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Accelerando [en] by Stross, Charles 
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Manfred trades ideas for kudos via the Free Intellect Foundation, bastard child of George Soros and Richard Stallman. His reputation is cemented by donations to the public good that don't backfire. So he's offended and startled to discover that he's dropped twenty points in the past two hours - and frightened to see that this is by no means unusual. He was expecting a ten-point drop mediated via an options trade - payment for the use of the anonymous luggage remixer that routed his old suitcase to Mombasa and in return sent this new one to him via the left-luggage office in Luton - but this is more serious. The entire reputation market seems to have been hit by the confidence flu.
CONTENT - Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future [en] by Doctorow, Cory ocn 810:
Email is a sloppy, complicated ecosystem. It has organisms of sufficient diversity and sheer number as to beggar the imagination: thousands of SMTP agents, millions of mail-servers, hundreds of millions of users. That richness and diversity lets all kinds of innovative stuff happen: if you go to nytimes.com and "send a story to a friend," the NYT can convincingly spoof your return address on the email it sends to your friend, so that it appears that the email originated on your computer. Also: a spammer can harvest your email and use it as a fake return address on the spam he sends to your friend. Sysadmins have server processes that send them mail to secret pager-addresses when something goes wrong, and GPLed mailing-list software gets used by spammers and people running high-volume mailing lists alike.
Democratizing Innovation [en] by von Hippel, Eric ocn 364:
Richard Stallman, a brilliant programmer in MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, was especially distressed by the loss of access to communally developed source code. He also was offended by a general trend in the software world toward development of proprietary software packages and the release of software in forms that could not be studied or modified by others. Stallman viewed these practices as morally wrong impingements on the rights of software users to freely learn and create. In 1985, in response, he founded the Free Software Foundation and set about to develop and diffuse a legal mechanism that could preserve free access for all to the software developed by software hackers. Stallman's pioneering idea was to use the existing mechanism of copyright law to this end. Software authors interested in preserving the status of their software as "free" software could use their own copyright to grant licenses on terms that would guarantee a number of rights to all future users. They could do this by simply affixing a standard license to their software that conveyed these rights. The basic license developed by Stallman to implement this seminal idea was the General Public License or GPL (sometimes referred to as copyleft, in a play on the word "copyright"). Basic rights transferred to those possessing a copy of free software include the right to use it at no cost, the right to study its source code, the right to modify it, and the right to distribute modified or unmodified versions to others at no cost. Licenses conveying similar rights were developed by others, and a number of such licenses are currently used in the open source field. Free and open source software licenses do not grant users the full rights associated with free revealing as that term was defined earlier. Those who obtain the software under a license such as the GPL are restricted from certain practices. For example, they cannot incorporate GPL software into proprietary software that they then sell.【12 See www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL 】 Indeed, contributors of code to open source software projects are very concerned with enforcing such restrictions in order to ensure that their code remains accessible to all (O'Mahony 2003).
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The idea of free software did not immediately become mainstream, and industry was especially suspicious of it. In 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond agreed that a significant part of the problem resided in Stallman's term "free" software, which might understandably have an ominous ring to the ears of businesspeople. Accordingly, they, along with other prominent hackers, founded the open source software movement (Perens 1999). Open source software uses the licensing practices pioneered by the free software movement. It differs from that movement primarily on philosophical grounds, preferring to emphasize the practical benefits of its licensing practices over issues regarding the moral importance of granting users the freedoms offered by both free and open source software. The term "open source" is now generally used by both practitioners and scholars to refer to free or open source software, and that is the term I use in this book.
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Interesting examples also exist regarding on the impact a commons can have on the value of intellectual property innovators seek to hold apart from it. Weber (2004) recounts the following anecdote: In 1988, Linux developers were building new graphical interfaces for their open source software. One of the most promising of these, KDE, was offered under the General Public License. However, Matthias Ettrich, its developer, had built KDE using a proprietary graphical library called Qt. He felt at the time that this could be an acceptable solution because Qt was of good quality and Troll Tech, owner of Qt, licensed Qt at no charge under some circumstances. However, Troll Tech did require a developer's fee be paid under other circumstances, and some Linux developers were concerned about having code not licensed under the GPL as part of their code. They tried to convince Troll Tech to change the Qt license so that it would be under the GPL when used in free software. But Troll Tech, as was fully within its rights, refused to do this. Linux developers then, as was fully within their rights, began to develop open source alternatives to Qt that could be licensed under the GPL. As those projects moved toward success, Troll Tech recognized that Qt might be surpassed and effectively shut out of the Linux market. In 2000 the company therefore decided to license Qt under the GPL.
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4. See www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL
For the Win [en] by Doctorow, Cory ocn 234:
Mamaji looked hard at her. Beside them, Mala's little brother Gopal took advantage of their distraction to sneak the last bit of eggplant off Mala's plate. Mala noticed, but pretended she hadn't, and concentrated on keeping her eyes down.
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He made a little namaste at Mamaji, hands pressed together at his chest, a small hint of a bow. "Good night, Mrs Vajpayee. That was a lovely supper. Thank you." he said. "Good night, General Robotwallah. I will come to the cafe tomorrow at three o'clock to talk more about your missions. Good night, Gopal," he said, and her brother looked up at him, guiltily, eggplant still poking out of the corner of his mouth.
Free Culture - How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity [en] by Lessig, Lawrence ocn 8:
That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of "free culture" - not "free" as in "free beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement, 【2 Richard M. Stallman, Free Software, Free Societies 57 ( Joshua Gay, ed. 2002). 】 but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" - a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.
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The inspiration for the title and for much of the argument of this book comes from the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. Indeed, as I reread Stallman's own work, especially the essays in Free Software, Free Society, I realize that all of the theoretical insights I develop here are insights Stallman described decades ago. One could thus well argue that this work is "merely" derivative.
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I accept that criticism, if indeed it is a criticism. The work of a lawyer is always derivative, and I mean to do nothing more in this book than to remind a culture about a tradition that has always been its own. Like Stallman, I defend that tradition on the basis of values. Like Stallman, I believe those are the values of freedom. And like Stallman, I believe those are values of our past that will need to be defended in our future. A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.
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Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here.
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More important for our purposes, to support "open source and free software" is not to oppose copyright. "Open source and free software" is not software in the public domain. Instead, like Microsoft's software, the copyright owners of free and open source software insist quite strongly that the terms of their software license be respected by adopters of free and open source software. The terms of that license are no doubt different from the terms of a proprietary software license. Free software licensed under the General Public License (GPL), for example, requires that the source code for the software be made available by anyone who modifies and redistributes the software. But that requirement is effective only if copyright governs software. If copyright did not govern software, then free software could not impose the same kind of requirements on its adopters. It thus depends upon copyright law just as Microsoft does.
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That was the world Richard Stallman was born into, and while he was a researcher at MIT, he grew to love the community that developed when one was free to explore and tinker with the software that ran on machines. Being a smart sort himself, and a talented programmer, Stallman grew to depend upon the freedom to add to or modify other people's work.
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In an academic setting, at least, that's not a terribly radical idea. In a math department, anyone would be free to tinker with a proof that someone offered. If you thought you had a better way to prove a theorem, you could take what someone else did and change it. In a classics department, if you believed a colleague's translation of a recently discovered text was flawed, you were free to improve it. Thus, to Stallman, it seemed obvious that you should be free to tinker with and improve the code that ran a machine. This, too, was knowledge. Why shouldn't it be open for criticism like anything else?
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Thus, the practice of proprietary code began to spread, and by the early 1980s, Stallman found himself surrounded by proprietary code. The world of free software had been erased by a change in the economics of computing. And as he believed, if he did nothing about it, then the freedom to change and share software would be fundamentally weakened.
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Therefore, in 1984, Stallman began a project to build a free operating system, so that at least a strain of free software would survive. That was the birth of the GNU project, into which Linus Torvalds's "Linux" kernel was added to produce the GNU/Linux operating system.
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Stallman's technique was to use copyright law to build a world of software that must be kept free. Software licensed under the Free Software Foundation's GPL cannot be modified and distributed unless the source code for that software is made available as well. Thus, anyone building upon GPL'd software would have to make their buildings free as well. This would assure, Stallman believed, that an ecology of code would develop that remained free for others to build upon. His fundamental goal was freedom; innovative creative code was a byproduct.
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Stallman was thus doing for software what privacy advocates now do for privacy. He was seeking a way to rebuild a kind of freedom that was taken for granted before. Through the affirmative use of licenses that bind copyrighted code, Stallman was affirmatively reclaiming a space where free software would survive. He was actively protecting what before had been passively guaranteed.
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The idea would be a modification of a proposal that has been floated by Harvard law professor William Fisher.【220 William Fisher, Digital Music: Problems and Possibilities (last revised: 10 October 2000), available at link #77; William Fisher, Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment (forthcoming) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), ch. 6, available at link #78. Professor Netanel has proposed a related idea that would exempt noncommercial sharing from the reach of copyright and would establish compensation to artists to balance any loss. See Neil Weinstock Netanel, "Impose a Noncommercial Use Levy to Allow Free P2P File Sharing," available at link #79. For other proposals, see Lawrence Lessig, "Who's Holding Back Broadband?" Washington Post, 8 January 2002, A17; Philip S. Corwin on behalf of Sharman Networks, A Letter to Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 26 February 2002, available at link #80; Serguei Osokine, A Quick Case for Intellectual Property Use Fee (IPUF), 3 March 2002, available at link #81; Jefferson Graham, "Kazaa, Verizon Propose to Pay Artists Directly," USA Today, 13 May 2002, available at link #82; Steven M. Cherry, "Getting Copyright Right," IEEE Spectrum Online, 1 July 2002, available at link #83; Declan Mc-Cullagh, "Verizon's Copyright Campaign," CNET News.com, 27 August 2002, available at link #84. Fisher's proposal is very similar to Richard Stallman's proposal for DAT. Unlike Fisher's, Stallman's proposal would not pay artists directly proportionally, though more popular artists would get more than the less popular. As is typical with Stallman, his proposal predates the current debate by about a decade. See link #85. 】 Fisher suggests a very clever way around the current impasse of the Internet. Under his plan, all content capable of digital transmission would (1) be marked with a digital watermark (don't worry about how easy it is to evade these marks; as you'll see, there's no incentive to evade them). Once the content is marked, then entrepreneurs would develop (2) systems to monitor how many items of each content were distributed. On the basis of those numbers, then (3) artists would be compensated. The compensation would be paid for by (4) an appropriate tax.
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This book is the product of a long and as yet unsuccessful struggle that began when I read of Eric Eldred's war to keep books free. Eldred's work helped launch a movement, the free culture movement, and it is to him that this book is dedicated. I received guidance in various places from friends and academics, including Glenn Brown, Peter DiCola, Jennifer Mnookin, Richard Posner, Mark Rose, and Kathleen Sullivan. And I received correction and guidance from many amazing students at Stanford Law School and Stanford University. They included Andrew B. Coan, John Eden, James P. Fellers, Christopher Guzelian, Erica Goldberg, Robert Hall- man, Andrew Harris, Matthew Kahn, Brian Link, Ohad Mayblum, Alina Ng, and Erica Platt. I am particularly grateful to Catherine Crump and Harry Surden, who helped direct their research, and to Laura Lynch, who brilliantly managed the army that they assembled, and provided her own critical eye on much of this. Yuko Noguchi helped me to understand the laws of Japan as well as its culture. I am thankful to her, and to the many in Japan who helped me prepare this book: Joi Ito, Takayuki Matsutani, Naoto Misaki, Michihiro Sasaki, Hiromichi Tanaka, Hiroo Yamagata, and Yoshihiro Yonezawa. I am thankful as well as to Professor Nobuhiro Nakayama, and the Tokyo University Business Law Center, for giving me the chance to spend time in Japan, and to Tadashi Shiraishi and Kiyokazu Yamagami for their generous help while I was there. These are the traditional sorts of help that academics regularly draw upon. But in addition to them, the Internet has made it possible to receive advice and correction from many whom I have never even met. Among those who have responded with extremely helpful advice to requests on my blog about the book are Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, David Gerstein, and Peter DiMauro, as well as a long list of those who had specific ideas about ways to develop my argument. They included Richard Bondi, Steven Cherry, David Coe, Nik Cubrilovic, Bob Devine, Charles Eicher, Thomas Guida, Elihu M. Gerson, Jeremy Hunsinger, Vaughn Iverson, John Karabaic, Jeff Keltner, James Lindenschmidt, K. L. Mann, Mark Manning, Nora McCauley, Jeffrey McHugh, Evan McMullen, Fred Norton, John Pormann, Pedro A. D. Rezende, Shabbir Safdar, Saul Schleimer, Clay Shirky, Adam Shostack, Kragen Sitaker, Chris Smith, Bruce Steinberg, Andrzej Jan Taramina, Sean Walsh, Matt Wasserman, Miljenko Williams, "Wink," Roger Wood, "Ximmbo da Jazz," and Richard Yanco. (I apologize if I have missed anyone; with computers come glitches, and a crash of my e-mail system meant I lost a bunch of great replies.) Richard Stallman and Michael Carroll each read the whole book in draft, and each provided extremely helpful correction and advice. Michael helped me to see more clearly the significance of the regulation of derivitive works. And Richard corrected an embarrassingly large number of errors. While my work is in part inspired by Stallman's, he does not agree with me in important places throughout this book. Finally, and forever, I am thankful to Bettina, who has always insisted that there would be unending happiness away from these battles, and who has always been right. This slow learner is, as ever, grateful for her perpetual patience and love.
Free For All - How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High Tech Titans [en] by Wayner, Peter ocn 8:
Many friends, acquaintances, and subjects of the book were kind enough to read versions that were a bit more polished, but far from complete: L. David Baron, Jeff Bates, Brian Behlendorf, Alan Cox, Robert Dreyer, Theo de Raadt, Telsa Gwynne, Jordan Hubbard, James Lewis Moss, Kirk McKusick, Sam Ockman, Tim O'Reilly, Sameer Parekh, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Richard Stallman.
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Open source software floated around the Internet controlled by a variety of licenses with names like the GNU General Public License (GPL). To say that the software was "controlled" by the license is a bit of a stretch. If anything, the licenses were deliberately worded to prohibit control. The GNU GPL, for instance, let users modify the program and give away their own versions. The license did more to enforce sharing of all the source code than it did to control or constrain. It was more an anti-license than anything else, and its author, Richard Stallman, often called it a "copyleft."
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Sharing software had already been endorsed by Richard Stallman, a legendary programmer from MIT who believed that keeping source code private was a sin and a crime against humanity. A programmer who shares the source code lets others learn, and those others can contribute their ideas back into the mix. Closed source code leaves users frustrated because they can't learn about the software or fix any bugs. Stallman broke away from MIT in 1984 when he founded the Free Software Foundation. This became the organization that sponsored Stallman's grand project to free source code, a project he called GNU. In the 1980s, Stallman created very advanced tools like the GNU Emacs text editor, which people could use to write programs and articles. Others donated their work and the GNU project soon included a wide range of tools, utilities, and games. All of them were distributed for free.
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Torvalds looked at Stallman and decided to follow his lead with open source code. Torvalds's free software began to attract people who liked to play around with technology. Some just glanced at it. Others messed around for a few hours. Free is a powerful incentive. It doesn't let money, credit cards, purchase orders, and the boss's approval get in the way of curiosity. A few, like Alan Cox, had such a good time taking apart an operating system that they stayed on and began contributing back to the project.
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Software is different from cars or hamburgers. Once someone writes the source code, copying the source costs next to nothing. That makes it much easier for tinkerers like Cox to have a global effect. If Cox, Stallman, Torvalds, and his chums just happen to luck upon something that's better than Microsoft, then the rest of the world can share their invention for next to nothing. That's what makes Cox, Torvalds, and their buddies a credible threat no matter how often they sleep late.
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This doesn't mean that the image is all wrong. Some of the luminaries like Richard Stallman and Alan Cox have been known to sport long, Rip van Winkle-grade beards. Some folks are strikingly pale. A few could bathe a bit more frequently. Caffeine is a bit too popular with them. Some people look as if they were targets for derision by the idiots on the high school football team.
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In fact, it's not exactly fair to categorize many of the free software programmers as a loosely knit band of rebel programmers out to destroy Microsoft. It's a great image that feeds the media's need to highlight conflict, but it's not exactly true. The free software movement began long before Microsoft was a household word. Richard Stallman wrote his manifesto setting out some of the precepts in 1984. He was careful to push the notion that programmers always used to share the source code to software until the 1980s, when corporations began to develop the shrink-wrapped software business. In the olden days of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, programmers always shared. While Stallman has been known to flip his middle finger out at the name Bill Gates for the reporting pleasure of a writer from Salon magazine, he's not after Microsoft per se. He just wants to return computing to the good old days when the source was free and sharing was possible.
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The free software movement in particular owes a great deal to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Richard Stallman, the man who is credited with starting the movement, began working in MIT's computer labs in the 1970s. He gets credit for sparking the revolution because he wrote the GNU Manifesto in 1984. The document spelled out why it's essential to share the source code to a program with others. Stallman took the matter to heart because he also practiced what he wrote about and contributed several great programs, including a text editor with thousands of features.
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Of course, Stallman doesn't take credit for coming up with the idea of sharing source code. He remembers his early years at MIT quite fondly and speaks of how people would share their source code and software without restrictions. The computers were new, complicated, and temperamental. Cooperation was the only way that anyone could accomplish anything. That's why IBM shared the source code to the operating systems on their mainframes though the early part of the 1960s.
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Stallman looked at this as mind control and the death of a great tradition. Many others at the universities were more pragmatic. AT&T had given plenty of money and resources to the university. Wasn't it fair for the university to give something back?
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Stallman looked at this a bit differently. Yes, AT&T was being nice when they gave grants to the university, but weren't masters always kind when they gave bowls of gruel to their slaves? The binary version AT&T started distributing to the world was just gruel for Stallman. The high priests and lucky few got to read the source code. They got to eat the steak and lobster spread. Stallman saw this central, controlling, corporate force as the enemy, and he began naming his work GNU, which was a recursive acronym that stood for "GNU's Not UNIX." The GNU project aimed to produce a complete working operating system that was going to do everything that UNIX did for none of the moral, emotional, or ethical cost. Users would be able to read the source code to Stallman's OS and modify it without signing a tough non-disclosure agreement drafted by teams of lawyers. They would be able to play with their software in complete freedom. Stallman notes that he never aimed to produce an operating system that didn't cost anything. The world may be entranced with the notion of a price tag of zero, but for Stallman, that was just a side effect of the unrestricted sharing.
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Creating a stand-alone system that would do everything with free software was his dream, but it was a long way from fruition, and Stallman was smart enough to start off with a manageable project. He began by producing a text editor known as GNU Emacs. The program was a big hit because it was highly customizable. Some people just used the program to edit papers, but others programmed it to accomplish fancier tasks such as reading their e-mail and generating automatic responses. One programmer was told by management that he had to include plenty of comments in his source code, so he programmed GNU Emacs to insert them automatically. One professor created a version of GNU Emacs that would automatically insert random praise into requests to his secretary.【2 "Where are those reports I asked you to copy? You're doing a great job. Thanks for all the help," on one day. "Are you ever going to copy those reports? You're doing a great job. Thanks for all the help," on the next. 】 Practically everything in Emacs could be changed or customized. If you didn't like hitting the delete key to fix a mistyped character, then you could arrange for the 6 key to do the same thing. This might make it hard to type numbers, but the user was free to mess up his life as much as he wanted.
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It took Microsoft years to catch up with Stallman's solution, and even then they implemented it in a dangerous way. They let people create little custom programs for modifying documents, but they forgot to prevent malicious code from crying havoc. Today, Microsoft Word allows little programs named macro viruses to roam around the planet. Open up a Word document, and a virus might be lurking.
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In the 1980s, the free software world devoted itself to projects like this. GNU Emacs became a big hit in the academic world where system administrators could install it for free and not worry about counting students or negotiating licenses. Also, smart minds were better able to appreciate the cool flexibility Stallman had engineered into the system. Clever folks wasted time by adding filters to the text editor that would scan their text and translate it into, like, Valley Girl talk or more urban jive.
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Stallman's biggest programming project for GNU during the 1980s was writing the GNU C compiler (GCC). This program was an important tool that converted the C source code written by humans into the machine code understood by computers. The GCC package was an important cornerstone for the GNU project in several ways. First, it was one of the best compilers around. Second, it could easily move from machine to machine. Stallman personally ported it to several different big platforms like Intel's x86 line of processors. Third, the package was free, which in the case of GNU software meant that anyone was free to use and modify the software.
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The next great leap forward came in the early 1990s as people began to realize that a completely free operating system was a serious possibility. Stallman had always dreamed of replacing UNIX with something that was just as good and accompanied by the source code, but it was a large task. It was the reason he started the GNU project. Slowly but surely, the GNU project was assembling the parts to make it work. There were hundreds of small utilities and bigger tools donated to the GNU project, and those little bits were starting to add up.
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This lawsuit marked the end of universities' preeminent role in the development of free software. Suddenly, the lawsuit focused everyone's attention and made them realize that taking money from corporations came into conflict with sharing software source code. Richard Stallman left MIT in 1984 when he understood that a university's need for money would eventually trump his belief in total sharing of source code. Stallman was just a staff member who kept the computers running. He wasn't a tenured professor who could officially do anything. So he started the Free Software Foundation and never looked back. MIT helped him at the beginning by loaning him space, but it was clear that the relationship was near the end. Universities needed money to function. Professors at many institutions had quotas specifying how much grant money they needed to raise. Stallman wasn't bringing in cash by giving away his software.
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Toward the end of the 1980s, most people in the computer world were well aware of Stallman's crusade against the corporate dominance of AT&T and UNIX. Most programmers knew that GNU stood for "GNU's Not UNIX." Stallman was not the only person annoyed by AT&T's attitude toward secrecy and non-disclosure agreements. In fact, his attitude was contagious. Some of the folks at Berkeley looked at the growth of tools emerging from the GNU project and felt a bit used. They had written many pieces of code that found their way into AT&T's version of UNIX. They had contributed many great ideas. Yet AT&T was behaving as if AT&T alone owned it. They gave and gave, while AT&T took.
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Stallman got to distribute his source code. Stallman got to share with others. Stallman got to build his reputation. Programmers raved about Stallman's Emacs. People played GNU Chess at their offices. Others were donating their tools to the GNU project. Everyone was getting some attention by sharing except the folks at Berkeley who collaborated with AT&T. This started to rub people the wrong way.
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Torvalds looked at the price of Minix ($150) and thought it was too much. Richard Stallman's GNU General Public License had taken root in Torvalds's brain, and he saw the limitations in charging for software. GNU had also produced a wide variety of tools and utility programs that he could use on his machine. Minix was controlled by Tanenbaum, albeit with a much looser hand than many of the other companies at the time.
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At first glance, he was making astounding progress. He created a working system with a compiler in less than half a year. But he also had the advantage of borrowing from the GNU project. Stallman's GNU project group had already written a compiler (GCC) and a nice text user interface (bash). Torvalds just grabbed these because he could. He was standing on the shoulders of the giants who had come before him.
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Anyone could break off from Torvalds's project because Torvalds decided to ship the source code to his project under Richard Stallman's GNU General Public License, or GPL. In the beginning, he issued it with a more restrictive license that prohibited any "commercial" use, but eventually moved to the GNU license. This was a crucial decision because it cemented a promise with anyone who spent a few minutes playing with his toy operating system for the 386. It stated that all of the source code that Torvalds or anyone else wrote would be freely accessible and shared with everyone. This decision was a double-edged sword for the community. Everyone could take the software for free,
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but if they started circulating some new software built with the code, they would have to donate their changes back to the project. It was like flypaper. Anyone who started working with the project grew attached to it. They couldn't run off into their own corner. Some programmers joke that this flypaper license is like sex. If you make one mistake by hooking up with a project protected by GPL, you pay for it forever. If you ever ship a version of the project, you must include all of the source code. It can be distributed freely forever.
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While some people complained about the sticky nature of the GPL, enough saw it as a virtue. They liked Torvalds's source code, and they liked the fact that the GPL made them full partners in the project. Anyone could donate their time and be sure it wasn't going to disappear. The source code became a body of work held in common trust for everyone. No one could rope it off, fence it in, or take control.
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Torvalds's burgeoning kernel dovetailed nicely with the tools that the GNU project created. All of the work by Stallman and his disciples could be easily ported to work with the operating system core that Torvalds was now calling Linux. This was the power of freely distributable source code. Anyone could make a connection, and someone invariably did. Soon, much of the GNU code began running on Linux. These tools made it easier to create more new programs, and the snowball began to roll.
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Many people feel that Linus Torvalds's true act of genius was in coming up with a flexible and responsive system for letting his toy OS grow and change. He released new versions often, and he encouraged everyone to test them with him. In the past, many open source developers using the GNU GPL had only shipped new versions at major landmarks in development, acting a bit like the commercial developers. After they released version 1.0, they would hole up in their basements until they had added enough new features to justify version 2.0.
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This freedom also attracted others to the party. They knew that Linux would always be theirs, too. They could write neat features and plug them into the Linux kernel without worrying that Torvalds would yank the rug out from under them. The GPL was a contract that lasted long into the future. It was a promise that bound them together.
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Torvalds's operating system plugged a crucial hole in the world of free source software and made it possible for someone to run a computer without paying anyone for a license. Richard Stallman had dreamed of this day, and Torvalds came up with the last major piece of the puzzle.
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It goes without saying that all the cool software coming out of Stallman's Free Software Foundation found its way to Linux. Some were simple toys like GNU Chess, but others were serious tools that were essential to the growth of the project. By 1991, the FSF was offering what might be argued were the best text editor and compiler in the world. Others might have been close, but Stallman's were free. These were crucial tools that made it possible for Linux to grow quickly from a tiny experimental kernel into a full-featured OS for doing everything a programmer might want to do.
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Lewis-Moss points out one of the smoldering controversies in the world of free software: all of the tools and games that came from the GNU project started becoming part of what people simply thought of as plain "Linux." The name for the small kernel of the operating system soon grew to apply to almost all the free software that ran with it. This angered Stallman, who first argued that a better name would be"Lignux."When that failed to take hold, he moved to "GNU/Linux." Some ignored his pleas and simply used "Linux," which is still a bit unfair. Some feel that"GNU/Linux"is too much of a mouthful and, for better or worse, just plain Linux is an appropriate shortcut. Some, like Lewis-Moss, hold firm to GNU/Linux.
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Soon some people were bundling together CD-ROMs with all this software in one batch. The group would try to work out as many glitches as possible so that the purchaser's life would be easier. All boasted strange names like Yggdrasil, Slackware, SuSE, Debian, or Red Hat. Many were just garage projects that never made much money, but that was okay. Making money wasn't really the point. People just wanted to play with the source. Plus, few thought that much money could be made. The GPL, for instance, made it difficult to differentiate the product because it required everyone to share their source code with the world. If Slackware came up with a neat fix that made their version of Linux better, then Debian and SuSE could grab it. The GPL prevented anyone from constraining the growth of Linux.
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The competition and the GPL meant that the users would never feel bound to one OS. If problems arose, anyone could always just start a splinter group and take Linux in that direction. And they did. All the major systems began as splinter groups, and some picked up enough steam and energy to dominate. In time, the best splinter groups spun off their own splinter groups and the process grew terribly complicated.
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This was one of the first times that a major corporation started taking note of what was happening in the garages and basements of hardcore computer programmers. It was also one of the first times that a corporation looked at an open source operating system and did not react with fear or shock. Sun was always a big contributor of open source software, but they kept their OS proprietary. Hall worked tirelessly at Digital to ensure that the corporation understood the implications of the GPL and saw that it was a good way to get more interested in the Alpha chip. He says he taught upper management at Digital how to "say the L-word."
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Hall also helped start a group called Linux International, which works to make the corporate world safe for Linux. "We help vendors understand the Linux marketplace," Hall told me. "There's a lot of confusion about what the GPL means. Less now, but still there's a lot of confusion. We helped them find the markets."
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Most of this development lived in its own Shangri-La. Red Hat, for instance, charged money for its disks, but released all of its software under the GPL. Others could copy their disks for free, and many did. Red Hat may be a company, but the management realized that they depended on thousands if not millions of unpaid volunteers to create their product.
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Slowly but surely, more and more people became aware of Linux, the GNU project, and its cousins like FreeBSD. No one was making much money off the stuff, but the word of mouth was spreading very quickly. The disks were priced reasonably, and people were curious. The GPL encouraged people to share. People began borrowing disks from their friends. Some companies even manufactured cheap rip-off copies of the CD-ROMs, an act that the GPL encouraged.
ocn 368:
A few people thought this was a disaster. Richard Stallman watched the world change from his office in the artificial intelligence labs of MIT. Stallman is the ultimate hacker, if you use the word in the classical sense. In the beginning, the word only described someone who knows how to program well and loves to poke around in the insides of computers. It only took on its more malicious tone later as the media managed to group all of those with the ability to wrangle computers into the same dangerous camp. Hackers often use the term "cracker" to refer to these people.
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Stallman is a model of the hacker. He is strident, super intelligent, highly logical, and completely honest. Most corporations keep their hackers shut off in a back room because these traits seem to scare away customers and investors who just want sweet little lies in their ears. Stallman was never that kind of guy. He looked at the burgeoning corporate control of software and didn't like it one bit. His freedom was slowly being whittled away, and he wasn't the type to simply sit by and not say anything.
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When Stallman left the AI lab in 1984, he didn't want to be controlled by its policies. Universities started adopting many of the same practices as the corporations in the 1980s, and Stallman couldn't be a special exception. If MIT was going to be paying him a salary, MIT would own his code and any patents that came from it. Even MIT, which is a much cooler place than most, couldn't accommodate him on staff. He didn't move far, however, because after he set up the Free Software Foundation, he kept an office at MIT, first unofficially and then officially. Once he wasn't "on the staff," the rules became different.
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Stallman turned to consulting for money, but it was consulting with a twist. He would only work for companies that wouldn't put any restrictions on the software he created. This wasn't an easy sell. He was insisting that any work he did for Corporation X could also be shared with Corporations Y and Z, even if they were direct competitors.
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This wasn't how things were done in the 1980s. That was the decade when companies figured out how to lock up the source code to a program by only distributing a machine-readable version. They hoped this would control their product and let them restrain people who might try to steal their ideas and their intellectual property. Stallman thought it was shutting down his ability to poke around inside the computer and fix it. This secrecy blocked him from sharing his thoughts and ideas with other programmers.
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Stallman thought this was a disaster for the world and set out to convince the world that he was right. In 1984, he wrote the GNU Manifesto, which started his GNU project and laid out the conditions for his revolution. This document stood out a bit in the middle of the era of Ronald Reagan because it laid out Stallman's plan for creating a virtual commune where people would be free to use the software. It is one of the first cases when someone tried to set down a definition of the word "free" for software users. Sure, software and ideas were quite free long ago, but no one noticed until the freedom was gone.
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The document is a wonderful glimpse at the nascent free software world because it is as much a recruiting document as a tirade directed at corporate business practices. When the American colonies split off from England, Thomas Paine spelled out the problems with the English in the first paragraph of his pamphlet "Common Sense." In his manifesto, Stallman didn't get started using words like "dishonor" until the sixth paragraph. The first several paragraphs spelled out the cool tools he had developed already: "an Emacs text editor with Lisp for writing editor commands, a source level debugger, a yacc-compatible parser generator, a linker, and around 35 utilities." Then he pointed to the work he wanted to complete soon: "A new portable optimizing C compiler has compiled itself and may be released this year. An initial kernel exists but many more features are needed to emulate Unix." He was saying, in effect, that he already had a few juicy peaches growing on the trees of his commune.
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The fifth paragraph even explained to everyone that the name of the project would be the acronym GNU, which stood for "GNU's Not UNIX," and it should be pronounced with a hard G to make sure that no one would get it confused with the word "new." Stallman has always cared about words, the way they're used and the way they're pronounced.
ocn 380:
In 1984, UNIX became the focus of Stallman's animus because its original developer, AT&T, was pushing to try to make some money back after paying so many people at Bell Labs to create it. Most people were somewhat conflicted by the fight. They understood that AT&T had paid good money and supported many researchers with the company's beneficence. The company gave money, time, and spare computers. Sure, it was a pain to pay AT&T for something and get only a long license drafted by teams of lawyers. Yes, it would be nice if we could poke around under the hood of UNIX without signing a non-disclosure agreement. It would be nice if we could be free to do whatever we want, but certainly someone who pays for something deserves the right to decide how it is used. We've all got to eat.
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Stallman wasn't confused at all. Licenses like AT&T's would constrict his freedom to share with others. To make matters worse, the software companies wanted him to pay for the privilege of getting software without the source code.
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Stallman explains that his feelings weren't focused on AT&T per se. Software companies were springing up all over the place, and most of them were locking up their source code with proprietary licenses. It was the 1980s thing to do, like listening to music by Duran Duran and Boy George.
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This was a crucial point that kept Stallman from being dismissed as a quasi-communist crank who just wanted everyone to live happily on some nerd commune. The source code is a valuable tool for everyone because it is readable by humans, or at least humans who happen to be good at programming. Companies learned to keep source code proprietary, and it became almost a reflex. If people wanted to use it, they should pay to help defray the cost of creating it. This made sense to programmers who wanted to make a living or even get rich writing their own code. But it was awfully frustrating at times. Many programmers have pulled their hair out in grief when their work was stopped by some bug or undocumented feature buried deep in the proprietary, super-secret software made by Microsoft, IBM, Apple, or whomever. If they had the source code, they would be able to poke around and figure out what was really happening. Instead, they had to treat the software like a black box and keep probing it with test programs that might reveal the secrets hidden inside. Every programmer has had an experience like this, and every programmer knew that they could solve the problem much faster if they could only read the source code. They didn't want to steal anything, they just wanted to know what was going on so they could make their own code work.
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Stallman's GNU project would be different, and he explained, "Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes."
ocn 388:
When people first heard of his ideas, they became fixated on the word "free." These were the Reagan years. Saying that people should just give away their hard work was sounding mighty communist to everyone, and this was long before the Berlin Wall fell. Stallman reexamined the word "free" and all of its different meanings. He carefully considered all of the different connotations, examined the alternatives, and decided that "free" was still the best word. He began to try to explain the shades of meaning he was after. His revolution was about "free speech," not "free beer." This wasn't going to be a revolution in the sense that frequent flyer miles revolutionized air travel nor in the way that aluminum cans revolutionized beer drinking. No, this was going to be a revolution as Rousseau, Locke, and Paine used the word.
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While Stallman pushed people away from the notion of "free beer," there's little question that this element turned out to be a very important part of the strategy and a foundation of its success. Stallman insisted that anyone could do what they wanted with the software, so he insisted that the source code must be freely distributed. That is, no one could put any restrictions on how you used the software. While this didn't make it free beer, it did mean that you could turn around and give a copy to your friends or your clients. It was pretty close.
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The "free beer" nature of Stallman's software also attracted users. If some programmers wanted to check out a new tool, they could download it and try it out without paying for it. They didn't need to ask their boss for a budget, and they didn't need to figure out a way to deal with an invoice. Just one click and the software was there. Commercial software companies continue to imitate this feature by distributing trial versions that come with either a few crippled features or a time lock that shuts them down after a few days.
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Of course, the "free beer" nature of the GNU project soon led to money problems. The GNU project took up his time and generated no real revenues at first. Stallman had always lived frugally. He says that he never made more than $20,000 a year at MIT, and still managed to save on that salary. But he was finding it harder and harder to get his assigned jobs done at MIT and write the cool GNU code. While Stallman always supported a programmer's right to make money for writing code, the GNU project wasn't generating any money.
ocn 398:
Most folks saw this conflict coming from the beginning. Sure, Stallman would be able to rant and rave about corporate software development for a bit, but eventually he and his disciples would need to eat.
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When the MIT support ended, Stallman soon stumbled upon a surprising fact: he could charge for the software he was giving away and make some money. People loved his software, but it was often hard to keep track of it. Getting the package delivered on computer tape or a CD-ROM gave people a hard copy that they could store for future reference or backup. Online manuals were also nice, but the printed book is still a very popular and easy-to-use way of storing information. Stallman's Free Software Foundation began selling printed manuals, tapes, and then CD-ROMs filled with software to make money. Surprisingly, people started paying money for these versions despite the fact that they could download the same versions for free.
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Some folks enjoyed pointing out the hypocrisy in Stallman's move. Stallman had run his mouth for so long that many programming "sellouts" who worked for corporations savored the irony. At last that weenie had gotten the picture. He was forced to make money to support himself, and he was selling out, too. These cynics didn't get what Stallman was trying to do.
ocn 401:
Most of us would have given up at this time. The free software thing seemed like a good idea, but now that the money was running out it was time to get a real job. In writing this book and interviewing some of the famous and not-so-famous free software developers, I found that some were involved in for-profit, not-so-free software development now. Stallman, though, wasn't going to give up his ideals, and his mind started shifting to accommodate this new measure of reality. He decided that it wouldn't be wrong to sell copies of software or even software services as long as you didn't withhold the source code and stomp on anyone's freedom to use the source code as they wished.
ocn 402:
Stallman has always been great at splitting hairs and creating Jesuitical distinctions, and this insight was one of his best. At first glance, it looked slightly nutty. If people were free to do anything they wanted with software, they could just give a copy to their friend and their friend would never send money back to Stallman's Free Software Foundation. In fact, someone could buy a copy from Stallman and then start reselling copies to others to undercut Stallman. The Free Software Foundation and the GNU GPL gave them the freedom to do so. It was as if a movie theater sold tickets to a movie, but also posted a big sign near the exit door that said "Hey, it's absolutely okay for you to prop this open so your friends can sneak in without paying."
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While this total freedom befuddled most people, it didn't fail. Many paid for tapes or CD-ROM versions because they wanted the convenience. Stallman's versions came with the latest bug fixes and new features. They were the quasi-official versions. Others felt that paying helped support the work so they didn't feel bad about doing it. They liked the FSF and wanted it to produce more code. Others just liked printed books better than electronic documentation. Buying them from Stallman was cheaper than printing them out. Still others paid for the CD-ROMs because they just wanted to support the Free Software Foundation.
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Stallman also found other support. The MacArthur Foundation gave him one of their genius grants that paid him a nice salary for five years to do whatever he wanted. Companies like Intel hired him as a consultant and asked him to make sure that some of his software ran on Intel chips. People were quite willing to pay for convenience because even free software didn't do everything that it should.
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Stallman also recognized that this freedom introduced a measure of competition. If he could charge for copies, then so could others. The source code would be a vast commonweal, but the means of delivering it would be filled with people struggling to do the best job of distributing the software. It was a pretty hard-core Reaganaut notion for a reputed communist. At the beginning, few bothered to compete with him, but in time all of the GNU code began to be included with computer operating systems. By the time Linus Torvalds wrote his OS, the GNU code was ready to be included.
ocn 407:
If Stallman's first great insight was that the world did not need to put up with proprietary source code, then his second was that he could strictly control the use of GNU software with an innovative legal document entitled GNU General Public License, or GPL. To illustrate the difference, he called the agreement a "copyleft" and set about creating a legal document defining what it meant for software to be "free." Well, defining what he thought it should mean.
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The GPL was a carefully crafted legal document that didn't put the software into the "public domain," a designation that would have allowed people to truly do anything they wanted with the software. The license, in fact, copyrighted the software and then extended users very liberal rights for making innumerable copies as long as the users didn't hurt other people's rights to use the software.
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The definition of stepping on other people's rights is one that keeps political science departments at universities in business. There are many constituencies that all frame their arguments in terms of protecting someone's rights. Stallman saw protecting the rights of other users in very strong terms and strengthened his grip a bit by inserting a controversial clause. He insisted that a person who distributes an improved version of the program must also share the source code. That meant that some greedy company couldn't download his GNU Emacs editor, slap on a few new features, and then sell the whole package without including all of the source code they created. If people were going to benefit from the GNU sharing, they were going to have to share back. It was freedom with a price.
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This strong compact was ready-built for some ironic moments. When Apple began trying to expand the scope of intellectual property laws by suing companies like Microsoft for stealing their "look and feel," Stallman became incensed and decided that he wouldn't develop software for Apple machines as a form of protest and spite. If Apple was going to pollute the legal landscape with terrible impediments to sharing ideas, then Stallman wasn't going to help them sell machines by writing software for the machines. But the GNU copyleft license specifically allowed anyone to freely distribute the source code and use it as they wanted. That meant that others could use the GNU code and convert it to run on the Apple if they wanted to do so. Many did port much of the GNU software to the Mac and distributed the source code with it in order to comply with the license. Stallman couldn't do anything about it. Sure, he was the great leader of the FSF and the author of some of its code, but he had given away his power with the license. The only thing he could do was refuse to help the folks moving the software to the Mac. When it came to principles, he placed freedom to use the source code at the top of the hierarchy.
ocn 413:
Stallman hates that characterization. "To call anything 'like a virus' is a very vicious thing. People who say things like that are trying to find ways to make the GPL look bad," he says.
ocn 414:
Stallman did try to work around this problem by creating what he at first called the "Library General Public License" and now refers to as the "Lesser General Public License," a document that allowed software developers to share small chunks of code with each other under less restrictive circumstances. A programmer can use the LGPL to bind chunks of code known as libraries. Others can share the libraries and use them with their source code as long as they don't fully integrate them. Any changes they make to the library itself must be made public, but there is no requirement to release the source code for the main program that uses the library.
ocn 415:
This license is essentially a concession to some rough edges at the corners where the world of programming joins the world of law. While Stallman was dead set on creating a perfect collection of free programs that would solve everyone's needs, he was far from finished. If people were going to use his software, they were going to have to use it on machines made by Sun, AT&T, IBM, or someone else who sold a proprietary operating system along with it. He understood that he needed to compromise, at least for system libraries.
ocn 416:
The problem is drawing boundaries around what is one pile of software owned by one person and what is another pile owned by someone else. The GPL guaranteed that GNU software would "infect" other packages and force people who used his code to join the party and release theirs as well. So he had to come up with a definition that spelled out what it meant for people to use his code and "incorporate" it with others.
ocn 418:
Stallman recognized that programmers sometimes wrote libraries that they wanted others to use. After all, that was the point of GNU: creating tools that others would be free to use. So Stallman relented and created the Lesser Public License, which would allow people to create libraries that might be incorporated into other programs that weren't fully GNU. The library itself still came with source code, and the user would need to distribute all changes made to the library, but there was no limitation on the larger package.
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Stallman's LGPL was a concession to the fact that sometimes programs can be used like libraries and sometimes libraries can be used like programs. In the end, the programmer can draw a strong line around one set of boxes and say that the GPL covers these functions without leaking out to infect the software that links up with the black boxes.
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Still, these concessions aren't enough for some people. Many continue to rail against Stallman's definition of freedom and characterize the GPL as a fascist document that steals the rights of any programmer who comes along afterward. Being free means having the right to do anything you want with the code, including keeping all your modifications private.
ocn 424:
To be fair, the GPL never forces you to give away your changes to the source code. It just forces you to release your modifications if you redistribute it. If you just run your own version in your home, then you don't need to share anything. When you start sharing binary versions of the software, however, you need to ship the source code, too.
ocn 426:
These fine distinctions didn't satisfy many programmers who weren't so taken with Stallman's doctrinaire version of freedom. They wanted to create free software and have the freedom to make some money off of it. This tradition dates back many years before Stallman and is a firm part of academic life. Many professors and students developed software and published a free version before starting up a company that would commercialize the work. They used their professor's salary or student stipend to support the work, and the free software they contributed to the world was meant as an exchange. In many cases, the U.S. government paid for the creation of the software through a grant, and the free release was a gift to the taxpayers who ultimately funded it. In other cases, corporations paid for parts of the research and the free release was seen as a way to give something back to the sponsoring corporation without turning the university into a home for the corporation's lowpaid slave programmers who were students in name only.
ocn 427:
In many cases, the free distribution was an honest gift made by researchers who wanted to give their work the greatest possible distribution. They would be repaid in fame and academic prestige, which can be more lucrative than everything but a good start-up's IPO. Sharing knowledge and creating more of it was what universities were all about. Stallman tapped into that tradition.
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The GNU GPL, he felt, wasn't appropriate for technology that was developed largely with government grants. The work should be as free as possible and shouldn't force "other people to do things (e.g., give away their personal work) in order to get access to what you had done."
ocn 436:
The BSD license evolved along a strange legal path that was more like the meandering of a drunken cow than the laser-like devotion of Stallman.
ocn 442:
Joy was just one of a large number of people who worked heavily on the BSD project from 1977 through the early 1980s. The work was low-level and grungy by today's standards. The students and professors scrambled just to move UNIX to the new machines they bought. Often, large parts of the guts of the operating system needed to be modified or upgraded to deal with a new type of disk drive or file system. As they did this more and more often, they began to develop more and more higher-level abstractions to ease the task. One of the earliest examples was Joy's screen editor known as vi, a simple package that could be used to edit text files and reprogram the system. The "battle" between Joy's vi and Stallman's Emacs is another example of the schism between MIT and Berkeley. This was just one of the new tools included in version 2 of BSD, a collection that was shipped to 75 different people and institutions.
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During this time, the relationship between AT&T and the universities was cordial. AT&T owned the commercial market for UNIX and Berkeley supplied many of the versions used in universities. While the universities got BSD for free, they still needed to negotiate a license with AT&T, and companies paid a fortune. This wasn't too much of a problem because universities are often terribly myopic. If they share their work with other universities and professors, they usually consider their sharing done. There may be folks out there without university appointments, but those folks are usually viewed as cranks who can be safely ignored. Occasionally, those cranks write their own OS that grows up to be Linux. The BSD version of freedom was still a far cry from Stallman's, but then Stallman hadn't articulated it yet. His manifesto was still a few years off.
ocn 445:
The intellectual tension between Stallman and Berkeley grew during the 1980s. While Stallman began what many thought was a quixotic journey to build a completely free OS, Berkeley students and professors continued to layer their improvements to UNIX on top of AT&T's code. The AT&T code was good, it was available, and many of the folks at Berkeley had either directly or indirectly helped influence it. They were generally happy keeping AT&T code at the core despite the fact that all of the BSD users needed to negotiate with AT&T. This process grew more and more expensive as AT&T tried to make more and more money off of UNIX.
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Of course, Stallman didn't like the freedom of the BSD-style license. To him, it meant that companies could run off with the hard work and shared source code of another, make a pile of money, and give nothing back. The companies and individuals who were getting the BSD network release were getting the cumulative hard work of many students and professors at Berkeley (and other places) who donated their time and effort to building a decent OS. The least these companies owed the students were the bug fixes, the extensions, and the enhancements they created when they were playing with the source code and gluing it into their products.
ocn 447:
Stallman had a point. Many of these companies "shared" by selling the software back to these students and the taxpayers who had paid for their work. While it is impossible to go back and audit the motives of everyone who used the code, there have been many who've used BSDstyle code for their personal gain.
ocn 456:
Gilmore decided to use the GNU license to protect the Free/SWAN software, in part because he has had bad experiences in the past with totally free software. He once wrote a little program called PDTar that was an improvement over the standard version of Tar used on the Internet to bundle together a group of files into one big, easy-tomanage bag of bits often known affectionately as "tarballs." He decided he wasn't going to mess around with Stallman's GNU license or impose any restrictions on the source code at all. He was just going to release it into the public domain and give everyone total freedom.
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This good deed did not go unpunished, although the punishment was relatively minor. He recalls, "I never made PDTar work for DOS, but six or eight people did. For years after the release, I would get mail saying, 'I've got this binary for the DOS release and it doesn't work.' They often didn't even have the sources that went with the version so I couldn't help them if I tried." Total freedom, it turned out, brought a certain amount of anarchy that made it difficult for him to manage the project. While the total freedom may have encouraged others to build their own versions of PDTar, it didn't force them to release the source code that went with their versions so others could learn from or fix their mistakes Hugh Daniel, one of the testers for the Free/SWAN project, says that he thinks the GNU General Public License will help keep some coherency to the project. "There's also a magic thing with GPL code that open source doesn't have," Daniel said. "For some reason, projects don't bifurcate in GPL space. People don't grab a copy of the code and call it their own. For some reason there's a sense of community in GPL code. There seems to be one version. There's one GPL kernel and there's umpty-ump BSD branches."
ocn 458:
Daniel is basically correct. The BSD code has evolved, or forked, into many different versions with names like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD while the Linux UNIX kernel released under Stallman's GPL is limited to one fairly coherent package. Still, there is plenty of crosspollination between the different versions of BSD UNIX. Both NetBSD 1.0 and FreeBSD 2.0, for instance, borrowed code from 4.4 BSD-Lite. Also, many versions of Linux come with tools and utilities that came from the BSD project.
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For all of these reasons, it may be hard to argue that the freedoms provided by the BSD-style license were largely responsible for the splintering. The GNU software users are just as free to make new versions as long as they kick back the source code into free circulation. In fact, it may be possible to argue that the Macintosh versions of some of the GNU code comprise a splinter group because it occurred despite the ill will Stallman felt for the Mac.
ocn 470:
The definition of what was open source grew out of the Debian project, one of the different groups that banded together to press CDROMs of stable Linux releases. Groups like these often get into debates about what software to include on the disks. Some wanted to be very pure and only include GPL'ed software. In a small way, that would force others to contribute back to the project because they wouldn't get their software distributed by the group unless it was GPL'ed. Others wanted less stringent requirements that might include quasi-commercial projects that still came with their source code. There were some cool projects out there that weren't protected by GPL, and it could be awfully hard to pass up the chance to integrate them into a package.
ocn 472:
The official definition of what was acceptable to Debian leaned toward more freedom and fewer restrictions on the use of software. Of course, that's the only way that anyone could come up with a definition that included both GNU and the much less restrictive BSD. But this was also the intent of the open source group. Perens and Eric Raymond felt that Stallman still sounded too quasi-communist for "conservative businessmen," and they wanted the open source definition to avoid insisting upon the sort of forced sharing that Stallman's GNU virus provided.
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Still, the definition borrowed heavily from Stallman's concept of GNU, and Perens credits him by saying that many of the Debian guidelines are derived from the GPL. An official open source license for a product must provide the programmer with source code that is human-readable. It can't restrict what modifications are made to the software or how it is sold or given away.
