Linus on Linux, 22 - and 5 - Years Later

In case you weren't aware, Linus is on Google+. Here's a recent post:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is Apache the Most Important Open Source Project?

Back in the mists of time - I'm talking about 2000 here - when free software was still viewed by many as a rather exotic idea, I published a book detailing its history up to that point. Naturally, I wrote about Apache (the Web server, not the foundation) there, since even in those early days it was already the sectoral leader. As I pointed out:

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.

Righting Wrongs by Re-writing Ebooks

One key property of printed books is that it is very hard to modify them. Digital books, by contrast, are trivially easy to re-write - provided they are released under a licence that permits that.

One early enlightened example of a book that does allow such modification is Free as in Freedom, a biography of Richard Stallman that came out around the same time as Rebel Code.

Although Free as in Freedom was based on extensive interviews with him, Stallman was not entirely happy with certain aspects of it; he has therefore taken advantage of the GNU Free Documentation Licence it was published under in order to offer his own gloss on the text and facts [.pdf]:

I have aimed to make this edition combine the advantages of my knowledge and Williams’ interviews and outside viewpoint. The reader can judge to what extent I have achieved this.

I read the published text of the English edition for the first time in 2009 when I was asked to assist in making a French translation of Free as in Freedom. It called for more than small changes. Many facts needed correction, but deeper changes were also needed.

...


The first edition overdramatized many events by projecting spurious emotions into them.

However, as Stallman explains, making changes was a non-trivial task:

For all these reasons, many statements in the original edition were mistaken or incoherent. It was necessary to correct them, but not straightforward to do so with integrity short of a total rewrite, which was undesirable for other reasons. Using explicit notes for the corrections was suggested, but in most chapters the amount of change made explicit notes prohibitive. Some errors were too pervasive or too ingrained to be corrected by notes. Inline or footnotes for the rest would have overwhelmed the text in some places and made the text hard to read; footnotes would have been skipped by readers tired of looking down for them. I have therefore made corrections directly in the text.

This ability for subjects of books to offer comments on and corrections to the text is a fascinating new development made possible by digital books and liberal licences. It raises all sorts of questions of how best to offer this extra layer of information and comment, and what the ethical - and legal - issues are in terms of making sure that the reader knows who is claiming what.

With Free as in Freedom 2.0, Stallman is once again a blazing a new trail; it will be interesting to see who follows him, and how.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

(Finally) Meeting Mr. Open Source Business

The careers of few people have been so intertwined with the history of open source as that of Larry Augustin. He was even present when the term “open source” was coined, at a meeting at the offices of his GNU/Linux hardware company VA Linux, on 3 February 1998. Present were Eric Raymond, John “maddog” Hall, Sam Ockman (from the Silicon Valley Linux User Group) and Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute - and the person who actually came up with the name.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Move Commons: Moving Beyond Creative Commons

Talking of commons, I was reading David Bollier's Viral Spiral recently, probably the best book about the rise of the commons as a new force (and I want to emphasise that I am not at all bitter about the fact that he didn't mention Rebel Code once in his description of the early days of free software - nope, not bitter in the slightest.)

I bought a dead tree version, but it's freely available online under a CC licence (sadly not an option when Rebel Code came out...for the simple reason Creative Commons was being formulated at the same time I was writing it.) That's appropriate, since the book is largely about the evolution of the CC licences - and a fascinating tale it is, too.

One particularity of those licences is the way that they try to give users different flavours (in fact there were originally more than there are now - some were later dropped). In many ways the ability to specify exactly which freedoms you are passing on is the most revolutionary - and contentious - part of the CC project.

Against that background, I was therefore delighted to come across Move Commons (MC), "a simple tool for initiatives, collectives and NGOs to declare the core principles they are committed to." It works in almost the same way as the CC licences, allowing you to specify exactly what your "core principles" are:

MC helps these initiatives to declare the core principles they are committed to, allowing others to understand the initiative’s insight with the first glance. The idea is to choose the MC that fits your initiative, and place the generated logo (a combination of four icons) in your webpage.

Once done that, when the next websurfer reaches the initiative’s webpage, it’ll be very easy to understand your initiative’s approach and immediatly answer several questions (Is this a Non-Profit? Are they transparent? Can I use part of their content for my blog? How are they organized internally? Do they expand the Commons with their actions?), before even clicking here and there.

