With the release of GNU Emacs, the GNU P_Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software

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 nonprofit organization

dedicated to speeding the GNU Project towards its goal.

With Stallman as president and various hacker allies as

board members, the FSF helped provide a corporate face

for the GNU Project.

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.

"I think in '85 our total expenses and revenue were

something in the order of $23,000, give or take,"

Chassell recalls. "Richard had his office, and we

borrowed space. I put all the stuff, especially the

tapes, under my desk. It wasn't until sometime later

LMI loaned us some space where we could store tapes and

things of that sort."

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 close off access

to Unix source code, a trend that only speeded the

number of inquiries into ongoing GNU software projects.

The Unix wizards who once regarded Stallman as a noisy

kook were now beginning to see him as a software Cassandra.

"A lot of people don't realize, until they've had it

happen to them, how frustrating it can be to spend a

few years working on a software program only to have it

taken away," says Chassell, summarizing the feelings

and opinions of the correspondents writing in to the

FSF during the early years. "After that happens a

couple of times, you start to say to yourself, `Hey,

wait a minute.'"

For Chassell, the decision to participate in the Free

Software Foundation came down to his own personal

feelings of loss. Prior to LMI, Chassell had been

working for hire, writing an introductory book on Unix

for Cadmus, Inc., a Cambridge-area software company.

When Cadmus folded, taking the rights to the book down

with it, Chassell says he attempted to buy the rights

back with no success.

"As far as I know, that book is still sitting on shelf

somewhere, unusable, uncopyable, just taken out of the

system," Chassell says. "It was quite a good

introduction if I may say so myself. It would have

taken maybe three or four months to convert [the book]

into a perfectly usable introduction to GNU/Linux

today. The whole experience, aside from what I have in

my memory, was lost."

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."

St. Ignucius

The Maui High Performance Computing Center is located

in a single-story building in the dusty red hills just

above the town of Kihei. Framed by million-dollar views

and the multimillion dollar real estate of the

Silversword Golf Course, the center seems like the

ultimate scientific boondoggle. Far from the boxy,

sterile confines of Tech Square or even the sprawling

research metropolises of Argonne, Illinois and Los

Alamos, New Mexico, the MHPCC seems like the kind of

place where scientists spend more time on their tans

than their post-doctoral research projects.

The image is only half true. Although researchers at

the MHPCC do take advantage of the local recreational

opportunities, they also take their work seriously.

According to Top500.org, a web site that tracks the

most powerful supercomputers in the world, the IBM SP

Power3 supercomputer housed within the MHPCC clocks in

at 837 billion floating-point operations per second,

making it one of 25 most powerful computers in the

world. Co-owned and operated by the University of

Hawaii and the U.S. Air Force, the machine divides its

computer cycles between the number crunching tasks

associated with military logistics and high-temperature

physics research.

Simply put, the MHPCC is a unique place, a place where

the brainy culture of science and engineering and the

laid-back culture of the Hawaiian islands coexist in

peaceful equilibrium. A slogan on the lab's 2000 web

site sums it up: "Computing in paradise."

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

pale hacker skin to the hazards of tropical exposure.

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 are a deep shade

of ochre. The only residual indication of geek status

are the gadgets: Nokia cell phones, Palm Pilots, and

Sony VAIO laptops.

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.

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.

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.

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.See "Grateful Dead Time Capsule: 1985-1995 North

American Tour Grosses." http://www.accessplace.com/gdtc/1197.htm

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."See Evan Leibovitch, "Who's Afraid of Big Bad

Wolves,"

ZDNet Tech Update (December 15, 2000).

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0Y/A

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.

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.

"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."

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.

"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."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 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). For more information, please visit "The

Free Software Definition" at

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

Adds Stallman, "There's a lot more work to do."

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.

"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."

The speech ends with a brief discussion of software

patents, a growing issue of concern both within the

software industry and within the free software

community. Like Napster, software patents reflect the

awkward nature of applying laws and concepts written

for the physical world to the frictionless universe of

information technology. The difference between

protecting a program under copyright and protecting a

program under software patents is subtle but

significant. In the case of copyright, a software

creator can restrict duplication of the source code but

not duplication of the idea or functionality that the

source code addresses. In other words, if a developer

chooses not to use a software program under the

original developer's terms, that second developer is

still free to reverse-engineer the program-i.e.,

duplicate the software program's functionality by

rewriting the source code from scratch. Such

duplication of ideas is common within the commercial

software industry, where companies often isolate

reverse-engineering teams to head off accusations of

corporate espionage or developer hanky-panky. In the

jargon of modern software development, companies refer

to this technique as "clean room" engineering.

Software patents work differently. According to the

U.S. Patent Office, companies and individuals may

secure patents for innovative algorithms provided they

submit their claims to a public review. In theory, this

allows the patent-holder to trade off disclosure of

their invention for a limited monopoly of a minimum of

20 years after the patent filing. In practice, the

disclosure is of limited value, since the operation of

the program is often self-evident. Unlike copyright, a

patent gives its holder the ability to head off the

independent development of software programs with the

same or similar functionality.

In the software industry, where 20 years can cover the

entire life cycle of a marketplace, patents take on a

strategic weight. Where companies such as Microsoft and

Apple once battled over copyright and the "look and

feel" of various technologies, today's Internet

companies use patents as a way to stake out individual

applications and business models, the most notorious

example being Amazon.com's 2000 attempt to patent the

company's "one-click" online shopping process. For most

companies, however, software patents have become a

defensive tool, with cross-licensing deals balancing

one set of corporate patents against another in a tense

form of corporate detente. Still, in a few notable

cases of computer encryption and graphic imaging

algorithms, software vendors have successfully stifled

rival technologies.

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.

Pointing to software patents' ability to create

sheltered regions in the marketplace, 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 red herrings compared to

the large issues of user and developer freedom.

"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."

Such comments involve a hefty dose of spin, of course.

Most open source advocates are equally, if not more,

vociferous as Stallman when it comes to opposing

software patents. Still, the underlying logic of

Stallman's argument-that open source advocates

emphasize the utilitarian advantages of free software

over the political advantages-remains uncontested.

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.

