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Bill Joy’s Future

Was Bill Joy Correct Back in 2000? What His Warning Means for Science, Technology, and AI Today.

Since there’s a lot of distracting and unfortunate AI doom in the media these days, I figured I’d go back and revisit Bill Joy in April 2000 for some history on the pending catastrophes we keep hearing about today. I remember that Joy’s massive article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” hit really hard twenty-six years ago. Joy was a cofounder of the iconic Sun Microsystems, after all. He helped build the Internet. And here he was now warning that three technologies might eventually lead to human extinction. Unlike today, though, that negative perspective was a pretty novel idea back then. The technologies he cited that could end us all included robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. His core argument was actually pretty simple. These were not like past technologies. These new things could potentially replicate themselves, and that’s the bit that would change everything if they were used as weapons or just got loose by accident.

I first read Joy’s article at a coffee shop in Cupertino, California right across the street from Sun where I worked in software systems marketing. The article was widely read at Sun and also across Silicon Valley and for months also generated wild discussions about Joy and his analysis. Many people just called him crazy. But that only demonstrates to me that those who made such flippant statements never read his article or thought deeply about his arguments. Others knew better, though. They knew full well that Joy was documenting in detail the very real risks of rapidly developing technology and the consequences of ignoring them.

That is, of course, the standard and pervasive culture of Silicon Valley. The valley may be big, but it’s remarkably insular as well. I didn’t know Joy at the time I read his article, but I went on to meet him several times at Sun and worked closely with his teams promoting projects like SPARC, Solaris, Java, Jini, and later on JXTA. I didn’t really know him well, of course, but he was always friendly and professional to me. He was quiet, too, and I always found him a serious thinker who obviously knew far more than he ever expressed. Sun was filled with such characters. They all fascinated me to no end.

The timing of the Joy article is also interesting. He said he had been working on the essay since his 1998 conversation with Ray Kurzweil and continued revising drafts through 1999. When Wired published the piece in April 2000, the tech world was at its peak. The NASDAQ hit a high of 5,048 in March of 2000 just a few weeks before the article dropped. And at that time Sun’s stock reached $250 a share, which gave the company a market cap around $200 billion. That was a significant achievement for 2000. Sun was one of the hottest companies in the valley back then, and it was quite an experience working there. The place was buzzing with activity. I loved it. Many of us did. So, it was into that environment of overt tech optimism running at manic levels that Joy published his thoughts about our potentially perilous future.

Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy at the Sun Reunion in Silicon Valley in October 2019.

Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy at the Sun Reunion in Silicon Valley in October 2019. Photo by Jim Grisanzio.

Boom!

Then everything blew up. The bubble burst. By mid-April 2000 the NASDAQ suffered its worst week in history and dropped more than 25 percent. Companies started dumping workers like I’ve never seen before. Joy’s dark warnings about unchecked technology landed precisely as that optimism crashed. He obviously couldn’t have seen the future, but his timing was remarkable.

Joy’s warnings took on an even darker tone the following year. After publishing the Wired article, he signed a book contract to expand on the concepts. He moved into a hotel room in New York City and surrounded himself with gloomy books covering plagues and nuclear bombs and other such material he was studying about the future risks of technology. Then on September 11, 2001 came the terrorist attacks we’ve come to know as 9/11. I knew a few people who worked at the Sun building in New York City, but I didn’t know Joy was also in the city at the time. He said he stood in the streets with everyone else and watched the impossible happen in real life. The next morning he went back outside and observed a long line of sanitation trucks parked on Houston Street ready to haul away the rubble. Everything below 14th Street was closed, he said. “It was quite a compelling experience, but not really, I suppose, a surprise to someone who had his room full of the books I was reading,” he said in a TED Talk. “I was not surprised that it happened at all.”

Joy eventually abandoned the book project. I point this out just as an aside since the event occurred shortly after he published the article I’m writing about here in this post. Still, it does reflect the feeling of the times. How much had changed in Silicon Valley and the United States in just one year.

Who Is Bill Joy?

Joy was born in 1954 in Michigan, and he was considered a child prodigy. He started school early, was reading by age three, and later excelled in math and science. He even graduated high school at 16. He loved books and thinking, and that became his escape from the world. He also loved science fiction and devoured Heinlein’s “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” and Asimov’s “I, Robot” with its Three Laws of Robotics. He wanted to be a ham radio operator, which were the Internet hackers of their day, but he couldn’t afford the equipment. On TV, Star Trek inspired his imagination, and Gene Roddenberry’s “The Prime Directive” clearly resonated with him. You can actually see that ethic woven into his writing thereafter.

At Berkeley in the 1970s, he created the vi text editor, which to his surprise, was still widely used more than twenty years later Some hard core developers still use it even now. He also developed the Berkeley version of the Unix operating system and was a key contributor to the TCP/IP network stack. When the other founders of Sun Microsystems (Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, and Scott McNealy) invited him to join them, he participated in the creation of advanced microprocessor technologies and software technologies such as Java and Jini. As co-designer of three microprocessor architectures — SPARC, picoJava, and MAJC — he helped drive innovations that shaped modern computing.

By the time he wrote his famous Wired essay, Joy was only 45 years old and at the peak of his influence among developers in Silicon Valley. But Joy was far more than just a coder. He was well connected to the broader scientific community as well. That’s what made his article so jarring to so many people. He was not an uninformed critic chiming in from outside with yet another opinion in the media, which we’re all familiar with today as we read the news. He was a core architect of the digital age who was expressing deep doubts about where his own work was leading. His self-reflection was pervasive during this time in his writings and during his conference presentations.

The Kurzweil Meeting

Joy’s concern seemed to begin at George Gilder’s Telecosm conference in 1998 when he met Ray Kurzweil, who was an inventor and futurist. Kurzweil talked about how the rate of technological improvement was accelerating and also how humans may merge with robots or download their consciousnesses to achieve near immortality. I remember attending several talks on this topic of immortality when I moved to Silicon Valley in early 2000. It always sounded so silly to me. I wondered how such smart people could take that stuff so seriously. But even now some people in these circles talk about downloading themselves. It still sounds silly. The other bits, though, about intelligent robots and genetic engineering were much more reasonable given my own experience working in the biotech industry before I joined Sun. Joy had heard such talk before and always felt sentient robots were science fiction. But hearing it from someone he respected changed things. Kurzweil gave him a preprint of “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” which outlined a utopian future where humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. I don’t know how far Joy goes with respect to robotic sentience, but it’s clearly more than I’m willing to accept.