But not only that. By choosing your MC you are connecting with other collectives using MC. Thus, anyone can come to movecommons.org and search for “non-profits that are sharing their contents, and are interested in environmentalism and education“, and if your initative fits that description, it’d appear there. You can thus link with other similar initiatives, regardless of their geographical location. Besides, volunteers could easily find you when they are searching with initiatives like yours… independently of how much you have invested in marketing

The page of options gives an idea of how this works, complete with dinky little logos representing things like profit/non-profit and hierarchical/non-hierarchical.

It's a clever idea, although I'm not sure they've got the key categories worked out yet - for example, it's not clear what the "Reproducible" option really means in terms of content licensing. Still, it's great to see people building on the CC ideas, just as Creative Commons built on the GNU GPL's original breakthrough.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Richard Stallman: "I Wished I Had Killed Myself"

I received a review copy of Steven Levy's seminal book Hackers back in the 1980s, but never read it. I did, though, keep it, because it looked interesting and important. It came in very handy when I wrote Rebel Code, since in some sense my book is a continuation of Levy's story, and his meticulous work provided me with the context for everything that happened afterwards.

So I was naturally intrigued to read Levy's recent encounters with some of the key hackers he wrote about back then, in his new Wired article "Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists".

Sadly, it is rather disappointing, the meandering parts never quite adding up to any satisfactory whole (and the section on Gates seems overly complaisant.) But it's worth reading (a) for the photos of hackers as they were then, and (b) for the following revelatory confession of RMS:

In our original interview, Stallman said, “I’m the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don’t really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.” Now, meeting over Chinese food, he reaffirms this. “I have certainly wished I had killed myself when I was born,” he says. “In terms of effect on the world, it’s very good that I’ve lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn’t do it. But I sure wish I hadn’t had so much pain.”

This "pain" that Stallman says he has endured makes his decision to champion tirelessly freedom and free software for all these decades all the more remarkable - and our debt to him for doing so all the greater.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Light Blue Rebel Code

Cambridge University is celebrating its 800th anniversary in 2009. The official history tells the tale of the buildings; but what about the ideas?

Down through the years, Oxford has produced many powerful men and Cambridge many iconoclasts – scientists, philosophers and revolutionaries. The polarisation is by no means total: Oxford's alumni include the reformer John Wyclif and the father of economics Adam Smith, while ours include the Prime Minister Charles Grey, who abolished slavery and passed the Great Reform Bill. But we've long produced more of the rebels; way back in the Civil War, for example, we were parliamentarian while Oxford was royalist. Why should this be?

Read on for the rest of this splendidly iconoclastic history of Cambridge University by Ross Anderson, a man who managed a fair bit of iconoclasm in his undergraduate days, as I recall.... (Via John Naughton.)

Qt Goes LGLP: the Trolltech Saga Attains Closure

There are few commercial programs whose history is more intertwined with the rise of free software than Nokia's Qt toolkit, originally created by the Norwegian company Trolltech. As one of the company's founders, Haarvard Nord, told me nearly ten years ago, when I was writing Rebel Code, Qt began life as a purely proprietary product, but with a free version specifically aimed at free software programmers...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Linus Plays Prince of Persia - Again

Most people in the free software world know that before he wrote Linux, Linus was using the Minix operating system. To run it, he had to acquire his first "proper" PC - his main machine until then was the Sinclair QL (remember that?). As he told me a few years ago, the PC arrived early in 1991....

On Open Enterprise blog.

IBM's ex-Mr GNU/Linux Joins Obama Policy Group

Good news: Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the person who essentially steered IBM toward GNU/Linux - with huge knock-on effects - has joined one of that nice Mr Obama's policy groups:

Technology, Innovation & Government Reform

The Technology, Innovation & Government Reform Policy Working Group will help prepare the incoming Administration to implement the Innovation Agenda, which includes a range of proposals to create a 21st century government that is more open and effective; leverages technology to grow the economy, create jobs, and solve our country’s most pressing problems; respects the integrity of and renews our commitment to science; and catalyzes active citizenship and partnerships in shared governance with civil society institutions. The Working Group is organized into four sub-teams: (1) Innovation and Government, (2) Innovation and National Priorities, (3) Innovation and Science, and (4) Innovation and Civil Society.

As well as interviewing him for Rebel Code, where he graciously spent some time explaining things when he was a busy man, I also interviewed him for the Guardian. That piece provides a lot of hints at just how wide-ranging his interests are. (Via eightbar.)

Der Doppelgänger

Here's a typical Moody text I never wrote:

A brief explanation of what the free culture movement is and the various factors that led to its fighting to preserve the commons, including corporations and special interests trying to restrict the commons to protect their interests, the development of the open source community, technological developments, such as the Internet and digital copying of media, the developmentof web 2.0 and its philosophies, current state of copyright law and youth culture.