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Some reacted negatively. Richard Stallman decided that he didn't like the word "open" as much as "free." Open doesn't capture the essence of freedom. Ockman says, "I don't think it's very fair. For ages, he's always said that the term 'free software' is problematic because people think of 'free beer' when they should be thinking of 'free speech.' We were attempting to solve that term. If the masses are confused, then corporate America is confused even more."
ocn 478:
The debate has even produced more terms. Some people now use the phrase "free source" to apply to the general conglomeration of the GPL and the open source world. Using "free software" implies that someone is aligned with Stallman's Free Software Foundation. Using "open source" implies you're aligned with the more business-friendly Open Source Initiative. So "free source" and "open source" both work as a compromise. Others tweak the meaning of free and refer to GPL protected software as "GNUFree."
ocn 479:
Naturally, all of this debate about freedom can reach comic proportions. Programmers are almost better than lawyers at finding loopholes, if only because they have to live with a program that crashes.【7 Lawyers just watch their clients go to jail. 】 Stallman, for instance, applies the GPL to everything coming out of the GNU project except the license itself. That can't be changed, although it can be freely reproduced. Some argue that if it were changeable, people would be able to insert and delete terms at will. Then they could apply the changed GPL to the new version of the software and do what they want. Stallman's original intent would not be changed. The GPL would still apply to all of the GNU software and its descendants, but it wouldn't be the same GPL.
ocn 482:
The free source realm has been pushing the parallels for some time now. When AT&T unveiled their round logo with an offset dimple, most free source people began to snicker. The company that began the free software revolution by pushing its intellectual property rights and annoying Richard Stallman had chosen a logo that looked just like the Death Star. Everyone said, "Imperialist minds think alike." Some even wondered and hoped that George Lucas would sue AT&T for some sort of look-and-feel, trademark infringement. Those who use the legal intimidation light saber should die by the legal intimidation light saber.
ocn 486:
Stallman saw this secrecy as a great crime. Computer users should be able to share the source code so they can share ways to make it better. This trade should lead to more information-trading in a great feedback loop. Some folks even used the word "bloom" to describe the explosion of interest and cross-feedback. They're using the word the way biologists use it to describe the way algae can just burst into existence, overwhelming a region of the ocean. Clever insights, brilliant bug fixes, and wonderful new features just appear out of nowhere as human curiosity is amplified by human generosity in a grand explosion of intellectual synergy. The only thing missing from the picture is a bunch of furry Ewoks dancing around a campfire.【8 Linux does have many marketing opportunities. Torvalds chose a penguin named Tux as the mascot, and several companies actually manufacture and sell stuffed penguins to the Linux realm. The BSD world has embraced a cute demon, a visual pun on the fact that BSD UNIX uses the word "daemon" to refer to some of the faceless background programs in the OS. 】
ocn 488:
Eric Raymond, a man who is sort of the armchair philosopher of the open source world, did a great job of summarizing the phenomenon and creating this myth in his essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Raymond is an earnest programmer who spent some time working on projects like Stallman's GNU Emacs. He saw the advantages of open source development early, perhaps because he's a hard-core libertarian. Government solutions are cumbersome. Empowering individuals by not restraining them is great. Raymond comes off as a bit more extreme than other libertarians, in part because he doesn't hesitate to defend the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution as much as the first. Raymond is not ashamed to support widespread gun ownership as a way to further empower the individual. He dislikes the National Rifle Association because they're too willing to compromise away rights that he feels are absolute.
ocn 490:
Raymond looked at open source development and found what he wanted to find: the wonderful efficiency of unregulated markets. Sure, some folks loved to label Richard Stallman a communist, a description that has always annoyed Stallman. Raymond looked a bit deeper and saw that the basis of the free software movement's success was the freedom that gave each user the complete power to change and improve their software. Just as Sigmund Freud found sex at the root of everything and Carl Jung uncovered a battle of animus and anima, the libertarian found freedom.
ocn 515:
He saw Richard Stallman and the early years of the GNU projects as an example of cathedral-style development. These teams would often labor for months if not years before sharing their tools with the world. Raymond himself said he behaved the same way with some of the early tools that he wrote and contributed to the GNU project.
ocn 517:
Of course, Stallman and Raymond have had tussles in the past. Raymond is careful to praise the man and say he values his friendship, but also tempers it by saying that Stallman is difficult to work with.
ocn 518:
In Raymond's case, he says that he once wanted to rewrite much of the Lisp code that was built into GNU Emacs. Stallman's Emacs allowed any user to hook up their own software into Emacs by writing it in a special version of Lisp. Some had written mail readers. Others had added automatic comment-generating code. All of this was written in Lisp.
ocn 520:
According to Raymond, Stallman didn't want him to do the work and refused to build it into the distribution. Stallman could do this because he controlled the Free Software Foundation and the distribution of the software. Raymond could have created his own version, but refused because it was too complicated and ultimately bad for everyone if two versions emerged.
ocn 521:
For his part, Stallman explains that he was glad to accept parts of Raymond's work, but he didn't want to be forced into accepting them all. Stallman says, "Actually, I accepted a substantial amount of work that Eric had done. He had a number of ideas I liked, but he also had some ideas I thought were mistaken. I was happy to accept his help, as long as I could judge his ideas one by one, accepting some and declining some.
ocn 530:
"If you look closely," he says, "there really isn't a bazaar. At the top it's always a one-person cathedral. It's either Linus, Stallman, or someone else." That is, the myth of a bazaar as a wide-open, free-for-all of competition isn't exactly true. Sure, everyone can download the source code, diddle with it, and make suggestions, but at the end of the day it matters what Torvalds, Stallman, or someone else says. There is always a great architect of Chartres lording it over his domain.
ocn 547:
David Henkel-Wallace is one of the founders of the free software company Cygnus. This company built its success around supporting the development tools created by Stallman's Free Software Foundation. They would sign contracts with companies to answer any questions they had about using the free software tools. At first companies would balk at paying for support until they realized that it was cheaper than hiring in-house technical staff to do the work. John Gilmore, one of the cofounders, liked to say, "We make free software affordable."
ocn 576:
The free source world is sort of a Club Med for these kinds of individualists. Richard Stallman managed to organize a group of highly employable people and get them to donate their $50+-per-hour time to a movement by promising complete freedom. Everyone who showed up valued freedom much more than the money they could be making working for big companies. It's not a bit surprising that all of the free thinkers are also coming up with the same answers to life. Great minds think alike, right?
ocn 594:
The archetypes are often defined by prominent people, and no one is more central to the free source world than Richard Stallman. Some follow the man like a disciple, others say that his strong views color the movement and scare away normal people. Everyone goes out of their way to praise the man and tell you how much they respect what he's done. Almost everyone will turn around and follow the compliment with a veiled complaint like, "He can be difficult to work with." Stallman is known for being a very unreasonable man in the sense that George Bernard Shaw used the word when he said, "The Reasonable man adapts to nature. The unreasonable man seeks to adapt nature to himself. Therefore it is only through the actions of unreasonable men that civilization advances." The reasonable man would still be waiting on hold as the tech support folks in MegaSoft played with their Nerf footballs and joked about the weenies who needed help using their proprietary software.
ocn 595:
I often think that only someone as obsessed and brilliant as Stallman could have dreamed up the GNU Public License. Only he could have realized that it was possible to insist that everyone give away the source code and allow them to charge for it at the same time if they want. Most of us would have locked our brains if we found ourselves with a dream of a world of unencumbered source code but hobbled by the reality that we needed money to live. Stallman found himself in that place in the early days of the Free Software Foundation and then found a way to squeeze his way out of the dilemma by charging for CD-ROMs and printed manuals. The fact that others could still freely copy the information they got meant that he wasn't compromising his core dream.
ocn 596:
If Stallman is a product of MIT, then one opposite of him is the group of hackers that emerged from Berkeley and produced the other free software known as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Berkeley's computer science department always had a tight bond with AT&T and Sun and shared much of the early UNIX code with both.
ocn 597:
While there were many individuals at Berkeley who are well known among developers and hackers, no one stands out like Richard Stallman. This is because Stallman is such a strong iconoclast, not because Berkeley is the home of ne'er-do-wells who don't measure up. In fact, the pragmatism of some of the leaders to emerge from the university is almost as great as Stallman's idealism, and this pragmatism is one of the virtues celebrated by Berkeley's circle of coders. For instance, Bill Joy helped develop much of the early versions of the BSD before he went off to take a strong leadership role at Sun Microsystems.
ocn 607:
In some respects, Ousterhout's pragmatism was entirely different from Stallman's. He openly acknowledged the need to make money and also admitted that Sun was leaving TCL/Tk free because it might be practically impossible to make it proprietary. The depth of interest in the community made it likely that a free version would continue to evolve. Stallman would never cut such a deal with a company shipping proprietary software.
ocn 608:
In other respects, many of the differences are only at the level of rhetoric. Ousterhout worked on producing a compromise that would leave TCL/Tk free while the sales of development tools paid the bills. Stallman did the same thing when he figured out a way to charge people for CD-ROMs and manuals. Ousterhout's work at Sun was spun off into a company called Scriptics that is surprisingly like many of the other free software vendors. The core of the product, TCL/Tk 8.1 at this time, is governed by a BSD-style license. The source code can be downloaded from the site. The company itself, on the other hand, sells a more enhanced product known as TCLPro.
ocn 609:
In many ways, the real opposite to Richard Stallman is not Bill Joy or John Ousterhout, it's Linus Benedict Torvalds. While Stallman, Joy, and Ousterhout are products of the U.S. academic system, Torvalds is very much an outsider who found himself trying to program in Europe without access to a decent OS. While the folks at Berkeley, MIT, and many U.S. universities were able to get access to UNIX thanks to carefully constructed licenses produced by the OS's then-owner, AT&T, students in Finland like Torvalds were frozen out.
ocn 623:
The biggest distinction may be between folks who favor the GPL and those who use the BSD-style license to protect their software. This is probably the biggest decision a free software creator must make because it controls whether others will be able to build commercial versions of the software without contributing the new code back to the project.
ocn 624:
People who embrace the GPL are more likely to embrace Richard Stallman, or at least less likely to curse him in public. They tend to be iconoclastic and individualistic. GPL projects tend to be more cultish and driven by a weird mixture of personality and ain't-it-cool hysteria.
ocn 625:
The people on the side of BSD-style license, on the other hand, seem pragmatic, organized, and focused. There are three major free versions of BSD UNIX alone, and they're notable because they each have centrally administered collections of files. The GPL-protected Linux can be purchased from at least six major groups that bundle it together, and each of them includes packages and pieces of software they find all over the Net.
ocn 626:
The BSD-license folks are also less cultish. The big poster boys, Torvalds and Stallman, are both GPL men. The free versions of BSD, which helped give Linux much of its foundation, are largely ignored by the press for all the wrong reasons. The BSD teams appear to be fragmented because they are all separate political organizations who have no formal ties. There are many contributors, which means that BSD has no major charismatic leader with a story as compelling as that of Linus Torvalds.
ocn 630:
In fact, it's easy to take these stereotypes too far. Yes, GPL folks can be aggressive, outspoken, quick-thinking, driven, and tempestuous. Sure, BSD folks are organized, thorough, mainstream, dedicated, and precise. But there are always exceptions to these rules, and the people in each camp will be quick to spot them.
ocn 631:
Someone might point out that Alan Cox, one of the steadfast keepers of the GPL-protected Linux kernels, is not particularly flashy nor given to writing long manifestos on the Net. Others might say that Brian Behlendorf has been a great defender of the Apache project. He certainly hasn't avoided defending the BSD license, although not in the way that Stallman might have liked. He was, after all, one of the members of the Apache team who helped convince IBM that they could use the Apache web server without danger.
ocn 632:
After BSD versus GPL, the next greatest fault line is the choice of editor. Some use the relatively simple vi, which came out of Berkeley and the early versions of BSD. Others cleave to Stallman's Emacs, which is far more baroque and extreme. The vi camp loves the simplicity. The Emacs fans brag about how they've programmed their version of Emacs to break into the White House, snag secret pictures of people in compromising positions, route them through an anonymous remailer, and negotiate for a big tax refund all with one complicated control-meta-trans keystroke.
ocn 633:
While this war is well known, it has little practical significance. People can choose for themselves, and their choices have no effect on others. GPL or BSD can affect millions; vi versus Emacs makes no big difference. It's just one of the endless gag controversies in the universe. If Entertainment Tonight were covering the free software world, they would spend hours cataloging which stars used vi and which used Emacs. Did Shirley MacLaine use vi or Emacs or even wordstar in a previous life?
ocn 648:
To some extent, the politics of the free source movement are such a conundrum that people simply project their wishes onto it. John Gilmore told me over dinner, "Well, it depends. Eric Raymond is sort of a libertarian but Richard Stallman is sort of a communist. I guess it's both." The freedom makes it possible for people to mold the movement to be what they want.
ocn 651:
Stallman and his supposed communist impulse is a bit harder to characterize. He has made his peace with money and he's quick to insist that he's not a communist or an enemy of the capitalist state. He's perfectly happy when people charge for their work as programmers and he often does the same. But it's easy to see why people start to think he's something of a communist. One of his essays, which he insists is not strictly communist, is entitled "Why Software Should Not Have Owners."
ocn 652:
Some of his basic instincts sure look Marxist. The source code to a program often acts like the means of production, and this is why the capitalists running the businesses try to control it. Stallman wanted to place these means of production in the hands of everyone so people could be free to do what they wanted. While Stallman didn't rail against the effects of money, he rejected the principle that intellectual capital, the source code, should be controlled.
ocn 653:
Stallman stops well short of giving everything away to everyone. Copyrighting books is okay, he says, because it "restricts only the mass producers of copies. It did not take freedom away from readers of books. An ordinary reader, who did not own a printing press, could copy books only with pen and ink, and few readers were sued for that." In other words, the copyright rules in the age of printing only restricted the guy across town with a printing press who was trying to steal someone else's business. The emergence of the computer, however, changes everything. When people can copy freely, the shackles bind everyone.
ocn 654:
Communism, of course, is the big loser of the 20th century, and so it's not surprising that Stallman tries to put some distance between the Soviet and the GNU empires. He notes puckishly that the draconian effects of the copyright laws in America are sort of similar to life in the Soviet Union, "where every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as samizdat." He notes, however, that "There is of course a difference: the motive for information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the U.S. the motive is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive. Any attempt to block the sharing of information, no matter why, leads to the same methods and the same harshness."
ocn 655:
Stallman has a point. The copyright rules restrict the ability of people to add, improve upon, or engage other people's work. The fair use rules that let a text author quote sections for comment don't really work in the software world, where it's pretty hard to copy anything but 100 percent of some source code. For programmers, the rules on source code can be pretty Soviet-like in practice.
ocn 657:
But Stallman is right to distance himself from Soviet-style communism because there are few similarities. There's little central control in Stallman's empire. All Stallman can do to enforce the GNU General Public License is sue someone in court. He, like the Pope, has no great armies ready to keep people in line. None of the Linux companies have much power to force people to do anything. The GNU General Public License is like a vast disarmament treaty. Everyone is free to do what they want with the software, and there are no legal cudgels to stop them. The only way to violate the license is to publish the software and not release the source code.
ocn 660:
The essay makes more confounding points equating Richard Stallman to Karl Marx for his writing and Linus Torvalds to Vladimir Lenin because of his aim to dominate the software world with his OS. For grins, he compares Eric Raymond to "Trotsky waiting for The People's ice pick" for no clear reason. Before this gets out of hand, he backpedals a bit and claims, "OK, communism is too harsh on Linux. Lenin too harsh on Torvalds [sic]."Then he sets off comparing the world of open source to the tree-hugging, back-to-the-earth movement.
ocn 663:
The free software world is quite different from that world. The GPL and the BSD licenses don't strip away someone's freedom and subjugate them to the state, it gives them the source code and a compiler to use with it. Yes, the GPL does restrict the freedom of people to take the free source code and sell their own proprietary additions, but this isn't the same as moving them to Siberia.
ocn 664:
The Free Software State doesn't steal the fruits of someone's labor away from them. Once you develop the code, you can still use it. The GPL doesn't mean that only Torvalds can sit around his dacha and compile the code. You get to use it, too. In fact, one of the reasons that people cite for contributing to GPL projects is the legal assurance that the enhancements will never be taken away from them. The source will always remain open and accessible.
ocn 674:
Perhaps it's better to concentrate on the real political battles that rage inside the open source code community. It may be better to see the battle as one of GPL versus BSD instead of communist versus libertarian. The license debate is tuned to the Internet world. It sets out the debate in terms the computer user can understand.
ocn 691:
Baron is one of the few folks I met while writing this book who frames his work on an open source project as charity. Most devotees get into the projects because they offer them the freedom to mess with the source code. Most also cite the practical strengths of open source, like the relatively quick bug fixes and the stability of well-run projects. Most people like to distance themselves from the more political firebrands of the free software movement like Richard Stallman by pointing out that they're not really in it to bring about the second coming of the Communist Revolution. Few suggest that their work is sort of a gift of their time that might make the world a better place. Few compare their work to the folks cleaning up homeless shelters or hospitals. Most don't disagree when it is pointed out to them, but most free software hackers don't roll out the charitable rhetoric to explain what they're up to.
ocn 714:
Of course, there are some open source charities. Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity that raises money and solicits tax-deductible donations. This money is used to pay for computers, overhead, and the salaries of young programmers who have great ideas for free software. The Debian Project also has a charitable arm known as Software in the Public Interest that raises money and computer equipment to support the creation of more free software.
ocn 716:
But there are differences, too. Stallman, for instance, is proud of the fact that he accepts no salary or travel reimbursement from the Free Software Foundation. He works 2 months a year to support himself and then donates the other 10 months a year to raising money to support other programmers to work on Foundation projects.
ocn 763:
The free software community also flourishes by creating a strong, transcendent version of love and binding it with a legal document that sets out the rules of the compact. Stallman wrote his first copyleft virus more than 15 years before this book began, and the movement is just beginning to gain real strength. The free software world isn't just a groovy love nest, it's a good example of how strong fences, freedom, and mutual respect can build strong relationships.
ocn 777:
The free software world, of course, removes these barriers. If the Hotmail folks had joined the Linux team instead of Microsoft, they would be free to do whatever they wanted with their website even if it annoyed Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and the pope. They wouldn't be rich, but there's always a price.
ocn 778:
Using the word "love" is a bit dangerous because the word manages to include the head-over-heels infatuation of teenagers and the affection people feel for a new car or a restaurant's food. The love that's embodied by the GPL, on the other hand, isn't anywhere near as much fun and it isn't particularly noteworthy. It just encompasses the mutual responsibility and respect that mature folks occasionally feel for each other. It's St. Paul's version of unconditional, everlasting love, not the pangs of desire that kept St. Augustine up late in his youth.
ocn 779:
Anyone who has spent time in the trenches in a corporate cubicle farm knows how wasteful the battles between groups and divisions can be. While the competition can sometimes produce healthy rivalries, it often just promotes discord. Any veteran of these wars should see the immediate value of disarmament treaties like the GPL. They permit healthy rivalries to continue while preventing secrecy and selfishness from erupting. The free source movement may not have money to move mountains, but it does have this love.
ocn 780:
This love also has a more traditional effect on the hackers who create the free source code. They do it because they love what they're doing. Many of the people in the free source movement are motivated by writing great software, and they judge their success by the recognition they get from equally talented peers. A "nice job" from the right person--like Richard Stallman, Alan Cox, or Linus Torvalds--can be worth more than $100,000 for some folks. It's a strange way to keep score, but for most of the programmers in the free source world it's more of a challenge than money. Any schmoe in Silicon Valley can make a couple of million dollars, but only a few select folks can rewrite the network interface code of the Linux kernel to improve the throughput of the Apache server by 20 percent.
ocn 782:
There's even some research to support the notion that rewards can diminish the creativity of people. Stallman likes to circulate a 1987 article from the Boston Globe that describes a number of different scientific experiments that show how people who get paid are less creative than those who produce things from their love of the art. The studies evaluated the success of poets, artists, and teachers who did their job for the fun of it and compared it with those who were rewarded for their efforts. In many cases, these were short-bounded exercises that could be evaluated fairly easily.
ocn 787:
Of course, it's important to recognize that even seemingly boring jobs can have very creative solutions. Stallman's GNU Emacs is a fascinating and over-the-top, creative solution to the simple job of manipulating text. Word processors and text editors might not be that exciting anymore, but finding creative ways to accomplish the task is still possible.
ocn 799:
To some extent, the influx of money and corporations is old news. Very old news. Richard Stallman faced the same problem in the 1980s when he realized that he needed to find a way to live without a university paycheck. He came up with the clever notion that the software and the source must always be free, but that anyone could charge whatever the market would bear for the copies. The Free Software Foundation itself continues to fund much of its development by creating and selling both CD-ROMs and printed manuals.
ocn 801:
There's no reason why the latest push into the mainstream is going to be any different. Sure, Red Hat is charging more and creating better packages, but most of the distribution is still governed by the GPL. Whenever people complain that Red Hat costs too much, Bob Young just points people to the companies that rip off his CDs and charge only $2 or $3 per copy. The GPL keeps many people from straying too far from the ideal.
ocn 802:
The source is also still available. Sure, the corporate suits can come in, cut deals, issue press releases, raise venture capital, and do some IPOs, but that doesn't change the fact that the source code is now widely distributed. Wasn't that the goal of Stallman's revolution? Didn't he want to be able to get at the guts of software and fix it? The source is now more omnipresent than ever. The corporations are practically begging folks to download it and send in bug fixes.
ocn 803:
Of course, access to the source was only half of Stallman's battle. A cynic might growl that the corporations seem to be begging folks to do their research, testing, and development work for them. They're looking for free beers. Stallman wanted freedom to do whatever he wanted with the source and many of the companies aren't ready to throw away all of their control.
ocn 815:
Some customers may like a dictator demanding complete obeisance to Sun's definition of Java, but some users are chaffing a bit. The freedom to look at the code isn't enough. They want the freedom to add their own features that are best tuned to their own needs, a process that may start to Balkanize the realm by creating more and more slightly different versions of Java. Sun clearly worries that the benefits of all this tuning aren't worth living through the cacophony of having thousands of slightly different versions. Releasing the source code allows all of the users to see more information about the structure of Sun's Java and helps them work off the same page. This is still a great use of the source code, but it isn't as free as the use imagined by Stallman.
ocn 817:
Baratz said, "We now have forty thousand community source licensees. The developers and the systems builders and the users all want the branded Java technology. They want to know that all of the apps are going to be there. That's the number-one reason that developers are writing to the platform." Their more restrictive license may not make Stallman and other free software devotees happy, but at least Java will run everywhere.
ocn 821:
Richard Stallman says, "Sun wants to be thought of as having joined our club, without paying the dues or complying with the public service requirements. They want the users to settle for the fragments of freedom Sun will let them have."
ocn 856:
Richard Stallman understands Reilly's point, but he suggests that the facts don't bear him out. If this feedback loop is so important, why do so many people brag about free software's reliability?
ocn 857:
Stallman says, "He has pointed out a theoretical problem, but if you look at the empirical facts, we do not have a real problem. So it is only a problem for the theory, not a problem for the users. Economists may have a challenge explaining why we DO produce such reliable software, but users have no reason to worry."
ocn 875:
Stallman carefully tried to spell out his solution in the GNU Manifesto. He wrote, "There's nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction.
ocn 877:
At first glance, Richard Stallman doesn't have to worry too much about making ends meet. MIT gave him an office. He got a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Companies pay him to help port his free software to their platforms. His golden reputation combined with a frugal lifestyle means that he can support himself with two months of paid work a year. The rest of the time he donates to the Free Software Foundation. It's not in the same league as running Microsoft, but he gets by.
ocn 878:
Still, Stallman's existence is far from certain. He had to work hard to develop the funding lines he has. In order to avoid any conflicts of interest, the Free Software Foundation doesn't pay Stallman a salary or cover his travel expenses. He says that getting paid by corporations to port software helped make ends meet, but it didn't help create new software. Stallman works hard to raise new funds for the FSF, and the money goes right out the door to pay programmers on new projects. This daily struggle for some form of income is one of the greatest challenges in the free source world today.
ocn 879:
Many other free software folks are following Stallman's tack by selling the services, not the software. Many of the members of the Apache Webserver Core, for instance, make their money by running websites. They get paid because their customers are able to type in www.website.com and see something pop up. The customer doesn't care whether it is free software or something from Microsoft that is juggling the requests. They just want the graphics and text to keep moving.
ocn 891:
The company began to specialize in porting GCC, the GNU compiler written first by Richard Stallman, to new chips that came along. While much of the visible world of computers was frantically standardizing on Intel chips running Microsoft operating systems, an invisible world was fragmenting as competition for the embedded systems blossomed. Everyone was making different chips to run the guts of microwave ovens, cell phones, laser printers, network routers, and other devices. These manufacturers didn't care whether a chip ran the latest MS software, they just wanted it to run. The appliance makers would set up the chip makers to compete against each other to provide the best solution with the cheapest price, and the chip manufacturers responded by churning out a stream of new, smaller, faster, and cheaper chips.
ocn 896:
17.2 How the GPL Built Cygnus's Monopoly
ocn 899:
Seeing these effects is something that only a truely devoted fan of free software can do. Most people rarely get beyond identifying the problems with giving up the source code to a project. They don't realize that the GPL affects all users and also hobbles the potential competitors. It's like a mutual disarmament or mutual armament treaty that fixes the rules for all comers and disarmament treaties are often favored by the most powerful.
ocn 919:
"The problem with the GPL is the GPL has an ax to grind, and in order to grind that ax it takes away all of the rights of the person who wrote the code. It serves the need of everyone in the community except the person who wrote it."
ocn 960:
The free software community has a strange attitude toward forks. On one hand, forking is the whole reason Stallman wrote the free software manifesto. He wanted the right and the ability to mess around with the software on his computer. He wanted to be free to change it, modify it, and tear it to shreds if he felt like doing it one afternoon. No one should be able to stop him from doing that. He wanted to be totally free.
ocn 964:
Eric Raymond once got in a big fight with Richard Stallman about the structure of Emacs Lisp. Raymond said, "The Lisp libraries were in bad shape in a number of ways. They were poorly documented. There was a lot of work that had gone on outside the FSF that should be integrated and I wanted to merge in the best work from outside."
ocn 965:
The problem is that Stallman didn't want any part of Raymond's work. "He just said, 'I won't take those changes into the distribution.' That's his privilege to do," Raymond said.
ocn 966:
That put Raymond in an awkward position. He could continue to do the work, create his own distribution of Emacs, and publicly break with Stallman. If he were right and the Lisp code really needed work, then he would probably find more than a few folks who would cheer his work. They might start following him by downloading his distribution and sending their bug fixes his way. Of course, if he were wrong, he would set up his own web server, do all the work, put his Lisp fixes out there, and find that no one would show up. He would be ignored because people found it easier to just download Stallman's version of Emacs, which everyone thought was sort of the official version, if one could be said to exist. They didn't use the Lisp feature too much so it wasn't worth thinking about how some guy in Pennsylvania had fixed it. They were getting the real thing from the big man himself.
ocn 967:
Of course, something in between would probably happen. Some folks who cared about Lisp would make a point of downloading Raymond's version. The rest of the world would just go on using the regular version. In time, Stallman might soften and embrace the changes, but he might not. Perhaps someone would come along and create a third distribution that melded Raymond's changes with Stallman's into a harmonious version. That would be a great thing, except that it would force everyone to choose from among three different versions.
ocn 989:
The root of the split is easy to see. De Raadt is energetic. He thinks and speaks quickly about everything. He has a clear view about most free software and isn't afraid to share it. While some BSD members are charitable and conciliatory to Richard Stallman, de Raadt doesn't bother to hide his contempt for the organization. "The Free Software Foundation is one of the most misnamed organizations," he says, explaining that only BSD-style licensees have the true freedom to do whatever they want with the software. The GNU General Public License is a pair of handcuffs to him.
ocn 1026:
While the three forks of BSD may cooperate more than they compete, the Linux world still likes to look at the BSD world with a bit of contempt. All of the forks look somewhat messy, even if having the freedom to fork is what Stallman and GNU are ostensibly fighting to achieve. The Linux enthusiasts seem to think, "We've got our ducks in a single row. What's your problem?" It's sort of like the Army mentality. If it's green, uniform, and the same everywhere, then it must be good.
ocn 1049:
C2Net's decision to charge for the software rubbed some folks the wrong way. They were taking two free software packages and making something commercial out of them. This wasn't just a fork, it seemed like robbery to some. Of course, these complaints weren't really fair. Both collections of code emerged with a BSD-style license that gave everyone the right to create and sell commercial additions to the product. There wasn't any GPL-like requirement that they give back to the community. If no one wanted a commercial version, they shouldn't have released the code with a very open license in the first place.
ocn 1084:
The most prevalent form of government in these communities is the benign dictatorship. Richard Stallman wrote some of the most important code in the GNU pantheon, and he continues to write new code and help maintain the old software. The world of the Linux kernel is dominated by Linus Torvalds. The original founders always seem to hold a strong sway over the group. Most of the code in the Linux kernel is written by others and checked out by a tight circle of friends, but Torvalds still has the final word on many changes.
ocn 1087:
The Debian group has a wonderful pedigree and many praise it as the purest version of Linux around, but it began as a bunch of outlaws who cried mutiny and tossed Richard Stallman overboard. Well, it wasn't really so dramatic. In fact, "mutiny" isn't really the right word when everyone is free to use the source code however they want.
ocn 1091:
Still, Stallman insisted it was a good idea. Debian resisted and said it took up too much space and raised duplication costs. Eventually, the debate ended as the Debian group went their own way. Although Stallman paid Murdock and wrote much of the GNU code on the disk, the GPL prevented him from doing much. The project continued. The source code lived on. And the Debian disks kept shipping. Stallman was no longer titular leader of Debian.
ocn 1092:
The rift between the group has largely healed. Perens now praises Stallman and says that the two of them are still very close philosophically on the most important issues in the free software world. Stallman, for his part, uses Debian on his machines because he feels the closest kinship with it.
ocn 1094:
Stallman himself remembers the argument rather eloquently."The fact is, I wanted to influence them, but I did not want to force them. Forcing them would go against my moral beliefs. I believe that people are entitled to freedom in these matters, which means that I cannot tell them what to do," he told me. "I wrote the GPL to give everyone freedom from domination by authors of software, and that includes me on both sides."
ocn 1123:
These developers then coalesced into a core group and set up a structure for the code. They chose the basic, BSD-style license for their software, which allowed anyone to use the code for whatever purpose without distributing the source code to any changes. Many of the group lived in Berkeley then and still live in the area today. Of course, the BSD-style license also made sense for many of the developers who were involved in businesses and often didn't want to jump into the open source world with what they saw as Stallman's absolutist fervor. Businesses could adopt the Apache code without fear that some license would force them to reveal their source code later. The only catch was that they couldn't call the product Apache unless it was an unmodified copy of something approved by the Apache group.
ocn 1136:
The ability to snag GPL'ed software from around the Net keeps their development costs much lower than Sun, Apple, or Microsoft. They never paid most of the authors of the code they ship. They just package it up. Anyone else can just go find it on the Net and grab it themselves. This pretty much guarantees that Red Hat will be in a commodity business.
ocn 1137:
To make matters worse for Red Hat, the potential competitors don't have to go out onto the Net and reassemble the collection of software for themselves. The GPL specifically forbids people from placing limitations on redistributing the source code. That means that a potential competitor doesn't have to do much more than buy a copy of Red Hat's disk and send it off to the CD-ROM pressing plant. People do this all the time. One company at the exposition was selling copies of all the major Linux distributions like Red Hat, Slackware, and OpenBSD for about $3 per disk. If you bought in bulk, you could get 11 disks for $25. Not a bad deal if you're a consumer.
ocn 1140:
Young is also smart enough to use the competition from other cheap disk vendors to his advantage. He can't do anything about the GPL restrictions that force him to share with knockoff competitors, so he makes the best of them. "When people complain about how much we're charging for free software, I tell them to just go to CheapBytes.com," he said at the Expo. This is just one of the companies that regularly duplicates the CDs of Red Hat and resells them. Red Hat often gets some heat from people saying that the company is merely profiting off the hard work of others who've shared their software with the GPL. What gives them the right to charge so much for other people's software? But Young points out that people can get the software for $3. There must be a rational reason why they're buying Red Hat.
ocn 1148:
Distributors like Caldera, on the other hand, include nonfree software with their disk. You pay $29.95 to $149.95 for a CD-ROM and get some nonfree software like a word processor tossed in as a bonus. This is a great deal if you're only going to install the software once, but the copyright on the nonfree software prevents you from distributing the CD-ROM to friends. Caldera is hoping that the extras it throws in will steer people toward its disk and get them to choose Caldera's version of Linux. Many of the purists, like Richard Stallman, hate this practice and think it is just a not very subtle way to privatize the free software. If the average user isn't free to redistribute all the code, then there's something evil afoot. Of course, Stallman or any of the other software authors can't do anything about this because they made their software freely distributable.
ocn 1149:
Young is trying to walk the line between these two approaches. Red Hat is very much in the business of selling CD-ROMs. The company has a payroll with more than a handful of programmers who are drawing nonvolunteer salaries to keep the distributions fresh and the code clean. But he's avoided the temptation of adding not-so-free code to his disks. This gives him more credibility with the programmers who create the software and give it away. In theory, Young doesn't need to ingratiate himself to the various authors of GPL-protected software packages. They've already given the code away. Their power is gone. In practice, he gains plenty of political goodwill by playing the game by their rules.
ocn 1151:
Ockman is a recent Stanford graduate in his early twenties and a strong devotee of the Linux and GPL world. He says he started his company to prove that Linux could deliver solid, dependable servers that could compete with the best that Sun and Microsoft have to offer.
ocn 1153:
In essence, the computer science department was keeping their kids penned up in the shallow end of the pool instead of taking them out into the ocean. Ockman found the ocean on his own time and started writing GPL-protected code and contributing to the political emergence of free software.
ocn 1154:
When Ockman had to choose a version of Linux for his Penguin computers, he chose Red Hat. Bob Young's company made the sale because it was playing by the rules of the game and giving software back with a GPL. Ockman says, "We actually buy the box set for every single one. Partially because the customers like to get the books, but also to support Red Hat. That's also why we picked Red Hat. They're the most free of all of the distributions."
ocn 1156:
Of course, Penguin Computing could have just bought one Red Hat CD-ROM and installed their software on all of the machines going out the door. That would have let them cut their costs by about $50. The GPL lets anyone install the software as often as they wish. But this wouldn't be pure savings because Ockman is also offloading some of his own work when he bundles a Red Hat package with his computers. He adds, "Technically the box set I include allows customers to call Red Hat, but no one ever does, nor do we expect them or want them to call anyone but us." In essence, his company is adding some extra support with the Red Hat box.
ocn 1163:
The most expensive T-shirt at the show came with a logo that imitated one of the early marketing images of the first Star Wars movie. The shirt showed Torvalds and Stallman instead of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker under a banner headline of "OS Wars." The shirt cost only $100, but "came with free admission to the upcoming Linux convention in Atlanta."
ocn 1174:
Now, what happened to the boys who wrote the code? Did Richard Stallman get any of it? Did Linus Torvalds? Some of the major developers like Alan Cox and David Miller already work for Red Hat, so they probably drew shares out of the employee pool. There are thousands of names, however, who aren't on anyone's radar screen. They've written many lines of code for naught.
ocn 1185:
On the face of it, most open source developers have little to worry about. All the code on the Red Hat disk is covered with a General Protection License and isn't going to become proprietary. Robert Young has been very open about his promise to make sure that everything Red Hat ships falls under the GPL. That includes the distribution tools it writes in-house.
ocn 1186:
The GPL is a powerful force that prevents Red Hat from making many unilateral decisions. There are plenty of distributions that would like to take over the mantle of the most popular version of Linux. It's not hard. The source code is all there.
ocn 1190:
In November 1999, Red Hat purchased Cygnus Solutions, the other major commercial developer of GPL-protected software, which specialized in maintaining and extending the compiler, GCC. Red Hat had 235 employees at the time and Cygnus Solutions had 181. That's a huge fraction of the open source developers under one roof. The Cygnus press release came with the headline, RED HAT TO ACQUIRE CYGNUS AND CREATE OPEN SOURCE POWERHOUSE.
ocn 1191:
To make matters worse, one of the founders of Cygnus, Michael Tiemann, likes to brag that the open source software prevents competitors from rising up to threaten Cygnus. The GPL guarantees that the competitors will also have to publish their source, giving Cygnus a chance to stay ahead. In this model, any company with the money and stamina to achieve market dominance isn't going to be knocked down by some kids in a garage.
ocn 1214:
Of course, the cost of this is debatable. Tivo, for instance, is a company that makes a set-top box for recording television content on an internal hard disk. The average user just sees a fancy, easy-to-use front end, but underneath, the entire system runs on the Linux operating system. Tivo released a copy of the stripped-down version of Linux it ships on its machines on its website, fulfilling its obligation to the GNU GPL. The only problem I've discovered is that the web page (www.tivo.com/linux/) is not particularly easy to find from the home page. If I hadn't known it was there, I wouldn't have found it.
ocn 1260:
The free software revolution undermines this great scheme in two very insidious ways. The first is subtle. No one officially has much control over a free software product, and that means that no country can claim it as its own. If Bill Gates says that the Japanese version of Windows will require a three-button mouse, then Japan will have to adjust. But Torvalds, Stallman, and the rest can't do a darn thing about anyone. People can just reprogram their mouse. If being boss means making people jump, then no one in the free software world is boss of anything. Free source code isn't on anyone's side. It's more neutral than Switzerland was in World War II. The United States can only take solace in the fact that many of the great free source minds choose to live in its boundaries.
ocn 1262:
These are two insidious effects. The main job of governments is to tax people. Occasionally, one government will lust after the tax revenue of another and a war will break out that will force people to choose sides. The GPL and the BSD licenses destroy this tax mechanism, and no one knows what this will bring.
ocn 1268:
The free source code world tripped into this debate when a peace activist named Phil Zimmerman sat down one day and wrote a program he called Pretty Good Privacy, or simply PGP. Zimmerman's package was solid, pretty easy to use, and free. To make matters worse for the government, Zimmerman gave away all of the source code and didn't even use a BSD or GPL license. It was just out there for all the world to see.
ocn 1275:
Initially, Zimmerman distributed PGP under the GPL, but backed away from that when he discovered that the GPL didn't give him much control over improvements. In fact, they proliferated and it made it hard to keep track of who created them. Today, the source code comes with a license that is very similar to the BSD license and lets people circulate the source code as much as they want.
ocn 1312:
For the devoted disciples of the open software mantra, the software in the free source world is infinitely better. Richard Stallman feels that the GNU code is better than the Microsoft code just because he has the source code and the freedom to do what he wants with it. The freedom is more important to him than whatever super-duper feature comes out of the Microsoft teams. After all, he can add any feature he wants if he has access to the basic source code. Living without the source code means waiting like a good peon for the nice masters from the big corporation to bless us with a bug fix.
ocn 1313:
There's no question that people like Stallman love life with source code. A deeper question is whether the free source realm offers a wealthier lifestyle for the average computer user. Most people aren't programmers, and most programmers aren't even the hard-core hackers who love to fiddle with the UNIX kernel. I've rarely used the source code to Linux, Emacs, or any of the neat tools on the Net, and many times I've simply recompiled the source code without looking at it. Is this community still a better deal?
ocn 1316:
Others point out that the free software world has generated more than its share of innovation. Most of the Internet was built upon non-proprietary standards developed by companies with Department of Defense contracts. Stallman's Emacs continues to be one of the great programs in the world. Many of the projects like Apache are the first place where new ideas are demonstrated. People who want to mock up a project find it easier to extend free source software. These ideas are often reborn as commercial products. While free source users may not have access to the latest commercial innovations, they have plenty of their own emerging from the open software world. GNOME isn't just a Windows clone--it comes with thousands of neat extensions and improvements that can't be found in Redmond.
ocn 1317:
Stallman himself says the GNU project improved many pieces of software when they rewrote them. He says, "We built on their work, to the extent that we could legally do so (since we could not use any of their code), but that is the way progress is made. Almost every GNU program that replaces a piece of Unix includes improvements."
ocn 1318:
Another way to approach the question is to look at people's behavior. Some argue that companies like Red Hat or organizations like Debian prove that people need and want some of the commercial world's handholding. They can't afford to simply download the code and fiddle with it. Most people aren't high school students doing time for being young. They've got jobs, families, and hobbies. They pay because paying brings continuity, form, structure, and order to the free source world. Ultimately, these Red Hat users aren't Stallman disciples, they're commercial sheep who are just as dependent on Red Hat as the Windows customers are on Microsoft.
ocn 1331:
The free software world, of course, is a perfect example of the altruistic nature of the potlatch. Software is given away with no guarantee of any return. People are free to use the software and change it in any way. The GNU Public License is not much different from the social glue that forces tribe members to have a larger party the next year and give back even more. If someone ends up creating something new or interesting after using GPL code as a foundation, then they become required to give the code back to the tribe.
ocn 1332:
Of course, it's hard to get much guidance from Gilder over whether the GPL is better than the BSD license. He constantly frames investment as a "gift" to try to deemphasize the greed of capitalism. Of course, anyone who has been through a mortgage foreclosure or a debt refinancing knows that the banks don't act as if they've given away a gift. There are legal solutions for strong-arming the folks who don't give back enough. He was trying to get readers to forget these tactics a bit and get them to realize that after all of the arms are broken, the bank is still left with whatever the loan produced. There were no ultimate guarantees that all of the money would come back.
ocn 1336:
At first glance, none of this matters to the free software world. The authors give away their products, and as long as someone pays a minimal amount for storage the software will not decay. The web is filled with source code repositories and strongholds that let people store away their software and let others download it at will. These cost a minimal amount to keep up and the cost is dropping every day. There's no reason to believe that the original work of Stallman will be lost to the disease, pestilence, wear, and decay that have cursed physical objects like houses, clothes, and food.
ocn 1338:
The good news is that free source software is well positioned to fix these problems. Distributing the source code with the software lets others do their best to keep the software running in a changing environment. John Gilmore, for instance, says that he now embraces the GPL because earlier experiments with totally free software created versions without accompanying source code.
ocn 1339:
The bad news is that Gilder has a point about capital formation. Richard Stallman did a great job writing Emacs and GCC, but the accolades weren't as easy to spend as cash. Stallman was like the guy with a pile of whale meat in his front yard. He could feast for a bit, but you can only eat so much whale meat. Stallman could edit all day and night with Emacs. He could revel in the neat features and cool Emacs LISP hacks that friends and disciples would contribute back to the project. But he couldn't translate that pile of whale meat into a free OS that would let him throw away UNIX and Windows.
ocn 1340:
While Stallman didn't have monetary capital, he did have plenty of intellectual capital. By 1991, his GNU project had built many well respected tools that were among the best in their class. Torvalds had a great example of what the GPL could do before he chose to protect his Linux kernel with the license. He also had a great set of tools that the GNU project created.
ocn 1342:
Stallman's reputation also can be worth more than money when it opens the right doors. He continues to be blessed by the implicit support of MIT, and many young programmers are proud to contribute their work to his projects. It's a badge of honor to be associated with either Linux or the Free Software Foundation. Programmers often list these details on their résumés, and the facts have weight.
ocn 1343:
The reputation also helps him start new projects. I could write the skeleton of a new double-rotating, buzzword-enhanced editor, label it "PeteMACS," and post it to the Net hoping everyone would love it, fix it, and extend it. It could happen. But I'm sure that Stallman would find it much easier to grab the hearts, minds, and spare cycles of programmers because he's got a great reputation. That may not be as liquid as money, but it can be better.
ocn 1345:
In this sense, the battle between free and proprietary software development is one between pure giving and strong liquidity. The GPL world gives with no expectation of return and finds that it often gets a return of a thousand times back from a grateful world of programmers. The proprietary world, on the other hand, can take its profits and redirect them quickly to take on another project. It's a battle of the speed of easy, unfettered, open source cooperation versus the lightning speed of money flowing to make things work.
ocn 1348:
A deeper question is whether the open or proprietary model does a better job of creating a world where we want to live. Satisfying our wants is the ultimate measure of a wealthy society. Computers, cyberspace, and the Internet are rapidly taking up a larger and larger part of people's time. Television viewership is dropping, often dramatically, as people turn to life online. The time spent in cyberspace is going to be important. _1 Stallman wrote in BYTE magazine in 1986, I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage. It is an activity that benefits the person that does it at the cost of impoverishing all of society. One person gains one dollar by destroying two dollars' worth of wealth.
ocn 1352:
Richard Stallman told me, "Why do you keep talking about 'capital'? None of this has anything to do with capital. Linus didn't need capital to develop a kernel, he just wrote it. We used money to hire hackers to work on the kernel, but describing that as capital is misleading.
ocn 1358:
David Henkel-Wallace sat quietly in a chair in a Palo Alto coffee shop explaining what he did when he worked at the free software firm Cygnus. He brought his new daughter along in a baby carriage and kept her parked alongside. Cygnus, of course, is one of the bigger successes in the free software world. He helped make some real money building and sustaining the free compiler, GCC, that Richard Stallman built and gave away. Cygnus managed to make the real money even after they gave away all of their work.
ocn 1417:
Stallman's GNU project has been dealing with patents for a long time and has some experience programming around them. The GNU Zip program, for instance, was written to avoid the patents on the Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm claimed by UNISYS and IBM. The software is well-written and it works as well as, if not better than, the algorithm it replaces. Now it's pretty standard on the web and very popular because it is open source and patent-free. It's the politically correct compression algorithm to use because it's open to everyone.
ocn 1436:
The open source ideals are also strangely empowering because they force everyone to give up their will to power and control. Even if Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, and everyone else in the free software world decides that you're a scumbag who should be exiled to Siberia, they can't take away the code from you. That freedom is a very powerful drug.
ocn 1449:
BSD An abbreviation for Berkeley Software Distribution, a package first released by Bill Joy in the 1970s. The term has come to mean both a class of UNIX that was part of the distribution and also the license that protects this software. There are several free versions of BSD UNIX that are well-accepted and well-supported by the free source software community. OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD are three of them. Many commercial versions of UNIX, like Sun's Solaris and NeXT's OS, can trace their roots to this distribution. The BSD was originally protected by a license that allowed anyone to freely copy and modify the source code as long as they gave some credit to the University of California at Berkeley. Unlike the GNU GPL, the license does not require the user to release the source code to any modifications.
ocn 1453:
driver Most computers are designed to work with optional devices like modems, disk drives, printers, cameras, and keyboards. A driver is a piece of software that translates the signals sent by the device into a set of signals that can be understood by the operating system. Most operating systems are designed to be modular, so these drivers can be added as an afterthought whenever a user connects a new device. They are usually designed to have a standard structure so other software will work with them. The driver for each mouse, for instance, translates the signals from the mouse into a standard description that includes the position of the mouse and its direction. Drivers are an important point of debate in the free software community because volunteers must often create the drivers. Most manufacturers write the drivers for Windows computers because these customers make up the bulk of their sales. The manufacturers often avoid creating drivers for Linux or BSD systems because they perceive the market to be small. Some manufacturers also cite the GNU GPL as an impediment because they feel that releasing the source code to their drivers publishes important competitive information.
ocn 1455:
Free Software Foundation An organization set up by Richard Stallman to raise money for the creation of new free software. Stallman donates his time to the organization and takes no salary. The money is spent on hiring programmers to create new free software.
ocn 1458:
GNU A recursive acronym that stands for "GNU is Not UNIX." The project was started by Richard Stallman in the 1980s to fight against the tide of proprietary software. The project began with several very nice programs like GNU Emacs and GCC, the C compiler that was protected by Stallman's GNU General Purpose License. It has since grown to issue software packages that handle many different tasks from games (GNU Chess) to privacy (GNU Privacy Guard). See also GPL and Free Software Foundation (www.gnu.org). Its main goal is to produce a free operating system that provides a user with the ability to do everything they want with software that comes with the source code.
ocn 1460:
GPL An abbreviation that stands for "General Purpose License." This license was first written by Richard Stallman to control the usage of software created by the GNU project. A user is free to read and modify the source code of a GPL-protected package, but the user must agree to distribute any changes or improvements if they distribute the software at all. Stallman views the license as a way to force people to share their own improvements and contribute back to the project if they benefit from the project's hard work. See also BSD.
ocn 1462:
KDE The K desktop environment is another toolkit that offers much of the same functionality as Windows. It is controversial because it originally used some proprietary software and some users needed a license. See also GNOME, a similar package that is distributed under the GNU GPL. (www.kde.org)
ocn 1497:
Kidd, Eric. "Why You Might Want to Use the Library GPL for Your Next Library." Linux Gazette, March 1999.
‹http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue38/kidd.html›
ocn 1523:
Stallman, Richard. "The GNU Manifesto." 1984.
‹http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html›
"Why Software Should Not Have Owners." 1994.
‹http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html›
Free as in Freedom (2.0) - Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution [en] by Williams, Sam; Stallman, Richard M. ocn 0:
This is Free as in Freedom 2.0: Richard Stallman and the Free Soft-ware Revolution , a revision of Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software.
ocn 0:
Copyright c 2002, 2010 Sam Williams
Copyright c 2010 Richard M. Stallman
ocn 0:
The cover photograph of Richard Stallman is by Peter Hinely. The PDP-10 photograph in Chapter 7 is by Rodney Brooks. The photo-graph of St. IGNUcius in Chapter 8 is by Stian Eikeland
ocn 1:
Free as in Freedom (2.0) - Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution, Sam Williams, Second Edition Revisions by Richard M. Stallman
ocn 2:
Foreword by Richard M. Stallman
ocn 13:
This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the email exchange that set in motion the writing of Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software and, by extension, the work prefaced here, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution.
ocn 21:
Ten years ago, it wasn't hard to find yourself at a technology conference listening in on a conversation (or subjected to direct tutelage) in which some old-timer, Richard Stallman included, offered a compelling vision of an alternate possibility. It was the job of these old-timers, I ultimately realized, to make sure we newbies in the journalism game recognized that the tools we prided ourselves in finally knowing how to use - Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, just to name a few popular offerings from a single oft-cited vendor - were but a pale shadow of towering edifice the original architects of the personal computer set out to build.
ocn 29:
In the years immediately following the publication of Free as in Freedom, I was able to justify my decision by noting that the GFDL, just like the GNU General Public License in the software realm, makes it possible for any reader to modify the book and resell it as a competitive work. As Ernest Hemingway once put it, "the first draft of anything is shit." If Stallman or others within the hacker community saw Free as in Freedom as a first draft at best, well, at least I had spared them the time and labor of generating their own first draft.
ocn 31:
Before moving on to the next reason, I should note that one of the pleasant by-products of this book is a re-opening of email communication channels between Richard and myself. The resulting communication has reacquainted me with the razor-sharp Stallman writing style.
ocn 32:
An illustrative and perhaps amusing anecdote for anyone out there who has wrangled with Richard in text: In the course of discussing the passage in which I observe and document the process of Richard losing his cool amid the rush hour traffic of Kihei, Maui, a passage that served as the basis for Chapter 7 ("A Brief Journey through Hacker Hell") in the original book, I acknowledged a common complaint among the book's reviewers - namely, that the episode seemed out of place, a fragment of magazine-style profile interrupting a book-length biography. I told Richard that he could discard the episode for that reason alone but noted that my decision to include it was based on two justifications. First, it offered a glimpse of the Stallman temper, something I'd been warned about but had yet to experience in a first hand manner. Second, I felt the overall scene possessed a certain metaphorical value. Hence the chapter title. Stallman, to my surprise, agreed on both counts. His concern lay more in the two off-key words. At one point I quote him accusing the lead driver of our two-vehicle caravan with "deliberately" leading us down a dead-end street, an accusation that, if true, suggested a level of malice outside the bounds of the actual situation. Without the benefit of a recorded transcript - I only had a notebook at the time, I allowed that it was likely I'd mishandled Stallman's actual wording and had made it more hurtful than originally intended.
ocn 33:
On a separate issue, meanwhile, Stallman questioned his quoted use of the word "fucking." Again, I didn't have the moment on tape, but I wrote back that I distinctly recalled an impressive display of profanity, a reminder of Richard's New York roots, and was willing to stand by that memory.
ocn 34:
An email response from Richard, received the next day, restated the critique in a way that forced me to go back and re-read the first message. As it turned out, Stallman wasn't so much objecting to the "fuck" as the "-ing" portion of the quote.
ocn 35:
"Part of the reason I doubt [the words] is that they involve using fucking as an adverb," Stallman wrote. "I have never spoken that way. So I am sure the words are somewhat altered."
ocn 37:
The second reason a person should feel compelled to read this book cycles back to the opening theme of this preface - how different a future we face in 2010 compared to the one we were still squinting our eyes to see back in 2000. I ll be honest: Like many Americans (and non-Americans), my world view was altered by the events of September 11, 2001, so much so that it wasn't much longer after the publication of Free as in Freedom that my attention drifted sharply away from the free software movement and Stallman's efforts to keep it on course. While I have managed to follow the broad trends and major issues, the day-to-day drama surrounding software standards, software copyrights and software patents has become something I largely skip over - the Internet news equivalent of the Water Board notes in the local daily newspaper, in other words.
ocn 38:
[RMS: The September 2001 attacks, not mentioned later in the book, deserve brief comment here. Far from "changing everything," as many proclaim, the attacks have, in fact, changed very little in the U.S.: There are still scoundrels in power who hate our freedoms. The only major difference is that they can now cite "terrorists" as an excuse for laws to take them away. See the political notes on stallman.org for more about this.]
ocn 41:
On all counts, I would argue that Richard M. Stallman, while maybe not the archetype, is at the very least an ur-type of the successful reformer just described.
ocn 49:
Richard M. Stallman, a staff software programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab), discovered the malfunction the hard way. An hour after sending off a 50-page file to the office laser printer, Stallman, 27, broke off a productive work session to retrieve his documents. Upon arrival, he found only four pages in the printer's tray. To make matters even more frustrating, the four pages belonged to another user, meaning that Stallman's print job and the unfinished portion of somebody else's print job were still trapped somewhere within the electrical plumbing of the lab's computer network.
ocn 50:
Waiting for machines is an occupational hazard when you're a software programmer, so Stallman took his frustration with a grain of salt. Still, the difference between waiting for a machine and waiting on a machine is a sizable one. It wasn't the first time he'd been forced to stand over the printer, watching pages print out one by one. As a person who spent the bulk of his days and nights improving the efficiency of machines and the software programs that controlled them, Stallman felt a natural urge to open up the machine, look at the guts, and seek out the root of the problem.
ocn 51:
Unfortunately, Stallman's skills as a computer programmer did not extend to the mechanical-engineering realm. As freshly printed documents poured out of the machine, Stallman had a chance to reflect on other ways to circumvent the printing jam problem.
ocn 52:
How long ago had it been that the staff members at the AI Lab had welcomed the new printer with open arms? Stallman wondered. The machine had been a donation from the Xerox Corporation. A cutting edge prototype, it was a modified version of a fast Xerox photocopier. Only instead of making copies, it relied on software data piped in over a computer network to turn that data into professional-looking documents. Created by engineers at the world-famous Xerox Palo Alto Research Facility, it was, quite simply, an early taste of the desktop-printing revolution that would seize the rest of the computing industry by the end of the decade.
ocn 57:
Stallman was hardly the only AI Lab denizen to notice the problem, but he also thought of a remedy. Years before, for the lab's previous printer, Stallman had solved a similar problem by modifying the software program that regulated the printer, on a small PDP-11machine, as well as the Incompatible Timesharing System that ran on the main PDP-10 computer. Stallman couldn't eliminate paper jams, but he could insert software code that made the PDP-11 check the printer periodically, and report jams back to the PDP-10. Stallman also inserted code on the PDP-10 to notify every user with a waiting print job that the printer was jammed. The notice was simple, something along the lines of "The printer is jammed, please fix it," and because it went out to the people with the most pressing need to fix the problem, chances were that one of them would fix it forthwith.
ocn 58:
As fixes go, Stallman's was oblique but elegant. It didn't fix the mechanical side of the problem, but it did the next best thing by closing the information loop between user and machine. Thanks to a few additional lines of software code, AI Lab employees could eliminate the 10 or 15 minutes wasted each week in running back and forth to check on the printer. In programming terms, Stallman's fix took advantage of the amplified intelligence of the overall network.
ocn 59:
"If you got that message, you couldn't assume somebody else would fix it," says Stallman, recalling the logic. "You had to go to the printer. A minute or two after the printer got in trouble, the two or three people who got messages arrive to fix the machine. Of those two or three people, one of them, at least, would usually know how to fix the problem."
ocn 62:
When Stallman noticed the jamming tendency in the Xerox laser printer, he thought of applying the old fix or "hack" to this printer. In the course of looking up the Xerox laser-printer software, however, Stallman made a troubling discovery. The printer didn't have any software, at least nothing Stallman or a fellow programmer could read. Until then, most companies had made it a form of courtesy to publish source-code files-readable text files that documented the individual software commands that told a machine what to do. Xerox, in this instance, had provided software files only in compiled, or binary, form. If programmers looked at the files, all they would see was an endless stream of ones and zeroes - gibberish.
ocn 63:
There are programs, called "disassemblers," to convert the ones and zeroes into low-level machine instructions, but figuring out what those instructions actually "do" is a long and hard task, known as "reverse engineering." To reverse engineer this program could have taken more time than five years' worth of jammed printouts. Stallman wasn't desperate enough for that, so he put the problem aside.
ocn 64:
Xerox's unfriendly policy contrasted blatantly with the usual practices of the hacker community. For instance, to develop the program for the PDP-11 that ran the old printer, and the program for another PDP-11 that handled display terminals, the AI Lab needed a cross-assembler program to build PDP-11 programs on the PDP-10 main computer. The lab's hackers could have written one, but Stallman, a Harvard student, found such a program at Harvard's computer lab. That program was written to run on the same kind of computer, the PDP-10, albeit with a different operating system. Stallman never knew who had written the program, since the source code did not say. But he brought a copy back to the AI Lab. He then altered the source code to make it run on the AI Lab's Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS). With no muss and little fuss, the AI Lab got the program it needed for its software infrastructure. Stallman even added a few features not found in the original version, making the program more powerful. "We wound up using it for several years," Stallman says.
ocn 65:
From the perspective of a 1970s-era programmer, the transaction was the software equivalent of a neighbor stopping by to borrow a power tool or a cup of sugar from a neighbor. The only difference was that in borrowing a copy of the software for the AI Lab, Stallman had done nothing to deprive anyone else of the use of the program. If anything, other hackers gained in the process, because Stallman had introduced additional features that other hackers were welcome to borrow back. For instance, Stallman recalls a programmer at the private engineering firm, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, borrowing the program. He made it run on Twenex and added a few additional features, which Stallman eventually reintegrated into the AI Lab's own source-code archive. The two programmers decided to maintain a common version together, which had the code to run either on ITSor on Twenex at the user's choice.
ocn 66:
"A program would develop the way a city develops," says Stallman, recalling the software infrastructure of the AI Lab. "Parts would get replaced and rebuilt. New things would get added on. But you could always look at a certain part and say, 'Hmm, by the style, I see this part was written back in the early 60s and this part was written in themid-1970s.'"
ocn 67:
Through this simple system of intellectual accretion, hackers at the AI Lab and other places built up robust creations. Not every programmer participating in this culture described himself as a hacker, but most shared the sentiments of Richard M. Stallman. If a program or software fix was good enough to solve your problems, it was good enough to solve somebody else's problems. Why not share it out of a simple desire for good karma?
ocn 69:
Likewise, Stallman was annoyed that Xerox had not provided the source-code files, but not yet angry. He never thought of asking Xerox for a copy. "They had already given us the laser printer," Stallman says. "I could not say they owed us something more. Besides, I took for granted that the absence of source code reflected an intentional decision, and that asking them to change it would be futile."
ocn 72:
For Stallman, this was a betrayal of the programmer ethos, pure and simple. Instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access. But he didn't think deeply about the question, since he didn't use Scribe much.
ocn 74:
Stallman had a Lab-related reason, a few months later, to visit the Carnegie Mellon campus. During that visit, he made a point of looking for the person reported to have the printer software source code. By good fortune, the man was in his office.
ocn 75:
In true engineer-to-engineer fashion, the conversation was cordial but blunt. After briefly introducing himself as a visitor from MIT, Stallman requested a copy of the laser-printer source code that he wanted to modify. To his chagrin, the researcher refused.
ocn 76:
"He told me that he had promised not to give me a copy," Stallman says.
ocn 77:
Memory is a funny thing. Twenty years after the fact, Stallman's mental history tape is blank in places. Not only does he not remember the motivating reason for the trip or even the time of year during which he took it, he also has no recollection of who was on the other end of the conversation. According to Reid, the person most likely to have fielded Stallman's request is Robert Sproull, a former Xerox PARC researcher and current director of Sun Laboratories, a research division of the computer-technology conglomerate Sun Microsystems. During the 1970s, Sproull had been the primary developer of the laser-printer software in question while at Xerox PARC. Around 1980, Sproull took a faculty research position at Carnegie Mellon where he continued his laser-printer work amid other projects.
ocn 79:
"The code that Stallman was asking for was leading-edge, state-of-the-art code that Sproull had written in the year or so before going to Carnegie Mellon," recalls Reid. If so, that might indicate a mis-understanding that occurred, since Stallman wanted the source for the program that MIT had used for quite some time, not some newer version. But the question of which version never arose in the brief conversation.
ocn 80:
In talking to audiences, Stallman has made repeated reference to the incident, noting that the man's unwillingness to hand over the source code stemmed from a nondisclosure agreement, a contractual agreement between him and the Xerox Corporation giving the signatory access to the software source code in exchange for a promise of secrecy. Now a standard item of business in the software industry, the nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, was a novel development at the time, a reflection of both the commercial value of the laser printer to Xerox and the information needed to run it. "Xerox was at the time trying to make a commercial product out of the laser printer," recalls Reid. "They would have been insane to give away the source code."
ocn 81:
For Stallman, however, the NDA was something else entirely. It was a refusal on the part of some CMU researcher to participate in a society that, until then, had encouraged software programmers to regard programs as communal resources. Like a peasant whose centuries-old irrigation ditch had grown suddenly dry, Stallman had followed the ditch to its source only to find a brand-spanking-new hydroelectric dam bearing the Xerox logo.
ocn 82:
For Stallman, the realization that Xerox had compelled a fellow programmer to participate in this newfangled system of compelled secrecy took a while to sink in. In the first moment, he could only seethe refusal in a personal context. "I was so angry I couldn't think of a way to express it. So I just turned away and walked out without another word," Stallman recalls. "I might have slammed the door. Who knows? All I remember is wanting to get out of there. I went to his office expecting him to cooperate, so I had not thought about how I would respond if he refused. When he did, I was stunned speechless as well as disappointed and angry."
ocn 83:
Twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers, and Stallman presents the event as one that made him confront an ethical issue, though not the only such event on his path. Within the next few months, a series of events would befall both Stallman and the AI Lab hacker community that would make 30 seconds worth of tension in a remote Carnegie Mellon office seem trivial by comparison. Nevertheless, when it comes time to sort out the events that would transform Stallman from a lone hacker, instinctively suspicious of centralized authority, to a crusading activist applying traditional notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the world of software development, Stallman singles out the Carnegie Mellon encounter for special attention.
ocn 84:
"It was my first encounter with a nondisclosure agreement, and it immediately taught me that nondisclosure agreements have victims," says Stallman, firmly. "In this case I was the victim. [My lab and I]were victims."
ocn 85:
Stallman later explained, "If he had refused me his cooperation for personal reasons, it would not have raised any larger issue. I might have considered him a jerk, but no more. The fact that his refusal was impersonal, that he had promised in advance to be uncooperative, not just to me but to anyone whatsoever, made this a larger issue."
ocn 86:
Although previous events had raised Stallman's ire, he says it wasn't until his Carnegie Mellon encounter that he realized the events were beginning to intrude on a culture he had long considered sacrosanct. He said, "I already had an idea that software should be shared, but I wasn't sure how to think about that. My thoughts weren't clear and organized to the point where I could express them in a concise fashion to the rest of the world. After this experience, I started to recognize what the issue was, and how big it was."
ocn 87:
As an elite programmer at one of the world's elite institutions, Stallman had been perfectly willing to ignore the compromises and bargains of his fellow programmers just so long as they didn't interfere with his own work. Until the arrival of the Xerox laser printer, Stallman had been content to look down on the machines and programs other computer users grimly tolerated.
ocn 88:
Now that the laser printer had insinuated itself within the AI Lab's network, however, something had changed. The machine worked fine, barring the paper jams, but the ability to modify software according to personal taste or community need had been taken away. From the viewpoint of the software industry, the printer software represented a change in business tactics. Software had become such a valuable asset that companies no longer accepted the need to publicize source code, especially when publication meant giving potential competitors a chance to duplicate something cheaply. From Stallman's viewpoint, the printer was a Trojan Horse. After a decade of failure, software that users could not change and redistribute - future hackers would use the term "proprietary" software - had gained a foothold inside the AI Lab through the sneakiest of methods. It had come disguised as a gift.
