De-fanging Software Patents For GNU GPL'd Code

A theme that has re-appeared on this blog many times over the years is that of software patents. As I've noted before, they are perhaps the biggest single threat to free software, especially since the decline of Microsoft. Indeed, it's not hard to see software patent lawsuits being filed by Microsoft in the last, desperate stage of that decline in order to inflict the maximum damage on open source.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Richard Stallman on the Painful Birth of GNU

Earlier this week I posted Richard Stallman's recollections of the AI Lab at MIT, where he first encountered and came to love the hacker world and its spirit. That idyllic period came to an end as a result of the commercialisation of the AI Labs' computer system, called the Lisp Machine, which led to the destruction of the unique environment that created it in the first place, and to its re-birth as the GNU project.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Richard Stallman on the Hacker Spirit at MIT

Last week I noted that the GNU project was celebrating its 30th anniversary. I thought it might be interesting to hear what Richard Stallman had to say about the environment in which he came up with the idea for GNU. What follows is part of a long interview I conducted with him in 1999, when I was carrying out research for "Rebel Code". Most of this is unpublished, and offers what I hope is some insights into the hacker culture at MIT, where Stallman was working.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Birth of a GNU Era

Exactly 30 years ago, a hacker posted an unusual message to the net.unix-wizards newsgroup:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Apple's Patent For Creating A Leak-Proof Data Pipe, And Why It's Doomed To Fail

In 2001, I published a history of free software, called "Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution." One of the people I interviewed for the book was Eben Moglen, for many years the General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and one of the main architects of the later versions of the GNU General Public License. He had the following interesting thoughts on the delivery of digital media: 

On Techdirt.

What a Wonderful Piece of Work is Opus

When we talk of free software, we typically think of things like GNU/Linux, Apache or Firefox. But one aspect that often gets overlooked is that of multimedia codecs. There's a good reason for this: most of them are patent-encumbered, which makes using them with free software hard - well, hard if you want to do it legally. In practice, most people have employed implementations of dubious legality, and the licensors have taken the sensible view that they are hardly losing millions from this kind of activity, and have turned a blind eye.

On Open Enterprise blog.

'Hack The Real World And Share The Results'

Eben Moglen has been battling to defend key digital rights for the last two decades. A lawyer by training, he helped Phil Zimmerman fight off the US government's attack on the use of the Pretty Good Privacy encryption program in the early 1990s, in what became known as the Crypto Wars. That brought him to the attention of Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project, and together they produced version 3 of the GNU GPL, finally released after 12 years' work in 2006. 

On Techdirt.

'Almost Anybody Can Have An Idea' -- Linus Torvalds

A constant theme here on Techdirt is that it's not the idea that's crucial, but the execution. Here's someone who seems to agree: 

On Techdirt.

Of Open Source and Open Innovation

Last week I wrote about a talk I gave with the title “Innovation inducement prizes as a possible mechanism to unlock the benefits of open innovation models”. I explored the idea of inducement prizes then, and now I'd like to look at open innovation.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Glyn Moody: The great prize: open innovation

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Software: What Exactly Can be Copyrighted?

One of the many arguments against allowing patents for software (alongside the principle argument that software is made up of algorithms, which are essentially mathematics, which is pure knowledge and hence is not patentable) is the fact that software is anyway covered by copyright law. This means that others cannot simply copy your code, just as a novelist cannot simply copy large chunks of someone else's writing. But whether copyright law prevents others from copying the underlying ideas of that code by re-implementing them independently is another matter.

On The H Open.

Eben Moglen - Freedom vs. The Cloud Log

Free software has won: practically all of the biggest and most exciting Web companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter run on it. But it is also in danger of losing, because those same services now represent a huge threat to our freedom as a result of the vast stores of information they hold about us, and the in-depth surveillance that implies.

