developerWorks: You're listening to developerWorks Interviews, where we feature conversations with technical luminaries and thought leaders from a variety of disciplines on topics of import to technology professionals. I'm your host, Scott Laningham. Our guest today is Jon "maddog" Hall, president of Linux International, a worldwide nonprofit association of end users who are dedicated to furthering the acceptance and use of Linux and other free and open source software. Jon serves on the boards of several companies and nonprofit organizations. He is a much-respected elder statesman of the programming community and a leader of the open source movement. Maddog, it's an honor to have you on. Thanks for your time.

Hall: It's great to be here.

developerWorks: I'm sure you're tired of answering this question, but you've got to tell us how you got that name "maddog," for those who don't know.

Hall: Well, when I was 27 years old, I wasn't quite as much of a control of my temper as I am now at the age of 57. And I didn't understand that when you lose your temper that a lot of times, you lose the argument. I had a dean of instruction at the school I was teaching at who was British, and he thought that there was one way of teaching students and I thought the best way of teaching students was to take them out for beer and pizza after class. And sometimes, we would get in heated discussions, and sometimes the discussions were too hot for maddogs and Englishmen. Since he was British, I was the maddog.

developerWorks: Did he take kids out for something different, or he didn't take them out at all?

Hall: No, he wasn't ... well, we won't get into politics [laughter]. No, no -- he was a very good dean, actually, and I learned a lot from him. Eventually, we realized we were actually on the same side, which was we wanted to have a good education for the students. The school had its own issues in the fact of it had a union for the faculty, and sometimes the union members weren't, you know, in the same boat of wanting a good education for the students.

developerWorks: So even though you're not "maddog"-like anymore, the name just stuck?

Hall: I actually still have the temper. I feel it every once in a while. It rises up inside of me. But I've learned to control it better.

developerWorks: Well, please let me know if I ask anything that ignites it and I'll back off.

Hall: I'm sure we'll be fine.

developerWorks: Can I ask you, what was it about technology and programming in specific that grabbed your interest in younger years, and when did that happen?

Hall: Well, you have to understand that I started programming back in 1969, and the concept of shrinkwrapped software just didn't exist back then. If you'd gone down to your corner PC store -- assuming that they existed -- you'd need an 18-wheel tractor trailer truck to haul away your purchase, and you'd need three-phase power and a 20-ton air conditioner to cool it. So back in those days, a lot of software was, in effect, open source, at least, and freely available. And I was a student at Drexel University. I got involved with an organization called DECUS, The Digital Equipment Corporation User Society. It's a lot like SHARE, IBM's user society. And we had a library like SHARE's, where the software would be contributed by people who needed it for their own purposes. And they said, "Hey -- why not give it away to people, that other people might be able to benefit from it?"

I was studying to be an electrical engineer but I got involved with software because I was really very interested in the fact that almost through pure logic people could solve problems. And unlike an electrical engineer who has to worry about things like drift and tolerances and things like that, the software people seemed to be able to get along just with like ones and zeros, which was all right with me. And I guess there was the instant gratification of writing a program and seeing it work and knowing that you'd done a good job on it that kind of got me interested in the software.

developerWorks: Well, in that perspective that you come from that you described from the late '60s, obviously explains your feelings, I would think, about the open source movement. And so this next question -- there are obviously some different organizations that promote the technology and cause that is, Linux, notably the Linux Professional Institute and Linux International the organization that you head. How do you see their place in contribution to the adoption of Linux?

Hall: Well, Linux International started off in 1994 as a vendor organization. It was actually the idea of a person from Australia by the name of Patrick D'Cruze. He tried to start it down in Australia, but the fledgling Linux marketplace down there just wasn't big enough at the time. So he moved it up to the United States, and a gentleman by the name of Alan Fedder, who was the president of Uniform, was actually the first president of LI ... about six months. Because it was a volunteer position and always has been, Allen had decided he needed to do something that brought in real money. And the various organizations that belonged, organizations like the Linux Mall and a fledgling Red Hat at that time, and a series of other companies looked around said, "Hey -- we'll choose Jon Hall from Digital Equipment Corporation to be the president because, believe it or not, you know, Bob Young of Red Hat didn't trust the president of SUSE to be the executive director and vice versa." And they figured that Digital was a neutral enough player that it would be OK if I became the president. And our job was to try and address free and open source from a business perspective.

