Bob Young on freedom, control, and the GPL

Bob Young, known to the free-software community as the co-founder of Red Hat, founder of the print-on-demand service Lulu, and creator of the non-profit Center For The Public Domain, delivered the morning keynote address on the first full day of linux.conf.au (LCA) 2015 in Auckland. Although Young confessed several times to not being as plugged-in to the Linux and free-software economy as he once was, he had plenty of wisdom to dispense to the crowd, in particular by looking back on which (perhaps unexpected) factors allowed Red Hat to become a successful enterprise in the face of large competitors selling proprietary software.

Young's talk was laid-back, informal, and peppered with wisecracks and comedic stories—he introduced himself as "the light entertainment interlude" between the week's other keynotes from Eben Moglen and Linus Torvalds, and he consistently referred to himself as "just a typewriter salesman," to pick out two examples from many. But whatever description one might use, Young oversaw the rise of Red Hat in the early 1990s from a small software shop to a major IT vendor, and at the start of that process, it was far from a proven strategy that free software could compete for customers in the commercial space.

Young said he was initially a bigger skeptic about free software than Bill Gates, but while he was editing an early software-development newsletter, he repeatedly heard from developers that free software was what they wanted to hear more about. By the time Linux 1.0 was released, he decided to find out for himself how it all worked, so he went to meet with Richard Stallman, Donald Becker, and other "really smart guys" and figure out why altruism—an idea that Young had never thought would be capable of spawning a sophisticated technological system—seemed to be succeeding.

Each of those encounters had its own lesson: Stallman advocated the egalitarian notion that each free-software developer contributed according to their ability and reaped rewards in accordance to their skill level; Becker argued that sharing software was simply "the right thing to do;" Becker's boss Thomas Sterling explained the notion of the barter economy, saying "I contribute a driver and get back a gigabyte of software with the license to do what I want with it—and you think they are exploiting me?" But what finally clicked for Young seemed to be what he heard from engineers: that free software gives them control over their own system, and control was the one thing that proprietary software vendors were unwilling to part with.

That idea was what led to the formation of Red Hat. It was fundamentally against the proprietary IT vendors' business models to sell a product that allowed the customer to have control, so Red Hat had an immediate competitive advantage against all of them. Young added that he recently stopped by Red Hat's offices (his first visit in a long time) to try and ensure that he didn't put something problematic into his LCA talk that would cause the company's stock price to plummet. On that visit, he said he was thrilled to see that the corporate messaging remains essentially the same: customers are treated as partners with the company; giving them control over their systems is still paramount.

Young then spoke briefly about software licenses. He has long been a staunch advocate of the GPL, he said, but not because he has detailed opinions of the differences between it and other, similar licenses. Rather, he said, he learned early on that customers do not care about the details of free-software licenses, and that diving into an explanation of them was the fastest way to send a potential customer running toward the competition. (In an aside, Young made it clear that even during his days at Red Hat, he never considered other Linux distributors to be "the competition;" he used the word only to refer to the proprietary vendors.)

With the GPL, everyone knows what the rules are, more or less, so the debate is over quickly. They might not actually know the rules, he added, but they think they do, which amounts to the same thing. As a "business guy," he said, he is always trying to simplify the "pitch"—the GPL tells everyone "what we're about," so it has the greatest impact. Furthermore, he advised developers not to waste any time trying to come up with a new, specially-crafted free-software license for their project. Whatever effort it takes to write that new license corresponds to creating more complications for the potential customer. In the end, it is a net loss.

Young took a few questions from the audience at the end, some about Red Hat and some about Lulu. The two companies are quite different on the surface, but Young explained that they are both attempts to do the same thing: give customers control over what they want to do. When Red Hat was competing for customers with Microsoft, he said, Microsoft was totally unwilling to offer customers the control that Red Hat was, so Red Hat gained a lot of contracts and grew into an enormous enterprise of its own.

Lulu is different, he noted, in the sense that the competition—most notably Amazon—has seen Lulu's business model and responded by offering its own, similar service. Thus, Lulu has a different kind of battle to fight. It is still a really fun project, he said, but time will tell whether or not what it offers to authors is significantly better than Amazon's pitch, only marginally better, or if Amazon comes up with something better.

Several audience members asked about how the community should respond to resistance toward software-freedom issues. One asked specifically how to communicate free-software ideals to politicians; another asked about businesses' resistance toward the GPL. On the political front, Young said that there are a number of players today who take the correct approach (Lawrence Lessig, the EFF, and Public Knowledge, for example). They emphasize transparency, which is important to politicians. But Young also advised everyone listening to understand that they, too, have a role to play in such conversations. If you ever meet a politician, he said, make sure the politician knows what you consider important. Money in politics is a problem, but all politicians ultimately care more about votes than money.

As for businesses' resistance toward the GPL, Young said that it would be better to ask Moglen or Karen Sandler for the real details. But he noted that in the early days, Stallman had considered putting his software into the public domain. That would not work, Stallman concluded, since the "public domain" is not a concept that is protected against abuse (in this case, against turning a public-domain program into a proprietary one). The GPL and the concept of "copyleft" that it implements, he said, create the legal protection for the public domain. There are other licenses, but there is no more effective tool for the "real" public domain. And that real public domain is the thing that gives users (or customers) control, which, in turn, is the one thing proprietary software cannot offer.

"Control" as Young articulated it in his talk is, essentially, the same idea as the freedom that has always been central to free software. But it is interesting to hear it described in such different terms. Young jokingly called himself "an evil capitalist" several times, and perhaps control is terminology that fits better into vendor-to-customer conversations and sales pitches than does freedom. But Red Hat's success over the years certainly demonstrates that Young's way of explaining the issues is one that resonates with quite a few users.

[The author would like to thank LCA 2015 for travel assistance to Auckland.]