Nevertheless, Joy’s unease intensified after reading the book. He felt sure Kurzweil was understating the dangers. Then he found a passage in the book describing a dystopian future where machines become so capable that humans depend on them completely. The passage argued that we wouldn’t consciously hand over control to the bots. Instead, “the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions.” In other words, we would gradually grow dependent. I can surely see that as a potential reality, no question about it.

But that passage came from Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber! Joy admits this realization was uncomfortable to say the very least since he was taking a point from a terrorist seriously. Many people have said the same thing after reading Kaczynski’s words, and he’s actually still cited even today. Kaczynski’s bombs had killed three people and wounded many others. One bomb gravely injured David Gelernter, one of Joy’s colleagues and friends. But Joy felt compelled to confront the argument because, however uncomfortable, he saw merit in that single passage about the unintended consequences of technology.

The Self-Replication Problem

Joy’s main concern centers around one key difference between powerful 21st-century technologies and those of the 20th-century. Nuclear weapons required huge facilities and rare materials. But genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics, what Joy called GNR technologies, require less infrastructure and can potentially make copies of themselves. A bomb explodes once, but a self-replicating machine doesn’t stop. And that could be a serious problem if something goes wrong.

This matters because knowledge spreads freely. You can’t control ideas at all like you may be able to control uranium. Once people know how to genetically engineer bacteria or design tiny self-replicating machines, that knowledge exists in the world and will move rapidly. A small group, even one person, could potentially cause massive harm. Joy calls this “knowledge-enabled mass destruction.” As he wrote, “I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.”

He made that point even sharper later. The real danger, he said, is no longer nation-states but individuals or small groups now empowered with “pandemic power.” These new digital, self-replicating technologies give extreme individuals the kind of destructive capability once reserved only for governments. That shift changes everything because the ramifications of mistakes or ill intent can’t be calculated or controlled.

The advancement of technology was clearly moving faster and Joy knew it. He learned about complex systems and non-linear systems from physicists Stephen Wolfram and Brosl Hasslacher in the early 1980s. These are systems where small changes move in unpredictable ways and where feedback loops create unexpected outcomes. Thus, they are extremely difficult to predict. Later, Joy deepened his understanding of these issues after conversations with Danny Hillis, a pioneer of parallel supercomputers and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, biologist Stuart Kauffman, and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann. Hasslacher and Mark Reed, a leading researcher in molecular electronics at Yale, also gave him insight into molecular electronics, which is the manipulation of matter at the atomic and molecular level where individual atoms replace transistors. When you get to this point in Joy’s article you can’t help but realize that he’s going well beyond just being a smart software developer who happened to strike it rich by helping found a successful tech company in the valley.

Joy knew that the merger of computers and physical sciences was creating enormous power, which up to that point others hadn’t expressed clearly in the popular tech media. By 2030, Joy calculated, we would likely build machines a million times as powerful as personal computers of 2000. That’s enough computing power to make the scenarios that worried him technically possible. As he wrote, “But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable.” He admitted he had once been too optimistic about nanotechnology. Having struggled his entire career to build reliable software systems, it seemed to him more than likely that this future would not work out as well as some people had imagined.

Three Scenarios

Joy walks through what could actually happen with these technologies. What’s interesting is that evolution itself would be one of the driving forces moving these technologies from a positive outcome to something very negative in the wrong hands.

One — Robots might simply out-compete humans for resources the way better-adapted species have always displaced others. We wouldn’t need a robot uprising. Hans Moravec, a roboticist and futurist at Carnegie Mellon, argued that “in a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials.” So, economic forces alone could push us aside. Also, the dream of robotics includes downloading our consciousnesses into machines. But Joy questions whether a downloaded consciousness would be human in any meaningful sense. The robots would not be our children, and on that path our humanity might be lost entirely. This is one of the reasons why I take Joy seriously. He sees the obvious problem with the downloading issue in a way that others in this field simply do not.

Two — Genetic engineering gives us power to create devastating plagues, either by accident or intention. Joy calls this the “White Plague” scenario, which references a Frank Herbert novel where a molecular biologist weaponizes his knowledge. We now know these profound changes in biological sciences could be imminent and could challenge all of our notions of what life is, and Joy points out that the public remains skeptical even by the standards of 2000.

Three — Nanotechnology could produce “gray goo,” which are self-replicating nanobots that consume the biosphere. Eric Drexler, an engineer and pioneer of molecular nanotechnology, warned in 1986 that “tough omnivorous ‘bacteria’ could out-compete real bacteria. They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days.” Joy notes grimly, “Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident. Oops.”

The Manhattan Project Parallel

Joy uses the atomic bomb as his template. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, physicists were shocked by what they created. Oppenheimer later said the physicists “have known sin.” But there was a real opportunity to prevent a nuclear arms race by internationalizing nuclear power as documented in 1946 via the Acheson-Lilienthal report and the Baruch Plan. It failed, though, because political distrust and competitive pressure got in the way. Within years, the Soviets had the bomb, and the arms race was on. This is a pattern that will repeat in the future.

Freeman Dyson, a theoretical physicist who worked on nuclear weapons and later advocated arms control, captured the moment: “The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it is there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles, this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

Up to that point, everyone feared nuclear bombs as the ultimate expression of madness. But Joy feared that we were repeating the pattern with even more dangerous technologies, and the commercial incentives for their production would be enormous. Nations compete. Corporations compete. Individuals compete. Researchers want and need breakthrough innovations. The momentum builds, and pretty soon it’s almost impossible to stop. We are being propelled into the new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. However, the driver is not military necessity this time but instead private sector economic gain and competitive pressure. This is human nature, though. Our history is literally filled with these processes. It’s who we are. Joy was simply stating the obvious.

The Relinquishment Argument

This is the part that bothered many people the most. Joy argues for “relinquishment,” or the voluntary decision not to pursue certain lines of knowledge or technology because they are too dangerous. This goes against everything we believe about the value of knowledge and open inquiry, especially in Silicon Valley and across the scientific community generally.

That may be why Joy’s article struck such a nerve. The general population is used to various power centers attempting to curtail their freedoms for whatever reason of the day. But regular people are largely powerless to do much about it beyond voting, which is time consuming, or protesting, which brings its own personal risks. The scientific and technological elite, however, represents something different. They are one of the power centers themselves, and here was one of their own, a high profile one at that, advocating for relinquishment. You have to give it to Joy. He was brave to express such thoughts directly in the face of powerful people.