We recognize that there will be things needed such as a standard between the different versions and different distributions of Linux. And so we started the project called the Linux Standard Base Project, it was actually started by Bruce Perens, who at that time was on the board of directors. That turned into the Free Standards Group, and I still very strongly support the work that they're doing in trying to make sure that an application that has developed on Red Hat Linux, for instance, will also be running on SUSE Linux and also run on other LSB-compliant Linux distributions.

We also recognized that there needs to be certification for systems administrators because a bank manager may not know anything about Linux. And how do they determine that the person standing in front of them can really be a systems administrator for their systems? And so we started the ... or, helped to start, I should say, the Linux Professional Institute, and we helped to fund some of their original tests and do some of the psychometrics on those tests to make sure that the tests were fair. We defended the Linux trademark, when somebody came in and tried to hold it ransom. And we had that trademark assigned to Linus Torvalds, and have continued to get Linux trademarks assigned to Linus from around the world, as necessary. And from time to time, we've had to step in and straighten out discussions, let's say, between people who have tried to hold the trademark ransome.

So things like that. And plus, trying to describe to people that free software is of high quality and the word "free" means freedom, not free as in beer, necessarily -- that people have to be and should expect to be paid for their software contributions, particularly if they're not doing it for their own benefit, if they're doing it for somebody else. We try and point out to people that there are costs associated with developing software, and that it isn't fair that the people that write the software should also have to bear unreasonable costs for this. And we try and educate people on the different licenses and how to make money with free software and how to save money with free software.

developerWorks: How do you feel about the impact and success of all these efforts along the road at this point in time?

Hall: Well, I'm obviously very pleased with how Linux has progressed into the commercial environment. When we first started with Linux International, there was a certain number of the developers who were doing this more or less as a hobby, and they said, "Well, you know -- I don't really like it that some people are making money off of my work that I'm contributing for free." And some of the developers, like Linus Torvalds and people like Allen Cox and other ones, stood up and said, "Well, you know -- if we don't allow people to make money, then what's going to happen is that Linux is going to move forward very slowly. And if people are allowed to make money, then it's going to move forward much faster, just because of the way things work in the world."

I think that over the years, it's been formed a very good relationship between the Linux community and the commercial interests that are using Linux for various things. Plus, if you take a look at the real licensing behind free software, which says you can use the software for any purpose, to say you can't use it for making money is in effect violating one of the principles of the software.

developerWorks: You know, I hear folks talk about what they sometimes see as a tug of war between the grassroots angle and the corporate interest angle, that type of thing. How do you see that changing over time, the corporate interest vs. maybe if there is a lessening of the grassroots angle and what does that all mean?

Hall: Well, I also see sometimes the arguing or the tug of war, as you call it, but I think that part of that may be helped if corporations begin to understand that a lot of the things that the grassroots people want are actually beneficial to the companies and beneficial to the end users that the companies are trying to sell to. I think that over time, as we get more and more used to this model -- and also as corporations change their model of making money, which they're going to have to do -- that a lot of these pulls from different areas will iron themselves out.

A good example of a company that has changed its way of doing business is IBM®. And when I first got involved with IBM, I was asked to come to Austin, Texas, and give a talk there. And I was privileged enough to see a memo from Lou Gerstner that said, in the past IBM has been a closed source company that only did open source when it was proved that that was the way to go. And in the future, IBM is going to be an open source company, unless it's proved that we should have something closed source. I was very, very amazed by that letter because that was a very good, big step forward. You know, as I started into it and dealing more and more with IBM, it came out that IBM says, "Hey -- no big secret to this. We make, you know, a fair amount of money on our integration and that type of work, and we make very little money and very little profit on, say, sales on our notebooks and our desktop workstations. So it makes more sense for us to put that energy and to put those people into places where we're making more money than in these things where the profit margin is so thin that it's hard for us to make any money. And that's one reason, of course, why IBM sold off its notebook and a lot of its desktops to Lenovo. And Lenovo is able to have a lower overhead and a larger volume because they sell to more people than just IBM and they can make more of a profit.

