Browse Interview Clips

I started volunteering there and I made a little magazine, you know, compiling their Billboard chart...And so that's sort of a through line in my, in my career. It's like an aesthetic and cultural and philosophical political preference, you know.

Andy was like, I've seen the light. Software should be free, at least the operating system...Software that should be part of the commons in the way that the phone system is, is a utility.

Mitchell connected with Mitch and they were talking about, can we create a gnome fund, a mozilla Foundation? Uh, and I think the two of them put their heads together. And out of that came the Mozilla Foundation.

It's diverse community and people are there for different reasons...overindexes on folks with those drives building a better world and chasing our curiosity and sharing it with folks.

We believe that technology has a lot of risks...but we also have faith, you know, that technology can solve problems. And if we stay in the driver's seat, we can use this technology to solve important problems.

Heather Meeker: How'd you decide to get involved in/create this movement of open source? Bruce Perens: Well, obviously, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants because the work of Richard Stallman preceeded mine, and the basic concepts of open source are those created by Richard for free software. What we did with open source was create a marketing program for the free software concept which would reach different people. So, Richard's approach was very well suited for programmers, but it depended on the apriori understanding of the usefulness of software freedom. And our approach was more based on just having a big collection of software that you could build, whether it was a business or any project that you wanted to, you could build these upon, you could share the development of the software and my feeling personally was that the philosophy would come later for a lot of the people who participated.

Bruce Perens: We did not achieve all of our goals. Actually, I would have liked it if people did appreciate the need for software freedom, which is something that is becoming more meaningful today, especially in the context of privacy and people seeing the large web companies, as sort of privacy eating giants, don't really have your best interest in mind. And open source, though very successful, I think, has evolved a extremely capable open source, exploitation industry. So, I'm not quite so happy about that, I actually am working on solutions.

Bruce Perens: I joined, I guess, there must have been 50 people on the whole project at the time, and eventually became the Debian project leader. Ian went on to other things and took the project and did something that no one knew was possible at that time, which was that Ian had made all of the core of the project, everything that it needed to boot and run and install packages, had been produced by Ian. And I took it and obviously didn't have the time to work on all of these packages and fanned them out to 50 people who I only knew from email correspondence on the net. I was a Debian project leader, I had never actually met another Debian developer, and fanned it out. And these 50 people who also did not physically know each other combined to create a working, running, operating system. And obviously, the software was very modular and that certainly helped us get away with that but also the fact that open source let us all sort of look over each other's shoulders and help each other was very useful as well.

Bruce Perens: The whole idea of BusyBox is it's all of the commands that you might need to install an operating system on a computer made smaller so that they all would fit on a floppy disk. Okay, that's how far back this goes. We had those three-and-a-half inch plastic floppy disks and the kernel fit on one and all of the runtime and BusyBox fit on the second one. And so, you would boot your system using these two floppy disks and then you would be able to put a CD in the CD drive and install the entire distribution from it.

Bruce Perens: Um, I think that the software collaboration was very successful. A lot of the organizational efforts were not. For example, during this time, I drove the creation of software in the public interest, non-profit that's still very active in supporting open source projects, and there was vast distrust among the Debian developers of software in the public interest.

Elisabetta Mori: Can you talk about your childhood? Cat Allman: Sure. I was born in Oakland, in Oakland, California, in 1958, and raised in the East Bay Hills, looking out across San Francisco Bay to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco with my older brother Eric Allman, creator, original creator of Send Mail, the mail transfer agent. Went to public schools, ending up at University of California, Santa Cruz, where I studied American Studies, so not engineering, not computer science. Growing up with an older brother who was a science child prodigy put me on another path for a while, though because of his interests we grew up with like boxes of punch cards, which it turns out if you make a cone out of them and staple them and spray paint them gold, you can make a Christmas wreath out of them...

