"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
>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:2006-02-05
Thanks for the edits. I really wrote the whole thing off the top of my head, so some parts weren't completely accurate.
Stallman has nothing against commercial software.
You are right, although a bit pedantic. I was describing the process that took place, which was commerce taking over what had before that been almost entirely academic.
The thing is, by the 80s, UNIX geeks were already a breed apart. I lumped them in with the academic crowd there which isn't accurate. The point I was trying to make is that while the FSF were approaching businesses and institutions, they were pretty much getting laughed out the of the building. But you are right, GNU did have a following, especially emacs which was the de-facto coding tool on unix environments for a very long time.
IMHO, this is a cop-out. HURD itself has been in development for almost 20 years now with no usable version in sight, and it was the second try for a GNU kernel. While a micro-kernel is more difficult then a monolithic one, it isnt THAT much more difficult.
If read all the CatB stuff (I forget exactly which essay he talks about it), ESR says that the open source methodology was started in linux, and others who used it successfully were unconsciously copying things that Linus did. What happened with CatB is that it moved from the unconscious to the conscious. If you really want me to find the exact quote I will, but I am basing that statement on what he wrote.
KDE calls itself Free NOW, but that is because of all the Qt drama when it started. GNOME was specifically started as a Free alternative to KDE, and had strong times to GNU. And of course GNU is free, it is the OS made by the FSF. What I am referring to is what ESR said when he was describing the whole birth of Mozilla thing. He said a few weeks after the term Open Source hit the wild, so web searching showed far more adoption then he had anticipated. I was into mucking with Apples back then, so I can't say from personal experience.
Now there's some egg on my face ;-) Like I said, I wrote that off the top of my head, and it has been a real long time since I was reading through the FSF materials.
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.
Well, quite honestly, most people don't care about either, and use linux because it is a cool way to "stick it to the man", and is free as in beer. These people are more or less leeches, but they make up a nice percentage of the user base. Typically, when someone around me is using Free and Open interchangeably, I try to briefly describe the difference between philosophy and methodology. The people I run into lean more towards the practical, but it could be where I live and who I talk to.
You see, I didn't even know that.
I will point out though that while they may say they support the FSF, they do not follow their principals. Most of those companies do not completely Free all their assets, which is what the FSF says is right. Most of what you listed release source code where it makes sense, and keep the "crown jewels" closed, as ESR describes in The Magic Cauldron. That and while I have been in business meetings where people are discussing open source, the only context I have ever heard FSF morality preached to me is in forums like these (or LUGs, which is sort of the same thing)
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!
It amounts to the same thing, a corruption of the word Freedom. Freedom for a guy to hack on a program in his basement is not the same thing as the charter of human rights. It doesn't even remotely come close.
There is a huge difference for a government to say "we demand open formats and protocols for our infrastructure so we will not be reliant on a single business" to saying all source code not given away is wrong. Free software works for stuff like transport protocols or server software, but it falls apart for real commercial applications. The vast majority of advancements in digital image creation and manipulation have been done by adobe, which would simply not exist in a Free Software world. Same thing with sound, DAWs would be at an even lower level then they are in Linux if it weren't for proprietary software. Games would be at the zork level.
What I am saying is that when you bring morality into what is essentially a discussion about practical issues, you end up painting everything black or white. Like it or not, corporate innovation deals with things that academic innovation would never really consider a priority, and by removing commercial incentive, you are basically killing the software industry. And while there is a difference between commercial and free, removing any ability for a company to protect their investment in R&D makes it amount to virtually the same thing. The only way for it to be worthwhile is for software to be used to sell something else, which still means there is no software industry.
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:2006-02-05
Well, you are right in that I did not represent middle ground too well in my story, but like it or not, a world ruled by geeks is a world run by big egos and touchy personalities. More often then not, the FOSS world erupts in what can only be described as High Drama. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way, as not only is it better then any soap opera, but more often then not people simply do not stand for something they don't believe is right, and when the dust settles, you end up with two alternatives competing on technical merit.
There are a great many people who fall into your analogy, but Linus and RMS are not two of them. RMS has repeatedly called Linus "Just an engineer", and Linus' remarks in this interview about "Frothing at the mouth ideologues" are fairly common. While both camps work together, there is still frustration on both sides.
I am sorry if I came off "pro-business", because I really love both the ideas behind open source, and what has already been accomplished. I am only pro-business in that I believe that abolishing intellectual property in the software industry, or any other industry would result in a drop in innovation due to a lack of financial incentive for businesses to put the money they do into these things. There has been a balance between academic innovation for scientific curiosity, and commercial market driven innovation for a very long time now, and it has been working pretty damn well so far. Academic innovation has given us stuff like TCP/IP and the web, Commercial innovation has given us stuff like Photoshop and Pro Tools. You need both, because both tackle different spheres more efficiently.
Now, you can say that free software businesses can/do exist. But the fact of the matter is that these make up a very small amount of the market, and they only really succeed by using software as a vehicle to sell something else. Red Hat doesnt really sell linux, they sell their certifications and support. IBM doesnt really sell linux, they use it as a way to reduce the cost of their "eSolutions". Palm isn't going to be selling linux, they will be selling their palmtop computers.
I'm not saying this way of doing business is bad, but it is the only viable way of turning a profit when you take out the factor of IP protection. How will people like Adobe exist? How about gaming companies? Id or Unreal really exists because of their engine liscences, you take that away from them and they have no real incentive to deliver. What about apple? Who would buy over-priced hardware in a pretty box if stuff like Quartz and all their nifty APIs got ported into free desktops?
There needs to be a mix of both. The OSI allows for this, the FSF is not only opposed, but they say I am morally wrong for suggesting such a notion.
Last point, if you read stuff by guys like Larry Lessig (the Creative Commons guy), he will tell you that things like copyright and patents were fantastic ideas, but have become corrupted by the shift in governament legislation from its constituants to corporate lobby groups. Having a limited monopoly on things you come up with has been driving north american innovation for centuries now, and been quite successful at it. You are right that we should not let companies walk all over us, but we need reform, not abolishment.
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:2006-02-05
The four freedoms of software are
* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies 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). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Code that abides by those four freedoms is considered Free. Code that abides by freedom 1 is considered to be Open.
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.