 My name is Chris Tankers-Lee, as they said. I have spent most of my computing career thinking about and using open source technology in various ways. Since I got my very first personal computer that I could actually keep in my room, I've been playing with lots of technologies and learning and thinking about how open source affects all of us throughout all of our stages of development. And one thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately as I delved more into the history of open source technology is what it actually means to be truly open source. There is a term being thrown around that we live in a post-open source world. And that to me is kind of sad because open source is something that's very important to us. But when I sit down and I think about a lot of things, one thing that kind of popped into my mind, mostly because I do a lot of PHP, I've been doing it for about 15 years, is that PHP is probably the last true open source language. And because of that, it makes it one of the greatest languages that we have. So I've written a lot of different languages. My day-to-day job, I do PHP, but I've done Python, Ruby, Go, C. And many of them have some great open source offerings and ideals that started all the way back in the early days of modern computing history. PHP for me, though, has been one of the few that actually eschew the kind of issues that we have with many of the commercial software offerings that are there. It doesn't think that we need a benevolent dictator like some other languages. And it's been a language that hasn't been shackled by any sort of corporate sales policy or any need to drive sales in any way. It has been able to stand the test of time despite ridicule for many other groups, slow development during our times of like PHP 5 to PHP 5.3 and that long slog to get to 5.4 and the sometimes controversial internals group that we have. But a lot of this exists precisely because we adhere to these ideas of open source and a lot of the things that came from the early benefactors of computing. So what makes PHP so special when other languages still seem to pop up and flourish and kind of catch that spotlight that despite us powering over 80% of the internet that we just kind of seem to lack? Well for honestly, for me, what makes me think that PHP is gonna be here long into the future and what keeps us together is this community. It's events like this with PHP UK which bring together people from all across Britain. But all of the other conferences as well in the US, in mainland Europe, in Asia. It's all of the attendees here that help keep this community alive because even if we didn't have companies, all of you are developing software and keeping the community alive. We're all here because of one central tenant of computing that has always existed and that is that all information should be free. This is one of the founding ideas of early computing. And when I say early computing, I'm actually talking about going all the way back to the early days of modern computing in the 1950s when giant machines roamed entire floors of buildings and weren't contained in my pocket. This idea was actually born out of a model rail club at MIT in the 1950s. One group was actually tasked with designing the signals and the power layout for the model rail, the model rail sets that they had. And if any of you have played with model trains, you know that that stuff can get very, very complicated. Back around this time, MIT basically had one large machine. It was an IBM 704 and it took up a huge section of one of their buildings. But this machine was heavily restricted. You basically designed your code on a bunch of punch cards, brought it to a set of operators, they would offer it to the 704 and then eventually they would respond back with whatever happened. As a developer, you prayed to the 704, hoping that your program would run because if it blew up, you might not know for a couple of days by the time the operators got around to actually running your software and then you're going to pick up the results. This all changed in about 1958. When this machine was loaned to MIT, this was the TX-0, or as they called it, the Tix-O, which was one of the first transistor-based computers. Now this thing amazed a lot of those early computer hackers at MIT. It didn't use punch cards at all. It actually used paper tape, which was really quick at the time to put code into. But the big thing was it wasn't cloistered away like that big giant 704. If you wanted to play with this, you just signed up for computer time and you could sit in front of this terminal. And this terminal was amazing. It had 64K of RAM, which we all know the joke about 64K of RAM, but in 1958, that was actually a ton of memory. It had a screen, which was unheard of for most machines. But the big thing for the hackers was that you could actually type your program up, feed it into the computer in real time, and if it blew up, you could debug it right then and there. There was no waiting. Like with PHP, they got the instant satisfaction of writing a piece of code and seeing it execute in real time. They just didn't have an F5 button to keep refreshing the browser. There was one big problem though, and that was that there was absolutely no software for this. When it was loaned to MIT, it was here's some hardware, we don't know what to do with this. So the hackers at MIT did what they always do, and that was they created whatever they needed. Most importantly though, they shared amongst themselves everything that they created. Why would you hide away information or programs or pieces of work that you've done from your friends, your work family? There was no need to. If you wrote something that solved a problem, it was just kept in a common drawer with all of the rest of the