He Changes Minds

They can't vote. They can't strike. Some of them can't even read yet. But in a decade or two, today's youth will run the world. And by then it may be too late. By then, according to one technology crusader, corporate self-interest and political shortsightedness may have compromised their inherent rights to dream, invent, and change the world.

Bob Young is fighting that Orwellian vision of the future. Cofounder and chairman of Red Hat Software Inc., he champions the intellectual-property rights of the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators. Young fervently believes cooperative, open collaboration -- as demonstrated in the open-source technology that Red Hat distributes -- is a smart way to do business, to govern countries, and to protect future entrepreneurs' right to invent. And so he invests his time and passion in this cause and in a private foundation called the Red Hat Center, which aims to publicize and galvanize people behind the fight for free access to information. Ultimately, it also aims to reach a compromise that will both empower and protect entrepreneurs in the digital sphere and beyond.

"The next generation of innovators is being harmed, and no one's taking that into account because the next generation can't vote -- they're in high school, grade school, and playpens," Young says. "When they emerge from school and want to make a genetically modified seed or to investigate the next human-genome cell, they should be guaranteed the freedom to do so."

Roots in Transparency

If open-source technology represents a wave of change crashing over the software industry, then Red Hat is the dazzled surfer riding that crest all the way to shore.

Since Bob Young and Marc Ewing founded Red Hat Software in 1994, the North Carolina-based company has used the Linux server operating system and an army of adept volunteers to challenge the status quo. To date, nearly 1 million programmers worldwide contribute to the open-source movement by tweaking, adapting, and sharing the source code that powers up to 60% of the Internet.

Red Hat demonstrated that open-source business was smart business when it issued its IPO in 1999 -- and subsequently posted annual revenues of more than $42 million. Since then, the Red Hat stock has surged and plunged -- rising to $151 a share within two months of the IPO and dropping to nearly $10 a share in October. These discouraging financials have cast some doubt on the financial promise of open-source technology, but they have done little to quell Young's enthusiasm for the open-source model.

Now, he's expanding his revolution.

An Attack From the Hill

Open-source evangelists have enemies in high places. In 1997 and 1998, the U.S. Congress passed two controversial cyberspace acts: the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). These acts extend patent and copyright laws into cyberspace. The software and entertainment industries generally support these laws as protection for their traditional business models against threats like Napster. Scientists, librarians, and academics oppose the acts, claiming they ultimately hinder knowledge sharing and hamper innovation.

Supporters believe that intellectual-property patents will stimulate innovation by attracting new business to underdeveloped regions; will protect artists and innovators from plagiarism and theft, especially on the Web; and will clarify some of the confusion surrounding downloadable material on the Internet.

Young doesn't object to patents or copyrights in essence, or to the protection of artists and innovators. But he does believe the DMCA compromises the freedom and creativity of tomorrow's entrepreneurs because, he says, it hinders the free exchange of ideas. He cites a Thomas Jefferson essay written in 1813 that discusses intellectual and physical property protection:

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

"We're all standing on the shoulders of giants," Young says. "Every entrepreneur owes his idea to the people he studied and met in elementary school, in high school, in college, and in industry. We all build our ideas on the best ideas we can find. Now imagine if there were no more good ideas we were allowed to use."