But all the things that IBM is doing, their support of open source, when you take a look at it, it makes perfect sense because if you're going in to provide a solution for a customer and you're trying to do that with a whole series of closed source proprietary products, there's only so much you can do to glue those products together and make them work well together. If, on the other hand, you have access to the source code for those projects, and you can change the source code or extend the source code so they can then work together better, you probably will be able to come up with a better solution for the customer.

And then a whole series of other things. I mean if you went into a problem with a bug and you need to have it fixed and you have the source code you can prioritize that fix by throwing money at it or having someone else do it. In a closed-source area you can't do that because you're dependent upon the company that created that software to fix that bug for you.

developerWorks: Do you feel like that thought change that you're talking about there is the most important thing that needs to be done to advance the cause of Linux, or is there something more?

Hall: I think it's a big thing. I think that people are just too used to the concept of going down to the corner store and saying, "Oh, there's a product I can use," open up a magazine saying, "There's a product I can use." Instead of going through their company and saying, "Man, this is creating a lot of trouble for me, let me go out and find somebody who can fix this problem," you know, and to do that with an open source type of product or service that would really tailor this to their needs.

I also believe that people have forgotten what it was like to do business 25 or 30 years ago in the software space. When we had some problem that we needed to solve, we wrote up the specification for the problem and we went out and found a couple of different companies who would bid on it. They would come back and say, "OK -- this is how much it's going to cost, and this is the solution we give you." And we'd evaluate that and pick the right solution. And then we'd have a whole set of criteria as to the acceptance of that solution. You know, how many bugs we would find, and what the documentation was supposed to look like, and how good it was supposed to be, and milestones and benchmarks of the software for acceptance. And all of that capability and all of the knowledge of how to do that was kind of wiped away by people going out and buying a packaged software product that, you know, somebody claimed would help them out, but how much does it take to do that?

developerWorks: Yes, that consumer mental model has changed our lives in a lot of ways, not just in the way you're describing, too, hasn't it?

Hall: Absolutely. And I find it very strange that a person who will say, "Well, just give me a software package that will fix my problem, I don't want to know anything about it, here's my money." They'll do that, and yet they'll go down to the local car lot and argue for hours and stress for hours over which car is going to meet the needs of their family. Is it large enough? Is it safe enough? What gas mileage does it get? And is it standard shift or automatic? And yet nobody in their right mind -- well, nobody I know, anyway -- would take a suitcase of money down to the automobile lot, hand it to the guy and say, "Just give me any car on the lot." [Laughter] The only time you'd do that is if you just robbed a bank and you need to make a quick get away, got the suitcase of money, and you'll take any car that will move.

developerWorks: Maybe only the Hummer buyers will do that, I don't know, but ....

Hall: Or the incredibly wealthy, right? That they don't care, right? Fine, OK. But the average person that needs a vehicle to do a job. You know, if you're going to be doing landscaping, you probably would aim towards a pickup truck, right? If you're going to be going out for a nice drive on a sunny day, you might want a sports car, particularly if you're retired, it's just you and the spouse there, right? So people would buy the thing that would fit their need -- not a one-thing-fits-all strategy.

developerWorks: So there's a patience and inquisitiveness, and some other qualities that we need to introduce into the equation here, aren't there?

Hall: Well, and it may be tough because it's something that really has to be learned. And I think that there's probably a real opportunity for companies -- educational companies -- to go out and say, "How do you buy software in the free software space? And how do you find the right software, and how do you qualify it?" -- for all of those people who have never had to go through that. I can't count the number of people who have gone out and bought packages, software packages, paid $50, $60, $100 for them, $200, whatever -- taking them home and they simply don't work. I mean, they don't work at all much less work and do what they want them to.

And so this entire cost of ownership thing that keeps coming up where a certain large company in Redmond, Washington, keeps pointing out that their products are less of a cost of ownership than the free and open source, and they typically take their examples where they have a customer who is already using their software and is migrating to another version of their software, as opposed to somebody who is going from, who has never used a computer before or new project and is now going to be using, say, Linux -- they always go to that -- yet they never talk about the value of the answer. They only talk about the cost of the solution.