ocn 89:
That Xerox had offered some programmers access to additional gifts in exchange for secrecy was also galling, but Stallman takes pains to note that, if presented with such a quid pro quo bargain at a younger age, he just might have taken the Xerox Corporation up on its offer. The anger of the Carnegie Mellon encounter, however, had a firming effect on Stallman's own moral lassitude. Not only did it give him the necessary anger to view such future offers with suspicion, it also forced him to turn the situation around: what if a fellow hacker dropped into Stallman's office someday and it suddenly became Stallman's job to refuse the hacker's request for source code?
ocn 90:
"When somebody invited me to betray all my colleagues in that way, I remembered how angry I was when somebody else had done that to me and my whole lab," Stallman says. "So I said, 'Thank you very much for offering me this nice software package, but I can't accept it on the conditions that you're asking for, so I'm going to do without it.'"
ocn 91:
It was a lesson Stallman would carry with him through the tumultuous years of the 1980s, a decade during which many of his MIT colleagues would depart the AI Lab and sign nondisclosure agreements of their own. They may have told themselves that this was a necessary evil so they could work on the best projects. For Stallman, however, the NDA called the moral legitimacy of the project into question. What good is a technically exciting project if it is meant to be withheld from the community?
ocn 92:
As Stallman would quickly learn, refusing such offers involved more than personal sacrifice. It involved segregating himself from fellow hackers who, though sharing a similar distaste for secrecy, tended to express that distaste in a more morally flexible fashion. Refusing another's request for source code, Stallman decided, was not only a betrayal of the scientific mission that had nurtured software development since the end of World War II, it was a violation of the Golden Rule, the baseline moral dictate to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
ocn 93:
Hence the importance of the laser printer and the encounter that resulted from it. Without it, Stallman says, his life might have followed a more ordinary path, one balancing the material comforts of a commercial programmer with the ultimate frustration of a life spent writing invisible software code. There would have been no sense of clarity, no urgency to address a problem others weren't addressing. Most importantly, there would have been no righteous anger, an emotion that, as we soon shall see, has propelled Stallman's career as surely as any political ideology or ethical belief.
ocn 94:
"From that day forward, I decided this was something I could never participate in," says Stallman, alluding to the practice of trading personal liberty for the sake of convenience - Stallman's description of the NDA bargain - as well as the overall culture that encouraged such ethically suspect deal-making in the first place. "I decided never to make other people victims as I had been a victim."
ocn 99:
Once inside the auditorium, a visitor finds the person who has forced this temporary shutdown of building security procedures. The person is Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, original president of the Free Software Foundation, winner of the 1990 MacArthur Fellowship, winner of the Association of Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award (also in 1990), co-recipient of the Takeda Foundation's 2001 Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, and former AI Lab hacker. As announced over a host of hacker-related web sites, including the GNU Project's own ‹http://www.gnu.org› site, Stallman is in Manhattan, his former hometown, to deliver a much anticipated speech in rebuttal to the Microsoft Corporation's recent campaign against the GNU General Public License.
ocn 100:
The subject of Stallman's speech is the history and future of the free software movement. The location is significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL, a legal device originally conceived by Stallman 16 years before. Built to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy overtaking the computer industry - a wave first noticed by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox laser printer - the GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free software community. In simplest terms, the GPL establishes a form of communal ownership - what today's legal scholars now call the "digital commons" - through the legal weight of copyright. The GPL makes this irrevocable; once an author gives code to the community in this way, that code can't be made proprietary by anyone else. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright license, if they use a substantial amount of the original source code. For this reason, critics of the GPL have taken to calling it a "viral" license, suggesting inaccurately that it spreads itself to every software program it touches.【2 Actually, the GPL's powers are not quite that potent: just putting your code in the same computer with a GPL-covered program does not put your code under the GPL. "To compare something to a virus is very harsh," says Stallman. "A spider plant is a more accurate comparison; it goes to another place if you actively take a cutting." For more information on the GNU General Public License,
visit ‹http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html›. 】
ocn 101:
In an information economy increasingly dependent on software and increasingly beholden to software standards, the GPL has become the proverbial "big stick." Even companies that once derided it as "software socialism" have come around to recognize the benefits. Linux, the kernel developed by Finnish college student Linus Torvalds in 1991, is licensed under the GPL, as are most parts of the GNU system: GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger, the GNU C Compiler, etc. Together, these tools form the components of the free software GNU/Linux operating system, developed, nurtured, and owned by the worldwide hacker community. Instead of viewing this community as a threat, high-tech companies like IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Sun Microsystems have come to rely upon it, selling software applications and services built to ride atop the ever-growing free software infrastructure.【3 Although these applications run on GNU/Linux, it does not follow that they are themselves free software. On the contrary, most of them applications are proprietary software, and respect your freedom no more than Windows does. They may contribute to the success of GNU/Linux, but they don't contribute to the goal of freedom for which it exists. 】
ocn 102:
They've also come to rely upon it as a strategic weapon in the hacker community's perennial war against Microsoft, the Redmond, Washington-based company that has dominated the PC-software marketplace since the late 1980s. As owner of the popular Windows operating system, Microsoft stands to lose the most in an industry-wide shift to the GPL license. Each program in the Windows colossus is covered by copyrights and contracts (End User License Agreements, or EULAs) asserting the proprietary status of the executable, as well as the underlying source code that users can't get anyway. Incorporating code protected by the "viral" GPL into one of these programs is forbidden; to comply with the GPL's requirements, Microsoft would be legally required to make that whole program free software. Rival companies could then copy, modify, and sell improved versions of it, taking away the basis of Microsoft's lock over the users.
ocn 103:
Hence the company's growing concern over the GPL's rate of adoption. Hence the recent Mundie speech blasting the GPL and the "open source" approach to software development and sales. (Microsoft does not even acknowledge the term "free software," preferring to use its attacks to direct attention towards the apolitical "open source" camp described in chapter 11, and away from the free software movement.) And hence Stallman's decision to deliver a public rebuttal to that speech on the same campus here today.
ocn 104:
20 years is a long time in the software industry. Consider this: in 1980, when Richard Stallman was cursing the AI Lab's Xerox laser printer, Microsoft, which dominates the worldwide software industry, was still a privately held startup. IBM, the company then regarded as the most powerful force in the computer hardware industry, had yet to introduce its first personal computer, thereby igniting the current low-cost PC market. Many of the technologies we now take for granted - the World Wide Web, satellite television, 32-bit video-game consoles - didn't even exist. The same goes for many of the companies that now fill the upper echelons of the corporate establishment, companies like AOL, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, Compaq, and Dell. The list goes on and on.
ocn 105:
Among those who value progress above freedom, the fact that the high-technology marketplace has come so far in such little time is cited both for and against the GNU GPL. Some argue in favor of the GPL, pointing to the short lifespan of most computer hardware platforms. Facing the risk of buying an obsolete product, consumers tend to flock to companies with the best long-term survival. As a result, the software marketplace has become a winner-take-all arena.【4 See Shubha Ghosh, "Revealing the Microsoft Windows Source Code," Gi-galaw.com (January, 2000),
http://www.gigalaw.com/. 】 The proprietary software environment, they say, leads to monopoly abuse and stagnation. Strong companies suck all the oxygen out of the marketplace for rival competitors and innovative startups. Others argue just the opposite. Selling software is just as risky, if not more risky, than buying software, they say. Without the legal guarantees provided by proprietary software licenses, not to mention the economic prospects of a privately owned "killer app" (i.e., a break-through technology that launches an entirely new market),【5 Killer apps don't have to be proprietary. Still, I think the reader gets the point: the software marketplace is like the lottery. The bigger the potential pay-off, the more people want to participate. For a good summary of the killer-app phenomenon, see Philip Ben-David, "Whatever Happened to the 'Killer App'?", e-Commerce News (December 7, 2000),
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/5893.html. 】 companies lose the incentive to participate. Once again, the market stagnates and innovation declines. As Mundie himself noted in his May 3rd address on the same campus, the GPL's "viral" nature "poses a threat" to any company that relies on the uniqueness of its software as a competitive asset. Added Mundie:
ocn 107:
The mutual success of GNU/Linux and Windows over the last 10years suggests that both sides on this question are sometimes right. However, free software activists such as Stallman think this is a side issue. The real question, they say, isn't whether free or proprietary software will succeed more, it's which one is more ethical.
ocn 110:
Such admonitions serve as the backdrop for Stallman's speech today. Less than a month after their utterance, Stallman stands with his back to one of the chalk boards at the front of the room, edgy to begin.
ocn 111:
If the last two decades have brought dramatic changes to the software marketplace, they have brought even more dramatic changes to Stallman himself. Gone is the skinny, clean-shaven hacker who once spent his entire days communing with his beloved PDP-10. In his place stands a heavy-set middle-aged man with long hair and rabbinical beard, a man who now spends the bulk of his time writing and answering email, haranguing fellow programmers, and giving speeches like the one today. Dressed in an aqua-colored T-shirt and brown polyester pants, Stallman looks like a desert hermit who just stepped out of a Salvation Army dressing room.
ocn 112:
The crowd is filled with visitors who share Stallman's fashion and grooming tastes. Many come bearing laptop computers and cellular modems, all the better to record and transmit Stallman's words to a waiting Internet audience. The gender ratio is roughly 15 males to 1 female, and 1 of the 7 or 8 females in the room comes in bearing a stuffed penguin, the official Linux mascot, while another carries a stuffed teddy bear.
ocn 113:
Agitated, Stallman leaves his post at the front of the room and takes a seat in a front-row chair, tapping commands into an already-opened laptop. For the next 10 minutes Stallman is oblivious to the growing number of students, professors, and fans circulating in front of him at the foot of the auditorium stage.
ocn 114:
Before the speech can begin, the baroque rituals of academic formality must be observed. Stallman's appearance merits not one but two introductions. Mike Uretsky, co-director of the Stern School's Center for Advanced Technology, provides the first.
ocn 116:
Before Uretsky can get another sentence out, Stallman is on his feet waving him down like a stranded motorist.
ocn 117:
"I do free software," Stallman says to rising laughter. "Open source is a different movement.
ocn 118:
"The laughter gives way to applause. The room is stocked with Stallman partisans, people who know of his reputation for verbal exactitude, not to mention his much publicized 1998 falling out with the open source software proponents. Most have come to anticipate such outbursts the same way radio fans once waited for Jack Benny's trademark, "Now cut that out!" phrase during each radio program.
ocn 119:
Uretsky hastily finishes his introduction and cedes the stage to Edmond Schonberg, a professor in the NYU computer-science department. As a computer programmer and GNU Project contributor, Schonberg knows which linguistic land mines to avoid. He deftly summarizes Stallman's career from the perspective of a modern-day programmer.
ocn 120:
"Richard is the perfect example of somebody who, by acting locally, started thinking globally [about] problems concerning the un-availability of source code," says Schonberg. "He has developed a coherent philosophy that has forced all of us to reexamine our ideas of how software is produced, of what intellectual property means, and of what the software community actually represents."【8 If this were to be said today, Stallman would object to the term "intellectual property" as carrying bias and confusion.
See ‹http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html›. 】
ocn 121:
Schonberg welcomes Stallman to more applause. Stallman takes a moment to shut off his laptop, rises out of his chair, and takes the stage.
ocn 122:
At first, Stallman's address seems more Catskills comedy routine than political speech. "I'd like to thank Microsoft for providing me the opportunity to be on this platform," Stallman wisecracks. "For the past few weeks, I have felt like an author whose book was fortuitously banned somewhere."
ocn 123:
For the uninitiated, Stallman dives into a quick free software warm-up analogy. He likens a software program to a cooking recipe. Both provide useful step-by-step instructions on how to complete a desired task and can be easily modified if a user has special desires or circumstances. "You don't have to follow a recipe exactly," Stallman notes. "You can leave out some ingredients. Add some mushrooms, 'cause you like mushrooms. Put in less salt because your doctor said you should cut down on salt - whatever."
ocn 124:
Most importantly, Stallman says, software programs and recipes are both easy to share. In giving a recipe to a dinner guest, a cook loses little more than time and the cost of the paper the recipe was written on. Software programs require even less, usually a few mouse-clicks and a modicum of electricity. In both instances, however, the person giving the information gains two things: increased friendship and the ability to borrow interesting recipes in return.
ocn 125:
"Imagine what it would be like if recipes were packaged inside black boxes," Stallman says, shifting gears. "You couldn't see what ingredients they're using, let alone change them, and imagine if you made a copy for a friend. They would call you a pirate and try to put you in prison for years. That world would create tremendous outrage from all the people who are used to sharing recipes. But that is exactly what the world of proprietary software is like. A world in which common decency towards other people is prohibited or prevented."
ocn 126:
With this introductory analogy out of the way, Stallman launches into a retelling of the Xerox laser-printer episode. Like the recipe analogy, the laser-printer story is a useful rhetorical device. With its parable-like structure, it dramatizes just how quickly things can change in the software world. Drawing listeners back to an era before Amazon.com one-click shopping, Microsoft Windows, and Oracle databases, it asks the listener to examine the notion of software ownership free of its current corporate logos.
ocn 127:
Stallman delivers the story with all the polish and practice of a local district attorney conducting a closing argument. When he gets to the part about the Carnegie Mellon professor refusing to lend him a copy of the printer source code, Stallman pauses.
ocn 128:
"He had betrayed us," Stallman says. "But he didn't just do it to us. Chances are he did it to you."
ocn 129:
On the word "you," Stallman points his index finger accusingly at an unsuspecting member of the audience. The targeted audience member's eyebrows flinch slightly, but Stallman's own eyes have moved on. Slowly and deliberately, Stallman picks out a second listener to nervous titters from the crowd. "And I think, mostly likely, he did it to you, too," he says, pointing at an audience member three rows behind the first.
ocn 130:
By the time Stallman has a third audience member picked out, the titters have given away to general laughter. The gesture seems a bit staged, because it is. Still, when it comes time to wrap up the Xerox laser-printer story, Stallman does so with a showman's flourish. "He probably did it to most of the people here in this room - except a few, maybe, who weren't born yet in 1980," Stallman says, drawing more laughs. "[That's] because he had promised to refuse to cooperate with just about the entire population of the planet Earth."
ocn 131:
Stallman lets the comment sink in for a half-beat. "He had signed a nondisclosure agreement," Stallman adds.
ocn 132:
Richard Matthew Stallman's rise from frustrated academic to political leader over the last 20 years speaks to many things. It speaks to Stallman's stubborn nature and prodigious will. It speaks to the clearly articulated vision and values of the free software movement Stallman helped build. It speaks to the high-quality software programs Stallman has built, programs that have cemented Stallman's reputation as a programming legend. It speaks to the growing momentum of the GPL, a legal innovation that many Stallman observers see as his most momentous accomplishment.
ocn 134:
Maybe that's why, even at a time when most high-technology stars are on the wane, Stallman's star has grown. Since launching the GNU Project in 1984,【9 The acronym GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix." In another portion of the May 29, 2001, NYU speech, Stallman summed up the acronym's origin:
We hackers always look for a funny or naughty name for a program, because naming a program is half the fun of writing the program. We also had a tradition of recursive acronyms, to say that the program that you're writing is similar to some existing program... I looked for a recursive acronym for Something Is Not UNIX. And I tried all 26 letters and discovered that none of them was a word. I decided to make it a contraction. That way I could have a three-letter acronym, for Something's Not UNIX. And I tried letters, and I came across the word "GNU." That was it.
Although a fan of puns, Stallman recommends that software users pronounce the "g" at the beginning of the acronym (i.e., "gah-new").Not only does this avoid confusion with the word "gnu," the name of the African antelope, Connochaetes gnou, it also avoids confusion with the adjective "new." "We've been working on it for 17 years now, so it is not exactly new any more," Stallman says.
Source: author notes and online transcript of "Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation," Richard Stallman's May 29, 2001, speech at New York University,
‹http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt›. 】 Stallman has been at turns ignored, satirized, vilified, and attacked-both from within and without the free software movement. Through it all, the GNU Project has managed to meet its milestones, albeit with a few notorious delays, and stay relevant in a software marketplace several orders of magnitude more complex than the one it entered 18 years ago. So too has the free software ideology, an ideology meticulously groomed by Stallman himself.
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To understand the reasons behind this currency, it helps to examine Richard Stallman both in his own words and in the words of the people who have collaborated and battled with him along the way. The Richard Stallman character sketch is not a complicated one. If any person exemplifies the old adage "what you see is what you get," it's Stallman.
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"I think if you want to understand Richard Stallman the human being, you really need to see all of the parts as a consistent whole," advises Eben Moglen, legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation and professor of law at Columbia University Law School. "All those personal eccentricities that lots of people see as obstacles to getting to know Stallman really 'are' Stallman: Richard's strong sense of personal frustration, his enormous sense of principled ethical commitment, his inability to compromise, especially on issues he considers fundamental. These are all the very reasons Richard did what he did when he did."
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Explaining how a journey that started with a laser printer would eventually lead to a sparring match with the world's richest corporation is no easy task. It requires a thoughtful examination of the forces that have made software ownership so important in today's society. It also requires a thoughtful examination of a man who, like many political leaders before him, understands the malleability of human memory. It requires an ability to interpret the myths and politically laden codewords that have built up around Stallman over time. Finally, it requires an understanding of Stallman's genius as a programmer and his failures and successes in translating that genius to other pursuits.
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When it comes to offering his own summary of the journey, Stallman acknowledges the fusion of personality and principle observed by Moglen. "Stubbornness is my strong suit," he says. "Most people who attempt to do anything of any great difficulty eventually get discouraged and give up. I never gave up."
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He also credits blind chance. Had it not been for that run-in over the Xerox laser printer, had it not been for the personal and political conflicts that closed out his career as an MIT employee, had it not been for a half dozen other timely factors, Stallman finds it very easy to picture his life following a different career path. That being said, Stallman gives thanks to the forces and circumstances that put him in the position to make a difference.
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"I had just the right skills," says Stallman, summing up his decision for launching the GNU Project to the audience. "Nobody was there but me, so I felt like, 'I'm elected. I have to work on this. If not me, who?'"
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Richard Stallman's mother, Alice Lippman, still remembers the moment she realized her son had a special gift.
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Seated at the dining-room table of her second Manhattan apartment - the same spacious three-bedroom complex she and her son moved to following her 1967 marriage to Maurice Lippman, now deceased - Alice Lippman exudes a Jewish mother's mixture of pride and bemusement when recalling her son's early years. The nearby dining-room credenza offers an eight-by-ten photo of Stallman glowering in full beard and doctoral robes. The image dwarfs accompanying photos of Lippman's nieces and nephews, but before a visitor can make too much of it, Lippman makes sure to balance its prominent placement with an ironic wisecrack."
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Richard insisted I have it after he received his honorary doctorate at the University of Glasgow," says Lippman. "He said to me, 'Guess what, mom? It's the first graduation I ever attended.'"【10 One of the major background sources for this chapter was the interview "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-Certified Genius" by Michael Gross, author of the 1999 book Talking About My Generation , a collection of interviews with notable personalities from the so-called "Baby Boom" generation. Although Stallman did not make it into the book, Gross published the interview as an online supplement to the book's web site. The URL for the interview has changed several times since I first came across it. According to various readers who have gone searching for it, you can now find the interview at
http://www.mgross.com/MoreThgsChng/interviews/stallman1.html. 】
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As a single parent for nearly a decade - she and Richard's father, Daniel Stallman, were married in 1948, divorced in 1958, and split custody of their son afterwards - Lippman can attest to her son's aversion to authority. She can also attest to her son's lust for knowledge. It was during the times when the two forces intertwined, Lippman says, that she and her son experienced their biggest battles.
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Stallman, for his part, remembers things in a similar fashion, albeit with a political twist.
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The belief in individual freedom over arbitrary authority extended to school as well. Two years ahead of his classmates by age 11, Stallman endured all the usual frustrations of a gifted public-school student. It wasn't long after the puzzle incident that his mother attended the first in what would become a long string of parent-teacher conferences.
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"He absolutely refused to write papers," says Lippman, recalling an early controversy. "I think the last paper he wrote before his senior year in high school was an essay on the history of the number system in the west for a fourth-grade teacher." To be required to choose a specific topic when there was nothing he actually wanted to write about was almost impossible for Stallman, and painful enough to make him go to great lengths to avoid such situations.
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Gifted in anything that required analytical thinking, Stallman gravitated toward math and science at the expense of his other studies. What some teachers saw as single-mindedness, however, Lippman saw as impatience. Math and science offered simply too much opportunity to learn, especially in comparison to subjects and pursuits for which her son seemed less naturally inclined. Around age 10 or 11, when the boys in Stallman's class began playing a regular game of touch football, she remembers her son coming home in a rage. "He wanted to play so badly, but he just didn't have the coordination skills," Lippman recalls. "It made him so angry."
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The anger eventually drove her son to focus on math and science all the more. Even in the realm of science, however, her son's impatience could be problematic. Poring through calculus textbooks by age seven, Stallman saw little need to dumb down his discourse for adults. Sometime, during his middle-school years, Lippman hired a student from nearby Columbia University to play big brother to her son. The student left the family's apartment after the first session and never came back. "I think what Richard was talking about went over his head," Lippman speculates.
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"He was fuming," Lippman says. "All he could say to me was, 'But I'm not published yet.' Apparently he had something that he really wanted to show NASA." Stallman doesn't remember the incident, but thinks it more likely that he was anguished because he didn't have anything to show.
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Such anecdotes offer early evidence of the intensity that would become Stallman's chief trademark throughout life. When other kids came to the table, Stallman stayed in his room and read. When other kids played Johnny Unit as, Stallman played spaceman. "I was weird," Stallman says, summing up his early years succinctly in a 1999 interview. "After a certain age, the only friends I had were teachers."【12 Ibid. 】 Stallman was not ashamed of his weird characteristics, distinguishing them from the social ineptness that he did regard as a failing. However, both contributed together to his social exclusion.
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Although it meant courting more run-ins at school, Lippman decided to indulge her son's passion. By age 12, Richard was attending science camps during the summer and private school during the school year. When a teacher recommended her son enroll in the Columbia Science Honors Program, a post-Sputnik program designed for gifted middle- and high-school students in New York City, Stallman added to his extracurriculars and was soon commuting uptown to the Columbia University campus on Saturdays.
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Dan Chess, a fellow classmate in the Columbia Science Honors Program, recalls Richard Stallman seeming a bit weird even among the students who shared a similar lust for math and science. "We were all geeks and nerds, but he was unusually poorly adjusted," recalls Chess, now a mathematics professor at Hunter College. "He was also smart as shit. I've known a lot of smart people, but I think he was the smartest person I've ever known."
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Seth Breidbart, a fellow Columbia Science Honors Program alumnus, offers bolstering testimony. A computer programmer who has kept in touch with Stallman thanks to a shared passion for science fiction and science-fiction conventions, he recalls the 15-year-old, buzz-cut-wearing Stallman as "scary," especially to a fellow 15-year-old.
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Such descriptions give rise to speculation: are judgment-laden adjectives like "intense" and "hardheaded" simply a way to describe traits that today might be categorized under juvenile behavioral disorder? A December, 2001, Wired magazine article titled "The Geek Syndrome" paints the portrait of several scientifically gifted children diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome. In many ways, the parental recollections recorded in the Wired article are eerily similar to the ones offered by Lippman. Stallman also speculates about this. In the interview for a 2000 profile for the Toronto Star, Stallman said he wondered if he were "borderline autistic." The article inaccurately cited the speculation as a certainty.【13 See Judy Steed, Toronto Star, BUSINESS, (October 9, 2000): C03. His vision of free software and social cooperation stands in stark contrast to the isolated nature of his private life. A Glenn Gould-like eccentric, the Canadian pianist was similarly brilliant, articulate, and lonely. Stallman considers himself afflicted, to some degree, by autism: a condition that, he says, makes it difficult for him to interact with people. 】
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"It's possible I could have had something like that," Stallman says. "On the other hand, one of the aspects of that syndrome is difficulty following rhythms. I can dance. In fact, I love following the most complicated rhythms. It's not clear cut enough to know." Another possibility is that Stallman had a "shadow syndrome" which goes someway in the direction of Asperger's syndrome but without going beyond the limits of normality.【15 See John Ratey and Catherine Johnson, "Shadow Syndromes." 】
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For the most part, Lippman recalls her son exhibiting the excitement, energy, and social skills of any normal boy. It wasn't until after a series of traumatic events battered the Stallman household, she says, that her son became introverted and emotionally distant.
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The first traumatic event was the divorce of Alice and Daniel Stallman, Richard's father. Although Lippman says both she and her ex-husband tried to prepare their son for the blow, she says the blow was devastating nonetheless. "He sort of didn't pay attention when we first told him what was happening," Lippman recalls. "But the reality smacked him in the face when he and I moved into a new apartment. The first thing he said was, 'Where's Dad's furniture?'"
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For the next decade, Stallman would spend his weekdays at his mother's apartment in Manhattan and his weekends at his father's home in Queens. The shuttling back and forth gave him a chance to study a pair of contrasting parenting styles that, to this day, leaves Stallman firmly opposed to the idea of raising children himself. Speaking about his father, a World War II vet who died in early 2001, Stallman balances respect with anger. On one hand, there is the man whose moral commitment led him to learn French just so he could be more helpful to Allies when they'd finally fight the Nazis in France. On the other hand, there was the parent who always knew how to craft a put-down for cruel effect.【16 Regrettably, I did not get a chance to interview Daniel Stallman for this book. During the early research for this book, Stallman informed me that his father suffered from Alzheimer's. When I resumed research in late 2001, I learned, sadly, that Daniel Stallman had died earlier in the year. 】
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"My father had a horrible temper," Stallman says. "He never screamed, but he always found a way to criticize you in a cold, designed-to-crush way."
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As for life in his mother's apartment, Stallman is less equivocal. "That was war," he says. "I used to say in my misery, 'I want to go home,' meaning to the nonexistent place that I'll never have."
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For the first few years after the divorce, Stallman found the tranquility that eluded him in the home of his paternal grandparents. One died when he was 8, and the other when he was 10. For Stallman, the loss was devastating. "I used to go and visit and feel I was in a loving, gentle environment," Stallman recalls. "It was the only place I ever found one, until I went away to college."
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From Stallman's perspective, the emotional withdrawal was merely an attempt to deal with the agony of adolescence. Labeling his teenage years a "pure horror," Stallman says he often felt like a deaf person amid a crowd of chattering music listeners.
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"I often had the feeling that I couldn't understand what other people were saying," says Stallman, recalling his sense of exclusion. "I could understand the words, but something was going on underneath the conversations that I didn't understand. I couldn't understand why people were interested in the things other people said."
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For all the agony it produced, adolescence would have an encouraging effect on Stallman's sense of individuality. At a time when most of his classmates were growing their hair out, Stallman preferred to keep his short. At a time when the whole teenage world was listening to rock and roll, Stallman preferred classical music. A devoted fan of science fiction, Mad magazine, and late-night TV, Stallman came to have a distinctly off-the-wall personality that met with the incomprehension of parents and peers alike.
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Outside the home, Stallman saved the jokes for the adults who tended to indulge his gifted nature. One of the first was a summer-camp counselor who lent Stallman a manual for the IBM 7094 computer during his 8th or 9th year. To a pre teenager fascinated with numbers and science, the gift was a godsend.【17 Stallman, an atheist, would probably quibble with this description. Suffice it to say, it was something Stallman welcomed. See Gross (1999): "As soon as I heard about computers, I wanted to see one and play with one." 】 Soon, Stallman was writing out programs on paper in the instructions of the 7094. There was no computer around to run them on, and he had no real applications to use one for, but he yearned to write a program - any program whatsoever. He asked the counselor for arbitrary suggestions of something to code.
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With the first personal computer still a decade away, Stallman would be forced to wait a few years before getting access to his first computer. His chance finally came during his senior year of high school. The IBM New York Scientific Center, a now-defunct research facility in downtown Manhattan, offered Stallman the chance to try to write his first real program. His fancy was to write a pre-processor for the programming language PL/I, designed to add the tensor algebra summation convention as a feature to the language. "I first wrote it in PL/I, then started over in assembler language when the compiled PL/I program was too big to fit in the computer," he recalls.
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Simultaneously, Stallman had held a laboratory-assistant position in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in math or physics, Stallman's analytical mind impressed the lab director enough that a few years after Stallman departed for college, Lippman received an unexpected phone call. "It was the professor at Rockefeller," Lippman says. "He wanted to know how Richard was doing. He was surprised to learn that he was working in computers. He'd always thought Richard had a great future ahead of him as a biologist."
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Stallman's analytical skills impressed faculty members at Columbia as well, even when Stallman himself became a target of their ire. "Typically once or twice an hour [Stallman] would catch some mistake in the lecture," says Breidbart. "And he was not shy about letting the professors know it immediately. It got him a lot of respect but not much popularity."
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Hearing Breidbart's anecdote retold elicits a wry smile from Stallman. "I may have been a bit of a jerk sometimes," he admits. "But I found kindred spirits among teachers, because they, too, liked to learn. Kids, for the most part, didn't. At least not in the same way."
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Hanging out with the advanced kids on Saturday nevertheless encouraged Stallman to think more about the merits of increased socialization. With college fast approaching, Stallman, like many in his Columbia Science Honors Program, had narrowed his list of desired schools down to two choices: Harvard and MIT. Hearing of her son's desire to move on to the Ivy League, Lippman became concerned. As a 15-year-old high-school junior, Stallman was still having run-ins with teachers and administrators. Only the year before, he had pulled straight A's in American History, Chemistry, French, and Algebra, but a glaring F in English reflected the ongoing boycott of writing assignments. Such miscues might draw a knowing chuckle at MIT, but at Harvard, they were a red flag.
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During her son's junior year, Lippman says she scheduled an appointment with a therapist. The therapist expressed instant concern over Stallman's unwillingness to write papers and his run-ins with teachers. Her son certainly had the intellectual wherewithal to succeed at Harvard, but did he have the patience to sit through college classes that required a term paper? The therapist suggested a trial run. If Stallman could make it through a full year in New York City public schools, including an English class that required term papers, he could probably make it at Harvard. Following the completion of his junior year, Stallman promptly enrolled in public summer school downtown and began making up the mandatory humanities classes he had shunned earlier in his high-school career.
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By fall, Stallman was back within the mainstream population of New York City high-school students, at Louis D. Brandeis High School on on West 84th Street. It wasn't easy sitting through classes that seemed remedial in comparison with his Saturday studies at Columbia, but Lippman recalls proudly her son's ability to toe the line.
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By the end of his first semester at Brandeis High, things were falling into place. A 96 in English wiped away much of the stigma of the 60 earned 2 years before. For good measure, Stallman backed it up with top marks in American History, Advanced Placement Calculus, and Microbiology. The crowning touch was a perfect 100 in Physics. Though still a social outcast, Stallman finished his 10 months at Brandeis as the fourth-ranked student in a class of 789.
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Outside the classroom, Stallman pursued his studies with even more diligence, rushing off to fulfill his laboratory-assistant duties at Rockefeller University during the week and dodging the Vietnam protesters on his way to Saturday school at Columbia. It was there, while the rest of the Science Honors Program students sat around discussing their college choices, that Stallman finally took a moment to participate in the preclass bull session.
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Thirty years later, Breidbart remembers the moment clearly. As soon as Stallman broke the news that he, too, would be attending Harvard University in the fall, an awkward silence filled the room. Almost as if on cue, the corners of Stallman's mouth slowly turned upward into a self-satisfied smile. Says Breidbart, "It was his silent way of saying, 'That's right. You haven't got rid of me yet.'"
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Although their relationship was fraught with tension, Richard Stallman would inherit one noteworthy trait from his mother: a passion for progressive politics.
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It was an inherited trait that would take several decades to emerge, however. For the first few years of his life, Stallman lived in what he now admits was a "political vacuum."【18 See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, Mac Arthur-certified Genius" (1999). 】 Like most Americans during the Eisenhower age, the Stallman family spent the Fifties trying to recapture the normalcy lost during the wartime years of the 1940s.
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That all began to change, however, in the late 1950s when Alice divorced Daniel Stallman. The move back to Manhattan represented more than a change of address; it represented a new, independent identity and a jarring loss of tranquility.
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Such opposition permeated the Stallman-Lippman household. In 1967, Lippman remarried. Her new husband, Maurice Lippman, a major in the Air National Guard, resigned his commission to demonstrate his opposition to the war. Lippman's stepson, Andrew Lippman, was at MIT and temporarily eligible for a student deferment. Still, the threat of induction should that deferment disappear, as it eventually did, made the risk of U.S. escalation all the more immediate. Finally, there was Richard who, though younger, faced the prospect of being drafted as the war lasted into the 1970s.
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For Stallman, the Vietnam War elicited a complex mixture of emotions: confusion, horror, and, ultimately, a profound sense of political impotence. As a kid who could barely cope in the mild authoritarian universe of private school, Stallman experienced a shiver whenever the thought of Army boot camp presented itself. He did not think he could get through it and emerge sane.
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"I was devastated by the fear, but I couldn't imagine what to do and didn't have the guts to go demonstrate," recalls Stallman, whose March 16th birthday earned him a low number in the dreaded draft lottery. This did not affect him immediately, since he had a college deferment, one of the last before the U.S. stopped granting them; but it would affect him in a few years. "I couldn't envision moving to Canada or Sweden. The idea of getting up by myself and moving somewhere. How could I do that? I didn't know how to live by myself. I wasn't the kind of person who felt confident in approaching things like that."
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Stallman says he was impressed by the family members who did speak out. Recalling a sticker, printed and distributed by his father, likening the My Lai massacre to similar Nazi atrocities in World War II, he says he was "excited" by his father's gesture of outrage. "I admired him for doing it," Stallman says. "But I didn't imagine that I could do anything. I was afraid that the juggernaut of the draft was going to destroy me."
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However, Stallman says he was turned off by the tone and direction of much of that movement. Like other members of the Science Honors Program, he saw the weekend demonstrations at Columbia as little more than a distracting spectacle.【20 Chess, another Columbia Science Honors Program alum, describes the protests as "background noise." "We were all political," he says, "but the SHP was important. We would never have skipped it for a demonstration." 】 Ultimately, Stallman says, the irrational forces driving the anti-war movement became indistinguishable from the irrational forces driving the rest of youth culture. Instead of worshiping the Beatles, girls in Stallman's age group were suddenly worshiping firebrands like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. To a kid already struggling to comprehend his teenage peers, slogans like "make love not war" had a taunting quality. Stallman did not want to make war, at least not in Southeast Asia, but nobody was inviting him to make love either.
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"I didn't like the counter culture much," Stallman recalls. "I didn't like the music. I didn't like the drugs. I was scared of the drugs. I especially didn't like the anti-intellectualism, and I didn't like the prejudice against technology. After all, I loved a computer. And I didn't like the mindless anti-Americanism that I often encountered. There were people whose thinking was so simplistic that if they disapproved of the conduct of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, they had to support the North Vietnamese. They couldn't imagine a more complicated position, I guess."
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Such comments underline a trait that would become the key to Stallman's own political maturation. For Stallman, political confidence was directly proportionate to personal confidence. By 1970, Stallman had become confident in few things outside the realm of math and science. Nevertheless, confidence in math gave him enough of a foundation to examine the extremes of the anti-war movement in purely logical terms. Doing so, Stallman found the logic wanting. Although opposed to the war in Vietnam, Stallman saw no reason to disavow war as a means for defending liberty or correcting injustice.
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In the 1980s, a more confident Stallman decided to make up for his past inactivity by participating in mass rallies for abortion rights in Washington DC. "I became dissatisfied with my earlier self for failing in my duty to protest the Vietnam War," he explains.
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In 1970, Stallman left behind the nightly dinnertime conversations about politics and the Vietnam War as he departed for Harvard. Looking back, Stallman describes the transition from his mother's Manhattan apartment to life in a Cambridge dorm as an "escape." At Harvard, he could go to his room and have peace whenever he wanted it. Peers who watched Stallman make the transition, however, saw little to suggest a liberating experience.
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To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his strengths: math and science. Like most members of the Science Honors Program, Stallman breezed through the qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary "boot camp" class for freshman mathematics "concentrators" at Harvard. Within the class, members of the Science Honors Program formed a durable unit. "We were the math mafia," says Chess with a laugh. "Harvard was nothing, at least compared with the SHP."
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To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school."
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"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman." Seth Breidbart, a fellow Math 55 classmate, remembers Stallman distinguishing himself from his peers even then.
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It was in Math 55 that Richard Stallman began to cultivate a reputation for brilliance. Breidbart agrees, but Chess, whose competitive streak refused to yield, says the realization that Stallman might be the best mathematician in the class didn't set in until the next year. "It was during a class on Real Analysis," says Chess, now a math professor at Hunter College. "I actually remember in a proof about complex valued measures that Richard came up with an idea that was basically a metaphor from the calculus of variations. It was the first time I ever saw somebody solve a problem in a brilliantly original way."
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"That's the thing about mathematics," says Chess. "You don't have to be a first-rank mathematician to recognize first-rate mathematical talent. I could tell I was up there, but I could also tell I wasn't at the first rank. If Richard had chosen to be a mathematician, he would have been a first-rank mathematician."【21 Stallman doubts this, however. "One of the reasons I moved from math and physics to programming is that I never learned how to discover anything new in the former two. I only learned to study what others had done. In programming, I could do something useful every day." 】
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For Stallman, success in the classroom was balanced by the same lack of success in the social arena. Even as other members of the math mafia gathered to take on the Math 55 problem sets, Stallman preferred to work alone. The same went for living arrangements. On the housing application for Harvard, Stallman clearly spelled out his preferences. "I said I preferred an invisible, inaudible, intangible roommate," he says. In a rare stroke of bureaucratic foresight, Harvard's housing office accepted the request, giving Stallman a one-room single for his freshman year.
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Breidbart, the only math-mafia member to share a dorm with Stallman that freshman year, says Stallman slowly but surely learned how to interact with other students. He recalls how other dorm mates, impressed by Stallman's logical acumen, began welcoming his input whenever an intellectual debate broke out in the dining club or dorm commons."
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Stallman remembers the discussions vividly. "I was always in favor of immortality," he says. "How else would we be able to see what the world is like 200 years from now?" Curious, he began asking various acquaintances whether they would want immortality if offered it. "I was shocked that most people regarded immortality as a bad thing." Many said that death was good because there was no use living a decrepit life, and that aging was good because it got people prepared for death, without recognizing the circularity of the combination.
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Although perceived as a first-rank mathematician and first-rate in-formal debater, Stallman shied away from clear-cut competitive events that might have sealed his brilliant reputation. Near the end of fresh-man year at Harvard, Breidbart recalls how Stallman conspicuously ducked the Putnam exam, a prestigious test open to math students throughout the U.S. and Canada. In addition to giving students ac hance to measure their knowledge in relation to their peers, the Putnam served as a chief recruiting tool for academic math departments. According to campus legend, the top scorer automatically qualified for a graduate fellowship at any school of his choice, including Harvard.
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Surprised that Stallman, the best student in the class, had skipped the test, Breidbart says he and a fellow classmate cornered him in the dining common and demanded an explanation. "He said he was afraid of not doing well," Breidbart recalls.
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Breidbart and the friend quickly wrote down a few problems from memory and gave them to Stallman. "He solved all of them," Breidbart says, " leading me to conclude that by not doing well, he either meant coming in second or getting something wrong."
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Stallman remembers the episode a bit differently. "I remember that they did bring me the questions and it's possible that I solved one of them, but I'm pretty sure I didn't solve them all," he says. Nevertheless, Stallman agrees with Breidbart's recollection that fear was the primary reason for not taking the test. Despite a demonstrated willingness to point out the intellectual weaknesses of his peers and professors in the classroom, Stallman hated and feared the notion of head-to-head competition - so why not just avoid it?
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"It's the same reason I never liked chess," says Stallman. "Whenever I'd play, I would become so consumed by the fear of making a single mistake and losing that I would start making stupid mistakes very early in the game. The fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy." He avoided the problem by not playing chess.
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Whether such fears ultimately prompted Stallman to shy away from a mathematical career is a moot issue. By the end of his freshman year at Harvard, Stallman had other interests pulling him away from the field. Computer programming, a latent fascination throughout Stallman's high-school years, was becoming a full-fledged passion. Where other math students sought occasional refuge in art and history classes, Stallman sought it in the computer-science laboratory.
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For Stallman, the first taste of real computer programming at the IBM New York Scientific Center had triggered a desire to learn more. "Toward the end of my first year at Harvard school, I started to have enough courage to go visit computer labs and see what they had. I'd ask them if they had extra copies of any manuals that I could read." Taking the manuals home, Stallman would examine the machine specifications to learn about the range of different computer designs.
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One day, near the end of his freshman year, Stallman heard about a special laboratory near MIT. The laboratory was located on the ninth floor of a building in Tech Square, the mostly-commercial office park MIT had built across the street from the campus. According to the rumors, the lab itself was dedicated to the cutting-edge science of artificial intelligence and boasted the cutting-edge machines and software to match.
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Intrigued, Stallman decided to pay a visit.
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The trip was short, about 2 miles on foot, 10 minutes by train, but as Stallman would soon find out, MIT and Harvard can feel like opposite poles of the same planet. With its maze-like tangle of inter-connected office buildings, the Institute's campus offered an aestheticy in to Harvard's spacious colonial-village yang. Of the two, the maze of MIT was much more Stallman's style. The same could be said for the student body, a geeky collection of ex-high school misfits known more for its predilection for pranks than its politically powerful alumni.
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The yin-yang relationship extended to the AI Lab as well. Unlike Harvard computer labs, there was no grad-student gatekeeper, no clipboard waiting list for terminal access, no atmosphere of "look but don't touch." Instead, Stallman found only a collection of open terminals and robotic arms, presumably the artifacts of some AI experiment. When he encountered a lab employee, he asked if the lab had any spare manuals it could loan to an inquisitive student. "They had some, but a lot of things weren't documented," Stallman recalls. "They were hackers, after all," he adds wryly, referring to hackers' tendency to move on to a new project without documenting the last one.
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Stallman left with something even better than a manual: A job. His first project was to write a PDP-11 simulator that would run on a PDP-10. He came back to the AI Lab the next week, grabbing an available terminal, and began writing the code.
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Looking back, Stallman sees nothing unusual in the AI Lab's willingness to accept an unproven outsider at first glance. "That's the way it was back then," he says. "That's the way it still is now. I'll hire somebody when I meet him if I see he's good. Why wait? Stuffy people who insist on putting bureaucracy into everything really miss the point. If a person is good, he shouldn't have to go through a long, detailed hiring process; he should be sitting at a computer writing code."
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To get a taste of "bureaucratic and stuffy," Stallman need only visit the computer labs at Harvard. There, access to the terminals was doled out according to academic rank. As an undergrad, Stallman sometimes had to wait for hours. The waiting wasn't difficult, but it was frustrating. Waiting for a public terminal, knowing all the while that a half dozen equally usable machines were sitting idle inside professors' locked offices, seemed the height of irrational waste. Although Stallman continued to pay the occasional visit to the Harvard computer labs, he preferred the more egalitarian policies of the AI Lab. "It was a breath of fresh air," he says. "At the AI Lab, people seemed more concerned about work than status."
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Stallman quickly learned that the AI Lab's first-come, first-served policy owed much to the efforts of a vigilant few. Many were holdovers from the days of Project MAC, the Department of Defense-funded re-search program that had given birth to the first time-share operating systems. A few were already legends in the computing world. There was Richard Greenblatt, the lab's in-house Lisp expert and author of MacHack, the computer chess program that had once humbled AI critic Hubert Dreyfus. There was Gerald Sussman, original author of the robotic block-stacking program HACKER. And there was Bill Gosper, the in-house math whiz already in the midst of an 18-month hacking bender triggered by the philosophical implications of the computer game LIFE.【22 See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 144. Levy devotes about five pages to describing Gosper's fascination with LIFE, a math-based software game first created by British mathematician John Conway. I heartily recommend this book as a supplement, perhaps even a prerequisite, to this one. 】
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Members of the tight-knit group called themselves "hackers." Overtime, they extended the "hacker" description to Stallman as well. In the process of doing so, they inculcated Stallman in the ethical traditions of the "hacker ethic." In their fascination with exploring the limits of what they could make a computer do, hackers might sit at a terminal for 36 hours straight if fascinated with a challenge. Most importantly, they demanded access to the computer (when no one else was using it) and the most useful information about it. Hackers spoke openly about changing the world through software, and Stallman learned the instinctual hacker disdain for any obstacle that prevented a hacker from fulfilling this noble cause. Chief among these obstacles were poor software, academic bureaucracy, and selfish behavior.
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Stallman also learned the lore, stories of how hackers, when presented with an obstacle, had circumvented it in creative ways. This included various ways that hackers had opened professors' offices to "liberate" sequestered terminals. Unlike their pampered Harvard counterparts, MIT faculty members knew better than to treat the AI Lab's limited stock of terminals as private property. If a faculty member made the mistake of locking away a terminal for the night, hackers were quick to make the terminal accessible again - and to remonstrate with the professor for having mistreated the community. Some hackers did this by picking locks ("lock hacking"), some by removing ceiling tiles and climbing over the wall. On the 9th floor, with its false floor for the computers' cables, some spelunked under it. "I was actually shown a cart with a heavy cylinder of metal on it that had been used to break down the door of one professor's office,"【23 Gerald Sussman, an MIT faculty member and hacker whose work at the AI Lab predates Stallman's, disputes this story. According to Sussman, the hackers never broke any doors to retrieve terminals. 】 Stallman says.
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Nowhere was this tinkering impulse better reflected than in the operating system that powered the lab's central PDP-10 computer. Dubbed ITS, short for the Incompatible Time Sharing system, the operating system incorporated the hacking ethic into its very design. Hackers had built it as a protest to Project MAC's original operating system, the Compatible Time Sharing System, CTSS, and named it accordingly. At the time, hackers felt the CTSS design too restrictive, limiting programmers' power to modify and improve the program's own internal architecture if needed. According to one legend passed down by hackers, the decision to build ITS had political overtones as well. Unlike CTSS, which had been designed for the IBM 7094, ITS was built specifically for the PDP-6. In letting hackers write the system themselves, AI Lab administrators guaranteed that only hackers would feel comfortable using the PDP-6. In the feudal world of academic research, the gambit worked. Although the PDP-6 was co-owned in conjunction with other departments, AI researchers soon had it to themselves. Using ITS and the PDP-6 as a foundation, the Lab had been able to declare independence from Project MAC shortly before Stallman's arrival.【24 Ibid. 】
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As an apprentice hacker, Stallman quickly became enamored with ITS. Although forbidding to some non-hackers, ITS boasted features most commercial operating systems wouldn't offer for years (or even to this day), features such as multitasking, applying the debugger immediately to any running program, and full-screen editing capability.
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"ITS had a very elegant internal mechanism for one program to examine another," says Stallman, recalling the program. "You could examine all sorts of status about another program in a very clean, well-specified way." This was convenient not only for debugging, but also for programs to start, stop or control other programs.
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"If you said, 'Stop the job,' it would always be stopped in user mode. It would be stopped between two user-mode instructions, and everything about the job would be consistent for that point," Stallman says. "If you said, 'Resume the job,' it would continue properly. Not only that, but if you were to change the (explicitly visible) status of the job and continue it, and later change it back, everything would be consistent. There was no hidden status anywhere."
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Starting in September 1971, hacking at the AI Lab had become a regular part of Stallman's weekly school schedule. From Sunday through Friday, Stallman was at Harvard. As soon as Friday afternoon arrived, however, he was on the subway, heading down to MIT for the weekend. Stallman usually made sure to arrive well before the ritual food run. Joining five or six other hackers in their nightly quest for Chinese food, he would jump inside a beat-up car and head across the Harvard Bridge into nearby Boston. For the next hour or so, he and his hacker colleagues would discuss everything from ITS to the internal logic of the Chinese language and pictograph system. Following dinner, the group would return to MIT and hack code until dawn, or perhaps go to Chinatown again at 3 a.m.
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Stallman might stay up all morning hacking, or might sleep Saturday morning on a couch. On waking he would hack some more, have another Chinese dinner, then go back to Harvard. Sometimes he would stay through Sunday as well. These Chinese dinners were not only delicious; they also provided sustenance lacking in the Harvard dining halls, where on the average only one meal a day included anything he could stomach. (Breakfast did not enter the count, since he didn't like most breakfast foods and was normally asleep at that hour.)
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For the geeky outcast who rarely associated with his high-school peers, it was a heady experience to be hanging out with people who shared the same predilection for computers, science fiction, and Chinese food. "I remember many sunrises seen from a car coming back from Chinatown," Stallman would recall nostalgically, 15 years after the fact in a speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute. "It was actually a very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, 'cause that's such a calm time of day. It's a wonderful time of day to get ready to go to bed. It's so nice to walk home with the light just brightening and the birds starting to chirp; you can get a real feeling of gentle satisfaction, of tranquility about the work that you have done that night."【26 See Richard Stallman, "RMS lecture at KTH (Sweden)," (October 30, 1986),
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html. 】
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The more Stallman hung out with the hackers, the more he adopted the hacker world view. Already committed to the notion of personal liberty, Stallman began to infuse his actions with a sense of communal duty. When others violated the communal code, Stallman was quick to speak out. Within a year of his first visit, Stallman was the one opening locked offices to recover the sequestered terminals that belonged to the lab community as a whole. In true hacker fashion, Stallman also sought to make his own personal contribution to the art. One of the most artful door-opening tricks, commonly attributed to Greenblatt, involved bending a stiff wire into several right angles and attaching a strip of tape to one end. Sliding the wire under the door, a hacker could twist and rotate the wire so that the tape touched the inside doorknob. Provided the tape stuck, a hacker could turn the doorknob by pulling the handle formed from the outside end of the wire.
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When Stallman tried the trick, he found it hard to execute. Getting the tape to stick wasn't always easy, and twisting the wire in a way that turned the doorknob was similarly difficult. Stallman thought about another method: sliding away ceiling tiles to climb over the wall. This always worked, if there was a desk to jump down onto, but it generally covered the hacker in itchy fiberglass. Was there a way to correct that flaw? Stallman considered an alternative approach. What if, instead of slipping a wire under the door, a hacker slid away two ceiling panels and reached over the wall with a wire?
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Stallman took it upon himself to try it out. Instead of using a wire, Stallman draped out a long U-shaped loop of magnetic tape with a short U of adhesive tape attached sticky-side-up at the base. Reaching across over the door jamb, he dangled the tape until it looped under the inside doorknob. Lifting the tape until the adhesive stuck, he then pulled on one end of the tape, thus turning the doorknob. Sure enough, the door opened. Stallman had added a new twist to the art of getting into a locked room.
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"Sometimes you had to kick the door after you turned the doorknob," says Stallman, recalling a slight imperfection of the new method. "It took a little bit of balance to pull it off while standing on a chair on a desk."
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Such activities reflected a growing willingness on Stallman's part to speak and act out in defense of political beliefs. The AI Lab's spirit of direct action had proved inspirational enough for Stallman to breakout of the timid impotence of his teenage years. Opening up an office to free a terminal wasn't the same as taking part in a protest march, but it was effective in a way that most protests weren't: it solved the problem at hand.
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By the time of his last years at Harvard, Stallman was beginning to apply the whimsical and irreverent lessons of the AI Lab back at school .
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"The snake was a candidate for election within Currier House, Stallman's dorm, not the campus-wide student council. Stallman does re-member the snake attracting a fair number of votes, thanks in large part to the fact that both the snake and its owner both shared the same last name. "People may have voted for it because they thought they were voting for the owner," Stallman says. "Campaign posters said that the snake was 'slithering for' the office. We also said it was an 'at large' candidate, since it had climbed into the wall through the ventilating unit a few weeks before and nobody knew where it was."
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Stallman and friends also "nominated" the house master's 3-year-old son. "His platform was mandatory retirement at age seven," Stallman recalls. Such pranks paled in comparison to the fake-candidate pranks on the MIT campus, however. One of the most successful fake-candidate pranks was a cat named Woodstock, which actually managed to outdraw most of the human candidates in a campus-wide election. "They never announced how many votes Woodstock got, and they treated those votes as spoiled ballots," Stallman recalls. "But the large number of spoiled ballots in that election suggested that Woodstock had actually won. A couple of years later, Woodstock was suspiciously run over by a car. Nobody knows if the driver was working for the MIT administration." Stallman says he had nothing to do with Woodstock's candidacy, "but I admired it."【27 In an email shortly after this book went into its final edit cycle, Stallman says he drew political inspiration from the Harvard campus as well. "In my first year of Harvard, in a Chinese History class, I read the story of the first revolt against the Qin dynasty," he says. (That's the one whose cruel founder burnt all the books and was buried with the terra cotta warriors.) "The story is not reliable history, but it was very moving." 】
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At the AI Lab, Stallman's political activities had a sharper-edged tone. During the 1970s, hackers faced the constant challenge of faculty members and administrators pulling an end-run around ITS and its hacker-friendly design. ITS allowed anyone to sit down at a console and do anything at all, even order the system to shut down in five minutes. If someone ordered a shutdown with no good reason, some other user canceled it. In the mid-1970s some faculty members (usually those who had formed their attitudes elsewhere) began calling for a file security system to limit access to their data. Other operating systems had such features, so those faculty members had become accustomed to living under security, and to the feeling that it was protecting them from something dangerous. But the AI Lab, through the insistence of Stallman and other hackers, remained a security-free zone.
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Stallman presented both ethical and practical arguments against adding security. On the ethical side, Stallman appealed to the AI Lab community's traditions of intellectual openness and trust. On the practical side, he pointed to the internal structure of ITS, which was built to foster hacking and cooperation rather than to keep every user under control. Any attempt to reverse that design would require a major overhaul. To make it even more difficult, he used up the last empty field in each file's descriptor for a feature to record which user had most recently changed the file. This feature left no place to store file security information, but it was so useful that nobody could seriously propose to remove it.
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"The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System decided that file protection was usually used by a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone else," Stallman would later explain. "They didn't want anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn't implement that kind of a feature. The result was, that whenever something in the system was broken, you could always fix it" (since access control did not stand in your way).【28 See Richard Stallman (1986). 】
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Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI Lab's machines security-free. In one group at the nearby MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences, however, security-minded faculty members won the day. The DM group installed its first password system in 1977. Once again, Stallman took it upon himself to correct what he saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access to the software code that controlled the password system, Stallman wrote a program to decrypt the encrypted passwords that the system recorded. Then he started an email campaign, asking users to choose the null string as their passwords. If the user had chosen "starfish," for example, the email message looked something like this:
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Stallman, speaking in an interview for the 1984 book Hackers, proudly noted that one-fifth of the LCS staff accepted this argument and employed the null-string password.【29 See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 417. 】
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Stallman's null-string campaign, and his resistance to security in general, would ultimately be defeated. By the early 1980s, even the AI Lab's machines were sporting password security systems. Even so, it represented a major milestone in terms of Stallman's personal and political maturation. Seen in the context of Stallman's later career, it represents a significant step in the development of the timid teenager, afraid to speak out even on issues of life-threatening importance, into the adult activist who would soon turn needling and cajoling into a full-time occupation.
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In voicing his opposition to computer security, Stallman drew on many of the key ideas that had shaped his early life: hunger for knowledge, distaste for authority, and frustration over prejudice and secret rules that rendered some people outcasts. He would also draw on the ethical concepts that would shape his adult life: responsibility to the community, trust, and the hacker spirit of direct action. Expressed in software-computing terms, the null string represents the 1.0 version of the Richard Stallman political world view - incomplete in a few places but, for the most part, fully mature.
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Looking back, Stallman hesitates to impart too much significance to an event so early in his hacking career. "In that early stage there were a lot of people who shared my feelings," he says. "The large number of people who adopted the null string as their password was a sign that many people agreed that it was the proper thing to do. I was simply inclined to be an activist about it."
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Stallman does credit the AI Lab for awakening that activist spirit, however. As a teenager, Stallman had observed political events with little idea as to how he could do or say anything of importance. As a young adult, Stallman was speaking out on matters in which he felt supremely confident, matters such as software design, responsibility to the community, and individual freedom. "I joined this community which had a way of life which involved respecting each other's freedom," he says. "It didn't take me long to figure out that that was a good thing. It took me longer to come to the conclusion that this was a moral issue."
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Hacking at the AI Lab wasn't the only activity helping to boost Stallman's esteem. At the start of his junior year at Harvard, Stallman began participating in a recreational international folk dance group which had just been started in Currier House. He was not going to try it, considering himself incapable of dancing, but a friend pointed out, "You don't know you can't if you haven't tried." To his amazement, he was good at it and enjoyed it. What started as an experiment became another passion alongside hacking and studying; also, occasionally, away to meet women, though it didn't lead to a date during his college career. While dancing, Stallman no longer felt like the awkward, un-coordinated 10-year-old whose attempts to play football had ended in frustration. He felt confident, agile, and alive. In the early 80s, Stallman went further and joined the MIT Folk Dance Performing Group. Dancing for audiences, dressed in an imitation of the traditional garb of a Balkan peasant, he found being in front of an audience fun, and discovered an aptitude for being on stage which later helped him in public speaking.
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Although the dancing and hacking did little to improve Stallman's social standing, they helped him overcome the sense of exclusion that had clouded his pre-Harvard life. In 1977, attending a science-fiction convention for the first time, he came across Nancy the Button maker, who makes calligraphic buttons saying whatever you wish. Excited, Stallman ordered a button with the words "Impeach God" emblazoned on it.
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For Stallman, the "Impeach God" message worked on many levels. An atheist since early childhood, Stallman first saw it as an attempt to start a "second front" in the ongoing debate on religion. "Back then everybody was arguing about whether a god existed," Stallman recalls. "'Impeach God' approached the subject from a completely different viewpoint. If a god was so powerful as to create the world and yet did nothing to correct the problems in it, why would we ever want to worship such a god? Wouldn't it be more just to put it on trial?"