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, cofounder of the

Open Source Initiative and one of the leading hackers

to endorse the term, effectively summed up the

frustration of following Stallman down the political

path in a 1999 essay, titled " Shut Up and Show Them

the Code": RMS's rhetoric is very seductive to the kind

of people we are. We hackers are thinkers and idealists

who readily resonate with appeals to "principle" and

"freedom" and "rights." Even when we disagree with bits

of his program, we want RMS's rhetorical style to work;

we think it ought to work; we tend to be puzzled and

disbelieving when it fails on the 95% of people who

aren't wired like we are.4 Included among that 95%,

Raymond writes, are the bulk of business managers,

investors, and nonhacker computer users who, through

sheer weight of numbers, tend to decide the overall

direction of the commercial software marketplace.

Without a way to win these people over, Raymond argues,

programmers are doomed to pursue their ideology on the

periphery of society: When RMS insists that we talk

about "computer users' rights," he's issuing a

dangerously attractive invitation to us to repeat old

failures. It's one we should reject-not because his

principles are wrong, but because that kind of

language, applied to software, simply does not persuade

anybody but us. In fact, it confuses and repels most

people outside our culture.4 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 nonfree program, because I won't

give up my freedom for something like that. My rule is,

if I can't share it with you, I won't take it."

Such answers, however, reinforce the quasi-religious

nature of the Stallman message. Like a Jew keeping

kosher or a Mormon refusing to drink alcohol, Stallman

paints his decision to use free software in the place

of proprietary in the color of tradition and personal

belief. 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.

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. Out

of a second bag, he pulls a reflective yellow computer

disk and places it on his head. The crowd lets out a

startled laugh.

"I am St. Ignucius of the Church of Emacs," says

Stallman, raising his right hand in mock-blessing. "I

bless your computer, my child."

Stallman dressed as St. Ignucius. Photo by Wouter van

Oortmerssen.

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 goes from awkward haole to Russian

religious icon.

" 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."

The skit is a lighthearted moment of self-pardoy, 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 of

the hook, saying, "It's OK to laugh. I know I'm weird."

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: When

I say RMS calibrates what he does, I'm not belittling

or accusing him of insincerity. I'm saying that like

all good communicators he's got a theatrical streak.

Sometimes it's conscious-have you ever seen him in his

St. Ignucius drag, blessing software with a disk

platter on his head? Mostly it's unconscious; he's just

learned the degree of irritating stimulus that works,

that holds attention without (usually) freaking people out.See "Guest

Interview: Eric S. Raymond," Linux.com (May

18, 1999). http://www.linux.com/interviews/19990518/8/

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."

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 performace 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. 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."

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 Stallman's laughing at his audience

more than the audience is laughing at him.

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 system from all your computer 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."

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, 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."

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 and tell all your friends to

do likewise."

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 onstage 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 tablemate: "You

mean free software. That's the proper way to refer to it."

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."

The result, Stallman says, is something akin to a

third-world city. People move in, hoping to strike it

rich or at the very least to take part in a vibrant,

open culture, and yet those who hold the true power

keep evolving new tricks and strategies-i.e., software

patents-to keep the masses out. "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."

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."

Hands pop up. Stallman points to a member of the golf

shirt-wearing contingent. "Without patents, how would

you suggest dealing with commercial espionage?"

"Well, those two questions have nothing to do with each

other, really," says Stallman.

"But I mean if someone wants to steal another company's

piece of software."

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.

Companies that develop nonfree 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."

"But if it doesn't affect their publication," a new

audience member jumps in, his voice trailing off almost

as soon as he starts speaking.

"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

to learn anything anyway. The only reason to look at

patents is to see the bad news of what you can't do."

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.

"Happy hacking," he says. Endnotes

1. See "Grateful Dead Time Capsule: 1985-1995 North

American Tour Grosses."

http://www.accessplace.com/gdtc/1197.htm 2. See Evan

Leibovitch, "Who's Afraid of Big Bad Wolves," ZDNet

Tech Update (December 15, 2000).

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0Y/A>

3. 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 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). For more information, please visit "The

Free Software Definition" at

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. 4. See Eric

Raymond, "Shut Up and Show Them the Code," online

essay, (June 28, 1999). 5. See "Guest Interview: Eric

S. Raymond," Linux.com (May 18, 1999).

http://www.linux.com/interviews/19990518/8/

The GNU General Public License

By the spring of 1985, Richard Stallman had settled on

the GNU Project's first milestone-a Lisp-based free

software version of Emacs. To meet this goal, however,

he faced two challenges. First, he had to rebuild Emacs

in a way that made it platform independent. Second, he

had to rebuild the Emacs Commune in a similar fashion.

The dispute with UniPress had highlighted a flaw in the

Emacs Commune social contract. Where users relied on

Stallman's expert insight, the Commune's rules held. In

areas where Stallman no longer held the position of

alpha hacker-pre-1984 Unix systems, for

example-individuals and companies were free to make

their own rules.

The tension between the freedom to modify and the

freedom to exert authorial privilege had been building

before GOSMACS. The Copyright Act of 1976 had

overhauled U.S. copyright law, extending the legal

protection of copyright to software programs. According

to Section 102(b) of the Act, individuals and companies

now possessed the ability to copyright the "expression"

of a software program but not the "actual processes or

methods embodied in the program."See Hal Abelson, Mike Fischer, and Joanne

Costello,

"Software and Copyright Law," updated version (1998).

Translated, programmers and companies had the ability

to treat software programs like a story or song. Other

programmers could take inspiration from the work, but

to make a direct copy or nonsatirical derivative, they

first had to secure permission from the original

creator. Although the new law guaranteed that even

programs without copyright notices carried copyright

protection, programmers quickly asserted their rights,

attaching coypright notices to their software programs.

At first, Stallman viewed these notices with alarm.

Rare was the software program that didn't borrow source

code from past programs, and yet, with a single stroke

of the president's pen, Congress had given programmers

and companies the power to assert individual authorship

over communally built programs. It also injected a dose

of formality into what had otherwise been an informal

system. Even if hackers could demonstrate how a given

program's source-code bloodlines stretched back years,

if not decades, the resources and money that went into

battling each copyright notice were beyond most

hackers' means. Simply put, disputes that had once been

settled hacker-to-hacker were now settled

lawyer-to-lawyer. In such a system, companies, not

hackers, held the automatic advantage.

Proponents of software copyright had their

counter-arguments: without copyright, works might

otherwise slip into the public domain. Putting a

of quality. Programmers or companies who attached their

name to the copyright attached their reputations as

well. Finally, it was a contract, as well as a

statement of ownership. Using copyright as a flexible

form of license, an author could give away certain

rights in exchange for certain forms of behavior on the

part of the user. For example, an author could give

away the right to suppress unauthorized copies just so

long as the end user agreed not to create a commercial offshoot.