Cat Allman: Fast forward a little bit and my first job with free and open source software was at Mount Zainu. Mount Zainu is Unix trademark backwards. Our logo was a little mountain range. I was a contractor, not an employee, but so I was working on coordinating the company's involvement with DECUS, which was the DEC User Group Conference. And found myself really kind of engaged with the political idea of software that had been created at a publicly funded institution as being free and available to the rest of us to use. Really the academic method of, you know, you come up with an idea and other people build on it and civilization rolls along...

Cat Allman: So my brother around that time, that would be 1997, had a former colleague who they were talking together about doing something with Sendmail in terms of starting a business around it. My brother wouldn't hire me because nepotism, he's a very principled guy, so I started harassing his business partner to give me a job as they were putting this idea of a company together. And he finally gave up and hired me. So I was employee number five at Sendmail Inc...

Cat Allman: So they eventually broke down and hired me. And yeah, it was very exciting to try working at a big company. I have to say my first day was spent in a windowless room in a group for an orientation with all these extraordinarily perky videos. And I went home in tears because I thought oh my god I've made a terrible mistake. But unlike most people at least at the time who applied to Google I went into it knowing who I was going to work for and what I was going to work on. I didn't go to work at Google, I went to work on free and open source software at Google...

Cat Allman: Challenges going forward to the FLOSS ecosystem. Something that I'm really concerned about, And I'm conflicted about it is, FLOSS is one of those 20 plus year overnight successes. It's been around a long time, but it's only now that people, businesses are appreciating how essential it is. At the same time, they still want the code for free. I mean, lots of businesses like Google are understanding the importance of working with projects so that they are sustainable, they have the economic and other resources that they need to continue. But what I worry about is the psychological aspects...

Karen Herman: Did, did you have any interest in computing or computers as a kid? Deb Goodkin: So, um, we didn't have a computer when I was growing up. So that was before home computers. And so I really, the only thing I knew about computers was really the word processors, which were fancy typewriters. And because my dad was also a writer, we had one at home. And so that was pretty novel. And but, but I didn't grow up with computers. So I didn't know anything, I really didn't know anything about them. And, and so it really wasn't until I went to college that I was exposed to computers. So really, before that, I mean, part of my growing up, and maybe because I had brothers too, I built a lot of things, I was really into, like building models, and we would build like, model cars and model airplanes and things like that. So I've always enjoyed that building things.

Karen Herman: It's interesting, because you said that you really didn't have, you didn't know anything about computers till you got to college. How did you then decide to major in it? Deb Goodkin: Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. Because when I started college, actually, I was focused more on business, because like I said, before, the plan was really for me to take over my dad's business. But it wasn't something I was really interested in. And my mom actually helped me try to figure out what I was good at. And I grew up thinking, never thinking I was good at math, but my mom would always tell me how she was good at math. I don't even know why it would come up. But I knew that I knew my mom was good at math. And so I realized that I was also very good at math. And so in doing like an assessment test at that time, computer science, and engineering actually came up as a strength. And I thought, you know what, I, this would be a great major, because I could get a job. And so that was really why I went in that direction.

Karen Herman: What did you, what was the thing that you learned the most about at IBM? Deb Goodkin: At IBM, it gave me a really good foundation on how to develop code. And so you didn't really have like a hacking mentality then, like you have now. And, and, and that's fine, too. It's just that you really had to think through, what are you trying to do? And then how are you going to do that? And then, And then, as like a junior level engineer, I would actually, so I'd have to come up with my plan or my design. And then you actually had a design that you hand wrote. So it wasn't a programming language yet. And, and so we actually refer to it as pseudocode. And then you would actually meet with others, your colleagues, and, and people would review your design. And so you wouldn't actually implement it until it got approved. So, so it was a great way to learn because if someone saw like a hole in that, or even a, you know, a better way to do something, you would learn from that. And so taking that time to think through, you know, what, really, what are you trying to achieve? And then how can you get there? I, that was a good skill to have, and philosophy to have. Also working with others to learn how to collaborate with others. I mean, you learn that in school, but, but now, you know, you have a real product. And, and the way IBM worked back then, too, is sometimes you had competing teams. And so they had the money to fund, like, similar teams, you didn't always know it. And, and so whoever came out with better product, you know, basically won. You didn't look at it like that, basically, they would cancel your product, project, and you'd move on to something else. So, because things were so new, back then, too. So you didn't, there was so much possibility for innovation. And so I think that philosophy, that IBM was able to do that, was great. I also learned a lot from my manager, who happened to be a female, and her background was electrical engineering, too. And she was such a good role model for me, as well as a lot of the other people there. So, so it was a great experience starting out.

