"The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what's happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time?
I had the opportunity to chat with the original creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, in a number of email exchanges."
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Member since:2005-07-15
>One side of the community believes that corporate involvement fundamentally violates the basic principles of free software; these people are called "frothing-at-the-mouth" ideologues. The other extreme of the community believes open source is just an another development model that should ultimately be used for the private sector.
I don't know about which "sides of the community" you are talking. Because you are using the two terms "Free Software" and "Open Source" it seems like you mean those two sides.
I also agree that there are differences but i can't see the differences you describe.
The Free Software "side" is quite happy about every company which develop, improve or sell Free Software.
And as far as I know the Open Source side doesn't restrict them self only to the private sector.
Edited 2007-08-22 19:36
Member since:2006-01-28
Most FLOSS users do not belong to one camp or the other. They relish the idea of a completely free operating system, but realize that sometimes compromises must be struck. Only those standing outside the community or those wishing to instill a sense of divisiveness on the hope that repeating the same nonsense ad-infinitum will really divide us in the future are talking about open source and free software as if they were some hugely different animals.
Hell, even RMS has consistently said that running SOME free software on Windows is better than running none at all. Baby steps, training wheels and all of that.
Those of us that have been around for a long time have worked to make sure the FLOSS community is a force that is increasingly heard. Precisely at a time when we are going from strength to strength, it is nothing but a waste of time to engage in endless and pointless debates about whether we are in it because we have found a superior software development methodology or because we believe that sharing ideas is a better way to build a healthier society.
Guess what, it's both and I'll have some ice-cream with that cake.
Edited 2007-08-22 20:36
Member since:2006-03-31
You stated:
I stated:
I believe you proved my point.
Member since:2006-02-05
actually, its alot more structured then you described. There is a real lack of understanding in the community of the difference between Free and Open source software. All Free software is open, but not all Open software is Free. To really understand the difference, a bit of a history lesson is in order.
Basically, it goes like this. Way back in the day when software began to get commercialized, there was an academic named Richard Stallman, who believed that restricting access to what was essentially an academic pursuit was unethical. He decided he was going to do something about it, and founded the Free Software Foundation as a non-profit organization. The purpose of the FSF was to promote Stallmans' views on the ethical nature of software, and attracted a few followers on campuses, but made next to no headway outside of the academic setting. As virtually everything became commercial, the FSF decided to make their own operating system that was completely Free from the ground up, first of all for their own use, secondly as a vehicle to promote their philosophy. This was named GNU, and while they did manage to accomplish a few big things (GCC, Emacs), they were never able to get their kernel to the point of even being usable, let alone fully functional.
While the FSF were busy doing their thing, a young guy called Linus decided to roll his own kernel for the fun of it. He banged out a really basic, poorly coded development version, and was well on his way to complete obscurity when he decided he was going to get other enthusiasts in on it. He posted his source code on some newsgroups, and asked people for help. Very quickly, Linux started developing a community, and began improving exponentially. Linus had a natural knack of dealing with the kind of people who would consider hacking on a kernel to be fun, and managed to manage this community of enthusiasts from all over the world quite efficiently. Very soon, he had a usable kernel. But the kernel, while being the most complex part, is not the only thing you need to run an operating system. Since Linus had no real desire to write high level code, he went looking for something he could put his kernel on.
It was pretty much a match made in heaven. GNU, with no Kernel, and Linux, with no userland. Linus looked over the GPL, and while he didn't buy into the philosophy behind it, liked the whole idea of having it be open to everyone who wants to play fair. With a usable userland around, Linux seriously started picking up steam, and began to come onto the radar of all the old UNIX hackers who never switched to apple or windows. Pretty soon, all sorts of people were working on various projects to improve on what was becoming not only a real decent UNIX, but also an incredably fun one to be a part of.
The defining moment was when one hacker with an interest in sociology, Eric Raymond, decided to start a project called fetchmail. He was fascinated by the community development that was going on, and really analyzed what was going on while he took his project from the start to being a category killer. Eventually, he wrote a paper on it called the Cathedral and the Bazaar, which basically layed out in detail the rules and style of management that Linus had inadvertently created when he brought help in to develop Linux. CatB was huge, as it became a virtual manual for creating a successful community around your project.
The final step was when Netscape contacted Eric and told him they wanted to move their development into more Bazaar style, and wanted his help. In the early brainstorming sessions with what was to become Mozilla, the idea of branding this development methodology came up, and Open Source was the name they came up with. Virtually overnight, all kinds of projects that had been calling themselves Free Software, started to identify themselves as Open Source.
Now, Stallman was pissed. Not only was Linux the resounding success he had always hoped GNU to be, but people were using his code, but not his ideology. Linus has no time for religion when it comes to technology, and Eric had created a methodology with none of the moral points that were so close to Stallmans heart. So the FSF went on a crusade to start to win the hearts and minds of the community back from the open source camp. This initiative is where the GNU/Linux, and FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) monikers came from.