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At the same time, "Impeach God" was a reference to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, in effect comparing a tyrannical deity to Nixon. Watergate affected Stallman deeply. As a child, Stallman had grown up resenting authority. Now, as an adult, his mistrust had been solidified by the culture of the AI Lab hacker community. To the hackers, Watergate was merely a Shakespearean rendition of the daily power struggles that made life such a hassle for those without privilege. It was an out sized parable for what happened when people traded liberty and openness for security and convenience.
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Buoyed by growing confidence, Stallman wore the button proudly. People curious enough to ask him about it received a well-prepared spiel. "My name is Jehovah," Stallman would say. "I have a secret plan to end injustice and suffering, but due to heavenly security reasons I can't tell you the workings of my plan. I see the big picture and you don't, and you know I'm good because I told you so. So put your faith in me and obey me without question. If you don't obey, that means you're evil, so I'll put you on my enemies list and throw you in a pit where the Infernal Revenue Service will audit your taxes every year for all eternity."
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Those who interpreted the spiel as a parody of the Watergate hearings only got half the message. For Stallman, the other half of the message was something only his fellow hackers seemed to be hearing. One hundred years after Lord Acton warned about absolute power corrupting absolutely, Americans seemed to have forgotten the first part of Acton's truism: power, itself, corrupts. Rather than point out the numerous examples of petty corruption, Stallman felt content voicing his outrage toward an entire system that trusted power in the first place.
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"I figured, why stop with the small fry," says Stallman, recalling the button and its message. "If we went after Nixon, why not go after Mr. Big? The way I see it, any being that has power and abuses it deserves to have that power taken away."
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Ask anyone who's spent more than a minute in Richard Stallman's presence, and you'll get the same recollection: forget the long hair. Forget the quirky demeanor. The first thing you notice is the gaze. One look into Stallman's green eyes, and you know you're in the presence of a true believer.
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To call the Stallman gaze intense is an understatement. Stallman's eyes don't just look at you; they look through you. Even when your own eyes momentarily shift away out of simple primate politeness, Stallman's eyes remain locked-in, sizzling away at the side of your head like twin photon beams.
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Maybe that's why most writers, when describing Stallman, tend to go for the religious angle. In a 1998 Salon.com article titled "The Saint of Free Software," Andrew Leonard describes Stallman's green eyes as "radiating the power of an Old Testament prophet."1【30 See Andrew Leonard, "The Saint of Free Software," Salon.com (August 1998),
http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/08/cov_31feature.html. 】 A 1999 Wired magazine article describes the Stallman beard as "Rasputin-like,"【31 See Leander Kahney, "Linux's Forgotten Man," Wired News (March 5, 1999),
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,18291,00.html. 】 while a London Guardian profile describes the Stallman smile as the smile of "a disciple seeing Jesus."【32 See "Programmer on moral high ground; Free software is a moral issue for Richard Stallman believes in freedom and free software," London Guardian (November 6, 1999),
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/nov/06/andrewbrown.
These are just a small sampling of the religious comparisons. To date, the most extreme comparison has to go to Linus Torvalds, who, in his autobiography - see Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58 - writes, "Richard Stallman is the God of Free Software." Honorable mention goes to Larry Lessig, who, in a footnote description of Stallman in his book - see Larry Lessig, The Future of Ideas (Random House, 2001): 270 - likens Stallman to Moses:...
as with Moses, it was another leader, Linus Torvalds, who finally carried the movement into the promised land by facilitating the development of the final part of the OS puzzle. Like Moses, too, Stallman is both respected and reviled by allies within the movement. He is[an] unforgiving, and hence for many inspiring, leader of a critically important aspect of modern culture. I have deep respect for the principle and commitment of this extraordinary individual, though I also have great respect for those who are courageous enough to question his thinking and then sustain his wrath.
In a final interview with Stallman, I asked him his thoughts about the religious comparisons. "Some people do compare me with an Old Testament prophet, and the reason is Old Testament prophets said certain social practices were wrong. They wouldn't compromise on moral issues. They couldn't be bought off, and they were usually treated with contempt." 】
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Such analogies serve a purpose, but they ultimately fall short. That's because they fail to take into account the vulnerable side of the Stallman persona. Watch the Stallman gaze for an extended period of time, and you will begin to notice a subtle change. What appears at first to be an attempt to intimidate or hypnotize reveals itself upon second and third viewing as a frustrated attempt to build and maintain contact. If his personality has a touch or "shadow" of autism or Asperger's Syndrome, a possibility that Stallman has entertained from time to time, his eyes certainly confirm the diagnosis. Even at their most high-beam level of intensity, they have a tendency to grow cloudy and distant, like the eyes of a wounded animal preparing to give up the ghost.
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My own first encounter with the legendary Stallman gaze dates back to the March, 1999, LinuxWorld Convention and Expo in San Jose, California. Billed as a "coming out party" for the "Linux" software community, the convention also stands out as the event that reintroduced Stallman to the technology media. Determined to push for his proper share of credit, Stallman used the event to instruct spectators and reporters alike on the history of the GNU Project and the project's overt political objectives.
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As a reporter sent to cover the event, I received my own Stallman tutorial during a press conference announcing the release of GNOME 1.0, a free software graphic user interface. Unwittingly, I push an entire bank of hot buttons when I throw out my very first question to Stallman himself: "Do you think GNOME's maturity will affect the commercial popularity of the Linux operating system?"
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"I ask that you please stop calling the operating system Linux," Stallman responds, eyes immediately zeroing in on mine. "The Linux kernel is just a small part of the operating system. Many of the software programs that make up the operating system you call Linux were not developed by Linus Torvalds at all. They were created by GNU Project volunteers, putting in their own personal time so that users might have a free operating system like the one we have today. To not acknowledge the contribution of those programmers is both impolite and a misrepresentation of history. That's why I ask that when you refer to the operating system, please call it by its proper name, GNU/Linux."
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Taking the words down in my reporter's notebook, I notice an eerie silence in the crowded room. When I finally look up, I find Stallman's unblinking eyes waiting for me. Timidly, a second reporter throws out a question, making sure to use the term "GNU/Linux" instead of Linux. Miguel de Icaza, leader of the GNOME project, fields the question. It isn't until halfway through de Icaza's answer, however, that Stallman's eyes finally unlock from mine. As soon as they do, a mild shiver rolls down my back. When Stallman starts lecturing another reporter over a perceived error in diction, I feel a guilty tinge of relief. At least he isn't looking at me, I tell myself.
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For Stallman, such face-to-face moments would serve their purpose. By the end of the first LinuxWorld show, most reporters know better than to use the term "Linux" in his presence, and Wired.com is running a story comparing Stallman to a pre-Stalinist revolutionary erased from the history books by hackers and entrepreneurs eager to downplay the GNU Project's overly political objectives.【33 See Leander Kahney (1999). 】 Other articles follow, and while few reporters call the operating system GNU/Linux in print, most are quick to credit Stallman for launching the drive to build a free software operating system 15 years before.
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I won't meet Stallman again for another 17 months. During the interim, Stallman will revisit Silicon Valley once more for the August, 1999 LinuxWorld show. Although not invited to speak, Stallman does manage to deliver the event's best line. Accepting the show's Linus Torvalds Award for Community Service - an award named after Linux creator Linus Torvalds - on behalf of the Free Software Foundation, Stallman wisecracks, "Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance."
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Maybe that's why, when LinuxWorld follows up its first two shows with a third LinuxWorld show in August, 2000, Stallman is conspicuously absent.
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My second encounter with Stallman and his trademark gaze comes shortly after that third LinuxWorld show. Hearing that Stallman is going to be in Silicon Valley, I set up a lunch interview in Palo Alto, California. The meeting place seems ironic, not only because of his absence from the show but also because of the overall backdrop. Outside of Redmond, Washington, few cities offer a more direct testament to the economic value of proprietary software. Curious to see how Stallman, a man who has spent the better part of his life railing against our culture's predilection toward greed and selfishness, is coping in a city where even garage-sized bungalows run in the half-million-dollar price range, I make the drive down from Oakland.
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I follow the directions Stallman has given me, until I reach the headquarters of Art.net, a nonprofit "virtual artists collective." Located in a hedge-shrouded house in the northern corner of the city, the Art.net headquarters are refreshingly run-down. Suddenly, the idea of Stallman lurking in the heart of Silicon Valley doesn't seem so strange after all.
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I find Stallman sitting in a darkened room, tapping away on his gray laptop computer. He looks up as soon as I enter the room, giving me a full blast of his 200-watt gaze. When he offers a soothing "Hello," I offer a return greeting. Before the words come out, however, his eyes have already shifted back to the laptop screen.
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"I'm just finishing an article on the spirit of hacking," Stallman says, fingers still tapping. "Take a look."
ocn 313:
I take a look. The room is dimly lit, and the text appears as greenish-white letters on a black background, a reversal of the color scheme used by most desktop word-processing programs, so it takes my eyes a moment to adjust. When they do, I find myself reading Stallman's account of a recent meal at a Korean restaurant. Before the meal, Stallman makes an interesting discovery: the person setting the table has left six chopsticks instead of the usual two in front of Stallman's place setting. Where most restaurant goers would have ignored the redundant pairs, Stallman takes it as challenge: find away to use all six chopsticks at once. Like many software hacks, the successful solution is both clever and silly at the same time. Hence Stallman's decision to use it as an illustration.
ocn 314:
As I read the story, I feel Stallman watching me intently. I look over to notice a proud but child-like half smile on his face. When I praise the essay, my comment barely merits a raised eyebrow.
ocn 316:
Stallman goes back to tapping away at his laptop. The laptop is gray and boxy, not like the sleek, modern laptops that seemed to be a programmer favorite at the recent LinuxWorld show. Above the keyboard rides a smaller, lighter keyboard, a testament to Stallman's aging hands. During the mid 1990s, the pain in Stallman's hands became so unbearable that he had to hire a typist. Today, Stallman relies on a keyboard whose keys require less pressure than a typical computer keyboard.
ocn 317:
Stallman has a tendency to block out all external stimuli while working. Watching his eyes lock onto the screen and his fingers dance, one quickly gets the sense of two old friends locked in deep conversation.
ocn 319:
"Ready for lunch?" Stallman asks.
ocn 320:
We walk to my car. Pleading a sore ankle, Stallman limps along slowly. Stallman blames the injury on a tendon in his left foot. The injury is three years old and has gotten so bad that Stallman, a huge fan of folk dancing, has been forced to give up all dancing activities."I love folk dancing intensely," Stallman laments. "Not being able to dance has been a tragedy for me."
ocn 321:
Stallman's body bears witness to the tragedy. Lack of exercise has left Stallman with swollen cheeks and a pot belly that was much less visible the year before. You can tell the weight gain has been dramatic, because when Stallman walks, he arches his back like a pregnant woman trying to accommodate an unfamiliar load.
ocn 322:
The walk is further slowed by Stallman's willingness to stop and smell the roses, literally. Spotting a particularly beautiful blossom, he strokes the innermost petals against his nose, takes a deep sniff, and steps back with a contented sigh.
ocn 323:
"Mmm, rhinophytophilia," he says, rubbing his back.【34 At the time, I thought Stallman was referring to the flower's scientific name. Months later, I would learn that rhino phytophilia was in fact a humorous reference to the activity - i.e., Stallman's sticking his nose into a flower and enjoying the moment - presenting it as the kinky practice of nasal sex with plants. For another humorous Stallman flower incident,
visit: ‹http://www.stallman.org/articles/texas.html›. 】
ocn 324:
The drive to the restaurant takes less than three minutes. Upon recommendation from Tim Ney, former executive director of the Free Software Foundation, I have let Stallman choose the restaurant. While some reporters zero in on Stallman's monk-like lifestyle, the truth is, Stallman is a committed epicure when it comes to food. One of the fringe benefits of being a traveling missionary for the free software cause is the ability to sample delicious food from around the world. "Visit almost any major city in the world, and chances are Richard knows the best restaurant in town," says Ney. "Richard also takes great pride in knowing what's on the menu and ordering for the entire table." (If they are willing, that is.)
ocn 325:
For today's meal, Stallman has chosen a Cantonese-style dim sum restaurant two blocks off University Avenue, Palo Alto's main drag. The choice is partially inspired by Stallman's recent visit to China, including a stop in Hong Kong, in addition to Stallman's personal aversion to spicier Hunanese and Szechuan cuisine. "I'm not a big fan of spicy," Stallman admits.
ocn 326:
We arrive a few minutes after 11 a.m. and find ourselves already subject to a 20-minute wait. Given the hacker aversion to lost time, I hold my breath momentarily, fearing an outburst. Stallman, contrary to expectations, takes the news in stride.
ocn 328:
During the wait, Stallman practices a few dance steps. His moves are tentative but skilled. We discuss current events. Stallman says his only regret about not attending LinuxWorld was missing out on a press conference announcing the launch of the GNOME Foundation. Backed by Sun Microsystems and IBM, the foundation is in many ways a vindication for Stallman, who has long championed that free software and free-market economics need not be mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, Stallman remains dissatisfied by the message that came out.
ocn 329:
"The way it was presented, the companies were talking about Linux with no mention of the GNU Project at all," Stallman says.
ocn 330:
Such disappointments merely contrast the warm response coming from overseas, especially Asia, Stallman notes. A quick glance at the Stallman 2000 travel itinerary bespeaks the growing popularity of the free software message. Between recent visits to India, China, and Brazil, Stallman has spent 12 of the last 115 days on United States soil. His travels have given him an opportunity to see how the free software concept translates into different languages of cultures.
ocn 331:
"In India many people are interested in free software, because they see it as a way to build their computing infrastructure without spending a lot of money," Stallman says. "In China, the concept has been much slower to catch on. Comparing free software to free speech is harder to do when you don't have any free speech. Still, the level of interest in free software during my last visit was profound."
ocn 333:
Although based on proprietary software, the Napster system draws inspiration from the long-held Stallman contention that once a work enters the digital realm - in other words, once making a copy is less a matter of duplicating sounds or duplicating atoms and more a matter of duplicating information - the natural human impulse to share a work becomes harder to restrict. Rather than impose additional restrictions, Napster execs have decided to take advantage of the impulse. Giving music listeners a central place to trade music files, the company has gambled on its ability to steer the resulting user traffic toward other commercial opportunities.
ocn 334:
The sudden success of the Napster model has put the fear in traditional record companies, with good reason. Just days before my Palo Alto meeting with Stallman, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel granted a request filed by the Recording Industry Association of America for an injunction against the file-sharing service. The in-junction was subsequently suspended by the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals, but by early 2001, the Court of Appeals, too, would find the San Mateo-based company in breach of copyright law,【35 See Cecily Barnes and Scott Ard, "Court Grants Stay of Napster Injunction," News.com (July 28, 2000),
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-2376465.html. 】 a decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later proclaim a "clear victory for the creative content community and the legitimate online marketplace."【36 See "A Clear Victory for Recording Industry in Napster Case," RIAA press release (February 12, 2001),
http://www.riaa.com/PR_story.cfm?id=372. 】
ocn 335:
For hackers such as Stallman, the Napster business model is troublesome in different ways. The company's eagerness to appropriate time-worn hacker principles such as file sharing and communal information ownership, while at the same time selling a service based on proprietary software, sends a distressing mixed message. As a person who already has a hard enough time getting his own carefully articulated message into the media stream, Stallman is understandably reticent when it comes to speaking out about the company. Still, Stallman does admit to learning a thing or two from the social side of the Napster phenomenon.
ocn 336:
"Before Napster, I thought it might be [sufficient] for people to privately redistribute works of entertainment," Stallman says. "The number of people who find Napster useful, however, tells me that the right to redistribute copies not only on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis, but to the public at large, is essential and therefore may not be taken away."
ocn 337:
No sooner does Stallman say this than the door to the restaurant swings open and we are invited back inside by the host. Within a few seconds, we are seated in a side corner of the restaurant next to a large mirrored wall.
ocn 338:
The restaurant's menu doubles as an order form, and Stallman is quickly checking off boxes before the host has even brought water to the table. "Deep-fried shrimp roll wrapped in bean-curd skin," Stallman reads. "Bean-curd skin. It offers such an interesting texture. I think we should get it."
ocn 339:
This comment leads to an impromptu discussion of Chinese food and Stallman's recent visit to China. "The food in China is utterly exquisite," Stallman says, his voice gaining an edge of emotion for the first time this morning. "So many different things that I've never seen in the U.S., local things made from local mushrooms and local vegetables. It got to the point where I started keeping a journal just to keep track of every wonderful meal."
ocn 340:
The conversation segues into a discussion of Korean cuisine. During the same June, 2000, Asian tour, Stallman paid a visit to South Korea. His arrival ignited a mini-firestorm in the local media thanks to a Korean software conference attended by Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates that same week. Next to getting his photo above Gates's photo on the front page of the top Seoul newspaper, Stallman says the best thing about the trip was the food. "I had a bowl of naeng myun, which is cold noodles," says Stallman. "These were a very interesting feeling noodle. Most places don't use quite the same kind of noodles for your naeng myun, so I can say with complete certainty that this was the most exquisite naeng myun I ever had."
ocn 341:
The term "exquisite" is high praise coming from Stallman. I know this, because a few moments after listening to Stallman rhapsodize about naeng myun, I feel his laser-beam eyes singeing the top of my right shoulder.
ocn 342:
"There is the most exquisite woman sitting just behind you," Stallman says.
ocn 343:
I turn to look, catching a glimpse of a woman's back. The woman is young, somewhere in her mid-20s, and is wearing a white sequined dress. She and her male lunch companion are in the final stages of paying the check. When both get up from the table to leave the restaurant, I can tell without looking, because Stallman's eyes suddenly dim in intensity.
ocn 345:
After a brief sigh, Stallman recovers. The moment gives me a chance to discuss Stallman's reputation vis-'a-vis the fairer sex. The reputation is a bit contradictory at times. A number of hackers report Stallman's predilection for greeting females with a kiss on the back of the hand.【37 See Mae Ling Mak, "A Mae Ling Story" (December 17, 1998),
http://crackmonkey.org/pipermail/crackmonkey/1998-December/001777.html. So far, Mak is the only person I've found willing to speak on the record in regard to this practice, although I've heard this from a few other female sources. Mak, despite expressing initial revulsion at it, later managed to put aside her misgivings and dance with Stallman at a 1999 LinuxWorld show. 】 A May 26, 2000 Salon.com article, meanwhile, portrays Stallman as a bit of a hacker lothario. Documenting the free software-free love connection, reporter Annalee Newitz presents Stallman as rejecting traditional family values, telling her, "I believe in love, but not monogamy."【38 See Annalee Newitz, "If Code is Free Why Not Me?", Salon.com (May 26,2000),
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/26/free_love/print.html. 】
ocn 346:
Stallman lets his menu drop a little when I bring this up. "Well, most men seem to want sex and seem to have a rather contemptuous attitude towards women," he says. "Even women they're involved with. I can't understand it at all."
ocn 347:
I mention a passage from the 1999 book Open Sources in which Stallman confesses to wanting to name the GNU kernel after a girl-friend at the time. The girlfriend's name was Alix, a name that fit perfectly with the Unix developer convention of putting an "x" at the end names of operating systems and kernels - e.g., "Linux." Alix was a Unix system administrator, and had suggested to her friends, "Someone should name a kernel after me." So Stallman decided to name the GNU kernel "Alix" as a surprise for her. The kernel's main developer renamed the kernel "Hurd," but retained the name "Alix" for part of it. One of Alix's friends noticed this part in a source snapshot and told her, and she was touched. A later redesign of the Hurd eliminated that part.【39 See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 65. [RMS: Williams interpreted this vignette as suggesting that I am a hopeless romantic, and that my efforts were meant to impress some as-yet-unidentified woman. No MIT hacker would believe this, since we learned quite young that most women wouldn't notice us, let alone love us, for our programming. We programmed because it was fascinating. Meanwhile, these events were only possible because I had a thoroughly identified girlfriend at the time. If I was a romantic, at the time I was neither a hopeless romantic nor a hopeful romantic, but rather temporarily a successful one. On the strength of that naive interpretation, Williams went on to compare meto Don Quijote. For completeness' sake, here's a somewhat inarticulate quote from the first edition: "I wasn't really trying to be romantic. It was more of a teasing thing. I mean, it was romantic, but it was also teasing, you know? It would have been a delightful surprise."] 】
ocn 348:
For the first time all morning, Stallman smiles. I bring up the hand kissing. "Yes, I do do that," Stallman says. "I've found it's a way of offering some affection that a lot of women will enjoy. It's a chance to give some affection and to be appreciated for it."
ocn 349:
Affection is a thread that runs clear through Richard Stallman's life, and he is painfully candid about it when questions arise. "There really hasn't been much affection in my life, except in my mind," he says. Still, the discussion quickly grows awkward. After a few one-word replies, Stallman finally lifts up his menu, cutting off the inquiry.
ocn 351:
When the food comes out, the conversation slaloms between the arriving courses. We discuss the oft-noted hacker affection for Chinese food, the weekly dinner runs into Boston's Chinatown district during Stallman's days as a staff programmer at the AI Lab, and the underlying logic of the Chinese language and its associated writing system. Each thrust on my part elicits a well-informed parry on Stallman's part.
ocn 352:
"I heard some people speaking Shanghainese the last time I was in China," Stallman says. "It was interesting to hear. It sounded quite different [from Mandarin]. I had them tell me some cognate words in Mandarin and Shanghainese. In some cases you can see the resemblance, but one question I was wondering about was whether tones would be similar. They're not. That's interesting to me, because there's a theory that the tones evolved from additional syllables that got lost and replaced. Their effect survives in the tone. If that's true, and I've seen claims that that happened within historic times, the dialects must have diverged before the loss of these final syllables."
ocn 353:
The first dish, a plate of pan-fried turnip cakes, has arrived. Both Stallman and I take a moment to carve up the large rectangular cakes, which smell like boiled cabbage but taste like potato latkes fried in bacon.
ocn 354:
I decide to bring up the outcast issue again, wondering if Stallman's teenage years conditioned him to take unpopular stands, most notably his uphill battle since 1994 to get computer users and the media to replace the popular term "Linux" with "GNU/Linux."
ocn 355:
"I believe [being an outcast] did help me [to avoid bowing to popular views]," Stallman says, chewing on a dumpling. "I have never understood what peer pressure does to other people. I think the reason is that I was so hopelessly rejected that for me, there wasn't anything to gain by trying to follow any of the fads. It wouldn't have made any difference. I'd still be just as rejected, so I didn't try."
ocn 356:
Stallman points to his taste in music as a key example of his contrarian tendencies. As a teenager, when most of his high school classmates were listening to Motown and acid rock, Stallman preferred classical music. The memory leads to a rare humorous episode from Stallman's middle-school years. Following the Beatles' 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, most of Stallman's classmates rushed out to purchase the latest Beatles albums and singles. Right then and there, Stallman says, he made a decision to boycott the Fab Four.
ocn 357:
"I liked some of the pre-Beatles popular music," Stallman says. "But I didn't like the Beatles. I especially disliked the wild way people reacted to them. It was like: who was going to have a Beatles assembly to adulate the Beatles the most?"
ocn 358:
When his Beatles boycott failed to take hold, Stallman looked for other ways to point out the herd-mentality of his peers. Stallman says he briefly considered putting together a rock band himself dedicated to satirizing the Liverpool group.
ocn 360:
Given his current love for international folk music, I ask Stallman if he had a similar affinity for Bob Dylan and the other folk musicians of the early 1960s. Stallman shakes his head. "I did like Peter, Paul and Mary," he says. "That reminds me of a great filk."
ocn 361:
When I ask for a definition of "filk," Stallman explains that the term is used in science fiction fandom to refer to the writing of new lyrics for songs. (In recent decades, some filkers write melodies too.) Classic filks include "On Top of Spaghetti," a rewrite of "On Top of Old Smokey," and "Yoda," filk-master "Weird" Al Yankovic's Star Wars-oriented rendition of the Kinks tune, "Lola."
ocn 362:
Stallman asks me if I would be interested in hearing the filk. As soon as I say yes, Stallman's voice begins singing in an unexpectedly clear tone, using the tune of "Blowin' in the Wind":
ocn 364:
The singing ends, and Stallman's lips curl into another child-like half smile. I glance around at the nearby tables. The Asian families enjoying their Sunday lunch pay little attention to the bearded alto in their midst.【40 For Stallman's own filks,
visit ‹http://www.stallman.org/doggerel.html› . To hear Stallman singing "The Free Software Song,"
visit ‹http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html›. 】 After a few moments of hesitation, I finally smile too.
ocn 365:
"Do you want that last cornball?" Stallman asks, eyes twinkling. Before I can screw up the punch line, Stallman grabs the corn-encrusted dumpling with his two chopsticks and lifts it proudly. "Maybe I'm the one who should get the cornball," he says.
ocn 366:
The food gone, our conversation assumes the dynamics of a normal interview. Stallman reclines in his chair and cradles a cup of tea in his hands. We resume talking about Napster and its relation to the free software movement. Should the principles of free software be extended to similar arenas such as music publishing? I ask.
ocn 367:
"It's a mistake to transfer answers from one thing to another," says Stallman, contrasting songs with software programs. "The right approach is to look at each type of work and see what conclusion you get."
ocn 368:
When it comes to copyrighted works, Stallman says he divides the world into three categories. The first category involves "functional" works - e.g., software programs, dictionaries, and textbooks. The second category involves works that might best be described as "testimonial" - e.g., scientific papers and historical documents. Such works serve a purpose that would be undermined if subsequent readers or authors were free to modify the work at will. It also includes works of personal expression - e.g., diaries, journals, and autobiographies. To modify such documents would be to alter a person's recollections or point of view, which Stallman considers ethically unjustifiable. The third category includes works of art and entertainment.
ocn 369:
Of the three categories, the first should give users the unlimited right to make modified versions, while the second and third should regulate that right according to the will of the original author. Regardless of category, however, the freedom to copy and redistribute non-commercially should remain unabridged at all times, Stallman insists. If that means giving Internet users the right to generate a hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and then email the copies to a hundred strangers, so be it. "It's clear that private occasional redistribution must be permitted, because only a police state can stop that," Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between people and their friends. Napster has convinced me that we also need to permit, must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public for the fun of it. Because so many people want to do that and find it so useful."
ocn 370:
When I ask whether the courts would accept such a permissive outlook, Stallman cuts me off.
ocn 372:
The comment provides an insight into Stallman's political philosophy: just because the legal system currently backs up businesses' ability to treat copyright as the software equivalent of land title doesn't mean computer users have to play the game according to those rules. Freedom is an ethical issue, not a legal issue. "I'm looking beyond what the existing laws are to what they should be," Stallman says. "I'm not trying to draft legislation. I'm thinking about what should the law do? I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect."
ocn 373:
The invocation of Jim Crow prompts another question. How much influence or inspiration does Stallman draw from past political leaders? Like the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, his attempt to drive social change is based on an appeal to timeless values: freedom, justice, and fair play.
ocn 374:
Stallman divides his attention between my analogy and a particularly tangled strand of hair. When I stretch the analogy to the point where I'm comparing Stallman with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stallman, after breaking off a split end and popping it into his mouth, cuts me off.
ocn 376:
I suggest Malcolm X as another point of comparison. Like the former Nation of Islam spokesperson, Stallman has built up a reputation for courting controversy, alienating potential allies, and preaching a message favoring self-sufficiency over cultural integration.
ocn 377:
Chewing on another split end, Stallman rejects the comparison. "My message is closer to King's message," he says. "It's a universal message. It's a message of firm condemnation of certain practices that mistreat others. It's not a message of hatred for anyone. And it's not aimed at a narrow group of people. I invite anyone to value freedom and to have freedom."
ocn 378:
Many criticize Stallman for rejecting handy political alliances; some psychologize this and describe it as a character trait. In the case of his well-publicized distaste for the term "open source," the unwillingness to participate in recent coalition-building projects seems understand-able. As a man who has spent the last two decades stumping on the behalf of free software, Stallman's political capital is deeply invested in the term. Still, comments such as the "Han Solo" comparison at the 1999 LinuxWorld have only reinforced Stallman's reputation, amongst those who believe virtue consists of following the crowd, as a disgruntled mossback unwilling to roll with political or marketing trends.
ocn 379:
"I admire and respect Richard for all the work he's done," says Red Hat president Robert Young, summing up Stallman's paradoxical political conduct. "My only critique is that sometimes Richard treats his friends worse than his enemies."
ocn 381:
Stallman's reluctance to ally the free software movement with other political causes is not due to lack of interest in them. Visit his offices at MIT, and you instantly find a clearinghouse of left-leaning news articles covering civil-rights abuses around the globe. Visit his personal web site, stallman.org, and you'll find attacks on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the War on Drugs, and the World Trade Organization. Stallman explains, "We have to be careful of entering the free software movement into alliances with other political causes that substantial numbers of free software supporters might not agree with. For instance, we avoid linking the free software movement with any political party because we do not want to drive away the supporters and elected officials of other parties."
ocn 382:
Given his activist tendencies, I ask, why hasn't Stallman sought a larger voice? Why hasn't he used his visibility in the hacker world as a platform to boost his political voice? [RMS: But I do - when I see a good opportunity. That's why I started stallman.org. ]
ocn 383:
Stallman lets his tangled hair drop and contemplates the question for a moment. [RMS: My quoted response doesn't fit that question. It does fit a different question, "Why do you focus on free software rather than on the other causes you believe in?" I suspect the question I was asked was more like that one.]
ocn 385:
Once again, Stallman presents his political activity as a function of personal confidence. Given the amount of time it has taken him to develop and hone the free software movement's core tenets, Stallman is hesitant to believe he can advance the other causes he supports.
ocn 387:
Chewing a final split end, Stallman suggests paying the check. Be-fore the waiter can take it away, however, Stallman pulls out a white-colored dollar bill and throws it on the pile. The bill looks so clearly counterfeit, I can't help but pick it up and read it. Sure enough, it did not come from the US Mint. Instead of bearing the image of a George Washington or Abe Lincoln, the bill's front side bears the image of a cartoon pig. Instead of the United States of America, the banner above the pig reads, "Untied Status of Avarice." The bill is for zero dollars,【41 RMS: Williams was mistaken to call this bill "counterfeit." It is legal tender, worth zero dollars for payment of any debt. Any U.S. government office will convert it into zero dollars' worth of gold. 】 and when the waiter picks up the money, Stallman makes sure to tug on his sleeve.
ocn 388:
"I added an extra zero to your tip," Stallman says, yet another half smile creeping across his lips.
ocn 390:
"I think that means we're free to go," Stallman says.
ocn 393:
"It was a bit like the Garden of Eden," says Stallman, summing up the lab and its software-sharing ethos in a 1998 Forbes article. "It hadn't occurred to us not to cooperate."【42 See Josh McHugh, "For the Love of Hacking," Forbes (August 10, 1998),
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1998/0810/6203094a.html. 】
ocn 394:
Such mythological descriptions, while extreme, underline an important fact. The ninth floor of 545 Tech Square was more than a workplace for many. For hackers such as Stallman, it was home.
ocn 395:
The word "home" is a weighted term in the Stallman lexicon. In a pointed swipe at his parents, Stallman, to this day, refuses to acknowledge any home before Currier House, the dorm he lived in during his days at Harvard. He has also been known to describe leaving that home in tragicomic terms. Once, while describing his years at Harvard, Stallman said his only regret was getting kicked out. It wasn't until I asked Stallman what precipitated his ouster, that I realized I had walked into a classic Stallman setup line.
ocn 396:
"At Harvard they have this policy where if you pass too many classes they ask you to leave," Stallman says.
ocn 397:
With no dorm and no desire to return to New York, Stallman followed a path blazed by Greenblatt, Gosper, Sussman, and the many other hackers before him. Enrolling at MIT as a grad student, Stallman rented a room in an apartment in nearby Cambridge but soon viewed the AI Lab itself as his de facto home. In a 1986 speech, Stallman recalled his memories of the AI Lab during this period:
ocn 398:
I may have done a little bit more living at the lab than most people, because every year or two for some reason or other I'd have no apartment and I would spend a few months living at the lab. And I've always found it very comfortable, as well as nice and cool in the summer. But it was not at all uncommon to find people falling asleep at the lab, again because of their enthusiasm; you stay up as long as you possibly can hacking, because you just don't want to stop. And then when you're completely exhausted, you climb over to the nearest soft horizontal surface. A very informal atmosphere.【43 See Stallman (1986). 】
ocn 400:
Almost a quarter century after its publication, Stallman still bristles when hearing Weizenbaum's "computer bum" description, discussing it in the present tense as if Weizenbaum himself was still in the room. "He wants people to be just professionals, doing it for the money and wanting to get away from it and forget about it as soon as possible," Stallman says. "What he sees as a normal state of affairs, I see as a tragedy."
ocn 401:
Hacker life, however, was not without tragedy. Stallman characterizes his transition from weekend hacker to full-time AI Lab denizen as a series of painful misfortunes that could only be eased through the euphoria of hacking. As Stallman himself has said, the first misfortune was his graduation from Harvard. Eager to continue his studies in physics, Stallman enrolled as a graduate student at MIT. The choice of schools was a natural one. Not only did it give Stallman the chance to follow the footsteps of great MIT alumni: William Shockley ('36), Richard P. Feynman ('39), and Murray Gell-Mann ('51), it also put him two miles closer to the AI Lab and its new PDP-10 computer. "My attention was going toward programming, but I still thought, well, maybe I can do both," Stallman says.
ocn 402:
Toiling in the fields of graduate-level science by day and programming in the monastic confines of the AI Lab by night, Stallman tried to achieve a perfect balance. The fulcrum of this geek teeter-totter was his weekly outing with the Folk-Dance Club, his one social outlet that guaranteed at least a modicum of interaction with the opposite sex. Near the end of that first year at MIT, however, disaster struck. A knee injury forced Stallman to stop dancing. At first, Stallman viewed the injury as a temporary problem; he went to dancing and chatted with friends while listening to the music he loved. By the end of the summer, when the knee still ached and classes reconvened, Stallman began to worry. "My knee wasn't getting any better," Stallman recalls," which meant I had to expect to be unable to dance, permanently. I was heartbroken."
ocn 403:
With no dorm and no dancing, Stallman's social universe imploded. Dancing was the only situation in which he had found success in meeting women and occasionally even dating them. No more dancing ever was painful enough, but it also meant, it seemed, no more dates ever.
ocn 404:
"I felt basically that I'd lost all my energy," Stallman recalls. "I'd lost my energy to do anything but what was most immediately tempting. The energy to do something else was gone. I was in total despair."
ocn 405:
Stallman retreated from the world even further, focusing entirely on his work at the AI Lab. By October, 1975, he dropped out of MIT and out of physics, never to return to studies. Software hacking, once a hobby, had become his calling.
ocn 406:
Looking back on that period, Stallman sees the transition from full-time student to full-time hacker as inevitable. Sooner or later, he believes, the siren's call of computer hacking would have overpowered his interest in other professional pursuits. "With physics and math, I could never figure out a way to contribute," says Stallman, recalling his struggles prior to the knee injury. "I would have been proud to advance either one of those fields, but I could never see a way to do that. I didn't know where to start. With software, I saw right away how to write things that would run and be useful. The pleasure of that knowledge led me to want to do it more."
ocn 407:
Stallman wasn't the first to equate hacking with pleasure. Many of the hackers who staffed the AI Lab boasted similar, incomplete academic resumes. *** Most had come in pursuing degrees in math or electrical engineering only to surrender their academic careers and professional ambitions to the sheer exhilaration that came with solving problems never before addressed. Like St. Thomas Aquinas, the scholastic known for working so long on his theological summae that he sometimes achieved spiritual visions, hackers reached transcendent internal states through sheer mental focus and physical exhaustion. Although Stallman shunned drugs, like most hackers, he enjoyed the "high" that came near the end of a 20-hour coding bender.
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Perhaps the most enjoyable emotion, however, was the sense of personal fulfillment. When it came to hacking, Stallman was a natural. A childhood's worth of late-night study sessions gave him the ability to work long hours with little sleep. As a social outcast since age 10, he had little difficulty working alone. And as a mathematician with a built-in gift for logic and foresight, Stallman possessed the ability to circumvent design barriers that left most hackers spinning their wheels.
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"He was special," recalls Gerald Sussman, an AI Lab faculty member and (since 1985) board member of the Free Software Foundation. Describing Stallman as a "clear thinker and a clear designer," Sussman invited Stallman to join him in AI research projects in 1973 and 1975, both aimed at making AI programs that could analyze circuits the way human engineers do it. The project required an expert's command of Lisp, a programming language built specifically for AI applications, as well as understanding (supplied by Sussman) of how a human might approach the same task. The 1975 project pioneered an AI technique called dependency-directed backtracking or truth maintenance, which consists of positing tentative assumptions, noticing if they lead to contradictions, and reconsidering the pertinent assumptions if that occurs.
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When he wasn't working on official projects such as these, Stallman devoted his time to pet projects. It was in a hacker's best interest to improve the lab's software infrastructure, and one of Stallman's biggest pet projects during this period was the lab's editor program TECO.
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The story of Stallman's work on TECO during the 1970s is inextricably linked with Stallman's later leadership of the free software movement. It is also a significant stage in the history of computer evolution, so much so that a brief recapitulation of that evolution is necessary. During the 1950s and 1960s, when computers were first appearing at universities, computer programming was an incredibly abstract pursuit. To communicate with the machine, programmers created a series of punch cards, with each card representing an individual software command. Programmers would then hand the cards over to a central system administrator who would then insert them, one by one, into the machine, waiting for the machine to spit out a new set of punch cards, which the programmer would then decipher as output. This process, known as "batch processing," was cumbersome and time consuming. It was also prone to abuses of authority. One of the motivating factors behind hackers' inbred aversion to centralization was the power held by early system operators in dictating which jobs held top priority.
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TECO was a substantial improvement over old editors, but it still had its drawbacks. To create and edit a document, a programmer had to enter a series of commands specifying each edit. It was an abstract process. Unlike modern word processors, which update text with each keystroke, TECO demanded that the user enter an extended series of editing instructions followed by an "end of command string" sequence just to change the text. Over time, a hacker grew proficient enough to make large changes elegantly in one command string, but as Stallman himself would later point out, the process required "a mental skill like that of blindfold chess."【46 See Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor," AI Lab Memo (1979). An updated HTML version of this memo, from which I am quoting, is available at
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html. 】
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TECO wasn't the only full-screen editor floating around the computer world at this time. During a visit to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1976, Stallman encountered an edit program named E. The program contained an internal feature, which allowed a user to update display text after each command keystroke. In the language of 1970s programming, E was one of the first rudimentary WYSIWYG editors. Short for "what you see is what you get," WYSIWYG meant that a user could manipulate the file by moving through the displayed text, as opposed to working through a back-end editor program."【47 See Richard Stallman, "Emacs the Full Screen Editor" (1987),
http://www.lysator.liu.se/history/garb/txt/87-1-emacs.txt. 】
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Impressed by the hack, Stallman looked for ways to expand TECO's functionality in similar fashion upon his return to MIT. He found a TECO feature called Control-R, written by Carl Mikkelson and named after the two-key combination that triggered it. Mikkelson's hack switched TECO from its usual abstract command-execution mode to a more intuitive keystroke-by-keystroke mode. The only flaws were that it used just five lines of the screen and was too inefficient for real use. Stallman reimplemented the feature to use the whole screen efficiently, then extended it in a subtle but significant way. He made it possible to attach TECO command strings, or "macros," to keystrokes. Advanced TECO users already saved macros in files; Stallman's hack made it possible to call them up fast. The result was a user-programmable WYSIWYG editor. "That was the real breakthrough," says Guy Steele, a fellow AI Lab hacker at the time.【48 Ibid. 】
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By Stallman's own recollection, the macro hack touched off an explosion of further innovation. "Everybody and his brother was writing his own collection of redefined screen-editor commands, a command for everything he typically liked to do," Stallman would later recall. "People would pass them around and improve them, making them more powerful and more general. The collections of redefinitions gradually became system programs in their own right."【49 Ibid. 】
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So many people found the macro innovations useful and had incorporated it into their own TECO programs that the TECO editor had become secondary to the macro mania it inspired. "We started to categorize it mentally as a programming language rather than as an editor," Stallman says. Users were experiencing their own pleasure tweaking the software and trading new ideas.【50 Ibid. 】
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Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to solve the problem. He gathered together the four different macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. In the course of implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele say she attracted Stallman's attention.
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For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with Stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out. Looking over another hacker's shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the AI Lab. Stallman, the TECO maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele's work "interesting" and quickly set off to complete it.
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"As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the implementation, and Stallman did the rest," says Steele with a laugh.
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The project's new name, Emacs, came courtesy of Stallman. Short for "editing macros," it signified the evolutionary transcendence that had taken place during the macros explosion two years before. It also took advantage of a gap in the software programming lexicon. Noting a lack of programs on ITS starting with the letter "E," Stallman chose Emacs, making it natural to reference the program with a single letter. Once again, the hacker lust for efficiency had left its mark.【51 Ibid. 】
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Stallman now faced another conundrum: if users made changes but didn't communicate those changes back to the rest of the community, the Tower of Babel effect would simply emerge in other places. Falling back on the hacker doctrine of sharing innovation, Stallman embedded a statement within the source code that set the terms of use. Users were free to modify and redistribute the code on the condition that they gave back all the extensions they made. Stallman called this "joining the Emacs Commune." Just as TECO had become more than a simple editor, Emacs had become more than a simple software program. To Stallman, it was a social contract. In a 1981 memo documenting the project, Stallman spelled out the contract terms. "EMACS," he wrote, "was distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed."【52 See Stallman (1979): #SEC34. 】
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The original Emacs ran only on the PDP-10 computer, but soon users of other computers wanted an Emacs to edit with. The explosive innovation continued throughout the decade, resulting in a host of Emacs-like programs with varying degrees of cross-compatibility. The Emacs Commune's rules did not apply to them, since their code was separate. A few cited their relation to Stallman's original Emacs with humorously recursive names: Sine (Sine is not Emacs), Eine (Eine isnot Emacs), and Zwei (Zwei was Eine initially). A true Emacs had to provide user-programmability like the original; editors with similar keyword commands but without the user-programmability were called "ersatz Emacs." One example was Mince (Mince is Not Complete Emacs).
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While Stallman was developing Emacs in the AI Lab, there were other, unsettling developments elsewhere in the hacker community. Brian Reid's 1979 decision to embed "time bombs" in Scribe, making it possible for Unilogic to limit unpaid user access to the software, was a dark omen to Stallman. "He considered it the most Nazi thing he ever saw in his life," recalls Reid. Despite going on to later Internet fame as the co-creator of the Usenet alt hierarchy, Reid says he still has yet to live down that 1979 decision, at least in Stallman's eyes. "He said that all software should be free and the prospect of charging money for software was a crime against humanity."【53 In a 1996 interview with online magazine MEME , Stallman cited Scribe's sale as irksome, but declined to mention Reid by name. "The problem was nobody censured or punished this student for what he did," Stallman said. "The result was other people got tempted to follow his example." See MEME 2.04,
http://memex.org/meme2-04.html. 】
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Although Stallman had been powerless to head off Reid's sale, he did possess the ability to curtail other forms of behavior deemed contrary to the hacker ethos. As central source-code maintainer for the original Emacs, Stallman began to wield his power for political effect. During his final stages of conflict with the administrators at the Laboratory for Computer Science over password systems, Stallman initiated a software "strike," refusing to send lab members the latest version of Emacs until they rejected the security system on the lab's computers.【54 See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 419. 】 This was more gesture than sanction, since nothing could stop them from installing it themselves. But it got the point across: putting passwords on an ITS system would lead to condemnation and reaction.
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"A lot of people were angry with me, saying I was trying to hold them hostage or blackmail them, which in a sense I was," Stallman would later tell author Steven Levy. "I was engaging in violence against them because I thought they were engaging in violence to everyone at large."【55 Ibid. 】
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Over time, Emacs became a sales tool for the hacker ethic. The flexibility Stallman had built into the software not only encouraged collaboration, it demanded it. Users who didn't keep abreast of the latest developments in Emacs evolution or didn't contribute their contributions back to Stallman ran the risk of missing out on the latest breakthroughs. And the breakthroughs were many. Twenty years later, users of GNU Emacs (a second implementation started in 1984)have modified it for so many different uses - using it as a spreadsheet, calculator, database, and web browser - that later Emacs developers adopted an overflowing sink to represent its versatile functionality. "That's the idea that we wanted to convey," says Stallman. "The amount of stuff it has contained within it is both wonderful and awful at the same time."
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Stallman's AI Lab contemporaries are more charitable. Hal Abelson, an MIT grad student who worked with Sussman during the 1970sand would later assist Stallman as a charter board member of the FreeSoftware Foundation, describes Emacs as "an absolutely brilliant creation." In giving programmers a way to add new software libraries and features without messing up the system, Abelson says, Stallman paved the way for future large-scale collaborative software projects. "Its structure was robust enough that you'd have people all over the world who were loosely collaborating [and] contributing to it," Abelson says. "I don't know if that had been done before."【56 In writing this chapter, I've elected to focus more on the social significance of Emacs than the software significance. To read more about the software side, I recommend Stallman's 1979 memo. I particularly recommend the section titled "Research Through Development of Installed Tools" (#SEC27). Not only is it accessible to the nontechnical reader, it also sheds light on how closely inter-twined Stallman's political philosophies are with his software-design philosophies. A sample excerpt follows:EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight. 】
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Guy Steele expresses similar admiration. Currently a research scientist for Sun Microsystems, he remembers Stallman primarily as a "brilliant programmer with the ability to generate large quantities of relatively bug-free code." Although their personalities didn't exactly mesh, Steele and Stallman collaborated long enough for Steele to get a glimpse of Stallman's intense coding style. He recalls a notable episode in the late 1970s when the two programmers banded together to write the editor's "pretty print" feature. Originally conceived by Steele, pretty print was another keystroke-triggered feature that reformatted Emacs' source code so that it was both more readable and took up less space, further bolstering the program's WYSIWYG qualities. The feature was strategic enough to attract Stallman's active interest, and it wasn't long before Steele wrote that he and Stallman were planning an improved version.
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The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk. By the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to just under 100 lines. "My fingers were on the keyboard the whole time," Steele recalls, "but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it."
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The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. Asa programmer, Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still, something about this session was different. Working with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same time. "My first thought afterward was [that] it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."
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Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.【57 See Richard Stallman, "Initial GNU Announcement" (September 1983). 】
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I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I have implemented one crash proof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines.【59 Ibid. 】
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As fate would have it, Stallman's fanciful GNU Project missed its Thanksgiving launch date. By January, 1984, however, Stallman made good on his promise and fully immersed himself in the world of Unix software development. For a software architect raised on ITS, it was like designing suburban shopping malls instead of Moorish palaces. Even so, building a Unix-like operating system had its hidden advantages. ITS had been powerful, but it also possessed an Achilles' heel: MIT hackers had written it specifically to run on the powerful DEC-built PDP-10 computer. When AI Lab administrators elected to phase out the lab's PDP-10 machine in the early 1980s, the operating system that hackers once likened to a vibrant city became an instant ghost town. Unix, on the other hand, was designed for portability, which made it immune to such dangers. Originally developed by junior scientists at AT&T, the program had slipped out under corporate-management radar, finding a happy home in the cash-strapped world of academic computer systems. With fewer resources than their MIT brethren, Unix developers had customized the software to ride atop a motley assortment of hardware systems, primarily the 16-bit PDP-11 - a machine considered fit for only small tasks by most AI Lab hackers - but later also 32-bit mainframes such as the VAX 11/780. By 1983, a few companies, most notably Sun Microsystems, were developing a more powerful generation of desktop computers, dubbed "workstations," to take advantage of that increasingly ubiquitous operating system on machines comparable in power to the much older PDP-10.
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Stallman's decision to start developing the GNU system was triggered by the end of the ITS system that the AI Lab hackers had nurtured for so long. The demise of ITS, and the AI Lab hacker community which had sustained it, had been a traumatic blow to Stallman. If the Xerox laser printer episode had taught him to recognize the in- justice of proprietary software, the community's death forced him to choose between surrendering to proprietary software and opposing it.
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With few hackers left to mind the shop, programs and machines took longer to fix - or were not fixed at all. Even worse, Stallman says, the lab began to undergo a "demographic change." The hackers who had once formed a vocal minority within the AI Lab were almost gone while "the professors and the students who didn't really love the [PDP-10] were just as numerous as before."【61 See Richard Stallman (1986). 】
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"Without hackers to maintain the system, [faculty members] said,'We're going to have a disaster; we must have commercial software,'" Stallman would recall a few years later. "They said, 'We can expect the company to maintain it.' It proved that they were utterly wrong, but that's what they did."【62 Ibid. 】
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At first, hackers viewed the Twenex system as yet another authoritarian symbol begging to be subverted. The system's name itself was a protest. Officially dubbed TOPS-20 by DEC, it was named as a successor to TOPS-10, a proprietary operating system DEC distributed for the PDP-10. But TOPS-20 was not based on TOPS-10. It was derived from the Tenex system which Bolt Beranek Newmanhad developed for the PDP-10.【63 Multiple sources: see Richard Stallman interview, Gerald Sussman email, and Jargon File 3.0.0 at
http://catb.org/jargon/html/T/TWENEX.html. 】 Stallman, the hacker who coined the Twenex term, says he came up with the name as a way to avoid using the TOPS-20 name. "The system was far from tops, so there was noway I was going to call it that," Stallman recalls. "So I decided to insert a 'w' in the Tenex name and call it Twenex."
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Cadging passwords, and applying the debugger during startup, Stallman successfully foiled these attempts. After the second foiled" coup d'état," Stallman issued an alert to all the AI Lab personnel.【65 See Richard Stallman (1986). 】
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"There has been another attempt to seize power," Stallman wrote. "So far, the aristocratic forces have been defeated." To protect his identity, Stallman signed the message "Radio Free OZ."
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The disguise was a thin one at best. By 1982, Stallman's aversion to passwords and secrecy had become so well known that users outside the AI Laboratory were using his account from around the ARPAnet - the research-funded computer network that would serve as a foundation for today's Internet. One such "tourist" during the early 1980s was Don Hopkins, a California programmer who learned through the hacking grapevine that all an outsider needed to do to gain access to MIT's vaunted ITS system was to log in under the initials RMS and enter the same three-letter monogram when the system requested a password.
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This so-called "tourist" policy, which had been openly tolerated by MIT management during the ITS years,【66 See "MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy,"
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html. 】 fell by the wayside when Oz became the lab's primary link to the ARPAnet. At first, Stallman continued his policy of repeating his login ID as a password so outside users could have access through his account. Over time, however, Oz's fragility prompted administrators to bar outsiders who, through sheer accident or malicious intent, might bring down the system. When those same administrators eventually demanded that Stall-man stop publishing his password, Stallman, citing personal ethics, instead ceased using the Oz system altogether.【67 See Richard Stallman (1986). 】
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"[When] passwords first appeared at the MIT AI Lab I [decided] to follow my belief that there should be no passwords," Stallman would later say. "Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime."【68 Ibid. 】
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Stallman's refusal to bow before the great and powerful Oz symbolized the growing tension between hackers and AI Lab management during the early 1980s. This tension paled in comparison to the conflict that raged within the hacker community itself. By the time the Dec system 20 arrived, the hacker community was divided into two camps, LMI and Symbolics.
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Symbolics, with its outside investment, recruited various AI Lab hackers and set some of them working on improving parts of the Lisp Machine operating system outside the auspices of the AI Lab. By the end of 1980, the company had hired 14 AI Lab staffers as part-time consultants to develop its version of the Lisp Machine. The remaining few, apart from Stallman, worked for LMI.【69 See Steve Levy, Hackers, page 423. 】 Stallman, preferring the unpressured life at the AI Lab and not wishing to take a side, chose to join neither company.
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On March 16, 1982, a date Stallman remembers well because it was his birthday, Symbolics executives ended the gentleman's agreement. The motive was to attack LMI. LMI had fewer hackers, and fewer staff in general, so the Symbolics executives thought that LMI was getting the main benefit of sharing the system improvements. By ending the sharing of system code, they hoped to wipe out LMI. So they decided to enforce the letter of the license. Instead of contributing their improvements to the MIT version of the system, which LMI could use, they provided MIT with a copy of the Symbolics version of the system for users at MIT to run. Anyone using it would provide the service of testing only to Symbolics, and if he made improvements, most likely they too would only be useful for Symbolics.
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When Symbolics executives noticed that their latest features were still appearing in the MIT Lisp Machine system and, by extension, the LMI Lisp machine, they were not pleased. Stallman knew what copyright law required, and was rewriting the features from scratch.He took advantage of the opportunity to read the source code Symbolics supplied to MIT, so as to understand the problems and fixes, and then made sure to write his changes in a totally different way. But the Symbolics executives didn't believe this. They installed a "spy" program on Stallman's computer terminal looking for evidence against him. However, when they took their case to MIT administration, around the start of 1983, they had little evidence to present: a dozen places in the sources where both versions had been changed and appeared similar.
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When the AI Lab administrators showed Stallman Symbolics' supposed evidence, he refuted it, showing that the similarities were actually held over from before the fork. Then he turned the logic around:if, after the thousands of lines he had written, Symbolics could produce no better evidence than this, it demonstrated that Stallman's diligent efforts to avoid copying were effective. The AI Lab approved Stallman's work, which he continued till the end of 1983.【70 The Brain Makers by H. P. Newquist says inaccurately that the AI Lab told Stallman to stay away from the Lisp Machine project. 】
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Stallman did make a change in his practices, though. "Just to be ultra safe, I no longer read their source code [for new features and major changes]. I used only the documentation and wrote the code from that." For the biggest new features, rather than wait for Symbolics to release documentation, he designed them on his own; later, when the Symbolics documentation appeared, he added compatibility with Symbolics' interface for the feature. Then he read Symbolics' source code changes to find minor bugs they had fixed, and fixed each of them differently.
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The experience solidified Stallman's resolve. As Stallman designed replacements for Symbolics' new features, he also enlisted members of the AI Lab to keep using the MIT system, so as to provide a continuous stream of bug reports. MIT continued giving LMI direct access to the changes. "I was going to punish Symbolics if it was the last thing I did," Stallman says. Such statements are revealing. Not only do they shed light on Stallman's non pacifist nature, they also reflect the intense level of emotion triggered by the conflict.
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The level of despair owed much to what Stallman viewed as the "destruction" of his "home" - i.e., the demise of the AI Lab's close-knit hacker subculture. In a later email interview with Levy, Stall-man would liken himself to the historical figure Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi, a Pacific Northwest tribe wiped out during the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s. The analogy casts Stallman's survival in epic, almost mythical, terms.【71 Steven Levy in Hackers had this period in mind when he described Stallman as the "last of the true hackers," but his intended meaning was not what you might think. Levy used the term "true hackers" to distinguish the MIT hacker community from two other hacker communities described later in the book, to which he gave other names. When this community had dissolved, leaving only Stallman, he therefore became the last of the "true hackers." Levy did not mean that nobody else was truly a hacker, but people tend to interpret his words that way, especially those who see them without reading the explanations in Levy's book. Stallman has never described himself using those words of Levy's. 】 The hackers who worked for Symbolics saw it differently. Instead of seeing Symbolics as an ex-terminating force, many of Stallman's colleagues saw it as a belated bid for relevance. In commercializing the Lisp Machine, the company pushed hacker principles of engineer-driven software design out of the ivory-tower confines of the AI Lab and into the corporate market place where manager-driven design principles held sway. Rather than viewing Stallman as a holdout, many hackers saw him as the representative of an obsolete practice.
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Personal hostilities also affected the situation. Even before Symbolics hired away most of the AI Lab's hacker staff, Stallman says many of the hackers who later joined Symbolics were shunning him. "I was no longer getting invited to go to Chinatown," Stallman recalls. "The custom started by Greenblatt was that if you went out to dinner, you went around or sent a message asking anybody at the lab if they also wanted to go. Sometime around 1980-1981, I stopped getting asked. They were not only not inviting me, but one person later confessed that he had been pressured to lie to me to keep their going away to dinner without me a secret."
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Although Stallman felt hurt by this petty form of ostracism, there was nothing to be done about it. The Symbolics ultimatum changed the matter from a personal rejection to a broader injustice. When Symbolics excluded its source changes from redistribution, as a means to defeat its rival, Stallman determined to thwart Symbolics' goal. By holing up in his MIT offices and writing equivalents for each new software feature and fix, he gave users of the MIT system, including LMI customers, access to the same features as Symbolics users.
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It also guaranteed Stallman's legendary status within the hacker community. Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics programmers - a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself - still stands as one of the major human accomplishments of the Information Age, or of any age for that matter. Dubbing it a "master hack" and Stallman himself a "virtual John Henry of computer code," author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging respect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over Stallman's output during this period:
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I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad (probably not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and I would still say, "But wait a minute - Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!"【72 See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 426 】
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For Stallman, the months spent playing catch up with Symbolics evoke a mixture of pride and profound sadness. As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal whose father had served in World War II, Stallman is no pacifist. In many ways, the Symbolics war offered the rite of passage toward which Stallman had been careening ever since joining the AI Lab staff a decade before. At the same time, however, it coincided with the traumatic destruction of the AI Lab hacker culture that had nurtured Stallman since his teenage years. One day, while taking a break from writing code, Stallman experienced a traumatic moment passing through the lab's equipment room. There, Stallman encountered the hulking, unused frame of the PDP-10 machine. Startled by the dormant lights, lights that once actively blinked out a silent code indicating the status of the internal program, Stallman says the emotional impact was not unlike coming across a beloved family member's well-preserved corpse.
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Stallman would have little opportunity to mourn. The Lisp Ma-chine, despite all the furor it invoked and all the labor that had gone into making it, was merely a sideshow to the large battles in the technology marketplace. The relentless pace of computer miniaturization was bringing in newer, more powerful microprocessors that would soon incorporate the machine's hardware and software capabilities like a modern metropolis swallowing up an ancient desert village.
