Raising top-quality rabble

December 26, 2002

If one were to tell anyone acquainted with Rick Moen that the word self-effacing can actually be used in conjunction with him, it is very likely that one would be met with a disbelieving stare.

However, that's a fact: Rick was initially hesitant to admit that he would qualify as a subject for an interview, as (in his own words), he was "just an unemployed sysadmin in the Silicon Valley area" wondering from where his next job would come. He hemmed and hawed a bit before being convinced that the exposure could be justified.

Rick calls himself "a software generalist" in the Linux community, who answers technical questions on-line, concerning all aspects of Linux. He does this on the mailing lists of various Linux user groups (without respect to geographical boundaries - he is very active on the Linux Users of Victoria list), on Usenet newsgroups, and as a member of the answer gang of the monthly e-magazine Linux Gazette.

But these apart, he has been a moving force behind many events that have propelled Linux into the limelight - he helped plan the LINC Expo (which evolved into the first LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, in San Jose), the first Windows Refund Day, and many other Linux community events in the San Francisco Bay Area. All of which have earned him the reputation of being something of a rabble-rouser.

A native of California who spent a considerable part of his formative years in Hong Kong, he completed a bachelor's degree in mathematics after first registering for a computer science programme at Princeton University and finding that he disliked it.

He moved into IT by accident. Late in college, he took some courses in finance and law, found he was good at them, and then took the national examination for the CPA credential (the American term for chartered accountancy), passed it, and started working for CPA firms.

He kept finding that he hated the work and his employers found him a fish out of water: in desperation, he took an IT job at a software firm south of San Francisco, and has been in the field ever since.

"Nobody in my family has had, to my knowledge, any history in computing: I come from a long and proud heritage of starving Norwegian peasants," he said. "However, I personally had my fingers in computing from early on. In grammar school, I was one of a group of children occasionally taken down to play with Stanford University's mainframes - Hollerith punched-cards and JCL - and my high school had a time-shared HP3000 system with TeleType ASR33 terminals and 110bps modems, which eventually were upgraded to ADM3 glass-tty dumb terminals (a whole 300 bps!), and I discovered and was entranced by HP programmable calculators.

"My last two years of high school (1975-76) were also when something seemingly little better than HP calculators emerged: microcomputers. I had friends with IMSAI 8080s that had to be bootstrap-loaded from front-panel binary switches and cassette tape drives, and bicycled up regularly to every meeting of the pioneering Homebrew Computer Club at Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre's auditorium. But all those early machines with their fuzzy 40-column displays and 2-4kB of RAM seemed pretty feeble compared to the school minicomputer - and so they were. Their potential was a bit difficult to see, at the time."

Rick spoke at length about various aspects of his involvement in the Linux community. The story in his own words:

Why Linux? Any regrets about going down this path?

When Linux started being available, Unix for the PC-using masses had been brewing for several years. The biggest attraction was - believe it or not - that it was something interesting for a change, For reasons still unclear, several proprietary Unixes for the 386 suddenly became available cheaply: I found AT&T System V Release 3.22 with the then-customary shelf full of manuals for US $50, and the quite advanced Novell Unixware for US $200.

AT&T Unix was dreadfully primitive but intriguing; the manuals alone were worth the purchase price, because of the way they helped me learn the Unix way of thinking - relatively small tools used in combination. Novell Unixware was much more polished and useful, but a dead-end because all the tools were hermetically sealed - proprietary code - and compilers and similar development tools were not included.

At exactly this time, around 1988, BSD (Berkeley Unix) escaped from University of California at Berkeley, across San Francisco Bay from me, courtesy of Lynne and Bill Jolitz's 386BSD Project, the first truly open-source Unix. Not only was this the first time, to borrow Red Hat executive Bob Young's metaphor, that the car bonnet wasn't welded shut, but also it was a really high quality operating system - much better tools than anyone was used to.

But why Unix at all, you might ask? 386BSD (and, a few years later, Linux) had depth: That is, as you became interested in finer details of how things worked, you kept finding behind-the-scenes mechanisms to automate tasks, to make networks function more smoothly, to provide new, highly reliable services, and in myriad ways to do things you hadn't even realised you could do. Further, systems you built using Unix _stayed_ built: They didn't degrade or collapse. The only thing with a similar quality of depth was IBM's OS/2 2.0 and up, but not to the same degree. The other options were just dull - dull and stable (NetWare, VMS) or dull and fragile (Microsoft OSes and MacOS).

The 386BSD Project stalled because of internal problems and was entangled in the AT&T lawsuit against UC Berkeley, so Linux took the limelight starting in 1991-92, but its direct descendents (especially FreeBSD) remain excellent options.