It was this last argument that eventually softened

Stallman's resistance to software copyright notices.

Looking back on the years leading up to the GNU

Project, Stallman says he began to sense the beneficial

nature of copyright sometime around the release of

Emacs 15.0, the last significant pre-GNU Project

upgrade of Emacs. "I had seen email messages with

permitted' licenses," Stallman recalls. "Those

definitely were [an] inspiration."

For Emacs 15, Stallman drafted a copyright that gave

users the right to make and distribute copies. It also

gave users the right to make modified versions, but not

the right to claim sole ownership of those modified

versions, as in the case of GOSMACS.

Although helpful in codifying the social contract of

the Emacs Commune, the Emacs 15 license remained too

"informal" for the purposes of the GNU Project,

Stallman says. Soon after starting work on a GNU

version of Emacs, Stallman began consulting with the

other members of the Free Software Foundation on how to

shore up the license's language. He also consulted with

the attorneys who had helped him set up the Free

Software Foundation.

Mark Fischer, a Boston attorney specializing in

intellectual-property law, 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. The second was

to encourage others to adopt the same licensing practices."

Encouraging others to adopt the same licensing

practices meant closing off the escape hatch that had

allowed privately owned versions of Emacs to emerge. To

close that escape hatch, Stallman and his free software

colleagues came up with a solution: users would be free

to modify GNU Emacs just so long as they published

their modifications. In addition, the resulting

"derivative" works would also have carry the same GNU

Emacs License.

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

contract. 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 contract terms as unique.

"I think asking other people to accept the price was,

if not unique, highly unusual at that time," he says.

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. 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 changes

as per the demands of 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.

As an example of this informality, Gilmore cites a

Larry Wall, future creator of the Perl programming

language, patch made it simple for Unix programmers to

insert source-code fixes-" patches" in hacker

jargon-into any large program. Recognizing the utility

of this feature, Wall put the following copyright

notice in the program's accompanying README file:

in whole or in part as long as you don't try to make

money off it, or pretend that you wrote it.See Trn Kit README.

http://www.za.debian.org/doc/trn/trn-readme

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.

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: 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.See John Gilmore, quoted from email to author.

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. The license contained a preamble

spelling out its political intentions:

The General Public License is designed to make sure

that you have the freedom to give away or sell copies

of free software, that you receive source code or can

get it if you want it, that you can change the software

or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you

know you can do these things.

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.See Richard Stallman, et

al., "GNU General Public

License: Version 1," (February, 1989).

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copying-1.0.html

In fashioning the GPL, Stallman had been forced to make

an additional adjustment to the informal tenets of the

old Emacs Commune. Where he had once demanded that

Commune members publish any and all changes, Stallman

now demanded publication only in instances when

programmers circulated their derivative versions in the

same public manner as Stallman. In other words,

programmers who simply modified Emacs for private use

no longer needed to send the source-code changes back

to Stallman. In what would become a rare compromise of

free software doctrine, Stallman slashed the price tag

for free software. Users could innovate without

Stallman looking over their shoulders just so long as

they didn't bar Stallman and the rest of the hacker

community from future exchanges of the same program.

Looking back, Stallman says the GPL compromise was

fueled by his own dissatisfaction with the Big Brother

aspect of the original Emacs Commune social contract.

As much as he liked peering into other hackers'

systems, the knowledge that some future source-code

maintainer might use that power to ill effect forced

him to temper the GPL.

"It was wrong to require people to publish all

changes," says Stallman. "It was wrong to require them

to be sent to one privileged developer. That kind of

centralization and privilege for one was not consistent

with a society in which all had equal rights."

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 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

helped Stallman with the creation of the license. "The

process worked very well and GPL in its several

versions has gone from widespread skeptical and at

times hostile response to widespread acceptance."

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 jujitsu,

using the legal system that software hoarders have set

up against them."See David Betz and Jon Edwards, "Richard Stallman

discusses his public-domain [sic] Unix-compatible

software system with BYTE editors," BYTE (July, 1996).

(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 quotes, then he's not

thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join."

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."

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." Following the release of the first

version of GPL, Stallman paid tribute to the sticker,

nicknaming the free software license "Copyleft." Over

time, the nickname and its shorthand symbol, a

backwards "C," would become an official Free Software

Foundation synonym for the GPL.

The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all

great religions are built upon the "routinization" or

"institutionalization" of charisma. Every successful

religion, Weber argued, converts the charisma or

message of the original religious leader into a social,

political, and ethical apparatus more easily

translatable across cultures and time.

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. A few

have even accepted the GPL as a preemptive protective

mechanism for their own software programs. Even those

who reject the GPL contract as too compulsory, still

credit it as influential.

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 brand name, 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.

Although the Berkeley BSD source code was shared among

researchers and commercial programmers with a

source-code license, this commercialization presented a

problem. The Berkeley code was intermixed with

proprietary AT&T code. As a result, Berkeley

distributions were 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, became increasingly burdensome.

Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project

of porting BSD over to the Digital Equipment

Corporation's 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

The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the

way Stallman would have liked. In June, 1989, Berkeley

separated its networking code from the rest of the

AT&T-owned operating system and distributed it under a

University of California license. The contract terms

were liberal. All a licensee had to do was give credit

to the university in advertisements touting derivative programs.The University

of California's "obnoxious advertising

clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for

a less restrictive alternative to the GPL, some hackers

used the University of California, replacing

"University of California" with the name of their own

instution. The result: free software programs that

borrowed from dozens of other programs would have to

cite dozens of institutions in advertisements. In 1999,

after a decade of lobbying on Stallman's part, the

University of California agreed to drop this clause.

In contrast to the GPL, proprietary offshoots were

permissible. Only one problem hampered the license's

rapid adoption: the BSD Networking release wasn't a

complete operating system. People could study the code,

but it could only be run in conjunction with other

proprietary-licensed code.

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 brand

name-the effort would finally bear fruit in the early

1990s. Even before then, however, many of the Berkeley

utilities would make their way into Stallman's GNU Project.

"I think it's highly unlikely that we ever would have

gone as strongly as we did without the GNU influence,"

says Bostic, looking back. "It was clearly something

where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea."

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 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

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

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.

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.

Such commercial exploitation was completely within the

confines of 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."

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.

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 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.

"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."

