Summary
When VA Linux bought Andover.net, the first question on many people's lips was why. Eileen Cohen sheds light on that question in an interview with Mark Stone.
Mark Stone joined VA Linux Systems in December 1999 to head VA's Media Group. Prior to that he was the executive editor for O'Reilly's & Associates' Open Source Group, where he developed and contributed to Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. On February 3, VA Linux Systems announced it was acquiring Andover.net -- the owners of Slashdot, Freshmeat, QuestionExchange, and other Websites -- in a cash-and-stock deal worth roughly $1.04 billion. I asked Mark how Andover's sites might affect the Web side of VA's business and what the implications might be for the open source community.
LinuxWorld: You bring some impressive publishing credentials to VA Linux Systems. Were you hired in anticipation of a major expansion of VA's Website holdings?
Mark Stone: I don't actually know the answer to that. When I was brought onboard, the Websites we were most concerned about in the discussions we had were Linux.com, SourceForge.org, and Themes.org, and so far those continue to be ones that occupy my thoughts the most.
LinuxWorld: How involved will you be with the newly acquired Andover.net sites?
Mark Stone: There's a lot that hasn't been decided so far. We're in this transition period, trying to plan out what will actually happen after the deal closes, so very little is going to be decided during that time. But I certainly hope to be very much involved with whatever directions those Websites might take.
LinuxWorld: Do you have a particular vision of what those directions might be?
Mark Stone: I have some ideas of what I would like to see and what I think the open source community is missing. What we're seeing more and more is that Websites are becoming not just places to distribute content but also platforms to deliver services and applications. The open source community has some of that covered, but certainly not all. I still think we don't have a first-rate news site of our own. Slashdot is a marvelous aggregator of news stories, but it's not a news site per se. Slashdot is first and foremost an outstanding discussion forum -- a kind of village green for the open source community -- and it's a wonderful resource in that respect.
A Web-based environment could offer the open source community a whole range of things that haven't really come to fruition yet. One exciting thing about working with the SourceForge team is that its Website shows us a new direction -- one where an entire development center is available online and works through a Web interface. I hope that one or more of these Web properties will be able to expand eventually on that notion of Web-based services.
LinuxWorld: SourceForge appears to be a runaway success. Is it making money for VA Linux?
Mark Stone: Oh gosh, that's always a hard question for an open source company, isn't it? It's producing opportunities to make money that we're very excited about, and that's its purpose, or one of its purposes.
LinuxWorld: Community and press response to the Andover acquisition has focused on Andover's open source sites, but it owns several others, including some that describe themselves as cross-platform and even one [Slaughterhouse.com] that's Windows focused. What are VA's plans for these other entities?
Mark Stone: Again, I can't really comment on what the plans are, but I know what I hope might happen and some of the ideas I've had.
Open source means a lot more than just Linux, and one of the exciting things that's happening right now is an increasing interest in open source from people in the Windows community. In fact, we're even seeing, I think, a real increase in open source development on Windows platforms.
When I was at O'Reilly, one of the things O'Reilly worked at very hard was to get a reasonable port of Perl running on Windows systems running on Win32. In typical O'Reilly fashion, I think they were a bit ahead of their time, but that was an important early indicator of the interest in open source code and open source ideas in the Windows community. And it's only increased since then. Tcl is a scripting language that's been very successful in Windows environments. The Apache team's been working very hard to get a solid port of Apache that'll run under Windows. I know IBM's been very instrumental in helping to move that along. These trends have had some momentum for a while, and I think they'll continue to grow.
So it's going to be interesting to see what impact this has on Andover's other sites. I don't know the answer at this point, but I can certainly see the opportunity there. The fact that a portaled code repository of Windows programs is there doesn't mean that it's not of interest to the open source community. There's certainly a nice opportunity to extend a welcoming hand from the Linux community to the Windows community, and if we have an opportunity to use these Websites to do that, I think that would be a good thing.
LinuxWorld: Andover.net lost $15.7 million in its last quarter. How will the Andover assets contribute to VA Linux's profitability?