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One of the most notorious of these programmers was Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout two years Stallman's junior. Although Stallman didn't know it at the time, seven years before sending out his message to the net.unix-wizards newsgroup, Gates, a budding entrepreneur and general partner with the Albuquerque-based software firm Micro-Soft, later spelled as Microsoft, had sent out his own open letter to the software-developer community. Written in response to the PC users copying Micro-Soft's software programs, Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists" had excoriated the notion of communal software development.
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For a man who had spent the entire 1960s as a throwback to the 1950s, Stallman didn't mind living out of step with his peers. As a programmer used to working with the best machines and the best software, however, Stallman faced what he could only describe as a "stark moral choice": either swallow his ethical objection for "proprietary" software - the term Stallman and his fellow hackers used to describe any program that carried copyright terms or an end-user license that restricted copying and modification - or dedicate his life to building an alternate, non-proprietary system of software programs. After his two-year battle with Symbolics, Stallman felt confident enough to undertake the latter option. "I suppose I could have stopped working
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on computers altogether," Stallman says. "I had no special skills, but I'm sure I could have become a waiter. Not at a fancy restaurant, probably, but I could've been a waiter somewhere."
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Being a waiter - i.e., dropping out of programming altogether -would have meant completely giving up an activity, computer programming, that had given him so much pleasure. Looking back on his life since moving to Cambridge, Stallman finds it easy to identify lengthy periods when software programming provided the only pleasure. Rather than drop out, Stallman decided to stick it out.
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An Atheist, Stallman rejects notions such as fate, karma, or a divine calling in life. Nevertheless, he does feel that the decision to shun proprietary software and build an operating system to help others do the same was a natural one. After all, it was Stallman's own personal combination of stubbornness, foresight, and coding virtuosity that led him to consider a fork in the road most others didn't know existed. In his article, "The GNU Project," Stallman affirms agreement with the ideals encapsulated in the words of the Jewish sage Hillel:
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If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?【74 See ‹http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html›. Stallman adds his own footnote to this statement, writing, "As an Atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said. 】
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Speaking to audiences, Stallman avoids the religious route and ex-presses the decision in pragmatic terms. "I asked myself: what could I, an operating-system developer, do to improve the situation? It wasn't until I examined the question for a while that I realized an operating-system developer was exactly what was needed to solve the problem."
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Once he recognized that, Stallman says, everything else "fell into place." In 1983, MIT was acquiring second-generation Lisp Machines from Symbolics, on which the MIT Lisp Machine system could not possibly run. Once most of the MIT machines were replaced, he would be unable to continue maintaining that system effectively for lack of users' bug reports. He would have to stop. But he also wanted to stop. The MIT Lisp Machine system was not free software: even though users could get the source code, they could not redistribute it freely. Meanwhile, the goal of continuing the MIT system had already been achieved: LMI had survived and was developing software on its own.
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Stallman didn't want to spend his whole life punishing those who had destroyed his old community. He wanted to build a new one. He decided to denounce software that would require him to compromise his ethical beliefs, and devote his life to the creation of programs that would make it easier for him and others to escape from it. Pledging to build a free software operating system "or die trying - of old age, of course," Stallman quips, he resigned from the MIT staff in January, 1984, to build GNU.
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The resignation distanced Stallman's work from the legal auspices of MIT. Still, Stallman had enough friends and allies within the AI Lab to continue using the facilities, and later his own office. He also had the ability to secure outside consulting gigs to underwrite the early stages of the GNU Project. In resigning from MIT, however, Stallman negated any debate about conflict of interest or Institute ownership of the software. The man whose early adulthood fear of social isolation had driven him deeper and deeper into the AI Lab's embrace was now building a legal firewall between himself and that environment.
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For the first few months, Stallman operated in isolation from the Unix community as well. Although his announcement to the net.unix-wizards group had attracted sympathetic responses, few volunteers signed on to join the crusade in its early stages.
ocn 502:
Aware that the job was enormous, Stallman decided to try to reuse existing free software wherever possible. So he began looking for existing free programs and tools that could be converted into GNU programs and tools. One of the first candidates was a compiler named VUCK, which converted programs written in the popular C programming language into machine-runnable code. Translated from the Dutch, the program's acronym stood for the Free University Compiler Kit. Optimistic, Stallman asked the program's author if the program was free. When the author informed him that the words "Free University" were a reference to the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and that the program was not free, Stallman was chagrined.
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"He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not," recalls Stallman. He had not only refused to help - he suggested Stallman drop his plan to develop GNU, and instead write some add-ons to boost sales of VUCK, in return for a share of the profits. "I therefore decided that my first program for the GNU Project would be a multi-language, multi-platform compiler." 19【75 See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 65. 】
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Instead of VUCK, Stallman found the Pastel compiler ("off-color Pascal"), written by programmers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. According to what they said when they gave him a copy, the compiler was free to copy and modify. Unfortunately, the program was unsuitable for the job, because its memory requirements were enormous. It parsed the entire input file in core memory, then retained all the internal data until it finished compiling the file. On mainframe systems this design had been forgivable. On Unix systems it was a crippling barrier, since even 32-bit machines that ran Unix were often unable to provide so much memory to a program. Stallman made substantial progress at first, building a C-compatible front end to the compiler and testing it on the larger Vax, whose system could handle large memory spaces. When he tried porting the system to the 68010, and investigated why it crashed, he discovered the memory size problem, and concluded he would have to build a totally new compiler from scratch. Stallman eventually did this, producing the GNU C Compiler or GCC. But it was not clear in 1984 what to do about the compiler, so he decided to let those plans gel while turning his attention to other parts of GNU.
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In September of 1984, thus, Stallman began development of a GNU version of Emacs, the replacement for the program he had been supervising for a decade. Within the Unix community, the two native editor programs were vi, written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, and ed, written by Bell Labs scientist (and Unix co-creator) Ken Thompson. Both were useful and popular, but neither offered the endlessly expandable nature of Emacs.
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Looking back, Stallman says he didn't view the decision in strategic terms. "I wanted an Emacs, and I had a good opportunity to develop one."
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Once again, Stallman had found existing code with which he hoped to save time. In writing a Unix version of Emacs, Stallman was soon following the footsteps of Carnegie Mellon graduate student James Gosling, author of a C-based version dubbed Gosling Emacs or Gosmacs. Gosling's version of Emacs included an interpreter for a simplified offshoot of the Lisp language, called Mocklisp. Although Gosling had put Gosmacs under copyright and had sold the rights to UniPress, a privately held software company, Stallman received the assurances of a fellow developer who had participated in early Gosmacs development. According to the developer, Gosling, while a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon, had given him permission by email to distribute his own version of Gosmacs in exchange for his contribution to the code.
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At first Stallman thought he would change only the user-level commands, to implement full compatibility with the original PDP-10Emacs. However, when he found how weak Mocklisp was in comparison with real Lisp, he felt compelled to replace it with a true Lisp system. This made it natural to rewrite most of the higher-level code of Gosmacs in a completely different way, taking advantage of the greater power and flexible data structures of Lisp. By mid-1985, in GNU Emacs as released on the Internet, only a few files still had code remaining from Gosmacs.
ocn 509:
Then UniPress caught wind of Stallman's project, and denied that the other developer had received permission to distribute his own version of Gosmacs. He could not find a copy of the old email to defend his claim. Stallman eliminated this problem by writing replacements for the few modules that remained from Gosmacs.
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Nevertheless, the notion of developers selling off software rights - indeed, the very notion of developers having such powers to sell in the first place - rankled Stallman. In a 1986 speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute, Stallman cited the UniPress incident as yet another example of the dangers associated with proprietary software.
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"Sometimes I think that perhaps one of the best things I could do with my life is find a gigantic pile of proprietary software that was a trade secret, and start handing out copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be a trade secret any more," said Stallman. "Perhaps that would be a much more efficient way for me to give people new free software than actually writing it myself; but everyone is too cowardly to even take it."【76 See Richard Stallman (1986). 】
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Despite the stress it generated, the dispute over Gosling's code would assist both Stallman and the free software movement in the longterm. It would force Stallman to address the weaknesses of the Emacs Commune and the informal trust system that had allowed problematic offshoots to emerge. It would also force Stallman to sharpen the free software movement's political objectives. Following the release of GNU Emacs in 1985, Stallman issued The GNU Manifesto, an expansion of the original announcement posted in September, 1983. Stallman included within the document a lengthy section devoted to the many arguments used by commercial and academic programmers to justify the proliferation of proprietary software programs. One argument, "Don't programmers deserve a reward for their creativity," earned a response encapsulating Stallman's anger over the recent Gosling Emacs episode:
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"If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution," Stallman wrote. "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [ sic ] as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs."【77 See Richard Stallman, The GNU Manifesto (1985),
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/ manifesto.html. 】
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With the release of GNU Emacs, the GNU Project finally had code to show. It also had the burdens of any software-based enterprise. As more and more Unix developers began playing with the software, money, gifts, and requests for tapes began to pour in. To address the business side of the GNU Project, Stallman drafted a few of his colleagues and formed the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a non-profit organization dedicated to speeding the GNU Project towards its goal. With Stallman as president and various friends and hacker allies as board members, the FSF helped provide a corporate face for the GNU Project.
ocn 515:
Robert Chassell, a programmer then working at Lisp Machines, Inc., became one of five charter board members at the Free Software Foundation following a dinner conversation with Stallman. Chassell also served as the organization's treasurer, a role that started small but quickly grew.
ocn 517:
In addition to providing a face, the Free Software Foundation provided a center of gravity for other disenchanted programmers. The Unix market that had seemed so collegial even at the time of Stallman's initial GNU announcement was becoming increasingly competitive. In an attempt to tighten their hold on customers, companies were starting to deny users access to Unix source code, a trend that only speeded the number of inquiries into ongoing GNU software projects.
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The Unix wizards who once regarded Stallman as a noisy kook were now beginning to see him as a software prophet or a software Cassandra, according as they felt hope or despair over escaping the problem she identified.
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Forced to watch his work sink into the mire while his erstwhile employer struggled through bankruptcy, Chassell says he felt a hint of the anger that drove Stallman to fits of apoplexy. "The main clarity, for me, was the sense that if you want to have a decent life, you don't want to have bits of it closed off," Chassell says. "This whole idea of having the freedom to go in and to fix something and modify it, whatever it may be, it really makes a difference. It makes one think happily that after you've lived a few years that what you've done is worthwhile. Because otherwise it just gets taken away and thrown out or abandoned or, at the very least, you no longer have any relation to it. It's like losing a bit of your life."
ocn 527:
It's not exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find Richard Stallman, a man who, when taking in the beautiful view of the nearby Maui Channel through the picture windows of a staffer's office, mutters a terse critique: "Too much sun." Still, as an emissary from one computing paradise to another, Stallman has a message to deliver, even if it means subjecting his hacker eyes to painful solar glare.
ocn 528:
The conference room is already full by the time I arrive to catch Stallman's speech. The gender breakdown is a little better than at the New York speech, 85% male, 15% female, but not by much. About half of the audience members wear khaki pants and logo-encrusted golf shirts. The other half seems to have gone native. Dressed in the gaudy flower-print shirts so popular in this corner of the world, their faces area deep shade of ochre. The only residual indication of geek status are the gadgets: Nokia cell phones, Palm Pilots, and Sony VAIO laptops.
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Needless to say, Stallman, who stands in front of the room dressed in plain blue T-shirt, brown polyester slacks, and white socks, sticks out like a sore thumb. The fluorescent lights of the conference room help bring out the unhealthy color of his sun-starved skin.【78 RMS: The idea that skin can be "sun-starved" or that paleness is "unhealthy"is dangerous misinformation; staying out of the sun can't hurt you as long as you have enough Vitamin D. What damages the skin, and can even kill you, is excessive exposure to sunlight. 】 His beard and hair are enough to trigger beads of sweat on even the coolest Hawaiian neck. Short of having the words "mainlander" tattooed on his forehead, Stallman couldn't look more alien if he tried. [RMS: Is there something bad about looking different from others?]
ocn 530:
As Stallman putters around the front of the room, a few audience members wearing T-shirts with the logo of the Maui FreeBSD Users Group (MFUG) race to set up camera and audio equipment. FreeBSD, a free software offshoot of the Berkeley Software Distribution, the venerable 1970s academic version of Unix, is technically a competitor to the GNU/Linux operating system. Still, in the hacking world, Stallman speeches are documented with a fervor reminiscent of the Grateful Dead and its legendary army of amateur archivists. As the local free software heads, it's up to the MFUG members to make sure fellow programmers in Hamburg, Mumbai, and Novosibirsk don't miss out on the latest pearls of RMS wisdom.
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The analogy to the Grateful Dead is apt. Often, when describing the business opportunities inherent within the free software model, Stallman has held up the Grateful Dead as an example. In refusing to restrict fans' ability to record live concerts, the Grateful Dead became more than a rock group. They became the center of a tribal community dedicated to Grateful Dead music. Over time, that tribal community became so large and so devoted that the band shunned record contracts and supported itself solely through musical tours and live appearances. In 1994, the band's last year as a touring act, the Grateful Dead drew $52 million in gate receipts alone.【79 See "Grateful Dead Time Capsule: 1985-1995 North American Tour Grosses,"
http://www.dead101.com/1197.htm. 】
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While few software companies have been able to match that success, the tribal aspect of the free software community is one reason many in the latter half of the 1990s started to accept the notion that publishing software source code might be a good thing. Hoping to build their own loyal followings, companies such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett Packard have come to accept the letter, if not the spirit, of the Stallman free software message. Describing the GPL as the information-technology industry's Magna Carta, ZDNet software columnist Evan Leibovitch sees the growing affection for all things GNU as more than just a trend. "This societal shift is letting users take back control of their futures," Leibovitch writes. "Just as the Magna Carta gave rights to British subjects, the GPL enforces consumer rights and freedoms on behalf of the users of computer software."【80 See Evan Leibovitch, "Who's Afraid of Big Bad Wolves," ZDNet Tech Update (December 15, 2000),
http://www.zdnet.com/news/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolves/298394. 】
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The tribal aspect of the free software community also helps explain why 40-odd programmers, who might otherwise be working on physics projects or surfing the Web for windsurfing buoy reports, have packed into a conference room to hear Stallman speak.
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Unlike the New York speech, Stallman gets no introduction. He also offers no self-introduction. When the FreeBSD people finally get their equipment up and running, Stallman simply steps forward, starts speaking, and steamrolls over every other voice in the room.
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"Most of the time when people consider the question of what rules society should have for using software, the people considering it are from software companies, and they consider the question from a self-serving perspective," says Stallman, opening his speech. "What rules can we impose on everybody else so they have to pay us lots of money? I had the good fortune in the 1970s to be part of a community of programmers who shared software. And because of this I always like to look at the same issue from a different direction to ask: what kind of rules make possible a good society that is good for the people who are in it? And therefore I reach completely different answers."
ocn 536:
Once again, Stallman quickly segues into the parable of the Xerox laser printer, taking a moment to deliver the same dramatic finger-pointing gestures to the crowd. He also devotes a minute or two to the GNU/Linux name.
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"Some people say to me, 'Why make such a fuss about getting credit for this system? After all, the important thing is the job is done, not whether you get recognition for it.' Well, this would be wise advice if it were true. But the job wasn't to build an operating system; the job is to spread freedom to the users of computers. And to do that we have to make it possible to do everything with computers in freedom."【81 For narrative purposes, I have hesitated to go in-depth when describing Stallman's full definition of software "freedom." The GNU Project web site lists four fundamental components:
_* The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
_* The freedom to study the program's source code, and change it so that the program does what you wish (freedom 1).
_* The freedom to redistribute copies of the program so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
_* The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, so that the whole community can benefit from them (freedom 3). For more information, please visit "The Free Software Definition" at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. 】
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Adds Stallman, "There's a lot more work to do."
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For some in the audience, this is old material. For others, it's a little arcane. When a member of the golf-shirt contingent starts dozing off, Stallman stops the speech and asks somebody to wake the person up.
ocn 540:
"Somebody once said my voice was so soothing, he asked if I was some kind of healer," says Stallman, drawing a quick laugh from the crowd. "I guess that probably means I can help you drift gently into a blissful, relaxing sleep. And some of you might need that. I guess I shouldn't object if you do. If you need to sleep, by all means do."
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For Stallman, the software-patent issue dramatizes the need for eternal hacker vigilance. It also underlines the importance of stressing the political benefits of free software programs over the competitive benefits. Stallman says competitive performance and price, two areas where free software operating systems such as GNU/Linux and FreeBSD already hold a distinct advantage over their proprietary counterparts, are side issues compared to the large issues of user and developer freedom.
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That's not to say the term "open source" doesn't have its political implications. For open source advocates, the term open source serves two purposes. First, it eliminates the confusion associated with the word "free," a word many businesses interpret as meaning "zero cost." Second, it allows companies to examine the free software phenomenon on a technological, rather than ethical, basis. Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative and one of the leading hackers to endorse the term, explained his refusal to follow Stallman's political path in a 1999 essay, titled "Shut Up and Show Them the Code":
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Stallman, however, rejects Raymond's premises:
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But the principal flaw in the open source argument, according to Stallman, is that it leads to weaker conclusions. It convinces many users to run some programs which are free, but does not offer the many reason to migrate entirely to free software. This partially gives them freedom, but does not teach them to recognize it and value it as such, so they remain likely to let it drop and lose it. For instance, what happens when the improvement of free software is blocked by a patent?
ocn 557:
Most open source advocates are equally, if not more, vociferous as Stallman when it comes to opposing software patents. So too are most proprietary software developers, since patents threaten their projects too. However, pointing to software patents' tendency to put areas of software functionality off limits, Stallman contrasts what the free software idea and the open source idea imply about such cases.
ocn 558:
"It's not because we don't have the talent to make better software," says Stallman. "It's because we don't have the right. Somebody has prohibited us from serving the public. So what's going to happen when users encounter these gaps in free software? Well, if they have been persuaded by the open source movement that these freedoms are good because they lead to more-powerful reliable software, they're likely to say, 'You didn't deliver what you promised. This software's not more powerful. It's missing this feature. You lied to me.' But if they have come to agree with the free software movement, that the freedom is important in itself, then they will say, 'How dare those people stop me from having this feature and my freedom too.' And with that kind of response, we may survive the hits that we're going to take as these patents explode."
ocn 559:
Watching Stallman deliver his political message in person, it is hard to see anything confusing or repellent. Stallman's appearance may seem off-putting, but his message is logical. When an audience member asks if, in shunning proprietary software, free software proponents lose the ability to keep up with the latest technological advancements, Stallman answers the question in terms of his own personal beliefs. "I think that freedom is more important than mere technical advance," he says. "I would always choose a less advanced free program rather than a more advanced non free program, because I won't give up my freedom for something like that [advance]. My rule is, if I can't share it with you, I won't take it."
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In the minds of those who assume ethics means religion, such answers reinforce the quasi-religious nature of the Stallman message. However, unlike a Jew keeping kosher or a Mormon refusing to drink alcohol, Stallman is not obeying a commandment, but simply refusing to cede his freedom. His speech explains the practical requisites for doing so: a proprietary program takes away your freedom, so if you want freedom, you need to reject the program.
ocn 561:
Stallman paints his decision to use free software in place of proprietary in the color of a personal belief he hopes others will come to share. As software evangelists go, Stallman avoids forcing those beliefs down listeners' throats. Then again, a listener rarely leaves a Stallman speech not knowing where the true path to software righteousness lies.
ocn 562:
As if to drive home this message, Stallman punctuates his speech with an unusual ritual. Pulling a black robe out of a plastic grocery bag, Stallman puts it on. Then he pulls out a reflective brown computer disk and places it on his head. The crowd lets out a startled laugh.
ocn 563:
"I am St. IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs," says Stallman, raising his right hand in mock-blessing. "I bless your computer, my child."
ocn 564:
The laughter turns into full-blown applause after a few seconds. As audience members clap, the computer disk on Stallman's head catches the glare of an overhead light, eliciting a perfect halo effect. In the blink of an eye, Stallman resembles a Russian religious icon.
ocn 565:
[free_as_in_freedom_2_02_rms_st_ignucius.png]
Stallman dressed as St. IGNUcius. The photo was taken by Stian Eikeland in Bergen, Norway on February 19, 2009.
ocn 566:
"Emacs was initially a text editor," says Stallman, explaining the getup. "Eventually it became a way of life for many and a religion for some. We call this religion the Church of Emacs."
ocn 567:
The skit is a lighthearted moment of self-parody, a humorous return-jab at the many people who might see Stallman's form of software asceticism as religious fanaticism in disguise. It is also the sound of the other shoe dropping - loudly. It's as if, in donning his robe and halo, Stallman is finally letting listeners off the hook, saying, "It's OK to laugh. I know I'm weird." [RMS: To laugh at someone for being weird is boorish, and it is not my intention to excuse that. But I hope people will laugh at my St. IGNUcius comedy routine.]
ocn 568:
Discussing the St. IGNUcius persona afterward, Stallman says he first came up with it in 1996, long after the creation of Emacs but well before the emergence of the "open source" term and the struggle for hacker-community leadership that precipitated it. At the time, Stallman says, he wanted a way to "poke fun at himself," to remind listeners that, though stubborn, Stallman was not the fanatic some made him out to be. It was only later, Stallman adds, that others seized the persona as a convenient way to play up his reputation as software ideologue, as Eric Raymond did in an 1999 interview with the Linux.com web site:
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Stallman takes issue with the Raymond analysis. "It's simply my way of making fun of myself," he says. "The fact that others see it as anything more than that is a reflection of their agenda, not mine."
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That said, Stallman does admit to being a ham. "Are you kidding?" he says at one point. "I love being the center of attention." To facilitate that process, Stallman says he once enrolled in Toastmasters, an organization that helps members bolster their public-speaking skills and one Stallman recommends highly to others. He possesses a stage presence that would be the envy of most theatrical performers and feels a link to vaudevillians of years past. A few days after the Maui High Performance Computing Center speech, I allude to the 1999 LinuxWorld performance and ask Stallman if he has a Groucho Marx complex - i.e., the unwillingness to belong to any club that would have him as a member.【85 RMS: Williams misinterprets Groucho's famous remark by treating it as psychological. It was intended as a jab at the overt antisemitism of many clubs, which was why they would refuse him as a member. I did not understand this either until my mother explained it to me. Williams and I grew up when bigotry had gone underground, and there was no need to veil criticism of bigotry in humor as Groucho did. 】 Stallman's response is immediate: "No, but I admire Groucho Marx in a lot of ways and certainly have been in some things I say inspired by him. But then I've also been inspired in some ways by Harpo."
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The Groucho Marx influence is certainly evident in Stallman's lifelong fondness for punning. Then again, punning and wordplay are common hacker traits. Perhaps the most Groucho-like aspect of Stallman's personality, however, is the deadpan manner in which the puns are delivered. Most come so stealthily - without even the hint of a raised eyebrow or upturned smile - you almost have to wonder if Stal-man's laughing at his audience more than the audience is laughing at him.
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Watching members of the Maui High Performance Computer Center laugh at the St. IGNUcius parody, such concerns evaporate. While not exactly a standup act, Stallman certainly possesses the chops to keep a roomful of engineers in stitches. "To be a saint in the Church of Emacs does not require celibacy, but it does require making a commitment to living a life of moral purity," he tells the Maui audience. "You must exorcise the evil proprietary operating systems from all your computers, and then install a wholly [holy] free operating system. And then you must install only free software on top of that. If you make this commitment and live by it, then you too will be a saint in the Church of Emacs, and you too may have a halo."
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The St. IGNUcius skit ends with a brief inside joke. On most Unix systems and Unix-related offshoots, the primary competitor program to Emacs is vi, pronounced vee-eye, a text-editing program developed by former UC Berkeley student and current Sun Microsystems chief scientist, Bill Joy. Before doffing his "halo," Stallman pokes fun at the rival program. "People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi," he says. "Using a free version of vi is not a sin;it is a penance. So happy hacking."【86 The service of the Church of Emacs has developed further since 2001. Users can now join the Church by reciting the Confession of the Faith: "There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels." Stallman sometimes mentions the religious ceremony known as the Foobar Mitzvah, the Great Schism between various rival versions of Emacs, and the cult of the Virgin of Emacs (which refers to any person that has not yet learned to use Emacs). In addition, "vi vi vi" has been identified as the Editor of the Beast. 】
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After a brief question-and-answer session, audience members gather around Stallman. A few ask for autographs. "I'll sign this," says Stallman, holding up one woman's print out of the GNU General Public License, "but only if you promise me to use the term GNU/Linux instead of Linux" (when referring to the system), "and tell all your friends to do likewise."
ocn 576:
The comment merely confirms a private observation. Unlike other stage performers and political figures, Stallman has no "off" mode. Aside from the St. IGNUcius character, the ideologue you see on stage is the ideologue you meet backstage. Later that evening, during a dinner conversation in which a programmer mentions his affinity for "open source" programs, Stallman, between bites, upbraids his table-mate: "You mean free software. That's the proper way to refer to it."
ocn 577:
During the question-and-answer session, Stallman admits to playing the pedagogue at times. "There are many people who say, 'Well, first let's invite people to join the community, and then let's teach them about freedom.' And that could be a reasonable strategy, but what we have is almost everybody's inviting people to join the community, and hardly anybody's teaching them about freedom once they come in."
ocn 578:
The result, Stallman says, is something akin to a third-world city. "You have millions of people moving in and building shantytowns, but nobody's working on step two: getting them out of those shantytowns. If you think talking about software freedom is a good strategy, please join in doing step two. There are plenty working on step one. We need more people working on step two."
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Working on "step two" means driving home the issue that freedom, not acceptance, is the root issue of the free software movement. Those who hope to reform the proprietary software industry from the inside are on a fool's errand. "Change from the inside is risky," Stallman stays. "Unless you're working at the level of a Gorbachev, you're going to be neutralized."
ocn 580:
Hands pop up. Stallman points to a member of the golf shirt-wearing contingent. "Without patents, how would you suggest dealing with commercial espionage?"
ocn 581:
"Well, those two questions have nothing to do with each other, really," says Stallman.
ocn 583:
Stallman's recoils as if hit by a poisonous spray. "Wait a second," Stallman says. "Steal? I'm sorry, there's so much prejudice in that statement that the only thing I can say is that I reject that prejudice." Then he turns to the substance of the question. "Companies that develop non-free software and other things keep lots and lots of trade secrets, and so that's not really likely to change. In the old days -even in the 1980s - for the most part programmers were not aware that there were even software patents and were paying no attention to them. What happened was that people published the interesting ideas, and if they were not in the free software movement, they kept secret the little details. And now they patent those broad ideas and keep secret the little details. So as far as what you're describing, patents really make no difference to it one way or another."
ocn 585:
"But it does," Stallman says. "Their publication is telling you that this is an idea that's off limits to the rest of the community for 20 years. And what the hell good is that? Besides, they've written it in such a hard way to read, both to obfuscate the idea and to make the patent as broad as possible, that it's basically useless looking at the published information [in the patent] to learn anything anyway. The only reason to look at patents is to see the bad news of what you can't do."
ocn 586:
The audience falls silent. The speech, which began at 3:15, is now nearing the 5:00 whistle, and most listeners are already squirming in their seats, antsy to get a jump start on the weekend. Sensing the fatigue, Stallman glances around the room and hastily shuts things down. "So it looks like we're done," he says, following the observation with an auctioneer's "going, going, gone" to flush out any last-minute questioners. When nobody throws their hand up, Stallman signs off with a traditional exit line.
ocn 589:
By the spring of 1985, Richard Stallman had produced the GNU Project's first useful result - a Lisp-based version of Emacs for Unix-like operating systems. To make it available to others as free software, he had to develop the way to release it - in effect, the follow-on for the Emacs Commune.
ocn 591:
Translated, this treated a program much like an algebra textbook:its author can claim copyright on the text but not on the mathematical ideas of algebra or the pedagogical technique employed to explain it. Thus, regardless of what Stallman said about using the code of the original Emacs, other programmers were legally entitled to write their own implementations of the ideas and commands of Emacs, and they did. Gosmacs was one of 30-odd imitations of the original Emacs developed for various computer systems.
ocn 592:
The Emacs Commune applied only to the code of the original Emacs program written by Stallman himself. Even if it had been legally enforced, it would not have applied to separately developed imitations such as Gosmacs. Making Gosmacs non-free was unethical according to the ethical ideas of the free software movement, because(as proprietary software) it did not respect its users' freedom, but this issue had nothing to do with where the ideas in Gosmacs came from.
ocn 594:
Stallman saw these notices as the flags of an invading, occupying army. Rare was the program that didn't borrow source code from past programs, and yet, with a single stroke of the president's pen, the U.S. government had given programmers and companies the legal power to forbid such reuse. Copyright also injected a dose of formality into what had otherwise been an informal system. Simply put, disputes that had once been settled hacker-to-hacker were now to be settled lawyer-to-lawyer. In such a system, companies, not hackers, held the automatic advantage. Some saw placing one's name in a copyright notice as taking responsibility for the quality of the code, but the copyright notice usually has a company's name, and there are other ways for individuals to say what code they wrote.
ocn 595:
However, Stallman also noticed, in the years leading up to the GNU Project, that copyright allowed an author to grant permission for certain activities covered by copyright, and place conditions on them too. "I had seen email messages with copyright notices plus simple 'verbatim copying permitted' licenses," he recalls. "Those definitely were [an] inspiration." These licenses carried the condition not to remove the license. Stallman's idea was to take this a few steps further. For example, a permission notice could allow users to redistribute even modified versions, with the condition that these versions carry the same permission.
ocn 596:
Thus Stallman concluded that use of copyright was not necessarily unethical. What was bad about software copyright was the way it was typically used, and designed to be used: to deny the user essential freedoms. Most authors imagined no other way to use it. But copyright could be used in a different way: to make a program free and assure its continued freedom.
ocn 597:
By GNU Emacs 16, in early 1985, Stallman drafted a copyright-based license that gave users the right to make and distribute copies. It also gave users the right to make and distribute modified versions, but only under the same license. They could not exercise the unlimited power of copyright over those modified versions, so they could not make their versions proprietary as Gosmacs was. And they had to make the source code available. Those conditions closed the legal gap that would otherwise allow restricted, non-free versions of GNU Emacs to emerge.
ocn 598:
Although helpful in codifying the social contract of the Emacs Commune, the early GNU Emacs license remained too "informal" for its purpose, Stallman says. Soon after forming the Free Software Foundation he began working on a more airtight version, consulting with the other directors and with the attorneys who had helped to set it up.
ocn 599:
Mark Fischer, a Boston copyright attorney who initially provided Stallman's legal advice, recalls discussing the license with Stallman during this period. "Richard had very strong views about how it should work," Fischer says, "He had two principles. The first was to make the software absolutely as open as possible." (By the time he said this, Fischer seems to have been influenced by open source supporters; Stallman never sought to make software "open.") "The second was to encourage others to adopt the same licensing practices." The requirements in the license were designed for the second goal.
ocn 600:
The revolutionary nature of this final condition would take a while to sink in. At the time, Fischer says, he simply viewed the GNU Emacs license as a simple trade. It put a price tag on GNU Emacs' use. Instead of money, Stallman was charging users access to their own later modifications. That said, Fischer does remember the license terms as unique.
ocn 602:
In fashioning the GNU Emacs license, Stallman made one major change to the informal tenets of the old Emacs Commune. Where he had once demanded that Commune members send him all the changes they wrote, Stallman now demanded only that they pass along source code and freedom whenever they chose to redistribute the program. In other words, programmers who simply modified Emacs for private use no longer needed to send the source-code changes back to Stallman. In a rare alteration of free software doctrine, Stallman slashed the "price tag" for free software. Users could innovate without Stallman looking over their shoulders, and distribute their versions only when they wished, just so long as all copies came with permission for their possessors to develop and redistribute them further.
ocn 603:
Stallman says this change was fueled by his own dissatisfaction with the Big Brother aspect of the original Emacs Commune social contract. As much as he had found it useful for everyone to send him their changes, he came to feel that requiring this was unjust. "It was wrong to require people to publish all changes," says Stallman.
ocn 605:
The GNU Emacs General Public License made its debut on a version of GNU Emacs in 1985. Following the release, Stallman welcomed input from the general hacker community on how to improve the license's language. One hacker to take up the offer was future software activist John Gilmore, then working as a consultant to Sun Microsystems. As part of his consulting work, Gilmore had ported Emacs over to SunOS, the company's in-house version of Unix. In the process of doing so, Gilmore had published the changed version under the GNU Emacs license. Instead of viewing the license as a liability, Gilmore saw it as clear and concise expression of the hacker ethos. "Up until then, most licenses were very informal," Gilmore recalls.
ocn 608:
Such statements, while reflective of the hacker ethic, also reflected the difficulty of translating the loose, informal nature of that ethic into the rigid, legal language of copyright. In writing the GNU Emacs license, Stallman had done more than close up the escape hatch that permitted proprietary offshoots. He had expressed the hacker ethic in a manner understandable to both lawyer and hacker alike.
ocn 609:
It wasn't long, Gilmore says, before other hackers began discussing ways to "port" the GNU Emacs license over to their own programs. Prompted by a conversation on Usenet, Gilmore sent an email to Stallman in November, 1986, suggesting modification:
ocn 611:
Gilmore wasn't the only person suggesting a more general approach. By the end of 1986, Stallman himself was at work with GNU Project's next major milestone, the source-code debugger GDB. To release this, he had to modify the GNU Emacs license so it applied to GDB instead of GNU Emacs. It was not a big job, but it was an opening for possible errors. In 1989, Stallman figured out how to remove the specific references to Emacs, and express the connection between the program code and the license solely in the program's source files. This way, any developer could apply the license to his program without changing the license. The GNU General Public License, GNU GPL for short, was born. The GNU Project soon made it the official license of all existing GNU programs.
ocn 612:
In publishing the GPL, Stallman followed the software convention of using decimal numbers to indicate versions with minor changes and whole numbers to indicate versions with major changes. The first version, in 1989, was labeled Version 1.0. The license contained a preamble spelling out its political intentions:
ocn 614:
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.【90 See Richard Stallman, et al., "GNU General Public License: Version 1,"(February, 1989),
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.html. 】
ocn 615:
"The GPL developed much like any piece of free software with a large community discussing its structure, its respect or the opposite in their observation, needs for tweaking and even to compromise it mildly for greater acceptance," says Jerry Cohen, another attorney who advised Stallman after Fischer departed. "The process worked very well and GPL in its several versions has gone from widespread skeptical and at times hostile response to widespread acceptance."
ocn 616:
In a 1986 interview with BYTE magazine, Stallman summed up the GPL in colorful terms. In addition to proclaiming hacker values, Stallman said, readers should also "see it as a form of intellectual ju-jitsu, using the legal system that software hoarders have set up against them."【91 See David Betz and Jon Edwards, "Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain [ sic ] Unix-compatible software system with BYTE editors," BYTE (July, 1986). (Reprinted on the GNU Project web site:
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html .)
This interview offers an interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at Stallman's political attitudes during the earliest days of the GNU Project. It is also helpful in tracing the evolution of Stallman's rhetoric.
Describing the purpose of the GPL, Stallman says, "I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage."
Contrast this with a statement to the author in August 2000: "I urge you not to use the term 'intellectual property' in your thinking. It will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. And those things are so different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about them at once. If you hear somebody saying something' about intellectual property,' without [putting it in] quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join."
[RMS: The contrast it shows is that I've learned to be more cautious in generalizing. I probably wouldn't talk about "owning knowledge" today, since it's a very broad concept. But "owning knowledge" is not the same generalization as "intellectual property," and the difference between those three laws is crucial to understanding any legal issue about owning knowledge. Patents are direct monopolies over using specific knowledge; that really is one form of "owning knowledge." Copyrights are one of the methods used to stop the sharing of works that embody or explain knowledge, which is a very different thing. Meanwhile, trademarks have very little to do with the subject of knowledge.] 】 Years later, Stallman would describe the GPL's creation in less hostile terms. "I was thinking about issues that were in a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal," he says. "I had to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system that we're in. In spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for a new society, but since I wasn't a government, I couldn't actually change any laws. I had to try to do this by building on top of the existing legal system, which had not been designed for anything like this."
ocn 617:
About the time Stallman was pondering the ethical, political, and legal issues associated with free software, a California hacker named Don Hopkins mailed him a manual for the 68000 microprocessor. Hopkins, a Unix hacker and fellow science-fiction buff, had borrowed the manual from Stallman a while earlier. As a display of gratitude, Hopkins decorated the return envelope with a number of stickers obtained at a local science-fiction convention. One sticker in particular caught Stallman's eye. It read, "Copyleft (L), All Rights Reversed." Stallman, inspired by the sticker, nicknamed the legal technique employed in the GNU Emacs license (and later in the GNU GPL) "Copyleft," jocularly symbolized by a backwards "C" in a circle. Over time, the nickname would become general Free Software Foundation terminology for any copyright license "making a program free software and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free software as well."
ocn 619:
While not religious per se, the GNU GPL certainly qualifies as an interesting example of this "routinization" process at work in the modern, decentralized world of software development. Since its unveiling, programmers and companies who have otherwise expressed little loyalty or allegiance to Stallman have willingly accepted the GPL bargain at face value. Thousands have also accepted the GPL as a preemptive protective mechanism for their own software programs. Even those who reject the GPL conditions as too limiting still credit it as influential.
ocn 620:
One hacker falling into this latter group was Keith Bostic, a University of California employee at the time of the GPL 1.0 release. Bostic's department, the Computer Systems Research Group (SRG), had been involved in Unix development since the late 1970s and was responsible for many key parts of Unix, including the TCP/IP networking protocol, the cornerstone of modern Internet communications. By the late 1980s, AT&T, the original owner of the Unix software, began to focus on commercializing Unix and began looking to the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, the academic version of Unix developed by Bostic and his Berkeley peers, as a key source of commercial technology.
ocn 621:
The code written by Bostic and friends was off limits to nearly everyone, because it was intermixed with proprietary AT&T code. Berkeley distributions were therefore available only to institutions that already had a Unix source license from AT&T. As AT&T raised its license fees, this arrangement, which had at first seemed innocuous (to those who thought only of academia) became increasingly burdensome even there. To use Berkeley's code in GNU, Stallman would have to convince Berkeley to separate it from AT&T's code and release it as free software. In 1984 or 1985 he met with the leaders of the BSD effort, pointing out that AT&T was not a charity and that for a university to donate its work (in effect) to AT&T was not proper. He asked them to separate out their code and release it as free software.
ocn 622:
Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project of porting the latest version of BSD to the PDP-11 computer. It was during this period, Bostic says, that he came into close interaction with Stallman during Stallman's occasional forays out to the west coast. "I remember vividly arguing copyright with Stallman while he sat at borrowed workstations at CSRG," says Bostic. "We'd go to dinner afterward and continue arguing about copyright over dinner."
ocn 623:
The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have preferred. In June, 1989, Berkeley had separated its networking code from the rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and began distributing it under a copyright-based free license. The license terms were liberal. All a licensee had to do was give credit to the university in advertisements touting derivative programs.【92 The University of California's "obnoxious advertising clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for a permissive alternative to the GPL, some hackers used the original BSD license, replacing "University of California" with their own names or the names of their institutions. The result: free software systems using many of these programs would have to cite dozens of names in advertisements. In 1999, after a few years of lobbying on Stallman's part, the University of California agreed to drop this clause. See "The BSD License Problem" at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html. 】 In contrast to the GPL, this license permitted proprietary offshoots. One problem limited the use of the BSD Networking release: it wasn't a complete operating system, just the network-related parts of one. While the code would be a major contribution to any free operating system, it could only be run at that time in conjunction with other, proprietary-licensed code.
ocn 624:
Over the next few years, Bostic and other University of California employees worked to replace the missing components and turn BSD into a complete, freely redistributable operating system. Although delayed by a legal challenge from Unix Systems Laboratories - the AT&T spin-off that retained ownership of the Unix code - the effort would finally bear fruit in the early 1990s. Even before then, however, many of the Berkeley network utilities would make their way into Stallman's GNU system.
ocn 626:
By the end of the 1980s, the GPL was beginning to exert a gravitational effect on the free software community. A program didn't have to carry the GPL to qualify as free software - witness the case of the BSD network utilities - but putting a program under the GPL sent a definite message. "I think the very existence of the GPL inspired people to think through whether they were making free software, and how they would license it," says Bruce Perens, creator of Electric Fence, a popular Unix utility, and future leader of the Debian GNU/Linux development team. A few years after the release of the GPL, Perens says he decided to discard Electric Fence's homegrown license in favor of Stallman's lawyer-vetted copyright. "It was actually pretty easy to do," Perens recalls.
ocn 627:
Rich Morin, the programmer who had viewed Stallman's initial GNU announcement with a degree of skepticism, recalls being impressed by the software that began to gather under the GPL umbrella. As the leader of a SunOS user group, one of Morin's primary duties during the 1980s had been to send out distribution tapes containing the best freeware or free software utilities. The job often mandated calling up original program authors to verify whether their programs were copyrighted or whether they had been consigned to the public domain. Around 1989, Morin says, he began to notice that the best software programs typically fell under the GPL license. "As a software distributor, as soon as I saw the word GPL, I knew I was home free,"recalls Morin.
ocn 628:
To compensate for the prior hassles that went into compiling distribution tapes to the Sun User Group, Morin had charged recipients a convenience fee. Now, with programs moving over to the GPL, Morin was suddenly getting his tapes put together in half the time, turning a tidy profit in the process. Sensing a commercial opportunity, Morin rechristened his hobby as a business: Prime Time Freeware.
ocn 629:
Such commercial exploitation was completely consistent with the free software agenda. "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price," advised Stallman in the GPL's preamble. By the late 1980s, Stallman had refined it to a more simple mnemonic: "Don't think free as in free beer; think free as in free speech."
ocn 630:
For the most part, businesses ignored Stallman's entreaties. Still, for a few entrepreneurs, the freedom associated with free software was the same freedom associated with free markets. Take software ownership out of the commercial equation, and you had a situation where even the smallest software company was free to compete against the IBMs and DECs of the world.
ocn 631:
One of the first entrepreneurs to grasp this concept was Michael Tiemann, a software programmer and graduate student at Stanford University. During the 1980s, Tiemann had followed the GNU Project like an aspiring jazz musician following a favorite artist. It wasn't until the release of the GNU C Compiler, or GCC, in 1987, however, that he began to grasp the full potential of free software. Dubbing GCC a "bombshell," Tiemann says the program's own existence underlined Stallman's determination as a programmer.
ocn 632:
"Just as every writer dreams of writing the great American novel, every programmer back in the 1980s talked about writing the great American compiler," Tiemman recalls. "Suddenly Stallman had done it. It was very humbling."
ocn 634:
Rather than compete with Stallman, Tiemann decided to build on top of his work. The original version of GCC weighed in at 110,000 lines of code, but Tiemann recalls the program as surprisingly easy to understand. So easy in fact that Tiemann says it took less than five days to master and another week to port the software to a new hardware platform, National Semiconductor's 32032 microchip. Over the next year, Tiemann began playing around with the source code, creating the first "native" or direct compiler for the C++ programming language, by extending GCC to handle C++ as well as C. (The existing, proprietary implementation of the C++ language worked by converting the code to the C language, then feeding the result to a C compiler.) One day, while delivering a lecture on the program at Bell Labs, Tiemann ran into some AT&T developers struggling to pull off the same thing.
ocn 637:
Tiemann found added inspiration in the GNU Manifesto: while excoriating the greed of proprietary software vendors, it also encourages companies, as long as they respect users freedom, to use and redistribute free software in their commercial activities. By removing the power of monopoly from the commercial software question, the GPL makes it possible for even small companies to compete on the basis of service, which extends from simple tech support to training to extending free programs for specific clients' needs.
ocn 638:
In a 1999 essay, Tiemann recalls the impact of Stallman's Manifesto. "It read like a socialist polemic, but I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise."【93 See Michael Tiemann, "Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's Account," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 139,
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/tiemans.html. 】
ocn 639:
This business plan was not new; Stallman supported himself in the late 80s by doing this on a small scale. But Tiemann intended to take it to a new level. Teaming up with John Gilmore and David Vinayak Wallace, Tiemann launched a software consulting service dedicated to customizing GNU programs. Dubbed Cygnus Support (informally, "Cygnus" was a recursive acronym for "Cygnus, Your GNU Support"), the company signed its first development contract in February, 1990. By the end of the year, the company had $725,000 worth of support and development contracts.
ocn 640:
The complete GNU operating system Stallman envisioned required more than software development tools. In the 1990s, GNU also developed a command line interpreter or "shell," which was an extended replacement for the Bourne Shell (written by FSF employee Brian Fox, and christened by Stallman the Bourne Again Shell, or BASH), as well as the PostScript interpreter Ghostscript, the documentation browser platform Texinfo, the C Library which C programs need in order to run and talk to the system's kernel, the spreadsheet Oleo ("better for you than the more expensive spreadsheet"), and even a fairly good chess game. However, programmers were typically most interested in the GNU programming tools.
ocn 641:
GNU Emacs, GDB, and GCC were the "big three" of developer-oriented tools, but they weren't the only ones developed by the GNU Project in the 80s. By 1990, GNU had also generated GNU versions of the build-controller Make, the parser-generator YACC (rechristened Bison), and awk (rechristened gawk); as well as dozens more. Like GCC, GNU programs were usually designed to run on multiple systems, not just a single vendor's platform. In the process of making programs more flexible, Stallman and his collaborators often made them more useful as well.
ocn 642:
Recalling the GNU universalist approach, Prime Time Freeware's Morin points to a useless but vitally important software package called GNU Hello, which serves as an example to show programmers how to properly package a program for GNU. "It's the hello world program which is five lines of C, packaged up as if it were a GNU distribution," Morin says. "And so it's got the Texinfo stuff and the configure stuff. It's got all the other software engineering goo that the GNU Project has come up with to allow packages to port to all these different environments smoothly. That's tremendously important work, and it affects not only all of [Stallman's] software, but also all of the other GNU Project software."
ocn 643:
According to Stallman, improving technically on the components of Unix was secondary to replacing them with free software. "With each piece I may or may not find a way to improve it," said Stallman to BYTE. "To some extent I am getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much better. To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long time and worked on many other systems. I therefore have many ideas [which I learned from them] to bring to bear."【94 See Richard Stallman, BYTE (1986). 】
ocn 644:
Nevertheless, as GNU tools made their mark in the late 1980s, Stallman's AI Lab-honed reputation for design fastidiousness soon became legendary throughout the entire software-development community.
ocn 645:
Jeremy Allison, a Sun user during the late 1980s and programmer destined to run his own free software project, Samba, in the 1990s, recalls that reputation with a laugh. During the late 1980s, Allison began using Emacs. Inspired by the program's community-development model, Allison says he sent in a snippet of source code only to have it rejected by Stallman.
ocn 648:
As with several other major system components, Stallman sought a head-start on kernel development by looking for an existing program to adapt. A review of GNU Project "GNUs letters" of the late 1980s reveals that this approach, like the initial attempt to build GCC out of Pastel, had its problems. A January, 1987 GNUs letter reported the GNU Project's intention to overhaul TRIX, a kernel developed at MIT. However, Stallman never actually tried to do this, since he was working on GCC at the time; later he concluded that TRIX would require too much change to be a good starting point. By February of 1988, according to a newsletter published that month, the GNU Project had shifted its kernel plans to Mach, a lightweight "micro-kernel" developed at Carnegie Mellon. Mach was not then free software, but its developers privately said they would liberate it; when this occurred, in 1990, GNU Project kernel development could really commence.【95 See "Hurd History,"
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history.html. 】
ocn 649:
The delays in kernel development were just one of many concerns weighing on Stallman during this period. In 1989, Lotus Development Corporation filed suit against rival software companies, Paperback Software International and Borland, for copying menu commands from Lotus' popular 1-2-3 Spreadsheet program. Lotus' suit, coupled with the Apple-Microsoft "look and feel" battle, endangered the future of the GNU system. Although neither suit directly attacked the GNU Project, both threatened the right to develop software compatible with existing programs, as many GNU programs were. These lawsuits could impose a chilling effect on the entire culture of software development. Determined to do something, Stallman and a few professors put an ad in The Tech (the MIT student newspaper) blasting the lawsuits and calling for a boycott of both Lotus and Apple. He then followed up the ad by helping to organize a group to protest the corporations filing the suit. Calling itself the League for Programming Freedom, the group held protests outside the offices of Lotus, Inc.
ocn 651:
They document the evolving nature of the software industry. Applications had quietly replaced operating systems as the primary corporate battleground. In its unfinished quest to build a free software operating system, the GNU Project seemed hopelessly behind the times to those whose primary values were fashion and success. Indeed, the very fact that Stallman had felt it necessary to put together an entirely new group dedicated to battling the "look and feel" lawsuits led some observers to think that the FSF was obsolete.
ocn 652:
However, Stallman had a strategic reason to start a separate organization to fight the imposition of new monopolies on software development: so that proprietary software developers would join it too. Extending copyright to cover interfaces would threaten many proprietary software developers as well as many free software developers. These proprietary developers were unlikely to endorse the Free Soft-ware Foundation, but there was, intentionally, nothing in the League for Programming Freedom to drive them away. For the same reason, Stallman handed over leadership of LPF to others as soon as it was feasible.
ocn 653:
In 1990, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation certified Stallman's genius status when it granted Stallman a Mac Arthur fellowship, the so-called "genius grant," amounting in this case to$240,000 over 5 years. Although the Foundation does not state a reason for its grants, this one was seen as an award for launching the GNU Project and giving voice to the free software philosophy. The grant relieved a number of short-term concerns for Stallman. For instance, it enabled him to cease the consulting work through which he had obtained his income in the 80s and devote more time to the free software cause.
ocn 654:
The award also made it possible for Stallman to register normally to vote. In 1985 a fire in the house where Stallman lived left him without an official domicile. It also covered most of his books with ash, and cleaning these "dirty books" did not yield satisfying results. From that time he lived as a "squatter" at 545 Technology Square, and had to vote as a "homeless person."【97 See Reuven Lerner, "Stallman wins $240,000 MacArthur award," MIT, The Tech (July 18, 1990),
http://the-tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html. 】 "[The Cambridge Election Commission] didn't want to accept that as my address," Stallman would later recall. "A newspaper article about the MacArthur grant said that, and then they let me register."【98 See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, Mac Arthur-certified Genius" (1999). 】
ocn 655:
Most importantly, the MacArthur fellowship gave Stallman press attention and speaking invitations, which he used to spread the word about GNU, free software, and dangers such as "look and feel" lawsuits and software patents.
ocn 656:
Interestingly, the GNU system's completion would stem from one of these trips. In April 1991, Stallman paid a visit to the Polytechnic University in Helsinki, Finland. Among the audience members was 21-year-old Linus Torvalds, who was just beginning to develop the Linux kernel - the free software kernel destined to fill the GNU system's main remaining gap.
ocn 657:
A student at the nearby University of Helsinki at the time, Torvalds regarded Stallman with bemusement. "I saw, for the first time in my life, the stereotypical long-haired, bearded hacker type," recalls Torvalds in his 2001 autobiography Just for Fun. "We don't have much of them in Helsinki."【99 See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-59. Although presumably accurate in regard to Torvalds' life, what the book says about Stallman is sometimes wrong. For instance, it says that Stallman "wants to make everything open source," and that he "complains about other people not using the GPL." In fact, Stallman advocates free software, not open source. He urges authors to choose the GNU GPL, in most circumstances, but says that all free software licenses are ethical. 】
ocn 658:
While not exactly attuned to the "socio political" side of the Stallman agenda, Torvalds nevertheless appreciated one aspect of the agenda's underlying logic: no programmer writes error-free code. Even when users have no wish to adapt a program to their specific preferences, any program can use improvement. By sharing software, hackers put a program's improvement ahead of individual motivations such as greed or ego protection.
ocn 659:
Like many programmers of his generation, Torvalds had cut his teeth not on mainframe computers like the IBM 7094, but on a motley assortment of home-built computer systems. As a university student, Torvalds had made the step up from PC programming to Unix, using the university's MicroVAX. This ladder-like progression had given Torvalds a different perspective on the barriers to machine access. For Stallman, the chief barriers were bureaucracy and privilege. For Torvalds, the chief barriers were geography and the harsh Helsinki winter. Forced to trek across the University of Helsinki just to log in to his Unix account, Torvalds quickly began looking for a way to log in from the warm confines of his off-campus apartment.
ocn 660:
Torvalds was using Minix, a lightweight non-free system developed as an instructional example by Dutch university professor Andrew Tanenbaum.【100 It was non-free in 1991. Minix is free software now. 】 It included the non-free Free University Compiler Kit, plus utilities of the sort that Tanenbaum had contemptuously invited Stallman in 1983 to write.【101 Tanenbaum describes Minix as an "operating system" in his book, Operating System Design and Implementation , but what the book discusses is only the part of the system that corresponds to the kernel of Unix. There are two customary usages of the term "operating system," and one of them is what is called the "kernel" in Unix terminology. But that's not the only terminological complication in the subject. That part of Minix consists of a microkernel plus servers that run on it, a design of the same kind as the GNU Hurd plus Mach. The microkernel plus servers are comparable to the kernel of Unix. But when that book says "the kernel," it refers to the microkernel only. See Andrew Tanenbaum, Operating System Design and Implementation , 1987. 】
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Since Minix lacked many important features. Torvalds began extending his terminal emulator into a kernel comparable to that of Minix, except that it was monolithic. Feeling ambitious, he solicited a Minix newsgroup for copies of the POSIX standards, the specifications for a Unix-compatible kernel.【103 POSIX was subsequently extended to include specifications for many command-line features, but that did not exist in 1991. 】 A few weeks later, having put his kernel together with some GNU programs and adapted them to work with it, Torvalds was posting a message reminiscent of Stallman's original 1983 GNU posting:
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Neither compiling Linux with GCC nor running GCC with Linux required him legally to release Linux under the GNU GPL, but Torvalds' use of GCC implied for him a certain obligation to let other users borrow back. As Torvalds would later put it: "I had hoisted myself up on the shoulders of giants."【106 Ibid, p. 95-97. 】 Not surprisingly, he began to think about what would happen when other people looked to him for similar support. A decade after the decision, Torvalds echoes the Free Software Foundation's Robert Chassell when he sums up his thoughts at the time:
ocn 671:
When it was time to release the 0.12 version of Linux, the first to operate fully with GCC, Torvalds decided to throw his lot in with the free software movement. He discarded the old license of Linux and replaced it with the GPL. Within three years, Linux developers were offering release 1.0 of Linux, the kernel; it worked smoothly with the almost complete GNU system, composed of programs from the GNU Project and elsewhere. In effect, they had completed the GNU operating system by adding Linux to it. The resulting system was basically GNU plus Linux. Torvalds and friends, however, referred to it confusingly as "Linux."
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By 1994, the amalgamated system had earned enough respect in the hacker world to make some observers from the business world wonder if Torvalds hadn't given away the farm by switching to the GPL in the project's initial months. In the first issue of Linux Journal, publisher Robert Young sat down with Torvalds for an interview. When Young asked the Finnish programmer if he felt regret at giving up private ownership of the Linux source code, Torvalds said no. "Even with 20/20 hindsight," Torvalds said, he considered the GPL "one of the very best design decisions" made during the early stages of the Linux project.【108 See Robert Young, "Interview with Linus, the Author of Linux," Linux Journal (March 1, 1994),
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2736. 】
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That the decision had been made with zero appeal or deference to Stallman and the Free Software Foundation speaks to the GPL's growing portability. Although it would take a couple of years to be recognized by Stallman, the explosiveness of Linux development conjured flashbacks of Emacs. This time around, however, the innovation triggering the explosion wasn't a software hack like Control-R but the novelty of running a Unix-like system on the PC architecture. The motives may have been different, but the end result certainly fit the ethical specifications: a fully functional operating system composed entirely of free software.
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As his initial email message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup indicates, it would take a few months before Torvalds saw Linux as anything more than a holdover until the GNU developers delivered on the Hurd kernel. As far as Torvalds was concerned, he was simply the latest in a long line of kids taking apart and reassembling things just for fun. Nevertheless, when summing up the runaway success of a project that could have just as easily spent the rest of its days on an abandoned computer hard drive, Torvalds credits his younger self for having the wisdom to give up control and accept the GPL bargain. "I may not have seen the light," writes Torvalds, reflecting on Stallman's 1991 Polytechnic University speech and his subsequent decision to switch to the GPL. "But I guess something from his speech sunk in."【109 See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 59. 】
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Such laziness, while admirable from an efficiency perspective, was troubling from a political perspective. For one thing, it underlined the lack of an ideological agenda on Torvalds' part. Unlike the GNU developers, Torvalds hadn't built his kernel out of a desire to give his fellow hackers freedom; he'd built it to have something he himself could play with. So what exactly was the combined system, and which philosophy would people associate it with? Was it a manifestation of the free software philosophy first articulated by Stallman in the GNU Manifesto? Or was it simply an amalgamation of nifty software tools that any user, similarly motivated, could assemble on his own home system?
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In a bid to "stir up some interest," Murdock posted his intentions on the Internet, including Usenet's comp.os.linux newsgroup. One of the first responding email messages was from ‹rms@ai.mit.edu.› As a hacker, Murdock instantly recognized the address. It was Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and a man Murdock knew even back then as "the hacker of hackers." Seeing the address in his mail queue, Murdock was puzzled. Why on Earth would Stallman, a person leading his own operating-system project, care about Murdock's gripes over "Linux" distributions?
ocn 687:
"He said the Free Software Foundation was starting to look closely at Linux and that the FSF was interested in possibly doing a Linux [sic] system, too. Basically, it looked to Stallman like our goals were in line with their philosophy."
ocn 688:
Not to over dramatize, the message represented a change in strategy on Stallman's part. Until 1993, Stallman had been content to keep his nose out of Linux affairs. After first hearing of the new kernel, Stallman asked a friend to check its suitability. Recalls Stallman, "Here ported back that the software was modeled after System V, which was the inferior version of Unix. He also told me it wasn't portable."
