To Free or Not to Free the Code in Question
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Part IX - Reaction: Open Source 1997-1999 Phase two of the coup to dethrone the GNU king of Free Software, and subsume the FSF public code assets to private sector values, was mounted. Disingenuosly on both parts it seems, after 1996 publisher Tim O'Reilly was able to cite Linus Torvald's reorientation: "Linus had just moved to Silicon Valley at that point, and he explained how only recently that he had learned that the word 'free' had two meanings - free as in 'libre' and free as in 'gratis' - in English." Cost-free pursuit of an OS was Linus's orginal drive, but market politics were now obfuscating personal profit. O'Reilly - who was falling out with RMS over the sale of copyright book titles based on copyleft Free Software - asked experienced Stallman opponent Eric Raymond (ESR) to repeat a popular speech he had written based on his developer experience post-Linux. The 1997 Perl conference brought together ESR, Netscape, and a maelstrom of change. "O'Reilly hoped to use the event to publicize the role of free software in creating the entire infrastructure of the Internet. From web-friendly languages such as Perl and Python to back-room programs such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon), a software tool that lets users replace arcane IP numbers with the easy-to-remember domain-name addresses (e.g., amazon.com), and sendmail, the most popular mail program on the Internet, free software had become an emergent phenomenon. Like a colony of ants creating a beautiful nest one grain of sand at a time, the only thing missing was the communal self-awareness. O'Reilly saw Raymond's speech as a good way to inspire that self-awareness, to drive home the point that free software development didn't start and end with the GNU Project. Programming languages, such as Perl and Python, and Internet software, such as BIND, sendmail, and Apache, demonstrated that free software was already ubiquitous and influential." [Sam Williams Open Source "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 11, O'Reilly 2002]. Netscape's code-opening gave an edge to the wedge of capital's Not-Unix counter-revolution. California claimed free software initiative back from MIT/GNU, under the leadership of ESR, to revive the open Berkeley licensing framework. An historic echo of Stalinism, this counter-revolution would also employ terminological change, expungement of memory, revision of history, and its very own team cult of the leader - counterposed against the FSF's culture of ideas, most especially Freedom (not to proprietise software). "When Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' essay as a major influence upon the company's decision, the company instantly elevated Raymond to the level of hacker celebrity. Determined not to squander the opportunity, Raymond traveled west to deliver interviews, advise Netscape executives, and take part in the eventual party celebrating the publication of Netscape Navigator's source code. The code name for Navigator's source code was 'Mozilla': a reference both to the program's gargantuan size - 30 million lines of code - and to its heritage. Developed as a proprietary offshoot of Mosaic, the web browser created by Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois, Mozilla was proof, yet again, that when it came to building new programs, most programmers preferred to borrow on older, modifiable programs." An Open ideologue career had taken off: "While in California, Raymond also managed to squeeze in a visit to VA Research, a Santa Clara-based company selling workstations with the GNU/Linux operating system preinstalled. Convened by Raymond, the meeting was small. The invite list included VA founder Larry Augustin, a few VA employees, and Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute, a Silicon Valley think tank specializing in nanotechnology." "'The meeting's agenda boiled down to one item: how to take advantage of Netscape's decision so that other companies might follow suit?' 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 cognitive dissonance, the free software movement faced an uphill climb, even after Netscape." "Peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free software cause, offered an alternative: open source." [Sam Williams Open Source "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 11, O'Reilly 2002]. The business executives were correct. The 'cognitive dissonance' of Free not meaning zero cost came from the FSF's admission of commoditised code, where they had not accepted that fifth definition of Free Software commercially. This proved to be a gaping theoretical shortfall - an open window through which non-Free software licensing would now pour. The single defect in Stallman's shield of principles would potentially undo his entire defense of a public OS software codebase. Not until July 2005 would the relevant patch be made available. Microsoft's victory in the browser wars was panicking the growing Nix mainstream into accepting openly shallow norms of computer marketing, to match Microsoft's tactics. The "Pragmatist Reaction" of reifying an "Open Source" brand resulted. The reactionary credo was to forego the long-term and serious socio-economic struggle for a free Unix, and sell