Beyond Market, Freedom Matters
BY K G KUMAR
What is it about the Free Software Movement that raises the hackles of the world's most powerful software company? And what is it that causes Microsoft executives to misconstrue the essence of the movement, and often misattribute it to the Open Source initiative--a related, but philosophically watered-down version of the same original vision, asks K.G. Kumar in an article that was earlier published in the Economic and Political Weekly of India.
By basing itself on moral rectitude and ethical resoluteness, the Free Software Movement seeks to focus on the importance of "freedom" as in "free speech" or "free elections", and not gratis, as in "free beer". In the process, it has invited the wrath of the likes of Microsoft.
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Q: Do you view Linux and the open-source movement as a threat to Microsoft?
A: Yeah. It's good competition. It will force us to be innovative. It will force us to justify the prices and value that we deliver. And that's only healthy. The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.
--- Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO and No. 2 in the company, responding to a question by Chicago Sun-Times reporter Dave Newbart
We could not establish a community of freedom in the land of proprietary software where each program had its lord. We had to build a new land in cyberspace -- the free software GNU operating system, which we started writing in 1984. In 1991, when GNU Most read story was almost finished, the kernel Linux written by Linus Torvalds filled the last in Linux: gap; soon the free GNU/Linux system was available.
-- Richard Matthew Stallman, Founder and President, Free Software Foundation
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ENTHUSIASTS GIVE IT A BOOST
It is easy -- and tempting -- to pitch these two opposing positions against each other, and portray the whole "free" vs proprietary software debate in antagonistic, David vs Goliath terms. It is even more tempting and dramatic to view these differences as the contours of a battle between lowly, poorly paid and equipped programmers and the world's largest software company, Microsoft, led by what the international media incessantly reminds us is the world's richest man.
In reality, though, the Free Software Movement is not a movement against Microsoft or Bill Gates. Nor does it appear daunted by the gigantic proportions or reputations of its foes. That is because the well-spring of its raison d'etre is moral rectitude and ethical resoluteness. The Free Software Movement is a movement for freedom, pure and simple--freedom as defined in any combination of these dictionary meanings: "exemption or release from slavery or imprisonment"; "the quality of self-determination attributed to the will"; "the state of being able to act without hindrance or restraint"; "liberty of action"; "exemption from arbitrary, despotic or autocratic control"; "unfettered"; even, "independence" and "civil liberty".
That last sense is particularly apt, since Richard Matthew Stallman began the Free Software Movement in 1984 inspired by the ideals of the American War of Independence of 1776: "freedom, community and voluntary co-operation, which leads to free enterprise, free speech and free software."
Yet, critics and opponents of the Free Software Movement choose to ignore these allusions of the word "freedom", choosing to focus, instead, on the economic and business aspects of "free" software. The mighty multinational Microsoft, for instance, alleges that the very notion of free software is "unAmerican". In an address at New York University on 3 May 2001, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's senior vice president, described the movement as "flimsy", "flawed", jeopardizing property rights and threatening to undermine the software industry, a key economic growth engine. Reuters reported that Mundie's language was "more in the spirit of a trash-talking sports star than the typically ambiguous, jargon-filled phrasings of a software executive."
What is it about the Free Software Movement that raises the hackles of the world's most powerful software company? And what is it that causes Microsoft executives to misconstrue the essence of the movement, and often misattribute it to the Open Source initiative--a related, but philosophically watered-down version of the same original vision?
Any answers to these and related questions must inevitably point to a bearded, long-haired, pun-loving genius of a programmer named Richard Matthew ("Math You", as he once elaborated to an interviewer, referring to his abiding love for mathematics) Stallman. Born in New York in 1953, Stallman--or RMS as he is popularly known in the fraternity, after his login identity name for the computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he started his programming career--is the only child of a printing press owning father and a liberal-minded schoolteacher of a mother.
Growing up in New York's West Side, Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. In 1971, during the end of his freshman year, he got a job as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. (Contrary to popular belief, reinforced by media reports of virus attacks and their creators, a "hacker" is not a malevolent, evil-minded person tapping away at the keyboard of a computer to break into distant security systems. Rather, a hacker is merely someone who is obsessed with programming and writing code, someone who would rather program than, say, eat or sleep, someone who has imbibed the spirit of "playful cleverness". The more malicious type portrayed in the media is more correctly referred to as a "cracker".)