For the most part, people use the two words interchangably, and while they will buy in somewhat to the five freedoms and all that, when you really explain the free software philosophy to them, they will side more with the practical then the religious side of things.
As it stands, the FSF is still pretty much ignored by the people who matter in the Linux community. Stallman believes that intellectual property is morally wrong, and has even gone so far as to say that people should pirate commercial software, since businesses should not get compensation for their ill gotten gains. Corporate involvement and the Free Software religion really do not mix, as they view the world in completely different ways. The open source methodology however, mixes wonderfully with corporate involvement, to the point where massive pillers of the industry like IBM, SUN, Novell, and Apple are all following the principals Eric Raymond published in his CatB papers.
Anyways, sorry for the long post, but I wanted to hit all the main points so I can link to this in future threads. Getting tired of writing out bits of it all the time. As you can probably tell, I am a huge fan of open source, but have very little time for the FSF. I believe that with so many things going on in the world, to devote your life to something as trivial as this is kind of sick. Not only that, but saying that software has freedoms just like people demeans the whole idea of what freedom is.
Member since:2005-07-15
>Way back in the day when software began to get commercialized,
It doesn't become commercialized, it become proprietary.
Stallman has nothing against commercial software.
>and attracted a few followers on campuses, but made next to no headway outside of the academic setting.
In the 80s GNU was really famous, especially in the proprietary Unix world. Almost everyone installed this great and free GNU software on top of their proprietary Unix.
>they were never able to get their kernel to the point of even being usable, let alone fully functional.
They choosed a far more complex architecture for their kernel so that Linux was faster ready to use. With Linux beeing ready to use there was no need for another kernel so that the GNU kernel become the lowest possible priority and the GNU project focused on other missing parts.
>Eventually, he wrote a paper on it called the Cathedral and the Bazaar, which basically layed out in detail the rules and style of management that Linus had inadvertently created when he brought help in to develop Linux.
It was not only Linux, other projects used the same development strategy. It is also interesting to know that the first releases of this paper spoke about Free Software. Also Netscape was inspired by a version of this paper which spoke about Free Software.
>Virtually overnight, all kinds of projects that had been calling themselves Free Software, started to identify themselves as Open Source.
I can't see that. The largest part of the base system comes from GNU and all this projects call themselves as Free Software and not as Open Source. Also other important projects like KDE and many more call themselves Free Software.
>For the most part, people use the two words interchangably, and while they will buy in somewhat to the five freedoms and all that,
its 4 freedoms!
>when you really explain the free software philosophy to them, they will side more with the practical then the religious side of things.
I have made a different experience. Most people don't care about how you develop software but they understand the role of computers and software in today's world and the ethical questions which arise out of them.
>As it stands, the FSF is still pretty much ignored by the people who matter in the Linux community. [..] The open source methodology however, mixes wonderfully with corporate involvement, to the point where massive pillers of the industry like IBM, SUN, Novell, and Apple are all following the principals Eric Raymond published in his CatB papers.
I disagree. A lot of the important projects are GNU projects. And other projects like KDE also federalize themselves with the FSF. The same is true for companies. Just look at the list of supporters of FSF and the other Free Software Foundations there you will find names like Google, HP, IBM, Nokia, Intel, JBoss, Nec, Cisco, Samsung, MySQL, Sun,...
>Not only that, but saying that software has freedoms just like people demeans the whole idea of what freedom is.
Not the software should have freedom. But people should have freedom who depend more and more on computers and software to participate in the digital society/culture, to learn, to work, to communicate, etc. Also government and economy should have freedom by controlling their IT infrastructure. That's the important point!
PS: Because you said that Free Software and the FSF is pretty much ignored by important people in the GNU/Linux world I can't resist in citing a important person of the Linux (the kernel) world, Alan Cox (said to Eric Raymond): "That would be because we believe in Free Software and doing the right thing (a practice you appear to have given up on). Maybe it is time the term 'open source' also did the decent thing and died out with you."
Edited 2007-08-22 21:41
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-03-31
"Not only that, but saying that software has freedoms just like people demeans the whole idea of what freedom is."
Thank you for your historical notes. I very much appreciate them. However I disagree with your assumption that free software is trivial compared to other issues facing the world. Initially I agreed with you, but here is a counter-example:
A friend has been working on a program that does protein interaction and gene expression analysis to determine the characteristics of breast cancer. This program requires computational statistics. Matlab provided the required routines to do the calculations, but the program needs to be able to run on computers without Matlab installed. The friend looked at the source code of R, figured out how the calculations were done, and included them in her program.
In this case, free AND open source software benefited science; perhaps in the future it might improve the lives of others. That's a clear-cut example.
EDIT: I improved the explanation of the example.
Edited 2007-08-23 03:43
Member since:2005-07-08
Basically, it goes like this. Way back in the day when software began to get commercialized, there was an academic named Richard Stallman, who believed...
While the FSF were busy doing their thing, a young guy called Linus...
It was pretty much a match made in heaven...
Now, Stallman was pissed. Not only was Linux the resounding success he had always hoped GNU to be...
As it stands, the FSF is still pretty much ignored by the people who matter in the Linux community...
