'Maddog' Hall at LinuxFest NW

BELLINGHAM -- Open-source guru Jon "Maddog" Hall, executive director of Linux International, spoke to an overflow crowd this morning at LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, making the case that open-source software is as relevant and critical now as ever.

Hall gave an overview of the open-source movement, including his own early work with Linus Torvalds, before concluding with the theme of his presentation, "How Free and Open Source Software Will have World Domination." Here's an extended excerpt from his remarks.

"The small point of time that we had that closed-source software was useful was the period of 1977 to 1990, because at that time what they were doing was generating more and more computer systems, building up a larger and larger marketplace for computers, and at the same time generating a whole era of people who were used to computers, knowledgeable about computers, and could move computers forward.

"Here's the real problem. Back in the early period of that time, when you had a problem, you could call up the company and get an answer, because you could typically talk to the president of the company on the line, or the chief programmer, and you could get an answer in a day. I did that. The problem is, those companies have grown, and now, even though they have 50 engineers they have 4.5 million customers, or 90 million customers, or a billion customers. And the person who could really solve the problem for you can't solve the problem for you because there's just too many customers, with too diverse needs, and they're not going to solve your problem. End of discussion.

Someone in the crowd said, "They're too big to fail."

"They're not too big to fail," Hall answered. "They only fail faster."

He continued, "So we have to think about total cost of ownership. And the total cost of ownership has to do with the value of the software. This is what's going to drive world domination of free software. Not the fact it's 'free of cost.' Nothing is free of cost, not even a mother's love. The fact it's a higher value than the software you get on these relatively inexpensive PCs and stuff like that. That's what's going to drive it. And it's going to be driven a lot of times outside of the United States, because of all the reasons I talked about (including national security and other issues). The fact that all of the people throughout the world recognize this value is necessary.

"One final point. When I started with computers in 1969, when I had a problem, I could talk to the person next to me, who also had a master's degree in computer science. I could talk to the person downstairs, who had a PhD in computer science. And so the gap between what we needed a computer to do and what it actually did was relatively small and was only spread amongst maybe a thousand or two thousand people in the world.

"Today, the gap still exists. Everytime your computer crashes, that costs you money. Every time you can't figure out what to do, that costs you money.But now, there's a billion people out there that have that problem. And what happens when they have a problem? They call up somebody, they get somebody in India or worse, West Texas. ... And neither one of them have the answer to your problem. If it's over a billion people, if it's even only $5 a day, $5 a day, that's $5 billion a day that we're losing as a world economy because software doesn't do what we need it to.

"And if you have free software, you can make the business decision to give a thousand people in your company, all experiencing the same problem, you can make the business decision to fix that problem, send that fix back, and make it work. I'm not saying we can get rid of the whole $5 gap. But if we can get it down to $2, that means we save as a world economy $3 billion a day. That would almost pay for the war in Iraq. Thank you very much."

LinuxFest Northwest continues through Sunday at Bellingham Technical College, 3028 Lindbergh Avenue; Bellingham, WA. Admission is free. Here's the presentation schedule. The crowd so far is large but manageable. For more details, see our preview.