At MIT's AI Lab, Stallman learned operating system development by doing it as part of a long-standing software-sharing community. "Sharing of software was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking," he notes. Stallman wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975, for which, in 1991, he received the Grace Hooper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. ("Calling Emacs an editor is like calling the Earth a nice hunk of dirt," is what one commentator had to say about this powerful, comprehensive Swiss Army knife-style piece of software.)
However, the AI Lab's hacker community and spirit soon collapsed, when corporate interests began luring away all the talented hackers from MIT. For Stallman, the last straw was when the AI Lab decided to use Digital's non-free timesharing system, alongside the fact that the computers then used, like the VAX or the 68020, featured operating systems that required signing a non-disclosure agreement even to get an executable copy.
Stallman found himself confronted with a stark moral choice. He had to choose to do something "for the good...so as to make a community possible again." That was how he homed in on the idea of developing an operating system (OS), the heart of any computer, without which no one can run one.
In January 1984, Stallman resigned from MIT to start the GNU Project to develop the free operating system, GNU. GNU is a recursive acronymn (hackers revel in puns and word play) for "GNU's Not Unix". Stallman quit MIT so that the institute would not be able to interfere with the distribution of GNU as free software. GNU is Unix-compatible software, i.e, it can run Unix programs but is not identical to Unix, then the leading enterprise OS, known for its portability.
In 1985, the year after he quit MIT, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in Boston,dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify and redistribute computer programs. (Those who imagine that the Free Software Movement arose in response to Microsoft should remember that the Redmont company's breakthrough OS, Windows 3.1, shipped in June 1992, a full seven years after FSF was founded, while its current flagship, Windows 2000, came almost another six years after that.)
FSF is a tax-exempt charity for free software development. It raises funds by selling GNU CD-ROMs, T-shirts, manuals and deluxe distributions (all of which users are free to copy and change), as well as from donations.
FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in "free speech", not necessarily gratis, as in "free beer") software and free documentation. In particular, FSF promotes the GNU operating system, used widely today in its GNU/Linux variant, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds. It is estimated that there are over 20 million users of GNU/Linux systems today. These systems are often mistakenly called just "Linux"; calling them "GNU/Linux" corrects this confusion.
They may not know it, but most Indian Internet users are already benefiting from free software, because today, almost all Web servers run on free software or variants of GNU/Linux. Even The Economist -- a magazine that supports free enterprise and corporate energy -- admits that on the server side, GNU/Linux has become so impressive and capable that it now represents a real threat to the Microsoft Windows NT hegemony. According to The Economist, over one million websites now run on GNU/Linux.
Many ISPs now base their Internet operations on GNU/Linux, in preference to Windows NT or even Unix. Users in some niche segments like advanced graphics and image processing, swear by GNU/Linux's robustness and reliability. In fact, many of the effects for the film Titanic were created on GNU/Linux machines. "Using 200 DEC Alpha-based systems running the Red Hat 4.1 distribution of GNU/Linux, after upgrading the kernel to support the PC164 mainboard, Digital Domain found a performance increase of three to four over SGI systems. The combination of the GNU/Linux OS and Alpha CPUs also delivered the most cost-effective solution to time and processing demands," according to Daryll Strauss of Digital Domain, the company that developed graphics for Titanic.
GNU/Linux is now a robust operating system, complete with an entire set of tools, utilities and applications, almost all of which are distributed with source code, and free of cost. It is not just the near-zero cost of this particular OS that wins the hearts of network administrators; it is its greater stability. This matters a great deal for remote-managed network servers.
Consider, also, these facts:
* gcc, the GNU C compiler, the flagship of the GNU suite, has consistently outperformed the best of commercial compilers. (A compiler is a program that translates a source program into an executable program, or that translates instructions written in a high-level programming language into machine language.)
* GNU/Linux has over 20 million users around the world, on eight processor families.
* Apache, the free Web server from Apache Software Foundation, has 61% of the global market share for Web servers (figures for May 2000), putting it streets ahead of commercial products like Microsoft's IIS (21%) and Netscape's Enterprise Server (5%).
* BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon), an open source program, runs over 80% of the domain name servers around the world.
* SendMail, the mailer programme used by nearly 80% of the world's installations, is free software.
* Perl, TCL and Python are the public-domain languages that stitch together thousands of websites.
* StarOffice, a complete office applications suite programmed in Java, which can be a total substitute for Microsoft's Office, has been released under the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL) by Sun Microsystems.
* AbiWord (www.abisource.com), a small (3.6 MB) open source GPL'd word processor offers everything that MS Word does --- for free!