It's by one "David W. Moody, California State University, San Jose School of Library and Information Science." Sad, then, that he makes no mention of Rebel Code in his bibliography about openness, since it pre-dates by far other sources that he does mention. But I'm not bitter.

Much.

Du bleicher Geselle!

Come On, IBM, Pull Your Socks Up

On Open Enterprise blog.

Recursive Publics: Hardly a Two-Bit Idea

For some years I have contemplated – and even planned out in some detail - a kind of follow-up to Rebel Code, which would look at the ways the ideas underlying free software have radiated out ever wider, to open content, open access, open courseware, open science – well, if you're reading this blog, you can fill in the rest. Happily, I couldn't find a publisher willing to take this on, so I was spared all the effort (non-authors have no idea what an outrageous amount of work books entail).

Now someone else has gone ahead, done all that work, and written pretty much that book, albeit with a more scholarly, anthropological twist than I could aspire to. Moreover, in true open source fashion, its author, Christopher Kelty, has made it freely available, not only to read, but to hack. The following paragraph expresses the core idea of this (and my) book:

The significance of Free Software extends far beyond the arcane and detailed technical practices of software programmers and “geeks” (as I refer to them herein). Since about 1998, the practices and ideas of Free Software have extended into new realms of life and creativity: from software to music and film to science, engineering, and education; from national politics of intellectual property to global debates about civil society; from UNIX to Mac OS X and Windows; from medical records and databases to international disease monitoring and synthetic biology; from Open Source to open access. Free Software is no longer only about software—it exemplifies a more general reorientation of power and knowledge.

I've only speed-read it – it's a dense and rich book – but from what I've seen, I can heartily recommend it to anyone who finds some of the ideas on this blog vaguely amusing: it's the work of a kindred spirit. The only thing I wasn't so keen on was its title: “Two Bits” Now, call me parochial, but the only connotation of “two bits” for me is inferiority, as in a two-bit solution. A far better title, IMHO, would have been one of the cleverest concepts in the book: that of “recursive publics”:

Recursive publics are publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first place and which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals. In the cases explored herein, that specific infrastructure includes the creation of the Internet itself, as well as its associated tools and structures, such as Usenet, e-mail,the World Wide Web (www), UNIX and UNIX-derived operating systems, protocols, standards, and standards processes. For the last thirty years, the Internet has been the subject of a contest in which Free Software has been both a central combatant and an important architect.

By calling Free Software a recursive public, I am doing two things: first, I am drawing attention to the democratic and political significance of Free Software and the Internet; and second, I am suggesting that our current understanding (both academic and colloquial) of what counts as a self-governing public, or even as “the public,” is radically inadequate to understanding the contemporary reori entation of knowledge and power.

The arch-recursionist himself, RMS, would love that.

Patron Saint of Computing on Free Software

During the writing of Rebel Code I had the privilege of talking to nearly all of the world's top hackers. Among those, Donald Knuth is pretty much at the apex, certainly in the world of computer science.

His interviews are all-too rare these days, not least because he is racing against time to write as much of his magnum opus, The Art of Computer Programming, as he can. So I was pleased to come across this one, in which St Donald has these wise words to say on the subject of free software:

The success of open source code is perhaps the only thing in the computer field that hasn’t surprised me during the past several decades. But it still hasn’t reached its full potential; I believe that open-source programs will begin to be completely dominant as the economy moves more and more from products towards services, and as more and more volunteers arise to improve the code.

For example, open-source code can produce thousands of binaries, tuned perfectly to the configurations of individual users, whereas commercial software usually will exist in only a few versions. A generic binary executable file must include things like inefficient "sync" instructions that are totally inappropriate for many installations; such wastage goes away when the source code is highly configurable. This should be a huge win for open source.

(Via tuxmachines.org.)

Richard Stallman - The Santa of Software

Ha!

Stallman's Symbolic Victory

Slashdot points to an interesting list of first 100 registered domains. But I doubt whether even the most deep-dyed supporter of free software realises that it was the company behind the very first domain - Symbolics.com - that ultimately led to Richard Stallman to start his GNU project.

Symbolics was in competition with a company called LMI - Lisp Machine Incorporated - set up by a friend of Stallman. As its name implies, it was in the business of making computers running the Lisp programming language, as was Symbolics.

Unfortunately, Symbolics had most of the top LISP programmers, having recruited all Stallman's fellow hackers at MIT's AI Lab, and thereby destroying its community. All, that is, apart from Stallman, who set about single-handedly matching the work of Symbolics and its entire team of coders. This is what he told me for my book Rebel Code in 1999:

Looking back, Stallman says that this period beginning March 1982 saw "absolutely" the most intense coding he had ever done; it probably represents one of the most sustained bouts of one-person programming in history.