And so I give this analogy, which helps people understand. You go down to your local store, you buy a CD. You take the CD home and you install it on your system. It cost you $5 -- one of the CDs in the rack of CDs is sitting there, you know, it costs you $5 and an hour of your time. You start up the program and it does absolutely nothing. The total cost of ownership is $5 and an hour of your time. But you go down to the same store, you buy another CD, take it home, it takes you an hour to install it. Same cost of ownership. But all of a sudden, you find out that your dog can let itself in and out of the house. Your kids come home from school, they've got straight A's for the first time in their entire lives. And the next day, the income tax person calls you up and says, they found a mistake in your income tax and they owe you $200,000. And all of this was because of the software on that CD. The software on that CD is now infinitely valuable to you, but it still only cost you $5 and an hour of your time.

Now, obviously, total cost of ownership is important because if you can't afford the solution, if you don't have the $5 in your pocket, then you're stuck. But it is not something you should be concentrating on. You should be concentrating on what is the value of the answer.

developerWorks: What's the result.

Hall: What's the result. And how much can you tailor that result to give you exactly the answer you want.

developerWorks: You would think that would just be logical, wouldn't you?

Hall: You would think. But you know something, I'm experiencing in today's society that there are companies out there that basically don't want you to think, because if you did, you would probably not buy their products. And they are doing everything they can to try and make you not think. I mean that's part of marketing, right? I mean that's one side of marketing. It's a bad side, it's the evil side, it's the dark side. But, hey -- there's a lot of firms out there that that's the way they work.

developerWorks: You know, hearing you speak about that brings to mind some things I've read in recent years from certain authors and thinkers on education. They make a good argument that the business of education has actually fostered that attitude in many ways.

Hall: Well, one of the things that .... I mean, I used to teach at a small two-year technical college, like I said. And I've taught at a series of other colleges. And my feeling is that what a university and what a college is about is not to train somebody in some particular field, but instead to get those people to learn how to learn on their own, from books, from magazines, from talking with people, how to evaluate different alternatives, how to filter out information from data. And this is very, very important when we start to go out onto the Net and look at things on the Net. You know, what is ... the information or the data that we're taking in, what is information and what is data and what is the data that people want us to see vs. the data they don't want us to see.

You know, I'm appalled when I see universities teaching courses that are based upon a particular product from a company, and then calling that some type of education. That's not education; that's training. And I think it's appalling that people that are taking money in a university environment, particularly a public university, for that type of training. I think if they want to teach them, if they want to educate their students, that's fine. And I have no problem with students learning a particular product, but at the same time they should be introduced to other products, so that the students can then evaluate which is the best one for their purposes.

developerWorks: Because it's that skill of evaluation that ultimately is even more valuable to them, isn't it?

Hall: Exactly. And not only that, but they get to see why these tools are useful. It's not just, "Here's a tool, this is what it does, use it." One of the things I love about using open source in education is the fact that you can see what the tool does but, secondarily, you can see how the tool does it. So you're learning twice by using open source. I can see the answer the spreadsheet gives me, but I can see if I look at the source code how the spreadsheet calculated that answer. This is very important because you have to ask yourselves, "Well, to what level of significance was that answer generated?"

I think we all remember a few years ago there was a certain computer chip that added one and one and got 1.976, instead of two. And if all of you do is take the blind faith that the mechanism is going to give you the right answer, sooner or later you're going to be bitten. And I think that having open source and allowing people to see how software develops its answers is very important, particularly to a computer scientist.

developerWorks: Since we're talking about education right here, I'd love to know your thoughts about the importance of the programs like Hackerteen and, from a different standpoint, the One Laptop Per Child initiative. How do you see those programs and their importance in this whole picture?

Hall: Well, Hackerteen is a very interesting program. It's out of Brazil. A friend of mine who runs a consulting firm down there for Linux was approached a couple of years ago by the Brazilian FBI, and they were somewhat frustrated because they had just done a study and found out that 80 percent of all the people breaking into computer systems were something like 15 years of age and younger.

developerWorks: Oh my.