Nice "War of the Roses" narrative. It evokes the journalistic integrity of Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room. You grab onto this Stallman/Linus antagonistic framework and use it to pry apart a diverse collective that is working toward the same goals for different reasons.
I apologize for the upcoming Americanisms, but it's a useful analogy. Think of the social freedom crowd as the progressive Democrats, the alliance of big business and the economic freedom crowd as the conservative Republicans, and the small group of pro-business pundits of the ESR ilk as the DLC and their bluedogs.
Ultimately, we're all after the same thing: getting the products and services we need at a price we can afford. Both sides appreciate the efficiency of the private sector in making this happen. But while the conservatives are willing to let business operate as they wish, progressives favor modest regulations to prevent abuses.
What separates progressives from conservatives is their belief that a consolidation of power and wealth in the business class is threatening freedom. The conservatives believe that business success will ultimately trickle down to their employees. Normally, the shear size of the working class would allow them to exert influence over the tiny business elite.
However, the progressive majority in the working class has been tricked by the DLC into supporting bluedogs. These are essentially conservatives that campaign as Democrats. They tell people that Democrats don't stand a chance unless they let business get whatever they want. Then they throw in some socially-oriented wedge issue that has little to do with anything.
The result is that a Democratic majority ends up rubber-stamping conservative policy. Or more generally, the progressive world-view is marginalized and vastly underrepresented.
Progressives think something is wrong when the top 1% has more money than the bottom 95% while the highest tax bracket has dropped from 87% to 28% in the past 20 years and the White House spokesperson insists that this "isn't a very interesting story." New York City has the same distribution of wealth as Namibia, the most unequal nation in the entire world. That's an interesting story.
Obviously where the analogy falls apart is the lack of any major inequality in the FOSS ecosystem. That is because while the progressive FSF agenda is marginalized and often ridiculed, it is not underrepresented by any means. The GPL is a dominant license in the FOSS world. We observe that while commercial contributors would probably rather use a less restrictive license if they could, they are still profiting from their participation in the Linux community.
Equality is working. Business is good, and users are enjoying unparalleled freedom. Yet people like ESR still stress the fact that business is not in it for freedom. Of course they're not! They're in it for profit, and it's working. We don't need to pander to business any more than we do now. They get profit, we get freedom, and the developers get participation. We're working toward the same goals for different reasons.
So before you go bashing the FSF because business isn't buying the freedom aspect of the GPL, consider the balance that the GPL has brought to the greater FOSS community. Whether you're in it for profit, freedom, or collaboration, the GPL delivers. It's not pro-business. It's a compromise that business can live with. It favors users because there's way more of us than there are of them, and I think that's fair.
If only we could have the same level of balance in politics. I don't care if I'm ridiculed for my beliefs. I just think that ordinary people should get their way more often then not because there's more of us. We don't need to let big business walk all over us while they smugly promise to trickle down whatever they choose not to keep for themselves. They'll survive a little progressive regulation, and maybe we can once again feel as free as our leaders insist we are.
Member since:2006-09-27
"All Free software is open, but not all Open software is Free. "
So, how do you explain this? :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Public_License
"Free Software" and "Open Source" are two concepts that, as a logician may put it, are extensionally (almost) identical but intensionally distinct. It's very difficult to find a license that is "Free Sofware" and not "Open Source" or the other way around, and when it happens it's usually because those two labels are granted by different institutions who decide independently. The main difference is the motivation behind each concept: ethical/political in "Free Software", factual/technical in "Open Source". That's why "FOSS" is a useful concept.
Member since:2006-07-30
"There is no clear-cut evidence that corporate involvement is bad for Linux."
You left out patents and patent-deals from your list. To bow down to unsubstantiated copyright threats is the same as removing the word Free from FOSS.
There are three distros that are "involved" heavily now in this sector via Microsoft deals. This turned ugly very quickly and continues to get uglier so long as Microsoft continues to call the shots in regard to Linux.
Member since:
2006-03-31
In the interview, Torvalds writes:
"I dislike the frothing-at-the-mouth ideology (to me, ideology should be something personal, not something you push on other people) and I think it's much more interesting to see how Open Source actually generates a better process for doing complex technology, than push the 'freedom' angle and push an ideology."
The community is essentially divided between this issue: is corporate involvement good for open source projects like Linux? One side of the community believes that corporate involvement fundamentally violates the basic principles of free software; these people are called "frothing-at-the-mouth" ideologues. The other extreme of the community believes open source is just an another development model that should ultimately be used for the private sector. I think most members of the community are somewhere in between: we appreciate the open source model and wish to protect its tenets while welcoming companies that spend money to improve open source projects.
There is no clear-cut evidence that corporate involvement is bad for Linux. So I feel the future can go in two ways:
1) Private influence impedes proper development of Linux. The community will eventually be split along the idealogical line stated above.
2) Private influence, as it has been so far, continues to improve Linux. The "frothing-at-the-mouth" ideologues cannot prove the validity of their claims, and thus the question stated above is resolved.