instead a software range capitalised simply on its unique method of quickly maintaining quality: "Given a sufficiently large number of eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". The GNU Project and its GPL would increasingly become the target of this divisive ideological campaign, as it stood between a new programming caste and proprietary Unix product capable of competing with Microsoft. [ESR Linux and the Pragmatist Reaction: 1991-1998 The Art of Unix Programming 2003]. Raymond's counter-revolution was rolling, and the O'Reilly 'Freeware Summit' would now deliver the coup opportunity. Again, the language is disingenuous, because 'freeware' was already a runaway success - securing great customer interest and loyalty - but on Windows. This was head-on competition. [The Free Software Store provides one such example]. "What Is Open Source Software?" "In the spring of 1997, a group of leaders in the free software community assembled in California. This group included Eric Raymond, Tim O'Reilly, and VA Research president Larry Augustin, among others. Their concern was to find a way to promote the ideas surrounding free software to people who had formerly shunned the concept. They were concerned that the Free Software Foundation's anti-business message was keeping the world at large from really appreciating the power of free software." RMS was not invited. "At Eric Raymond's insistence, the group agreed that what they lacked in large part was a marketing campaign, a campaign devised to win mind share, and not just market share. Out of this discussion came a new term to describe the software they were promoting: Open Source. A series of guidelines were crafted to describe software that qualified as Open Source." "Bruce Perens had laid much of the groundwork for the Open Source Definition. One of the GNU project's state[d] goals was to create a freely available operating system that could serve as the platform for running GNU software. In a classic case of software bootstrapping, Linux had become that platform, and Linux had been created with the help of GNU tools. Perens had headed the Debian project, which managed a distribution of Linux that included within the distribution only software that adhered to the spirit of GNU. Perens had laid this out explicitly in a document called the 'Debian Social Contract.' The Open Source definition is a direct descendant of the 'Debian Social Contract,' and thus Open Source is very much in the spirit of GNU." "The Open Source Definition allows greater liberties with licensing than the GPL does. In particular, the Open Source Definition allows greater promiscuity when mixing proprietary and open-source software." "Consequently, an Open Source license could conceivably allow the use and redistribution of open-source software without compensation or even credit. As an example you can take great swaths of the Netscape browser source code and distribute it with another, possibly proprietary, program without even notifying Netscape. Why would Netscape wish this? For a number of reasons, but the most compelling is that it gets greater market share for their client code, which works very well with their commercial offerings. In this way, giving away source code is a very good way to build a platform. This is also one of the reasons why the people at Netscape did not use the GPL.. [Citing bio-medical,] alliance between science and industry is an uneasy one at best. ..Computer science, too, must exist in an uneasy alliance with industry ..Open-source software is a commodity market ..take brand management seriously." [Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, & Mark Stone Introduction "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" O'Reilly Jan1999, emphasis added]. "The 'open source' label itself came out of a strategy session held on February 3rd 1998 in Palo Alto, California. The people present included Todd Anderson, Chris Peterson (of the Foresight Institute), John 'maddog' Hall and Larry Augustin (both of Linux International), Sam Ockman (of the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group), and Eric Raymond. We were reacting to Netscape's announcement that it planned to give away the source of its browser. One of us (Raymond) had been invited out by Netscape to help them plan the release and followon actions. We realized that the Netscape announcement had created a precious window of time within which we might finally be able to get the corporate world to listen to what we have to teach about the superiority of an open development process. We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with 'free software' in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. 