What's most important about Linux (and its BSD cousins) is being the standard-bearer for the idea of Unix: anything can be fixed, or used to make something new or better. You're given control of all the tools (including everything that was used to make those tools). You're given an industrial-strength platform with rock-solid stability and very high levels of performance. Further: no more Microsoft-style forced upgrades and strategic incompatibilities to rob your wallet. IT departments are only now starting to remember what it's like to control their infrastructure, and Linux is what's reminding them.

No regrets, for me: the skills you learn while learning Linux are vital for practically all other areas of computing (and all of the interesting parts). Also, you get the distinct craftsman's pleasure of working with quality tools. Linux rocks my world.

How would you characterise your role in the Linux community?

I'm something of a software generalist, and am best known for answering technical questions on-line, concerning practically all aspects of Linux. I do this on the mailing lists of various Linux user groups, on Usenet newsgroups, and as a member of the "Answer Gang" team of the monthly e-magazine Linux Gazette.

Locally in my part of California, I run public events called "installfests", where we Linux greybeards will help you either Linux-ise your PC or help you solve any and all Linux-related problems. I keep a couple of dozen Linux variants ("distributions") on hand and duplicate the CD-ROMs for people (which is perfectly lawful), as part of the Linux user group that meets at my wife's and my house, twice a month. I write technical and analysis articles for commercial publication, occasionally. Last, I maintain a collection of FAQs and information files on my Web site. So, I'm known in the community for all of those things.

How did you first get involved in the community?

Originally, via the Usenet technical newsgroups (worldwide on-line discussion forums). Long before local Linux user groups started, Linux already had a huge on-line following (certainly by 1992, when I started using it). Most common questions already had well-documented answers in FAQ (frequently-asked questions) documents, and the rest you could pick up by participating in the on-line community.

You've been described as a rabble rouser. True? False?

The rumours are true, but I raise only top-quality rabble. We have a saying in the Linux community: "If you don't like the news, make some of your own." Here in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area, a number of us found to our surprise that we're pretty good at Linux publicity events, and have done a number of them. We had a huge summer picnic in celebration of Linux's 10th birthday in 2001, and had such a good time that we repeated it this past summer, too. In 1998, we had several PR events where we good-naturedly capitalised on Microsoft marketing efforts to show up in public and on-camera, such as during the product launch of Windows 98, where we gave out hundreds of Linux CD-ROMs to people interested in installing them (and pointing out where the stores were also selling Linux boxed sets).

One of the surprises of those years was that we seemed to be significantly more effective at marketing than Microsoft Corporation was, and with no funding at all.

How many people have you converted to Linux? Take the case of any one individual you've converted to Linux. Let's have a rundown of the process.

This is my golden opportunity to embarrass my friend Bill Schoolcraft, so I'm going to run with it. Bill was a professional industrial welder with no particular computer expertise, when he noticed Linux gatherings and started attending them to see what it was about. I was one of the old-timers he learned from, and I successfully badgered him to take extensive notes. I think it was when I kept using the metaphor of software as tools, and stressing the difference good tools and mastery of them can make, that he really "got" the point of the Unix way of thinking. Now, six years later, he's a senior Linux and (Sun Microsystems) Solaris administrator, and earns a good living at it.

But I don't seek to "convert" people in the sense of trying to interest those who prefer something else. Why would I? (More about that, below).

Do you think you could achieve more if your advocacy was a little less strident?

I'm reminded of a story about the 19th century US public speaker and political figure Robert G. Ingersoll, who was wildly popular with the public but inspired influential "establishment" detractors by being publicly non-religious: Some reporters came to visit, and asked him about the rumours that his son had gotten drunk during a wild party and fell unconscious under the table. Ingersoll paused for effect, then started: "Well, first of all, he didn't fall under the table. And he wasn't actually unconscious. For that matter, he didn't fall. And there wasn't any party, and he didn't have anything to drink.... And, by the way, I don't have a son."

So it's not what I'd call strident, and I don't do advocacy. At least, not in the usual sense of the term.

The usual sort of OS advocacy is what the "Team OS/2" crowd used to do: They knew that their favourite software would live or die by the level of corporate acceptance and release/maintenance of proprietary shrink-wrapped OS/2 applications. They lobbied, they lost, IBM lost interest, and now their favourite OS is effectively dead.