"In some ways it was very comfortable because I was doing almost nothing else," he says, "and I would go to sleep whenever I felt sleepy; when I woke up I would go back to coding; and when I felt sleepy again I'd go to sleep again. I had nothing like a daily schedule. I'd sleep probably for a few hours one and a half times a day, and it was wonderful; I felt more awake than I've ever felt. And I got a tremendous amount of work done [and] I did it tremendously efficiently." Although "it was exhilarating sometimes, sometimes it was terribly wearying. It was in some ways terribly lonesome, but I kept doing it [and] I wouldn't let anything stop me," he says."

His eventual failure to match Symbolics' work, which included a completely new system, proved a blessing disguise:

"I decided I didn't want to just continue punishing Symbolics forever. They destroyed my community; now I [wanted] to build something to replace it," he says. "I decided I would develop a free operating system, and in this way lay the foundation for a new community like the one that had been wiped out."

The rest, as they say, is history.

Thank You, FOSS

Via GigaOM, I came across a link to this love-letter to Facebook:

Thinking about it, I've rarely used a service that has brought me so much emotional satisfaction...connecting with good friends is a feel-good thing and it is this emotional value that makes Facebook hard to beat in terms of the gratification other services can provide. So much so, here I am even writing a thank you note to the service (I can't remember doing that for any service...I've written about how "cool" stuff is, or how useful some service might be...but "thank you"? Never).

Although I think that Facebook is interesting - but not unproblematic, especially its recent moves - I'd never see it in this light. But it set me wondering whether there was anything comparable for me - a place of digital belonging of the kind offered by Facebook. And I realised there was, but not one that was crystallised in a single service. Rather, I feel this same sense of "connecting with good friends" with respect to the much larger, and more diffuse free software community.

This isn't a new thing. Back in the early years of this century, when I was writing Rebel Code, I was astonished at how helpful everyone was that I spoke to in that world. That stood in stark contrast to the traditional computing milieu, where many was full of their own (false) self-importance, and rather too fixated on making lots of money.

It seems I'm not alone in this sense of hacker camaraderie:

The key thing here is that in all the details, spats, debates, differences in direction and nitty-gritty, it is easy to forget that the core ingredients in this community are enthusiastic, smart, decent people who volunteer their time and energy to make Open Source happen. As Open Source continues to explode, and as we continue to see such huge growth and success as it spreads across the world and into different industries, we all need to remember that the raw ingredients that make this happen are enthusiastic, smart, decent people, and I for one feel privileged to spend every day with these people.

To paraphrase W.H.Auden:

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, FOSS.

From Rebel Code to Codi Rebel

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for: Rebel Code....in Catalan:

Una història apassionant que ens explica com un grup d'inconformistes desafià les grans empreses i va produir una revolució inesperada en el món dels ordinadors. En 1991 un jove estudiant, Linus Torvalds, va comprar un ordinador personal i es va plantejar l'elaboració d'un nou programari. Tot va començar gairebé com un joc, com un hobby, però en pocs anys, i amb l'ajuda d'un grup d'amics i col·laboradors connectats a través de la xarxa, Torvalds desenvolupà un sistema operatiu que esdevingué un veritable repte per a Microsoft. El programari GNU/Linux és utilitzat avui per milions de persones. I la qüestió que més desassossec provoca entre els grans gegants de la informàtica és que el seu ús és lliure, no costa diners. En aquest relat ple d'anècdotes i d'històries reveladores, Glyn Moody exposa de manera clara i accessible com es va desenvolupar aquesta lluita entre David i Goliat protagonitzada per Linux, bo i situant-la en el context més ampli de la història del moviment en favor del programari lliure. Alhora mostra tot el que es pot aconseguir quan la creativitat i la cooperació intel·lectual es posen per damunt del simple benefici econòmic. Glyn Moody s'ha ocupat de Linux gairebé des del moment de la seua elaboració.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Update: A here's a word from the translators.

Catalonians of the World, Unite!

Good news: a Catalan translation of Rebel Code - Codi Rebel, no less - is hurtling towards a bookshop near you. Well, it is if you live in Catalonia. Here's the rousing peroration to keep you going until that happy day (probably a good few months off):

El GNU/Linux i els projectes de codi obert tracten del codi interior que està en les arrels de tot allò bo que tenim i que es rebel·la contra el pitjor que hi ha en nosaltres mateixos i que existirà mentre la humanitat perdure.

Brings tears to the eyes.