'Open source,' contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with. Over the next week we worked on spreading the word. Linus Torvalds gave us an all-important imprimatur :-) the following day. Bruce Perens got involved early, offering to trademark 'open source' and host this web site. Phil Hughes offered us a pulpit in Linux Journal. Richard Stallman flirted with adopting the term, then changed his mind." [History of the OSI Open Source Initiative, emphasis added]. ESR: "After the Netscape announcement broke in January I did a lot of thinking about the next phase - the serious push to get 'free software' accepted in the mainstream corporate world.. it's time to reposition. We need a new and better label.. we're willing to work with and co-opt the market for our own purposes, rather than remaining stuck in a marginal, adversarial position.. It's crunch time, people. The Netscape announcement changes everything. We've broken out of the little corner we've been in for twenty years. We're in a whole new game now, a bigger and more exciting one - and one I think we can win." [Goodbye, "free software"; hello, "open source" 8 February 1998]. In essence then, the OSD argued allowance for reversion to BSD's liberal distribution scheme - against the spreading influence of the GPL - and created a bureaucratic structure for facilitating that reversion, for larger business allies. But the Netscape code release followed on from (market desperation and) the OSD initiative, and not - as OSS propagandists misleadingly portray, as above - the other way around: the OSS case being made by Netscape. This was mostly about the commercial BSD base unhitching their licensing scheme from their fractured and declining platform, and attaching it to Linux's GPL'd growth. To be fair, many utilities in most Linux distributions are from BSD - in accord with BSD licensing, but not responsible to it. Hence the lesser ethics required to downplay GNU and reassert market forces as Free *nix's driver. OSS invokes scientific method - as feeding industrial innovation - to reverse the GNU/GPL's success under Linux viz BSD, to make up for its compromised ethics. Open Source Initiative OSI 1998 "non-profit corporation dedicated to managing and promoting the Open Source Definition for the good of the community, specifically through the OSI Certified Open Source Software (OSS) certification mark and program". President Emeritus - Eric S Raymond. From 1997, a specious and reactionary Unix creed had recovered direction, using Netscape's 'success' (read failure) and Linus's GNU-opposing and GNU-exploiting sentiment and leadership cult. Free Software was theoretically undermined, liquidated and seized, as 'free software' vagueness and inheritence (a regressive strategem to admit BSD-stlye open licensing under the 'free software' banner, by historical revision). To 'clarify', 'Open Source' can mean neither open-source nor open-as-to-source: "..you can get the source code for a X-licensed program, modify it, and then sell binary versions of the program without distributing the source code of your modifications, and without applying the X license to those modifications. This is still Open Source, however, as the Open Source Definition does not require that modifications always carry the original license." The channel of software privatisation had been bullishly reopened. [Bruce Perens The Open Source Definition in "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" O'Reilly Jan1999]. |
The two principle achievements of the Open Source counter-revolution were: 1) acceptance, market profile, and wider distribution of Free Software and relatives; 2) clarification by reduction of the Free Software concept into plain '[cost-]free software'. The latter was a theoretical gain, though mostly unrecognised for the next seven years. Not-Unix was getting a whole new spin: "Rather than stress the political significance of free software programs, open source advocates have chosen to stress the engineering integrity of the hacker development model. Citing the power of peer review, the open source argument paints programs such as GNU/Linux or FreeBSD as better built, better inspected and, by extension, more trushworthy to the average user." [Sam Williams A Stark Moral Choice "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 7, O'Reilly 2002]. Stallman biographer Sam Williams details some consequent attachment of big names, cash values, and what they provoked, thus: "Stallman's monomaniacal 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 open source.' Six months later, a John Markoff article on Apple Computer was proclaiming the company's adoption of the 'open source' Apache server in the article headline." "Such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies that actively embraced the 'open source' term. By August of 1999, Red Hat, a company that now eagerly billed itself as 'open source,' was selling shares on Nasdaq. In December, VA Linux-formerly VA Research-was floating its own IPO to historical effect. Opening at $30 per share, the company's stock price exploded past the $300 mark in initial trading only to settle back down to the $239 level. Shareholders lucky enough to get in at the bottom and stay until the end experienced a 698% increase in paper wealth, a Nasdaq record." "Among those lucky shareholders was Eric Raymond, who, as a company board member since the Mozilla launch, had received 150,000 shares of VA Linux stock. Stunned by the realization that his essay contrasting the Stallman-Torvalds managerial styles had netted him $36 million in potential wealth, Raymond penned a follow-up essay. In it, Raymond mused on the relationship between the hacker ethic and monetary wealth: 'Reporters often ask me these days if I think the open-source community will be corrupted by the influx of big money. I tell them what I believe, which is this: commercial demand for programmers has been so intense for so long that anyone