So Joy asks, what if the unlimited pursuit of knowledge puts us all in mortal danger? He points out that we have done this before. At a 1989 nanotechnology conference, Joy said, “We cannot simply do our science and not worry about these ethical issues.” The United States unilaterally abandoned biological weapons development because the logic was clear. These weapons were easy to replicate and could easily end up in malicious hands. We would be more secure if nobody developed them, and we embodied this concept in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.

Joy further quotes Thoreau: “We do not ride on the railroad. It rides upon us.” Then he asks directly, “The question is, indeed, Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies?”

Joy isn’t advocating the stopping of all research. He just prefers being thoughtful and strategic about which lines of inquiry we pursue and which ones we intentionally avoid. It means international agreements, verification systems, and scientists adopting ethical codes like the Hippocratic oath. It requires transparency and cooperation. Within that context, he sounds reasonable, right?

Personal Responsibility

Joy writes honestly about his own sense of responsibility: “I feel, too, a deepened sense of personal responsibility, not for the work I have already done, but for the work that I might yet do, at the confluence of the sciences.” That statement carries some weight because Joy was someone who helped create the technologies that might enable the dangers he himself feared.

But he finds hope in the Dalai Lama’s “Ethics for the New Millennium,” which argues that the most important thing is to conduct our lives with love and compassion for others, and that our societies need a stronger notion of universal responsibility. This awareness of greater spiritual principles at play in a world of technology is rare among the valley elite. Joy was saying that neither material progress nor the pursuit of knowledge is the key to happiness. We need to find alternative outlets for our creative forces beyond the culture of perpetual technological and economic growth.

In the TED Talk he gave six years after publishing his article, Joy made the point even clearer. The solution, he said, can’t be technology alone. We need both better public policy and deeper moral progress. He spoke of the need for “the head and the heart,” which echoes Russell and Einstein. He also argued that scientists, technologists, and businessmen must be held personally accountable under the law for the consequences of their inventions. That must have been shocking to Joy’s peers! Yet, today they face no such responsibility. That, he believed, had to change. What’s striking about hearing him articulate these perfectly reasonable points is that they aren’t taken that seriously during the time he was writing or even now. Many thoughtful people say similar things at technical conferences or in political speeches. We all clap and support the concepts. Yet, very little actually changes. Or at least the changes take so long and occur in such small steps that we’re left unsatisfied in the present moment.

Was Joy Right?

Joy’s article was unique for its time in the popular press. When it appeared on Wired’s cover in April 2000, it created quite the rumble in tech circles. Joy even said it generated thousands of letters to the editor, many of them overtly hostile. Wired had been a cheerleader for the digital age for nearly a decade. Its shift from cheering to warning marked an important and surprising moment in the digital community. Also, Bill Joy wasn’t some alarmist outsider like many others. He was one of the core architects. His warning came from inside the cathedral and it certainly resonated. At the time, I was working in marketing at Sun, and one of my jobs was to promote Sun’s technologies to the media. In press interviews during this period reporters would always bring up Joy’s article even if the meeting was booked to cover another issue. We had to draft briefing and messaging documents to prepare executives, managers, and engineers that we brought into all interviews because we knew Joy’s article would always come up in the discussion. I remember many stressful meetings and awkward interviews from this period.

The article also presaged much of what we are experiencing now but not necessarily always in the ways Joy anticipated. His specific predictions about nanotechnology have not materialized yet. And the gray goo scenario is now considered flawed and implausible. Most scientists believe built-in limitations make runaway nanotechnology improbable. But the science is never settled, so we’ll just have to see how things evolve in the future.

But Joy’s underlying concerns were clearly prescient. And we have to deal with that. He worried about knowledge-enabled destruction, powerful technologies becoming widely available, and complex systems we don’t fully understand. All of these have become more relevant as artificial intelligence has advanced today far faster than most people expected in 2000. Interestingly, Joy only explicitly mentioned artificial intelligence once in his article, possibly because he was writing at the tail end of the second “AI winter.” Yet his concerns about self-replicating technologies and systems moving beyond human control resonate well with some of the modern AI risk debates these days.

In 2025, Joy himself reviewed his Wired article in a comprehensive session at Berkeley that covered scientific advancements over the last 50 years. He said he was called a doomer for his article in 2000, but to him it was just a matter of pragmatic realism. “So if we look back 25 years, the risk was real. It’s happened roughly like I said, and we haven’t done anything about it, which is really kind of frustrating and disturbing.” He also connected his original argument from 2000 to the technologies of today. Whereas 20th century technologies require rare raw materials, the thing about “21st century technologies is that they only require information. So, they’re fundamentally different and more dangerous and difficult-to-impossible to control.” One example he cites is that AI today is “verging on being able to do recursive self-improvement,” which is the very process he warned about decades ago.

He also warned about mirror life, which he described in the Berkeley session as a possible threat to the biosphere and cited recent reports from Stanford and Nature. He framed it as just one more example of powerful technologies that could cause catastrophic harm if misused. His concern remains fixed on crazy people using advanced technologies “to do bad things as their first act, and we wouldn’t have the chance to stop them.” His conclusions weren’t encouraging, which certainly fits the tone of his original piece in Wired back in 2000. Technology today has become more powerful, the financial incentives have become more intense, and society still hasn’t done enough to address the dangers he identified years ago. It seems like his predictions were pretty close to an observation of reality today.

In the same 2025 session, Joy said that the early calls for an AI pause and stronger rules for deployment were justified. “For the AI risk I think the people weren’t wrong that we need a pause, and we need rules, and we need to be aware that we’re giving very powerful tools to everybody. I mean, we have the bill of rights and freedom of speech, and we say it’s just information and everybody should have access to everything. That means if we spend a trillion dollars collectively in our society making something which has some good uses and also can be dangerous I have to give it to everybody independent of the fact that I’m then thereby giving it to the people for whom it can be dangerous. Or should I say, well, that’s some specialized knowledge and maybe it should be more closely held.” Fair point. But where to draw the line is the issue and that goes well beyond just talking about technology.

So, Joy recognizes the benefits of AI here, just as he recognizes the value of other technologies. But he also reserves much more of his focus to describe in detail his concerns about the risks. That fits well with the views he expressed in 2000.

