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Chapter 1: Boot Time | page 1, 2, 3
I enjoyed swinging the mattock. I am a technology reporter for an online magazine, which means most of my waking life is spent sitting in front of my computer writing words meant to be read by other people sitting in front of their computers. The virtual life is deficient in visceral fulfillment; after pushing e-mail back and forth all week, the prospect of repeatedly hurling a heavy chunk of iron and fiberglass into the dirt offered welcome satisfaction. As I raised the mattock over my back and let it fall with a sweet thwack into the bamboo, I fell into a nearly unthinking rhythm -- hoist the mattock, let it fall, hoist, fall, hoist, fall. Every so often I would grab a 4-foot crowbar and crack another section of rhizome out of the ground, lifting the grotesquely beautiful twisted mass of roots on high to flaunt at my family, as if I had just snared a 20-pound bass or brought down a charging 12-point stag with a bow and arrow. But try as I might, I found myself unable to sever my workaday life from my backyard labor. In between hoists, my thoughts swung back to the cornerstones of my daily reporting. For two years, my attention had increasingly gravitated toward one particular set of stories: the free-software movement. The story of free software, it seemed to me, set forth a grand narrative about technology that put the entire world of computing into sharp, intriguing focus. As far as I was concerned, thumping away at my runaway running bamboo, the story of the free-software movement was equal parts political revolution, cultural upheaval and economic tidal wave. It was the most interesting and most important narrative to be told in the computing universe. My editors at Salon.com agreed with me, their enthusiasm fueled by the circulation figures our traffic tabulating software registered whenever I wrote an article on the topic. For nearly two years they had been encouraging me to follow the story, to attempt to answer the many questions that rippled off free software's wake. How was it possible that free-software projects could battle Microsoft and Netscape for market share? How could a ragtag band of hackers dotted across the world -- from Finland to Fremont, Calif. -- be collaborating with such efficiency? What did the concept of free software mean for the protection of intellectual property? And what would happen when the big guns of corporate capitalism finally trained their sights on this upstart? Could free software actually win in the long run? Or would Microsoft annihilate it, as it had demolished so many opponents before? My editors weren't the only people paying attention. As I labored away in my garden and at my computer, mighty Microsoft was casting its Sauron-like eye upon these meddlesome hacker hobbits. Microsoft is an arrogant company, but it is not stupid. Several influential Microsoft executives were justly alarmed at the fast growth of a competitor that might possibly, in the long run, be even more dangerous to Microsoft's stock price and quarterly profits than the trustbusting Department of Justice, or any gaggle of Bill Gates-hating Silicon Valley CEOs. The free-software movement poses a unique challenge to Microsoft. Microsoft's traditional strategy, when faced by a threat from another company, is simple: Buy out, crush or subvert the enemy. Yet even though there are a smattering of corporations boasting particularly high profiles in the free-software world, there is no single company that symbolizes or controls the movement. The code itself is common property, the product of a collaborative effort midwifed by the Internet. Microsoft would be able to squash free software about as easily at it could squelch the Net itself. One particular morning I swung my mattock at yet another square inch of gleaming rhizome. Thwack. I stared with despair at how little progress I had made after several hours of backbreaking work. Theoretically, this was fun, a relaxing change of pace. But I was really getting next to nowhere, and I had to face the fact that if I didn't uproot every last square inch, some tiny rhizome splinter would start it all up again. That roiling mass of roots -- the woody rhizome, the slender rootlets -- all twisted together in incredible complexity ... how dared I imagine I could defeat it? Who did I think I was -- Microsoft? Rhizome power. How obvious could a metaphor be? My bamboo offered me a clear and simple demonstration of just what kind of foe Microsoft and the rest of the proprietary-software world faced from the free-software challenge. The Internet is a rhizome: It has no central trunk, no main axis, no single point of entry or exit. It spreads everywhere, connects everything. The Internet even does Mother Nature one better: It's a superrhizome. Bamboo roots interlock and intertwine, but they don't actually interconnect; if you sever one rhizome, you create two distinct patches. But the Internet is built on the principle of multiply redundant interconnection. There's always another way through, another "workaround," as programmers like to say.
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