Hall: So they would go to a house to arrest somebody for breaking into the computer system, and the person who answered the name and came to the door would be less than four feet tall. And it's really embarrassing to have to try and slap into jail somebody who is that young, right? It just ruins your whole day and your PR image [laughter]. So they came to my friend and asked him, "Why were these kids doing it?" And my friend, having no better answer, came to me and said, "You know what's going on?" And I told him that basically there's two types of people that break into computer systems: those who are very, very good and you never know they were there; and those who are basically script kitties, where they find scripts on the Net and then apply them to 50,000 systems and break in, a lot of times, to simply brag to their friends that they've done that, for some type of self-gratification or peer gratification.

And I very strongly believe in the concept of Father Flannigan of Boys Town -- there's no such thing as a bad boy or bad girl, for that matter. Of course, like any generality, of course there are, but they're relatively few. I talked him into developing this program called Hackerteen, where it's a black belt; you go through a series of belts like Karate. It's a role-playing game on the Net. And it also uses the Japanese style of cartoons to try and teach people how to be really good systems administrators and how to be really good programmers and to raise their self-esteem without having to go around breaking into people's computer systems.

developerWorks: That's cool.

Hall: And the program has been, I think, phenomenally successful. He's extended it to get things like try and get some of these students jobs because in Brazil a lot of times it's very important for people in the 16-, 17- or 18-year-old category to get a job, to be able to help bring in money for the family. And not every kid makes it through the program. This is not a babysitting program. It's a program that's very rigorous, and a lot of times, people drop out along the way. But the people who do graduate, I've met them and I've been very impressed with their skills and ttheir poise. He also has them meet with psychologists and people who talk about ethics in computers. Actually, I wish they'd had Hackerteen around when Enron was going on.

So it's worked out really well, and he's trying to expand the program right now, and that would be good. And I'm happy to say that IBM has been a sponsor of this program. They've been very supportive. And that helps out a lot, too.

The One Laptop Per Child Project, I think that that is fairly misunderstood by a lot of people. I think that it's kind of like going to the moon. We haven't received a whole bunch of moon ore back from the moon. We haven't received a whole bunch of new plants or exotic life forms that have come back from the moon. But the effort of getting there allowed lots of things to happen. New ceramics, Velcro, new types of mechanisms. It helped to produce the micro-miniaturization marketplace itself. Lots of different things.

And I believe that the One Laptop Per Child project has elevated forward people's looking and concentrating on this. And I would say that even though a lot of the image of One Laptop Per Child is the child in the middle of Africa where you have nothing around except planes and no electricity, it will be wonderful if the laptop is useful in that place. But where I'm actually more interested in a laptop is in the urban jungles of Montevideo, Uruguay, or the favelas of Brazil or the innercity Chicago, or Appalachia, where there is electricity, but what they need is some type of mesh network to get communication and hook up to the Internet and also the low cost of the computer to give them access to the information. And when I take a look at the real cost benefits of the One Laptop Per Child project, people complain about the cost of the $100 or $130 and say, wouldn't this money be spent some other place?

But on the other hand, when you take a look at the costs of producing books, the information could be delivered electronically to these people. As an example, with Project Gutenberg, I believe they now have 17,000 different English texts and things that are out of copyright that are freely distributable but if you printed them out, it would be horrendously expensive. But delivered over the Internet, they would be phenomenally cheap. For somebody who is trying to learn English as a second language, or even English period, or if they were studying literature or any type of philosophy, having these books available would be just tremendous.

developerWorks: This type of empowerment and horizons-expanding effort really takes that kind of vision and introspective, analytical mind that you're talking about earlier in regard to education, doesn't it?

Hall: Exactly. And if you take a look, if you tie that type of stuff in with something like Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons, I don't know how much you've listened to Lawrence, but the fact that in a lot of societies today we're kind of a read-only type of thing. We sit in front of a TV, and the stuff comes in. And one of the things that YouTube has demonstrated is that the young people want to be creative. They want to be in a creative environment. And to have this type of facility available to even the people in the favelas and stuff like that means that they can be creative. They can exercise that creative part of their mind, and they can communicate with other people around the world that otherwise they're more isolated. I mean, I talk with people around the world using voice over IP. And I can afford to talk with people around the world because it costs me virtually nothing. Well, think about it, if somebody is trying to learn the English language or trying to learn any language, to be able to talk with a real Parisian French person and talk with them and practice your French -- that would be wonderful.