Karen Herman: How did you first, um, you know, hear about the FreeBSD foundation and how did, how were you connected? Deb Goodkin: So, um, the FreeBSD foundation, I didn't know anything about. And, um, so, uh, my friend had contacted me and she said, so she was working at this, um, aerospace company here in Boulder. And, um, so I'm here in Boulder, Colorado. Um, and she said, I, there's a guy at my company. So she worked at an HR and she said, there's this guy in my company. He's running a nonprofit and he's looking for someone to run it. And I told him that I had a friend who is an engineer and looking for some work. And so anyway, so she connected us and that was the first time I had heard of FreeBSD and the FreeBSD foundation. And so, um, so the guy she was talking about was Justin Gibbs, who's the founder of the FreeBSD foundation. He's here in Boulder and he had started the foundation, I think it was about four or five years before that. And I bet he was working full time. And so it was growing to the point where he really couldn't run it. He, and he saw so much potential for growth that he wanted to find someone to run the company.

Karen Herman: Talk about, so, so the, the FreeBSD foundation and then there's the FreeBSD, how, how does that work, um, in terms of, you know, how you work together or, or don't? Deb Goodkin: Yeah, we're two totally different organizations. And so the FreeBSD project is, uh, made up of volunteers and, uh, from around the world and it's not a legal entity. And we have the FreeBSD foundation and, uh, which is a legal entity. It's, uh, um, here in the US we, it's, um, based, uh, when the IRS, um, uh, not certification, but, um, a definition, um, is this that we're a 501 C three. And so there's different types of nonprofits here. And so we're for the public good. And so our whole purpose is to support the project. So if FreeBSD went away, then we would most likely go away because we wouldn't have a purpose anymore.

Karen Herman: Talk about the international aspect of it as well. Deb Goodkin: The, yeah, it's, it's a US focus because like the foundation, we're a US corporation, but, and I don't know, I can't remember what the breakout is of number of like US contributors to outside the US, but you have people from all over the world and, and, um, you know, we have lots of people in Europe and, uh, people in, uh, Ukraine, uh, Asia, uh, South America who are contributing to the project. And, um, and so you have, so you have different cultures, uh, and, and it's interesting. Um, you know, it's, it's interesting. Um, I think it's really important for us to figure out how to work well together.

Karen Herman: What is your biggest challenge? Deb Goodkin: Um, I would say the biggest challenge that, well, a couple of things, uh, one is for the project, one's for us. So one would be getting the money that to do this work, to fund the work. Cause we, there's, there's so many things we know we can help with and we just don't have the resources to do it. And, uh, we have these conversations all the time, like, oh, if we had someone who could step in to do this, that would be so beneficial. And, but we can't, can't do it cause we don't have the funding.

Karen Herman: Have you had any challenges in your career, um, being a woman in sort of a man dominated field? Deb Goodkin: Um, well, yeah, I have, um, I mean, even, you know, starting out in college, um, there weren't that many women in, who are studying any, any of those disciplines, uh, computer science, engineering, computer engineering, and math. Cause those were, I think the areas that I touched on. Um, but I also found that because it was such a hard discipline that we really worked together to understand things that we had. Um, I mean, maybe you didn't have Google back then, but yeah, we had our own working group that spent a lot of time together. And so sometimes, so there might be six of us and really just teaching each other concepts, if someone doesn't understand it.

Eric Allman: So back in high school, actually in junior high school, there was a teacher, I guess a math teacher at a different school when I was in who decided it would be cool to do an after-school program teaching kids how to program, Fortran to be precise. And I got involved with that and learned Fortran.