But Linux is fundamentally different because it and all key applications are open source: the programmer community that maintains it is self-supporting, and would keep it advancing and and healthy regardless of whether the business world and general public uses it with wild abandon, only a little, or not at all. Because of its open-source licence terms, its raw source code is permanently available. Linux cannot be "withdrawn from the market" at the whim of some company - as is slowly happening to OS/2. (Ed: IBM finally pulled the plug on OS/2 on December 10.)

Therefore, Linux users are not in a zero-sum competition for popularity with proponents of other operating systems (unlike, say, OS/2, MS-Windows, and Mac OS users). I can honestly wish Apple Computer well with their eye-pleasing and well-made (if a bit slow and inflexible) Mac OS X operating system: wishing them well doesn't mean wishing Linux ill.

Note that all of the identifiable "Linux companies" could blow away in the breeze like just so much Enron stock, and the advance of Linux would not be materially impaired, because what matters is source code and the licensing thereof, which has rather little to do with any of those firms' fortunes.

Further, and getting back to your original point, I honestly don't care if you or anyone else gets "converted" to Linux. I don't have to. I'm no better off if you do; I'm no worse off if you don't.

What I do care about is giving making useful information and help available to people using Linux or interested in it. Why? Partly to redeem the trust shown by others when they helped me. Partly because it's interesting. Partly because researching and then teaching things I usually start knowing little about is the best way I know to learn. And partly out of pure, unadulterated self-interest: people knowing your name is at least a foot in the door, in the IT business.

As to stridency, there _is_ a well-known problem of all on-line discussion media. Some people become emotionally invested in positions they've taken in technical arguments, and gratuituously turn technical disagreements into verbal brawls. And unfortunately they tend to be drawn to people like me who attempt to state their views clearly and forcefully. It's as if you were to say "I like herring" and thereby summon every dedicated herring-hater within a hundred-mile radius. The problem comes with the territory.

But that causes occasional unpleasantness and back-biting _among_ some on-line Linux users, not an aspect of "advocacy", which isn't something we have much use for, generally - especially where the term refers to convincing the unwilling.

What do you hope to achieve by this advocacy?

I hope to have fun, to learn, to help those willing to "help themselves" by learning about their systems, to become qualified to work professionally with better and more-interesting technology, to spend more of my time around people I enjoy, and to improve my quality of life by improving the grade of tools I work with.

Please note that "converting users to Linux" is nowhere on that list.

With many people there's obviously a lot more to this than just the matter of pushing free/better software. Your comments?

The first thing that draws you in is that it gets things done. For example, when I needed a DNS nameserver at my workplace 10 years ago, and had no budget to buy anything, there Linux was. Bang it onto the disused 486SX in the corner, and boom! you have a nameserver. Suddenly need a departmental NT file and print-server? No problem: Just enable Samba on the Linux box. Intranet server? Switch on Apache. Print server, AppleShare server, fax server, mail server? No problem.

That entire laundry-list of functions might be a single Pentium 133 with 128 MB of RAM, performing all of them at once - and also being a decent graphical workstation on the side - without breaking out a sweat. By comparison, with Windows NT it's safest to devote a machine to _each_ of those roles - or three machines in the case of Microsoft Exchange Server (a mail machine and two NT domain servers).

So, it's no wonder that underfunded IT departments have frequently adopted Linux machines everywhere the technical employees can slide the machines in without unduly alarming management.

You will most often come to Linux to get things done. People often stay because they start realising further possibilities: Want to filter e-mail for Windows viruses? Report to management on network traffic? Monitor all of your network's devices for trouble spots? Run a central backup server? Creat a good-quality corporate firewall without breaking the bank? Linux is perfect for all of those projects.

Let's come to the Windows refund day in February 1999. Whose idea was it?

A young webmaster named Matt Jensen in Seattle announced his idea out of the blue, having been inspired by the success of Australian Geoff Bennett in extracting a refund from Toshiba Australia for the unwanted Microsoft OS included with his laptop computer. Geoff carefully read the OS's licence statement, and noted that he was actually specifically _required_ to return the software for a refund (and forbidden to use it), if he didn't consent to the licence terms, which he did not. After a six-month epic display of mulishness, Toshiba Australia finally gave him a $A110 refund.

Hearing about this after the fact (and eventually about an American named Donna having done likewise with Canon Computer a year earlier), Matt put up a Web page urging that people bang on the desks of their respective hardware manufacturers (OEMs or Original Equipment Manufacturers) on February 15, 1999. (Someone named Chris Schoedel managed the refund feat a third time, about that time. We know of no other genuine cases.) This cause was then taken up on the Slashdot.org discussion site, which is where a number of other Linux activists (Linux Journal Technical Editor Don Marti, LinuxMall.com proprietor Mark Bolzern, and others) and I heard about it.