He said that the field of advanced technology has quickly become another arms race driven by enormous financial incentives, which repeats the pattern of technical arrogance that he warned about in relation to nuclear weapons in his original Wired article. “People are so excited about what they can do with their minds, they just can’t help themselves. And there’s such a pot of money out there that they just can’t stop.” He said society was now “skating right past” the period when the technology is still flexible enough to control. Once everyone has money and status invested in the race, he warned, changing direction would become much harder. There’s a “social physics” he describes that makes things seriously complicated and extremely difficult for people to consider the consequences. The danger, though, isn’t necessarily the technology itself, which also has many benefits. Instead, the issue is that the technology in the wrong hands can cause problems that can’t be prevented or fixed.

That 2025 session at Berkeley is the first time I’ve heard Joy address his Wired article in detail in the context of today’s debates over technological risk. Hopefully, he’ll keep contributing to the debate because unlike many others in the media at present, Joy can speak articulately about the benefits of the technology without also losing sight of the risks. He has that credibility because he’s lived the history directly. Perhaps he will because now he’s working on an AI startup with his son, daughter-in-law, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as the only employees. So, Bill Joy is very much in the game. It will be fascinating to see what he builds and how that differs from the current implementations of AI.

The Sun Sets

After leaving Sun in 2003, Joy moved into venture capital and focused on green energy and climate change investments at Kleiner Perkins. He also worked as a principal investigator and chief scientist at Water Street Capital. Now at 71, he’s focusing on his AI startup with his kids. And aside from his 2025 session at Berkeley, he’s mostly remained silent in public regarding the debate he actually started 26 years ago. It’s almost as if he said what he wanted to say in 2000, briefly repeated many of the same concepts in 2025, and now we’re left to digest his thoughts and hopefully implement his lessons all these years later. I doubt we will. I saw very little press coverage or social commentary of his 2025 talk at Berkeley.

Over the years, Joy didn’t stay stuck in doom or alarm. After the Wired article he actively tried to move toward better outcomes. He invested in solutions and backed innovations in education, new options to preserve the environment, and a major $200 million biodefense fund aimed at closing the gaps that could lead to a pandemic. He came to believe that we can’t solve the management of dangerous technology with just more technology alone. Instead, we need better policies, markets that price in the true cost of potential catastrophes, and a much deeper moral awareness. That combination of thoughts remains relatively rare today. Perhaps that explains the silence in the market that continues to just focus on doom rather than solutions.

Joy put it simply in that earlier talk at TED. “We can’t pick the future, but we can steer the future.” Over the years technologies have changed, but the fundamental challenge he identified in 2000 remains relevant now. Figuring out how to pursue knowledge and innovation while also maintaining enough wisdom and caution to survive the unintended consequences seems to be a question others should carefully consider today. Yet, few are doing so. In fact, the mania is running faster than ever and being driven by many people who have never heard of Bill Joy.

In his article, Joy compared coding to Michelangelo releasing statues from marble. He described his software engineering in a similar way to those ecstatic moments when the code emerged from his imagination as if it were already waiting in the machine to be freed. He ended his essay with that same image. After eighteen pages of text exploring multiple scientific disciplines and warning about existential dangers from the exploitation of technology, he wrote, “I am up late again, it is almost 6 am. I am trying to imagine some better answers, to break the spell and free them from the stone.”

Well, twenty-six years later, we’re all still up late as well. We’re still searching for those answers. But now we go forward in the wild world of AI, which probably represents the biggest paradigm shift enabling new opportunities in tech since the Internet itself. We should embrace those opportunities, but will we also consider and mitigate the risks?

Cluetrain Yesterday and Today

When I lived in California in late 2000 I read probably the best book on modern communications ever written: The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. The authors actually teased the book on the web in their 95 Theses in 1999, so we all knew what was coming would be equally outrageous. Couldn’t wait.

Back then I worked in Cupertino, and many times I’d take breaks and walk across the street from the office to get some coffee and flip through the pages. I loved it. It represented a radical departure in marketing and communications at the time because seemed obviously influenced by developers in the rapidly growing Free and Open Source Software movement (FOSS). I was already familiar with most of the topics in Cluetrain because I worked at Sun Microsystems and mixed with FOSS engineers every day. Still, it was cool to see the concepts applied to marketing where these ideas were totally unknown.

Cluetrain made bold predictions about markets becoming conversations, about authentic voice displacing canned corporate messaging, and about employees and customers breaking free from rigid command and control structures. We read it widely at Sun, especially those of us managing FOSS projects. Back then Sun was opening millions of lines of code, so the book gave us useful language as we built projects and engaged development communities. It also came in handy for dealing with the media, which was my primary job at the time. Cluetrain also fit Sun’s culture perfectly because the place seemed at times more like a frat house than a corporation.

The Prediction: Markets Are Conversations

The Cluetrain Manifesto’s central argument was clear. Mass media had interrupted human conversation and turned people into passive consumers and markets into targets. Even within Sun’s generally open culture, there were still power centers in marketing and product development talking in terms of “targeting” the media, developers, and customers. That positioning drove me nuts because the engineers never spoke that way. Cluetrain argued that the Internet would reverse that old paradigm because people could now talk directly to each other about products, communities, and companies across traditionally closed corporate firewalls.

The authors based their conclusions on their own observations. They showed how customers were gathering in online forums to compare notes, share experiences, and help each other get things done. Engineers at companies could openly explain their software to peers in the community and to potential customers without a corporate communications department in between. Companies that tried to control these conversations through legal threats or PR spin got mocked online, often without realizing it, so it fell to people like me to explain what was happening to teams internally. That was a painful process, I can assure you. The pushback from the more conservative teams was significant. But I never had to justify the book’s ideas to developers because in the FOSS community open communication was just considered normal.

But Cluetrain wasn’t simply calling for friendlier or more open marketing process. It was challenging the idea that companies should attempt to control the conversation about them. That was a wasted opportunity in the Cluetrain paradigm. The people building the products always knew more than the marketing department, and the customers using those products often knew things the company itself didn’t. The Internet let those conversations thrive at a scale that had never existed before, and it didn’t require everyone to agree to the latest message. In fact, disagreement was generally part of the value. People could challenge companies publicly and develop their own understanding of a product without waiting for the officially approved marketing campaign.