"You talk about single points of failure, GCC was it,"

echoes Bostic. "Nobody had a compiler back then, until

GCC came along."

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 a native compiler for the C+ programming

language. 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.

"There were about 40 or 50 people in the room, and I

asked how many people were working on the native code

compiler," Tiemann recalls. "My host said the

information was confidential but added that if I took a

look around the room I might get a good general idea."

It wasn't long after, Tiemann says, that the light bulb

went off in his head. "I had been working on that

project for six months," Tiemann says. I just thought

to myself, whether it's me or the code this is a level

of efficiency that the free market should be ready to reward."

Tiemann found added inspiration in the GNU Manifesto,

which, while excoriating the greed of some software

vendors, encourages other vendors to consider the

advantages of free software from a consumer point of

view. By removing the power of monopoly from the

commerical software question, the GPL makes it possible

for the smartest vendors to compete on the basis of

service and consulting, the two most profit-rich

corners of the software marketplace.

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."7. See Michael Tiemann, "Future of Cygnus Solutions:

Entrepreneur's Account," Open Sources (O'Reilly &

Associates, Inc., 1999): 139.

Teaming up with John Gilmore, another GNU Project fan,

Tiemann launched a software consulting service

dedicated to customizing GNU programs. Dubbed Cygnus

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.

GNU Emacs, GDB, and GCC were the "big three" of

developer-oriented tools, but they weren't the only

ones developed by Stallman during the GNU Project's

first half decade. By 1990, Stallman had also generated

GNU versions of the Bourne Shell (rechristened the

Bourne Again Shell, or BASH), YACC (rechristened

Bison), and awk (rechristened gawk). Like GCC , every

GNU program had to be 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.

Recalling the GNU universalist approach, Prime Time

Freeware's Morin points to a critical, albeit mundane,

software package called hello. "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."

According to Stallman, improving software programs was

secondary to building them in the first place. "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 to bring to bear."See Richard Stallman, BYTE

(1986).

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.

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.

"It was like the Onion headline," Allison says.

"`Child's prayers to God answered: No.'"

Stallman's growing stature as a software programmer,

however, was balanced by his struggles as a project

manager. Although the GNU Project moved from success to

success in creation of developer-oriented tools, its

inability to generate a working kernel-the central

"traffic cop" program in all Unix systems that

determines which devices and applications get access to

the microprocessor and when-was starting to elicit

grumbles as the 1980s came to a close. As with most GNU

Project efforts, Stallman had started kernel

development by looking for an existing program to

modify. According to a January 1987 "Gnusletter,"

Stallman was already working to overhaul TRIX, a Unix

kernel developed at MIT.

A review of GNU Project "GNUsletters" of the late 1980s

reflects the management tension. In January, 1987,

Stallman announced to the world that the GNU Project

was working to overhaul TRIX, a Unix kernel developed

at MIT. A year later, in February of 1988, the GNU

Project announced that it had shifted its attentions to

Mach, a lightweight "micro-kernel" developed at

Carnegie Mellon. All told, however, official GNU

Project kernel development wouldn't commence until 1990.See "HURD History."

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history.html

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 company, Paperback Software

International, for copying menu commands in Lotus'

popular 1-2-3 Spreadsheet program. Lotus' suit, coupled

with the Apple -Microsoft "look and feel" battle,

provided a troublesome backdrop for the GNU Project.

Although both suits fell outside the scope of the GNU

Project, both revolved around operating systems and

software applications developed for the personal

computer, not Unix-compatible hardware systems-they

threatened to impose a chilling effect on the entire

culture of software development. Determined to do

something, Stallman recruited a few programmer friends

and composed a magazine ad blasting the lawsuits. He

then followed up the ad by helping to organize a group

to protest the corporations filing the suit. Calling

itself the League of Programming Freedom, the group

held protests outside the offices of Lotus, Inc. and

the Boston courtroom hosting the Lotus trial.

The protests were notable.According to a League of Programming Freedom Press,

the

protests were notable for featuring the first

hexadecimal protest chant: 1-2-3-4, toss the lawyers

out the door; 5-6-7-8, innovate don't litigate;

9-A-B-C, 1-2-3 is not for me; D-E-F-O, look and feel

have got to go

http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/demo.final.release

They document the evolving nature of software

industry. Applications had quietly replaced operating

systems as the primary corporate battleground. In its

unfulfilled quest to build a free software operating

system, the GNU Project seemed hopelessly behind the

times. 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

reinforced that obsolescence in the eyes of some observers.

In 1990, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur

Foundation cerified Stallman's genius status when it

granted Stallman a MacArthur fellowship, therefore

making him a recipient for the organization's so-called

"genius grant." The grant, a $240,000 reward for

launching the GNU Project and giving voice to the free

software philosophy, relieved a number of short-term

concerns. First and foremost, it gave Stallman, a

nonsalaried employee of the FSF who had been supporting

himself through consulting contracts, the ability to

devote more time to writing GNU code.I use the term "writing" here loosely.

About the time

of the MacArthur award, Stallman began suffering

chronic pain in his hands and was dictating his work to

FSF-employed typists. Although some have speculated

that the hand pain was the result of repetitive stress

injury, or RSI, an injury common among software

programmers, Stallman is not 100% sure. "It was NOT

carpal tunnel syndrome," he writes. "My hand problem

was in the hands themselves, not in the wrists."

Stallman has since learned to work without typists

after switching to a keyboard with a lighter touch.

Ironically, the award also made it possible for

Stallman to vote. Months before the award, a fire in

Stallman's apartment house had consumed his few earthly

possessions. By the time of the award, Stallman was

listing himself as a "squatter"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

at 545 Technology Square. "[The registrar of voters]

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."See Michael Gross,

"Richard Stallman: High School

Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified

Genius" (1999).

Most importantly, the MacArthur money gave Stallman

more freedom. Already dedicated to the issue of

software freedom, Stallman chose to use the additional

freedom to increase his travels in support of the GNU

Project mission.

Interestingly, the ultimate success of the GNU Project

and the free software movement in general would stem

from one of these trips. In 1990, Stallman paid a visit

to the Polytechnic University in Helsinki, Finland.

Among the audience members was 21-year-old Linus

Torvalds, future developer of the Linux kernel-the free

software kernel destined to fill the GNU Project's most

sizable gap.

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."See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun:

The

Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins

Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-59.

While not exactly attuned to the "sociopolitical" side

of the Stallman agenda, Torvalds nevertheless

appreciated the agenda's underlying logic: no

programmer writes error-free code. By sharing software,

hackers put a program's improvement ahead of individual

motivations such as greed or ego protection.