Eric Allman:...it turns out we already had a- another very slow, also terminal-based network called Birknet, which was a project done by a guy named Eric Schmidt... I said, Birknet is software, ARPANET is software, and I know how to write software. I'll bet I can find some way to glue these things together... And that was a quick hack called DeliverMail. And I won't say it worked well, but it did work and so I basically wrote Deliver Mail to get people to stop bothering me.

Eric Allman:...We made the front page of the New York Times when we announced the company... Sendmail had a reputation for being difficult to configure so our first thing was we'll make it easy to configure and using a graphic user interface... I really love it when people use the stuff I've written. And the easiest way to do that is to give it away.

Eric Allman: So, so I started just attending USENIX. The first USENIX I went to was in San Francisco... And it was an amazingly wonderful conference. It's like you know I'm with my people here This is great and so I started going to more conferences and eventually I ended up on the board of directors... And I am this President for two years and I'm gratified that many people have told me that I was actually a good President.

Eric Allman:...coming out of the closet because it made my life a lot better and frankly the lives of other people around me a lot better... I lost some friends. You know, when I came out of the closet, I didn't just like open the door, I used dynamite to blow it open... And it gave me a path to being an easier to get along with person.

Well, so I actually was a computer programmer in the 1980s. I know that just sounds absolutely ancient now. Doesn't sound ancient to me, but it's all a matter of perspective. And I got into that because there was a lot of demand for people to work in particularly applications programming. When I graduated from college, and I didn't have a degree in computer science, and in fact, most people didn't have degrees in computer science, you couldn't really get a degree in computer science, except for maybe, you know, some schools.

Zack Ellis: What kept you interested in computer science? Heather Meeker: Computer...like programming is, it's an experience like almost nothing else, like when you are writing a program, you are in total control, right, subject to the rules of the language and the environment you're in, you tell the computer exactly what to do. If the computer doesn't do what you ask it to do, it's your fault. Right. I mean, that's not always true. It's almost always true. So that's like this experience. It's like pure engineering in a way. Like you're not even you're not even really bounded by the physical world in programming. Like it's like being a little megalomaniac, you know, it's like really exciting for that reason. Also, it's one of the most absorbing things I've ever done. Like when I was a coder, I would go to work and I'd get there, you know, at eight in the morning and then at five I would look up and the day would be over. And it was almost as if no time had passed because I was so focused on what I was doing. And I don't think I've ever experienced anything else quite like that. Nothing else I've ever done in my life, either for money or for fun, has has absorbed me that much. And I really loved it for that reason, but also got kind of burnt out on it for that reason. And and I stopped doing it. Not sure whether that was a good idea or a bad idea, but but it was what happened, you know. So that's what I loved about it. It was just you got to solve puzzles however you you know, and you were only really bounded by your ingenuity in doing that. I also thought coding was a very creative activity, and I'm not sure everybody thinks that. But but you have like so much control over how you do things. I just found that fascinating.

Heather Meeker: That scares lawyers a lot. Like when they don't have rules, they get freaked out. They like rules. So the experience was like walking out on a wire, you know. And by the way, there were some people at the time and probably still some some people, some lawyers who just would not deal with it at all because it was too weird and too new. And they felt that it was risky to give advice about it. But but my clients had questions. You know, I couldn't just say, oh, no, I don't know the answer to that. Like, you have to figure it out.

Zack Ellis: When did you start to see open source as something transformative? Heather Meeker: I really saw it as transformative almost from the beginning. I did not realize and I'm not sure very many people would have realized at that time how huge it would get. But it was just so different from everything else that you learned as a technology lawyer. Like if you do a regular software license, you know, it has a particular form and some terms that you would expect. Open source is like bizarro world licensing. It's like exactly the opposite. It's like giving away rights and forcing people to give away rights instead of just like normal licensing.