What Actually Happened

The first part of the prediction proved accurate. Conversations exploded online. Developer interactions thrived. Customer and developer reviews became crucial to purchasing decisions. Social media finally gave employees and customers a public voice, and many companies encouraged this change. For example, Sun and Microsoft were among the first large software companies to build blogging platforms for employees to talk with outside communities. Development engineers usually led the way, and within a few years Sun had more than two thousand employees blogging and talking to whoever they needed to talk to in order to get their jobs done. That openness was a real relief from the constraints of corporate life, and for a while the old, one-way broadcast model lost some of its grip. We used to call that old broadcast strategy “megaphone marketing” at Sun, but we were now in a many-to-many world. It was cool.

But the manifesto underestimated how quickly new gatekeepers would emerge, and how differently they would operate. The authors understood the Internet would break down old barriers between companies and their audiences, but they couldn’t have anticipated that the new communication systems would themselves become enormous businesses with their own tools and economic incentives.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms created spaces for open conversation, but they also monetized it. Attention became a product. Personal data became even more valuable than before. Algorithms became necessary to sort through the volume, but those same algorithms also began deciding which conversations got seen. A thoughtful explanation doesn’t necessarily earn more attention than an outrageous claim, and content that produces a strong emotional reaction can be worth much more to a platform than content that’s simply accurate or understated. And we all began to see this in our social feeds. A casual peek at a colleague’s screen would reveal that their online conversations showed an entirely different world based on their preferences that were amplified by the platform’s algorithms.

Bots and fake accounts made it worse and the line between an authentic participant and a manufactured one grew harder to see. And a well funded campaign could manufacture the appearance of agreement without any real support behind it. But developers could always see this. Most early FOSS projects ran on Mailman lists, so those discussions among engineers largely escaped the corporate swamp for years. Over time, though, as more engineers drifted onto social media, they were pulled into the mess too. The Internet didn’t eliminate gatekeepers. It built new ones with far more precision than the old media ever had. Also, whereas the old media tended to be centralized, the new one was atomized and embedded everywhere.

The Transformation of Corporate Communication

Companies adapted to these open changes quickly. They hired social media managers and community managers, built brand accounts, and encouraged employees to act as ambassadors. The language of Cluetrain worked its way into corporate communications and marketing meetings, which made it feel like the old model was changing. But something got lost along the way.

The manifesto called for people to speak from a genuine passion and their firsthand knowledge from working within an open community. However, what companies built instead was a new form of managed authenticity. Posts were getting written by communications teams and checked by legal before going out. Influencers were paid to look organic. Employees were encouraged to speak publicly while at the same time getting detailed guidance on exactly what they could and couldn’t say. Some companies appeared to be part of the conversation while also working to keep as much of the control as possible.

But other companies were more genuine about it. They admitted mistakes and let employees talk freely and participate in the communities. At Sun we aired plenty of our dirty laundry in public blogs, and the community noticed that and appreciated it. Several Microsoft bloggers did the same. But those were exceptions rather than the rule, and over time most companies learned to fold blogs and social media into the same communications machine they’d always run. Once authenticity became something a company could measure and manage, it turned into just another item in the corporate toolkit. It was wild to see people in marketing meetings starting to borrow the language engineers had used for years, at least on a surface level.

The Complexity of Authentic Voice

The manifesto also underestimated how hard an authentic voice is to maintain inside an large organization. It’s easy to say employees should speak honestly. It’s harder when those employees have managers, legal departments, and reasonable worries about what happens if they say the wrong thing publicly. People are complicated. They carry competing loyalties, worry about their careers, get tired, make mistakes, and sometimes just disagree with the company they work for.

Also, authentic doesn’t automatically mean good, either. A customer’s honest opinion can be unreasonable. An employee’s honest take can rest on a bias they don’t even recognize. A developer can be technically brilliant and still be a troll. FOSS communities learned this a long time ago, which is why so many projects eventually had to write and enforce conduct policies. Openness alone was never enough, especially when systems scale.

The manifesto also didn’t foresee how authenticity itself would become a commodity. Brands hire consultants to develop an authentic voice. Corporations spend real money trying to appear genuine, and influencers get paid to look like ordinary people making ordinary recommendations. As a result, people learned to perform realness the way they once performed professionalism, and once everyone is trying to appear authentic, authenticity just becomes another style of engagement. This is just a normal process of how organizations full of complicated people operate. It’s to be expected.

What the Manifesto Got Right, and What It Missed

Despite these blind spots, Cluetrain identified something real about how business would change. Markets did become more transparent, and information asymmetries did shrink. Customers and development communities gained real leverage over corporations. Microsoft’s own path from calling Linux a cancer to actively engaging open source projects is a good example. Companies that ignored what customers were saying suffered brand damage faster than they would have in the old broadcast era. And the hyperlinked organization the authors described turned out to be real to a certain degree. Work became more distributed. Information stopped moving strictly through the hierarchy. A developer could talk directly with a customer, and an employee could find the person who knew how to solve a problem without asking permission to cross multiple layers of management. Some managers didn’t love this, of course, but they couldn’t really stop it. Many even saw Cluetrain as an opportunity for career advancement and skill development.

What the authors missed, though, was that they underestimated how well old power would simply adapt. They believed the Internet would make hierarchy less important, and in some ways it did, but hierarchy didn’t disappear. It mostly moved online. They also underestimated scale. Small communities can sustain honest conversation because people get to know each other quickly. They learn who is helpful, who is selling, and who has a real history in the project. That doesn’t necessarily hold once a platform reaches millions or billions of people, though. Context breaks down, algorithms fill the gap by deciding which participants and messages get seen, and gaming becomes easier.

They didn’t foresee algorithmic curation either. The Internet made more information available, but that didn’t mean people would actually see more of it. Two people can use the same platform and end up with entirely different views of what’s happening because the platform is showing each of them a different slice of reality. And they didn’t anticipate how concentrated the new gatekeepers would become. All these years later handful of companies now provide the infrastructure most online conversation runs through. They set the rules, run the algorithms, and collect the data. The promise of decentralized conversation gave way to a new kind of centralized control.

The AI Complication

Then we got artificial intelligence, which is where Cluetrain gets interesting again. The authors believed people could tell the difference between corporate language and the way real people actually talk. That held up fine in 1999. It’s much harder to claim today, though.