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The friend's report was correct. Built to run on 386-based machines, Linux was firmly rooted to its low-cost hardware platform. What the friend failed to report, however, was the sizable advantage Linux enjoyed as the only free kernel in the marketplace. In other words, while Stallman spent the next year and a half listening to progress reports from the Hurd developer, reporting rather slow progress, Torvalds was winning over the programmers who would later uproot and replant Linux and GNU onto new platforms.
ocn 690:
By 1993, the GNU Project's failure to deliver a working kernel was leading to problems both within the GNU Project and in the free software movement at large. A March, 1993, Wired magazine article by Simson Garfinkel described the GNU Project as "bogged down" despite the success of the project's many tools.【111 See Simson Garfinkel, "Is Stallman Stalled?" Wired (March, 1993). 】 Those within the project and its nonprofit adjunct, the Free Software Foundation, remember the mood as being even worse than Garfinkel's article let on. "It was very clear, at least to me at the time, that there was a window of opportunity to introduce a new operating system," says Chassell. "And once that window was closed, people would become less interested. Which is in fact exactly what happened."【112 Chassell's concern about there being a 36-month "window" for a new operating system is not unique to the GNU Project. During the early 1990s, free software versions of the Berkeley Software Distribution were held up by Unix System Laboratories' lawsuit restricting the release of BSD-derived software. While many users consider BSD offshoots such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD to be demonstrably superior to GNU/Linux both in terms of performance and security, the number of FreeBSD and OpenBSD users remains a fraction of the total GNU/Linux user population. To view a sample analysis of the relative success of GNU/Linux in relation to other free software operating systems, see the essay by New Zealand hacker, Liam Greenwood, "Why is Linux Successful" (1999),
http://www.freebsddiary.org/linux.php. 】
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Much has been made about the GNU Project's struggles during the 1990-1993 period. While some place the blame on Stallman for those struggles, Eric Raymond, an old friend of Stallman's who supported the GNU Project lukewarmly, says the problem was largely institutional. "The FSF got arrogant," Raymond says. "They moved away from the goal of doing a production-ready operating system to doing operating-system research." Even worse, "They thought nothing outside the FSF could affect them."
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Stallman responds, "Although the emotions Raymond cites come from his imagination, he's right about one cause of the Hurd's delay:the Hurd developer several times redesigned and rewrote large parts of the code based on what he had learned, rather than trying to make the Hurd run as soon as possible. It was good design practice, but it wasn't the right practice for our goal: to get something working ASAP."
ocn 694:
Stallman cites other issues that also caused delay. The Lotus and Apple lawsuits claimed much of his attention; this, coupled with hand problems that prevented him from typing for three years, mostly excluded Stallman from programming. Stallman also cites poor communication between various portions of the GNU Project. "We had to do a lot of work to get the debugging environment to work," he recalls." And the people maintaining GDB at the time were not that cooperative." They had given priority to supporting the existing platforms of GDB's current users, rather than to the overall goal of a complete GNU system.
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Most fundamentally, however, Stallman says he and the Hurd developers underestimated the difficulty of developing the Unix kernel facilities on top of the Mach microkernel. "I figured, OK, the [Mach]part that has to talk to the machine has already been debugged," Stallman says, recalling the Hurd team's troubles in a 2000 speech. "With that head start, we should be able to get it done faster. But instead, it turned out that debugging these asynchronous multi-threaded programs was really hard. There were timing bugs that would clobber the files, and that's no fun. The end result was that it took many, many years to produce a test version."【113 See Maui High Performance Computing Center Speech. In subsequent emails, I asked Stallman what exactly he meant by the term "timing bugs." Stallman said "timing errors" was a better way to summarize the problem and offered an elucidating technical information of how a timing error can hamper an operating system's performance:
"Timing errors" occur in an asynchronous system where jobs done in parallel can theoretically occur in any order, and one particular order leads to problems.
Imagine that program A does X, and program B does Y, where both X and Y are short routines that examine and update the same data structure. Nearly always the computer will do X before Y, or do Y before X, and then there will be no problem. On rare occasions, by chance, the scheduler will let program A run until it is in the middle of X, and then run B which will do Y. Thus, Y will be done while Xis half-done. Since they are updating the same data structure, they will interfere. For instance, perhaps X has already examined the data structure, and it won't notice that there was a change. There will be an unreproducible failure, unreproducible because it depends on chance factors (when the scheduler decides to run which program and how long).
The way to prevent such a failure is to use a lock to make sure X and Y can't run at the same time. Programmers writing asynchronous systems know about the general need for locks, but sometimes they overlook the need for a lock in a specific place or on a specific data structure. Then the program has a timing error. 】
ocn 696:
Over time, the growing success of GNU together with Linux made it clear that the GNU Project should get on the train that was leaving and not wait for the Hurd. Besides, there were weaknesses in the community surrounding GNU/Linux. Sure, Linux had been licensed under the GPL, but as Murdock himself had noted, the desire to treat GNU/Linux as a purely free software operating system was far from unanimous. By late 1993, the total GNU/Linux user population had grown from a dozen or so enthusiasts to somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000.【114 GNU/Linux user-population numbers are sketchy at best, which is why I've provided such a broad range. The 100,000 total comes from the Red Hat "Milestones" site,
http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/milestones.html. 】 What had once been a hobby was now a marketplace ripe for exploitation, and some developers had no objection to exploiting it with non-free software. Like Winston Churchill watching Soviet troops sweep into Berlin, Stallman felt an understandable set of mixed emotions when it came time to celebrate the GNU/Linux "victory."【115 I wrote this Winston Churchill analogy before Stallman himself sent me his own unsolicited comment on Churchill:
World War II and the determination needed to win it was a very strong memory as I was growing up. Statements such as Churchill's, "We will fight them in the landing zones, we will fight them on the beaches... we will never surrender," have always resonated for me. 】
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Although late to the party, Stallman still had clout. As soon as the FSF announced that it would lend its money and moral support to Murdock's software project, other offers of support began rolling in. Murdock dubbed the new project Debian - a compression of his and his wife, Deborah's, names - and within a few weeks was rolling out the first distribution. "[Richard's support] catapulted Debian almost overnight from this interesting little project to something people within the community had to pay attention to," Murdock says.
ocn 698:
In January of 1994, Murdock issued the Debian Manifesto. Written in the spirit of Stallman's GNU Manifesto from a decade before, it explained the importance of working closely with the Free Software Foundation. Murdock wrote:
ocn 701:
Shortly after the Manifesto's release, the Free Software Foundation made its first major request. Stallman wanted Murdock to call its distribution "GNU/Linux." At first, Stallman proposed the term "Lignux" - combining the names Linux and GNU - but the initial reaction was very negative, and this convinced Stallman to go with the longer but less criticized GNU/Linux.
ocn 702:
Some dismissed Stallman's attempt to add the "GNU" prefix as a belated quest for credit, never mind whether it was due, but Murdock saw it differently. Looking back, Murdock saw it as an attempt to counteract the growing tension between the GNU Project's developers and those who adapted GNU programs to use with the Linux kernel. "There was a split emerging," Murdock recalls. "Richard was concerned."
ocn 706:
As leader of the GNU Project, Stallman had already experienced the negative effects of a software fork in 1991. Says Stallman, "Lucid hired several people to write improvements to GNU Emacs, meant to be contributions to it; but the developers did not inform me about the project. Instead they designed several new features on their own. As you might expect, I agreed with some of their decisions and disagreed with others. They asked me to incorporate all their code, but when I said I wanted to use about half of it, they declined to help me adapt that half to work on its own. I had to do it on my own." The fork had given birth to a parallel version, Lucid Emacs, and hard feelings all around.【117 Jamie Zawinski, a former Lucid programmer who would go on to head the Mozilla development team, has a web site that documents the Lucid/GNU Emacs fork, titled, "The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism.", at
http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html. Stallman's response to those accusations is in
http://stallman.org/articles/xemacs.origin. 】
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Now programmers had forked several of the principal GNU packages at once. At first, Stallman says he considered the forks to be a product of impatience. In contrast to the fast and informal dynamics of the Linux team, GNU source-code maintainers tended to be slower and more circumspect in making changes that might affect a program's long-term viability. They also were unafraid of harshly critiquing other people's code. Over time, however, Stallman began to sense that there was an underlying lack of awareness of the GNU Project and its objectives when reading Linux developers' emails.
ocn 708:
"We discovered that the people who considered themselves 'Linux users' didn't care about the GNU Project," Stallman says. "They said, 'Why should I bother doing these things? I don't care about the GNU Project. It [the program]'s working for me. It's working for us Linux users, and nothing else matters to us.' And that was quite surprising, given that people were essentially using a variant of the GNU system, and they cared so little. They cared less than anybody else about GNU." Fooled by their own practice of calling the combination "Linux," they did not realize that their system was more GNU than Linux.
ocn 709:
For the sake of unity, Stallman asked the maintainers-in-charge to do the work which normally the change authors should have done. In most cases this was feasible, but not in glibc. Short for GNU C Library, glibc is the package that all programs use to make "system calls" directed at the kernel, in this case Linux. User programs on a Unix-like system communicate with the kernel only through the C library.
ocn 711:
Murdock says this was the precipitating cause that motivated Stallman to insist on adding the GNU prefix when Debian rolled out its software distribution. "The fork has since converged. Still, at the time, there was a concern that if the Linux community saw itself as a different thing as the GNU community, it might be a force for disunity."
ocn 712:
While some viewed it as politically grasping to describe the combination of GNU and Linux as a "variant" of GNU, Murdock, already sympathetic to the free software cause, saw Stallman's request to call Debian's version GNU/Linux as reasonable. "It was more for unity than for credit," he says.
ocn 714:
"I can tell you that I've had my share of disagreements with him," says Murdock with a laugh. "In all honesty Richard can be a fairly difficult person to work with." The principal disagreement was over debugging. Stallman wanted to include debugging information in all executable programs, to enable users to immediately investigate any bugs they might encounter. Murdock thought this would make the system files too big and interfere with distribution. Neither was willing to change his mind.
ocn 715:
In 1996, Murdock, following his graduation from Purdue, decided to hand over the reins of the growing Debian project. He had already been ceding management duties to Bruce Perens, the hacker best known for his work on Electric Fence, a Unix utility released under the GPL. Perens, like Murdock, was a Unix programmer who had become enamored of GNU/Linux as soon as the operating system's Unix-like abilities became manifest. Like Murdock, Perens sympathized with the political agenda of Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, albeit from afar.
ocn 716:
"I remember after Stallman had already come out with the GNU Manifesto, GNU Emacs, and GCC, I read an article that said he was working as a consultant for Intel," says Perens, recalling his first brush with Stallman in the late 1980s. "I wrote him asking how he could be advocating free software on the one hand and working for Intel on the other. He wrote back saying, 'I work as a consultant to produce free-software.' He was perfectly polite about it, and I thought his answer made perfect sense."
ocn 717:
As a prominent Debian developer, however, Perens regarded Murdock's design battles with Stallman with dismay. Upon assuming leadership of the development team, Perens says he made the command decision to distance Debian from the Free Software Foundation. "I decided we did not want Richard's style of micro-management," he says.
ocn 718:
According to Perens, Stallman was taken aback by the decision but had the wisdom to roll with it. "He gave it some time to cool off and sent a message that we really needed a relationship. He requested that we call it GNU/Linux and left it at that. I decided that was fine. I made the decision unilaterally. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief."
ocn 720:
Outside the realm of hacker-oriented systems, however, GNU/Linux was picking up steam in the commercial Unix marketplace. In North Carolina, a Unix company billing itself as Red Hat was revamping its business to focus on GNU/Linux. The chief executive officer was Robert Young, the former Linux Journal editor who in 1994 had put the question to Linus Torvalds, asking whether he had any regrets about putting the kernel under the GPL. To Young, Torvalds' response had a "profound" impact on his own view toward GNU/Linux. Instead of looking for a way to corner the GNU/Linux market via traditional software tactics, Young began to consider what might happen if a company adopted the same approach as Debian - i.e., building an operating system completely out of free software parts. Cygnus Solutions, the company founded by Michael Tiemann and John Gilmore in 1990, was already demonstrating the ability to sell free software based on quality and customizability. What if Red Hat took the same approach with GNU/Linux?
ocn 721:
"In the western scientific tradition we stand on the shoulders of giants," says Young, echoing both Torvalds and Sir Isaac Newton before him. "In business, this translates to not having to reinvent wheels as we go along. The beauty of [the GPL] model is you put your code into the public domain.【119 Young uses the term "public domain" loosely here. Strictly speaking, it means "not copyrighted." Code released under the GNU GPL cannot be in the public domain, since it must be copyrighted in order for the GNU GPL to apply. 】 If you're an independent software vendor and you're trying to build some application and you need a modem-dialer, well, why reinvent modem dialers? You can just steal PPP off of Red Hat [GNU/]Linux and use that as the core of your modem-dialing tool. If you need a graphic tool set, you don't have to write your own graphic library. Just download GTK. Suddenly you have the ability to reuse the best of what went before. And suddenly your focus as an application vendor is less on software management and more on writing the applications specific to your customer's needs." However, Young was no free software activist, and readily included non-free programs in Red Hat's GNU/Linux system.
ocn 729:
Over the past 15 years, free and low-cost software has become ubiquitous. This conference will bring together implementers of several different types of freely redistributable software and publishers of such software (on various media). There will be tutorials and refereed papers, as well as keynotes by Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.【121 See Peter Salus, "FYI-Conference on Freely Redistributable Software, 2/2, Cambridge" (1995) (archived by Terry Winograd),
http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/fsf96/call-for-papers.html. 】
ocn 731:
For Raymond, the 1996 conference was a welcome event. Although he did not thoroughly support the free software movement's ideas, he had contributed to some GNU programs, in particular to GNU Emacs. Those contributions stopped in 1992, when Raymond demanded authority to make changes in the official GNU version of GNU Emacs without discussing them with Stallman, who was directly in charge of Emacs development. Stallman rejected the demand, and Raymond accused Stallman of "micro-management." "Richard kicked up a fuss about my making unauthorized modifications when I was cleaning up the Emacs LISP libraries," Raymond recalls. "It frustrated me so much that I decided I didn't want to work with him anymore."
ocn 732:
Despite the falling out, Raymond remained active in the free software community. So much so that when Salus suggested a conference pairing Stallman and Torvalds as keynote speakers, Raymond eagerly seconded the idea. With Stallman representing the older, wiser contingent of ITS/Unix hackers and Torvalds representing the younger, more energetic crop of Linux hackers, the pairing indicated a symbolic show of unity that could only be beneficial, especially to ambitious younger (i.e., below 40) hackers such as Raymond. "I sort of had afoot in both camps," Raymond says.
ocn 734:
Even more surprising, says Raymond, was Torvalds' equal willingness to take potshots at other prominent hackers, including the most prominent hacker of all, Richard Stallman. By the end of the conference, Torvalds' half-hacker, half-slacker manner was winning over older and younger conference-goers alike.
ocn 738:
Stallman, for his part, doesn't remember any tension at the 1996conference; he probably wasn't present when Torvalds made that statement. But he does remember later feeling the sting of Torvalds' celebrated "cheekiness." "There was a thing in the Linux documentation which says print out the GNU coding standards and then tear them up," says Stallman, recalling one example. "When you look closely, what he disagreed with was the least important part of it, the recommendation for how to indent C code."
ocn 741:
This was an example of the growing dispute, within the free software community, between those who valued freedom as such, and those who mainly valued powerful, reliable software. Stallman referred to the two camps as political parties within the community, calling the former the "freedom party." The supporters of the other camp did not try to name it, so Stallman disparagingly called it the "bandwagon party" or the "success party," because many of them presented "more users" as the primary goal.
ocn 742:
In the decade since launching the GNU Project, Stallman had built up a fearsome reputation as a programmer. He had also built up a reputation for intransigence both in terms of software design and people management. This was partly true, but the reputation provided a convenient excuse that anyone could cite if Stallman did not do as he wished. The reputation has been augmented by mistaken guesses.
ocn 745:
The executive director in question then gave Stallman an ultimatum: give her total autonomy in the office or she would quit. Stallman, as president of the FSF, declined to give her total control over its activities, so she resigned, and he recruited in Peter Salus to replace her.
ocn 746:
When Raymond, an outsider, learned that these people had left the FSF, he presumed Stallman was at fault. This provided confirmation for his theory that Stallman's personality was the cause of any and all problems in the GNU Project.
ocn 754:
Raymond's paper associated the Cathedral style, which he and Stallman and many others had used, specifically with the GNU Project and Stallman, thus casting the contrast between development models as a comparison between Stallman and Torvalds. Where Stallman was his chosen example of the classic cathedral architect - i.e., a programming "wizard" who could disappear for 18 months and return with something like the GNU C Compiler - Torvalds was more like a genial dinner-party host. In letting others lead the Linux design discussion and stepping in only when the entire table needed a referee, Torvalds had created a development model very much reflective of his own laid-back personality. From Torvalds' perspective, the most important managerial task was not imposing control but keeping the ideas flowing.
ocn 756:
If the paper's description of these two styles of development was perceptive, its association of the Cathedral model specifically with Stallman (rather than all the others who had used it, including Raymond himself) was sheer calumny. In fact, the developers of some GNU packages including the GNU Hurd had read about and adopted Torvalds' methods before Raymond tried them, though without analyzing them further and publicly championing them as Raymond's paper did. Thousands of hackers, reading Raymond's article, must have been led to a negative attitude towards GNU by this smear.
ocn 759:
Raymond doesn't recall the conversation that took place, but he does remember the first complaint addressed. Despite the best efforts of Stallman and other hackers to remind people that the word "free" in free software stood for freedom and not price, the message still wasn't getting through. Most business executives, upon hearing the term for the first time, interpreted the word as synonymous with "zero cost," tuning out any follow-up messages in short order. Until hackers found a way to get past this misunderstanding, the free software movement faced an uphill climb, even after Netscape.
ocn 765:
For some observers, the unwillingness to include Stallman's name on the list qualified as a snub. "I decided not to go to the event because of it," says Perens, remembering the summit. Raymond, who did go, says he argued for Stallman's inclusion to no avail. The snub rumor gained additional strength from the fact that O'Reilly, the event's host, had feuded publicly with Stallman over the issue of software-manual copyrights. Prior to the meeting, Stallman had argued that free software manuals should be as freely copyable and modifiable as free software programs. O'Reilly, meanwhile, argued that a value-added market for non-free books increased the utility of free software by making it more accessible to a wider community. The two had also disputed the title of the event, with Stallman insisting on "Free Software" rather than "Freeware." The latter term most often refers to programs which are available gratis, but which are not free software because their source code is not released.
ocn 766:
Looking back, O'Reilly doesn't see the decision to leave Stallman's name off the invite list as a snub. "At that time, I had never met Richard in person, but in our email interactions, he'd been inflexible and unwilling to engage in dialogue. I wanted to make sure the GNU tradition was represented at the meeting, so I invited John Gilmore and Michael Tiemann, whom I knew personally, and whom I knew were passionate about the value of the GPL but seemed more willing to engage in a frank back-and-forth about the strengths and weaknesses of the various free software projects and traditions. Given all the later brouhaha, I do wish I'd invited Richard as well, but I certainly don't think that my failure to do so should be interpreted as a lack of respect for the GNU Project or for Richard personally."
ocn 771:
The term didn't take long to enter the national lexicon. Shortly after the summit, O'Reilly shepherded summit attendees to a press conference attended by reporters from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other prominent publications. Within a few months, Torvalds' face was appearing on the cover of Forbes magazine, with the faces of Stallman, Perl creator Larry Wall, and Apache team leader Brian Behlendorf featured in the interior spread. Open source was open for business.
ocn 774:
Raymond called Stallman after the meeting to tell him about the new term "open source" and ask if he would use it. Raymond says Stallman briefly considered adopting the term, only to discard it. "I know because I had direct personal conversations about it," Raymond says.
ocn 775:
Stallman's immediate response was, "I'll have to think about it." The following day he had concluded that the values of Raymond and O'Reilly would surely dominate the future discourse of "open source," and that the best way to keep the ideas of the free software movement in public view was to stick to its traditional term.
ocn 776:
Later in 1998, Stallman announced his position: "open source," while helpful in communicating the technical advantages of free software also encouraged speakers to soft-pedal the issue of software freedom. It avoided the unintended meaning of "gratis software" and the intended meaning of "freedom-respecting software" equally. As a means for conveying the latter meaning, it was therefore no use. In effect, Raymond and O'Reilly had given a name to the non-idealistic political party in the community, the one Stallman did not agree with.
ocn 777:
In addition, Stallman thought that the ideas of "open source" led people to put too much emphasis on winning the support of business. While such support in itself wasn't necessarily bad in itself, he expected that being too desperate for it would lead to harmful compromises. "Negotiation 101 would teach you that if you are desperate to get someone's agreement, you are asking for a bad deal," he says. "You need to be prepared to say no." Summing up his position at the 1999 LinuxWorld Convention and Expo, an event billed by Torvalds himself as a "coming out party" for the "Linux" community, Stallman implored his fellow hackers to resist the lure of easy compromise.
ocn 778:
"Because we've shown how much we can do, we don't have to be desperate to work with companies or compromise our goals," Stallman said during a panel discussion. "Let them offer and we'll accept. We don't have to change what we're doing to get them to help us. You can take a single step towards a goal, then another and then more and more and you'll actually reach your goal. Or, you can take a half measure that means you don't ever take another step, and you'll never get there."
ocn 779:
Even before the LinuxWorld show, however, Stallman was showing an increased willingness to alienate open source supporters. A few months after the Freeware Summit, O'Reilly hosted its second annual Perl Conference. This time around, Stallman was in attendance. During a panel discussion lauding IBM's decision to employ the free software Apache web server in its commercial offerings, Stallman, taking advantage of an audience microphone, made a sharp denunciation of panelist John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language. Stallman branded Ousterhout a "parasite" on the free software community for marketing a proprietary version of Tcl via Ousterhout's startup company, Scriptics. Ousterhout had stated that Scriptics would contribute only the barest minimum of its improvements to the free version of Tcl, meaning it would in effect use that small contribution to win community approval for much a larger amount of non-free software development. Stallman rejected this position and denounced Scriptics' plans. "I don't think Scriptics is necessary for the continued existenceof Tcl," Stallman said to hisses from the fellow audience members.【126 Ibid. 】
ocn 780:
"It was a pretty ugly scene," recalls Prime Time Freeware's Rich Morin. "John's done some pretty respectable things: Tcl, Tk, Sprite. He's a real contributor." Despite his sympathies for Stallman and Stallman's position, Morin felt empathy for those troubled by Stallman's discordant words.
ocn 781:
Stallman will not apologize. "Criticizing proprietary software isn't ugly - proprietary software is ugly. Ousterhout had indeed made real contributions in the past, but the point is that Scriptics was going to be nearly 100% a proprietary software company. In that conference, standing up for freedom meant disagreeing with nearly everyone. Speaking from the audience, I could only say a few sentences. The only way to raise the issue so it would not be immediately forgotten was to put it in strong terms."
ocn 783:
Stallman's controversial criticism of Ousterhout momentarily alienated a potential sympathizer, Bruce Perens. In 1998, Eric Raymond proposed launching the Open Source Initiative, or OSI, an organization that would police the use of the term "open source" and provide a definition for companies interested in making their own programs. Raymond recruited Perens to draft the definition.【127 See Bruce Perens et al., "The Open Source Definition," The Open Source Initiative (1998),
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html. 】
ocn 784:
Perens would later resign from the OSI, expressing regret that the organization had set itself up in opposition to Stallman and the FSF. Still, looking back on the need for a free software definition outside the Free Software Foundation's auspices, Perens understands why other hackers might still feel the need for distance. "I really like and admire Richard," says Perens. "I do think Richard would do his job better if Richard had more balance. That includes going away from free-software for a couple of months."
ocn 785:
Stallman's energies would do little to counteract the public-relations momentum of open source proponents. In August of 1998, when chip-maker Intel purchased a stake in GNU/Linux vendor Red Hat, an accompanying New York Times article described the company as the product of a movement "known alternatively as free software and opensource."【128 See Amy Harmon, "For Sale: Free Operating System," New York Times (September 28, 1998),
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/biztech/articles/28linux.html. 】 Six months later, a John Markoff article on Apple Computerwas proclaiming the company's adoption of the "open source" Apache server in the article headline.【129 See John Markoff, "Apple Adopts 'Open Source' for its Server Computers," New York Times (March 17, 1999),
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/17apple.html. 】
ocn 787:
The open source proponents' message was simple: all you need, to sell the free software concept, is to make it business-friendly. They saw Stallman and the free software movement as fighting the market;they sought instead to leverage it. Instead of playing the role of high-school outcasts, they had played the game of celebrity, magnifying their power in the process.
ocn 790:
Stallman responds, "Raymond misrepresents my views: I don't think Torvalds 'conspired' with anyone, since being sneaky is not his way. However, Raymond's nasty conduct is visible in those statements themselves. Rather than respond to my views (even as he claims they are) on their merits, he proposes psychological interpretations for them. He attributes the harshest interpretation to unnamed others, then 'defends' me by proposing a slightly less derogatory one. He has often 'defended' me this way."
ocn 791:
Ironically, the success of open source and open source advocates such as Raymond would not diminish Stallman's role as a leader - but it would lead many to misunderstand what he is a leader of. Since the free software movement lacks the corporate and media recognition of open source, most users of GNU/Linux do not hear that it exists, let alone what its views are. They have heard the ideas and values of opensource, and they never imagine that Stallman might have different ones. Thus he receives messages thanking him for his advocacy of "open source," and explains in response that he has never been a supporter of that, using the occasion to inform the sender about free-software.
ocn 793:
Despite all these obstacles, the free software movement does make its ideas heard sometimes, and continues to grow in absolute terms. By sticking to its guns, and presenting its ideas in contrast to those of open source, it gains ground. "One of Stallman's primary character traits is the fact he doesn't budge," says Ian Murdock. "He'll wait up to a decade for people to come around to his point of view if that's what it takes."
ocn 794:
Murdock, for one, finds that un-budgeable nature both refreshing and valuable. Stallman may no longer be the solitary leader of the free software movement, but he is still the polestar of the free software community. "You always know that he's going to be consistent in his views," Murdock says. "Most people aren't like that. Whether you agree with him or not, you really have to respect that."
ocn 797:
Richard Stallman stares, unblinking, through the windshield of a rental car, waiting for the light to change as we make our way through downtown Kihei.
ocn 799:
It's about two hours after Stallman's speech at the Maui High Performance Center, and Kihei, a town that seemed so inviting before the speech, now seems profoundly uncooperative. Like most beach cities, Kihei is a one-dimensional exercise in suburban sprawl. Driving down its main drag, with its endless succession of burger stands, realty agencies, and bikini shops, it's hard not to feel like a steel-coated morsel passing through the alimentary canal of a giant commercial tapeworm. The feeling is exacerbated by the lack of side roads. With nowhere to go but forward, traffic moves in spring-like lurches. 200 yards ahead, a light turns green. By the time we are moving, the light is yellow again.
ocn 800:
For Stallman, a lifetime resident of the east coast, the prospect of spending the better part of a sunny Hawaiian afternoon trapped in slow traffic is enough to trigger an embolism. [RMS: Since I was driving, I was also losing time to answer my email, and that's a real pain since I can barely keep up anyway.] Even worse is the knowledge that, with just a few quick right turns a quarter mile back, this whole situation easily could have been avoided. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of the driver ahead of us, a programmer from the lab who knows the way and who has decided to take us to Pa'ia via the scenic route instead of via the nearby Pilani Highway.
ocn 801:
"This is terrible," says Stallman between frustrated sighs. "Why didn't we take the other route?"
ocn 804:
"Why isn't he turning?" moans Stallman, throwing up his hands in frustration. "Can you believe this?"
ocn 805:
I decide not to answer either. I find the fact that I am sitting in a car with Stallman in the driver seat, in Maui no less, unbelievable enough. Until two hours ago, I didn't even know Stallman knew how to drive. Now, listening to Yo-Yo Ma's cello playing the mournful bass notes of "Appalachian Journey" on the car stereo and watching the sunset pass by on our left, I do my best to fade into the upholstery.
ocn 806:
When the next opportunity to turn finally comes up, Stallman hits his right turn signal in an attempt to cue the driver ahead of us. No such luck. Once again, we creep slowly through the intersection, coming to a stop a good 200 yards before the next light. By now, Stallman is livid.
ocn 808:
I look out Stallman's window. Nearby Kahoolawe and Lanai Islands provide an ideal frame for the setting sun. It's a breathtaking view, the kind that makes moments like this a bit more bearable if you're a Hawaiian native, I suppose. I try to direct Stallman's attention to it, but Stallman, by now obsessed by the inattentiveness of the driver ahead of us, blows me off.
ocn 809:
When the driver passes through another green light, completely ignoring a "Pilani Highway Next Right," I grit my teeth. I remember an early warning relayed to me by BSD programmer Keith Bostic. "Stallman does not suffer fools gladly," Bostic warned me. "If somebody says or does something stupid, he'll look them in the eye and say, 'That's stupid.'"
ocn 810:
Looking at the oblivious driver ahead of us, I realize that it's the stupidity, not the inconvenience, that's killing Stallman right now.
ocn 811:
"It's as if he picked this route with absolutely no thought on how to get there efficiently," Stallman says.
ocn 812:
The word "efficiently" hangs in the air like a bad odor. Few things irritate the hacker mind more than inefficiency. It was the inefficiency of checking the Xerox laser printer two or three times a day that triggered Stallman's initial inquiry into the printer source code. It was the inefficiency of rewriting software tools hijacked by commercial software vendors that led Stallman to battle Symbolics and to launch the GNU Project. If, as Jean Paul Sartre once opined, hell is other people, hacker hell is duplicating other people's stupid mistakes, and it's no exaggeration to say that Stallman's entire life has been an attempt to save mankind from these fiery depths.
ocn 814:
"Imperfect systems infuriate hackers," observes Steven Levy, another warning I should have listened to before climbing into the car with Stallman. "This is one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars - the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which are so goddamn unnecessary [Levy's emphasis] that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . . re-design the entire system."【130 See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 40. 】
ocn 816:
Before I can make this observation to Stallman, the driver finally hits his right turn signal. Stallman's hunched shoulders relax slightly, and for a moment the air of tension within the car dissipates. The tension comes back, however, as the driver in front of us slows down. "Construction Ahead" signs line both sides of the street, and even though the Pilani Highway lies less than a quarter mile off in the distance, the two-lane road between us and the highway is blocked by a dormant bulldozer and two large mounds of dirt.
ocn 817:
It takes Stallman a few seconds to register what's going on as our guide begins executing a clumsy five-point U-turn in front of us. When he catches a glimpse of the bulldozer and the "No Through Access" signs just beyond, Stallman finally boils over.
ocn 820:
Stallman can take it no longer.
ocn 822:
Stallman accents the words "my way" by gripping the steering wheel and pulling himself towards it twice. The image of Stallman's lurching frame is like that of a child throwing a temper tantrum in a car seat, an image further underlined by the tone of Stallman's voice. Halfway between anger and anguish, Stallman seems to be on the verge of tears.
ocn 823:
Fortunately, the tears do not arrive. Like a summer cloudburst, the tantrum ends almost as soon as it begins. After a few whiny gasps, Stallman shifts the car into reverse and begins executing his own U-turn. By the time we are back on the main drag, his face is as impassive as it was when we left the hotel 30 minutes earlier.
ocn 824:
It takes less than five minutes to reach the next cross-street. This one offers easy highway access, and within seconds, we are soon speeding off toward Pa'ia at a relaxing rate of speed. The sun that once loomed bright and yellow over Stallman's left shoulder is now burning a cool orange-red in our rear-view mirror. It lends its color to the gauntlet wili wili trees flying past us on both sides of the highway.
ocn 827:
For Richard Stallman, time may not heal all wounds, but it does provide a convenient ally.
ocn 828:
Four years after "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Stallman still chafes over the Raymond critique. He also grumbles over Linus Torvalds' elevation to the role of world's most famous hacker. He recalls a popular T-shirt that began showing at Linux tradeshows around 1999. Designed to mimic the original promotional poster for Star Wars, the shirt depicted Torvalds brandishing a light-saber like Luke Skywalker, while Stallman's face rides atop R2D2. The shirt still grates on Stallman's nerves not only because it depicts him as Torvalds' sidekick, but also because it elevates Torvalds to the leadership role in the free-software community, a role even Torvalds himself is loath to accept. "It's ironic," says Stallman mournfully. "Picking up that sword is exactly what Linus refuses to do. He gets everybody focusing on him as the symbol of the movement, and then he won't fight. What good is it?"
ocn 829:
Then again, it is that same unwillingness to "pick up the sword," on Torvalds' part, that has left the door open for Stallman to bolster his reputation as the hacker community's ethical arbiter. Despite his grievances, Stallman has to admit that the last few years have been quite good, both to himself and to his organization. Relegated to the periphery by the ironic success of the GNU/Linux system because users thought of it as "Linux," Stallman has nonetheless successfully recaptured the initiative. His speaking schedule between January 2000and December 2001 included stops on six continents and visits to countries where the notion of software freedom carries heavy overtones -China and India, for example.
ocn 830:
Outside the bully pulpit, Stallman has taken advantage of the leverage of the GNU General Public License (GPL), of which he remains the steward. During the summer of 2000, while the air was rapidly leaking out of the 1999 Linux IPO bubble, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation scored two major victories. In July, 2000, Troll tech, a Norwegian software company and developer of Qt, a graphical interface library that ran on the GNU/Linux operating system, announced it was licensing its software under the GPL. A few weeks later, Sun Microsystems, a company that, until then, had been warily trying to ride the open source bandwagon without actually contributing its code, finally relented and announced that it, too, was dual licensing its new OpenOffice【131 Sun was compelled by a trademark complaint to use the clumsy name "OpenOffice.org." 】 application suite under the Lesser GNU Public License(LGPL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL).
ocn 831:
In the case of Trolltech, this victory was the result of a protracted effort by the GNU Project. The non-freeness of Qt was a serious problem for the free software community because KDE, a free graphical desktop environment that was becoming popular, depended on it. Qt was non-free software but Trolltech had invited free software projects(such as KDE) to use it gratis. Although KDE itself was free software, users that insisted on freedom couldn't run it, since they had to reject Qt. Stallman recognized that many users would want a graphical desktop on GNU/Linux, and most would not value freedom enough to reject the temptation of KDE, with Qt hiding within. The danger was that GNU/Linux would become a motor for the installation of KDE, and therefore also of non-free Qt. This would undermine the freedom which was the purpose of GNU.
ocn 832:
To deal with this danger, Stallman recruited people to launch two parallel counter projects. One was GNOME, the GNU free graphical desktop environment. The other was Harmony, a compatible free replacement for Qt. If GNOME succeeded, KDE would not be necessary; if Harmony succeeded, KDE would not need Qt. Either way, users would be able to have a graphical desktop on GNU/Linux without non-free Qt.
ocn 833:
In 1999, these two efforts were making good progress, and the management of Trolltech were starting to feel the pressure. So Trolltech released Qt under its own free software license, the QPL. The QPL qualified as a free license, but Stallman pointed out the drawback of incompatibility with the GPL: in general, combining GPL-covered code with Qt in one program was impossible without violating one license or the other. Eventually the Trolltech management recognized that the GPL would serve their purposes equally well, and released Qt with dual licensing: the same Qt code, in parallel, was available under the GNU GPL and under the QPL. After three years, this was victory.
ocn 836:
"I can spell it out in three letters," said Boerries. "GPL."
ocn 837:
At the time, Boerries said his company's decision had little to do with Stallman and more to do with the momentum of GPL-protected programs. "What basically happened was the recognition that different products attracted different communities, and the license you use depends on what type of community you want to attract," said Boerries. "With [OpenOffice], it was clear we had the highest correlation with the GPL community."【132 Marco Boerries, interview with author (July, 2000). 】 Alas, this victory was incomplete, since OpenOffice recommends the use of non-free plug-ins.
ocn 838:
Such comments point out the under-recognized strength of the GPL and, indirectly, the political genius of the man who played the largest role in creating it. "There isn't a lawyer on earth who would have drafted the GPL the way it is," says Eben Moglen, Columbia University law professor and Free Software Foundation general counsel. "But it works. And it works because of Richard's philosophy of design."
ocn 839:
A former professional programmer, Moglen traces his pro bono work with Stallman back to 1990 when Stallman requested Moglen's legal assistance on a private affair. Moglen, then working with encryption expert Phillip Zimmerman during Zimmerman's legal battles with the federal government, says he was honored by the request.【133 For more information on Zimmerman's legal travails, read Steven Levy's Crypto, p. 287-288. In the original book version of Free as in Freedom, I reported that Moglen helped defend Zimmerman against the National Security Agency. According to Levy's account, Zimmerman was investigated by the U.S. Attorney's office and U.S. Customs, not the NSA. 】
ocn 841:
Since then, Moglen, perhaps more than any other individual, has had the best chance to observe the crossover of Stallman's hacker philosophies into the legal realm. Moglen says Stallman's approach to legal code and his approach to software code are largely the same. "I have to say, as a lawyer, the idea that what you should do with a legal document is to take out all the bugs doesn't make much sense," Moglen says. "There is uncertainty in every legal process, and what most lawyers want to do is to capture the benefits of uncertainty for their client. Richard's goal is the complete opposite. His goal is to remove uncertainty, which is inherently impossible. It is inherently impossible to draft one license to control all circumstances in all legal systems all over the world. But if you were to go at it, you would have to go at it his way. And the resulting elegance, the resulting simplicity in design almost achieves what it has to achieve. And from there a little lawyering will carry you quite far."
ocn 842:
As the person charged with pushing the Stallman agenda, Moglen understands the frustration of would-be allies. "Richard is a man who does not want to compromise over matters that he thinks of as fundamental," Moglen says, "and he does not take easily the twisting of words or even just the seeking of artful ambiguity, which human society often requires from a lot of people."
ocn 844:
Sklyarov had written and released a program to break digital copy-protection on Adobe e-Books, in Russia where there was no law against it, as an employee of a Russian company. He was then arrested while visiting the US to give a scientific paper about his work. Stallman eagerly participated in protests condemning Adobe for having Sklyarov arrested, and the Free Software Foundation denounced the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as "censorship of software," but it could not intervene in favor of Sklyarov's program because that was non-free. Thus, Moglen worked for Sklyarov's defense through the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The FSF avoided involvement in the distribution of deCSS, since that was illegal, but Stallman condemned the U.S. government for prohibiting deCSS, and Moglen worked as direct counsel for the defendants.
ocn 845:
Following the FSF's decision not to involve itself in those cases, Moglen has learned to appreciate the value of Stallman's stubbornness. "There have been times over the years where I've gone to Richard and said, 'We have to do this. We have to do that. Here's the strategic situation. Here's the next move. Here's what he have to do.' And Richard's response has always been, 'We don't have to do anything.'Just wait. What needs doing will get done."
ocn 847:
Such comments disavow Stallman's own self-assessment: "I'm not good at playing games," Stallman says, addressing the many unseen critics who see him as a shrewd strategist. "I'm not good at looking ahead and anticipating what somebody else might do. My approach has always been to focus on the foundation [of ideas], to say 'Let's make the foundation as strong as we can make it.'"
ocn 848:
The GPL's expanding popularity and continuing gravitational strength are the best tributes to the foundation laid by Stallman and his GNU colleagues. While Stallman was never the sole person in the world releasing free software, he nevertheless can take sole credit for building the free software movement's ethical framework. Whether or not other modern programmers feel comfortable working inside that framework is immaterial. The fact that they even have a choice at all is Stallman's greatest legacy.
ocn 849:
Discussing Stallman's legacy at this point seems a bit premature. Stallman, 48 at the time of this writing, still has a few years left to add to or subtract from that legacy. Still, the momentum of the free software movement makes it tempting to examine Stallman's life outside the day-to-day battles of the software industry and within a more august, historical setting.
ocn 850:
To his credit, Stallman refuses all opportunities to speculate about this. "I've never been able to work out detailed plans of what the future was going to be like," says Stallman, offering his own premature epitaph. "I just said 'I'm going to fight. Who knows where I'll get?'"
ocn 851:
There's no question that in picking his fights, Stallman has alienated the very people who might otherwise have been his greatest champions, had he been willing to fight for their views instead of his own. It is also a testament to his forthright, ethical nature that many of Stallman's erstwhile political opponents still manage to put in a few good words for him when pressed. The tension between Stallman the ideologue and Stallman the hacker genius, however, leads a biographer to wonder: how will people view Stallman when Stallman's own personality is no longer there to get in the way?
ocn 852:
In early drafts of this book, I dubbed this question the "100 year" question. Hoping to stimulate an objective view of Stallman and his work, I asked various software-industry luminaries to take themselves out of the current time-frame and put themselves in a position of a historian looking back on the free software movement 100 years in the future. From the current vantage point, it is easy to see similarities between Stallman and past Americans who, while somewhat marginal during their lifetime, have attained heightened historical importance in relation to their age. Easy comparisons include Henry David Thoreau, transcendentalist philosopher and author of Civil Disobedience, and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and progenitor of the modern environmental movement. It is also easy to see similarities in men like William Jennings Bryan, a.k.a. "The Great Commoner," leader of the populist movement, enemy of monopolies, and a man who, though powerful, seems to have faded into historical insignificance.
ocn 853:
Although not the first person to view software as public property, Stallman is guaranteed a footnote in future history books thanks to the GPL. Given that fact, it seems worthwhile to step back and examine Richard Stallman's legacy outside the current time frame. Will the GPL still be something software programmers use in the year 2102, or will it have long since fallen by the wayside? Will the term "free-software" seem as politically quaint as "free silver" does today, or will it seem eerily prescient in light of later political events?
ocn 854:
Predicting the future is risky sport. Stallman refuses, saying that asking what people will think in 100 years presumes we have no influence over it. The question he prefers is, "What should we do to make a better future?" But most people, when presented with the predictive question, seemed eager to bite.
ocn 856:
The "couple of other people" Moglen nominates for future textbook chapters include John Gilmore, who beyond contributing in various ways to free software has founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Theodor Holm Nelson, a.k.a. Ted Nelson, author of the 1982book, Literary Machines. Moglen says Stallman, Nelson, and Gilmore each stand out in historically significant, non-overlapping ways. He credits Nelson, commonly considered to have coined the term "hypertext," for identifying the predicament of information ownership in the digital age. Gilmore and Stallman, meanwhile, earn notable credit for identifying the negative political effects of information control and building organizations - the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the case of Gilmore and the Free Software Foundation in the case of Stallman - to counteract those effects. Of the two, however, Moglen sees Stallman's activities as more personal and less political in nature.
ocn 857:
"Richard was unique in that the ethical implications of un-free software were particularly clear to him at an early moment," says Moglen. "This has a lot to do with Richard's personality, which lots of people will, when writing about him, try to depict as epiphenomenal or even a drawback in Richard Stallman's own life work."
ocn 858:
Gilmore, who describes his inclusion between the erratic Nelson and the irascible Stallman as something of a "mixed honor," nevertheless seconds the Moglen argument. Writes Gilmore:
ocn 859:
My guess is that Stallman's writings will stand up as well as Thomas Jefferson's have; he's a pretty clear writer and also clear on his principles... Whether Richard will be as influential as Jefferson will depend on whether the abstractions we call "civil rights" end up more important a hundred years from now than the abstractions that we call "software" or "technically imposed restrictions."
ocn 860:
Another element of the Stallman legacy not to be overlooked, Gilmore writes, is the collaborative software-development model pioneered by the GNU Project. Although flawed at times, the model has nevertheless evolved into a standard within the software-development industry. All told, Gilmore says, this collaborative software-development model may end up being even more influential than the GNU Project, the GPL License, or any particular software program developed by Stallman:
ocn 862:
Stallman thinks that evaluation, though positive, misses the point. "It emphasizes development methods over freedom, which reflects the values of open source rather than free software. If that is how future users look back on the GNU Project, I fear it will lead to a world in which developers maintain users in bondage, and let them aid development occasionally as a reward, but never take the chains off them."
ocn 863:
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of the 2001 book, The Future of Ideas, is similarly bullish. Like many legal scholars, Lessig sees the GPL as a major bulwark of the current so-called "digital commons," the vast agglomeration of community-owned software programs, network and telecommunication standards that have triggered the Internet's exponential growth over the last three decades. Rather than connect Stallman with other Internet pioneers, men such as Vannevar Bush, Vinton Cerf, and J. C. R. Licklider who convinced others to see computer technology on a wider scale, Lessig sees Stallman's impact as more personal, introspective, and, ultimately, unique:
ocn 864:
[Stallman] changed the debate from "is" to "ought." He made people see how much was at stake, and he built a device to carry these ideals forward... That said, I don't quite know how to place him in the context of Cerf or Licklider. The innovation is different. It is not just about a certain kind of code, or enabling the Internet. [It's] much more about getting people to see the value in a certain kind of Internet. I don't think there is anyone else in that class, before or after.
ocn 865:
Not everybody sees the Stallman legacy as set in stone, of course. Eric Raymond, the open source proponent who feels that Stallman's leadership role has diminished significantly since 1996, sees mixed signals when looking into the 2102 crystal ball:
ocn 866:
I think Stallman's artifacts (GPL, Emacs, GCC) will be seen as revolutionary works, as foundation-stones of the information world. I think history will be less kind to some of the theories from which RMS operated, and not kind at all to his personal tendency towards territorial, cult-leader behavior.
ocn 867:
As for Stallman himself, he, too, sees mixed signals:
ocn 870:
Searching for his own 19th-century historical analogy, Stallman summons the figure of John Brown, the militant abolitionist regarded as a hero on one side of the Mason Dixon line and a madman on the other.
ocn 872:
Such comparisons document both the self-perceived peripheral nature of Stallman's current work and the binary nature of his current reputation. It's hard to see Stallman's reputation falling to the same level of infamy as Brown's did during the post-Reconstruction period. Stallman, despite his occasional war-like analogies, has done little to inspire violence. Still, it is easy to envision a future in which Stallman's ideas wind up on the ash-heap.【134 RMS: Sam Williams' further words here, "In fashioning the free software cause not not as a mass movement but as a collection of private battles against the forces of proprietary temptation," do not fit the facts. Ever since the first announcement of the GNU Project, I have asked the public to support the cause. The free software movement aims to be a mass movement, and the only question is whether it has enough supporters to qualify as "mass." As of 2009, the Free Software Foundation has some 3000 members that pay the hefty dues, and over 20,000 subscribers to its monthly e-mail newsletter. 】
ocn 873:
Then again, it is that very will that may someday prove to be Stallman's greatest lasting legacy. Moglen, a close observer over the last decade, warns those who mistake the Stallman personality as counter-productive or epiphenomenal to the "artifacts" of Stallman's life. Without that personality, Moglen says, there would be precious few artifacts to discuss. Says Moglen, a former Supreme Court clerk:
ocn 874:
Look, the greatest man I ever worked for was Thurgood Marshall. I knew what made him a great man. I knew why he had been able to change the world in his possible way. I would be going out on a limb a little bit if I were to make a comparison, because they could not be more different: Thurgood Marshall was a man in society, representing an outcast society to the society that enclosed it, but still a man in society. His skill was social skills. But he was all of a piece, too. Different as they were in every other respect, the person I now most compare him to in that sense - of a piece, compact, made of the substance that makes stars, all the way through - is Stallman.
ocn 875:
In an effort to drive that image home, Moglen reflects on a shared moment in the spring of 2000. The success of the VA Linux IPO was still resonating in the business media, and a half dozen issues related to free software were swimming through the news. Surrounded by a swirling hurricane of issues and stories each begging for comment, Moglen recalls sitting down for lunch with Stallman and feeling like a castaway dropped into the eye of the storm. For the next hour, he says, the conversation calmly revolved around a single topic: strengthening the GPL.
ocn 877:
Moglen says that moment, more than any other, drove home the elemental simplicity of the Stallman style.
ocn 885:
The story starts in April, 2000. At the time, I was writing stories for the ill-fated web site BeOpen.com. One of my first assignments was a phone interview with Richard M. Stallman. The interview went well, so well that Slashdot (「http://www.slashdot.org)」, the popular "news for nerds" site owned by VA Software, Inc. (formerly VA LinuxSystems and before that, VA Research), gave it a link in its daily list of feature stories. Within hours, the web servers at BeOpen were heating up as readers clicked over to the site.
ocn 890:
I read your interview with Richard Stallman on BeOpen
with great interest. I've been intrigued by RMS and his
work for some time now and was delighted to find your
piece which I really think you did a great job of capturing
some of the spirit of what Stallman is trying to do with
GNU-Linux and the Free Software Foundation.
ocn 891:
What I'd love to do, however, is read more - and I don't
think I'm alone. Do you think there is more information
and/or sources out there to expand and update your
interview and adapt it into more of a profile of Stallman?
