I remember in the early 2000s at Sun Microsystems we gathered hundreds of engineers in the auditorium on the Santa Clara campus for a day of sessions on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Back then Sun was quietly engaging FOSS community leaders at conferences and also inviting high profile developers to campus for conversations about building open communities. These meetings attempted to help teams as they grappled with opening Sun’s software projects: NetBeans, Grid Engine, Looking Glass, OpenSPARC, OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, JINI, JXTA, and Java.

There were many interesting speakers in the auditorium that day. But the Doc Searls session really resonated with me. He was a bold and dynamic personality. He explored concepts shared between software and construction, which struck me given my background in real estate development. I was new to Sun and software and had just moved to Silicon Valley from the East Coast. I was thrilled that my past experience in construction might help facilitate the radical career change I was making. I was already overwhelmed with the magnitude of change going on during that time at Sun, so it was nice to hear some solid and familiar content. I met many developers from the FOSS community in those early years at events and even at random meetings on Sun campuses. One day I walked into a meeting in Cupertino and sat down next to Richard Stallman, who then stood up and started lecturing the Java engineers for two hours about Free Software. Where am I? This is amazing, I thought to myself. Those interactions with FOSS leaders in and around Sun were extraordinary. It was an exciting time to be there.

Even though Sun had many competing factions during this time, the prevailing thought was that we didn’t want to simply open our software projects, dump the code over the firewall, and walk away. Instead, most teams aimed to update their internal development infrastructure, move source repositories across the firewall, release code under Open Source Initiative licenses, and build engineering communities by accepting contributions back. This approach, which aligned with the collaborative ethos Doc Searls expressed in his session, was an effort intended to help Sun return to its roots as a company grounded in Open Source and Open Standards. Now look, there were many internal skeptics (or antibodies, as we called them) resisting these moves, I assure you. And there were many heated battles at many levels throughout the entire company. The opening of all those projects over a period of about 6 years wasn’t easy.

Years after Doc’s talk at Sun, I stumbled across his article “The New Vernacular” and felt it nicely summarized the ideas he shared at Sun. Recently, I reread it. Here’s my reflection on his 2001 piece, looking back across twenty-four years.

The New Vernacular, Doc Searls, April 2001: A Summary

In 2001, Doc Searls argued that software was maturing into a construction industry, a vision that felt prescient then and remains relevant today for its emphasis on collaborative, community-driven development. The software industry had long borrowed the language from construction, speaking of tools, systems, architectures, builds, and frameworks. Searls suggested this wasn’t mere metaphor but pointed to a deeper shift: success would come not from dominant platform providers like Microsoft but from skilled practitioners working collaboratively in open source communities. In such a mature industry, he argued, Microsoft would hold no more importance than construction firms like Georgia Pacific or Kaufman & Broad.

The construction industry, Searls noted, had practiced what he called “open source” principles for centuries. Building materials, methods, and knowledge were openly shared and refined through peer review across generations. There was a strong history of meritocracy and mentorship, with experienced builders passing down hard-won knowledge to the next generation. This is evident in Architectural Graphic Standards, updated roughly every seven years through continuous peer review and incremental improvement. This wasn’t an abstract concept but a down-to-earth practice where the best ideas rose based on merit, not politics or corporate affiliation.

Drawing from Stewart Brand’s work in architecture and philosophy, Searls described “vernacular” construction: buildings designed not by professional architects but by builders and users who understood practical needs. This practical architecture evolved naturally, incorporating generational knowledge about maintaining and growing structures over time. These buildings stood in contrast to “magazine architecture,” which are art-focused designs that often proved impractical. Vernacular buildings embodied craft and practicality and improved as knowledge was shared and tested across projects. As Searls wrote, vernacular buildings are “everything not designed by professional architects — in other words, most of the world’s buildings.” Searls cited Richard Gabriel, a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Scientist at Sun, whose book on software patterns described building software for “habitability.” Gabriel used a New England farmhouse as his ideal, noting that “each part is well-suited to its needs, each part fits well with the others,” and inhabitants “are able to modify their environment because each part is built according to familiar patterns of design, use, and construction.”