In media-related areas, free software has made impressive strides, especially in the post-PC, post-Microsoft, post-Intel, post-Internet Explorer architecture, as these examples prove:
1. TiVo uses GNU/Linux for its digital TV recorder.
2. GNU/Linux forms the basis for Kerbango Radio and PenguinRadio, two Internet appliances that allow users to tune in to audio streams from around the world.
3. ScreenPhone, a new cordless communications device from Sweden's Ericsson, uses Red Hat Linux, with a graphical interface from Trolltech displayed on a colour touch screen, to offer telephony, email and Web browsing. Ericsson says this is the first of a new range of consumer products and services for home communications that it aims to develop jointly with Red Hat, one of the leading companies that distribute GNU/Linux.
4. LiViD, the Linux Video and DVD project, circumvents the Content Scramble System (CSS) used to block unauthorized viewing of DVDs. While the US film industry sees this as a ploy by hackers to subvert the encryption system, hackers say they just want the freedom to see their favourite DVDs under GNU/Linux (which was not an industry-supported platform).
5. Since 1994, the New York-based Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has used a GNU/Linux-based approach to provide approximately 45 nations with some of their earliest connections to the Internet.
6. In Ethiopia, which was too small a market for the likes of Microsoft, the free software typesetting programme TeX has been used to develop good fonts in Amharic, the main national language.
7. The "Scholar Net" programme of Mexico hopes to use GNU/Linux to bring computers and the Net to every elementary and mid-level school in the country.
8. Back home, the Simputer project, born in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, uses free software (mainly, GNU/Linux, Perl and Tk) to bring a simple, mobile computer into the hands of the average villager.
9. And finally, interestingly enough, the principles of free software have created what has come to be called "open journalism". The best example is Slashdot.org (slogan: "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."), run on free software, and whose content is generated by readers submitting news and stories, whetted and selected by a panel (named with each submission)--an example of a sturdy distributed news gathering and filtering machine independent of the large mainstream media companies.
As these examples and instances reveal, free software can -- and has -- worked well in the real, rough-and-tumble world of business and commerce. This is simply because the term "free software" has nothing to do with price; it is about freedom. In Stallman's words, a program is free software if:
* You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
* You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. (To make this freedom effective in practice, you must have access to the source code, since making changes in a program without having the source code is exceedingly difficult.)
* You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee.
* You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements.
Free software is distributed under the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL) or other licences approved by FSF in all domains. The GNU GPL gives each user the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software, based on unfettered access to the source code. Being free to do this means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission.
While granting the user these freedoms, the GNU GPL defends them by saying that no one is allowed to take them away from anyone else. Any published program, which incorporates all or a substantial part of a GNU GPL-covered program, must itself be released under the GNU GPL.
The GNU GPL ensures that no person or community can privatize the community's free software. In Stallman's words, "Whoever wishes to copy parts of our software into his program must let us use parts of that program in our programs. Nobody is forced to join our club, but those who wish to participate must offer us the same co-operation they receive from us. This makes the system fair."
"Copyleft" is the method used by FSF to prevent GNU software from being turned into proprietary software. Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means of privatizing software, it becomes a means of keeping software free.
The central idea of copyleft is that FSF gives everyone permission to run the program, copy it, modify it, and distribute modified versions--but not permission to add restrictions of their own. Thus, the crucial freedoms that define "free software" are guaranteed to everyone who has a copy; they become inalienable rights.
Later, Stallman would say that the decision to start the GNU project was based on a spirit similar to these words, attributed to Hillel, the rabbi scholar who flourished in the time of Herod : "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?". "As an atheist," Stallman hastens to add, "I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said."
Stallman went on to become the principal author of the GNU C compiler (gcc), a portable optimizing compiler that was designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over 30 different architectures and seven programming languages. Stallman also wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (GSD), GNU Emacs, and various other GNU programs.
In 1990, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellowship, and, in 1996, an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1998, along with Linus Torvalds, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award. In 1999, he received the Yuri Rubinski memorial award.
On a personal note, RMS likes music, butterflies, caves, good food and, needless to add, computers. He sometimes writes jokes, funny poetry and song parodies. When in the mood, especially in an evangelical, proselytizing setting before an enraptured audience, he playfully refers to himself as "St. IGNUcius in the Church of Emacs" -- even going so far as to don ethereal robes and a halo of a hat!.