Heather Meeker: so open source is used by everybody now. Like almost everyone in the technology industry now actually contributes to it. I mean, it's everywhere. We're using it right this minute to do this interview. It's in your phone. It's everywhere, right? And if you go back, I guess, 25 years, the notion that that private companies would do collaborate was not an idea. I mean, it wasn't a thing that it wasn't a thing. Right. And and today you have all these like big organizations and companies collaborating on things and giving stuff away. And that just wasn't done. I would say open source changed the entire face of technology because it it changed a paradigm for how people interact. You know, they were just strictly competitors and now they're collaborators. And even there are there are only like maybe two, three companies that are known for not doing it now. Right. If you go back 25 years, like no one was doing it. They were terrified about what these licenses meant and everything. So it's completely been absorbed in business. And that, you know, if you believe in markets, which I do because I studied economics and all that stuff, that wouldn't happen unless it worked. Right. It actually works as a paradigm. Like it produced a lot of really great stuff. And over that time, people became convinced of that and they overcame their fear about these licensing paradigms they didn't understand. So they got over the fear and then it really changed their behavior. So to me, it's changed everything about the way the technology industry operates.

Heather Meeker: Welcome to the open source stories, digital archive, or FOSSDA. Open source has changed the world. And it's changed the world greatly for the better. It's a movement that's been going on for quite a while now, and it didn't start because of a government, or a company, or a politician. It started really from people who wanted to change the way people had access to software because software is so important to our lives now. Whether you know it or not, you are using open-source software right now, and you're probably using it every moment of your life.

Heather Meeker: Because this is such an important change in our world, and because it happened in the way it did. I thought it was important to capture the personal stories of people involved in this movement. What made them so dedicated? What made them understand that this was so important?

Heather Meeker: Now, it's only fair that I tell my own story and it's certainly not the most interesting story you're going to hear, but I was a computer programmer a long time ago back in the 1980s. It was so long ago, we called ourselves computer programmers instead of software engineers. I wrote code in compiled Basic. Now, for people who are in the tech industry, that is, you know, a very lightweight way of doing computer programming, but hey, you can't judge, because it actually worked really well for what we were doing at the time.

Maddog: My father was a good influence on me because he was very interested in mechanical things and machinery... I particularly liked the Popular Electronics magazines...

Maddog: ...I said, sure, I'll take the course and I would read the book at night and then I would go in and practice at night and on the weekends programming this IBM 1130...

Maddog: ...What happened was this company called Sun Microsystems decided that they were going to bring out a system that that was specifically for UNIX at a much lower price...

Maddog: ...So this is how I got interested in Linux. And I could see because by this time I'd been in the computer industry a long time. And I could see the rate at which Linux was growing...

Maddog: ...Malaysia, the Malaysian government was creating a five year program to use open source software. And Malaysia is particularly interesting because... 70% of the IT workforce were women...

Maddog: ...as an example, one of the things we did recently was a diversity and inclusion policy for for our organization because we have two hundred fifteen thousand certified people in one hundred eighty countries around the world...

Maddog: ...40% of the students who qualify for a free university education [in Latin America] cannot accept it... Project Calwan teaches these young students how to set up their own business...

Joshua Gay: In the first moment, I kind of got intrigued by computer science. There's TI-82 calculators, what we used or what I had for school. And a friend of mine who was also one of the first people I knew to run Linux back in the 90s, he introduced me to the world of programming on a calculator in high school.

I remember he saw the graphic arts award that I had won. And he suggested, but we recently just started a computer science program and we have almost nobody applying. So if you apply direct to major for computer science, your odds will be much higher.

It was around that time. I think I had heard people talk about things like Red Hat Linux and free software. But it wasn't until I really started to look into it for the job I was working at Super Wings...

I decided to create something called MagnaWiki, a way to do annotations and revisioning of legislative texts... I was regularly calling legislative aides and things and getting their input and they were excited...

I ended up getting connected with Neeru Khosla. She had just started a project called the CK12 Foundation, a new company organization... her and her husband had been in Silicon Valley for quite a while then.

