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Back to the source in the desert
6 September 2001

Sound and vision: The Burning Man
festival (left) makes Glastonbury
look like a small picnic. Brian
Behlendorf (right) is its chief
technology guru

What links Apache servers and eight-day raves? Chloe Veltman talks to Brian Behlendorf, the brains behind both

Brian Behlendorf does not fit the corporate mould. Bouncing around in jeans and a T-shirt with a long ponytail, he looks more like a partygoer who has just emerged from an all-night rave than a businessman.

At just 28, the Californian technology pioneer and part-time dance music DJ has a string of high-tech credits to his name and a reputation as one of the most outspoken proponents of open-source - and often, therefore, free - software.

Unlike Bill Gates and his crew at Microsoft, who believe in keeping strict proprietary boundaries around their products, Behlendorf is one of a large number of computer engineers who argue that software code should be freely available to programmers over the internet.

"It seems so natural for developers to share code. Someone else's insights into what you are doing can save you a lot of time and effort," he says, comparing programmers exchanging code to jazz musicians jamming with each other. It is this philosophy that has made a hero out of Linus Torvalds, the Finnish student who developed the open-source operating system Linux 10 years ago.

Behlendorf has stood by the open-source ethic in every stage of his wide-ranging career. He is a co-founder of Apache, the open-source server technology that runs more than 60pc of the world's websites, but his second job is as The Burning Man music festival's chief technology guru. The festival - which makes Glastonbury look like a small picnic in a country field - is an eight-day carnival of music, art and deep-rooted eccentricity that takes place each year in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.

The third of Behlendorf's businesses is Collabnet, a company he founded in 1999. Again, based on open-source standards, it provides collaborative software development solutions to clients such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Nokia.

"The idea that software should be free is older than the idea of charging for it," says Behlendorf, expressing a view that would make the Net's many moneymakers come out in a rash.

Long before Microsoft started charging for its DOS operating system in the 1980s, most software development took place in non-commercial environments such as university computer science departments, where the open-source approach thrived. Behlendorf gives the example of the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) operating system at the University of California at Berkeley, an open-source version of the basic protocol that machines use to communicate over the internet. "Here was an operating system that anyone could implement and ultimately that's why it won over competing network standards," he says. "Thanks to open-source, we now have the internet."

Paradoxically, his insatiable programming habit forced him to drop out of Berkeley before completing his undergraduate degree in computer science. "Something had to give," he says. At the time, he was working a full week as a programmer at Wired magazine and its web-based affiliate, HotWired, as well as running his online music resource SFRaves.com and founding one of the first web consultancy companies, Organic.

Just to make sure he did not get bored, he also used to register the unused domain names of major companies for fun - such as McDonalds.com. It was just to prove a point, and he subsequently relinquished the domain to the fast-food giant. He also spent his time (in true geek fashion) trying to fix bugs in the National Centre for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) server. Collaborating with a team of programmers on an ad hoc basis and sending updates to the increasingly overstretched NCSA, Behlendorf and his colleagues asked for permission to use the NCSA code in 1994.

The result was the Apache server, from which the Apache Software Foundation was created to administer schemes and "maintain standards". Today there are about 70 core members of the foundation, who must have "demonstrated a commitment to collaborative open-source software development through sustained participation and contributions within the foundation's projects".

There seem to be two sides to Behlendorf's eclectic career path: music and technology. "I like to keep the two sides of my life separate," says Behlendorf, but occasionally they overlap. As an early participant in the Burning Man festival, he combined his love of dance music with his technological skills by running its web operations.

It was music that first got him interested in programming when a friend persuaded him to start SFRaves.com. Soon, the online music community merged into a larger resource called Hyperreal.org, which Behlendorf founded in 1994 to host other music websites such as the Burning Man online and The Orb's website. "There is a synergy between The Burning Man, open source software and rave culture," says Behlendorf, whose idea of the perfect weekend (not surprisingly) involves heading off with a tent into the wilderness for a two-day rave in deepest Wyoming or Oregon.

So, what does the free software zealot and music lover think of the plight of Napster, the troubled musical application of the open source ideal? Will music ever be exchanged as freely as code? "What works in the software world might work elsewhere. You can't put the genie back in the bottle," he says emphatically.

"After all, the internet is the world's most efficient photocopier. The record companies are not going to be able to stop all free music." Bang goes the business plan, then, if Behlendorf is right.