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 university student, Torvalds had made the

step up from C 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.

The search led Torvalds to the operating system Minix,

a lightweight version of Unix developed for

instructional purposes by Dutch university professor

Andrew Tanenbaum. The program fit within the memory

confines of a 386 PC, the most powerful machine

Torvalds could afford, but still lacked a few necessary

features. It most notably lacked terminal emulation,

the feature that allowed Torvalds' machine to mimic a

university terminal, making it possible to log in to

the MicroVAX from home.

During the summer of 1991, Torvalds rewrote Minix from

the ground up, adding other features as he did so. By

the end of the summer, Torvalds was referring to his

evolving work as the "GNU/Emacs of terminal emulation programs."See Linus

Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The

Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins

Publishers, Inc., 2001): 78.

Feeling confident, he solicited a Minix newsgroup for

copies of the POSIX standards, the software blue prints

that determined whether a program was Unix compatible.

A few weeks later, Torvalds was posting a message

eerily reminiscent of Stallman's original 1983 GNU posting:

Hello everybody out there using minix-

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby,

won't be big and professional like gnu for 386 (486) AT

clones). This has been brewing since April, and is

starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things

people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it

somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due

to practical reasons) among other things).See "Linux 10th Anniversary."

http://www.linux10.org/history/

The posting drew a smattering of responses and within a

month, Torvalds had posted a 0.01 version of the

operating system-i.e., the earliest possible version

fit for outside review-on an Internet FTP site. In the

course of doing so, Torvalds had to come up with a name

for the new system. On his own PC hard drive, Torvalds

had saved the program as Linux, a name that paid its

respects to the software convention of giving each Unix

variant a name that ended with the letter X. Deeming

the name too "egotistical," Torvalds changed it to

Freax, only to have the FTP site manager change it back.

Although Torvalds had set out build a full operating

system, both he and other developers knew at the time

that most of the functional tools needed to do so were

already available, thanks to the work of GNU, BSD, and

other free software developers. One of the first tools

the Linux development team took advantage of was the

GNU C Compiler, a tool that made it possible to process

programs written in the C programming language.

Integrating GCC improved the performance of Linux. It

also raised issues. Although the GPL's "viral" powers

didn't apply to the Linux kernel, Torvald's willingness

to borrow GCC for the purposes of his own free software

operating system indicated 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."See Linus Torvalds and

David Diamond, Just For Fun: The

Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins

Publishers, Inc., 2001): 96-97.

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 Chassel when he

sums up his thoughts at the time: You put six months of

your life into this thing and you want to make it

available and you want to get something out of it, but

you don't want people to take advantage of it. I wanted

people to be able to see [Linux], and to make changes

and improvements to their hearts' content. But I also

wanted to make sure that what I got out of it was to

see what they were doing. I wanted to always have

access to the sources so that if they made

improvements, I could make those improvements myself.See Linus Torvalds and

David Diamond, Just For Fun: The

Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins

Publishers, Inc., 2001): 94-95.

When it was time to release the 0.12 version of Linux,

the first to include a fully integrated version of GCC,

Torvalds decided to voice his allegiance with the free

software movement. He discarded the old kernel license

and replaced it with the GPL. The decision triggered a

porting spree, as Torvalds and his collaborators looked

to other GNU programs to fold into the growing Linux

stew. Within three years, Linux developers were

offering their first production release, Linux 1.0,

including fully modified versions of GCC, GDB, and a

host of BSD tools.

By 1994, the amalgamated operating system had earned

enough respect in the hacker world to make some

observers 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.See Robert Young, "Interview with Linus, the

Author of

Linux," Linux Journal (March 1, 1994).

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2736

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 few 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.

As his initial email message to the comp.os.minix

newsgroup indicates, it would take a few months before

Torvalds saw Linux as anything less than a holdover

until the GNU developers delivered on the HURD kernel.

This initial unwillingness to see Linux in political

terms would represent a major blow to the Free Software

Foundation.

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 ."See Linus Torvalds and

David Diamond, Just For Fun: The

Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins

Publishers, Inc., 2001): 59.

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

quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly and you

shouldn't join."

GNU/Linux

By 1993, the free software movement was at a

crossroads. To the optimistically inclined, all signs

pointed toward success for the hacker cultur. Wired

magazine, a funky, new publication offering stories on

data encryption, Usenet, and software freedom, was

flying off magazine racks. The Internet, once a slang

term used only by hackers and research scientists, had

found its way into mainstream lexicon. Even President

Clinton was using it. The personal computer, once a

hobbyist's toy, had grown to full-scale respectability,

giving a whole new generation of computer users access

to hacker-built software. And while the GNU Project had

not yet reached its goal of a fully intact, free

software operating system, curious users could still

try Linux in the interim.

Any way you sliced it, the news was good, or so it

seemed. After a decade of struggle, hackers and hacker

values were finally gaining acceptance in mainstream

society. People were getting it.

Or were they? To the pessimistically inclined, each

sign of acceptance carried its own troubling

countersign. Sure, being a hacker was suddenly cool,

but was cool good for a community that thrived on

alienation? Sure, the White House was saying all the

right things about the Internet, even going so far as

to register its own domain name, whitehouse.gov, but it

was also meeting with the companies, censorship

advocates, and law-enforcement officials looking to

tame the Internet's Wild West culture. Sure, PCs were

more powerful, but in commoditizing the PC marketplace

with its chips, Intel had created a situation in which

proprietary software vendors now held the power. For

every new user won over to the free software cause via

Linux, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were booting up

Microsoft Windows for the first time.

Finally, there was the curious nature of Linux itself.

Unrestricted by design bugs (like GNU) and legal

disputes (like BSD), Linux' high-speed evolution had

been so unplanned, its success so accidental, that

programmers closest to the software code itself didn't

know what to make of it. More compilation album than

operating system, it was comprised of a hacker medley

of greatest hits: everything from GCC, GDB, and glibc

(the GNU Project's newly developed C Library) to X (a

Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT's

Laboratory for Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools

such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon,

which lets users substitute easy-to-remember Internet

domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. The

arch's capstone, of course, was the Linux kernel-itself

a bored-out, super-charged version of Minix. Rather

than building their operating system from scratch,

Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux development

team had followed the old Picasso adage, "good artists

borrow; great artists steal." Or as Torvalds himself

would later translate it when describing the secret of

his success: "I'm basically a very lazy person who

likes to take credit for things other people actually do."Torvalds has offered

this quote in many different

settings. To date, however, the quote's most notable

appearance is in the Eric Raymond essay, "The Cathedral

and the Bazaar" (May, 1997).