What did it achieve?

A few things, but I'll get to that point presently. The key fact that became apparent to my circle of activists, early on, was that the event was ill-conceived. When we joined the planning effort, we found that Matt had no concept of how to organise a publicity event and shape the coverage: with no coordination, computer purchasers were to visit hardware vendors in obscurity and annoy them to probably no effect whatsoever - and with no real event for the press to cover.

Further, he didn't anticipate one fairly obvious hazard: Microsoft Corporation was already starting its campaign to discredit users of non-Microsoft PC OSes such as Linux and BSD. It had tried repeatedly to portray purchase of "naked PCs" (ones with no preloaded operating system) as indicative of software bootlegging. After all, they'd suggest, obviously that PC is going to get a Microsoft OS installed after purchase, as nobody could possibly want anything else, so allowing purchase of computers without a mandatory Microsoft OS means supporting illegal software copying. (I realise that's a non sequitur, but it's what they said.)

The hazard was that some sharp-witted Microsoft publicist might have found some young fellow to interview, getting him to testify that he'd be seeking a refund for his OEM preload (and thank you very much for the cash) but then intended to keep on using it because, of course, what else is there? Thankfully, this never happened, but my activist circle - after taking over planning of Windows Refund Day from Matt - took considerable pains to prevent the charge from being credible, if it were tried.

In any event, the little-known fact about Windows Refund Day was that it was about 95 percent damage control: It was an effort to save Matt's event, which we didn't ask for and would never have launched at all on our own initiative, from becoming a public-relations disaster that would have inevitably, despite our having not been responsible for its creation, reflected primarily on us Linux users.

Having approximately $A110 of our PC purchases go towards the mandatory purchase of Microsoft software we have no use for whatsoever is really only a minor annoyance - mostly when Microsoft then cites those involuntary purchases as proving their goods' popularity. The wary computer buyer can sometimes evade the "Microsoft tax" in most machine categories, with the notable exception (for the most part) of almost all x86 laptop computers. But we had been handed an event already heavily publicised, so we decided to make the most of it.

The first thing we did was change its focus from OEMs to Microsoft itself. Although the licence (the "EULA" or End-User Licence Agreement) stated that refunds should be sought from the OEMs, the three known success stories - the only ones worldwide - were exceptions to an otherwise grim picture of consistent industry-wide refusal to honour the EULA's terms, and had been wrenched from the OEMs in those cases by three extraordinarily determined and patient customers. So, we reasoned, since the OEMs were reneging and yet Microsoft was getting paid, it was fair to seek recourse from Microsoft.

The second thing we did was assess where and how to best hold those events. Matt Jensen belatedly realised that he'd _accidentally_ scheduled Windows Refund Day for the USA national holiday Presidents' Day (commemorating the birthdays of Presidents Washington and Lincoln), and in a panic spoke of the need to cancel the already heavily publicised event. We had to override him, finding the date to be (accidentally) perfect, because Microsoft Corporation would be open for office hours but most other businesses would not. Therefore, we could have heavy attendance from people on their day off, _and_ still be able to visit open Microsoft facilities.

Centralised events in public at or near Microsoft Corporation offices had a great deal more publicity potential than would Matt's original bother-the-OEMs plan - and in-person events did happen, garnishing a great deal of attention, in northern and southern California, New York City, New Zealand, and France. And thus, we managed to get across several messages quite clearly:

1. There are vast numbers of people whose attitude to Microsoft software is "Thanks, but no thanks" because they have other OSes and software they much prefer.
2. They're often obliged to buy it anyway, because of Microsoft's control of the OEMs.
3. When push comes to shove, Microsoft Corporation ignores its customers' needs and literally hides from them.

This last was graphically demonstrated in the largest Windows Refund Day event, in Foster City, California (near Silicon Valley), which I organised: Microsoft sent executive Adam Sohn down to read a brief statement to the press, and then he and his assistant fled up into their nearby office tower and locked out the elevators so that members of the public and the press couldn't talk to them at all. This PR debacle for the Redmondians was captured for the international press, and the lesson was lost on no one.

And it was a great deal of harmless fun, to boot: we had hundreds of people show up for our march and visit to our Microsoft neighbours in Foster City, and even had a rock and roll band show up and perform on a flatbed lorry. At the end of the afternoon, we drove up to the (Linux-based) Internet cafe where I lived in San Francisco, and had a party catered by appreciative IT businesses, including about a pallet full of good beer. Not bad, for 95 percent damage control.

Do ordinary people really care about such things?