software, like some sort of analog stack overflow that they would copy and paste from. But anybody was free to implement that code. No one was going to say, hey, I wrote that, don't use that, that's mine. They were encouraged to actually hack their software to make it better, to make it faster, stronger, more optimal, and for many people, especially coming into computers during this time, this was a passion for them. The thrill of seeing how quickly and how many few instructions they could get their software to run in. And out of this environment, developers created their own set of ethics. Now these ethics were partially based on the fundamental ideas of that tech model rail club. But in true fashion, they hacked those ideals to make much more sense in this burgeoning age of computers. So the first one was access to computers and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the hands-on imperative. One thing that was nice about the Tix Zero was that you could actually open it up and get your hands in there and figure out how it worked because there were no manuals. They literally had to get their hands in the guts of this machine, see how it was wired. But that was something they loved. They wanted to be able to tinker with, break, figure out how to fix things. All information should be free. There's no point in hiding information. It will always get out. But we all benefit from this shared amount of knowledge. Mistrust authority and promote decentralization. If someone owns something, they can take that away from you. If something can be taken away from you, do you actually own it? Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position. You should be judged by your ability to sit at the computer and just see what happens. And no one should be stopped from sitting at that computer just because of who they are. You can create art and beauty on a computer because even back in these early days, they realized that computers weren't just machines to dump out payroll reports. You can do a lot of things with these. And computers can change your life for the better. You can do anything you want on a computer. And this has been true even all the way back then. If you think about the computing power we have now, but you look back at some of the things that people have developed in since the 60s, it's amazing what we can do with even just a small amount of computing power. But ultimately, all information should be free, was and is one of the most important ideas that drove these early computer programmers. No one person controlled any of the software. No one person guided how any of this should work. Each developer came up with solutions for the problems that they had and they laid bare those solutions so that anyone else could benefit from it. As new problems cropped up, they shared them and that was all there was to it. There was no term for this yet, but that was just how it worked. There was no other mindset about software. And it worked this way for a long time, but a lot of this started to change in the 1970s. As computers shrank and moved into the home, and engineers and programmers wanted to tinker with this stuff outside of work, they banded together in various clubs to share their common interests. Nowadays, we would probably just call them user groups, but it's the same idea. We like computers, let's get together and talk about them. We like PHP, let's get together and talk about them. In 1975, you had probably one of the most famous computer clubs, the Homebrew Computer Club, start up in Menlo Park, California. This specific computer club has been called out for many various reasons, but I think it goes above, one of the reasons it's important is because of things above and beyond people like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and the Apple One Computer that they developed. It was actually also one of the birthplaces, birthplaces, I can't say that word, birthplace of the antithesis of early ideas in computer software. This is the Altair 8800. All information should be free, kind of reared its head when this was demoed at Ricky's Hyatt House in Palo Alto, California. The Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems Corporation, or MITS, was giving a demo on this brand new machine that they were gonna try to sell to developers, but it made people incredibly angry. Why? Well, Ed Roberts, who is quote unquote the father of personal computing as he tried to help shrink these things down, had decided not to give any sort of compiler away with this. Up until this point, if you bought a hardware kit, you got software to help build other software because they don't come with anything. You have to build everything from scratch. But what MITS decided to do was charge a premium to be able to just even make things for this machine. You would have to buy the software by the compiler. You would have to buy extra memory to be able to use this thing. It was about an extra $500 on top of this cost. And MITS had decided we're gonna sell this at cost and make up all the money and additional add-ons. All of a sudden, software was something that was thought of as having a cost and being able to be sold. Before this time, you mostly sold your time, like I will pay you to build this. Most people just built things out of an altruistic fashion. At the demo at Ricky's Hyatt House, however, the paper tape demo of Altair Basic mysteriously disappeared. At the next Holmberg Computing Club, however, it reappeared with 49 other siblings in a mysterious cardboard box. As it turns out, the developer of Altair Basic, Bill Gates, general partner of a small fledgling software development firm called micro-soft.com, it did have a dash in it, which I thought was hilarious. They actually had a royalty agreement set up with Altair, and for each copy of Basic sold, they would get a kickback. After the theft and the subsequent copying of that tape, he sent a letter to the Holmberg Computer Club. It was simply titled an open letter to hobbyists. In there, he said, to me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books, and software itself. Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte David off and developed Altair Basic. The feedback that we have gotten so far has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent. One, most users never bought Basic. And two, the amount of royalties we have received amounts to less than $2 per hour. So thanks to the Holmberg Computer Club, we not only have amazing things like the Apple One, but we also have one of the first documented cases of software piracy. But the general idea that software is something that could be held back, that software is something that I own, and I'm just letting you own, and that I can sell this as a physical commodity. Parallel to this, the 1970s also saw the development of the UNIX operating system. The history of this one is very, very interesting because it started based out of this idea from an antitrust case in 1958 against AT&T. Because back then, we even thought monopolies were bad. So the government said, AT&T, you're not allowed to get into the computing business. There was an extra hammer thrown on that though, where the government said, any technology that AT&T develops that's not telephone related, they have to license out for free to anyone who asks. It sounds a little bit like the GPL, but not quite, because it goes downhill from here real quick. But UNIX was actually really alluring for many reasons. It was portable. Up till this point, operating systems were developed for the specific machine, and only ran on that machine. It handled multiple users, which is something that very few operating systems did up till this point. They used a weird time-sharing system to get a lot of things done. UNIX started out as a standard for how to develop an operating system, and through the C Library actually became its own full implement standard, and people wanted to port that to different machines, and they could just ask for it, and then they would port it. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and the others who developed it shared the software out to everyone, but then also took code back in from people. Because again, for most programmers, sharing knowledge is a natural part of what they do. So if they put out UNIX and someone had a patch, they would just gladly accept it. In a weird way, this starts to provide our permissive license structure, but it also ended up dragging copyright into a lot of the code that we develop. Because after a while, the antitrust case dropped off, and eventually AT&T was allowed to start selling their non-telephone technology, and there were a lot of UNIX users. You eventually had to buy a license for UNIX, which is something people had never done, and it wasn't cheap. But around this time, you also had various different distributions of UNIX start to pop up. One of the most popular was the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD. So they released their own variant in 1978, but there was a problem. It contained code from AT&T, and AT&T was not happy about that. So if you wanted to use BSD, you had to pay a license to AT&T. There was a slight hiccup, though. AT&T had code that they didn't own copyrights to, either. So there was a wonderful, long-drawn-out legal battle over how to handle this, and it ended with, as long as BSD pulls out and re-implements all the code, they can stay around. So the 70s not only brought us the idea of ownership, it unfortunately dragged the idea of copyright, and made it something that we have to consider. In the 80s, in the early 80s, we saw probably the last piece of open-source software pop up, and that was through the GNU Tool Set and its subsequent GPL licensing. Its aim was to give computer users the freedom and control in their use of computers and computing devices in a world that was slowly being closed in on with commercial software. It wanted to do this by allowing people to collaboratively develop and provide that software based on some very specific freedoms and freedoms that needed to be granted to the software itself. And those were that users were free to run the software, to share it, to copy it, to distribute it, to study it, and most importantly, modify it. The GNU software guarantees these freedoms and rights in a legal manner. Because if commercial software was going to do it, we needed to make sure that we had legal protections as well. And it created a definition of free in the term of freedom separate from cost. So thanks to the GPL, we saw the rise of many popular open-source programs like Linux, which was released by Linus Torvalds in 1991. He started that project as a hobby with no intention of it becoming any sort of commercial success. And he just wanted to play with something on his own hardware. But he put that source code out there for other people to see, to help, to maybe patch, to see what they wanted to do with it. Now granted, it was originally distributed with what we would now call a non-open-source license. It basically just said, you can't commercially distribute it. But in 92, he switched to the GPL after deciding that the kernel itself wasn't enough for people. You have to distribute other things along with it. So the tool set was a great compliment to the kernel that he was building. So he adopted that. Now today, the GPL is actually on its third revision, thanks to many legal cases and things. And this continues to this day to be one of the main licenses and drivers behind open software development and making sure that developers can have their