Chris DiBona - Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution

Linux creator Linus Torvalds reports that the name"Linus" was chosen for him because of his parents'admiration for Nobel laureate Linus Pauling. Pauling was the rarestof men: a scientist who won the Nobel Prize not once, but twice. Wefind a cautionary tale for the Open Source community in the story ofPauling's foundational work that made possible the discovery ofthe structure of DNA.

The actual discovery was made Francis Crick and James Watson, and isfamously chronicled in Watson's book The Double Helix .Watson's book is a remarkably frank account of the way scienceis actually done. He recounts not just the brilliance and insight,but the politics, the competition, and the luck. The quest for thesecret of DNA became a fierce competition between, among others,Watson and Crick's lab in Cambridge, and Pauling's lab atCal Tech.

Watson describes with obvious unease the way in which Pauling came toknow that Watson and Crick had solved the mystery, and created amodel of DNA's helical structure. The story here centers on MaxDelbruk, a mutual friend who traveled between Cambridge and Cal Tech.While sympathetic to Watson and Crick's desire to keep thediscovery secret until all results could be confirmed,Delbruk's allegiance ultimately was to science itself. In thispassage, Watson describes how he learned that Pauling had heard thenews:

Linus Pauling first heard about the double helix from Max Delbruk. At the bottom of the letter that broke the news of the complementary chains, I had asked that he not tell Linus. I was still slightly afraid something would go wrong and did not want Pauling to think about hydrogen-bonded base pairs until we had a few more days to digest our position. My request, however, was ignored. Delbruk wanted to tell everyone in his lab and knew that within hours the gossip would travel from his lab in biology to their friends working under Linus. Also, Pauling made him promise to let him know the minute he heard from me. Then there was the even more important consideration that Delbruk hated any form of secrecy in scientific matters and did not want to keep Pauling in suspense any longer.

Clearly the need for secrecy made Watson uncomfortable. One of thepoignant themes that runs throughout the book is Watson'sacknowledgment that competition kept parties from disclosing all theyknew, and that the progress of science may have been delayed, if everso slightly, by that secrecy.

Science, after all, is ultimately an Open Source enterprise. Thescientific method rests on a process of discovery, and a process ofjustification. For scientific results to be justified, they must bereplicable. Replication is not possible unless the source is shared:the hypothesis, the test conditions, and the results. The process ofdiscovery can follow many paths, and at times scientific discoveriesdo occur in isolation. But ultimately the process of discovery mustbe served by sharing information: enabling other scientists to goforward where one cannot; pollinating the ideas of others so thatsomething new may grow that otherwise would not have been born.

In 1984, Richard Stallman, a researcher at the MIT AI Lab, startedthe GNU project. The GNU project's goal was, simply put, tomake it so that no one would ever have to pay for software. Stallmanlaunched the GNU project because essentially he feels that theknowledge that constitutes a running programwhat the computerindustry calls the source codeshould be free. If it were not,Stallman reasons, a very few, very powerful people would dominatecomputing.

Where proprietary commercial software vendors saw an industryguarding trade secrets that must be tightly protected, Stallman sawscientific knowledge that must be shared and distributed. The basictenet of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation (theumbrella organization for the GNU project) is that source code isfundamental to the furthering of computer science and freelyavailable source code is truly necessary for innovation to continue.

Stallman worried how the world would react to free software.Scientific knowledge is often in the public domain; it is onefunction of academic publishing to put it there. With software,however, it was clear that just letting the source code go into thepublic domain would tempt businesses to co-opt the code for their ownprofitability. Stallman's answer to this threat was the GNUGeneral Public License, known as the GPL (see ).