who can be seriously distracted by money is already gone. Our community has been self-selected for caring about other things - accomplishment, pride, artistic passion, and each other'." [Sam Williams Open Source "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 11, O'Reilly 2002]. The alternative, that Raymond had clearly not excluded, was bringing the money to the programmers. Obfuscation of the material dynamic was quickly thrown up, and personalised. "Whether or not such comments allayed suspicions that Raymond and other open source proponents had simply been in it for the money, they drove home the open source community's ultimate message: all you needed to sell the free software concept is a friendly face and a sensible message. Instead of fighting the marketplace head-on as Stallman had done, Raymond, Torvalds, and other new leaders of the hacker community had adopted a more relaxed approach - ignoring the marketplace in some areas, leveraging it in others. Instead of playing the role of high-school outcasts, they had played the game of celebrity, magnifying their power in the process." "'On his worst days Richard believes that Linus Torvalds and I conspired to hijack his revolution,' Raymond says. 'Richard's rejection of the term open source and his deliberate creation of an ideological fissure in my view comes from an odd mix of idealism and territoriality. There are people out there who think it's all Richard's personal ego. I don't believe that. It's more that he so personally associates himself with the free software idea that he sees any threat to that as a threat to himself'." [Sam Williams Open Source "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 11, O'Reilly 2002]. What was being lost here, were the FSF principles. Very quickly, the directional error was identified: "Open Source has de-emphasized the importance of the freedoms involved in Free Software. It's time for us to fix that. We must make it clear to the world that those freedoms are still important, and that software such as Linux would not be around without them.. The Open Source certification mark has already been abused". [It's Time to Talk About Free Software Again Bruce Perens 17Feb1999]. "Perens would later resign from the OSI, expressing regret that the organization had set itself up in opposition to Stallman and the FSF." And, "By the end of 1998, Stallman had formulated a position: open source, while helpful in communicating the technical advantages of free software, also encouraged speakers to soft-pedal the issue of software freedom. Given this drawback, Stallman would stick with the term free software." "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. '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'." Free Not-Unix's hardy general was settling in for this most gruelling campaign - for GNU's very survival. [Sam Williams Open Source "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 11, O'Reilly 2002]. "Late in 1998, there was an important dispute that threatened to fracture the Linux community. This fracture was caused by the advent of two software systems, GNOME and KDE, each of which aims to build an object-oriented desktop interface. On the one hand, KDE utilized Troll Technology's Qt library, a piece of code that was proprietary, but quite stable and mature. On the other hand, the GNOME people decided to use the GTK+ library, which was a completely free library, though not as mature as Qt." "In the past, Troll Technology would have had to choose between using the GPL and maintaining their proprietary stance. The rift between GNOME and KDE would have continued. With the advent of Open Source, however, Troll was able to change their license to one that met the Open Source definition, while still giving Troll the control over the technology they wanted. The rift between two important parts of the Linux community appears to be closing." [Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, & Mark Stone Introduction "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" O'Reilly Jan1999]. But does it, in 2005? If anything, GNOME and KDE appear to be competing (though for mutually exclusive user bases: C programming loyalists, or MS-orientated multimedia youth). True, they both still run on free *nix, and neither has failed. 'Interoperabiity' is fundamental, but in 2005 even MS is playing that card. - The genie was out of the bottle, and stronger forces for title privatisation were tightening the reins on free unix/Linux. Players like HP and IBM began buying into the Open Source development brand, which would open the way to a title challenge. "In the beginning of 1998, SCO sent out a letter to its vast mailing list of users slamming open Unixes like Linux and FreeBSD as unstable and unprofessional while offering a reduced price on the SCO base OS. They were widely scorned for this move and had to do some serious backpedaling. The letter insulted a number of people by blatantly lying about the credentials of Linux. SCO didn't give their customers credit for being smart enough to see through the FUD. SCO eventually published a retraction on their web site." "In late 1998, SCO sent out a press release talking about how SCO Unix now has a Linux compatibility layer, so that your favorite Linux programs can be run under SCO Unix. The response was