To Free or Not to Free the Code in Question
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Introductions - UNIX® Unix, and Not-Unix The average age within Canterbury Linux Users Group is around 40, so UNIX has been 'with us all our lives', though unmet by most people. For *nix's 40th birthday, it is useful to look at the evolution of the licensing models surrounding the various UNIX-like operating systems (OS). These models explain most about *nix fans' simple choice. This is a large, complex and nuanced (highly differentiated) social, technical and economic field. Many obscure titles have to be identified and navigated to make sense of 'Unix', and so there we begin. UNIX®, a competitive American software brand founded from a 1965 cooperative venture, has spawned and remains part of the highly diversified and international 'Unix' field of today. *Nix denotes the world of UNIX-related and UNIX-compatible computer OS, software, and their users. GNU/Linux OS became the most-used family member in 2002, and since challenges to become the best known. Its rival is the Unix amalgam present on Apple computers (which in 2005 countered by moving from powerPC to x86 microprocessor chips; see Part I onwards). We here trace a genealogical claim. What emerges is a tightly-wound tapestry of OS histories, in basic contest around a consuming dichotomy of motive force, all vying for the UNIX mantle of technical authority in competing ways. There are two main 'Unix-like' currents - made up of many derivative 'Unices' - vying to inherit the UNIX moment of computing celebrity, in continuing the line. Both are responses to the world-dominant capitalist culture that spawned them, and products of competing public sector research. One rides the profit dynamic out into industry, and one is fully committed to maintaining the public investment. The repayment means itself has thus therefore split: one indirect, through profitable companies and the communications tools they refine; and one direct, keeping those communications tools under the public title from whence they came, in a virulent, sixties-style counter-cultural 'hack'. The latter cloned UNIX as completely as the IBM PC has been, fully and methodically separating its brand. The unique resulting interplay of these heterogeneous Unix/-Not twin elements - in equal parts competitive and mutual support - explains the unique quality, dispersal, strength and potential of Not-Unix: as one influence fades, the other reinvigorates the 'Revolution OS' GNU/Linux. The firstborn is BSD-Unix, modelled on the parent, and embodied in many more computers than just Apple, such as Sun and Sparc. The sibling challenger is Not-Unix: a complete replacement for the UNIX-Unix line (GNU is Not Unix). Collectively, the Not/Unix twin rivals survive, and are brilliantly poised for their greatest leap forward - beyond business and hobbyist use, into the mass consumer realm - as we speak. For Not-Unix/Linux to complete its succession to the UNIX throne, it needs now to consciously assume that role. This means finally vanquishing UNIX, for its mortal faults. Why vanquish? Because the reason so few people have heard of Linux - and even less of GNU - is the undeclared (passive-aggressive) civil war within the 'Unix' lead group (Linux Users) at least, of resentment towards GNU-Not-Unix's growing distribution. This is where the 'Unix' survival myth comes from - an attack from the political right, against GNU's success, to staple the ancestral fragmentation fault. UNIX's historic inability to secure a mass market strategically limits the Unix line's chances of survival, so rooted in the commercial plane. However Not-Unix now flourishes more competitively, albeit subsumed to the LINUX® brand. This thesis is to reveal and break that subsumation. The ego-ridden and divided social context outlined above is the most confusing aspect to learning GNU/Linux - as entree to 'Unix'. An attempt is therefore made in this introduction to foster contributory perspective. We are still in draft mode, so please bear with the author here. Historical context is needed to understand the forces shaping GNU/Linux. A nasty word must be used and explained, and that is 'fascism', which explains all the distinctive tension around GNU/Linux - different as GNU/Linux is to every other 'Unix'. Our simple definition of fascism is 'you have an asset, and I am taking it'. Clearly the root traces back through mercantile capitalism to piracy on the high seas - that saw England succeed from Portugal, Spain and France, in terms of conquered gold - to the thuggish robbing of today that we can all do without. This is LINUX's 'Unix' relationship to GNU, and such robbery will cease. The child of global hegemony, via Vietnam-era manufacturing and technocratic rule, 'Unix' fails to lead computer users past the twentieth century. In defining techno-_____?, most fitting for the current, dominant Linux User attitude - exemplified in the sequestered contempt often held for ordinary Windows computer users and GNU traditions - but tactically outlawed by Unix dictate of Godwin's Law, is techno-fascist. The reason this term is banned by the unixocracy is to deflect historical analysis from exposing (largely US) capital investment in 1920s-1930s Central European counterrevolutionary militarism - in the same way that prior US backing for General Noriega, Osama Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein are since being 'historically corrected' - and