To Free or Not to Free the Code in Question
|
Part V - Community repair: GNU/GPL 1985-1989 In 1980, an encounter with a source-codeless binary backed by nondisclosure aggreement (NDA) galvinised the resolve of MIT hacker Richard Stallman, to defend the shared programming culture by which software had mostly been developed up till then: "In the 1980s, the hacker community that dominated Stallman's life began to dissolve. The emergence of 'portable software' - software that could be made to run on different types of computers - meant that the ability for computer users to modify and share the software that came with computers was now a problem for the business models of the computer manufacturers. To prevent their software from being used on their competitors' computers, manufacturers stopped distributing source code and began restricting copying and redistribution of their software by copyrighting it. Such restricted software had existed before, but now there was no escape from it." [Richard Stallman Wikipedia; For Want of a Printer "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 1, Sam Williams, O'Reilly 2002]. Stallman had already turned the open-source hacker development model into a defensible system, around the 'editing macros' (Emacs) enhancements of the ITS TECO text editor: "In the course of developing a standard system of macro commands, Stallman and [Guy] Steele had to traverse a political tightrope. In creating a standard program, Stallman was in clear violation of the fundamental hacker tenet - 'promote decentralization'.. [yet] 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 dubbed it 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 an early 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'." "Over time, Emacs became a sales tool for the hacker ethic. The flexibility Stallman and [other hackers] 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 had modified Emacs 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'." "Stallman's AI Lab contemporaries are more charitable. Hal Abelson, an MIT grad student who worked with Stallman during the 1970s and would later assist Stallman as a charter boardmember of the Free Software 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'." [The Emacs Commune "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 6, Sam Williams, O'Reilly 2002]. It was now time to build a full OS based on that system. "On September 27, 1983, computer programmers logging on to the Usenet newsgroup net.unix-wizards encountered an unusual message. Posted in the small hours of the morning, 12:30 a.m. to be exact, and signed by rms@mit-oz, the message's subject line was terse but attention-grabbing. 'New UNIX implementation,' it read. Instead of introducing a newly released version of Unix, however, the message's opening paragraph issued a call to arms: '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'." [A Stark Moral Choice "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 7, Sam Williams, O'Reilly 2002]. The full impact of code commoditisation was being felt at MIT. "Defense spending, long a major font for computer-science research, had dried up during the post-Vietnam years. In a desperate quest for new funds, laboratories and universities turned to the private sector. In the case of the AI Lab, winning over private investors was an easy sell. Home to some of the most ambitious computer-science projects of the post-war era, the lab became a quick incubator of technology. Indeed, by 1980, most of the lab's staff, including many hackers, were dividing its time between Institute and commercial projects." [A Stark Moral Choice "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 7, Sam Williams, O'Reilly 2002]. The pressure from outside was yet more challenging, to all of mainframe computing culture, on which it would crash with the force of a tsunami. "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." "Riding atop this microprocessor wave were hundreds - thousands - of commercial software programs, each protected by a patchwork of user licenses and nondisclosure agreements that made it impossible for hackers to review or share source code. The licenses were crude and ill-fitting, but by 1983 they had become strong enough to satisfy the courts and scare away would-be interlopers. Software, once a form of garnish most hardware companies gave away to make their expensive computer systems more flavorful, was quickly becoming the main dish. In their increasing hunger for new games and features, users were putting aside the traditional demand to review the recipe after every meal." "Nowhere was this state of affairs more evident than in the realm of personal computer systems. Companies such as Apple Computer and Commodore were minting fresh millionaires selling machines with built-in operating systems. Unaware of the hacker culture and its distaste for binary-only software, many of these users saw little need to protest when these companies failed to attach the accompanying source-code files. A few anarchic adherents of the hacker ethic helped propel that ethic into this new marketplace, but for the most part, the marketplace rewarded the programmers speedy enough to write new programs and savvy enough to copyright them as legally protected works." |