Perhaps including some more anecdotal information about
his personality and background that might really interest
and enlighten readers outside the more hardcore
programming scene?
ocn 892:
Tracy ended the email with a request that I give her a call to discuss the idea further. I did just that. Tracy told me her company was launching a new electronic book line, and it wanted stories that appealed to an early-adopter audience. The e-book format was 30,000words, about 100 pages, and she had pitched her bosses on the idea of profiling a major figure in the hacker community. Her bosses liked the idea, and in the process of searching for interesting people to profile,she had come across my BeOpen interview with Stallman. Hence her email to me.
ocn 895:
I have to admit, getting Stallman to participate in an e-book project was an afterthought on my part. As a reporter who covered the open source beat, I knew Stallman was a stickler. I'd already received a half dozen emails at that point upbraiding me for the use of "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux."
ocn 896:
Then again, I also knew Stallman was looking for ways to get his message out to the general public. Perhaps if I presented the project to him that way, he would be more receptive. If not, I could always rely upon the copious amounts of documents, interviews, and recorded online conversations Stallman had left lying around the Internet and do an unauthorized biography.
ocn 897:
During my research, I came across an essay titled "Freedom - Or Copyright?" Written by Stallman and published in the June, 2000,edition of the MIT Technology Review, the essay blasted e-books for an assortment of software sins. Not only did readers have to use proprietary software programs to read them, Stallman lamented, but the methods used to prevent unauthorized copying were overly harsh. Instead of downloading a transferable HTML or PDF file, readers downloaded an encrypted file. In essence, purchasing an e-book meant purchasing a nontransferable key to unscramble the encrypted content. Any attempt to open a book's content without an authorized key constituted a criminal violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law designed to bolster copyright enforcement on the Internet. Similar penalties held for readers who converted a book's content into an open file format, even if their only intention was to read the book on a different computer in their home. Unlike a normal book, the reader no longer held the right to lend, copy, or resell an e-book. They only had the right to read it on an authorized machine, warned Stallman:
ocn 898:
We still have the same old freedoms in using paper books.But if e-books replace printed books, that exception will do little good. With "electronic ink," which makes it possible to download new text onto an apparently printed piece of paper, even newspapers could become ephemeral. Imagine:no more used book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from the public library - no more "leaks" that might give someone a chance to read without paying. (And judging from the ads for Microsoft Reader, no more anonymous purchasing of books either.)This is the world publishers have in mind for us.【136 See "Freedom - Or Copyright?" (May, 2000),
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/stallman0500.asp. 】
ocn 900:
Eager to get started, I decided to call Stallman anyway and mention the book idea to him. When I did, he expressed immediate interest and immediate concern. "Did you read my essay on e-books?" he asked.
ocn 901:
When I told him, yes, I had read the essay and was waiting to hear back from the publisher, Stallman laid out two conditions: he didn't want to lend support to an e-book licensing mechanism he fundamentally opposed, and he didn't want to come off as lending support. "I don't want to participate in anything that makes me look like a hypocrite," he said.
ocn 902:
For Stallman, the software issue was secondary to the copyright issue. He said he was willing to ignore whatever software the publisher or its third-party vendors employed just so long as the company specified within the copyright that readers were free to make and distribute verbatim copies of the e-book's content. Stallman pointed to Stephen King's The Plant as a possible model. In June, 2000, King announced on his official web site that he was self-publishing The Plant in serial form. According to the announcement, the book's total cost would be $13, spread out over a series of $1 installments. As long as at least 75% of the readers paid for each chapter, King promised to continue releasing new installments. By August, the plan seemed to be working, as King had published the first two chapters with a third on the way.
ocn 903:
"I'd be willing to accept something like that," Stallman said. "As long as it also permitted verbatim copying." [RMS: As I recall, I also raised the issue of encryption; the text two paragraphs further down confirms this. I would not have agreed to publish the book in a way that required a non-free program to read it.]
ocn 904:
I forwarded the information to Tracy. Feeling confident that she and I might be able to work out an equitable arrangement, I called up Stallman and set up the first interview for the book. Stallman agreed to the interview without making a second inquiry into the status issue. Shortly after the first interview, I raced to set up a second interview (this one in Kihei), squeezing it in before Stallman headed off on a 14-day vacation to Tahiti. [RMS: That was not a pure vacation; I gave a speech there too.]
ocn 905:
It was during Stallman's vacation that the bad news came from Tracy. Her company's legal department didn't want to adjust its [license] notice on the e-books. Readers who wanted to make their books transferable would [first have to crack the encryption code, to be able to convert the book to a free, public format such as HTML. This would be illegal and they might face criminal penalties.]
ocn 907:
When I flew to New York, I met my agent, Henning Guttman. It was our first face-to-face meeting, and Henning seemed pessimistic about our chances of forcing a compromise, at least on the publisher's end. The large, established publishing houses already viewed the e-book format with enough suspicion and weren't in the mood to experiment with copyright language that made it easier for readers to avoid payment. As an agent who specialized in technology books, however,Henning was intrigued by the novel nature of my predicament. I told him about the two interviews I'd already gathered and the promise not to publish the book in a way that made Stallman "look like a hypocrite." Agreeing that I was in an ethical bind, Henning suggested we make that our negotiating point.
ocn 908:
Barring that, Henning said, we could always take the carrot-and-stick approach. The carrot would be the publicity that came with publishing an e-book that honored the hacker community's internal ethics. The stick would be the risks associated with publishing an e-book that didn't. Nine months before Dmitry Sklyarov became an Internet cause célèbre, we knew it was only a matter of time before an enterprising programmer revealed how to hack e-books. We also knew that a major publishing house releasing an [encrypted] e-book on Richard M. Stallman was the software equivalent of putting "Steal This E-Book" on the cover.
ocn 909:
After my meeting with Henning, I called Stallman. Hoping to make the carrot more enticing, I discussed a number of potential compromises. What if the publisher released the book's content under a[dual] license, something similar to what Sun Microsystems had done with Open Office, the free software desktop applications suite? The publisher could then release DRM-restricted【137 RMS: Williams wrote "commercial" here, but that is a misnomer, since it means "connected with business." All these versions would be commercial if a company published them. 】 versions of the e-book under [its usual] format, taking advantage of all the bells and whistles that went with the e-book software, while releasing the copyable version under a less aesthetically pleasing HTML format.
ocn 910:
Stallman told me he didn't mind the [dual-license] idea, but he did dislike the idea of making the freely copyable version inferior to the restricted version. Besides, he said [on second thought, this case was different precisely because he had] a way to control the outcome. He could refuse to cooperate.
ocn 912:
I made a few more suggestions with little effect. About the only thing I could get out of Stallman was a concession [RMS: i.e., a further compromise] that the e-book's [license] restrict all forms of file sharing to "noncommercial redistribution."
ocn 913:
Before I signed off, Stallman suggested I tell the publisher that I'd promised Stallman that the work would be [freely sharable]. I told Stallman I couldn't agree to that statement [RMS: though it was true,since he had accepted my conditions at the outset] but that I did view the book as unfinishable without his cooperation. Seemingly satisfied,Stallman hung up with his usual sign-off line: "Happy hacking."
ocn 914:
Henning and I met with Tracy the next day. Tracy said her company was willing to publish copyable excerpts in a unencrypted format but would limit the excerpts to 500 words. Henning informed her that this wouldn't be enough for me to get around my ethical obligation to Stallman. Tracy mentioned her own company's contractual obligation to online vendors such as Amazon.com. Even if the company decided to open up its e-book content this one time, it faced the risk of its partners calling it a breach of contract. Barring a change of heart in the executive suite or on the part of Stallman, the decision was up tome. I could use the interviews and go against my earlier agreement with Stallman, or I could plead journalistic ethics and back out of the verbal agreement to do the book.
ocn 915:
Following the meeting, my agent and I relocated to a pub on Third Ave. I used his cell phone to call Stallman, leaving a message when nobody answered. Henning left for a moment, giving me time to collect my thoughts. When he returned, he was holding up the cell phone.
ocn 916:
"It's Stallman," Henning said.
ocn 918:
"So," Stallman said bluntly. "Why should I give a damn about their contractual obligations?"
ocn 920:
"Don't you see?" Stallman said. "That's exactly why I'm doing this. I want a signal victory. I want them to make a choice between freedom and business as usual."
ocn 921:
As the words "signal victory" echoed in my head, I felt my attention wander momentarily to the passing foot traffic on the sidewalk. Coming into the bar, I had been pleased to notice that the location was less than half a block away from the street corner memorialized in the 1976 Ramones song, "53rd and 3rd," a song I always enjoyed playing in my days as a musician. Like the perpetually frustrated street hustler depicted in that song, I could feel things falling apart as quickly as they had come together. The irony was palpable. After weeks of gleefully recording other people's laments, I found myself in the position of trying to pull off the rarest of feats: a Richard Stallman compromise. When I continued hemming and hawing, pleading the publisher's position and revealing my growing sympathy for it,Stallman, like an animal smelling blood, attacked.
ocn 925:
"You mean license," Stallman said curtly.
ocn 928:
I must have been arguing on behalf of the publisher to the very end, because in my notes I managed to save a final Stallman chestnut: "I don't care. What they're doing is evil. I can't support evil. Goodbye." [RMS: It sounds like I had concluded that he would never take no for an answer, and the only way to end the conversation without accepting his proposition was to hang up on him.]
ocn 934:
Once there, I spoke with Tracy, careful to avoid shop talk. Our conversation was pleasant, relaxed. Before parting, we agreed to meet the next night. Once again, the conversation was pleasant, so pleasant that the Stallman e-book became almost a distant memory.
ocn 935:
When I got back to Oakland, I called around to various journalist friends and acquaintances. I recounted my predicament. Most upbraided me for giving up too much ground to Stallman in the pre-interview negotiation. [RMS: Those who have read the whole book know that I would never have dropped the conditions.] A former j-school professor suggested I ignore Stallman's "hypocrite" comment and just write the story. Reporters who knew of Stallman's media-savviness ex-pressed sympathy but uniformly offered the same response: it's your call.
ocn 936:
I decided to put the book on the back burner. Even with the interviews, I wasn't making much progress. Besides, it gave me a chance to speak with Tracy without running things past Henning first.By Christmas we had traded visits: she flying out to the west coast once, me flying out to New York a second time. The day before New Year's Eve, I proposed. Deciding which coast to live on, I picked New York. By February, I packed up my laptop computer and all my research notes related to the Stallman biography, and we winged our way to JFK Airport. Tracy and I were married on May 11. So much for failed book deals.
ocn 937:
During the summer, I began to contemplate turning my interview notes into a magazine article. Ethically, I felt in the clear doing so,since the original interview terms said nothing about traditional print media. To be honest, I also felt a bit more comfortable writing about Stallman after eight months of radio silence. Since our telephone conversation in September, I'd only received two emails from Stallman.Both chastised me for using "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" in a pair of articles for the web magazine Upside Today. Aside from that, I had enjoyed the silence. In June, about a week after the New York University speech, I took a crack at writing a 5,000-word magazine-length story about Stallman. This time, the words flowed. The distance had helped restore my lost sense of emotional perspective, I suppose.
ocn 938:
In July, a full year after the original email from Tracy, I got a call from Henning. He told me that O'Reilly & Associates, a publishing house out of Sebastopol, California, was interested in the running the Stallman story as a biography. [RMS: I have a vague memory that I suggested contacting O'Reilly, but I can't be sure after all these years.] The news pleased me. Of all the publishing houses in the world, O'Reilly, the same company that had published Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, seemed the most sensitive to the issues that had killed the earlier e-book. As a reporter, I had relied heavily on the O'Reilly book Open Sources as a historical reference. I also knew that various chapters of the book, including a chapter written by Stallman, had been published with [license] notices that permitted redistribution. Such knowledge would come in handy if the issue of electronic publication ever came up again.
ocn 944:
On that page, I found a Stallman critique of the Open Publication License. Stallman's critique related to the creation of modified works and the ability of an author to select either one of the OPL's options to restrict modification. If an author didn't want to select either option, it was better to use the GFDL instead, Stallman noted, since it minimized the risk of the non-selected options popping up in modified versions of a document.
ocn 946:
Still, the notion of unrestricted modification intrigued me. In my early negotiations with Tracy, I had pitched the merits of a GPL-style license for the e-book's content. At worst, I said, the license would guarantee a lot of positive publicity for the e-book. At best, it would encourage readers to participate in the book-writing process. As an author, I was willing to let other people amend my work just so long as my name always got top billing. Besides, it might even be interesting to watch the book evolve. I pictured later editions looking much like online versions of the Talmud, my original text in a central column surrounded by illuminating, third-party commentary in the margins.
ocn 947:
My idea drew inspiration from Project Xanadu (「http://www.xanadu.com)」, the legendary software concept originally conceived by Ted Nelson in 1960. During the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in 1999, I had seen the first demonstration of the project's [free] offshoot Udanax and had been wowed by the result. In one demonstration sequence, Udanax displayed a parent document and a derivative work in a similar two-column, plain-text format. With a click of the button, the program introduced lines linking each sentence in the parent to its conceptual offshoot in the derivative. An e-book biography of Richard M. Stallman didn't have to be Udanax-enabled, but given such technological possibilities, why not give users a chance to play around?【142 Anybody willing to "port" this book over to Udanax, the free software version of Xanadu, will receive enthusiastic support from me. To find out more about this intriguing technology,
visit ‹http://www.udanax.com›. 】
ocn 949:
After I signed the contract, I notified Stallman that the book project was back on. I mentioned the choice O'Reilly was giving me between the Open Publication License and the GNU Free Documentation License. I told him I was leaning toward the OPL, if only for the fact I saw no reason to give O'Reilly's competitors a chance to print the same book under a different cover. Stallman wrote back, arguing in favor of the GFDL, noting that O'Reilly had already used it several times in the past. Despite the events of the past year, I suggested a deal. I would choose the GFDL if it gave me the possibility to do more interviews and if Stallman agreed to help O'Reilly publicize the book. Stallman agreed to participate in more interviews but said that his participation in publicity-related events would depend on the content of the book. Viewing this as only fair, I set up an interview for December 17, 2001 in Cambridge.
ocn 950:
I set up the interview to coincide with a business trip my wife Tracy was taking to Boston. Two days before leaving, Tracy suggested I invite Stallman out to dinner.
ocn 951:
"After all," she said, "he is the one who brought us together."I sent an email to Stallman, who promptly sent a return email accepting the offer. When I drove up to Boston the next day, I met Tracy at her hotel and hopped the T to head over to MIT. When we got to Tech Square, I found Stallman in the middle of a conversation just as we knocked on the door.
ocn 952:
"I hope you don't mind," he said, pulling the door open far enough so that Tracy and I could just barely hear Stallman's conversational counterpart. It was a youngish woman, mid-20s I'd say, named Sarah.
ocn 953:
"I took the liberty of inviting somebody else to have dinner with us," Stallman said, matter-of-factly, giving me the same catlike smile he gave me back in that Palo Alto restaurant.
ocn 954:
To be honest, I wasn't too surprised. The news that Stallman had a new female friend had reached me a few weeks before, courtesy of Stallman's mother. "In fact, they both went to Japan last month when Richard went over to accept the Takeda Award," Lippman told me at the time.【143 Alas, I didn't find out about the Takeda Foundation's decision to award Stallman, along with Linus Torvalds and Ken Sakamura, with its first-ever award for"Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being" until after Stallman had made the trip to Japan to accept the award. For more information about the award and its accompanying $1 million prize, visit the Takeda site,
http://www.takeda-foundation.jp. 】
ocn 955:
On the way over to the restaurant, I learned the circumstances of Sarah and Richard's first meeting. Interestingly, the circumstances were very familiar. Working on her own fictional book, Sarah said she heard about Stallman and what an interesting character he was. She promptly decided to create a character in her book on Stallman and,in the interests of researching the character, set up an interview with Stallman. Things quickly went from there. The two had been dating since the beginning of 2001, she said.
ocn 956:
"I really admired the way Richard built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound personal concern," Sarah said,explaining her attraction to Stallman.
ocn 957:
My wife immediately threw back the question: "What was the issue?" "Crushing loneliness." During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had softened Stallman in any significant way. I didn't see anything to suggest they had. Although more flirtatious than I remembered,Stallman retained the same general level of prickliness. At one point,my wife uttered an emphatic "God forbid" only to receive a typical Stallman rebuke.
ocn 958:
"I hate to break it to you, but there is no God," Stallman said.[RMS: I must have been too deadpan. He could justly accuse me of being a wise guy, but not of rebuking.]
ocn 959:
Afterwards, when the dinner was complete and Sarah had departed, Stallman seemed to let his guard down a little. As we walked to a nearby bookstore, he admitted that the last 12 months had dramatically changed his outlook on life. "I thought I was going to be alone forever," he said. "I'm glad I was wrong."
ocn 960:
Before parting, Stallman handed me his "pleasure card," a business card listing Stallman's address, phone number, and favorite pastimes("sharing good books, good food and exotic music and dance") so that I might set up a final interview.
ocn 961:
The next day, over another meal of dim sum, Stallman seemed even more lovestruck than the night before. Recalling his debates with Currier House dorm maters over the benefits and drawbacks of an immortality serum, Stallman expressed hope that scientists might some day come up with the key to immortality. "Now that I'm finally starting to have happiness in my life, I want to have [a longer life]," he said.
ocn 962:
When I mentioned Sarah's "crushing loneliness" comment, Stallman failed to see a connection between loneliness on a physical or spiritual level and loneliness on a hacker level. "The impulse to share code is about friendship but friendship at a much lower level," he said. Later, however, when the subject came up again, Stallman did admit that loneliness, or the fear of perpetual loneliness [RMS: at the hacker-to-hacker, community level, that is], had played a major role in fueling his determination during the earliest days of the GNU Project.
ocn 964:
After the interview, I couldn't help but feel a certain sense of emotional symmetry. Hearing Sarah describe what attracted her to Stallman and hearing Stallman himself describe the emotions that prompted him to take up the free software cause, I was reminded of my own reasons for writing this book. Since July, 2000, I have learned to appreciate both the seductive and the repellent sides of the Richard Stallman persona. Like Eben Moglen before me, I feel that dismissing that persona as epiphenomenal or distracting in relation to the overall free software movement would be a grievous mistake. In many ways the two are so mutually defining as to be indistinguishable.
ocn 966:
While I'm sure not every reader feels the same level of affinity for Stallman...I'm sure most will agree [that] few individuals offer as singular a human portrait as Richard M. Stallman. It is my sincere hope that, with this initial portrait complete and with the help of the GFDL, others will feel a similar urge to add their own perspective to that portrait.
ocn 970:
The New Hacker Dictionary, an online compendium of software-programmer jargon, officially lists nine different connotations of the word "hack" and a similar number for "hacker." Then again, the same publication also includes an accompanying essay that quotes Phil Agre, an MIT hacker who warns readers not to be fooled by the word's perceived flexibility. "Hack has only one meaning," argues Agre. "An extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation." Richard Stallman tries to articulate it with the phrase, "Playful cleverness."
ocn 980:
It is a testament to the original computer hackers' prodigious skill that later programmers, including Richard M. Stallman, aspired to wear the same hacker mantle. By the mid to late 1970s, the term"hacker" had acquired elite connotations. In a general sense, a computer hacker was any person who wrote software code for the sake of writing software code. In the particular sense, however, it was a testament to programming skill. Like the term "artist," the meaning carried tribal overtones. To describe a fellow programmer as a hacker was a sign of respect. To describe oneself as a hacker was a sign of immense personal confidence. Either way, the original looseness of the computer-hacker appellation diminished as computers became more common.
ocn 985:
Hackers have railed against this perceived mis-usage of their self-designator for nearly two decades. Stallman, not one to take things lying down, coined the term "cracking" for "security breaking" so that people could more easily avoid calling it "hacking." But the distinction between hacking and cracking is often misunderstood. These two descriptive terms are not meant to be exclusive. It's not that "Hacking is here, and cracking is there, and never the twain shall meet." Hacking and cracking are different attributes of activities, just as "young"and "tall" are different attributes of persons.
ocn 990:
Once a vague item of obscure student jargon, the word "hacker" has become a linguistic billiard ball, subject to political spin and ethical nuances. Perhaps this is why so many hackers and journalists enjoy using it. We cannot predict how people will use the word in the future.We can, however, decide how we will use it ourselves. Using the term "cracking" rather than "hacking," when you mean "security breaking,"shows respect for Stallman and all the hackers mentioned in this book,and helps preserve something which all computer users have benefited from: the hacker spirit.
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v3 [en] by Free Software Foundation ocn 10:
Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it.
ocn 11:
For the developers' and authors' protection, the GPL clearly explains that there is no warranty for this free software. For both users' and authors' sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to authors of previous versions.
ocn 12:
Some devices are designed to deny users access to install or run modified versions of the software inside them, although the manufacturer can do so. This is fundamentally incompatible with the aim of protecting users' freedom to change the software. The systematic pattern of such abuse occurs in the area of products for individuals to use, which is precisely where it is most unacceptable. Therefore, we have designed this version of the GPL to prohibit the practice for those products. If such problems arise substantially in other domains, we stand ready to extend this provision to those domains in future versions of the GPL, as needed to protect the freedom of users.
ocn 13:
Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents. States should not allow patents to restrict development and use of software on general-purpose computers, but in those that do, we wish to avoid the special danger that patents applied to a free program could make it effectively proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL assures that patents cannot be used to render the program non-free.
ocn 122:
You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. For more information on this, and how to apply and follow the GNU GPL, see ‹http://www.gnu.org/licenses/›.
ocn 123:
The GNU General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License. But first, please read ‹http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html›.
Little Brother [en] by Doctorow, Cory ocn 505:
The hood went over my head and cinched tight at my neck. I was in total darkness and the air was stifling and stale. I was raised to my feet and walked down corridors, up stairs, on gravel. Up a gangplank. On a ship's steel deck. My hands were chained behind me, to a railing. I knelt on the deck and listened to the thrum of the diesel engines.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar [en] by Raymond, Eric S. ocn 47:
Indeed, my own most successful single hack previous to fetchmail was probably Emacs VC (version control) mode, a Linux-like collaboration by email with three other people, only one of whom (Richard Stallman, the author of Emacs and founder of the Free Software Foundation) I have met to this day. It was a front-end for SCCS, RCS and later CVS from within Emacs that offered "one-touch" version control operations. It evolved from a tiny, crude sccs.el mode somebody else had written. And the development of VC succeeded because, unlike Emacs itself, Emacs Lisp code could go through release/test/improve generations very quickly.
ocn 58:
I didn't think so. Granted, Linus is a damn fine hacker. How many of us could engineer an entire production-quality operating system kernel from scratch? But Linux didn't represent any awesome conceptual leap forward. Linus is not (or at least, not yet) an innovative genius of design in the way that, say, Richard Stallman or James Gosling (of NeWS and Java) are. Rather, Linus seems to me to be a genius of engineering and implementation, with a sixth sense for avoiding bugs and development dead-ends and a true knack for finding the minimum-effort path from point A to point B. Indeed, the whole design of Linux breathes this quality and mirrors Linus's essentially conservative and simplifying design approach.
The Public Domain - Enclosing the Commons of the Mind [en] by Boyle, James ocn 9:
A number of scientists and computer scientists made me see things I otherwise would not have—Drew Endy and Randy Ruttenberg in synthetic biology, Nobel laureates Sir John Sulston and Harold Varmus in genomics and biology more generally, Paul Ginsparg in astrophysics, and Harlan Onsrud in geospatial data. Paul Uhlir's work at the National Academy of Sciences introduced me to many of these issues. The work of Richard Stallman, the creator of the free software movement, remains an inspiration even though he profoundly disagrees with my nomenclature here—and with much else besides.
ocn 390:
To most people, pointing out vulnerabilities in computer security systems seemed, at least in 1999, like telling the world that your neighbor has forgotten to lock his door and all his possessions are there for the taking. But to the online community, it is by no means so clear. From the perspective of those who are knowledgeable in the field, there is a moral continuum. There is clearly legitimate computer security and cryptography research, which includes attempts to break into computer systems to test their defenses—that is how one finds out they are secure, after all. Then there are “hackers.” This term could be used to describe those who merely like to program. Richard Stallman, for example, the originator of the free software movement, describes himself thus. But the term could also be used for those who are interested in security or interoperability—making two systems work together. That was Mr. Johansen's declared goal, after all. But some self-described hackers go further. They believe that exploring and disclosing the weaknesses of supposedly secure systems is intellectually fulfilling, practically important, and protected by the First Amendment. They disclaim both moral and legal responsibility for the consequences of their disclosures. (Or at least the negative consequences; they frequently take credit for the positive consequences, such as improved security.) Finally, there are “crackers,” whose interest in gaining entry to computer systems is malicious or for financial gain. At what point on this continuum does the activity become legally, or morally, unacceptable? As the Reimerdes trial went on, it became clear that the answer the DMCA gave might not be the same as the one given even by undeniably legitimate computer scientists.
ocn 726:
For anyone interested in the way that networks can enable new collaborative methods of production, the free software movement, and the broader but less political movement that goes under the name of open source software, provide interesting case studies.【216 See Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub., 2001); Peter Wayner, Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000); Eben Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” First Monday 4 (1999), ‹http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594› [Ed. note: originally published as ‹http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_8/index.html›, the link has changed]. 】 Open source software is released under a series of licenses, the most important being the General Public License (GPL). The GPL specifies that anyone may copy the software, provided the license remains attached and the source code for the software always remains available.【217 Proprietary, or “binary only,” software is generally released only after the source code has been compiled into machine-readable object code, a form that is impenetrable to the user. Even if you were a master programmer, and the provisions of the Copyright Act, the appropriate licenses, and the DMCA did not forbid you from doing so, you would be unable to modify commercial proprietary software to customize it for your needs, remove a bug, or add a feature. Open source programmers say, disdainfully, that it is like buying a car with the hood welded shut. See, e.g., Wayner, Free for All, 264. 】 Users may add to or modify the code, may build on it and incorporate it into their own work, but if they do so, then the new program created is also covered by the GPL. Some people refer to this as the “viral” nature of the license; others find the term offensive.【218 See Brian Behlendorf, “Open Source as a Business Strategy,” in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, ed. Chris DiBona et al. (Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly, 1999), 149, 163. 】 The point, however, is that the open quality of the creative enterprise spreads. It is not simply a donation of a program or a work to the public domain, but a continual accretion in which all gain the benefits of the program on pain of agreeing to give their additions and innovations back to the communal project.
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For the whole structure to work without large-scale centralized coordination, the creation process has to be modular, with units of different sizes and complexities, each requiring slightly different expertise, all of which can be added together to make a grand whole. I can work on the sendmail program, you on the search algorithms. More likely, lots of people try, their efforts are judged by the community, and the best ones are adopted. Under these conditions, this curious mix of Kropotkin and Adam Smith, Richard Dawkins and Richard Stallman, we get distributed production without having to rely on the proprietary exclusion model. The whole enterprise will be much, much, much greater than the sum of the parts.
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If these questions are good ones, why are they also the wrong ones? I have given my guesses about the future of the distributed model of innovation. My own utopia has it flourishing alongside a scaled-down, but still powerful, intellectual property regime. Equally plausible scenarios see it as a dead end or as the inevitable victor in the war of productive processes. These are all guesses, however. At the very least, there is some possibility, even hope, that we could have a world in which much more of intellectual and inventive production is free. “ ‘Free' as in ‘free speech,' ” Richard Stallman says, not “free as in ‘free beer.' ”【232 Free Software Foundation, ‹http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html› [Ed. note: originally published at ‹http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/philosophy/free-sw.html›, the link has changed]. 】 But we could hope that much of it would be both free of centralized control and low- or no-cost. When the marginal cost of reproduction is zero, the marginal cost of transmission and storage approaches zero, the process of creation is additive, and much of the labor doesn't charge, the world looks a little different.【233 Exhibit A: the Internet—from the software and protocols on which it runs to the multiple volunteer sources of content and information. 】 This is at least a possible future, or part of a possible future, and one that we should not foreclose without thinking twice. Yet that is what we are doing. The Database Protection Bills and Directives, which extend intellectual property rights to the layer of facts;【234 See, e.g., the Database Investment and Intellectual Property Antipiracy Act of 1996, HR 3531, 104th Cong. (1996); The Consumer Access Bill, HR 1858, 106th Cong. § 101(1) (1999); see also Council Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 11 March 1996 on the Legal Protection of Databases, 1996 Official Journal of the European Union, L77 (27.03.1996): 20–28. 】 the efflorescence of software patents;【235 See generally Julie E. Cohen and Mark A. Lemley, “Patent Scope and Innovation in the Software Industry,” California Law Review 89 (2001): 1–58; see also Pamela Samuelson et al., “A Manifesto Concerning the Legal Protection of Computer Programs,” Columbia Law Review 94 (1994): 2308–2431. 】 the UCITA-led validation of shrinkwrap licenses that bind third parties;【236 Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, available at ‹http://www.law.upenn.edu/bll/archives/ulc/ucita/2002final.htm›. 】 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anticircumvention provisions【237 17 U.S.C. § 1201 (2002). 】 —the point of all of these developments is not merely that they make the peer-to-peer model difficult, but that in many cases they rule it out altogether. I will assert this point here, rather than argue for it, but I think it can be (and has been) demonstrated quite convincingly.【238 This point has been ably made by Pamela Samuelson, Jessica Litman, Jerry Reichman, Larry Lessig, and Yochai Benkler, among others. See Pamela Samuelson, “Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy: Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to Be Revised,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 519–566; Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001); J. H. Reichman and Paul F. Uhlir, “Database Protection at the Crossroads: Recent Developments and Their Impact on Science and Technology,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 793–838; Lawrence Lessig, “Jail Time in the Digital Age,” New York Times (July 30, 2001), A17; and Yochai Benkler, “Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain,” New York University Law Review 74 (1999): 354–446. Each has a slightly different focus and emphasis on the problem, but each has pointed out the impediments now being erected to distributed, nonproprietary solutions. See also James Boyle, “Cruel, Mean, or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual Property,” Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000): 2007–2039. 】
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Accept for the sake of argument that the free software community actually works, actually produces high-quality products capable of competing in the market with proprietary alternatives. Concede for a moment that the adoption of Creative Commons licenses shows there are millions of creators out there who want to share their works with others. Many of those creators even want to allow the world to build on their material. Indeed, let us concede that the whole history of the Web, from Wikipedia to the obsessive and usefully detailed sites created on everything from Vikings to shoe polishes, shows a desire to share one's knowledge, to build on the work of others one has never met. These efforts are remarkably varied. Some are ultimately aimed at profit—even if their results are free. Think of IBM's open source initiatives or musicians who release Creative Commons-licensed work in order to get more club gigs. Some are provided as a volunteer act of benevolence or civic duty, even if they “compete” with expensive proprietary alternatives. Think of Wikipedia or MIT's OpenCourseWare. When the infrastructure for this collaboration does not exist, it gets assembled—and quickly. Both the GPL and Creative Commons are examples. Accept all of this. So what?
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Free and open source software has been a subject of considerable interest to commentators. Glyn Moody's Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub., 2001), and Peter Wayner's Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000), both offer readable and accessible histories of the phenomenon. Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, revised edition (Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly, 2001), is a classic philosophy of the movement, written by a key participant—author of the phrase, famous among geeks, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Steve Weber, in The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), offers a scholarly argument that the success of free and open source software is not an exception to economic principles but a vindication of them. I agree, though the emphasis that Benkler and I put forward is rather different. To get a sense of the argument that free software (open source software's normatively charged cousin) is desirable for its political and moral implications, not just because of its efficiency or commercial success, one should read the essays of Richard Stallman, the true father of free software and a fine polemical, but rigorous, essayist. Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, ed. Joshua Gay (Boston: GNU Press, 2002). Another strong collection of essays can be found in Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A. Hissam, and Karim R. Lakhani, eds., Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). If you only have time to read a single essay on the subject it should be Eben Moglen's “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” First Monday 4 (1999), available at ‹http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594› [Ed. note: originally published as ‹http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_8/moglen/›, the link has changed].
The Wealth of Networks - How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom [en] by Benkler, Yochai ocn 20:
It is easy to miss these changes. They run against the grain of some of our most basic Economics 101 intuitions, intuitions honed in the industrial economy at a time when the only serious alternative seen was state Communism--an alternative almost universally considered unattractive today. The undeniable economic success of free software has prompted some leading-edge economists to try to understand why many thousands of loosely networked free software developers can compete with Microsoft at its own game and produce a massive operating system--GNU/Linux. That growing literature, consistent with its own goals, has focused on software and the particulars of the free and open-source software development communities, although Eric von Hippel's notion of "user-driven innovation" has begun to expand that focus to thinking about how individual need and creativity drive innovation at the individual level, and its diffusion through networks of likeminded individuals. The political implications of free software have been central to the free software movement and its founder, Richard Stallman, and were developed provocatively and with great insight by Eben Moglen. Free software is but one salient example of a much broader phenomenon. Why can fifty thousand volunteers successfully coauthor Wikipedia, the most serious online alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then turn around and give it away for free? Why do 4.5 million volunteers contribute their leftover computer cycles to create the most powerful supercomputer on Earth, SETI@Home? Without a broadly accepted analytic model to explain these phenomena, we tend to treat them as curiosities, perhaps transient fads, possibly of significance in one market segment or another. We [pg 6] should try instead to see them for what they are: a new mode of production emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world-- those that are the most fully computer networked and for which information goods and services have come to occupy the highest-valued roles.
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The quintessential instance of commons-based peer production has been free software. Free software, or open source, is an approach to software development that is based on shared effort on a nonproprietary model. It depends on many individuals contributing to a common project, with a variety of motivations, and sharing their respective contributions without any single person or entity asserting rights to exclude either from the contributed components or from the resulting whole. In order to avoid having the joint product appropriated by any single party, participants usually retain copyrights in their contribution, but license them to anyone--participant or stranger--on a model that combines a universal license to use the materials with licensing constraints that make it difficult, if not impossible, for any single contributor or third party to appropriate the project. This model of licensing is the most important institutional innovation of the free software movement. Its central instance is the GNU General Public License, or GPL. [pg 64]
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This requires anyone who modifies software and distributes the modified version to license it under the same free terms as the original software. While there have been many arguments about how widely the provisions that prevent downstream appropriation should be used, the practical adoption patterns have been dominated by forms of licensing that prevent anyone from exclusively appropriating the contributions or the joint product. More than 85 percent of active free software projects include some version of the GPL or similarly structured license.【20 Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, "The Scope of Open Source Licensing" (Harvard NOM working paper no. 02-42, table 1, Cambridge, MA, 2002). The figure is computed out of the data reported in this paper for the number of free software development projects that Lerner and Tirole identify as having "restrictive" or "very restrictive" licenses. 】
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The story of free software begins in 1984, when Richard Stallman started working on a project of building a nonproprietary operating system he called GNU (GNU's Not Unix). Stallman, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), operated from political conviction. He wanted a world in which software enabled people to use information freely, where no one would have to ask permission to change the software they use to fit their needs or to share it with a friend for whom it would be helpful. These freedoms to share and to make your own software were fundamentally incompatible with a model of production that relies on property rights and markets, he thought, because in order for there to be a market in uses of [pg 65] software, owners must be able to make the software unavailable to people who need it. These people would then pay the provider in exchange for access to the software or modification they need. If anyone can make software or share software they possess with friends, it becomes very difficult to write software on a business model that relies on excluding people from software they need unless they pay. As a practical matter, Stallman started writing software himself, and wrote a good bit of it. More fundamentally, he adopted a legal technique that started a snowball rolling. He could not write a whole operating system by himself. Instead, he released pieces of his code under a license that allowed anyone to copy, distribute, and modify the software in whatever way they pleased. He required only that, if the person who modified the software then distributed it to others, he or she do so under the exact same conditions that he had distributed his software. In this way, he invited all other programmers to collaborate with him on this development program, if they wanted to, on the condition that they be as generous with making their contributions available to others as he had been with his. Because he retained the copyright to the software he distributed, he could write this condition into the license that he attached to the software. This meant that anyone using or distributing the software as is, without modifying it, would not violate Stallman's license. They could also modify the software for their own use, and this would not violate the license. However, if they chose to distribute the modified software, they would violate Stallman's copyright unless they included a license identical to his with the software they distributed. This license became the GNU General Public License, or GPL. The legal jujitsu Stallman used--asserting his own copyright claims, but only to force all downstream users who wanted to rely on his contributions to make their own contributions available to everyone else--came to be known as "copyleft," an ironic twist on copyright. This legal artifice allowed anyone to contribute to the GNU project without worrying that one day they would wake up and find that someone had locked them out of the system they had helped to build.
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The next major step came when a person with a more practical, rather than prophetic, approach to his work began developing one central component of the operating system--the kernel. Linus Torvalds began to share the early implementations of his kernel, called Linux, with others, under the GPL. These others then modified, added, contributed, and shared among themselves these pieces of the operating system. Building on top of Stallman's foundation, Torvalds crystallized a model of production that was fundamentally [pg 66] different from those that preceded it. His model was based on voluntary contributions and ubiquitous, recursive sharing; on small incremental improvements to a project by widely dispersed people, some of whom contributed a lot, others a little. Based on our usual assumptions about volunteer projects and decentralized production processes that have no managers, this was a model that could not succeed. But it did.
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It took almost a decade for the mainstream technology industry to recognize the value of free or open-source software development and its collaborative production methodology. As the process expanded and came to encompass more participants, and produce more of the basic tools of Internet connectivity--Web server, e-mail server, scripting--more of those who participated sought to "normalize" it, or, more specifically, to render it apolitical. Free software is about freedom ("free as in free speech, not free beer" is Stallman's epitaph for it). "Open-source software" was chosen as a term that would not carry the political connotations. It was simply a mode of organizing software production that may be more effective than market-based production. This move to depoliticize peer production of software led to something of a schism between the free software movement and the communities of open source software developers. It is important to understand, however, that from the perspective of society at large and the historical trajectory of information production generally the abandonment of political motivation and the importation of free software into the mainstream have not made it less politically interesting, but more so. Open source and its wide adoption in the business and bureaucratic mainstream allowed free software to emerge from the fringes of the software world and move to the center of the public debate about practical alternatives to the current way of doing things.
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Encyclopedic and almanac-type information emerges on the Web out of the coordinate but entirely independent action of millions of users. This type of information also provides the focus on one of the most successful collaborative enterprises that has developed in the first five years of the twenty-first century, Wikipedia. Wikipedia was founded by an Internet entrepreneur, Jimmy Wales. Wales had earlier tried to organize an encyclopedia named Nupedia, which was built on a traditional production model, but whose outputs were to be released freely: its contributors were to be PhDs, using a formal, peer-reviewed process. That project appears to have failed to generate a sufficient number of high-quality contributions, but its outputs were used in Wikipedia as the seeds for a radically new form of encyclopedia writing. Founded in January 2001, Wikipedia combines three core characteristics: First, it uses a collaborative authorship tool, Wiki. This platform enables anyone, including anonymous passersby, to edit almost any page in the entire project. It stores all versions, makes changes easily visible, and enables anyone to revert a document to any prior version as well as to add changes, small and large. All contributions and changes are rendered transparent by the software and database. Second, it is a self-conscious effort at creating an encyclopedia--governed first and foremost by a collective informal undertaking to strive for a neutral point of view, within the limits of substantial self-awareness as to the difficulties of such an enterprise. An effort [pg 71] to represent sympathetically all views on a subject, rather than to achieve objectivity, is the core operative characteristic of this effort. Third, all the content generated by this collaboration is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, an adaptation of the GNU GPL to texts. The shift in strategy toward an open, peer-produced model proved enormously successful. The site saw tremendous growth both in the number of contributors, including the number of active and very active contributors, and in the number of articles included in the encyclopedia (table 3.1). Most of the early growth was in English, but more recently there has been an increase in the number of articles in many other languages: most notably in German (more than 200,000 articles), Japanese (more than 120,000 articles), and French (about 100,000), but also in another five languages that have between 40,000 and 70,000 articles each, another eleven languages with 10,000 to 40,000 articles each, and thirty-five languages with between 1,000 and 10,000 articles each.
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Cooperation in peer-production processes is usually maintained by some combination of technical architecture, social norms, legal rules, and a technically backed hierarchy that is validated by social norms. Wikipedia is the strongest example of a discourse-centric model of cooperation based on social norms. However, even Wikipedia includes, ultimately, a small number of people with system administrator privileges who can eliminate accounts or block users in the event that someone is being genuinely obstructionist. This technical fallback, however, appears only after substantial play has been given to self-policing by participants, and to informal and quasi-formal communitybased dispute resolution mechanisms. Slashdot, by contrast, provides a strong model of a sophisticated technical system intended to assure that no one can "defect" from the cooperative enterprise of commenting and moderating comments. It limits behavior enabled by the system to avoid destructive behavior before it happens, rather than policing it after the fact. The Slash code does this by technically limiting the power any given person has to moderate anyone else up or down, and by making every moderator the subject of a peer review system whose judgments are enforced technically-- that is, when any given user is described by a sufficiently large number of other users as unfair, that user automatically loses the technical ability to moderate the comments of others. The system itself is a free software project, licensed under the GPL (General Public License)--which is itself the quintessential example of how law is used to prevent some types of defection from the common enterprise of peer production of software. The particular type of defection that the GPL protects against is appropriation of the joint product by any single individual or firm, the risk of which would make it less attractive for anyone to contribute to the project to begin with. The GPL assures that, as a legal matter, no one who contributes to a free software project need worry that some other contributor will take the project and make it exclusively their own. The ultimate quality judgments regarding what is incorporated into the "formal" releases of free software projects provide the clearest example of the extent to which a meritocratic hierarchy can be used to integrate diverse contributions into a finished single product. In the case of the Linux kernel development project (see chapter 3), it was always within the power of Linus Torvalds, who initiated the project, to decide which contributions should be included in a new release, and which should not. But it is a funny sort of hierarchy, whose quirkiness Steve Weber [pg 105] well explicates.【38 Steve Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 】 Torvalds's authority is persuasive, not legal or technical, and certainly not determinative. He can do nothing except persuade others to prevent them from developing anything they want and add it to their kernel, or to distribute that alternative version of the kernel. There is nothing he can do to prevent the entire community of users, or some subsection of it, from rejecting his judgment about what ought to be included in the kernel. Anyone is legally free to do as they please. So these projects are based on a hierarchy of meritocratic respect, on social norms, and, to a great extent, on the mutual recognition by most players in this game that it is to everybody's advantage to have someone overlay a peer review system with some leadership.
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The most ambitious effort to create a commons-based framework for biological innovation in this field is BIOS. BIOS is an initiative of CAMBIA (Center for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture), a nonprofit agricultural research institute based in Australia, which was founded and is directed by Richard Jefferson, a pioneer in plant biotechnology. BIOS is based on the observation that much of contemporary agricultural research depends on access to tools and enabling technologies-- such as mechanisms to identify genes or for transferring them into target plants. When these tools are appropriated by a small number of firms and available only as part of capital-intensive production techniques, they cannot serve as the basis for innovation at the local level or for research organized on nonproprietary models. One of the core insights driving the BIOS initiative is the recognition that when a subset of necessary tools is available in the public domain, but other critical tools are not, the owners of those tools appropriate the full benefits of public domain innovation without at the same time changing the basic structural barriers to use of the proprietary technology. To overcome these problems, the BIOS initiative includes both a strong informatics component and a fairly ambitious "copyleft"-like model (similar to the GPL described in chapter 3) of licensing CAMBIA's basic tools and those of other members of the BIOS initiative. The informatics component builds on a patent database that has been developed by CAMBIA for a number of years, and whose ambition is to provide as complete as possible a dataset of who owns what tools, what the contours of ownership are, and by implication, who needs to be negotiated with and where research paths might emerge that are not yet appropriated and therefore may be open to unrestricted innovation.
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If universities do make the change, then the more complex problem will remain: designing an institutional interface between universities and the pharmaceutical industry that will provide sustainable significant benefits for developing-world distribution of drugs and for research opportunities into [pg 349] developing-world diseases. As we already saw in the context of agriculture, patents create two discrete kinds of barriers: The first is on distribution, because of the monopoly pricing power they purposefully confer on their owners. The second is on research that requires access to tools, enabling technologies, data, and materials generated by the developed-world research process, and that could be useful to research on developing-world diseases. Universities working alone will not provide access to drugs. While universities perform more than half of the basic scientific research in the United States, this effort means that more than 93 percent of university research expenditures go to basic and applied science, leaving less than 7 percent for development--the final research necessary to convert a scientific project into a usable product.【126 National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resource Statistics, Special Report: National Patterns of Research and Development Resources: 2003 NSF 05-308 (Arlington, VA: NSF, 2005), table 1. 】 Universities therefore cannot simply release their own patents and expect treatments based on their technologies to become accessible. Instead, a change is necessary in licensing practices that takes an approach similar to a synthesis of the general public license (GPL), of BIOS's licensing approach, and PIPRA.
Two Bits - The Cultural Significance of Free Software [en] by Kelty, Christopher M. ocn 51:
The fourth component, applying copyright (and copyleft) licenses (chapter 6), involves the problem of intellectual property as it faced programmers and geeks in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this [pg 15] chapter I detail the story of the first Free Software license—the GNU General Public License (GPL)—which emerged out of a controversy around a very famous piece of software called EMACS. The controversy is coincident with changing laws (in 1976 and 1980) and changing practices in the software industry—a general drift from trade secret to copyright protection—and it is also a story about the vaunted "hacker ethic" that reveals it in its native practical setting, rather than as a rarefied list of rules.
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Adepts with strong convictions—monks and priests whose initiation and mastery are evident—make the allegory work. Other uses of Christian iconography are less, so to speak, faithful to the sources. Another prominent personality, Richard Stallman, of the Free Software Foundation, is prone to dressing as his alter-ego, St. IGNUcius, patron saint of the church of EMACS—a church with no god, but intense devotion to a baroque text-processing program of undeniable, nigh-miraculous power.【64 See ‹http://www.stallman.org/saint.html› (accessed 5 February 2005) and ‹http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/religion/› (accessed 5 February 2005). On EMACS, see chapter 6. 】
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The first of these practices—the making of Free Software into a movement—is both the most immediately obvious and the most difficult to grasp. By the term movement I refer to the practice, among geeks, of arguing about and discussing the structure and meaning of Free Software: what it consists of, what it is for, and whether or not it is a movement. Some geeks call Free Software a movement, and some don't; some talk about the ideology and goals of Free Software, and some don't; some call it Free Software, while others call it Open Source. Amid all this argument, however, Free Software geeks recognize that they are all doing the same thing: the practice of creating a movement is the practice of talking about the meaning and necessity of the other four practices. It was in 1998-99 that geeks came to recognize that they were all doing the same thing and, almost immediately, to argue about why.【88 For instance, Richard Stallman writes, "The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are like two political camps within the free software community. Radical groups in the 1960s developed a reputation for factionalism: organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and then treated each other as enemies. Or at least, such is the [pg 322] image people have of them, whether or not it was true. The relationship between the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement is just the opposite of that picture. We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects. We don't think of the Open Source movement as an enemy. The enemy is proprietary software" ("Why ‘Free Software' Is Better than ‘Open Source,'" GNU's Not Unix! ‹http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html› [accessed 9 July 2006]). By contrast, the Open Source Initiative characterizes the relationship as follows: "How is ‘open source' related to ‘free software'? The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for free software. It's a pitch for ‘free software' because it works, not because it's the only right thing to do. We're selling freedom on its merits" (「http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.php」 [accessed 9 July 2006]). There are a large number of definitions of Free Software: canonical definitions include Richard Stallman's writings on the Free Software Foundation's Web site, www.fsf.org, including the "Free Software Definition" and "Confusing Words and Phrases that Are Worth Avoiding." From the Open Source side there is the "Open Source Definition" (「http://www.opensource.org/licenses/)」. Unaffiliated definitions can be found at www.freedomdefined.org. 】
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Free Software forked in 1998 when the term Open Source suddenly appeared (a term previously used only by the CIA to refer to unclassified sources of intelligence). The two terms resulted in two separate kinds of narratives: the first, regarding Free Software, stretched back into the 1980s, promoting software freedom and resistance to proprietary software "hoarding," as Richard Stallman, the head of the Free Software Foundation, refers to it; the second, regarding Open Source, was associated with the dotcom boom and the evangelism of the libertarian pro-business hacker Eric Raymond, who focused on the economic value and cost savings that Open Source Software represented, including the pragmatic (and polymathic) approach that governed the everyday use of Free Software in some of the largest online start-ups (Amazon, Yahoo!, HotWired, and others all "promoted" Free Software by using it to run their shops).
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A critical point in the emergence of Free Software occurred in 1998-99: new names, new narratives, but also new wealth and new stakes. "Open Source" was premised on dotcom promises of cost-cutting and "disintermediation" and various other schemes to make money on it (Cygnus Solutions, an early Free Software company, playfully tagged itself as "Making Free Software More Affordable"). VA Linux, for instance, which sold personal-computer systems pre-installed with Open Source operating systems, had the largest single initial public offering (IPO) of the stock-market bubble, seeing a 700 percent share-price increase in one day. "Free Software" by contrast fanned kindling flames of worry over intellectual-property expansionism and hitched itself to a nascent legal resistance to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Prior to 1998, Free Software referred either to the Free Software Foundation (and the watchful, micromanaging eye of Stallman) or to one of thousands of different commercial, avocational, or university-research projects, processes, licenses, and ideologies that had a variety of names: sourceware, freeware, shareware, open software, public domain software, and so on. The term Open Source, by contrast, sought to encompass them all in one movement.
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Writing Licenses Herein lies the rub, however: Netscape was immediately embroiled in controversy among Free Software hackers because it chose to write its own bespoke licenses for distributing the source code. Rather than rely on one of the existing licenses, such as the GNU GPL or the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) or MIT licenses, they created their own: the Netscape Public License (NPL) and the Mozilla Public License. The immediate concerns of Netscape had to do with their existing network of contracts and agreements with other, third-party developers—both those who had in the past contributed parts of the existing source code that Netscape might not have the rights to redistribute as Free Software, and those who were expecting in the future to buy and redistribute a commercial version. Existing Free Software licenses were either too permissive, giving to third parties rights that Netscape itself might not have, or too restrictive, binding Netscape to make source code freely available (the GPL) when it had already signed contracts with buyers of the nonfree code.
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Neither Stallman nor any other Free Software hacker was entirely happy with this situation. Stallman pointed out three flaws: "One flaw sends a bad philosophical message, another puts the free software community in a weak position, while the third creates a major practical problem within the free software community. Two of the flaws apply to the Mozilla Public License as well." He urged people [pg 105] not to use the NPL. Similarly, Bruce Perens suggested, "Many companies have adopted a variation of the MPL [sic] for their own programs. This is unfortunate, because the NPL was designed for the specific business situation that Netscape was in at the time it was written, and is not necessarily appropriate for others to use. It should remain the license of Netscape and Mozilla, and others should use the GPL or the BSD or X licenses."【92 Bruce Perens, "The Open Source Definition," 184. 】
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The Freeware Summit's very name indicated some of the concern about definition and direction. Stallman, despite his obvious centrality, but also because of it, was not invited to the Freeware Summit, and the Free Software Foundation was not held up as the core philosophical guide of this event. Rather, according to the press release distributed after the meeting, "The meeting's purpose was to facilitate a high-level discussion of the successes and challenges facing the developers. While this type of software has often been called ‘freeware' or ‘free software' in the past, the developers agreed that commercial development of the software is part of the picture, and that the terms ‘open source' or ‘sourceware' best describe the development method they support."【102 "Open Source Pioneers Meet in Historic Summit," press release, 14 April 1998, O'Reilly Press, ‹http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/796›. 】
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Raymond's paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" quickly became the most widely told story of how Open Source works and why it is important; it emphasizes the centrality of novel forms of coordination over the role of novel copyright licenses or practices of sharing source code. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" reports Raymond's experiments with Free Software (the bazaar model) and reflects on the difference between it and methodologies adopted by industry (the cathedral model). The paper does not truck with talk of freedom and has no denunciations of software hoarding à la Stallman. Significantly, it also has no discussion of issues of licensing. Being a hacker, however, Raymond did give his paper a "revision-history," which proudly displays revision 1.29, 9 February 1998: "Changed ‘free software' to ‘open source.'"【104 From Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The changelog is available online only: ‹http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/›. 】
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Raymond was determined to reject the philosophy of liberty that Stallman and the Free Software Foundation represented, but not in order to create a political movement of his own. Rather, Raymond (and the others at the Freeware Summit) sought to cash in on the rising tide of the Internet economy by turning the creation of Free Software into something that made more sense to investors, venture capitalists, and the stock-buying public. To Raymond, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation represented not freedom or liberty, but a kind of dogmatic, impossible communism. As Raymond was a committed libertarian, one might expect his core beliefs in the necessity of strong property rights to conflict with the strange communalism of Free Software—and, indeed, his rhetoric was focused on pragmatic, business-minded, profit-driven, and market-oriented uses of Free Software. For Raymond, the essentially interesting component of Free Software was not its enhancement of human liberty, but the innovation in software production that it represented (the "development model"). It was clear that Free Software achieved something amazing through a clever inversion of strong property rights, an inversion which could be expected to bring massive revenue in some other form, either through cost-cutting or, Netscape-style, through the stock market.
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Raymond wanted the business world and the mainstream industry to recognize Free Software's potential, but he felt that Stallman's [pg 110] rhetoric was getting in the way. Stallman's insistence, for example, on calling corporate intellectual-property protection of software "hoarding" was doing more damage than good in terms of Free Software's acceptance among businesses, as a practice, if not exactly a product.
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Raymond's papers channeled the frustration of an entire generation of Free Software hackers who may or may not have shared Stallman's dogmatic philosophical stance, but who nonetheless wanted to participate in the creation of Free Software. Raymond's paper, the Netscape announcement, and the Freeware Summit all played into a palpable anxiety: that in the midst of the single largest creation of paper wealth in U.S. history, those being enriched through Free Software and the Internet were not those who built it, who maintained it, or who got it.
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All through 1998 and 1999, buzz around Open Source built. Little-known companies such as Red Hat, VA Linux, Cygnus, Slackware, and SuSe, which had been providing Free Software support and services to customers, suddenly entered media and business consciousness. Articles in the mainstream press circulated throughout the spring and summer of 1998, often attempting to make sense of the name change and whether it meant a corresponding change in practice. A front-cover article in Forbes, which featured photos of Stallman, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, and Torvalds (figure 2), was noncommittal, cycling between Free Software, Open Source, and Freeware.【105 Josh McHugh, "For the Love of Hacking," Forbes, 10 August 1998, 94-100. 】
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By early 1999, O'Reilly Press published Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, a hastily written but widely read book. It included a number of articles—this time including one by Stallman—that cobbled together the first widely available public history of Free Software, both the practice and the technologies [pg 111] involved. Kirk McKusick's article detailed the history of important technologies like the BSD version of UNIX, while an article by Brian Behlendorf, of Apache, detailed the practical challenges of running Free Software projects. Raymond provided a history of hackers and a self-aggrandizing article about his own importance in creating the movement, while Stallman's contribution told his own version of the rise of Free Software.
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To most onlookers, Free Software and Open Source seem to be overwhelmed with frenzied argument; the flame wars and disputes, online and off, seem to dominate everything. To attend a conference where geeks—especially high-profile geeks like Raymond, Stallman, and Torvalds—are present, one might suspect that the very detailed practices of Free Software are overseen by the brow-beating, histrionic antics of a few charismatic leaders and that ideological commitments result in divergent, incompatible, and affect-laden [pg 113] opposition which must of necessity take specific and incompatible forms. Strangely, this is far from the case: all this sound and fury doesn't much change what people do, even if it is a requirement of apprenticeship. It truly is all over but for the shouting.
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According to most of the scholarly literature, the function of a movement is to narrate the shared goals and to recruit new members. But is this what happens in Free Software or Open Source?【106 On social movements—the closest analog, developed long ago—see Gerlach and Hine, People, Power, Change, and Freeman and Johnson, Waves of Protest. However, the Free Software and Open Source Movements do not have "causes" of the kind that conventional movements do, other than the perpetuation of Free and Open Source Software (see Coleman, "Political Agnosticism"; Chan, "Coding Free Software"). Similarly, there is no single development methodology that would cover only Open Source. Advocates of Open Source are all too willing to exclude those individuals or organizations who follow the same "development methodology" but do not use a Free Software license—such as Microsoft's oft-mocked "shared-source" program. The list of licenses approved by both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative is substantially the same. Further, the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the "Open Source Definition" are almost identical (compare ‹http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html› with ‹http://www.opensource.org/licenses/› [both accessed 30 June 2006]). 】 To begin with, movement is an awkward word; not all participants would define their participation this way. Richard Stallman suggests that Free Software is social movement, while Open Source is a development methodology. Similarly some Open Source proponents see it as a pragmatic methodology and Free Software as a dogmatic philosophy. While there are specific entities like the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, they do not comprise all Free Software or Open Source. Free Software and Open Source are neither corporations nor organizations nor consortia (for there are no organizations to consort); they are neither national, subnational, nor international; they are not "collectives" because no membership is required or assumed—indeed to hear someone assert "I belong" to Free Software or Open Source would sound absurd to anyone who does. Neither are they shady bands of hackers, crackers, or thieves meeting in the dead of night, which is to say that they are not an "informal" organization, because there is no formal equivalent to mimic or annul. Nor are they quite a crowd, for a crowd can attract participants who have no idea what the goal of the crowd is; also, crowds are temporary, while movements extend over time. It may be that movement is the best term of the lot, but unlike social movements, whose organization and momentum are fueled by shared causes or broken by ideological dispute, Free Software and Open Source share practices first, and ideologies second. It is this fact that is the strongest confirmation that they are a recursive public, a form of public that is as concerned with the material practical means of becoming public as it is with any given public debate.
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The movement, as a practice of discussion and argument, is made up of stories. It is a practice of storytelling: affect- and intellect-laden lore that orients existing participants toward a particular problem, contests other histories, parries attacks from outside, and draws in new recruits.【107 It is, in the terms of Actor Network Theory, a process of "enrollment" in which participants find ways to rhetorically align—and to disalign—their interests. It does not constitute the substance of their interest, however. See Latour, Science in Action; Callon, "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation." 】 This includes proselytism and evangelism (and the usable pasts of protestant reformations, singularities, rebellion and iconoclasm are often salient here), whether for the reform of intellectual-property law or for the adoption of Linux in the trenches of corporate America. It includes both heartfelt allegiance in the name of social justice as well as political agnosticism stripped of all ideology.【108 Coleman, "Political Agnosticism." 】 Every time Free Software is introduced to someone, discussed in the media, analyzed in a scholarly work, or installed in a workplace, a story of either Free Software or Open Source is used to explain its purpose, its momentum, and its temporality. At the extremes are the prophets and proselytes themselves: Eric Raymond describes Open Source as an evolutionarily necessary outcome of the natural tendency of human societies toward economies of abundance, while Richard Stallman describes it as a defense of the fundamental freedoms of creativity and speech, using a variety of philosophical theories of liberty, justice, and the defense of freedom.【109 See, respectively, Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Williams, Free as in Freedom. 】 Even scholarly analyses must begin with a potted history drawn from the self-narration of geeks who make or advocate free software.【110 For example, Castells, The Internet Galaxy, and Weber, The Success of Open Source both tell versions of the same story of origins and development. 】 Indeed, as a methodological aside, one reason it is so easy to track such stories and narratives is because geeks like to tell and, more important, like to archive such stories—to create Web pages, definitions, encyclopedia entries, dictionaries, and mini-histories and to save every scrap of correspondence, every fight, and every resolution related to their activities. This "archival hubris" yields a very peculiar and specific kind of fieldsite: one in which a kind [pg 115] of "as-it-happens" ethnographic observation is possible not only through "being there" in the moment but also by being there in the massive, proliferating archives of moments past. Understanding the movement as a changing entity requires constantly glancing back at its future promises and the conditions of their making.
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Before 1998, there was no movement. There was the Free Software Foundation, with its peculiar goals, and a very wide array of other projects, people, software, and ideas. Then, all of a sudden, in the heat of the dotcom boom, Free Software was a movement. Suddenly, it was a problem, a danger, a job, a calling, a dogma, a solution, a philosophy, a liberation, a methodology, a business plan, a success, and an alternative. Suddenly, it was Open Source or Free Software, and it became necessary to choose sides. After 1998, debates about definition exploded; denunciations and manifestos and journalistic hagiography proliferated. Ironically, the creation of two names allowed people to identify one thing, for [pg 116] these two names referred to identical practices, licenses, tools, and organizations. Free Software and Open Source shared everything "material," but differed vocally and at great length with respect to ideology. Stallman was denounced as a kook, a communist, an idealist, and a dogmatic holding back the successful adoption of Open Source by business; Raymond and users of "open source" were charged with selling out the ideals of freedom and autonomy, with the dilution of the principles and the promise of Free Software, as well as with being stooges of capitalist domination. Meanwhile, both groups proceeded to create objects—principally software—using tools that they agreed on, concepts of openness that they agreed on, licenses that they agreed on, and organizational schemes that they agreed on. Yet never was there fiercer debate about the definition of Free Software.
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Even after the invention of programming languages, programming "on" a computer—sitting at a glowing screen and hacking through the night—was still a long time in coming. For example, only by about 1969 was it possible to sit at a keyboard, write source code, instruct the computer to compile it, then run the program—all without leaving the keyboard—an activity that was all but unimaginable in the early days of "batch processing."【118 See Waldrop, The Dream Machine, 142-47. 】 Very few programmers worked in such a fashion before the mid-1970s, when text editors that allowed programmers to see the text on a screen rather [pg 123] than on a piece of paper started to proliferate.【119 A large number of editors were created in the 1970s; Richard Stallman's EMACS and Bill Joy's vi remain the most well known. Douglas Engelbart is somewhat too handsomely credited with the creation of the interactive computer, but the work of Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch in Berkeley, as well as that of the Multics team, Ken Thompson, and others on early on-screen editors is surely more substantial in terms of the fundamental ideas and problems of manipulating text files on a screen. This story is largely undocumented, save for in the computer-science literature itself. On Engelbart, see Bardini, Bootstrapping. 】 We are, by now, so familiar with the image of the man or woman sitting at a screen interacting with this device that it is nearly impossible to imagine how such a seemingly obvious practice was achieved in the first place—through the slow accumulation of the tools and techniques for working on a new kind of writing—and how that practice exploded into a Babel of languages and machines that betrayed the promise of the general-purpose computing machine.
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By such an account, open systems would be tantamount to economic regression, a state of pure competition on the basis of manufacturing superiority, and not on the basis of the competitive advantage granted by the monopoly of intellectual property, the clear hallmark of a high-tech industry.【164 Richard Stallman, echoing the image of medieval manacled wretches, characterized the blind spot thus: "Unix does not give the user any more legal freedom than Windows does. What they mean by ‘open systems' is that you can mix and match components, so you can decide to have, say, a Sun chain on your right leg and some other company's chain on your left leg, and maybe some third company's chain on your right arm, and this is supposed to be better than having to choose to have Sun chains on all your limbs, or Microsoft chains on all your limbs. You know, I don't care whose chains are on each limb. What I want is not to be chained by anyone" ("Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified Genius," interview by Michael Gross, Cambridge, Mass., 1999, 5, ‹http://www.mgross.com/MoreThgsChng/interviews/stallman1.html)›. 】 It was an irresolvable tension between the desire for a cooperative, market-based infrastructure and the structure of an intellectual-property system ill-suited to the technical realities within which companies and customers operated—a tension revealing the reorientation of knowledge and power with respect to creation, dissemination, and modification of knowledge.
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The use of novel, unconventional copyright licenses is, without a doubt, the most widely recognized and exquisitely refined component of Free Software. The GNU General Public License (GPL), written initially by Richard Stallman, is often referred to as a beautiful, clever, powerful "hack" of intellectual-property law—when it isn't being denounced as a viral, infectious object threatening the very fabric of economy and society. The very fact that something so boring, so arcane, and so legalistic as a copyright license can become an object of both devotional reverence and bilious scorn means there is much more than fine print at stake. [pg 180]
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But how did it come to be this way? As with the example of sharing UNIX source code, Free Software licenses are often explained as a reaction to expanding intellectual-property laws and resistance to rapacious corporations. The text of the GPL itself begins deep in such assumptions: "The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it."【207 "The GNU General Public Licence, Version 2.0," ‹http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html›. 】 But even if corporations are rapacious, sharing and modifying software are by no means natural human activities. The ideas of sharing and of common property and its relation to freedom must always be produced through specific practices of sharing, before being defended. The GPL is a precise example of how geeks fit together the practices of sharing and modifying software with the moral and technical orders—the social imaginaries—of freedom and autonomy. It is at once an exquisitely precise legal document and the expression of an idea of how software should be made available, shareable, and modifiable.
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In this chapter I tell the story of the creation of the GPL, the first Free Software license, during a controversy over EMACS, a very widely used and respected piece of software; the controversy concerned the reuse of bits of copyrighted source code in a version of EMACS ported to UNIX. There are two reasons to retell this story carefully. The first is simply to articulate the details of the origin of the Free Software license itself, as a central component of Free Software, details that should be understood in the context of changing copyright law and the UNIX and open-systems struggles of the 1980s. Second, although the story of the GPL is also an oft-told story of the "hacker ethic," the GPL is not an "expression" of this [pg 181] ethic, as if the ethic were genotype to a legal phenotype. Opposite the familiar story of ethics, I explain how the GPL was "figured out" in the controversy over EMACS, how it was formed in response to a complicated state of affairs, both legal and technical, and in a medium new to all the participants: the online mailing lists and discussion lists of Usenet and Arpanet.【208 All existing accounts of the hacker ethic come from two sources: from Stallman himself and from the colorful and compelling chapter about Stallman in Steven Levy's Hackers. Both acknowledge a prehistory to the ethic. Levy draws it back in time to the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club of the 1950s, while Stallman is more likely to describe it as reaching back to the scientific revolution or earlier. The stories of early hackerdom at MIT are avowedly Edenic, and in them hackers live in a world of uncontested freedom and collegial competition—something like a writer's commune without the alcohol or the brawling. There are stories about a printer whose software needed fixing but was only available under a nondisclosure agreement; about a requirement to use passwords (Stallman refused, chose
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A similar story might be told of Richard Stallman, hacker hero and founder of the Free Software Foundation, creator of (among many other things) the GNU C Compiler and GNU EMACS, two of the most widely used and tested Free Software tools in the world. Stallman is routinely abused for holding what many perceive to be "dogmatic" or "intractable" ideological positions about freedom and the right of individuals to do what they please with software. While it is no doubt quite true that his speeches and writings clearly betray a certain fervor and fanaticism, it would be a mistake to assume that his speeches, ideas, or belligerent demands concerning word choice constitute the real substance of his reform. In fact, it is the software he has created and the licenses he has written and rewritten which are the key to his Bentham-like inventiveness. Unlike Bentham, however, Stallman is not a creator of law and administrative structure, but a hacker.