AI can write a customer review, draft a social post, answer a support question, or generate an image that looks real. And it can do all of this while maintaining a consistent personality for years. Now, fake reviews and manufactured enthusiasm existed long before AI. What’s changed most recently is how cheap, easy, and fast it is to produce content at scale, and that undercuts one of the manifesto’s core assumptions. If authentic voice is what matters, but we can’t reliably tell which voices are authentic, what happens to the conversation? We used to be able to easily spot corporate messaging, but it’s getting harder and harder to spot AI messaging as those systems become pervasive.

It gets more interesting once you stop thinking about individual fake messages and start thinking about participants themselves. An AI system can answer questions, defend a company, criticize a competitor, and take part in a developer community to the point where people start developing relationships with it. But human reputation develops through repeated interactions where you have something at stake and have to live with what you said. But now an AI agent can simulate the pattern of that outcome without having any of the human substance behind it. Its apparent expertise actually came from a model trained on other people’s work, and its apparent reputation really belongs to whoever operates it either at the LLM or the harness level. That’s a bigger challenge to Cluetrain than simply noting that AI can write marketing copy.

Automation Is Not AI

There’s a distinction worth making here because it sometimes gets lost in many discussions about AI. Automation has been removing humans from transactions for decades. A vending machine does it. An ATM does it. A self checkout does it. None of those systems need AI at all.

I was reminded of this recently while clothes shopping in Tokyo. I expected a clerk to check each item, scan or key in the price, and fold everything neatly for me That’s usually how it goes here. This is Japan, after all. Direct human service matters. A lot. Instead, I dumped a tangled pile of ten items into a bin, and the system identified everything immediately, listed everything on a screen, and let me pay with a quick tap of my card (I love the security on that last part). No human involved anywhere in the process, and no bar codes for me to scan myself. It just worked. What matters here is that this kind of checkout doesn’t need AI to be impressive. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) can identify a pile of products without anyone scanning them one by one, which is what makes the example useful beyond AI specifically. Automation has been removing people from physical transactions for a long time. We’re all used to it now even though we may not like it. This may help explain why people are so sensitive about AI because AI now extends that same trend but into our conversations. Now an AI agent can replace the conversation itself.

Where Cluetrain Still Works

I still see the original Cluetrain principles working in the FOSS projects I’m part of, though. A developer asks a question on a mailing list, and other developers respond with real knowledge and no filter. They argue, share code, make mistakes, correct each other, and build things together because there’s context and an expectation of openness and credibility. People develop reputations in these spaces. You learn who has expertise, who tends to cause trouble, and who is genuinely trying to help. That history and experience over time gives the conversation weight that a comment in a text box on a website can’t create on its own.

I’d revise one part of the usual argument here, though. It’s not quite right to say Cluetrain works at human scale and fails at platform scale, since some gigantic communities function well and some tiny ones are dysfunctional. What actually matters is context, reputation, shared purpose, and accountability. A local bookstore can have those things. So can a software consultancy, a FOSS project, or a single team inside a much larger company. But Cluetrain breaks down once a conversation gets so large and impersonal that participants lose the ability to build context and reputation, while at the same time the platform itself gains more say over what everyone sees.

What We Need Now

The Internet did change business, and authentic conversations did become more important. But the story didn’t unfold as cleanly as Cluetrain predicted. Markets became conversations, sure, but many of those conversations are now mediated by platforms with their own economic incentives. Our content is now run through algorithms built to hold our attention, and our conversations are increasingly populated by AI that can imitate humans well enough to fool most people who aren’t looking closely.

That raises real questions. Does it matter whether the voice answering you is human as long as it gives you what you need? Many times it doesn’t matter. And that’s fine. But in most cases, people tend to seek human interactions. The real question is how markets will function at scale if we really can’t tell who, or what, we’re talking to. We don’t know the answers yet since all of this is still emerging. Some companies are being transparent about their use of AI and are disclosing when people are talking to a bot. Some companies are now saying that AI is just a tool to augment humans rather than a replacement for humans. Others, however, will remain less transparent about their use of AI simply because the incentive to cut human involvement is massive. Those companies seem intent on pushing the narrative that AI will just replace people in the future.

I don’t think AI will destroy human conversation or replace people entirely. Markets are changing, that’s true, and many people will be displaced, but that’s been happening forever. Nevertheless, People will keep seeking relationships, expertise, and direct contact with other people. That’s just an innate human characteristic. And the more artificial our digital environments become, the more valuable genuine interactions will get. That may be part of why live conferences still draw big crowds. When you’re standing in a room talking to someone, you don’t have to wonder if an algorithm or someone bot produced the experience. It’s just real.

That’s what Cluetrain ultimately got right. Markets are conversations because markets are made of people. The Internet made those conversations possible at a scale no one could have imagined in 1999, but it also built new gatekeepers, new incentives, and new questions about who or what we’re actually talking to. I still talk about Cluetrain at developer conferences, even though almost nobody in the room has heard of it anymore. The book may be mostly forgotten, but the basic idea holds. We should still want knowledgeable people talking directly with customers and developers talking directly with their peers. And we should still want communities where reputation gets earned through real contribution rather than assigned by algorithms that can be gamed.

Spamming the Linux Kernel Mailing List

Meeting Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit in Tokyo in June 2018.

I’ve crossed paths with Linus Torvalds at many events throughout the years, but this was the first time I actually met him and spoke with him. I waited until after his keynote and walked up to the stage, along with dozens of Japanese developers. He stayed afterwards and spoke to everyone and signed shirts and books for about a half hour. I stood off the side of the line and just took photos and listened in on the conversations. When he was finished chatting with everyone I introduced myself and we walked out into the hallway. I mentioned that I was the OpenSolaris Community Manager at Sun. He stopped, looked up, smiled, and said, “Oh, I’m sorry!” And we both laughed. I still have bittersweet feelings about Sun and OpenSolaris. It’s a shame how it all ended. I went from working on the hottest project at Sun at the time and being Sun’s #1 blogger (see: BSC front page (hits refreshed daily) to losing those platforms virtually overnight. That wrecked my career and forced me to reset yet again.

Then I told him about the time I spammed the Linux kernel mailing list with my OpenSolaris announcement back in 2005! It was an accident, of course. You see, we had been collecting emails on our website from people who wanted to be notified about the upcoming OpenSolaris announcement. We had already released the DTrace code in January 2005 but hadn’t yet opened the entire kernel. That bit was set for June and then there would be many releases after that. So, for six months about 10K people entered their email address into our web form, and obviously some special friend keyed in the Linux kernel list for kicks. Sure, we didn’t look at or clean the list for spam, but hey, we were all very busy. That OpenSolaris launch was quite a challenge.