So I look at all this and I just have to wish the very best to the One Laptop Per Child program -- and, for that matter, also the one that Intel® is running, PC Classmate or something like that -- because I think that it's going to have a very great impact on society. And I hope that some of the people who have been criticizing the One Laptop Per Child project would understand that it's a whole infrastructure. It's not just that one thing that is going to be propelling forward. And that if we reach for the moon, that we may have some very, very useful stuff come out of it -- even if we only hit a golf ball when we get there.

developerWorks: Can you remember a specific instance yourself where you saw the impact on someone's life of something like this?

Hall: When I was in a telecentro in Brazil, that's a place where they use cast-off computers, computers are donated by business. They're refurbished. They put free software on there, and the government rents a building and hires a small staff and people come in there and can use the computers for free. They use the computers to surf the Internet. They use the computers to practice writing resumes, to practice using a spreadsheet. They have little classes there to teach them how to do this. And the places are always jammed.

But when you take a look at that, when I was there one time, I noticed this little girl, very small girl, sitting in front of the computer. And I went around to see what she was doing. And she was using this piece of software, which was teaching her how to brush her teeth. And you say to yourself, "Well, anybody could learn how to brush your teeth just by picking up a book." Well, guess what? There weren't any books there on how to brush your teeth. She didn't have access to them. And you say, "Well, why doesn't she learn that from her parents?" Well, her parents didn't know how to brush her teeth, either. And so she was learning how to brush her teeth by watching this little illustration on the computer, and that is a really good educational way.

So we need to be able to produce that type of thing, produce stuff on the Web in their language -- Brazilians speak Portuguese -- in the Portuguese language, about things like HIV. And we have to do the same thing for the people who speak Zulu and Swahili and oh, by the way, the four different dialects of Swahili.

developerWorks: As a summary here to wrap up, could you share with us some -- I think you've been doing some of that already in regard to the things we've been talking about -- but could you give us some sense of your hopes and higher expectations for what the Web and open source movement, Linux, what these things mean to us all over the next decade or two and what they may help to facilitate and bring about for us all?

Hall: Well, what I really hope is that the Web and things like free software will finally allow people who have never been able to receive information, I mean really information before. I often think about the kid who is sitting in the middle of Idaho or they're 40 or 50 miles from the nearest town, and how often do they get to go to that town? How often do they actually see other people their age? When I was growing up, I was always watching these westerns, and the kid in the western always had a horse. And I was so envious of them having this horse that they could just jump on the horse and ride wherever they wanted to. And all of a sudden, I realized if they didn't have that horse, they'd be so isolated. They would never see anybody but their family, right?

So I see the Internet as tying us together. And when I go to all of these different countries, I go to Israel, I go to Oman, which is an Arab country, I go to all these places, all the people there are really nice. I talk with them. I'm friends with them. They are really, really nice people. And, again, I'm not a Pollyanna. I know that there are people that are not quite as nice. But the vast majority of the people, all they want to do is have a good life for themselves and a better life for their children. And to basically be left alone.

developerWorks: Right.

Hall: And so I hope that those people, as they talk with each other, realize that these other people are not boogeymen. They're not people who are out to attack you at any given moment. And that we can really begin to understand that, why can't we all live together? And I think it's fairly hard for somebody to start thinking about going to war with someone, when you've been talking with them over the Internet and working on a project together over the Internet. And you think about the fact that you're not attacking a country, you're attacking individuals that you're working with.

So I'm hoping that the Net and free software will foster even more of this, and open communications will foster even more of this, that when we see things like YouTube and people creating videos and music and stuff like that that we like, and we realize that these people are living in Mongolia or Vietnam or, North Korea, that maybe we should think and really try and negotiate more when our governments have issues with each other.

developerWorks: Amen to that. Jon, it's been a real treat getting to speak with you. Thanks so much for making time for us.

Hall: All right. My pleasure. Take care.

developerWorks: Our guest again has been Jon "maddog" Hall, president of Linux International and a leading voice in the open source movement. Find links to the various things we talked about today as well as information on all of our other developerWorks podcasts at ibm.com/developerWorks/podcasts. For everyone at developerWorks, I'm Scott Lanningham. Talk to you next time.

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