In the first edition of "The Hacker's Dictionary", this is how he described himself:
I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953, and moved to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. My hobbies include affection, international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics, recorder, puns, science fiction fandom, and programming; I magically get paid for doing the last one. About a year ago, I split up with the PDP-10 computer to which I was married for ten years. We still love each other, but the world is taking us in different directions. For the moment, I still live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among our old memories. "Richard Stallman" is just my mundane name; you can call me "RMS".
Not everyone, though, could get along famously with Stallman's purist and uncompromising approach. In 1988, some of them rallied around another celebrated hacker, Eric Raymond, to start the Open Source movement, supposedly a more pragmatic, less dogmatic, apolitical initiative to focus on the business and commercial aspects of free software. Erroneous media coverage has given the impression that Richard Stallman's work was done by the Open Source movement. The fact is, that latter movement was started only in 1998, while Stallman began the project to develop the alternative free operating system GNU in January 1984, almost two years before the Free Software Foundation was founded.
In Stallman's own words, "These two movements are like two political parties in our community. Labeling me or the GNU Project with the term 'open source' is like labeling Jawaharlal Nehru as a member of the BJP."
Stallman elaborates the fundamental difference between the two initiatives: "Some who favoured this term ('open source') aimed to avoid the confusion of 'free' with 'gratis' -- a valid goal. Others, however, aimed to set aside the spirit of principle that had motivated the free software movement and the GNU project, and to appeal instead to executives and business users, many of whom hold an ideology that places profit above freedom, above community, above principle. Thus, the rhetoric of 'Open Source' focuses on the potential to make high quality, powerful software, but shuns the ideas of freedom, community, and principle." 'Free software' and 'Open Source' describe the same category of software, more or less, but say different things about the software, and about values. The GNU Project continues to use the term 'free software', to express the idea that freedom, not just technology, is important."
The main argument for the term 'open source software' is that 'free software' makes some people uneasy, says Stallman. "That's true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might rather ignore. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may reject the idea for that. It does not follow that society would be better off if we stop talking about these things."
Which is all that he did during his recent trip to India to launch the Free Software Foundation of India (FSF India) in Thiruvananthapuram (formerly, Trivandrum) on 20 August at the Freedom First! conference. FSF India has been functioning informally as a close-knit group of programmers and free software users for some time. Though many of the core members of the group are based in Thiruvananthapuram, the network is fairly widespread, and encompasses programmers, students, IT professionals and lay persons from all over the subcontinent. Some of them have been running commercially successful businesses on free software. For instance, an Indo-UK publishing venture, Focal Image, has, for the last two years, been doing very good business out of Thiruvananthapuram, publishing scientific works using entirely free software solutions, including the LaTeX document preparation system.
Stallman was made a State government guest for the duration of his five-day tour of Kerala. The day he arrived in Thiruvananthapuram, he met the Minister for Industries and Information Technology, P. K. Kunhalikutty. (Stallman was earlier scheduled to meet the Chief Minister, A. K. Antony, who, being indisposed, had to cancel his appointment.)
An official press release from the minister's office said that "Mr. Kunhalikutty informed Mr. Stallman that the government was happy that a movement that represented the most discerning, yet increasingly mainstream ethos amongst the software development community is taking roots in Kerala. The free software movement, in his view, represented the distinctly open approach that the State wishes to adopt for IT-driven industrial growth and societal transformation..."
The release added that "the government is also keen to understand how well free software can be leveraged in the context of e-governance, particularly at the local self-government level. More specifically, Mr Kunhalikutty requested the involvement of Mr Stallman and the Free Software Foundation in developing free courseware (along the lines of free software) for the education of young students in the colleges and those in need in the IT industry in the State."
Stallman himself pointed out that free software has a special relevance for the Indian educational sector. "Schools in India can benefit by redistributing free software to save on licence fees. But free software offers a deeper benefit for education: the knowledge in free software is public knowledge, not secret. The sealed black box of a proprietary software system is designed to keep people in the dark. With free software, students can study the software they use, to learn how it works. They can write improvements to the software, and thus learn the craft of software development--which usually consists of improving existing programs."
"Computer users in India, as elsewhere, deserve the freedom to share and change software, the way cooks share and change recipes," Stallman said. "So I am delighted to inaugurate the Free Software Foundation of India, which will promote the use and the development of free software in this country. At first, FSF India will help individuals, communities, schools, governments and enterprises in India to make use of the free software that the rest of the world has already developed.
Over time, FSF India will lead Indian programmers to contribute to the human knowledge that free software represents."
