Dana Blankenhorn

The Biotech Cathedral and the Bazaar

We have become accustomed, in the first decades of the 21^st century, to thinking of technology as providing the highest value-add.

Software, made by hand but scaled instantly over cloud networks, is where the money is today.

But that will not be the case a decade from now.

The next revolution, in biotechnology, is already underway. I’ve described it as “DNA as a Programming Language.” While I made my life in computing, mostly as an observer, my son is now making his way into biotech, as a participant.

COVID-19 provided the “Visicalc moment” for this revolution, the giant “ah-ha” that created the mass market. Moderna, BionTech, and mRNA technology, gave the west vaccines against the disease long before older technologies. Moderna developed its vaccine within days of getting the DNA map of the COVID-19 genome.

Metaverse From the Bottom Up

There’s an enormous amount of capital going into what’s called the metaverse today. An awful lot is being written about it. The vast majority is being wasted.

I know this because Moore’s Law has been around for almost 60 years. Two generations. We know how a change like this occurs.

It occurs from the bottom up.

It was start-ups that forced IBM into mini-computers and, later, into PCs. Digital software natives Microsoft and Apple eventually pushed IBM aside entirely and let its own bureaucracy devour it. The same was true with networking. If we waited for AT&T to build the Internet, we’d still be waiting. It was the government’s insistence on open standards, driven largely by the needs of national defense, that drove the model in the 1990s.

The Metaverse Problem

Back in 2009, I covered Taiwan’s CompuText show, alongside my son, then 18.

We spent four days wandering the halls, on the hunt for “desktop Linux.” We eventually found Linux Foundation head Jim Zemlin addressing a small group in a corner of Taiwan 101, the city’s tallest building, miles from the show’s main hall. It’s become something of a joke between us since then.

The point is there was no desktop Linux. You can argue that Google Android is Linux, or that the Mac OS is based on a Linux, but these aren’t truly open systems. Linux is, and was, primarily a server technology.

This is important to note when thinking about Web 3.0, or the Metaverse, as the buzzword advocates call it. They say it’s the biggest thing since the Web was spun, nearly 3 decades ago. It’s certainly the biggest thing since the Cloud, which Amazon began selling 15 years ago.

Open Source Explains It All

Back in 2005 I was asked to take over a new “open source” beat for ZDNet.

It turns out to have been the most important story of my life. And yours.

Open source is software based on the radical idea that the more eyes you get on code, the better it will be. Without getting too deep into the weeds here, it works.

The benefits of open source, however, flow mainly to its users. In the old proprietary model, they flowed to developers. Microsoft and (especially) Oracle fought it so fiercely. They saw the “little guys” as ganging up to steal their competitive advantage. Microsoft finally surrendered, building a network of cloud data centers that has made it the second most-valuable company in the world. Oracle is worth barely one-tenth as much.

All of America’s biggest companies are now built on the open source idea. Apple built its cloud on open source. So did Google, and Amazon, and Facebook. Facebook extended this into hardware with its Open Compute Project. Netflix extended it into networking with Open Connect.

But open source relates to more than software, hardware, or technology.

Open Source is Business

Open source was born at a time of high tech unemployment.

In the wake of the dot-com bubble bursting, early this century, the ideas found in Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar found salience. The more eyes you could get on the code, the higher you could build the stack. This created competition for proprietary software. Anyone could build off the common framework.

Open source built the cloud, and the 5 Cloud Czars came to dominate it. They all use open source, but in a proprietary way. They support only the projects they’re using or those they’re seeking access to. In the 2010s developers all found jobs, often at 6-figure salaries, often dripping with stock options and grants. The idea of sharing with others went out of fashion.

Open core was one way to get around the open source idea. The center of the stack was shared, but everything the sponsor built above it was theirs. While small companies that did this ran into criticism, the fact is that if a stack has a commercial sponsor, the software is open core. The sponsor is building proprietary tools on an open source stack and calling it support.