The biggest change is in the first 10, maybe almost 15 years that I was a part of it, I couldn't really go more than a week or two without having a conversation about questioning the legitimacy of it... To now, where I don't necessarily think people are on the whole more informed of what free and open source software is. But the legitimacy of it, that it's here, that it's established, is so strong...

Karen Sandler: Sure. I grew up in the suburbs in the United States. Um, my parents had grown up very poor... And so, uh, he was quite technical, and he was one of the first people using, uh, computer code in order to, like, using computers to replace the, um, the manual, um, crunching of numbers...

Karen Sandler: ...I think I wrote my first really, really, really, really silly program when I was probably six years old, you know, or 5 or 6 years old...

Karen Sandler: Software Freedom Conservancy is my absolute dream job...

Karen Sandler: I would say that if you are able, you should donate to these causes that you care about...

Kirk McKusick: Well, math and science classes were clearly my strong suit in school and the ones that I enjoyed the most. And I had just a little bit of stuff with computers because there was nothing in my high school at that time that involved computers. But I had an opportunity to do some other stuff at the University of Delaware where I'd gotten a little bit of introduction to computers.

Elisabetta Mori: So you moved to Berkeley... And then, you know, you had first – you were sharing your room with Bill Joy when you were, like, a graduate student. And how did you get involved in the Berkeley Software Distribution Project?

Elisabetta Mori: So what do you think were your major contributions to the project? Kirk McKusick: So I'm going to start slightly before that transition happened. And that was, well, sort of the first big contribution I made was the Pascal compiler. And although Pascal, although important at that time, faded away fairly quickly. The other major contribution I made was the fast file system...

Kirk McKusick: So to the story, um, so Eric wrote this thing, it was originally called deliver mail. Uh, and by being essentially able to forward mail back and forth between the internet and the local Berkeley network, he no longer had people, no longer needed to have accounts on that machine...

Elisabetta Mori:Is there anything you would do differently if you had your time again?

I spent the summers working on the family farm in New Hampshire, baling hay, doing everything around the place. And I developed this tendency to just fix things. When you're out in the field and the tractor breaks, there's nobody to call. You had to just fix things yourself. And so my whole life, that's how I kind of approach things, which is just learn to do whatever needs to be done and be hands-on and fix things.

I was also lucky in that Dayton, Ohio, is home to something called the Ham Fest, which I don't know if a lot of people know, but it is a gathering of ham radio operators that happens every year. But beyond that sort of just ham radio operators, it's really about people who tinker with electronics. And so I was lucky to have this exposure early on that this interesting thing was happening and I wanted to learn. And so I was a kid who always was experimenting with sort of basic electronics. I had the little kits as a kid where you would build the radio from scratch or you would wire together a little electronic circuits. And I was always kind of tinkering or doing or building something like that.

There was one thing in my high school that was interesting. There was a course I took as I began to try and understand electronics and computers, but more a course at this time. And gosh, you look back and you realize how far the world has come. That my first sort of exposure to doing anything with programming was punched cards with cobalt. And as a high school student, I was able to take a course where we didn't even have a punch card machine. We had these big coding forms, big ledger sheets of paper, 11 by 17 pieces of paper with lines on them. And there were 80 columns on a punch card. And you literally wrote in clean print across these sheets of paper. And we would send them in. So I'd have to write my program out by hand on a piece of paper. You'd send it in. People would punch those into the punch card machines. You would get back decks of cards. And then you sorted the cards into a program. And then you sent the cards in to run. So we think today about fast turn and programming and developing code. The productivity in that sense of lines of code was pretty low. It was, you know, you spent a day writing forms. You sent it in. You got punched cards back. I mean, it took a week to turn around. And if you made one change, a comma in a different place, one different line, it was a week to make a minor change. So you had to get that right. You had to make sure that was sort of perfect when it went in because the turnaround was very slow.