the unshaken continuity through to today. Recognising the roots of fascism within our own capitalist output - particularly its flawed and outdated democratic model - is the first step towards halting fascism's reoccurrence. Refusing to have this debate, in the name of 'Unix authority', is a consciously pro-fascist act - and so one fully subject to due hostility. It is important to know what 'Unix' defends. Anglo-American imperial Zion differed mostly from its Axis Pan-Arab rival in terms of head-start and industrial muscle. Each pursued the same Middle East energy goals economically. The rights and wrongs of their conflict have less to do with morality and more relation to competing national cumulations of capital, through military machines. The luxury of functioning democracy derives from privileged position, where workers are bought into imperial gains via social democracy (the softer national socialism). Human rights and liberties are then affordable, and it is no coincidence how few democracies work, ethically, to absorb any legitimate measure of social welfare. Under pressure though, all democracies are subject to modification: no UK elections between 1935 and 1945; Roosevelt's four US terms / Democrats 1933-1952; and Labour 1935-1949, suspended NZ's 1942 elections and opened the way through to Nationalist demolition of worker's organistion in 1951. These were militarised, dictatorial states, quelling trade unions to rebuild profitability, as prototyped during World War One decimation of the west's working classes - simply moderated versions of the Italian and German extremes, per privileged, hegemonic advantage. In other words, since the Great Depression, national socialism has been the only form of government possible for developing capitalism: combining worker and capital interests behind a strengthened nation state. Democracy affords oscillation of emphasis - changes of party administration - over which set of interests will benefit most from the current direction of reform, but no substantial choice. So it is a lie to say racist Anglo-American states are not in their own way fascist (gangster). They differ mainly as to which family of Semites their imperialism oppresses and plunders, as colonisers and wage-enslavers of many more peoples, making their corporate playground of the world. We English-speakers are raised vilifying the disastrous German model of national socialism, and blinkered with national prejudice to the expansive success of our own. So long as economic expansion sustains its liberal veneer, Anglo-Americana remains semi-fascist only: the whittling away of social assets and freedoms are erosive and corrosive, rather than 'scary' and abrubt. The latent fascism increasingly reveals itself as the next global market crash draws nearer. |
Anglo-American, post-colonial, racist imperialism is a softer, kinder, more 'democratic' fascism, but a fascism nontheless: ask any impoverished Muslim what they think about the moral authority of 'The West'. Their answer is written increasingly in their children's blood. The sphere of authority sought by the Nazis - mainly a united and exclusive European market, a la Charlemagne, Bonaparte and Zollverein - had to end up in someone's hands. Any confusion as to where it went is relieved by tracing the fate of their rocket technology. Relevant? The place where worker organisation is even more repressed than in the US (to cheapen wages and frustrate worker political consciousness) - explaining the rising migration of capital influence - is China. And that national socialism - which must follow on from China's conversion to capitalism - has unprecedented potentiality. The world cannot afford the consequences of the next depression / war / reconstruction cycle, because of technologised destructive capacity. So the question is, who or what will intervene? Climatic reaction? World history turns on the global politics of comparative profitability, and no aspect of the future will remain untouched by China-US relations thus. America appears incapable of leading Western intellect, of securing a peaceful outcome, having expunged political economy as a mode of thought under McCarthy. America appears childish and bullying, without ears for learned, evolutionary culture - book-burning by Intelligent Design - in its gross consumerist, Nero-like fundamentalist absorptions. The riven contradiction of America's religious conservatism and liberal extremes leaves it intellectually incapacitated for solving the crisis enveloping it. 'Unix' needs to somehow survive through all this, like all science culture. National socialism is the trick of convincing workers that local capitalist expansion should be supported against the foreign varieties, using consumer prosperity. The Western states are the experts in this, despite all the trade sharing mechanisms temporarily in place. It is a very dangerous game - in that in times of economic contraction each state/combine is pitched into mortal contest with every other - and cannot be wished away. Halting fascism begins with exposing its roots, at home, and revealing its influence on contemporary society and world politics. So Godwin's Law, as imperial-apologist, is wrong, subterfuge, or anti-intellect at best. The moral complacency of the West is a central part of it's imperilled stagnation (seen in housing stock decay and urban riots). Why insist on drawing the political links? Because just as oil is the "lifeblood" of