Today, most contributions to open source have financial motives. Companies are trying to get access to the full stack, connecting their own stuff to the stack, and the core of the stack is enhanced mainly by its commercial sponsors. Programmer time is expensive. No one works for free. Young programmers may start their careers contributing to an open source program, but they’re quickly snapped up and go to work making money.

Thus the decision by LiveCode to “abandon” open source, putting their old code in an archive and building proprietary above it, drew headlines but it’s not really a story.

Because everyone is doing it.

The Problem with Academe

The University of Minnesota’s latest scandal illustrates a bigger problem with major universities.

As my friend Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been reporting, UMN’s Institutional Review Board let a computer science professor deliberately dump dodgy code into the Linux kernel, just to see what would happen. 

Well, now we know what will happen. The paper has been pulled, the professor has been shamed, and the university has been banned from contributing to Linux. Everyone is being punished by that, down to the last undergraduate.

Yet the university thought an apology would suffice. 

It doesn’t.

Redistribution of Technology Wealth

The redistribution of technology’s wealth is indeed trickier than I thought. 

When I first began covering open source in 2005, Amazon.Com was worth $19.6 billion, Google had just passed $100 billion  and Facebook was a start-up.

The “incumbent” software companies of that time were IBM, which was worth $140 billion, Oracle at $63 billion, and Microsoft at $273 billion.

Open source was an underdog technology. Closed source or “proprietary” software was where the money was. You licensed software. The company that developed it accepted all the costs of growing and maintaining it. The cloud was barely a gleam in Larry Page’s eye, a headache made necessary by Google’s roaring success in search.

The Cloud Crash of 2020

This fall represents the end of a full decade since I lost my last “tech reporting” gig at ZDNet and started focusing on finance.

I’ve made a lot of money. The value of my stock portfolio has tripled. I’ve found a good niche with InvestorPlace that has eased me toward retirement. I only work because I want to. Social Security would pay me more right now. But writing isn’t a job. It’s living, it’s breathing. If you can get paid for it, that means people are reading you and benefitting from it.

I’m very, very fortunate.

Most of my last decade has been spent following the clouds. Cloud computing, which combines distributed processing, virtualization, open source, and scale, has proven itself as the 21^st century’s first great technology revolution.

Moore’s Law of Health

One topic in the coming re-write of my Moore’s Law book, now called Moore’s Law Explains it All, involves what I call Moore’s Law of Politics.

Moore’s Second Law, the rising capital cost of chip making, offsets Moore’s Law itself. Moore’s Law of Software, its value increasing with use, offsets Moore’s Law of Content, because most content doesn’t gain in value once you read, hear or see it.

At the same time Moore’s Law of Health, the fact that technology lets us live longer, creates a negative in Moore’s Law of Politics.

Political decision-making is stuck in the past.

I got a reminder of this during my recent trip to Heidelberg. I met a young Vietnamese mathematician. He was about the same age as my own son, 28.

I asked him about the Vietnam War. To him it’s an historical relic, like our Civil War. Even his father wasn’t impacted by it. It’s something from his grandfather’s time.

Apotheosis of Nationalism

An apotheosis is the glorification of something to a divine level, the treatment of a human or institution as a god.

It’s a climax state. As with a swamp that has become a forest due to the steady deposit of leaves, it’s unstable. It’s the last step before a fall. Anyone and anything can become Icarus. Our doom is sealed when we get too close to the Sun.

Nationalism was born in the 18^th century. Ours was the first new nation. Nationalism has dominated political organization since the 19^th century, because it delivered leaders beyond those of royal blood. The reign of Louis XVI, then, was an apotheosis for the imperial model. The tumbrel began the end for the divine right of kings.

We’re now at the apotheosis of the nation state. Everyone is now part of a nation state. We can’t conceive of any other structure. Nation states, their leaders, and their philosophies send their people off to war for the glorification of “the people.” It’s a continuing competition for resources, both human and physical. Nationalism is the ultimate zero-sum game. For my nation to prosper, other nations and people must suffer.