Raise your hand if you’ve ever downloaded software by recording a series of tones on a tape while it was playing on a radio station.
Patrick Debois did – in the 1980s as a budding computer enthusiast. He recalled that Europe did not have the electronic exchange network BBS that existed in the United States. These radio shows were a way to distribute software, though they were often thwarted “when your mother came into the room saying something and messed up the recording.”
Patrick was only temporarily deterred and continued to explore his passion for computers, but missed a community. It found a community when Linux came on the scene. He talks about the value of the Linux community, “The fact that there was a sharing community, and the Linux community of tools that I could just use, especially as a student. I know open source is not free. But it was extremely helpful to me as a student at the time to be able to try new things, learn new things, dissect new things about open source.
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In 1994, while a student at Ghent University, he created a web page where anyone could add URLs to help people explore the Internet. It was around the same time as Yahoo! started manually indexing the Internet. His site was running on an old Spark machine, and it was fascinating for him to use a machine running on a shared source. He then took his first job out of college, where he managed a web server, firewall, and other new technologies.
Later, Patrick worked for the government, where he and his team managed the first mail server, the first DNS service, etc., all on three AutoCAD stations. He had to buy proprietary software from vendors, but was frustrated because when something didn’t work, he had to wait for the vendor to provide updates. He often wished he could try to fix it himself, then share with others what he had done. Sound familiar?
Patrick expressed, “If people are yelling at you, it’s true, and your only excuse is that we ask the seller, and it’ll take about a week or a month, that’s no excuse. And it makes you feel helpless at those times. So that’s why we started going the other way by mixing the two together? Sometimes you get good support from vendors. It’s neither. Open source itself is also no guarantee that you have good support, or that it is easy to write. But if there’s a supporting community, and it’s open source, then you feel like a good citizen and a member to contribute your fixes and solutions.
Open source itself is also no guarantee that you have good support, or that it is easy to write. But if there’s a supporting community, and it’s open source, then you feel like a good citizen and a member to contribute your fixes and solutions.
Fast forward to 2000 and open source is beginning to grow in popularity and gain wider acceptance. The Open Source Development Labs has partnered with the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux. The project morphed into the Linux Foundation in January 2007, when it was granted nonprofit status and was funded and sponsored by a consortium of major technology vendors.
At first, Patrick doubted it would work, fearing that a company might put its interests above those of the consortium when it comes to projects that meet building standards. “I’ll be honest, I have my doubts in a way that I’ve probably seen too much of the open standards discussion, or RFCs, or whatever, being kind of like written in some directions that some companies wanted in these kinds of situations. But I also liked that there’s governance now, and there’s discussion and no one party owns that. So I see the Linux Foundation probably more as a mediator in discussions between these companies. But I like that they stay neutral and don’t take a position on whether we should do a certain thing, yes or no. . . I think we are all sufficiently aware, when we come to the Foundation, that it is a balance between several points of view on the problem.
One of Patrick’s favorite Linux Foundation projects is signature store, a new standard for signing, verifying and protecting software. The project has 465 members from more than 20 companies. He also has his eye on LF AI & Data Foundationespecially on the data side because, “You can share your source quite easily, but it’s the data that makes it interesting.”
There’s so much more to Patrick’s story, including being credited with helping coin the term DevOps. The good news is that his story features in an episode of the Linux Foundation’s Untold Stories of Open Source podcast. Check Full episode and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.
Do you have any suggestions for future episodes or any other comments, questions, etc. ? Visit the the podcast’s GitHub page.