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html

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 an operating system

out of a desire to give his fellow hackers something to

work with; he'd built it to have something he himself

could play with. Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence,

Torvalds' genius lay less in the overall vision and

more in his ability to recruit other hackers to speed

the process.

That Torvalds and his recruits had succeeded where

others had not raised its own troubling question: what,

exactly, was Linux? 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?

By late 1993, a growing number of Linux users had begun

to lean toward the latter definition and began brewing

private variations on the Linux theme. They even became

bold enough to bottle and sell their variations-or

"distributions"-to fellow Unix aficionados. The results

were spotty at best.

"This was back before Red Hat and the other commercial

distributions," remembers Ian Murdock, then a computer

science student at Purdue University. "You'd flip

through Unix magazines and find all these business

card-sized ads proclaiming `Linux.' Most of the

companies were fly-by-night operations that saw nothing

wrong with slipping a little of their own source code

into the mix."

Murdock, a Unix programmer, remembers being "swept

away" by Linux when he first downloaded and installed

it on his home PC system. "It was just a lot of fun,"

he says. "It made me want to get involved." The

explosion of poorly built distributions began to dampen

his early enthusiasm, however. Deciding that the best

way to get involved was to build a version of Linux

free of additives, Murdock set about putting a list of

the best free software tools available with the

intention of folding them into his own distribution. "I

wanted something that would live up to the Linux name,"

Murdock says.

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?

Murdock opened the message.

"He said the Free Software Foundation was starting to

look closely at Linux and that the FSF was interested

in possibly doing a Linux system, too. Basically, it

looked to Stallman like our goals were in line with

their philosophy."

The message represented a dramatic about-face on

Stallman's part. Until 1993, Stallman had been content

to keep his nose out of the Linux community's affairs.

In fact, he had all but shunned the renegade operating

system when it first appeared on the Unix programming

landscape in 1991. After receiving the first

notification of a Unix-like operating system that ran

on PCs, Stallman says he delegated the task of

examining the new operating system to a friend. Recalls

Stallman, "He reported back that the software was

modeled after System V, which was the inferior version

of Unix. He also told me it wasn't portable."

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 freely modifiable operating system

in the marketplace. In other words, while Stallman

spent the next three years listening to bug reports

from his HURD team, Torvalds was winning over the

programmers who would later uproot and replant the

operating system onto new platforms.

By 1993, the GNU Project's inability to deliver a

working kernel was leading to problems both within the

GNU Project and within the free software movement at

large. A March, 1993, a Wired magazine article by

Simson Garfinkel described the GNU Project as "bogged

down" despite the success of the project's many tools.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."Chassel'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).

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 early

member of the GNU Emacs team and later Stallman critic,

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."

Murdock, a person less privy to the inner dealings of

the GNU Project, adopts a more charitable view. "I

think part of the problem is they were a little too

ambitious and they threw good money after bad," he

says. "Micro-kernels in the late 80s and early 90s were

a hot topic. Unfortunately, that was about the time

that the GNU Project started to design their kernel.

They ended up with alot of baggage and it would have

taken a lot of backpedaling to lose it."

Stallman cites a number of issues when explaining the

delay. The Lotus and Apple lawsuits had provided

political distractions, which, coupled with Stallman's

inability to type, made it difficult for Stallman to

lend a helping hand to the HURD team. 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." Mostly, however, Stallman says he and the

other members of the GNU Project team underestimated

the difficulty of expanding the Mach microkernal into a

full-fledged Unix kernel.

"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 multithreaded programs was really hard.

There were timing books 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."See Maui High Performance Computing

Center Speech.

Whatever the excuse, or excuses, the concurrent success

of the Linux-kernel team created a tense situation.

Sure, the Linux kernel had been licensed under the GPL,

but as Murdock himself had noted, the desire to treat

Linux as a purely free software operating system was

far from uniform. By late 1993, the total Linux user

population had grown from a dozen or so Minix

enthusiasts to somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000.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. Like Winston Churchill watching

Soviet troops sweep into Berlin, Stallman felt an

understandable set of mixed emotions when it came time

to celebrate the Linux "victory."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.

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.

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: The Free Software Foundation

plays an extremely important role in the future of

Debian. By the simple fact that they will be

distributing it, a message is sent to the world that

Linux is not a commercial product and that it never

should be, but that this does not mean that Linux will

never be able to compete commercially. For those of you

who disagree, I challenge you to rationalize the

success of GNU Emacs and GCC, which are not commercial

software but which have had quite an impact on the

commercial market regardless of that fact.

The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux

rather than on the destructive goal of enriching

oneself at the expense of the entire Linux community

and its future. The development and distribution of

Debian may not be the answer to the problems that I

have outlined in the Manifesto, but I hope that it will

at least attract enough attention to these problems to

allow them to be solved. 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, Murdock says,

Stallman had wanted to use the term " Lignux"-"as in

Linux with GNU at the heart of it"-but a sample testing

of the term on Usenet and in various impromptu hacker

focus groups had merited enough catcalls to convince

Stallman to go with the less awkward GNU/Linux.

Although some would dismiss Stallman's attempt to add

the "GNU" prefix as a belated quest for credit, Murdock

saw it differently. Looking back, Murdock saw it as an

attempt to counteract the growing tension between GNU

Project and Linux-kernel developers. "There was a split

emerging," Murdock recalls. "Richard was concerned."

The deepest split, Murdock says, was over glibc. Short

for GNU C Library, glibc is the package that lets

programmers make "system calls" directed at the kernel.

Over the course of 1993-1994, glibc emerged as a

troublesome bottleneck in Linux development. Because so

many new users were adding new functions to the Linux

kernel, the GNU Project's glibc maintainers were soon

overwhelmed with suggested changes. Frustrated by

delays and the GNU Project's growing reputation for

foot-dragging, some Linux developers suggested creating

a " fork"-i.e., a Linux-specific C Library parallel to glibc.

In the hacker world, forks are an interesting

phenomenon. Although the hacker ethic permits a

programmer to do anything he wants with a given

program's source code, most hackers prefer to pour

their innovations into a central source-code file or "

tree" to ensure compatibility with other people's

programs. To fork glibc this early in the development

of Linux would have meant losing the potential input of

hundreds, even thousands, of Linux developers. It would

also mean growing incompatibility between Linux and the

GNU system that Stallman and the GNU team still hoped

to develop.