They would recruit kids right out of their undergraduate, they would bring them in, they'd give them an opportunity to work for a year, and then they would send them off to school to get their master's, get advanced degrees. Fabulous, fabulous program. I was lucky enough to get accepted into that. And I went from South Bend, Indiana, Notre Dame, to Holmdel, New Jersey, the home of the transistor, and Bell Labs, the place where the Big Bang was discovered.

As a research team at Stanford, we had access to essentially anything we wanted to access to commercially. We could get that. But the software that we used was easier to work with, was better, was available for free. And that's where I really learned that a community of people working together with the goal of producing great software was often producing things that were better than what was available commercially.

This is just an amazing way of bootstrapping. And to me, I always look for today, I love the entrepreneurial part of the world and people launching and building things. We got people to send us checks for the computers they wanted, because we were selling a physical device. And to me, these things were hugely expensive. I mean, somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000. And I couldn't afford to buy the parts to send someone. People sent us a check ahead of time. We would cash the check, go buy the parts, have an assembly party in the living room of my apartment and ship them out. And that was what the business was initially.

Dell had been very inspirational to me. If you look at the start of Dell Computers with Michael Dell and his dorm room at, I think it was UT Austin, assembling PCs. I was doing the same, except I was doing it in the Unix world.

As I was doing this, two of my friends from Stanford had raised venture funding. Two gentlemen by the name of Jerry Yang and David Filo. You may recall those names as their little company they had started was Yahoo. Dave and Jerry were both PhD students in EDA, Electronic Design Automation, at Stanford. They had started this little directory of the web on a machine under their desk in their office at Stanford.

If you look at the concept of I am selling you something that's free, it's kind of an odd concept. It takes people a moment to get their heads around this concept.

We got Linus on the phone, and ultimately, the idea was we're going to brand this open source, because the openness of the source code was what was important. Bruce Perens, at the time, the head of the Debian project, had created a set of definitions for software that could be part of Debian. And we realized the world here needed to separate the notion of software in which the source code is available from free software, and we coined the term open source to do that. And we all agreed to promote and develop this, and that became the genesis for the term open source. And this was in 1998.

I always encourage learning. You know, as I look back now, I realize how naive I was at every stage, but that's how we learn. So I'm not big on the would have, should have, could have done it differently. I think everyone has to go through the learning phases, and there's a ton of things that I got wrong all the time. But I listened a lot, and I hope I learned from those. This is a little of my philosophy when I advise entrepreneurs and companies - I give them advice, but I also think they have to learn themselves. People make mistakes, that's part of the learning process. It's one of the things I think is great about the Silicon Valley culture - it's a culture in which people learn from making mistakes, and you can make a mistake, and get better, and learn, and come back, and that's okay.

I studied computer science before there was a computer science department. Uh, I became a devotee of that. I played with the computers that they made available to all of us. They had computers in the student rooms...

The first program I remember working on was kind of weird. It was, um, it was a program to try to determine what people's sign was in their, uh, when they were born and what kinds of influences the planets were having on them...

One of the friends that I met...worked for Xerox and, uh, developed Small talk...he said, you know, I'm, I'm working with this organization on the East Coast called the Open Source Initiative...

Karen Herman: Can you talk a little bit about Richard Stallman or your relationship with him? Larry Rosen: I met him through ISI. He was not on the OSI board, but he was, of course, a very powerful figure in the open source community.

I became a member of Apache...had a different philosophy, a very open philosophy, a philosophy where software could be developed into derivative works...

I think open source has been an enormous, enormous success...I want to accept some credit for having made good friends, for having not made as many enemies as I've made friends...

Roger Dannenberg: Well, the project started basically from research needs that we have that we were working on actually on query by humming, which was getting computers to recognize tunes that people might sing or hum and search a database for them and part of that is just recognizing pitch and tunes and we were working on some algorithms to improve that. And of course algorithms fail and then when they fail, you want to see what happened and we were trying to visualize audio and the analyses that we did and figure out what was going wrong and we just felt like it would be really great to have a tool that could help us display audio data in different formats and deal with different audio files.