Eben Moglen - Prof. of Law at Columbia and former General Counsel for the FSF. Vergrößern Better than almost anyone, Eben Moglen knows what's at stake. He was General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and helped draft several versions of the GNU GPL. As well as being Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, he is the Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. And he has an ambitious plan to save us from those seductive but freedom-threatening Web service companies. He explained to Glyn Moody what the problem is, and how we can fix it.

On The H Open.

Is Richard Stallman Mellowing?

Richard Stallman is sometimes presented as a kind of Old Testament prophet, hurling anathemas hither and thither (indeed, I've been guilty of this characterisation myself - well, he does *look* like one.) But just recently we've had a fascinating document that suggests that this is wrong – or that RMS is mellowing....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Windows Does Not Scale

Who's afraid of the data deluge?

Researchers and workers in fields as diverse as bio-technology, astronomy and computer science will soon find themselves overwhelmed with information. Better telescopes and genome sequencers are as much to blame for this data glut as are faster computers and bigger hard drives.

While consumers are just starting to comprehend the idea of buying external hard drives for the home capable of storing a terabyte of data, computer scientists need to grapple with data sets thousands of times as large and growing ever larger. (A single terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes and could store about 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

The next generation of computer scientists has to think in terms of what could be described as Internet scale. Facebook, for example, uses more than 1 petabyte of storage space to manage its users’ 40 billion photos. (A petabyte is about 1,000 times as large as a terabyte, and could store about 500 billion pages of text.)

Certainly not GNU/Linux: the latest Top500 supercomputer rankings show that the GNU/Linux family has 88.60%. Windows? Glad you asked: 1%.

So, forget about whether there will ever be a Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop: the future is about massive data-crunchers, and there GNU/Linux already reigns supreme, and has done for years. It's Windows that's got problems....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

RMS: 1, Symbolics: 0

Symbolics probably doesn't mean much to you, but it should. It was the main reason that Richard Stallman started the GNU project.

You can read the full story in Rebel Code - or, if by some mischance, you don't have the book to hand, in this speech by RMS. But to summarise an extremely complex tale, at first, Stallman fought Symbolics directly by matching their (proprietary) code with his own, which he gave to a rival; but later he realised that this was not really a sensible way of helping people to use and share software freely:

Once I stopped punishing Symbolics, I had to figure out what to do next. I had to make a free operating system, that was clear — the only way that people could work together and share was with a free operating system.

At first, I thought of making a Lisp-based system, but I realized that wouldn't be a good idea technically. To have something like the Lisp machine system, you needed special purpose microcode. That's what made it possible to run programs as fast as other computers would run their programs and still get the benefit of typechecking. Without that, you would be reduced to something like the Lisp compilers for other machines. The programs would be faster, but unstable. Now that's okay if you're running one program on a timesharing system — if one program crashes, that's not a disaster, that's something your program occasionally does. But that didn't make it good for writing the operating system in, so I rejected the idea of making a system like the Lisp machine.

I decided instead to make a Unix-like operating system that would have Lisp implementations to run as user programs. The kernel wouldn't be written in Lisp, but we'd have Lisp.

As well as provoking the creation of the free software movement, Symbolics has another claim to fame: it was the first registered domain name. Amazingly, only now is that name leaving its original owner:

Did you know the first .com domain name that was ever registered was Symbolics.com, on the 15th of March 1985 by the now defunct Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer Symbolics?

While the first that was created in January of that same year was Nordu.net (used to serve as the identifier of the first root server, nic.nordu.net), symbolics.com was the first domain name to actually be registered through the appropriate DNS process a few months later. This was of course long before there was a WWW, but you already had ‘the Internet’. In fact, the first TCP/IP-based wide-area network had already been operational for two years when nordu.net was created, right around the time the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) commissioned the construction of the legendary NSFNET, a university 56 kilobit/second network backbone. Only six companies thought it’d be a good idea to reserve the domain name on the root servers in 1985 (the others were bbn.com, think.com, mcc.com, dec.com and northrop.com). But Symbolics was first to make the move.