Here is my announcement.
Here’s my apology.
Threads from the day (search for OpenSolaris)

Embarrassing. But a lesson well learned. And a good laugh years later with Linus himself. He did ask if I was treated ok by the community after the gaffe, and I said I was. All good. Anyway, we had a good conversation about Sun, Oracle, Linux, and the FOSS community. I’ll take it.

Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit in Tokyo in June 2018.

Message to the OpenSolaris Pilot Program

And finally, here’s the private email I sent to the OpenSolaris Pilot Program the day before I spammed the Linux community on OpenSolaris launch day. We ran a private pilot program for a year before we opened the project and those few hundred developers became the seeds of the new OpenSolaris community.

[osol-discuss] Good Luck and Thank You

Jim Grisanzio Jim.Grisanzio at Sun.COM
Mon Jun 13 17:27:01 PDT 2005

Hello, OpenSource Pilot Community.

I just wanted to chime in before the fur really flies around here:
Good Luck, and Thank You!

You all deserve Sun's thanks for your efforts and your patience this year. It should be wild day tomorrow, for sure, so light up those blogs and start talking, guys. The engineers are leading this launch tomorrow, make no mistake about it.

Oh, and if you want to bring someone into the program, you *don't* have to call me and sign another f****** NDA. Just do it. I can't tell you how happy I am to not have to dig out another NDA. Not that I could read the damn thing but whatever. It's such a cold way to start a friendly little conversation, don't you think? Also, I've tried to honor as many of your requests (and those from internal people) as possible to get people into the program. We ended up with 145, but quite frankly, dozens and dozens of developers never made it in due to lack of time or resources. We even had a dozen Chinese engineers all briefed, translated, and NDA-signed but couldn't get export control approval in time. It drove me nuts for three months. I'm more than a bit pissed about that one.

Anyway, I hope you are happy with the results of what we are all releasing. The core team here has worked almost non-stop for weeks on this to get ready for the final push. We wanted to do more, you know that, but hey, look at where we were last year and look at the potential tomorrow brings. Also, the OpenSolaris team internally really has been genuine in their intentions, I can assure you. At times we've not been as open as we could have been -- we get that -- but I hope you believe me when I say that many people on the team fought hard on your behalf all year long. Every time you told us we were full of shit on something we took it to heart and it went up line. There were a few, ah, heated,
conversations regarding some of the issues that were discussed in the pilot. We won some and we lost some, but every time we moved a little closer to our goal of openness. As you've seen, this stuff takes time. I wish we could have exposed more of that process to you. Next time it will probably be easier to do that.

As this program has grown it's garnered attention from all across Sun and from Sun's competitors and supporters. Just recently, I've heard from executives and engineers traveling to South America and to Asia, and they report that there *absolutely* is massive community interest out there. Even Wall Street has noticed. Some people are probably a bit confused since the Solaris community was supposed to be dead by now. Well, too bad. It's too late. They lost their window of opportunity to crush us. Our next step is to stay positive and to engage the interest we know is there, make it tangible, and grow this OpenSolaris community. In a very real way, you've all been part of something special here. You've helped change this company and potentially an entire market along the way. Some people may not know this quite yet, but they'll surely find out tomorrow. You are some of the most knowledgeable people in the world about Solaris, and you've help make OpenSolaris a possibility. 

Congratulations and we'll see you on the other side.

Jim

Community Development is Business Development

During my time in Open Source community development, I’ve repeatedly faced the same annoying question coming from business managers: “What’s the business value of Open Source?”

Or sometimes the question goes unstated but whenever you talk about community development operations in a meeting the room goes quiet as if what you’re saying has little value. What’s funny is that this questioning of Open Source community development as a valuable discipline comes from the very people who directly engage in similar activities when they implement their own product launches; conferences; and tours to meet customers, analysts, and journalists. In community development, we do the same thing. The only difference is that we engage developers, not customers, analysts, and the press. That’s it. It’s that simple. But it gets even crazier when you realize that the developers we meet work within the customer base! And it’s well known that developers influence tech purchasing decisions.

This constant questioning of Open Source development hits community builders who work at major software vendors whether they are in engineering or marketing roles. The skepticism used to be understandable in the early days, but is it really still a mystery here in 2025? Giving away software for free seems counterintuitive to traditional business thinking, but the evidence of economic value is overwhelming. To not see this is unacceptable.

In Open Source software, a powerful economic principle has emerged over time. It’s simple. You build the Open Source development community first, and then the business opportunities follow. You have to actively work both sides of the equation, but the process isn’t difficult to understand. This isn’t speculation. So many companies have proven that this strategy generates serious revenue while also creating opportunities for millions of developers worldwide. It’s just business development. I sometimes push back on this question and point to concrete proof that community investment translates directly into business value. But most times I just ignore it and look out for people who are more knowledgable about market development.

Anyway, here are a few examples for kicks.

Linux: From Hobby Project to Massive Business Value

Take Linux. When Linus Torvalds released his Linux code in the 1990s, he invited collaboration from developers. Then thousands of kernel engineers submitted contributions. Now Linux powers most servers, supercomputers, and Android devices. IBM recognized this process early and invested aggressively in Linux development.

But many people missed this early innovation entirely. I remember I was at LinuxWorld Expo in New York City in 2001 when IBM announced its insane billion dollar investment in Linux. From the show floor I called back to colleagues on the marketing team at Sun in Silicon Valley because I viewed this move as a threat to Solaris, and I thought we’d have to respond in some way. I was literally on the call as Linus was holding court right outside the Sun booth on the show floor. He had dozens of young developers listening to his every word.

But instead of being taken seriously, I was met with laughter and mockery. “Oh, Jim, Linux is a toy,” they told me. The conversation ended quickly. That dismissive attitude was widespread throughout Sun’s technical marketing teams at the time — even among many engineers, sadly. Sun’s Solaris was a technically superior Unix at the time, so what could possibly go wrong, right? And besides, why would large enterprises ever choose a buggy free operating system cobbled together by a bunch of volunteers hacking in their basements?

That dismissal was costly. IBM’s investment paid massive returns and Linux totally undermined Solaris and Sun. I remember working on earning calls and and having to explain quarter after quarter why Linux was growing and why Solaris was declining. It was remarkable how utterly blind my colleagues in marketing and business development were at the time. It’s obvious they forgot to read “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.” I did suggest that they read the book, by the way, but no one took me up on the offer. I read it multiple times.