As leader of the GNU Project, Stallman had already

experienced the negative effects of a software fork in

1991. A group of Emacs developers working for a

software company named Lucid had a falling out over

Stallman's unwillingness to fold changes back into the

GNU Emacs code base. The fork had given birth to a

parallel version, Lucid Emacs, and hard feelings all around.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." http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

Murdock says Debian was mounting work on a similar fork

in glibc source code 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."

Stallman seconds Murdock's recollection. In fact, he

says there were nascent forks appearing in relation to

every major GNU component. At first, Stallman says he

considered the forks to be a product of sour grapes. In

contrast to the fast and informal dynamics of the

Linux-kernel 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.

"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'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."

While some viewed descriptions of Linux as a "variant"

of the GNU Project as politically grasping, 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.

Requests of a more technical nature quickly followed.

Although Murdock had been accommodating on political

issues, he struck a firmer pose when it came to the

design and development model of the actual software.

What had begun as a show of solidarity soon became of

model of other GNU projects.

"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."

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 program's

Unix-like abilities became manifest. Like Murdock,

Perens sympathized with the political agenda of

Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, albeit from afar.

"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."

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.

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."

Over time, Debian would develop a reputation as the

hacker's version of Linux, alongside Slackware, another

popular distribution founded during the same 1993-1994

period. Outside the realm of hacker-oriented systems,

however, 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 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 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?

"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.Young uses the term "public domain" incorrectly

here.

Public domain means not protected by copyright.

GPL-protected programs are by definition protected by

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 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."

Young wasn't the only software executive intrigued by

the business efficiencies of free software. By late

1996, most Unix companies were starting to wake up and

smell the brewing source code. The Linux sector was

still a good year or two away from full commercial

breakout mode, but those close enough to the hacker

community could feel it: something big was happening.

The Intel 386 chip, the Internet, and the World Wide

Web had hit the marketplace like a set of monster

waves, and Linux-and the host of software programs that

echoed it in terms of source-code accessibility and

permissive licensing-seemed like the largest wave yet.

For Ian Murdock, the programmer courted by Stallman and

then later turned off by Stallman's micromanagement

style, the wave seemed both a fitting tribute and a

fitting punishment for the man who had spent so much

time giving the free software movement an identity.

Like many Linux aficionados, Murdock had seen the

original postings. He'd seen Torvalds's original

admonition that Linux was "just a hobby." He'd also

seen Torvalds's admission to Minix creator Andrew

Tanenbaum: "If the GNU kernel had been ready last

spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project."This quote is taken

from the much-publicized

Torvalds-Tanenbaum "flame war" following the initial

release of Linux. In the process of defending his

choice of a nonportable monolithic kernel design,

Torvalds says he started working on Linux as a way to

learn more about his new 386 PC. "If the GNU kernel had

been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even

start my project." See Chris DiBona et al., Open

Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 224.

Like many, Murdock knew the opportunities that had

been squandered. He also knew the excitement of

watching new opportunities come seeping out of the very

fabric of the Internet.

"Being involved with Linux in those early days was

fun," recalls Murdock. "At the same time, it was

something to do, something to pass the time. If you go

back and read those old [comp.os.minix] exchanges,

you'll see the sentiment: this is something we can play

with until the HURD is ready. People were anxious. It's

funny, but in a lot of ways, I suspect that Linux would

never have happened if the HURD had come along more quickly."

By the end of 1996, however, such "what if" questions

were already moot. Call it Linux, call it GNU/Linux;

the users had spoken. The 36-month window had closed,

meaning that even if the GNU Project had rolled out its

HURD kernel, chances were slim anybody outside the

hard-core hacker community would have noticed. The

first Unix-like free software operating system was

here, and it had momentum. All hackers had left to do

was sit back and wait for the next major wave to come

crashing down on their heads. Even the shaggy-haired

head of one Richard M. Stallman.

Ready or not.

Open Source

In November , 1995, Peter Salus, a member of the Free

Software Foundation and author of the 1994 book, A

Quarter Century of Unix , issued a call for papers to

members of the GNU Project's "system-discuss" mailing

list. Salus, the conference's scheduled chairman,

wanted to tip off fellow hackers about the upcoming

Conference on Freely Redistributable Software in

Cambridge, Massachusetts. Slated for February, 1996 and

sponsored by the Free Software Foundation, the event

promised to be the first engineering conference solely

dedicated to free software and, in a show of unity with

other free software programmers, welcomed papers on

"any aspect of GNU, Linux, NetBSD, 386BSD, FreeBSD,

Perl, Tcl/tk, and other tools for which the code is

accessible and redistributable." Salus wrote: 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.See Peter Salus, "FYI-Conference on Freely

Redistributable Software, 2/2, Cambridge" (1995)

(archived by Terry Winograd).

http://hci.stanford.edu/pcd-archives/pcd-fyi/1995/0078.html

One of the first people to receive Salus' email was

conference committee member Eric S. Raymond. Although

not the leader of a project or company like the various

other members of the list, Raymond had built a tidy

reputation within the hacker community as a major

contributor to GNU Emacs and as editor of The New

Hacker Dictionary, a book version of the hacking

community's decade-old Jargon File.

For Raymond, the 1996 conference was a welcome event.

Active in the GNU Project during the 1980s, Raymond had

distanced himself from the project in 1992, citing,

like many others before him, Stallman's

"micro-management" style. "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."

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 a foot in both camps," Raymond says.

By the time of the conference, the tension between

those two camps had become palpable. Both groups had

one thing in common, though: the conference was their

first chance to meet the Finnish wunderkind in the

flesh. Surprisingly, Torvalds proved himself to be a

charming, affable speaker. Possessing only a slight

Swedish accent, Torvalds surprised audience members

with his quick, self-effacing wit.Although Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his

mother tongue

is Swedish. "The Rampantly Unofficial Linus FAQ" offers

a brief explanation: Finland has a significant (about

6%) Swedish-speaking minority population. They call

themselves "finlandssvensk" or "finlandssvenskar" and

consider themselves Finns; many of their families have

lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of

Finland's two official languages.

http://tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/linus/

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.

"It was a pivotal moment," recalls Raymond. "Before

1996, Richard was the only credible claimant to being

the ideological leader of the entire culture. People

who dissented didn't do so in public. The person who

broke that taboo was Torvalds."