Remarkably, Symbolics.com hasn’t changed ownership once during the nearly 25 years that followed its initial registration. Marking an end to that era, domain name investment company XF.com Investments has just purchased the domain name for an undisclosed sum.

It's pretty extraordinary how all these trailblazing events were tied up together back then; pretty strange, too, how distant they all seem. And, of course, good for the world that ultimately it was RMS that won.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

The Real Story Behind GNU/Linux

If the prospect of another week stretching out before you is getting you down, I've got good news. There's a post about GNU/Linux that is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face. It's a real stonker - try this for a start....

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Real Reason to Celebrate GNU's Birthday

As you may have noticed, there's a bit of a virtual shindig going on in celebration of GNU's 25th birthday (including Stephen Fry's wonderfully British salute, which really, er, takes the cake....). Most of these encomiums have dutifully noted how all the free and open source software we take for granted today – GNU/Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice.org and the rest – would simply not exist had Richard Stallman not drawn his line in the digital sand. But I think all of these paeans rather miss the point....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Sir Bill and Sir Tim: A Tale of Two Knights

On Open Enterprise blog.

Canonical's GNU Bazaar

On Open Enterprise blog.

Approving the AGPL: Funambol to the Rescue

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Trolls Done Good

Once upon a time, there were a bunch of wicked trolls. And then one day, they became good. That, in a nutshell, is the free software story of Trolltech, which produces the Qt toolkit underlying KDE.

Here's a fuller version:

When the K Desktop Environment was first announced in October 1996, it was not greeted with the universal approval that its creator, Matthias Ettrich, had hoped for. Alongside traditionalists who thought that any kind of graphical user interface was “too Windows-like” or just downright “sissy”, there was a deeper concern over the licensing of the underlying toolkit, Trolltech's Qt, which was free as in beer to hackers, but not free as in freedom. As Ettrich told me in 2000:

Everybody joining looked at alternatives [to Qt], and we had a long discussion: Shall we go with Qt? And the result was [we decided] it's the best technical solution if we want to reach the goal that we have.

Since Trolltech refused to adopt the GNU GPL for Qt (at that point: it did later), and since the KDE project refused to drop Qt, many hackers decided that they had to start a rival desktop project that would be truly free. One of the people thinking along these lines was Miguel de Icaza, who ended up leading a global team to create a desktop environment – although that was hardly his original intention:

Initially we were hoping that the existence of the project would make [Trolltech] change their minds, but they didn't. So we just kept working and working until we actually had something to use.

That “something to use” grew into GNOME, a rich, full-featured desktop environment, just as KDE had done, until the free software world found itself with the luxury – some would say liability – of two approaches.

Now it seems that the trolls have really done good:

Trolltech ASA is licensing its Qt cross-platform development framework under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3), with immediate effect.

Qt is already available under the GPL v2 and will continue to be so in addition to the GPL v3.

The GPL v3 license will make it easy and safe for free software developers to use Trolltech’s Qt with the most recent license framework from the Free Software Foundation. Trolltech hopes that its move will inspire free software projects to use GPL v3 when programming with Qt.

The move to GPL v3 licensing reinforces Trolltech’s strong tradition of giving developers the liberty to create and share software in accordance with the “four freedoms” defined by the Free Software Foundation.

"We decided to add GPL v3 licensing after consulting with both KDE e.V. and the Free Software Foundation," explained Eirik Chambe-Eng, co-founder of Trolltech. "I first read the GNU Manifesto from the Free Software Foundation back in 1987 and it forever shaped the way I viewed software. We at Trolltech are proud to continue serving the free software community by allowing software developers to choose which GPL version they want to use."

"I am very pleased that Trolltech has decided to make Qt available under GPL v3," commented Richard Stallman, author of the GPL and president of The Free Software Foundation. "This will allow parts of KDE to adopt GPL v3, too. Even better, Trolltech has made provisions for a smooth migration to future GPL versions if it approves of them."

What a turnaround. (Via Elkosmas.gr.)