By enabling Linux for enterprise use, and contributing to the growing Linux development movement, IBM built a thriving services business that generated billions. When IBM acquired Red Hat years later for tens of billions of dollars, they purchased a company built entirely on community-developed Open Source software. Meanwhile, Sun’s proprietary Solaris became increasingly irrelevant as Linux matured and captured the enterprise Unix market. That toy operating system that Sun’s marketers laughed at literally wrecked Sun. Oracle acquired what was left of Sun a few years later as the company crashed and burned to death. But not for Solaris. The real value at Sun was in Java and Java’s growing developer community. The lesson to me was clear: dismissing a thriving global open source community is a dumb strategic mistake. Sun did finally open Solaris but by then it was too late.

Linus Torvalds at Open Source Japan in Tokyo in 2018.
Linus Torvalds at Open Source Japan in Tokyo in 2018.
Java: The Power of a Global Developer Community

Java demonstrates the pattern as well. Engineers at Sun Microsystems created Java but the community made it dominant because the technology was open from the beginning. Millions of developers learned Java. Thousands of companies adopted it. And an entire ecosystem thrived. When Oracle acquired Sun, they recognized the value of Java’s massive global community. Java Virtual Machines now run on billions of devices globally, spanning servers, embedded systems, and IoT devices. Oracle generates substantial revenue from Java-related services and support. But it was the developer community that created the global installed base that drives this revenue. Java developers earn strong salaries, representing another dimension of community-driven value. The community created sustained employment for millions of developers worldwide.

Over the years, I have interviewed about a hundred Java developers for podcasts, and their perspective is remarkably consistent. They all tell me that the open sourcing of Java made all the difference in their careers and in Java’s success. Java was open from the start, and that openness enabled them to engage with the technology in ways that proprietary languages didn’t allow. They could examine the source code to understand how features worked. They could contribute improvements. They could build tools and frameworks on top of Java without license restrictions. They credit open source and community development as the fundamental reasons for Java’s success. Without that openness, Java would have been just another proprietary language competing for attention. With it, Java became a global platform that millions of developers built their careers around. This is not speculation from business strategists. This is the direct testimony of the developers who chose Java precisely because it was open.

James Gosling keynote in Japan in 2008.
James Gosling keynote in Japan in 2008.
How FOSS Creates Business Value and Opportunity

Development communities accelerate innovation faster than any single company could achieve internally. Major container orchestration platforms, AI tools, content management systems, operating systems, languages, frameworks and databases that were open sourced have improved rapidly through community contributions. The largest cloud providers now build profitable services around these technologies. Companies that Open Source their technologies gain access to global technical expertise while building ecosystems that drive commercial adoption.

Communities also function as talent pools where companies identify skilled developers through their Open Source contributions rather than through expensive recruiters. This collaborative approach has enabled companies to reach well over a billion dollars in revenue while also creating global opportunities for developers. For example, I’ve interviewed developers who stated quite directly and passionately that Open Source and Java saved their lives. Others have said that Java enabled them to go to college and support their parents. Some have built multi-million dollar companies around Open Source frameworks. Others earn substantial income from maintaining popular packages or community sponsorships. These success stories span continents and demonstrate that Open Source creates genuine economic opportunity regardless of geography or traditional credentials.

Finally

The evidence is pretty clear, isn’t it? Community development is business development. It’s not similar. It’s not almost the same. No. It’s identical. Companies can build profitable businesses by investing in Open Source development through code contributions, foundation support, and active participation. Major enterprise software companies, database vendors, DevOps platforms, data analytics firms, and content management providers all demonstrate the model works at any scale.

Decades of history and also current trends show this clearly. You build an Open Source development community first, and then the revenue follows. You support developers, contribute to projects, start technical user groups, and host conferences. These investments generate returns as the market matures through multiple channels including sales, talent acquisition, cost reduction, and market development. Just look at Linux and Java as the two obvious　examples. Open Source proves that collaboration creates more value than competition at the community level, and that sharing knowledge accelerates everyone’s success.

James Gosling and Bill Joy at the Sun Reunion in Silicon Vally in October 2019.
James Gosling and Bill Joy at the Sun Reunion in Silicon Vally in October 2019.

Read up on Sun’s Bill Joy: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

Doc Searls on The New Vernacular

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.

Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy at the Sun Reunion in Silicon Valley in October 2019.
Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy at the Sun Reunion in Silicon Valley in October 2019.

OpenSolaris in Berlin in 2007

We had a lot of t-shirts at Sun. This one was my favorite by far. It was understated in color with the dark blue and black but overwhelming and bold with all the FOSS project logos Sun was contributing to at the time. It remains the standard.

Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris in Berlin, Germany in 2007.
Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris in Berlin, Germany in 2007.
Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris in Berlin, Germany in 2007. Photo by Wolfgang Stief.
Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris in Berlin, Germany in 2007. Photo by Wolfgang Stief.
Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris in Berlin, Germany in 2007. Photo by Wolfgang Stief.
Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris in Berlin, Germany in 2007. Photo by Wolfgang Stief.
Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris in Berlin, Germany in 2007. Photo by Wolfgang Stief.
Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris in Berlin, Germany in 2007. Photo by Wolfgang Stief.

Scott McNealy at JavaOne 2025

Scott McNealy, former founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems and also my former employer, joined the Java team at JavaOne 2025 in Redwood Shores, California in March. I hadn’t seen him since the Sun Reunion in Silicon Valley in 2019 so it was really cool to cross paths again. When I met him before the opening keynote at JavaOne, I told him I missed Sun and OpenSolaris. What else would I talk about with the boss? :) Scott immediately started talking about the AT&T code so he clearly had it all top of mind. Love it.

Scott McNealy and Jim Grisanzio at JavaOne in March 2025.
Scott McNealy and Jim Grisanzio at JavaOne in March 2025.
Scott McNealy at JavaOne 2025.

OpenSolaris at Aizu University

Talking OpenSolaris at an IEEE event at Aizu University in Fukushima, Japan way back in 2007. That event was really cool because the students were international, and many of them were from China and Korea. I visited the university for community events twice when I worked at Sun.

Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris at Aizu University in Fukushima, Japan in October 2007.
Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris at Aizu University in Fukushima, Japan in October 2007.