information and their software continue to be free, even in the growing face of commercialization. And that brings us actually to 1994, but there's no fun pictures for 94. But actually in 1994, Rasmus Lerdorf actually created PHP itself, which, and used it internally, which was basically just a bunch of CGI bindings to the C libraries. He called it personal homepage tools. And he added functionality to it as he needed it. It started off as a way for him to track visitors to his resume, but then eventually it expanded to having database integration. And then in 1995, he released that source code for PHP. Much like Linus, he released that software with the intention that others would be able to provide bug fixes and improve the overall language. He had written something for himself, but he saw this could probably help other people. October 95 saw another rewrite of the code, so they renamed it personal homepage construction kit. By 96, it was renamed again to PHPFI, but by then the language had been evolved and iterated over time. In 97, we probably saw the biggest rewrite to the engine, which was done by Andy Gutmann's and Ziv Serovsky. They rewrote the underlying processor, giving us PHP 3.0. And as we all know, since about that time, PHP has exploded in not only its usage, but its feature set. Like I said, today, we still power more than 80% of the internet, and that is an amazing fact. But none of this would have been possible if Rasmus had just decided to keep it on his server. He gave it out for others to work with, and in fact, fairly quickly, handed it over to the community. He did not keep control of it like some other languages. This was something for all of us to share and enjoy and work with, but he has never taken the mantle of benevolent dictator for life. When he put out PHP, however, we didn't have a term of open source software. That didn't come around till about 1998. When the Cathedral in the Bazaar was released, which described Linux and the GPL and this open source revolution, which, oddly enough, has always been here. It has been the mainstay and the wall to try to keep back commercial software because open source software was the original idea with computing. We didn't start off selling software. We started off sharing the software. And now, thanks to that, a lot of that we have the open source initiative, which is a wonderful repository of various legal open source licenses. Because if commercial software is going to have their own licenses and use them in courts, we need to have good legal protection as well. If you're ever looking for a way to help out with open source, look at working with the open source initiative and supporting them. But if we take the sum total of history, compute of open source history anyway, and we look back at it and we think about PHP, I think it embodies all of those original ideas that started so long ago. Access to computers and anything which might teach you something about the way it works should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the hands-on imperative. We thrive specifically because we share that we put code out there, that we have things like composer and packages, and that we can take code and modify it for us and give it back out to people. Mistrust authority and promote decentralization. We don't have any one person that can tell us what to do. We have an internals group, and despite some of their problems sometimes and some of the drama that they have, it works. We have a wonderful RFC system and a wonderful voting system. But in the end, each person has one vote. Rasmus, despite being the creator, has one vote. He is a single voice in a sea of other voices of people that commit their time to making this language better, and anybody can work their way into that group fairly easily. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position. I am not gonna pretend that we are perfect with this. We sometimes don't do a very good job with it. But as a community, we try really hard. Many conference organizers try to make sure that their conferences are inclusive and diverse for as many people as possible. We all know how hard tech can be, and as long as we are trying, maybe one day we can get there. You can create art and beauty on a computer. We can make wonderful things with PHP all the way from something that dumps out payroll to powering the font of human knowledge through something like Wikipedia, which may not be the most beautiful thing in the world, but it is literally the font of human knowledge. And computers can change your life for the better. I would not be on the stage today if it was not for PHP. I've done a lot of other languages, but the PHP community has been one that has always been open and receptive and helpful. It has opened doors for me in ways that I would not have imagined when I graduated college. I have met many wonderful people that I still consider friends to this day. And without PHP, I honestly would probably be slogging it away in some corporate job. But ultimately, all information should be free. So as we go out to this conference, I want everybody to keep this in mind. Take everything that you learn the couple of days that you are here. Take it back to work. Take it back to your kids. Take it back to your local user group. Stream it on Twitch, write a blog post. Take what you learn and make sure that it gets shared. If you're talking to someone in the hallway, it's talking to someone in the hallway, and it sounds like they're having the same problem you had, share your solution with them. You might learn something, but you might also help someone else. So go out today, share everything that you learn, take the slides, but remember, all information should be free, and as a community, we thrive on that ideal. Thank you very much.