underwhelming. Why spend money on an OS just to make it compatible with a competitive free offering?" [Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, & Mark Stone Introduction "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" O'Reilly Jan1999]. The Nix market was consolidating. Apple brought out their new Operating System 10, based largely on the open-licensed BSD, in 1999: OS/X. Portability of software is uniting and strengthening the competition to Windows. ESR's anti-GNU campaign to undermine Free Software keeps intensifying: "Among software developers and in the technology trade press, use of the term 'open source' dominates use of the term 'free software' by 95%-5% or more.. Use of the term 'free software' is in long-term decline, and older or obsolete pages form a larger part of its share than for 'open source'". And "Recently, during FISL (Forum Internacional de Software Livre), in Brazil, Eric Raymond defended [the] open source model of development and [was] quoted: 'Basically, we don't need GPL. It's based on the belief that open source software is weak and needs to be protected. With it, we continue injuring ourselves, cutting ourselves from the economic benefits of BSD license'." [Terminology Wars: A Web Content Analysis ESR 28Oct2004; Eric Raymond talks about GPL & BSD licenses bsdnews.com 07Jun2005]. The big flaw in the opportunist and misleading 'Open Source' drive - the shallow marketing of open - is forgetting that the GNU GPL is the single measure most guaranteeing source code will remain open to all. The preponderance of 'Open Source' brand marketing is therefore inconsistent with Unix's widespread liberation. Free software forms its opposite promise, outweighing gloss with reason. The constant pressure to fully commoditise program code attacks the best counter to Microsoft monopoly - matching their own historic virality with an equivalent popularisation - not of more commercial software, but of fully free software. We won't beat MS at their own game. We have to maximise our contrast potential. This can be done with business allies, in a business-like way, just as 'Open Source' progress so far has demonstrated: "the future of software lies somewhere in a yet to be explored synergy between the clashing cultures of the freeware and commercial worlds." [Information Wants to be Valuable "A Report from the First O'Reilly Perl Conference" ]. Without this clear redirection of 'Open Source' back to its Free roots, it will continue sinking into the Redmond-think swamp: "Long gone are the days of swapping disks on a Commodore 64 or Apple II. But software piracy today still remains a huge problem in the global market, especially with the rise of broadband and high speed internet access. The digital world should be made safe for consumers willing to purchase software at reasonable prices. Software piracy, however, openly challenges that freedom and restricts the flow of good, quality software through rising costs and development burdens. This is not the way the digital world should be." In other words, with proprietary software, responsibility for producing quality code is shifted from the developer onto the consumer. Snakeoil indeed. The biggest salary justification here is the CEO and marketing's - not the programmers', who become mere grunts in a corporate machine. [Software Piracy: Who Are the Real Victims? Dr Dobb's Journal c2003]. There is no hiding the BSD-model software proprietarists' trading on misappropriated Free Nix: "Collectively, the CSRG, the Free Software Foundation, and the Linux kernel developers have created the platform from which the Open Source software movement has been launched.. look forward to the day when it becomes the preferred way to develop and buy software for users and companies everywhere." [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix McKusick]. But Free Nix became distributed freely (using the GPL) more than commercially (using various licenses) - in staying Not-Unix - despite all the nostalgic BSD-style wishing in the world. Free Nix is thus non-proprietary, when at its best. The proprietary Unices are a different exercise - Unix - marketed and advanced under the 'Open Source' misnomer. 'Open Source' is thus a (GNU) public codebase asset-stripping myth, privatising Free Nix, and requiring concerted democratic countering. One response has been to remain neutral and acknowledge neither camp, by distributing plain 'free software' as sponsor-ware (payment optional), as with DaveSource Marginal Hacks: "many businesses have made lots of money off of Open Source. I have no argument with that. My problem is with *who* makes the money. It is often not the authors, it is whoever does the best job packaging up *someone else's work*.. GNU's not getting credit for being responsible for a massive amount of the software that comes with a Linux system - or should I say a GNU/Linux system. If I'm not doing this for money, and I'm not getting credit for it, then what's the point?" Madison's criticism is legitimate. But although he bequests his code GPL, this proprietary solution has led to his software being catalogued amongst Windows programs of the same status, with less *nix group profile. [Open Source & Free Software David Ljung Madison 4June2001 & License for programs.. Marginal Hacks]. [Draft 25Sep05 - to be cont'd..] |