modern economy, data networks - made up of constituent communications hardware and software parts - are its central nervous system. Information technology cannot be fully understood out of economic context: just as Unix is easiest comprehended as part of the national socialist continuum, so too does GNU/Linux development make more sense when seen as the opposing, unitary route to peace, of international socialism. [Daniel Yergin The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power Simon & Schuster London 1991 p.14]. The simple generalisation is that New Zealand Unix geeks tend to vote National - our version of Tory or Republican (centre-right wing). Frustrated by MMP, this party yearns for narrow majority by which it can dictate further privatisation of public assets (like the LINUX® loyalists' liquidation of GNU). Class struggle has reached the desktop, pure and simple. The success of GNU-Not-Unix/Linux has shown - and continues to show - the way ahead for everyone with a choice that they wish to be able to keep developing. 'Unix' is the reactionary computing shibboleth, weilded to maintain proprietary order. Brand 'LINUX' identifies as Unix, and is promoted over GNU, precisely to negate GNU's revolutionary challenge - in the same way as a woman's right of self-determination is denied by those who would empower her unborn foetus instead. In summary, the following thesis documents Not/Unix's mixed provenance. *Nix was created midst vigorous contention between public and private organisations and values, and is thus constantly being reshaped. From that context we may conclude expectation that proprietary versus free licensing conflict will continue, for *nix's immediate future at least. The GNU General Public License emerged as fulcrum to the tussle - half way through this forty-year history - with UNIXTM and WindowsTM dominant on the private side, and BSD/GNU leading for the public. The stalling, conflicted nature of BSD/Unix - torn between UNIX and Not-UNIX - is therein understood. Which makes us, in 2005 AD, participants in the third great free *nix seeding moment - its social awareness reamplified - the reconciliation of BSD/Unix as Not-Unix (FreeNix education). A diagram of supporting evidence is in the Epilogue, Chart 1: The Free-Nix Operating System product development cycle ©. What follows is dialectic narrative, Promethean struggle: computing for the public good, or for private gain? GNU/Linux is pulled both ways, as 'Unix' flag-bearer: product of the military-industrial complex, or of the radical campus? Publication comes to you without charge (cost-free), as part of the GNU tradition. "Cost-Free" as subtitled above depicts the ongoing, see-saw contest between the opposing market distribution models - or ethics - out of which GNU/Linux continues to develop: investment of capital, or of community? Most specifically, 'Cost-Free' identifies the philosophical contest as to which model produces the better product - market monopoly battle, or liberated ideas? Cost-Free - the missing fifth GNU Freedom definition - is identified as the key material resolution, and supplied by this work. Warning: behemoths ahead. A secondary theme explores how the term "computer" became wholly outmoded in the three decades since 1965. Whereas 'computer' still applies to human beings in their mathematical faculty, better knowledge of the appliance privileged people work on most days comes from understanding it as a fully adaptable, mechanical abstractor (of thought, choice and effort, after value): Alan Turing's 'universal machine'. [This explains why the mythical leisure dividend of technology, on which we were idealistically raised, has not yet eventuated. Record profits by corporates and seven-figure CEO salaries are the new reality - amidst generalised lowering standards of living and overwork - because of the raised efficiency with which modern labour-time is abstracted and accumulated. Such has been the succession, of chief mass sensory capture tool, from cinema, to radio, to television, to abstractor. We are now most often at a working interface, PC-inspired, in our 'time off'. Therefore this also explains why most people will benefit from learning the abstractor's recent history.] Seen accurately, symbolic abstractors are as old and inalienable as human culture, collectively accreted over time - the mechanism of shared and numeric language - as fundamental to life as our relationship with fire. A cogent inheritance by and of all peoples, abstractor aspects are not themselves usefully abstracted, or separated into individual parts for valuation and patenting. Such attempts to own abstractor (language/digital) aspects can only retard human progress, and must therefore fail. "Look" is not the same as "Pepsi" or "Coke", for example. Closer to "hoover" as verbs in common use, preceding patent usage, "TCP/IP" and friends are wholly unsuitable as either brand or communications property. The world faces a choice in this, over which direction to take: forwards or backwards, both technically and internationally speaking, in shared digital language development. Binary expression knows neither ethnic nor national limit. It is the great unifier of all time. "And there will not be any geographical borders for Silicon Valley's future, because it's transforming itself to Internet Valley, which is destroying any geographical limits for the new kind of human being." [A New Home for the Mind? Netvalley]. [Draft 10Dec05] |