Ordinary people have a vague sense that they're probably being taken for a ride by Microsoft Corporation policies, but can't often quite put their fingers on the specifics. Whereas departments are often a bit rabid on the subject: licensing is often uncontrolled and poses a serious risk of licence audits, except for the larger firms that buy 3-year site licences (which Microsoft is now trying to shorten to 18 months, by the way), in which case they pay for both the site licence cost and (redundantly) for the OEM preload copies. Including, often, for server machines that will run something else entirely: some of the demonstrators at our Foster City event were _Microsoft's own customers_, who resented having to pay for mandatory copies of Windows 98 on machines that were immediately overwritten with separately-purchased copies of Windows NT.

(Those are the people who I see getting quite livid about Microsoft Corporation practices. Ironically, that's where you find the real Microsoft haters, while we of the Linux community merely give Microsoft a friendly razzing from time to time, purely in a spirit of fun.)

But don't forget, too, that the prices of PCs have been falling. $A110 doesn't seem like much, until suddenly the price of PCs falls below $A500, as it has in the US. And at the same time, the prices of Microsoft offerings have actually risen. At some point, the percentage sent to Redmond starts being a problem.

Are you involved in the forthcoming refund day (January 23)?

I am not, partly because I've been too busy with other things. Also, no refund initiative is going to succeed in any other than the publicity sense, as long as Microsoft continues to fully control the PC hardware OEMs.

Originally, Microsoft did this by offering favourable prices only to OEMs willing to pay a fixed fee to Redmond for each PC sold, regardless of whether it actually had Microsoft software on it. This situation established the tradition of refusing to _not_ include a Microsoft OS, which has really never changed since.

The US Department of Justice ended that arrangement by getting Microsoft to agree that it constituted illegal restraint of trade, in the first of two "consent decrees". (A consent decree is where a monopolist agrees to cease certain behaviour for a specified number of years, and in exchange avoids being prosecuted and possibly dismembered for violating the antitrust laws.) So, instead, it offered better pricing to more-compliant OEMs, until that was in turn barred by the second consent decree.

That leaves (or so we are told) two puppet strings left: the smaller one is per-model-line agreements of the sort banned by the first consent decree (because they were banned only if applied company-wide). The larger one is Microsoft co-op marketing: favoured OEMs' advertising costs are very heavily subsidised by Microsoft Corporation, forming a very significant percentage of revenues of goods sold. No OEM is willing to do anything that might risk that cash flow, especially when that could erase dangerously thin hardware profit margins.

So, the organisers of the second Windows Refund Day cannot seriously expect to change any OEM preload policies as long as those fundamental facts persist, but it's quite possible that quite a lot of useful publicity can be generated, if it's done well.

The end of the preload monopoly (and consequently of the "Microsoft tax") is more likely to happen from purely economic forces. When PCs drop below $A400 and keep slowly declining, something has to give. If what gives way are Microsoft's own prices, then they themselves might be in trouble. What becomes of their employees' loyalty when their ever-important stock options turn into dot-com funny money? We live in interesting times, anyway.

What kind of future do you see for Linux - on the server side? On the desktop?

The traditional Linux answer is that the server and the desktop are one and the same, and always have been. In my household's cheap LAN of Unix machines (my Linux boxes and my wife's Linux and MacOS X ones), any machine might be a server for some purposes and a client for others. I might actually run an application on a machine elsewhere in the house, imaging it onto the graphical Linux screen in front of me. The remote application (that I'm clicking at on my Linux screen) could be running on a remote Windows box. (Ask any Linux user group how to do this.)

But yes, I really do think Linux will continue to infiltrate computing in practically every area, as it keeps being adapted in new ways and repackaged to meet specialised roles. The next time you see a Linux computer, you may not even know it's a computer, let alone a Linux one. Ever seen a TiVo personal video recorder? It's a Linux-based computer, storing television programmes on its hard drive. Most people never realise that.

How does your wife/partner handle this obsession of yours? Your kids (if any) - how do they react?

I'm afraid my wife Deirdre is equally afflicted: she's actually a much better Unix programmer than I am, though she divides her attention between Linux and Apple's Mac OS X. (Another interesting fact: With the release of OS X, it's now true that all significant computer operating systems in use, except Microsoft's, are Unix-based.)

No children yet. One cat, and he's a "vi" user. (Just kidding.)

Anything else you'd like to add?

Linux isn't for everyone; but then, what is? However, you can get a great deal done with it, gain satisfaction from working with software that doesn't suck for a change, and have a lot of fun. Join us if you feel like trying it.