"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." "'Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?' asked Gates. 'What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free?'" "Although few hackers at the AI Lab saw the missive, Gates' 1976 letter nevertheless represented the changing attitude toward software both among commercial software companies and commercial software developers. Why treat software as a zero-cost commodity when the market said otherwise? As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, selling software became more than a way to recoup costs; it became a political statement. At a time when the Reagan Administration was rushing to dismantle many of the federal regulations and spending programs that had been built up during the half century following the Great Depression, more than a few software programmers saw the hacker ethic as anticompetitive and, by extension, un-American. At best, it was a throwback to the anticorporate attitudes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like a Wall Street banker discovering an old tie-dyed shirt hiding between French-cuffed shirts and double-breasted suits, many computer programmers treated the hacker ethic as an embarrassing reminder of an idealistic age." [A Stark Moral Choice "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 7, Sam Williams, O'Reilly 2002]. Here then is discovered the root contradiction that would confound GNU/Linux public takeup - the disparity between its hacker resource and hobbyist proto-professonal goals. Code commodification is the constant pressure on programming in a market economy, where capital seeks ever-new sources of profitabilty. But user-consumers do not want, or need, to know the details. Gates and Torvalds are building software in surprisingly similarly-understood ways. 1985 Free Software Foundation (FSF) MIT "In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix. Soon after, he incorporated the non-profit Free Software Foundation (FSF) to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software community." [Wikipedia]. The GNU Project specifies and defends four software freedoms: The freedom to run a program, for any purpose (freedom 0). The freedom to study how a program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). The freedom to redistribute copies of a program so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Free Software is defined as 'free as in speech, not as in beer'. That is, there is no proscription against selling the shared software, at minimal cost, as part of a support service. It is the service model that is recommended for business revenue, instead of the better known and proprietary software sales model. "This radical message (the freedom part, not the beer part) led many software companies to reject free software outright. After all, they are in the business of making money, not adding to our body of knowledge. For Stallman, this rift between the computer industry and computer science was acceptable, maybe even desirable." In NZ, it's called 'keeping the bastards honest', and faces down blatant profiteer disinformation fictionalising "the Free Software Foundation's anti-business message". [Introduction Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, & Mark Stone, in "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" O'Reilly Jan1999]. "The GNU Emacs License made its debut when Stallman finally released GNU Emacs in 1985. Following the release, Stallman welcomed input from the general hacker community on how to improve the license's language.. It wasn't long, [John] Gilmore says, before other hackers began discussing ways to 'port' the GNU Emacs License over to their own programs [as Gilmore had for Emacs to SunOS]. Prompted by a conversation on Usenet, Gilmore sent an email to Stallman in November, 1986, suggesting modification: 'You should probably remove "EMACS" from the license and replace it with "SOFTWARE" or something. Soon, we hope, Emacs will not be the biggest part of the GNU system, and the license applies to all of it.' 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, a source-code debugger, and was looking for ways to revamp the Emacs license so that it might apply to both programs. Stallman's solution: remove all specific references to Emacs and convert the license into a generic copyright umbrella for GNU Project software. The GNU General Public License, GPL for short, was born." "In fashioning the GPL, Stallman followed the software convention of using decimal numbers to indicate prototype versions and whole numbers to indicate mature versions. Stallman published Version 1.0 of the GPL in 1989 (a project Stallman was developing in 1985), almost a full year after the release of the GNU Debugger, Stallman's second major foray into the realm of Unix programming." "..As hacks go, the GPL stands as one of Stallman's best. It created a system of communal ownership within the normally proprietary confines of copyright law. More importantly, it demonstrated the intellectual similarity between legal code and software code. Implicit within the GPL's preamble was a profound message: instead of viewing copyright law with suspicion, hackers should view it as yet another system begging to be hacked." [The GNU General Public License "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 9, Sam Williams, O'Reilly 2002]. Low-$ Minix 1985 Apple-A/UX 86 + NeXT Computer 88 OSF/UI formed USL = "Unix wars" response RMS helped found the League for Programming Freedom (LPF) in 1989, "to prevent monopolies on software development.. [and] to publicize the danger of interface copyrights and software patents". Free Software Wikipedia [Draft 13Aug05 - to be cont'd..] |