Was Unix vernacular? In 2001, the answer was clear: absolutely. Searls cites Neal Stephenson’s observations that Unix represented a design from the hacker culture, not a company. Its command-line interface, with its consistent filesystem structure and obsessive abbreviations, reflected decades of practical, craft-driven refinement. This gave Unix a confidence and stability that commercial systems, contrived by corporate engineers, couldn’t replicate and embodied meritocratic traditions where the best solutions won through use and peer scrutiny. Searls quoted Stephenson: “UNIX, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture.”

The hacker culture and Unix’s development predated Moore’s Law and the modern software industry. MIT’s Building 20, a low-visibility, “no-style” facility, as Stewart Brand described, became legendary for enabling youthful creativity and experimentation. This “Low Road” culture mirrored vernacular construction, where function trumped aesthetics, in contrast to high-style architecture prioritizing aesthetics over utility. In places like Building 20, mentorship happened naturally, with veteran hackers guiding newcomers and sharing the community’s accumulated wisdom.

Drawing on Stewart Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now, Searls described civilization’s six layers, where slower layers like hacker culture set boundaries for faster ones like commerce. Brand noted that fast layers innovate, while slow ones stabilize. Hacker culture, rooted in nature and governance, gave software its open essence: freely shared, usable, and improvable by all. These qualities, vital to software’s foundation, aren’t commercial, as Searls emphasized: “These are values that do not—and cannot—come from business. They are not commercial values.”

The Internet embodied these vernacular principles, with almost natural qualities: nobody owns it, everybody can use it, anybody can improve it. Projects like Linux, Apache, and TCP/IP thrived because they followed this bottom-up, meritocratic model, where good code could come from anywhere and poor ideas were quickly discarded through community feedback. Corporate giants began to learn this lesson: Apple’s decision to open-source Darwin, adjusting its license after 70,000 hackers contributed, and IBM’s embrace of Linux, driven by internal engineering momentum and market changes, showed how companies could align with hacker culture’s principles, producing better results and attracting top talent.

Searls concluded that software companies faced a challenge: creating valuable infrastructure while generating shareholder returns. The answer lay in listening to engineers, who were building infrastructure organically, and recognizing what endured. Hacker culture’s deep understanding of software’s natural value—its ability to be shared, improved, and built upon—provided the foundation for software civilization. Companies aligning with these principles, rather than fighting them, would succeed.

Twenty-Four Years Later

Reading Doc Searls’ article now, in 2025, prompts reflection on how the software landscape has evolved. Searls was deeply embedded in the hacker culture of the early 2000s. But does that same culture persist today? The world has changed dramatically since then. Software ecosystems are more fragmented, with factions not always communicating. Development feels more atomized than it did two decades ago. International, domestic, and social politics now pervade many FOSS communities, unlike in 2000 when I joined Sun and such discussions were rare. Silicon Valley, once an American tech hub, is now a global economic powerhouse and has significant political influence in Washington. It’s totally different world.

I once viewed the FOSS community as roughly a single entity, but that no longer feels accurate. Perhaps I missed important distinctions back then. Today, I see diverse behaviors across FOSS communities. While FOSS is pervasive in 2025, corporate software giants are more powerful than ever and likely represent some of the most powerful institutions globally. We live in a world shaped by AI automation and algorithms, where opaque systems often replace the transparent human judgment and championed by early FOSS developers, challenging the freedoms hacker culture promoted.

So where does that leave developers today? Navigating this complex landscape requires revisiting the core principles Searls highlighted. The meritocracy and mentorship that defined hacker culture seem diluted in some FOSS communities. These principles are rarely articulated among young developers today, unlike two decades ago when they dominated every meetup. Some open source projects thrive, but they operate within intricate, disparate, and massive geopolitical systems with some stressing censorship and pervasive tracking of humans globally. This complexity is also evident in Bitcoin’s FOSS community, which navigates financial regulatory debates, unlike the technically focused, community-driven ethos of the early 2000s. Yet, I still hear Bitcoin developers articulating original FOSS principles—meritocracy, mentorship, collaboration, freedom—more strongly than some older, prominent developer communities. This highlights an opportunity to revive Searls’ vision

Searls’ argument about vernacular development, bottom-up collaboration, and the enduring value of open infrastructure remains insightful. With these concepts less frequently discussed today, they offer unique opportunities for developers to embrace foundational principles that will help build their skills, grow their networks, and improve their careers. The principles that made Unix and the Internet valuable —collaboration, openness, and practicality—endure, even as the landscape has transformed. The cycle continues. It’s time to learn again for this new age.