"It is natural for human beings to share ideas," Stallman added, "and by doing so, we make the whole world richer. When our contributions can be seen, used, enjoyed, and built on by others around the world, as they can in the free software community, it gives us a sense of community that is motivating and liberating."
According to its official spokespersons, FSF India, which is the first sister organization of FSF in Asia, will strive to ensure that free software is strengthened in all respects so as to form a genuine, credible and viable alternative to proprietary software for every kind of application.
To do so, FSF India aims to :
1. promote awareness about free software among the general public and, specifically, among programmers and students;
2. increase access to free software by users in India;
3. promote the development of local solutions to local problems by empowering local programmers in the use of free platforms, tools and technologies;
4. provide or support free software by way of documentation, expert help or any other means;
5. help organize training for programmers and users of free software platforms and software;
6. carry out R&D work for free software solutions to suit local requirements;
7. provide services for the free software programmer community by, for example, locating and distributing jobs;
8. assist the national and State governments in all aspects relating to free software, such as evolving and maintaining standards; providing a quality assurance mechanism for free software; and ensuring the use of free software in government and quasi-government milieux; and
9. provide services such as adjudication and conflict redressal within the free software domain.
To be sure, however, FSF India will not find the road ahead free of daunting obstacles. Already, certain corporate interests have taken objection to Stallman being feted as an official State guest of the government of Kerala. And the West Bengal government's recent announcement of a tie-up with Microsoft for its e-governance infrastructure is just an indication of the shape of things (read battles) to come.
Stallman, however, remains unfazed. "More important than convenience and reliability is freedom -- the freedom to co-operate. What I'm concerned about is not individual people or companies so much as the kind of way of life that we have. That's why I think it's a distraction to think about fighting Microsoft," Stallman told a Salon writer.
Stallman believes that Microsoft has another, more specific purpose in attacking the GNU General Public Licence. "Microsoft is known generally for imitation rather than innovation," he explains. "When Microsoft does something new, its purpose is strategic--not to improve computing for its users, but to close off alternatives for them."
"Microsoft uses an anticompetitive strategy called 'embrace and extend'. This means they start with the technology others are using, add a minor wrinkle which is secret so that nobody else can imitate it, then use that secret wrinkle so that only Microsoft software can communicate with other Microsoft software. In some cases, this makes it hard for you to use a non-Microsoft program when others you work with use a Microsoft program. In other cases, this makes it hard for you to use a non-Microsoft program for job A if you use a Microsoft program for job B. Either way, 'embrace and extend' magnifies the effect of Microsoft's market power."
What does society need? Stallman's answer: "It needs information that is truly available to its citizens---for example, programs that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate. But what software owners typically deliver is a black box that we can't study or change."
"Society also needs freedom," he adds. "When a program has an owner, the users lose freedom to control part of their own lives. And above all society needs to encourage the spirit of voluntary co-operation in its citizens. When software owners tell us that helping our neighbours in a natural way is "piracy", they pollute our society's civic spirit. This is why we say that free software is a matter of freedom, not price".
Anyone who talks so fervently about freedom, community and civic spirit must surely be a rabble-rousing, fist-shaking, table-thumping commie -- that's the general drift of corporate America's assessment of Stallman. "For the record", he clarifies, "I am not a communist or anything similar. The idea that people ought to co-operate and help their neighbours is much older than Marx--in fact, one notable exponent of this view lived 2000 years ago. And the idea of inalienable rights embodied in the GNU GPL comes from the founders of the United States. People who disagree with me often find it convenient to call me a communist, but they do so in order to misrepresent my views."
Which are precise and unambiguous: "You deserve to be able to co-operate openly and freely with other people who use software. You deserve to be able to learn how the software works, and to teach your students with it. You deserve to be able to hire your favorite programmer to fix it when it breaks. You deserve free software. "
Even Stallman's most bitter critics readily acknowledge the debt that all of them owe him one way or another. Most of them say, "If Richard did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him."
The same sentiment must have been in the mind of journalist and noted GNU/Linux watcher Glyn Moody when he wrote about "...dedicated hackers as Richard Stallman and the FSF who do not code to live, but live to code. This, ultimately, is the reason free software does not depend on open source companies for its own survival: It exists beyond the market."
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References:
* Moody, Glyn. Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. Allen Lane/The Penguin Press. London. 2001. * Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Penguin Books. Harmondsworth. 2001. * DiBona, Chris, Sam Ockman and Mark Stone (ed.). OpenSources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly & Associates. California. 1999. * http://www.gnu.org * http: //www.stallman.org * http: //www.fsf.org.in