#153 - Cory Doctorow and Joe Betts-LaCroix

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Cory Doctorow and Joe Betts-Lacroix.
Cory is a blogger, journalist and science fiction author. He's also the co-editor of Boing Boing. Joe is the CTO of VIUM and an expert at YC. You can find Cory on Twitter at Doctorow and Joe at Betts-Lacroix.
All right, here we go. All right, guys, welcome to the podcast. Excellent, thank you. So, today we have Cory Doctorow and Joe Betts-Lacroix. Joe, could you start it off?

**Joe Betts-LaCroix** (0:33)
Sure. So, Cory, when I saw your talk at Burning Man this last time, and I heard you mention adversarial interoperability, my sort of nerd buzzer went off, and I thought, wow, this is going to be a really cool concept for the founders at Y Combinator to think about.

**Craig Cannon** (0:54)
So, I think most people are familiar with the idea of interoperability, per se. You know, one thing plugs into another thing. And we've all encountered a kind of indifferent interoperability, where, you know, people who make your fridge don't care what kind of magnets you put on the door. We've encountered, like, cooperative interoperability, where the people who make your car actually go and adhere to a standard for the 12-volt lighter receptacle to make sure that when you go to the gas station and pay 50 cents for that, you know, USB charger thing that it always fits and works every time.
And those are great, and they're important, and they're kind of how we build systems, but there's another kind of interoperability that's really important to the history of tech, which is adversarial interoperability. And that's when I plug something into something you made without your permission, even if you don't like it, and maybe especially if you would prefer that I didn't, in order to make your customer my customer. And you can understand why companies that are very established don't like adversarial interoperability, but people who are trying to start a company, that's kind of where you'd want to start. And it used to be completely standard, right? If you remember, there were a couple of moments in say Mac OS's history, where adversarial interoperability was totally pivotal. At one point, Microsoft had not just dominance in the operating system market and the applications market, but it was establishing dominance in the local networking market, intranets. They had a product called SMB that was a proprietary networking protocol. And although they made clients for SMB for other platforms, they were deliberately very poor, so that those systems would always be second class citizens on the office network. It was really bad for Mac systems. It was really bad for GNU Linux and other Unixes. And it really sold the hell of a lot of Microsoft systems. And so very slowly, but surely, everything that wasn't a Microsoft OS was being squeezed out of the office land. And this Australian grad student used a protocol analyzer to capture enough SMB traffic that he was able to replicate SMB. He released his free open-source software. He called it Samba. It attracted a developer community and became kind of a gold standard, where now it's bundled in with everything you use. It's just part of the standard Linux distro and it's in Mac OS and even in mobile platforms. And they did that even though Microsoft didn't want them to.
Apple then internally produced another set of adversarial interoperable tools that were really important in the mid-2000s, when Microsoft's dominance of the office market, of the office suite market, was really threatening Mac's ability to collaborate within those environments.
Microsoft's versions for the Mac always lagged the Microsoft versions, and so the documents weren't really compatible.
Excuse me. So Apple reverse-engineered Microsoft's file formats, and they cloned them, and they made a new suite called the iWork suite. And they did this again without Microsoft's cooperation, and in defiance of Microsoft's marketing strategy. And in so doing, they were able to make Mac's first-class citizens on the LAN and in the office environment. So in both cases, they were able to do this because there were very few legal recourses available to dominant firms that had taken over their field. Software patents were rare and thin.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is this 1986 anti-hacking law that Ronald Reagan signed into law in a panic after he watched Matthew Broderick in War Games, I'm not making that up, had not yet been extended to cover terms of service violations as it would be eventually thanks to legal action by Blizzard and Facebook, where they were able to effectively say that violating terms of service was hacking and potentially a felony.