If anyone is qualified to tell us how to effectively lobby for the wider adoption of open-source software, it's Eric S. Raymond. After being propelled -- much to his surprise -- to sudden global prominence in 1998 through his involvement in inspiring and launching the Mozilla Project, Raymond found himself the de facto spokesman for an entire movement, observed that he was fairly good about it, and so set about explaining how and why. He briefed a large audience at the recent LinuxWorld Conference & Expo on these happenings, and on how the rest of us might do likewise, in a talk entitled "Meme Hacking for Fun and Profit."

Eric's first step was to figure out why the 1998 effort suddenly worked, making business interested in our community's software model, after nearly two decades of entirely futile attempts. It wasn't easy.

In May of 1997, Eric published an essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (CatB), explaining his theories of how free software (the only term for it, then) gets created, and why the process creates such good software so quickly, based on his experience managing a piece of utility software called Fetchmail (see Resources). This socio-technical analysis, while written to be accessible to a nontechnical audience, succeeded only in generating acclaim among propeller-beanie Linux users -- preaching to the choir. Eric remained better known as Guy Steele's successor in editing the MIT Jargon File, one of the cornerstones of "hackish" (computer programmer) culture, and as mastermind of the shadowy, tongue-in-cheek (or so They would have us think) Eric Conspiracy -- until January 23, 1998.

That morning, Eric received an emailed tip from a friend, suggesting he look at the prior day's announcement from Netscape, and cryptically commenting "I think someone's been reading your paper." And so Eric did -- and was thunderstruck by the fact that a major corporation seemed to be implementing his software-management ideas. Indeed, many parts of the announcement seemed to be quoting CatB directly.

He cold-called Netscape Communications Corporation's main telephone number, working through a bureaucratic maze for fifteen minutes, seeming to reach a dead end at a voicemail mailbox. His bewildered message went something like, "Hello, my name is Eric Raymond, and I think I had something to do with your announcement. Could somebody please call me?" Within the hour, Roseanne Cino of Netscape Marketing called back, saying, "Yes, all of our top people read your paper and loved it. Jim Barksdale is giving your name to the national press, and wants to meet you."

As Eric says, "This was the moment of vindication our tribe had been waiting for for twenty years." During all that time,

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