Mark Stone: Positively, at some point. [laughs] The big question is, when will that point be? And nobody really knows yet. Obviously we're still going through the details of this transaction and what their assets are and what to make of all this.
But we wouldn't have pursued this -- and VA's board wouldn't have been interested in having us pursue this -- if we didn't see a strong revenue opportunity down the road.
LinuxWorld: Will Linux.com undergo any major changes in all this?
Mark Stone: Again, I can't really say for sure, but VA is not here to change the fundamental community aspect of any of these Websites. That's the arrangement we had with the Linux.com team when we acquired the domain name and put together a team to manage it -- that we would do it in a hands-off fashion. You don't see banner ads on Linux.com, and I don't actually foresee a time when you will. It's a community site first and foremost. We're pleased to have an opportunity to work with that site and help improve it, but it belongs to the Linux community more than anything else. And that aspect I don't expect to change. It would be silly for us to change it. That's the value in the site.
It's the same thing with Slashdot. It would be pointless for us to try to change anything fundamental about what is really the basic appeal of the site and the key to its popularity.
LinuxWorld: In late January, Andover announced it would create a corporate services division to help businesses adopting Linux, and that Freshmeat would offer comprehensive services, such as free Web hosting, a Web-based version-control system, and project and mailing-list management. Will those initiatives be carried out, or will they be rolled into existing VA operations?
Mark Stone: I honestly have no idea at this point. We certainly support the spirit of those initiatives, and the challenge now is to find the best and most efficient way to make use of all this talent and see that such initiatives succeed.
LinuxWorld: How do you react to the concerns many in the Linux community are expressing: that the acquisition puts commercial interests above the needs of the community and that Slashdot in particular will ultimately be unable to maintain its objectivity?
Mark Stone: Well, I think that perception is always going to be out there, and there are some people that will always be skeptical -- and to some extent we count on those people! It's a community with a conscience, and that's part of its charm. So that's OK.
I think people will just have to watch and see what happens. Sometimes there's no winning. I mean, when Slashdot posted an official statement from Larry Augustin, our CEO, and Bruce Twickler, Andover's CEO, announcing their feelings on the relationship and that Slashdot would maintain autonomy, people criticized Slashdot for posting that story, saying, "See, this is a VA story, and they're putting it on their Website!" And you know, if they hadn't put it up, they would have been criticized, too: "It's an important item in the news -- how come you guys aren't covering it?" So sometimes you just can't win, and that's OK. [laughs] Like I said, it's part of the charm of the open source community, and if you don't learn to love it, you don't last in this community very long.
What I would say beyond that is that people on all sides of this debate have a tendency to slip into a false dilemma where they believe, on one hand, it's either supporting open source, which is an act of charity, or pursuing business interests, which is an act of selfishness. And I think the magic of open source is to reveal that it's really a false dilemma -- that it's possible to do something that's for the good of the community and at the same time furthers your own self-interest. That's how open source businesses get built. The greatest measure of an open source project's success is not only that it be endorsed and embraced by the open source community, but that it provide members of that community the opportunity to earn their livelihood with open source. That's really what VA is all about.
LinuxWorld: Ultimately, does VA Linux believe it's more important to please the Linux/open source community or to expand it?
Mark Stone: [laughs] That's a good question. That's a really good question. That's a hard question, too. So, of course, I'm not going to answer it.
There's no way to expand the Linux community without changing it, and we have to expand the Linux community -- so obviously it's going to change. But I think that's inevitable. I think it would be a mistake to believe there's some sort of equilibrium point, some kind of pristine state that the community could fall into where things could just stay that way forever and everyone could be happy -- where the rest of the high-tech world could go on doing its thing, and the Linux community could go on doing its thing, and neither would interfere with the other. It just isn't going to happen that way.
Linux will either grow or wither away, and if I had to choose between those two options I'd much rather see it grow. If that means bringing new people into the community who aren't as familiar with open source values as those of us who've been around for a few years, then I don't think of that so much as a negative as I think of it as a challenge. Our challenge is to get those people to understand the value of open source and understand it isn't just a product, it's a high-tech way of life that's going to change the way the industry works forever. The more people we can get that message to, the better-off we're going to be. The better-off everybody's going to be.