I walked up the dingy red carpet stairs to the banquet room in a Dim Sum joint in Chinatown. Inside several dozen geeks were hunched over indulgent plates doing what it is they do best, scarfing cheap Chinese food and talking code. It was the March meeting of the Bay Area Linux Users Group and despite the celebrity of its guest speaker it was true to form. Hawaiian and ThinkGeek shirts hid poorly the soggy mid-sections of dorks young and old for whom these kind of nights were why they got into open source. It was a circus of the frighteningly brilliant and opinionated with an open buffet, an inexpensive bar and the barest agenda to contain it all. At each of the tables of eight and ten long haired software lifers argued with newjack sysadmins about package management and source control. Wild eyed idealists showed off their XO laptops with the latest release candidate for Hardy Heron while squinting cynics regaled the first time they installed Slack on their toasters. It was the kind of meetup that only free and open source software can create, the kind of dinner I adore most.
I’d never been at a BALUG meeting before, but I got the sense that the night’s talk drew a lot of newcomers. Mark Shuttleworth had come up from a day of conferencing in the valley to deliver a few words to the real dorks driving the innovation the businessmen in Silicon Valley spend their days talking about. Shuttleworth is a South African technologist of no small accomplishment, founding Thawte, a company pioneering digital certificates and cryptography on the web. Following its sale, he started HBD Venture Capital as the premier firm funding innovation to take South African technology ideas to the world. He also is the second private citizen and the first African to go into space. But he wasn’t invited to this group of geeks for any of that. The professional merit that earned his invitation to this group was his pivotal role in FOSS as the CEO of Canonical and the passionate advocate for Ubuntu.
As typical of the LUG format, the introduction spared ceremony. Eschewing PowerPoint as the tool of marketing people, Shuttleworth instead elected to deliver the good, bad and ugly of open source as it stood today without a microphone and only the weight of ideas to carry its message. Calling it “the crazy artistic endeavor called software,” the good came easy as Sunday morning for phones, laptops, desktops, and servers. He lined the extraordinary opportunity of Linux on mobile devices. It’s size and extensibility makes immediate sense on the back ends of these small devices, the real excitement, he submitted, was with the interface – the software that one can touch. Similarly, that size and extensibility extended to the One Laptop Per Child project where a whole new market of cheap, connected Linux based hardware is emerging entirely from its effort. With the scale OLPC proved can exist, Shuttleworth posited that Linux was changing what a desktop experience constitutes. If a desktop is less productivity applications and more connectivity to the Internet, Linux is clearly winning. The superiority he described was “compatibility with the web, not compatibility with .doc.” His brief description of the good concluded with the promise of virtualization and the revolution it was carrying to the datacenter. While likening it to the creative economic destruction offered by the Internet is a bit of a stretch for even an idealist, the CEO of Canonical called Linux rightfully the leader in the field.
After a few thoughts on the laudable, the talk quickly turned to the lamentable state of applications on Linux. “We have to figure out how to reenergize OpenOffice,” he declared flatly. “Because we just aren’t there yet.” The domination of proprietary software in codecs was additionally called out as limiting. An exciting opportunity in his view was a free alternative to H.264; doing what Ogg Vorbis did for music for QuickTime. Describing the current predicament facing the RIAA, he fell short of calling out Apple by name saying, “[t]he music industry gave control to a company that told them exactly what they wanted to hear.” Shuttleworth suggested that the RIAA was discovering that closed codecs and DRM were an impediment for good business and only now finding out how dearly a price they were paying for their desperation.
“We don’t have the money,” he admitted plainly when turning to the ugly of FOSS. Calling the movement a “fundamentally scrappy army that collaborates well,” the bit that appears to be sticking in Shuttleworth’s craw is interoperability. Citing the example of Microsoft’s insanely successful Sharepoint product, the radical difference of user experience from project to project is just inelegant. The version control on which all these projects depend needs greater distribution as well, he suggested. The problem Canonical’s Launchpad is attempting to solve is one that could use some note taking from proprietary firms with Shuttleworth making the observation that a tighter coding experience would likely result in a tighter user experience.
And then the night turned into something really magical. At the pleading of BALUG’s MC for the evening, Shuttleworth began to relate his experience traveling to space. From the initial work learning Russian (which is “like testosterone and ballet distilled”) and doing the medical examinations in Star City to the terrifying night before launch, he gave the anecdotes and jokes one would expect he had probably delivered to crowds a million times before. But somehow, after coming to this kind of meeting, after spending time talking about the software we’ve devoted our professional and personal lives to, it became very personal. This wasn’t some uber rich sod squaking casually about the millions he dumped so he could get a one of a kind view. This was one of our own confiding about his extraordinarily personal journey into space.
The Q&A that followed hung on his space trip for some time.
“Is there really a gun in the Soyuz capsule?”
Yes, one barrel for bears and another for birds.
“How on target was your landing?”
Spot on.
“Did you see Debian in space?”
No Linux, but I saw Solaris, DOS, and Windows 98 on a 4 megabit coaxial network.
We continued on it for some time and eventually got back around to asking the questions about the software we had come to discuss. And in that telling the evidence of the phenomenon that is Mark Shuttleworth became clear. I’m sure he has a routine for the investors and for the analysts and for the marketers and for the channel partners and all the parrot people that make the work we do keep the lights on and pay the rent. But even with our most fan boy questions, he answered with patience, relying on the power of these ideas and the convictions of these principles we call open source over the jargonese that has taken over technology in the 21st century.
He stood around after the talk for 45 minutes as a group huddled around him, seeking his observation and input on this idea and that, his preference on Gnome or KDE, his idea about this or that new technology. He was like Lou Gehrig waiting after a game making sure all the autographs were signed.
As he was shuffling out, I got a photo with him and asked a fan boy question of my own.
“With your experience in selling Thawte, your work in venture capital, and your trip to space, I think its clear you can work with whomever you like in the whole world, Mark. Why do you choose to work with geeks?”
His grin was wry, his answer careful and unrehearsed. “Because I am one.”
Flickr: Testosterone and Ballet Distilled – Photos by Daniel Austin
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