Example: Open Source History Gets It All Wrong
I was doing some more software freedom history research today, and I found a small article titled “Open Source History” in Open Source Security Tools: Practical Guide to Security Applications as part of the Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series (you can download the whole book at no cost [PDF]).
Having read a lot of history stuff and discussed some of the points in heated debates online, I was amazed to read this: I could say that it is full of fabrications, but probably the author is just confused and lazy, not checking out sources.
The open source software movement has its roots in the birth of the UNIX platform, which is why many people associate open source with UNIX and Linux systems, even though the concept has spread to just about every other computer operating system available. UNIX was invented by Bell Labs, which was then the research division of AT&T. AT&T subsequently licensed the software to universities. Because AT&T was regulated, it wasn’t able to go into business selling UNIX, so it gave the universities the source code to the operating system, which was not normally done with commercial software. This was an afterthought, since AT&T didn’t really think there was much commercial value to it at the time.
Source code was the normal form for distributing software in the 60s and 70s because there were so many different hardware architectures, and the whole point of UNIX was that it was written in portable C that could be compiled on hundreds of different kinds of hardware.
Universities, being the breeding grounds for creative thought, immediately set about making their own additions and modifications to the original AT&T code. Some made only minor changes. Others, such as the University of California at Berkley, made so many modifications that they created a whole new branch of code. Soon the UNIX camp was split into two: the AT&T, or System V, code base used by many mainframe and minicomputer manufacturers, and the BSD code base, which spawned many of the BSD-based open source UNIX versions we have today. Linux was originally based on MINIX, a PC-based UNIX, which has System V roots.
The Linux kernel’s initial design was based on the Minix kernel, but it wasn’t based on its code.
The early open sourcers also had a philosophical split in the ranks. A programmer named Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which advocated that all software should be open source.
Stallman advocates software freedom, not open source.
He developed a special license to provide for this called the General Public License (GPL). It offers authors some protection of their material from commercial exploitation, but still provides for the free transfer of the source code.
This confuses “proprietary” with “commercial,” the most common misunderstanding people have about software freedom.
In fact, the GPL offers authors the best possible protection from proprietary exploitation, but still provides for many commercial opportunities, including selling software.
Berkley had developed its own open source license earlier, the BSD license, which is less restrictive than the GPL and is used by the many BSD UNIX variants in the open source world.
The BSD license was developed later than the GPL, for the Networking Release 1 in 1989, and is more restrictive than the GPL for users, since it allows developers to remove software freedom.
These two licenses allowed programmers to fearlessly develop for the new UNIX platforms without worry of legal woes or having their work being used by another for commercial gain.
This is total nonsense. Neither license protects from legal woes because of software idea patents. The whole point of the GPL and BSD licenses is that everyone has freedom to use the software for commercial gain.
This brought about the development of many of the applications that we use today on the Internet, as well as the underlying tools you don’t hear as much about, such as the C++ compiler, Gcc, and many programming and scripting languages such as Python, Awk, Sed, Expect, and so on. However, open source didn’t really get its boost until the Internet came to prominence in the early 1990s. Before then, developers had to rely on dial-up networks and Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) to communicate and transfer files back and forth. Networks such as USENET and DALnet sprung up to facilitate these many specialized forums. However, it was difficult and expensive to use these networks, and they often didn’t cross international boundaries because of the high costs of dialing up to the BBSs.
USENET (original name for newsgroups) an DALnet (an IRC network) are Internet services, not BBS ones.
The rise of the Internet changed all that. The combination of low-cost global communications and the ease of accessing information through Web pages caused a renaissance of innovation and development in the open source world. Now programmers could collaborate instantly and put up Web sites detailing their work that anyone in the world could easily find using search engines. Projects working on parallel paths merged their resources and combined forces. Other splinter groups spun off from larger ones, confident that they could now find support for their endeavors. It was from this fertile field that open source’s largest success to date grew. Linus Torvalds was a struggling Finnish college student who had a knack for fiddling with his PC. He wanted to run a version of UNIX on it since that is what he used at the university. He bought MINIX, which was a simplified PC version of the UNIX operating system. He was frustrated by the limitations in MINIX, particularly in the area of terminal emulation, since he needed to connect to the school to do his work. So what became the fastest growing operating system in history started out as a project to create a terminal emulation program for his PC. By the time he finished with his program and posted it to some USENET news groups, people began suggesting add-ons and improvements. At that point, the nucleus of what is today a multinational effort, thousands of people strong, was formed. Within six months he had a bare-bones operating system.
Within six months he had a bare-bones kernel, which together with the GNU operating system developed over the previous six years formed an operating system…
It didn’t do much, but with dozens of programmers contributing to the body of code, it didn’t take long for this “science project†to turn into what we know as the open source operating system called Linux.
…which is why the operating system is called GNU+Linux or GNU/Linux.
Linux is a testament to all that is good about open source. It starts with someone wanting to improve on something that already exists or create something totally new. If it is any good, momentum picks up and pretty soon you have something that would take a commercial company years and millions of dollars to create. Yet it didn’t cost a dime (unless you count the thousands of hours invested).
Most large free software projects have some kind of commercial company backing, and the significant developments of the operating system (as opposed to the applications) have all been done by free software company employees on company time since the mid 1990s.
Because of this, it can be offered free of charge.
It can be offered free of charge because, sometimes, that is a friendly thing to do. At other times, it can be distributed for a fee, because people like to exchange money for value, and freedom is valuable.
This allows it to spread even farther and attract even more developers. And the cycle continues. It is a true meritocracy, where only the good code and good programs survive. However, this is not to say that there is no commercial motive or opportunity in open source. Linus himself has made quite a bit of money by his efforts, though he would be the first to tell you that was never his intention.
That may not have been Linus’ intention when he was an undergraduate student, because undergraduate students are rarely intent on making lots of money at that time.
But Tom Lord wrote this was the intention of GNU developers: “As I recall, a lot of us working on the GNU software back then shared an assumption: that once the system was complete, there would always be work for systems programmers qualified to work on it, probably on an hourly basis, and mostly paying a little bit better than plumbing. It was well known that Stallman himself did occaisional $100/hr gigs: we imagined that completion of the GNU system would create a large market for such gigs, mostly working for direct end-users of the software.”
Many companies have sprung up around Linux to either support it or to build hardware or software around it. RedHat and Turbo Linux are just a few of the companies that have significant revenues and market values (albeit down from their late 1990s heights). Even companies that were known as proprietary software powerhouses, such as IBM, have embraced Linux as a way to sell more of their hardware and services. This is not to say that all software should be free or open source
Since it is unethical to use proprietary software (which you cannot share or understand), all software should respect users’ freedoms, which means being free and open source.
Although some of the more radical elements in the open source world would argue otherwise. There is room for proprietary, closed source software and always will be.
Proprietary software is moving into the network, so that you have freedom with all the software on your computer, but none with software running on servers which you access through the Internet.
But open source continues to gain momentum and support. Eventually it may represent a majority of the installed base of software. It offers an alternative to the commercial vendors and forces them to continue to innovate and offer real value for what they charge. After all, if there is an open source program that does for free what your commercial program does, you have to make your support worth the money you charge.
Again, this confuses “proprietary” with “commercial,” the most common misunderstanding people have about software freedom.
The Example: Open Source History Gets It All Wrong by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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