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Stallman's GNU General Public License "hacks" the federal copyright law, as is often pointed out. It does this by taking advantage of the very strong rights granted by federal law to actually loosen the restrictions normally associated with ownership. Because the statutes grant owners strong powers to create restrictions, Stallman's GPL contains the restriction that anybody can use the licensed material, for any purpose, so long as they subsequently offer the same restriction. Hacks (after which hackers are named) are clever solutions to problems or shortcomings in technology. Hacks are work-arounds, clever, shortest-path solutions that take advantage of characteristics of the system that may or may not have been obvious to the people who designed it. Hacks range from purely utilitarian to mischievously pointless, but they always depend on an existing system or tool through which they achieve their point. To call Free Software a hack is to point out that it would be nothing without the existence of intellectual-property law: it relies on the structure of U.S. copyright law (USC§17) in order to subvert it. Free Software licenses are, in a sense, immanent to copyright laws—there is nothing illegal or even legally arcane about what they accomplish—but there is nonetheless a kind of lingering sense [pg 183] that this particular use of copyright was not how the law was intended to function.
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Like all software since the 1980 copyright amendments, Free Software is copyrightable—and what's more, automatically copyrighted as it is written (there is no longer any requirement to register). Copyright law grants the author (or the employer of the author) a number of strong rights over the dispensation of what has been written: rights to copy, distribute, and change the work.【211 Copyright Act of 1976, Pub. L. No. 94-553, 90 Stat. 2541, enacted 19 October 1976; and Copyright Amendments, Pub. L. No. 96-517, 94 Stat. 3015, 3028 (amending §101 and §117, title 17, United States Code, regarding computer programs), enacted 12 December 1980. All amendments since 1976 are listed at ‹http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92preface.html›. 】 Free Software's hack is to immediately make use of these rights in order to abrogate the rights the programmer has been given, thus granting all subsequent licensees rights to copy, distribute, modify, and use the copyrighted software. Some licenses, like the GPL, add the further restriction that every licensee must offer the same terms to any subsequent licensee, others make no such restriction on subsequent uses. Thus, while statutory law suggests that individuals need strong rights and grants them, Free Software licenses effectively annul them in favor of other activities, such as sharing, porting, and forking software. It is for this reason that they have earned the name "copyleft."【212 The history of the copyright and software is discussed in Litman, Digital Copyright; Cohen et al., Copyright in a Global Information Economy; and Merges, Menell, and Lemley, Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age. 】
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This is a convenient ex post facto description, however. Neither Stallman nor anyone else started out with the intention of hacking copyright law. The hack of the Free Software licenses was a response to a complicated controversy over a very important invention, a tool that in turn enabled an invention called EMACS. The story of the controversy is well-known among hackers and geeks, but not often told, and not in any rich detail, outside of these small circles.【213 See Wayner, Free for All; Moody, Rebel Code; and Williams, Free as in Freedom. Although this story could be told simply by interviewing Stallman and James Gosling, both of whom are still alive and active in the software world, I have chosen to tell it through a detailed analysis of the Usenet and Arpanet archives of the controversy. The trade-off is between a kind of incomplete, fly-on-the-wall access to a moment in history and the likely revisionist retellings of those who lived through it. All of the messages referenced here are cited by their "Message-ID," which should allow anyone interested to access the original messages through Google Groups (「http://groups.google.com)」. 】
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Like all projects on ITS at the AI Lab, many people contributed to the extension and maintenance of EMACS (including Guy Steele, Dave Moon, Richard Greenblatt, and Charles Frankston), but there is a clear recognition that Stallman made it what it was. The earliest AI Lab memo on EMACS, by Eugene Ciccarelli, says: "Finally, of all the people who have contributed to the development of EMACS, [pg 185] and the TECO behind it, special mention and appreciation go to Richard M. Stallman. He not only gave TECO the power and generality it has, but brought together the good ideas of many different Teco-function packages, added a tremendous amount of new ideas and environment, and created EMACS. Personally one of the joys of my avocational life has been writing Teco/EMACS functions; what makes this fun and not painful is the rich set of tools to work with, all but a few of which have an ‘RMS' chiseled somewhere on them."【214 Eugene Ciccarelli, "An Introduction to the EMACS Editor," MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 447, 1978, 2. 】
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The proliferation of EMACS was both pleasing and frustrating to Stallman, since it meant that the work fragmented into different projects, each of them EMACS-like, rather than building on one core project, and in a 1981 report he said, "The proliferation of such superficial facsimiles of EMACS has an unfortunate confusing effect: their users, not knowing that they are using an imitation of EMACS and never having seen EMACS itself, are led to believe they are enjoying all the advantages of EMACS. Since any real-time display editor is a tremendous improvement over what they probably had before, they believe this readily. To prevent such confusion, we urge everyone to refer to a nonextensible imitation of EMACS as an ‘ersatz EMACS.' "【215 Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 519a, 26 March 1981, 19. Also published as Richard M. Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA Symposium on Text Manipulation, 8-10 June (ACM, 1981), 147-56. 】
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Thus, while EMACS in its specific form on ITS was a creation of Stallman, the idea of EMACS or of any "real-time display editor" was proliferating in different forms and on different machines. The porting of EMACS, like the porting of UNIX, was facilitated by both its conceptual design integrity and its widespread availability.
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The phrase "nonextensible imitation" captures the combination of design philosophy and moral philosophy that EMACS represented. Extensibility was not just a useful feature for the individual computer user; it was a way to make the improvements of each new user easily available equally to all by providing a standard way for users to add extensions and to learn how to use new extensions that were added (the "self-documenting" feature of the system). The program had a conceptual integrity that was compromised when it was copied imperfectly. EMACS has a modular, extensible design [pg 186] that by its very nature invites users to contribute to it, to extend it, and to make it perform all manner of tasks—to literally copy and modify it, instead of imitating it. For Stallman, this was not only a fantastic design for a text editor, but an expression of the way he had always done things in the small-scale setting of the AI Lab. The story of Stallman's moral commitments stresses his resistance to secrecy in software production, and EMACS is, both in its design and in Stallman's distribution of it an example of this resistance.
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Not everyone shared Stallman's sense of communal order, however. In order to facilitate the extension of EMACS through sharing, Stallman started something he called the "EMACS commune." At the end of the 1981 report—"EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," dated 26 March—he explained the terms of distribution for EMACS: "It is distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed. Those who are interested should contact me. Further information about how EMACS works is available in the same way."【216 Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 519a, 26 March 1981, 24. 】
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In another report, intended as a user's manual for EMACS, Stallman gave more detailed and slightly more colorful instructions:
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EMACS does not cost anything; instead, you are joining the EMACS software-sharing commune. The conditions of membership are that you must send back any improvements you make to EMACS, including any libraries you write, and that you must not redistribute the system except exactly as you got it, complete. (You can also distribute your customizations, separately.) Please do not attempt to get a copy of EMACS, for yourself or anyone else, by dumping it off of your local system. It is almost certain to be incomplete or inconsistent. It is pathetic to hear from sites that received incomplete copies lacking the sources [source code], asking me years later whether sources are available. (All sources are distributed, and should be on line at every site so that users can read them and copy code from them). If you wish to give away a copy of EMACS, copy a distribution tape from MIT, or mail me a tape and get a new one.【217 Richard M. Stallman, "EMACS Manual for ITS Users," MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 554, 22 October 1981, 163. 】
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Because EMACS was so widely admired and respected, Stallman had a certain amount of power over this commune. If it had been an obscure, nonextensible tool, useful for a single purpose, no one would have heeded such demands, but because EMACS was by nature the kind of tool that was both useful for all kinds of tasks and [pg 187] customizable for specific ones, Stallman was not the only person who benefited from this communal arrangement. Two disparate sites may well have needed the same macro extension, and therefore many could easily see the social benefit in returning extensions for inclusion, as well as in becoming a kind of co-developer of such a powerful system. As a result, the demands of the EMACS commune, while unusual and autocratic, were of obvious value to the flock. In terms of the concept of recursive public, EMACS was itself the tool through which it was possible for users to extend EMACS, the medium of their affinity; users had a natural incentive to share their contributions so that all might receive the maximum benefit.
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The terms of the EMACS distribution agreement were not quite legally binding; nothing compelled participation except Stallman's reputation, his hectoring, or a user's desire to reciprocate. On the one hand, Stallman had not yet chosen to, or been forced to, understand the details of the legal system, and so the EMACS commune was the next best thing. On the other hand, the state of intellectual-property law was in great flux at the time, and it was not clear to anyone, whether corporate or academic, exactly what kind of legal arrangements would be legitimate (the 1976 changes to copyright law were some of the most drastic in seventy years, and a 1980 amendment made software copyrightable, but no court cases had yet tested these changes). Stallman's "agreement" was a set of informal rules that expressed the general sense of mutual aid that was a feature of both the design of the system and Stallman's own experience at the AI Lab. It was an expression of the way Stallman expected others to behave, and his attempts to punish or shame people amounted to informal enforcement of these expectations. The small scale of the community worked in Stallman's favor.
ocn 540:
At its small scale, Stallman's commune was confronting many of the same issues that haunted the open-systems debates emerging at the same time, issues of interoperability, source-code sharing, standardization, portability, and forking. In particular, Stallman was acutely aware of the blind spot of open systems: the conflict of moral-technical orders represented by intellectual property. While UNIX vendors left intellectual-property rules unchallenged and simply assumed that they were the essential ground rules of debate, Stallman made them the substance of his experiment and, like Bentham, became something of a legal muckraker as a result.
ocn 541:
Stallman's communal model could not completely prevent the porting and forking of software. Despite Stallman's request that imitators refer to their versions of EMACS as ersatz EMACS, few did. In the absence of legal threats over a trademarked term there was not much to stop people from calling their ports and forks EMACS, a problem of success not unlike that of Kleenex or Xerox. Few people took the core ideas of EMACS, implemented them in an imitation, and then called it something else (EINE and ZWEI were exceptions). In the case of UNIX the proliferation of forked versions of the software did not render them any less UNIX, even when AT&T insisted on ownership of the trademarked name. But as time went on, EMACS was ported, forked, rewritten, copied, or imitated on different operating systems and different computer architectures in universities and corporations around the world; within five or six years, many versions of EMACS were in wide use. It was this situation of successful adoption that would provide the context for the controversy that occurred between 1983 and 1985.
ocn 543:
In brief the controversy was this: in 1983 James Gosling decided to sell his version of EMACS—a version written in C for UNIX called GOSMACS—to a commercial software vendor called Unipress. GOSMACS, the second most famous implementation of EMACS (after Stallman's itself ), was written when Gosling was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. For years, Gosling had distributed GOSMACS by himself and had run a mailing list on Usenet, on which he answered queries and discussed extensions. Gosling had explicitly asked people not to redistribute the program, but to come back to him (or send interested parties to him directly) for new versions, making GOSMACS more of a benevolent dictatorship than a commune. Gosling maintained his authority, but graciously accepted revisions and bug-fixes and extensions from users, incorporating them into new releases. Stallman's system, by contrast, allowed users to distribute their extensions themselves, as well as have them included in the "official" EMACS. By 1983, Gosling had decided he was unable to effectively maintain and support GOSMACS—a task he considered the proper role of a corporation.
ocn 544:
For Stallman, Gosling's decision to sell GOSMACS to Unipress was "software sabotage." Even though Gosling had been substantially responsible for writing GOSMACS, Stallman felt somewhat proprietorial toward this ersatz version—or, at the very least, was irked that no noncommercial UNIX version of EMACS existed. So Stallman wrote one himself (as part of a project he announced around the same time, called GNU [GNU's Not UNIX], to create a complete non-AT&T version of UNIX). He called his version GNU EMACS and released it under the same EMACS commune terms. The crux of the debate hinged on the fact that Stallman used, albeit ostensibly with permission, a small piece of Gosling's code in his new version of EMACS, a fact that led numerous people, including the new commercial suppliers of EMACS, to cry foul. Recriminations and legal threats ensued and the controversy was eventually resolved when Stallman rewrote the offending code, thus creating an entirely "Gosling-free" version that went on to become the standard UNIX version of EMACS.
ocn 545:
The story raises several questions with respect to the changing legal context. In particular, it raises questions about the difference between "law on the books" and "law in action," that is, the difference between the actions of hackers and commercial entities, advised by lawyers and legally minded friends, and the text and interpretation of statutes as they are written by legislators and interpreted by courts and lawyers. The legal issues span trade secret, patent, and trademark, but copyright is especially significant. Three issues were undecided at the time: the copyrightability of software, the definition of what counts as software and what doesn't, and the meaning of copyright infringement. While the controversy did not resolve any of these issues (the first two would be resolved by Congress and the courts, the third remains somewhat murky), it did clarify the legal issues for Stallman sufficiently that he could leave behind the informal EMACS commune and create the first version of a Free Software license, the GNU General Public License, which first started appearing in 1985.
ocn 549:
"Free," however, did not mean "public domain," as is clear from his statement that "abandoning it" to the public domain would destroy the program. The distinction is an important one that was, and continues to be, lost on many sophisticated members of net.emacs. Here, free means without charge, but Gosling had no intention of letting that word suggest that he was not the author, owner, maintainer, distributor, and sole beneficiary of whatever value GOSMACS had. Public domain, by contrast, implied giving up all these rights.【220 The thread starting at Message-ID: 969@sdcsvax.uucp contains one example of a discussion over the difference between public-domain and commercial software. 】 His decision to sell GOSMACS to Unipress was a decision to transfer these rights to a company that would then charge for all the labor he had previously provided for no charge (for "free"). Such a distinction was not clear to everyone; many people considered the fact that GOSMACS was free to imply that it was in the public domain.【221 In particular, a thread discussing this in detail starts at Message-ID: 172@encore.uucp and includes Message-ID: 137@osu-eddie.UUCP , Message-ID: 1127@godot.uucp , Message-ID: 148@osu-eddie.uucp . 】 Not least of these was Richard Stallman, who referred to Gosling's act as "software sabotage" and urged people to avoid using the "semi-ersatz" Unipress version.【222 Message-ID: bnews.sri-arpa.988. 】
ocn 550:
To Stallman, the advancing commercialization of EMACS, both by CCA and by Unipress, was a frustrating state of affairs. The commercialization of CCA had been of little concern so long as GOSMACS remained free, but with Gosling's announcement, there was no longer a UNIX version of EMACS available. To Stallman, however, "free" meant something more than either "public domain" or "for no cost." The EMACS commune was designed to keep EMACS alive and growing as well as to provide it for free—it was an image of community stewardship, a community that had included Gosling until April 1983.
ocn 551:
The disappearance of a UNIX version of EMACS, as well as the sudden commercial interest in making UNIX into a marketable operating system, fed into Stallman's nascent plan to create a completely new, noncommercial, non-AT&T UNIX operating system that he would give away free to anyone who could use it. He announced his intention on 27 September 1983:【223 Message-ID: 771@mit-eddie.uucp , announced on net.unix-wizards and net.usoft. 】
ocn 555:
At that point, it is clear, there was no "free software license." There was the word free, but not the term public domain. There was the "golden rule," and there was a resistance to nondisclosure and license arrangements in general, but certainly no articulated conception of copyleft of Free Software as a legally distinct entity. And yet Stallman hardly intended to "abandon it" to the public domain, as Gosling suggested. Instead, Stallman likely intended to require the same EMACS commune rules to apply to Free Software, rules that he would be able to control largely by overseeing (in a nonlegal sense) who was sent or sold what and by demanding (in the form of messages attached to the software) that any modifications or improvements come in the form of donations. It was during the period 1983-85 that the EMACS commune morphed into the GPL, as Stallman began adding copyrights and appending messages that made explicit what people could do with the software.【225 Various other people seem to have conceived of a similar scheme around the same time (if the Usenet archives are any guide), including Guido Van Rossum (who would later become famous for the creation of the Python scripting language). The following is from Message-ID: ‹5568@mcvax.uucp›:
/* This software is copyright (c) Mathematical Centre, Amsterdam,
* 1983.
* Permission is granted to use and copy this software, but not for * profit,
* and provided that these same conditions are imposed on any person
* receiving or using the software.
*/ 】
ocn 556:
The GNU project initially received little attention, however; scattered messages to net.unix-wizards over the course of 1983-84 periodically ask about the status and how to contact them, often in the context of discussions of AT&T UNIX licensing practices that were unfolding as UNIX was divested and began to market its own version of UNIX.【226 For example, Message-ID: 6818@brl-tgr.arpa . 】 Stallman's original plan for GNU was to start with the core operating system, the kernel, but his extensive work on EMACS and the sudden need for a free EMACS for UNIX led him to start with a UNIX version of EMACS. In 1984 and into 1985, he and others began work on a UNIX version of GNU EMACS. The two commercial versions of UNIX EMACS (CCA EMACS and Unipress EMACS) continued to circulate and improve in parallel. DEC users meanwhile used the original free version created by Stallman. And, as often happens, life went on: Zimmerman left CCA in August [pg 193] 1984, and Gosling moved to Sun, neither of them remaining closely involved in the software they had created, but leaving the new owners to do so.
ocn 557:
By March 1985, Stallman had a complete version (version 15) of GNU EMACS running on the BSD 4.2 version of UNIX (the version Bill Joy had helped create and had taken with him to form the core of Sun's version of UNIX), running on DEC's VAX computers. Stallman announced this software in a characteristically flamboyant manner, publishing in the computer programmers' monthly magazine Dr. Dobbs an article entitled "The GNU Manifesto."【227 Stallman, "The GNU Manifesto." Available at GNU's Not Unix!, ‹http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html›. 】
ocn 558:
Stallman's announcement that a free version of UNIX EMACS was available caused some concern among commercial distributors. The main such concern was that GNU EMACS 15.34 contained code marked "Copyright (c) James Gosling," code used to make EMACS display on screen.【228 The main file of the controversy was called display.c. A version that was modified by Chris Torek appears in net.sources, Message-ID: 424@umcp-cs.uucp . A separate example of a piece of code written by Gosling bears a note that claims he had declared it public domain, but did not "include the infamous Stallman anti-copyright clause" (Message-ID: 78@tove.uucp ). 】 The "discovery" (not so difficult, since Stallman always distributed the source code along with the binary) that this code had been reused by Stallman led to extensive discussion among EMACS users of issues such as the mechanics of copyright, the nature of infringement, the definition of software, the meaning of public domain, the difference between patent, copyright, and trade secret, and the mechanics of permission and its granting—in short, a discussion that would be repeatedly recapitulated in nearly every software and intellectual property controversy in the future.
ocn 563:
Stallman replied the next day. [pg 195]
ocn 566:
Stallman's original defense for using Gosling's code was that he had permission to do so. According to him, Fen Labalme had received written permission—whether to make use of or to redistribute is not clear—the display code that was included in GNU EMACS 15.34. According to Stallman, versions of Labalme's version of Gosling's version of EMACS were in use in various places (including at Labalme's employer, Megatest), and Stallman and Labalme considered this a legally defensible position.【233 Message-ID: 4486@mit-eddie.uucp . Stallman also recounts this version of events in "RMS Lecture at KTH (Sweden)," 30 October 1986, ‹http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html›. 】
ocn 567:
Over the next two weeks, a slew of messages attempted to pick apart and understand the issues of copyright, ownership, distribution, and authorship. Gosling wrote to clarify that GOSMACS had never been in the public domain, but that "unfortunately, two moves have left my records in a shambles," and he is therefore silent on the question of whether he granted permission.【234 Message-ID: 2334@sun.uucp . 】 Gosling's claim could well be strategic: giving permission, had he done so, might have angered Unipress, which expected exclusive control over the version he had sold; by the same token, he may well have approved of Stallman's re-creation, but not have wanted to affirm this in any legally actionable way. Meanwhile, Zimmerman relayed an anonymous message suggesting that some lawyers somewhere found the "third hand redistribution" argument was legally "all wet."【235 Message-ID: 732@masscomp.uucp . 】
ocn 568:
Stallman's biggest concern was not so much the legality of his own actions as the possibility that people would choose not to use the software because of legal threats (even if such threats were issued only as rumors by former employees of companies that distributed software they had written). Stallman wanted users not only [pg 196] to feel safe using his software but to adopt his view that software exists to be shared and improved and that anything that hinders this is a loss for everyone, which necessitates an EMACS commune.
ocn 569:
Stallman's legal grounds for using Gosling's code may or may not have been sound. Zimmerman did his best throughout to explain in detail what kind of permission Stallman and Labalme would have needed, drawing on his own experience with the CCA lawyers and AT&T Bell Labs, all the while berating Stallman for not creating the display code himself. Meanwhile, Unipress posted an official message that said, "UniPress wants to inform the community that portions of the GNU EMACS program are most definitely not public domain, and that use and/or distribution of the GNU EMACS program is not necessarily proper."【236 Message-ID: 103@unipress.uucp . 】 The admittedly vague tone of the message left most people wondering what that meant—and whether Unipress intended to sue anyone. Strategically speaking, the company may have wished to maintain good will among hackers and readers of net.emacs, an audience likely composed of many potential customers. Furthermore, if Gosling had given permission to Stallman, then Unipress would themselves have been on uncertain legal ground, unable to firmly and definitively threaten users of GNU EMACS with legal action. In either case, the question of whether or not permission was needed was not in question—only the question of whether it had been granted.【237 With the benefit of hindsight, the position that software could be in the public domain also seems legally uncertain, given that the 1976 changes to USC§17 abolished the requirement to register and, by the same token, to render uncertain the status of code contributed to Gosling and incorporated into GOSMACS. 】
ocn 572:
Indeed, the general irony of this complicated situation was certainly not as evident as it might have been given the emotional tone of the debates: Stallman was using code from Gosling based on permission Gosling had given to Labalme, but Labalme had written code for Gosling which Gosling had commercialized without telling Labalme—conceivably, but not likely, the same code. Furthermore, all of them were creating software that had been originally conceived in large part by Stallman (but based on ideas and work on TECO, an editor written twenty years before EMACS), who was now busy rewriting the very software Gosling had rewritten for UNIX. The "once proud hacker ethic" that Labalme mentions would thus amount not so much to an explicit belief in sharing so much as a fast-and-loose practice of making contributions and fixes without documenting them, giving oral permission to use and reuse, and "losing" records that may or may not have existed—hardly a noble enterprise.
ocn 573:
But by 27 June 1985, all of the legal discussion was rendered moot when Stallman announced that he would completely rewrite the display code in EMACS.
ocn 576:
On 5 July, Stallman sent out a message that said: [pg 198]
ocn 579:
The fact that it only took one week to create the code is a testament to Stallman's widely recognized skills in creating great software—it doesn't appear to have indicated any (legal) threat or urgency. Indeed, even though Unipress seems also to have been concerned about their own reputation, and despite the implication made by Stallman that they had forced this issue to happen, they took a month to respond. At that point, the Unipress employee Mike Gallaher wrote to insist, somewhat after the fact, that Unipress had no intention of suing anyone—as long as they were using the Gosling-free EMACS version 16 and higher.
ocn 582:
Both Stallman and Unipress received various attacks and defenses from observers of the controversy. Many people pointed out that Stallman should get credit for "inventing" EMACS and that the issue of him infringing on his own invention was therefore ironic. Others proclaimed the innocence and moral character of Unipress, which, it was claimed, was providing more of a service (support for EMACS) than the program itself.
ocn 583:
Some readers interpreted the fact that Stallman had rewritten the display code, whether under pressure from Unipress or not, as confirmation of the ideas expressed in "The GNU Manifesto," namely, that commercial software stifles innovation. According to this logic, precisely because Stallman was forced to rewrite the code, rather than build on something that he himself assumed he had permission [pg 199] to do, there was no innovation, only fear-induced caution.【243 Joaquim Martillo, Message-ID: 287@mit-athena.uucpp : "Trying to forbid RMS from using discarded code so that he must spend time to reinvent the wheel supports his contention that ‘software hoarders' are slowing down progress in computer science." 】 On the other hand, latent within this discussion is a deep sense of propriety about what people had created; many people, not only Stallman and Gosling and Zimmerman, had contributed to making EMACS what it was, and most had done so under the assumption, legally correct or not, that it would not be taken away from them or, worse, that others might profit by it.
ocn 586:
The EMACS controversy occurred in a period just after some of the largest changes to U.S. intellectual-property law in seventy years. Two aspects of this context are worth emphasizing: (1) practices and knowledge about the law change slowly and do not immediately reflect the change in either the law or the strategies of actors; (2) U.S. law creates a structural form of uncertainty in which the interplay between legislation and case law is never entirely certain. In the former aspect, programmers who grew up in the 1970s saw a commercial practice entirely dominated by trade secret and patent protection, and very rarely by copyright; thus, the shift to widespread use of copyright law (facilitated by the 1976 and 1980 changes to the law) to protect software was a shift in thinking that only slowly dawned on many participants, even the most legally astute, since it was a general shift in strategy as well as a statutory change. In the latter aspect, the 1976 and 1980 changes to the copyright law contained a number of uncertainties that would take over a decade to be worked out in case law, issues such as the copyrightability of software, the definition of software, and the meaning [pg 200] of infringement in software copyright, to say nothing of the impact of the codification of fair use and the removal of the requirement to register (issues that arguably went unnoticed until the turn of the millennium). Both aspects set the stage for the EMACS controversy and Stallman's creation of the GPL.
ocn 588:
By contrast, copyright law was rarely deployed in matters of software production. The first copyright registration of software occurred in 1964, but the desirability of relying on copyright over trade secret was uncertain well into the 1970s.【245 Calvin Mooers, in his 1975 article "Computer Software and Copyright," suggests that the IBM unbundling decision opened the doors to thinking about copyright protection. 】 Some corporations, like IBM, routinely marked all source code with a copyright symbol. Others asserted it only on the binaries they distributed or in the license agreements. The case of software on the UNIX operating system and its derivatives is particularly haphazard, and the existence of copyright notices by the authors varies widely. An informal survey by Barry Gold singled out only James Gosling, Walter Tichy (author of rcs), and the RAND Corporation as having adequately labeled source code with copyright notices.【246 Message-ID: 933@sdcrdcf.uucp . 】 Gosling was also the first to register EMACS as copyrighted software in 1983, [pg 201] while Stallman registered GNU EMACS just after version 15.34 was released in May 1985.【247 Gosling's EMACS 264 (Stallman copied EMACS 84) is registered with the Library of Congress, as is GNU EMACS 15.34. Gosling's EMACS Library of Congress registration number is TX-3-407-458, registered in 1992. Stallman's registration number is TX-1-575-302, registered in May 1985. The listed dates are uncertain, however, since there are periodic re-registrations and updates. 】
ocn 589:
The uncertainty of the change from reliance on trade secret to reliance on copyright is clear in some of the statements made by Stallman around the reuse of Gosling's code. Since neither Stallman nor Gosling sought to keep the program secret in any form—either by licensing it or by requiring users to keep it secret—there could be no claims of trade-secret status on either program. Nonetheless, there was frequent concern about whether one had seen any code (especially code from a UNIX operating system, which is covered by trade secret) and whether code that someone else had seen, rewritten, or distributed publicly was therefore "in the public domain."【248 This is particularly confusing in the case of "dbx." Message-ID: 4437@mit-eddie.uucp , Message-ID: 6238@shasta.arpa , and Message-ID: 730@masscomp.uucp . 】 But, at the same time, Stallman was concerned that rewriting Gosling's display code would be too difficult: "Any display code would have a considerable resemblance to that display code, just by virtue of doing the same job. Without any clear idea of exactly how much difference there would have to be to reassure you users, I cannot tell whether the rewrite would accomplish that. The law is not any guidance here. . . . Writing display code that is significantly different is not easy."【249 Message-ID: 4489@mit-eddie.uucp . 】
ocn 590:
Stallman's strategy for rewriting software, including his plan for the GNU operating system, also involved "not looking at" anyone else's code, so as to ensure that no trade-secret violations would occur. Although it was clear that Gosling's code was not a trade secret, it was also not obvious that it was "in the public domain," an assumption that might be made about other kinds of software protected by trade secret. Under trade-secret rules, Gosling's public distribution of GOSMACS appears to give the green light for its reuse, but under copyright law, a law of strict liability, any unauthorized use is a violation, regardless of how public the software may have been.【250 A standard practice well into the 1980s, and even later, was the creation of so-called clean-room versions of software, in which new programmers and designers who had not seen the offending code were hired to [pg 336] re-implement it in order to avoid the appearance of trade-secret violation. Copyright law is a strict liability law, meaning that ignorance does not absolve the infringer, so the practice of "clean-room engineering" seems not to have been as successful in the case of copyright, as the meaning of infringement remains murky. 】
ocn 596:
The EMACS controversy confronts all three of these questions. Stallman's initial creation of EMACS was accomplished under conditions in which it was unclear whether copyright would apply (i.e., before 1980). Stallman, of course, did not attempt to copyright the earliest versions of EMACS, but the 1976 amendments removed the requirement to register, thus rendering everything written after 1978 automatically copyrighted. Registration represented only an additional effort to assert ownership in cases of suspected infringement.
ocn 597:
Throughout this period, the question of whether software was copyrightable—or copyrighted—was being answered differently in different cases: AT&T was relying on trade-secret status; Gosling, Unipress, and CCA negotiated over copyrighted material; and Stallman was experimenting with his "commune." Although the uncertainty was answered statutorily by the 1980 amendment, not everyone instantly grasped this new fact or changed practices based on it. There is ample evidence throughout the Usenet archive that the 1976 changes were poorly understood, especially by comparison with the legal sophistication of hackers in the 1990s and 2000s. Although the law changed in 1980, practices changed more slowly, and justifications crystallized in the context of experiments like that of GNU EMACS.
ocn 600:
What's more, both the 1976 and 1980 amendments are silent on the copyright status of source code vs. binary code. While all the versions of EMACS were distributed in binary, Stallman and Gosling both included the source to allow users to modify it and extend it, but they differed on the proper form of redistribution. The threshold between modifying software for oneself and copyright infringement was not yet clear, and it hung on the meaning of redistribution. Changing the software for use on a single computer might be necessary to get it to run, but by the early days of the Arpanet, innocently placing that code in a public directory on one computer could look like mass distribution.【255 An interesting addendum here is that the manual for EMACS was also released at around the same time as EMACS 16 and was available [pg 337] as a TeX file. Stallman also attempted to deal with the paper document in the same fashion (see Message-ID: ‹4734@mit-eddie.uucp›, 19 July 1985), and this would much later become a different and trickier issue that would result in the GNU Free Documentation License. 】
ocn 601:
Finally, the question of what constitutes infringement was at the heart of this controversy and was not resolved by law or by legal adjudication, but simply by rewriting the code to avoid the question. Stallman's use of Gosling's code, his claim of third-hand permission, the presence or absence of written permission, the sale of GOSMACS to Unipress when it most likely contained code not written by Gosling but copyrighted in his name—all of these issues complicated the question of infringement to the point where Stallman's only feasible option for continuing to create software was to avoid using anyone else's code at all. Indeed, Stallman's decision to use Gosling's code (which he claims to have changed in significant portions) might have come to nothing if he had unethically [pg 205] and illegally chosen not to include the copyright notice at all (under the theory that the code was original to Stallman, or an imitation, rather than a portion of Gosling's work). Indeed, Chris Torek received Gosling's permission to remove Gosling's name and copyright from the version of display.c he had heavily modified, but he chose not to omit them: "The only reason I didn't do so is that I feel that he should certainly be credited as the inspiration (at the very least) for the code."【256 Message-ID: 659@umcp-cs.uucp . 】 Likewise, Stallman was most likely concerned to obey the law and to give credit where credit was due, and therefore left the copyright notice attached—a clear case of blurred meanings of authorship and ownership.
ocn 603:
Even as it resolved the controversy, however, GNU EMACS posed new problems for Stallman: how would the EMACS commune survive if it wasn't clear whether one could legally use another person's code, even if freely contributed? Was Gosling's action in selling work by others to Unipress legitimate? Would Stallman be able to enforce its opposite, namely, prevent people from commercializing EMACS code they contributed to him? How would Stallman avoid the future possibility of his own volunteers and contributors later asserting that he had infringed on their copyright?
ocn 604:
By 1986, Stallman was sending out a letter that recorded the formal transfer of copyright to the Free Software Foundation (which he had founded in late 1985), with equal rights to nonexclusive use of the software.【257 Message-ID: 8605202356.aa12789@ucbvax.berkeley.edu . 】 While such a demand for the expropriation of copyright might seem contrary to the aims of the GNU project, in the context of the unfolding copyright law and the GOSMACS controversy it made perfect sense. Having been accused himself of not having proper permission to use someone else's copyrighted material in his free version of GNU EMACS, Stallman took steps to forestall such an event in the future.
ocn 605:
The interplay between technical and legal issues and "ethical" concerns was reflected in the practical issues of fear, intimidation, and common-sense (mis)understandings of intellectual-property [pg 206] law. Zimmerman's veiled threats of legal liability were directed not only at Stallman but at anyone who was using the program Stallman had written; breaking the law was, for Zimmerman, an ethical lapse, not a problem of uncertainty and change. Whether or not such an interpretation of the law was correct, it did reveal the mechanisms whereby a low level of detailed knowledge about the law—and a law in flux, at that (not to mention the litigious reputation of the U.S. legal system worldwide)—often seemed to justify a sense that buying software was simply a less risky option than acquiring it for free. Businesses, not customers, it was assumed, would be liable for such infringements. By the same token, the sudden concern of software programmers (rather than lawyers) with the detailed mechanics of copyright law meant that a very large number of people found themselves asserting common-sense notions, only to be involved in a flame war over what the copyright law "actually says."
ocn 608:
The rest of the story is quickly told: Stallman resigned from the AI Lab at MIT and started the Free Software Foundation in 1985; he created a raft of new tools, but ultimately no full UNIX operating system, and issued General Public License 1.0 in 1989. In 1990 he was awarded a MacArthur "genius grant." During the 1990s, he was involved in various high-profile battles among a new generation of hackers; those controversies included the debate around Linus Torvalds's creation of Linux (which Stallman insisted be referred to as GNU/Linux), the forking of EMACS into Xemacs, and Stallman's own participation in—and exclusion from—conferences and events devoted to Free Software. [pg 207]
ocn 610:
Each time a new piece of software was released, it was accompanied by one or more text files which explained what its legal status was. At first, there was a file called DISTRIB, which contained an explanation of the rights the new owner had to modify and redistribute the software.【259 For example, Message-ID: 5745@ucbvax.arpa . 】 DISTRIB referenced a file called COPYING, which contained the "GNU EMACS copying permission notice," also known as the GNU EMACS GPL. The first of these licenses listed the copyright holder as Richard Stallman (in 1985), but by 1986 all licenses referred to the Free Software Foundation as the copyright holder.
ocn 611:
As the Free Software Foundation released other pieces of software, the license was renamed—GNU CC GPL, a GNU Bison GPL, a GNU GDB GPL, and so on, all of which were essentially the same terms—in a file called COPYING, which was meant to be distributed along with the software. In 1988, after the software and the licenses had become considerably more widely available, Stallman made a few changes to the license that relaxed some of the terms and specified others.【260 See Message-ID: 8803031948.aa01085@venus.berkeley.edu . 】 This new version would become the GNU GPL 1.0. By the time Free Software emerged into the public consciousness in the late 1990s, the GPL had reached version 2.0, and the Free Software Foundation had its own legal staff.
ocn 612:
The creation of the GPL and the Free Software Foundation are often understood as expressions of the hacker ethic, or of Stallman's ideological commitment to freedom. But the story of EMACS and the complex technical and legal details that structure it illustrate how the GPL is more than just a hack: it was a novel, privately ordered legal "commune." It was a space thoroughly independent of, but insinuated into the existing bedrock of rules and practices of the world of corporate and university software, and carved out of the slippery, changing substance of intellectual-property statutes. At a time when the giants of the software industry were fighting to create a different kind of openness—one that preserved and would even strengthen existing relations of intellectual property—this [pg 208] hack was a radical alternative that emphasized the sovereignty not of a national or corporate status quo, but of self-fashioning individuals who sought to opt out of that national-corporate unity. The creation of the GNU GPL was not a return to a golden age of small-scale communities freed from the dominating structures of bureaucratic modernity, but the creation of something new out of those structures. It relied on and emphasized, not their destruction, but their stability—at least until they are no longer necessary.
ocn 613:
The significance of the GPL is due to its embedding within and emergence from the legal and technical infrastructure. Such a practice of situated reworking is what gives Free Software—and perhaps all forms of engineering and creative practice—its warp and weft. Stallman's decision to resign from the AI Lab and start the Free Software Foundation is a good example; it allowed Stallman no only to devote energy to Free Software but also to formally differentiate the organizations, to forestall at least the potential threat that MIT (which still provided him with office space, equipment, and network connection) might decide to claim ownership over his work. One might think that the hacker ethic and the image of self-determining free individuals would demand the total absence of organizations, but it requires instead their proliferation and modulation. Stallman himself was never so purely free: he relied on the largesse of MIT's AI Lab, without which he would have had no office, no computer, no connection to the network, and indeed, for a while, no home.
ocn 615:
The EMACS text editor is still widely used, in version 22.1 as of 2007, and ported to just about every conceivable operating system. The controversy with Unipress has faded into the distance, as newer and more intense controversies have faced Stallman and Free Software, [pg 209] but the GPL has become the most widely used and most finely scrutinized of the legal licenses. More important, the EMACS controversy was by no means the only one to have erupted in the lives of software programmers; indeed, it has become virtually a rite of passage for young geeks to be involved in such debates, because it is the only way in which the technical details and the legal details that confront geeks can be explored in the requisite detail. Not all such arguments end in the complete rewriting of source code, and today many of them concern the attempt to convince or evangelize for the release of source code under a Free Software license. The EMACS controversy was in some ways a primal scene—a traumatic one, for sure—that determined the outcome of many subsequent fights by giving form to the Free Software license and its uses.
ocn 622:
Linux and Apache are the two paradigmatic cases of Free Software in the 1990s, both for hackers and for scholars of Free Software. Linux is a UNIX-like operating-system kernel, bootstrapped out of the Minix operating system created by Andrew Tanenbaum.【263 Linux is often called an operating system, which Stallman objects to on the theory that a kernel is only one part of an operating system. Stallman suggests that it be called GNU/Linux to reflect the use of GNU operating-system tools in combination with the Linux kernel. This not-so-subtle ploy to take credit for Linux reveals the complexity of the distinctions. The kernel is at the heart of hundreds of different "distributions"—such as Debian, Red Hat, SuSe, and Ubuntu Linux—all of which also use GNU tools, but [pg 338] which are often collections of software larger than just an operating system. Everyone involved seems to have an intuitive sense of what an operating system is (thanks to the pedagogical success of UNIX), but few can draw any firm lines around the object itself. 】 Apache is the continuation of the original National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) project to create a Web server (Rob McCool's original program, called httpd), bootstrapped out of a distributed collection of people who were using and improving that software.
ocn 626:
When Torvalds started, he was blessed with an eager audience of hackers keen on seeing a UNIX system run on desktop computers and a personal style of encouragement that produced enormous positive feedback. Torvalds is often given credit for creating, through his "management style," a "new generation" of Free Software—a younger generation than that of Stallman and Raymond. Linus and Linux are not in fact the causes of this change, but the results of being at the right place at the right time and joining together a number of existing components. Indeed, the title of Torvalds's semi-autobiographical reflection on Linux—Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary—captures some of the character of its genesis.
ocn 629:
During this period (roughly 1987 to 1993), the Free Software Foundation attained a mythic cult status—primarily among UNIX and EMACS users. Part of this status was due to the superiority of the tools Stallman and his collaborators had already created: the GNU C Compiler (gcc), GNU EMACS, the GNU Debugger (gdb), GNU Bison, and loads of smaller utilities that replaced the original AT&T UNIX versions. The GNU GPL had also acquired a life of its own by this time, having reached maturity as a license and become the de facto choice for those committed to Free Software and the Free Software Foundation. By 1991, however, the rumors of the imminent appearance of Stallman's replacement UNIX operating system had started to sound empty—it had been six years since his public announcement of his intention. Most hackers were skeptical of Stallman's operating-system project, even if they acknowledged the success of all the other tools necessary to create a full-fledged operating system, and Stallman himself was stymied by the development [pg 215] of one particular component: the kernel itself, called GNU Hurd.
ocn 636:
Torvalds's announcement is telling as to where his project fit into the existing context: "just a hobby," not "big and professional like gnu" (a comment that suggests the stature that Stallman and the Free Software Foundation had achieved, especially since they were in reality anything but "big and professional"). The announcement was posted to the Minix list and thus was essentially directed at Minix users; but Torvalds also makes a point of insisting that the system would be free of cost, and his postscript furthermore indicates that it would be free of Minix code, just as Minix had been free of AT&T code.
ocn 637:
Torvalds also mentions that he has ported "bash" and "gcc," software created and distributed by the Free Software Foundation and tools essential for interacting with the computer and compiling new versions of the kernel. Torvalds's decision to use these utilities, rather than write his own, reflects both the boundaries of his project (an operating-system kernel) and his satisfaction with the availability and reusability of software licensed under the GPL.
ocn 640:
By all accounts, Prentice Hall was not restrictive in its sublicensing of the operating system, if people wanted to create an "enhanced" [pg 217] version of Minix. Similarly, Tanenbaum's frequent presence on comp.os.minix testified to his commitment to sharing his knowledge about the system with anyone who wanted it—not just paying customers. Nonetheless, Torvalds's pointed use of the word free and his decision not to reuse any of the code is a clear indication of his desire to build a system completely unencumbered by restrictions, based perhaps on a kind of intuitive folkloric sense of the dangers associated with cases like that of EMACS.【270 Indeed, initially, Torvalds's terms of distribution for Linux were more restrictive than the GPL, including limitations on distributing it for a fee or for handling costs. Torvalds eventually loosened the restrictions and switched to the GPL in February 1992. Torvalds's release notes for Linux 0.12 say, "The Linux copyright will change: I've had a couple of requests [pg 339] to make it compatible with the GNU copyleft, removing the ‘you may not distribute it for money' condition. I agree. I propose that the copyright be changed so that it conforms to GNU—pending approval of the persons who have helped write code. I assume this is going to be no problem for anybody: If you have grievances (‘I wrote that code assuming the copyright would stay the same') mail me. Otherwise The GNU copyleft takes effect as of the first of February. If you do not know the gist of the GNU copyright—read it" (「http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12)」. 】
ocn 645:
By contrast, Torvalds's "fun" project had no goals. Being a cocky nineteen-year-old student with little better to do (no textbooks to write, no students, grants, research projects, or committee meetings), Torvalds was keen to accept all the ready-made help he could find to make his project better. And with 40,000 Minix users, he had a more or less instant set of contributors. Stallman's audience for EMACS in the early 1980s, by contrast, was limited to about a hundred distinct computers, which may have translated into thousands, but certainly not tens of thousands of users. Tanenbaum's work in creating a generation of students who not only understood the internals of an operating system but, more specifically, understood the internals of the UNIX operating system created a huge pool of competent and eager UNIX hackers. It was the work of porting UNIX not only to various machines but to a generation of minds as well that set the stage for this event—and this is an essential, though often overlooked component of the success of Linux.
ocn 697:
On one side of this controversy, naturally, was Richard Stallman and those sharing his vision of Free Software. On the other were pragmatists like Torvalds claiming no goals and no commitment to "ideology"—only a commitment to "fun." The tension laid bare the way in which recursive publics negotiate and modulate the core components of Free Software from within. Torvalds made a very strong and vocal statement concerning this issue, responding to Stallman's criticisms about the use of non-free software to create Free Software: "Quite frankly, I don't _want_ people using Linux for ideological reasons. I think ideology sucks. This world would be a much better place if people had less ideology, and a whole lot more ‘I do this because it's FUN and because others might find it useful, not because I got religion.'"【297 Linus Torvalds, "Re: [PATCH] Remove Bitkeeper Documentation from Linux Tree," 20 April 2002, ‹http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0204.2/1018.html›. Quoted in Shaikh and Cornford, "Version Management Tools." 】
ocn 698:
Torvalds emphasizes pragmatism in terms of coordination: the right tool for the job is the right tool for the job. In terms of licenses, [pg 234] however, such pragmatism does not play, and Torvalds has always been strongly committed to the GPL, refusing to let non-GPL software into the kernel. This strategic pragmatism is in fact a recognition of where experimental changes might be proposed, and where practices are settled. The GPL was a stable document, sharing source code widely was a stable practice, but coordinating a project using SCMs was, during this period, still in flux, and thus Bitkeeper was a tool well worth using so long as it remained suitable to Linux development. Torvalds was experimenting with the meaning of coordination: could a non-free tool be used to create Free Software?
ocn 704:
The Bitkeeper controversy illustrates again that adaptability is not about radical invention, but about critique and response. Whereas controlled design and hierarchical planning represent the domain of governance—control through goal-setting and orientation of a collective or a project—adaptability privileges politics, properly speaking, the ability to critique existing design and to [pg 236] propose alternatives without restriction. The tension between goal-setting and adaptability is also part of the dominant ideology of intellectual property. According to this ideology, IP laws promote invention of new products and ideas, but restrict the re-use or transformation of existing ones; defining where novelty begins is a core test of the law. McVoy made this tension explicit in his justifications for Bitkeeper: "Richard [Stallman] might want to consider the fact that developing new software is extremely expensive. He's very proud of the collection of free software, but that's a collection of re-implementations, but no profoundly new ideas or products. . . . What if the free software model simply can't support the costs of developing new ideas?"【300 Quoted in Jeremy Andrews, "Interview: Larry McVoy," Kernel Trap, 28 May 2002, ‹http://Kerneltrap.org/node/222›. 】
ocn 710:
Coordination in Free Software is about adaptability over planning. It is a way of resolving the tension between individual virtuosity in creation and the social benefit in shared labor. If all software were created, maintained, and distributed only by individuals, coordination would be superfluous, and software would indeed be part of the domain of poetry. But even the paradigmatic cases of virtuosic creation—EMACS by Richard Stallman, UNIX by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie—clearly represent the need for creative forms [pg 238] of coordination and the fundamental practice of reusing, reworking, rewriting, and imitation. UNIX was not created de novo, but was an attempt to streamline and rewrite Multics, itself a system that evolved out of Project MAC and the early mists of time-sharing and computer hacking.【305 Mitchell Waldrop's The Dream Machine details the family history well. 】 EMACS was a reworking of the TECO editor. Both examples are useful for understanding the evolution of modes of coordination and the spectrum of design and debugging.
ocn 712:
Similarly, Bill Joy's distribution of BSD and James Gosling's distribution of GOSMACS were both ad hoc, noncorporate experiments in "releasing early and often." These distribution schemes had a purpose (beyond satisfying demand for the software). The frequent distribution of patches, fixes, and extensions eased the pain of debugging software and satisfied users' demands for new features and extensions (by allowing them to do both themselves). Had Thompson and Ritchie followed the conventional corporate model of software production, they would have been held responsible for thoroughly debugging and testing the software they distributed, and AT&T or Bell Labs would have been responsible for coming up with all innovations and extensions as well, based on marketing and product research. Such an approach would have sacrificed adaptability in favor of planning. But Thompson's and Ritchie's model was different: both the extension and the debugging of software became shared responsibilities of the users and the developers. Stallman's creation of EMACS followed a similar pattern; since EMACS was by design extensible and intended to satisfy myriad unforeseen needs, the responsibility rested on the users to address those needs, and sharing their extensions and fixes had obvious social benefit.
ocn 754:
The commitment to openness and the modulation of the meaning of source code thus create implications for the meaning of Free Software licenses: do such licenses cover this kind of content? Are new licenses necessary? What should they look like? Connexions was by no means the first project to stimulate questions about the applicability of Free Software licenses to texts and documents. In the case of EMACS and the GPL, for example, Richard Stallman had faced the problem of licensing the manual at the same time as the source code for the editor. Indeed, such issues would ultimately result in a GNU Free Documentation License intended narrowly to [pg 257] cover software manuals. Stallman, due to his concern, had clashed during the 1990s with Tim O'Reilly, publisher and head of O'Reilly Press, which had long produced books and manuals for Free Software programs. O'Reilly argued that the principles reflected in Free Software licenses should not be applied to instructional books, because such books provided a service, a way for more people to learn how to use Free Software, and in turn created a larger audience. Stallman argued the opposite: manuals, just like the software they served, needed to be freely modifiable to remain useful.
ocn 763:
With the exception of Abelson—who, in addition to being a famous computer scientist, worked for years in the same building that Richard Stallman camped out in and chaired the committee that wrote the report recommending OCW—none of the members of Creative Commons cut their teeth on Free Software projects (they were lawyers and activists, primarily) and yet the emergence of Open Source into the public limelight in 1998 was an event that made more or less instant and intuitive sense to all of them. During this time, Lessig and members of the Berkman Center began an "open law" project designed to mimic the Internet-based collaboration of the Open Source project among lawyers who might want to [pg 260] contribute to the Eldred case. Creative Commons was thus built as much on a commitment to a notion of collaborative creation—the use of the Internet especially—but more generally on the ability of individuals to work together to create new things, and especially to coordinate the creation of these things by the use of novel licensing agreements.
ocn 765:
Creative Commons was thus a back-door approach: if the laws could not be changed, then people should be given the tools they needed to work around those laws. Understanding how Creative Commons was conceived requires seeing it as a modulation of both the notion of "source code" and the modulation of "copyright licenses." But the modulations take place in that context of a changing legal system that was so unfamiliar to Stallman and his EMACS users, a legal system responding to new forms of software, networks, and devices. For instance, the changes to the Copyright Act of 1976 created an unintended effect that Creative Commons would ultimately seize on. By eliminating the requirement to register copyrighted works (essentially granting copyright as soon as the [pg 261] work is "fixed in a tangible medium"), the copyright law created a situation wherein there was no explicit way in which a work could be intentionally placed in the public domain. Practically speaking an author could declare that a work was in the public domain, but legally speaking the risk would be borne entirely by the person who sought to make use of that work: to copy it, transform it, sell it, and so on. With the explosion of interest in the Internet, the problem ramified exponentially; it became impossible to know whether someone who had placed a text, an image, a song, or a video online intended for others to make use of it—even if the author explicitly declared it "in the public domain." Creative Commons licenses were thus conceived and rhetorically positioned as tools for making explicit exactly what uses could be made of a specific work. They protected the rights of people who sought to make use of "culture" (i.e., materials and ideas and works they had not authored), an approach that Lessig often summed up by saying, "Culture always builds on the past."
ocn 887:
Availability, reusability, and modifiability are at the heart of this reorientation. The experiments of UNIX and open systems would have come to nothing if they had not also prompted a concurrent experimentation with intellectual-property law, of which the copyleft license is the central and key variable. Richard Stallman's creation of GNU EMACS and the controversy over propriety that it engendered was in many ways an attempt to deal with exactly the same problem that UNIX vendors and open-systems advocates faced: how to build extensibility into the software market—except that Stallman never saw it as a market. For him, software was and is part of the human itself, constitutive of our very freedom and, hence, inalienable. Extending software, through collective mutual [pg 309] aid, is thus tantamount to vitality, progress, and self-actualization. But even for those who insist on seeing software as mere product, the problem of extensibility remains. Standardization, standards processes, and market entry all appear as political problems as soon as extensibility is denied—and thus the legal solution represented by copyleft appears as an option, even though it raises new and troubling questions about the nature of competition and profitability.
Democratizing Innovation [en] by von Hippel, Eric
12.
Free Culture - How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity [en] by Lessig, Lawrence
2.
220.
Free as in Freedom (2.0) - Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution [en] by Williams, Sam; Stallman, Richard M.
2.
visit ‹http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html›.
8.
See ‹http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html›.
9.
We hackers always look for a funny or naughty name for a program, because naming a program is half the fun of writing the program. We also had a tradition of recursive acronyms, to say that the program that you're writing is similar to some existing program... I looked for a recursive acronym for Something Is Not UNIX. And I tried all 26 letters and discovered that none of them was a word. I decided to make it a contraction. That way I could have a three-letter acronym, for Something's Not UNIX. And I tried letters, and I came across the word "GNU." That was it.
Although a fan of puns, Stallman recommends that software users pronounce the "g" at the beginning of the acronym (i.e., "gah-new").Not only does this avoid confusion with the word "gnu," the name of the African antelope, Connochaetes gnou, it also avoids confusion with the adjective "new." "We've been working on it for 17 years now, so it is not exactly new any more," Stallman says.
Source: author notes and online transcript of "Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation," Richard Stallman's May 29, 2001, speech at New York University,
‹http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt›.
10.
http://www.mgross.com/MoreThgsChng/interviews/stallman1.html.
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17.
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21.
23.
26.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/nov/06/andrewbrown.
These are just a small sampling of the religious comparisons. To date, the most extreme comparison has to go to Linus Torvalds, who, in his autobiography - see Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58 - writes, "Richard Stallman is the God of Free Software." Honorable mention goes to Larry Lessig, who, in a footnote description of Stallman in his book - see Larry Lessig, The Future of Ideas (Random House, 2001): 270 - likens Stallman to Moses:...
as with Moses, it was another leader, Linus Torvalds, who finally carried the movement into the promised land by facilitating the development of the final part of the OS puzzle. Like Moses, too, Stallman is both respected and reviled by allies within the movement. He is[an] unforgiving, and hence for many inspiring, leader of a critically important aspect of modern culture. I have deep respect for the principle and commitment of this extraordinary individual, though I also have great respect for those who are courageous enough to question his thinking and then sustain his wrath.
In a final interview with Stallman, I asked him his thoughts about the religious comparisons. "Some people do compare me with an Old Testament prophet, and the reason is Old Testament prophets said certain social practices were wrong. They wouldn't compromise on moral issues. They couldn't be bought off, and they were usually treated with contempt."
34.
visit: ‹http://www.stallman.org/articles/texas.html›.
37.
http://crackmonkey.org/pipermail/crackmonkey/1998-December/001777.html. So far, Mak is the only person I've found willing to speak on the record in regard to this practice, although I've heard this from a few other female sources. Mak, despite expressing initial revulsion at it, later managed to put aside her misgivings and dance with Stallman at a 1999 LinuxWorld show.
39.
40.
visit ‹http://www.stallman.org/doggerel.html› . To hear Stallman singing "The Free Software Song,"
visit ‹http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html›.
46.
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html.
47.
http://www.lysator.liu.se/history/garb/txt/87-1-emacs.txt.
52.
53.
http://memex.org/meme2-04.html.
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57.
61.
63.
http://catb.org/jargon/html/T/TWENEX.html.
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http://www.gnu.org/gnu/ manifesto.html.
81.
_* The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
_* The freedom to study the program's source code, and change it so that the program does what you wish (freedom 1).
_* The freedom to redistribute copies of the program so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
_* The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, so that the whole community can benefit from them (freedom 3). For more information, please visit "The Free Software Definition" at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.
86.
90.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.html.
91.
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html .)
This interview offers an interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at Stallman's political attitudes during the earliest days of the GNU Project. It is also helpful in tracing the evolution of Stallman's rhetoric.
Describing the purpose of the GPL, Stallman says, "I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage."
Contrast this with a statement to the author in August 2000: "I urge you not to use the term 'intellectual property' in your thinking. It will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. And those things are so different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about them at once. If you hear somebody saying something' about intellectual property,' without [putting it in] quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join."
[RMS: The contrast it shows is that I've learned to be more cautious in generalizing. I probably wouldn't talk about "owning knowledge" today, since it's a very broad concept. But "owning knowledge" is not the same generalization as "intellectual property," and the difference between those three laws is crucial to understanding any legal issue about owning knowledge. Patents are direct monopolies over using specific knowledge; that really is one form of "owning knowledge." Copyrights are one of the methods used to stop the sharing of works that embody or explain knowledge, which is a very different thing. Meanwhile, trademarks have very little to do with the subject of knowledge.]
92.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html.
94.
97.
http://the-tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html.
98.
99.
111.
113.
"Timing errors" occur in an asynchronous system where jobs done in parallel can theoretically occur in any order, and one particular order leads to problems.
Imagine that program A does X, and program B does Y, where both X and Y are short routines that examine and update the same data structure. Nearly always the computer will do X before Y, or do Y before X, and then there will be no problem. On rare occasions, by chance, the scheduler will let program A run until it is in the middle of X, and then run B which will do Y. Thus, Y will be done while Xis half-done. Since they are updating the same data structure, they will interfere. For instance, perhaps X has already examined the data structure, and it won't notice that there was a change. There will be an unreproducible failure, unreproducible because it depends on chance factors (when the scheduler decides to run which program and how long).
The way to prevent such a failure is to use a lock to make sure X and Y can't run at the same time. Programmers writing asynchronous systems know about the general need for locks, but sometimes they overlook the need for a lock in a specific place or on a specific data structure. Then the program has a timing error.
115.
World War II and the determination needed to win it was a very strong memory as I was growing up. Statements such as Churchill's, "We will fight them in the landing zones, we will fight them on the beaches... we will never surrender," have always resonated for me.
117.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html. Stallman's response to those accusations is in
http://stallman.org/articles/xemacs.origin.
119.
136.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/stallman0500.asp.
143.
http://www.takeda-foundation.jp.
Two Bits - The Cultural Significance of Free Software [en] by Kelty, Christopher M.
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