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BloombergBusinessweek November 18, 2019users can also opt to sponsor coders or projects that
interest them, à la Kickstarter or other crowdfunding
sites. Often, though, open source coders don’t get paid
what they’re worth, and their status as hobbyists com-
plicates the corporate world’s reliance on their work.
About this time last year a 48-year-old software devel-
oper in Sweden named Daniel Stenberg received a pan-
icked call one evening from a large German automaker.
The car company, which Stenberg declines to name,
asked that he fly to Germany immediately because an
application Stenberg had written was causing the enter-
tainment system software in 7 million cars to crash. “I
had to inform them that, you know, this is a spare-time
project for me and that I have a full-time job and can’t
just go to Germany for them,” Stenberg says. “They
started out pretty demanding, but then switched when
they realized the situation they were in.”
This is fairly typical for Stenberg, who since 1998 has
been refining a widely used open source tool known
as curl. Over the years, curl has found its way into the
electronics of almost every new car, as well as software
written by the likes of Apple, Instagram, YouTube, and
Spotify Technology. On any given day, more than 1 billion
people will unknowingly use curl, which helps transfer
data between internet-based services. Developers from
major companies and startups alike have grabbed curl
off GitHub and elsewhere and inserted it into their prod-
ucts in ways that Stenberg could never have field-tested
himself, and they’re not shy to send him messages at all
hours demanding that he fix bugs promptly.
“Most of the days ... I tear my hair when fixing bugs,
or I try to rephrase my emails to [not] sound old and
bitter (even though I can very well be that) when I
once again try to explain things to users who can be
extremely unfriendly and whining,” Stenberg writes on
his website. “I spend late evenings on curl when my wife
and kids are asleep. I escape my family and rob them
of my company to improve curl ... alone in the dark
(mostly) with my text editor and debugger.”
In similar fashion, thousands of labors of love have
found their way into software running everything from
cash registers to trains. Software tools like GitHub have
made this process easier with each passing year. Rather
than rewriting every piece of an app from scratch, a
developer just searches the vast library of open source
code to grab what already exists. The end result is a
complex system of interdependencies on thousands of
freely available tools and apps. If one of the volunteers
responsible for maintaining and improving those tools
and apps decides he’s had enough, entire swaths of the
internet and our infrastructure can cease to function
until someone else steps in with a fix. “It’s a bit crazy,”
Stenberg says. “Open source is a huge part of everything
now, and I think it’s still growing.”3
THIS ISN’T QUITE THE FUTURE
THE HIPPIES WANTED. IN THE
BEGINNING, FREE SOFTWARE
ZEALOTS WERE TRYING TO
DEMOCRATIZE TECHNOLOGY,
NOT CREATE A WAY FOR
POWERFUL CORPORATIONS
TO GET MORE POWER.They wanted to ensure the best computing tools and
data wouldn’t be centralized and metered out by cor-
porations. They wanted people to have the freedom to
explore technology and ideas away from the watchful
eyes of an overlord.
Yeah, well, oops. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and
many others have used open source code to create
grand, global advertising networks that track and ana-
lyze billions of people’s every move, online and off. By
comparison, ideological wars about bundling Excel
and Internet Explorer with Windows 95 seem down-
right quaint. “If you don’t have control over the tech-
nology that runs your life, the devices and services that
run your life, then your life will be run by other people
using the computers,” says Eben Moglen, a law profes-
sor at Columbia who’s spent decades at the fore of the
free software movement. “We made good stuff, and it
was turned into ammunition against our dreams.”
Moglen says he appreciates the leveling effect that
GitHub can have—it’s one of the best places for a talented
16-year-old programmer in Cambodia or Nigeria to show
off her skills and alter the economic course of her life.
Still, Moglen is counting on young people to form the core
of a greater backlash against big tech companies’ privacy
grabs. He’s pitching a hardware-software package called
the FreedomBox, which costs about $90. It’s a small com-
puter that uses open source software to replicate many
of the common internet services (search, messaging,
file-sharing) away from the prying eyes of the tech giants.
Other open source veterans argue that the revolu-
tion was worth it. Small teams of scientists can now
punch well above their weight thanks to GitHub short-
cuts.Cancerresearchers,tociteoneofmany,many
examples,frequentlyborrowfromGoogle’sopensource
machine-learning work in their hunt for better ways to
screen for tumors. “I don’t know who is religious about
open source anymore,” says Dave Rosenberg, a veteran
software executive and investor. “I don’t think you can
achieve the stuff we want without it.”