Roger Dannenberg: Yeah, a lot of from Dominic Mazzoni who was a grad student at the time and Dominic did did more of the work than anyone else. It was mainly the two of us and I was contributing some kind of low-level audio drivers that I had built and and worked on some symbolic display as opposed to audio waveform display, but Dominic really put together the basic waveform display and interaction. And, it was it was Dominic that suggested in the very beginning that if if we are going to build something to display data , it really wouldn't be much additional work to cut copy paste and right, you know, and write it back out to disk.

Roger Dannenberg: Well, I think maybe open sources is really an outgrowth and maybe I just see it this way, but maybe it really is an outgrowth of the academic world. Where in academia we do research and you know, we get the rewards are not so much money, but recognition. That people want to want to be recognized for being, for making contributions to whatever field, they do research or public or writing in.

Roger Dannenberg: So another problem is when you do have people that are contributing and very generous, you, well, at least with Audacity, there was a team of people that developed. So it was kind of like an inside, you know, it's as if you've got the inside group that has kind of all the power and all, you know, carries all the decisions and you have the outside group, which you also hope is there, you know, making contributions, but you know, the governance of very loose volunteer organization is really difficult because I think if it is completely open and everybody has an equal vote, then it's very easy to get distracted.

Roger Dannenberg: Yeah, I would I guess I would say that. I mean one thing that came out of that, you know, that I learned from this project, that might not be obvious to people thinking about open source is that there are a lot of possibilities for generating income and one of those is, you know, some of some of the Audacity developers, did some consulting on the side. So they would, for example, adapt Audacity for to be packaged with a product or are bundled with a crime or they would, you know, work with researchers and get some money to add some feature for them or something like that.

Tony Wasserman: So I went to Cal, University of California, Berkeley... the first computing course as a junior at Cal. And it was very quickly obvious to me that I was much better at programming and computing than I was at math or physics. And so having gone through Berkeley, I then went to graduate school at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Tony Wasserman: ...And my original thought was that I would go for a master's degree, but they made me an RA and encouraged me to stay. So eventually I got a doctorate in, of all things, artificial intelligence... Rolls of teletype paper that printed 10 uppercase characters per second and clattered as it did it...

Tony Wasserman: ...But then when UNIX came in the 1970s, I was on the faculty at UC San Francisco, and then I was also a lecturer at Berkeley... And Berkeley received a grant that involved enhancing AT&T UNIX. So Berkeley got the source code to AT&T UNIX and they made a bunch of changes, virtual memory being the one that is perhaps the most significant...

Tony Wasserman: ...we were distributing open source software in 1980... And the product was called Software Through Pictures. Ah, okay. So we were one of the first products to include open source software. I think we were second. I think Sun Microsystems was first...

Bryan Berhenshausen: What do you see as the biggest challenges for open source as an idea, or for open source as a movement, or even as a set of practices in the future? Tony Wasserman: Well, there are a lot of issues, of course... But the first part of it is that proprietary software isn't going away...

Tristan Nitot: ...for some reason, a friend of my parents' bought a TRS-80...and thought 'oh, the young Tristan may be interested in this new thing'. And so, he was going on vacation for two weeks and so, before going to vacation, he dropped it at the house...and for 15 days in a row, I was stuck in front of it. You know, opening the manual page 1 and starting to read...

Tristan Nitot: I made it into Netscape, it was in '97 and it was a lot of work, but it was fun with smart people. In '98, then Netscape decides to open up the source code for Netscape Communicator.

Netscape made - well, created - the Mozilla project and along with it came Bugzilla. Which was a complete game changer, even if it was not beautiful and not super easy to use, it was amazing.

Tristan Nitot:...Firefox was making progress...it started to be the response to that. It was delivering, really...People got excited. It became viral...And so I stayed there, making sure that we would launch Firefox in Europe, probably even though I was kind of starving financially...

Tristan Nitot:...Now, there is software everywhere. And if I want to be free as a citizen, then I need free software...the guy who controls the software, kind of more or less controls my life decides...And if I want to have control over that...I need free software.