The ultimate breach of taboo would come near the end of

the show. During a discussion on the growing market

dominance of Microsoft Windows or some similar topic,

Torvalds admitted to being a fan of Microsoft's

PowerPoint slideshow software program. From the

perspective of old-line software purists, it was like a

Mormon bragging in church about his fondness of

whiskey. From the perspective of Torvalds and his

growing band of followers, it was simply common sense.

Why shun worthy proprietary software programs just to

make a point? Being a hacker wasn't about suffering, it

was about getting the job done.

"That was a pretty shocking thing to say," Raymond

remembers. "Then again, he was able to do that, because

by 1995 and 1996, he was rapidly acquiring clout."

Stallman, for his part, doesn't remember any tension at

the 1996 conference, 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. "OK, so he

disagrees with some of our conventions. That's fine,

but he picked a singularly nasty way of saying so. He

could have just said `Here's the way I think you should

indent your code.' Fine. There should be no hostility there."

For Raymond, the warm reception other hackers gave to

Torvalds' comments merely confirmed his suspicions. The

dividing line separating Linux developers from

GNU/Linux developers was largely generational. Many

Linux hackers, like Torvalds, had grown up in a world

of proprietary software. Unless a program was clearly

inferior, most saw little reason to rail against a

program on licensing issues alone. Somewhere in the

universe of free software systems lurked a program that

hackers might someday turn into a free software

alternative to PowerPoint. Until then, why begrudge

Microsoft the initiative of developing the program and

reserving the rights to it?

As a former GNU Project member, Raymond sensed an added

dynamic to the tension between Stallman and Torvalds.

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.

Shortly before the 1996 conference, the Free Software

Foundation would experience a full-scale staff

defection, blamed in large part on Stallman. Brian

Youmans, a current FSF staffer hired by Salus in the

wake of the resignations, recalls the scene: "At one

point, Peter [Salus] was the only staff member working

in the office."

For Raymond, the defection merely confirmed a growing

suspicion: recent delays such as the HURD and recent

troubles such as the Lucid-Emacs schism reflected

problems normally associated with software project

management, not software code development. Shortly

after the Freely Redistributable Software Conference,

Raymond began working on his own pet software project,

a popmail utility called " fetchmail." Taking a cue

from Torvalds, Raymond issued his program with a

tacked-on promise to update the source code as early

and as often as possible. When users began sending in

bug reports and feature suggestions, Raymond, at first

anticipating a tangled mess, found the resulting

software surprisingly sturdy. Analyzing the success of

the Torvalds approach, Raymond issued a quick analysis:

using the Internet as his "petri dish" and the harsh

scrutiny of the hacker community as a form of natural

selection, Torvalds had created an evolutionary model

free of central planning.

What's more, Raymond decided, Torvalds had found a way

around Brooks' Law. First articulated by Fred P.

Brooks, manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of

the 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month , Brooks' Law

held that adding developers to a project only resulted

in further project delays. Believing as most hackers

that software, like soup, benefits from a limited

number of cooks, Raymond sensed something revolutionary

at work. In inviting more and more cooks into the

kitchen, Torvalds had actually found away to make the

resulting software better.Brooks' Law is the shorthand summary of the following

quote taken from Brooks' book: Since software

construction is inherently a systems effort-an exercise

in complex interrelationships-communication effort is

great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in

individual task time brought about by partitioning.

Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the

schedule. See Fred P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

(Addison Wesley Publishing, 1995)

Raymond put his observations on paper. He crafted them

into a speech, which he promptly delivered before a

group of friends and neighbors in Chester County,

Pennsylvania. Dubbed " The Cathedral and the Bazaar,"

the speech contrasted the management styles of the GNU

Project with the management style of Torvalds and the

kernel hackers. Raymond says the response was

enthusiastic, but not nearly as enthusiastic as the one

he received during the 1997 Linux Kongress, a gathering

of Linux users in Germany the next spring.

"At the Kongress, they gave me a standing ovation at

the end of the speech," Raymond recalls. "I took that

as significant for two reasons. For one thing, it meant

they were excited by what they were hearing. For

another thing, it meant they were excited even after

hearing the speech delivered through a language barrier."

Eventually, Raymond would convert the speech into a

paper, also titled "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." The

paper drew its name from Raymond's central analogy. GNU

programs were "cathedrals," impressive, centrally

planned monuments to the hacker ethic, built to stand

the test of time. Linux, on the other hand, was more

like "a great babbling bazaar," a software program

developed through the loose decentralizing dynamics of

the Internet.

Implicit within each analogy was a comparison of

Stallman and Torvalds. Where Stallman served as the

classic model of the 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 the Torvalds' perspective, the most

important managerial task was not imposing control but

keeping the ideas flowing.

Summarized Raymond, "I think Linus's cleverest and most

consequential hack was not the construction of the

Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the

Linux development model."See Eric Raymond, "The Cathredral and the Bazaar"

(1997).

In summarizing the secrets of Torvalds' managerial

success, Raymond himself had pulled off a coup. One of

the audience members at the Linux Kongress was Tim

O'Reilly, publisher of O'Reilly & Associates, a company

specializing in software manuals and software-related

books (and the publisher of this book). After hearing

Raymond's Kongress speech, O'Reilly promptly invited

Raymond to deliver it again at the company's inaugural

Perl Conference later that year in Monterey, California.

Although the conference was supposed to focus on Perl,

a scripting language created by Unix hacker Larry Wall,

O'Reilly assured Raymond that the conference would

address other free software technologies. Given the

growing commercial interest in Linux and Apache, a

popular free software web server, 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. He also assured Raymond an

even warmer reception than the one at Linux Kongress.

O'Reilly was right. "This time, I got the standing

ovation before the speech," says Raymond, laughing.

As predicted, the audience was stocked not only with

hackers, but with other people interested in the

growing power of the free software movement. One

contingent included a group from Netscape, the Mountain

View, California startup then nearing the end game of

its three-year battle with Microsoft for control of the

web-browser market.

Intrigued by Raymond's speech and anxious to win back

lost market share, Netscape executives took the message

back to corporate headquarters. A few months later, in

January, 1998, the company announced its plan to

publish the source code of its flagship Navigator web

browser in the hopes of enlisting hacker support in

future development.

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.

Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software · 第 19 / 20 章

With the release of GNU Emacs, the GNU Project finally