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.
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 Most of this is unpublished, and offers what I hope is some insights into the hacker culture at MIT, where Stallman was working.
Exactly 30 years ago, a hacker posted an unusual message to the net.unix-wizards newsgroup:
The idea of bringing in a unitary EU patent system has been rolling around Brussels so long most people have assumed it will never happen. But there is a clear push on at the moment to realise these plans once and for all. That's hinted at in this very low-key press release from yesterday [.pdf]:
In the 2005 "Grokster" decision, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that file sharing networks could be held liable for copyright infringement if they take "affirmative steps" to encourage infringement. Grokster closed down as a result, and the recording industry pretty much assumed it had won that battle
But as a fascinating analysis by Rebecca Giblin of what happened afterwards points out, against the industry's expectations, P2P filesharing flourished:
The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) was launched just over seven years ago:
May 24th 2004: The Open Knowledge Foundation was launched today with explicit objectives to promote the openness of all forms of knowledge where knowledge is taken to include information, data and all other synonymous terms. In particular
To promote freedom of access, creation and dissemination of knowledge.
To develop, support and promote projects, communities and tools that foster and facilitate the creation, access to and dissemination of knowledge.
To campaign against restrictions both legal and non-legal on the creation, access to and dissemination of knowledge.
On Open Enterprise blog.
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.
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Time magazine has one of those tiresome list thingies: "10 Ideas That Will Change the World" (pretentious, moi?). To its credit, it does correctly identify one of the key ideas that is already re-shaping our world:it's the young who are leading the way toward a different form of consumption, a collaborative consumption: renting, lending and even sharing goods instead of buying them. You can see it in the rise of big businesses like Netflix, whose more than 20 million subscribers pay a fee to essentially share DVDs, or Zipcar, which gives more than 500,000 members the chance to share cars part-time.
So, where do they think this all started?
Even as Bush was announcing its birth though, the ownership society was rotting from the inside out. Its demise began with Napster. The digitalization of music and the ability to share it made owning CDs superfluous. Then Napsterization spread to nearly all other media, and by 2008 the financial architecture that had been built to support all that ownership — the subprime mortgages and the credit-default swaps — had collapsed on top of us.
Well, Napster was an important moment when the idea of sharing spread to content, but it was definitely following in the footsteps of the Internet and free software, particularly the latter. When Napster arrived, RMS had been articulating the moral imperative to share for a decade and a half, and his followers had been doing it for nearly as long.
So although it's good to see the idea of sharing singled out in this way, it's sad to see poor old Richard Stallman and the free software crowd once more written out of history.
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A remarkable continuity underlies free software, going all the way back to Richard Stallman's first programs for his new GNU project. And yet within that continuity, there have been major shifts: are we due for another such leap?
On The H Open.
Last week I published a short correspondence I had with Richard Stallman on the subject of the GNU GPL and copyright. As I mentioned, that was from a couple of years ago, but I thought it might be worth posting now given the lively interest in the issues it raises.
On Open Enterprise.
A couple of days ago, I was writing about how Richard Stallman's GNU GPL uses copyright as a way of ensuring that licensees share code that they distribute – because if they don't, they are breaching the GPL, and therefore lose their protection against claims of copyright infringement.
On Open Enterprise blog.
As readers of this blog will doubtless know, Richard Stallman's great stroke of genius at the founding of the GNU project was to use copyright when crafting the GNU GPL licence, but in such a way that it undermined the restrictive monopoly copyright usually imposes on users, and required people to share instead.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Free software began as a political movement: its central aim was – and remains – the propagation of freedom. Later, it became a development methodology too, largely at the hands of Linus, whose geographical isolation in Finland forced him to develop ways of using the Internet to coordinate a new kind of massive, but decentralised, global collaboration. Later still, free software also became a way of making serious money – something that Stallman has repeatedly said he is quite happy with, contrary to much FUD claiming otherwise.
On The H Open.
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.
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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.
What was Richard Stallman's greatest achievement? Some might say it's Emacs, one of the most powerful and adaptable pieces of software ever written. Others might plump for gcc, an indispensable tool used by probably millions of hackers to write yet more free software. And then there is the entire GNU project, astonishing in its ambition to create a Unix-like operating system from scratch. But for me, his single most important hack was the creation of the GNU General Public Licence....
On Linux Journal.
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It's easy to focus on the dramatic bad news - like the OOXML shenanigans - and overlook the quiet success stories. Like the announcement that the Presidente of Ecuador, Rafael Correa Delgado, has just signed a decree making the use of open source the default policy for government:El Presidente de la República, Rafael Correa, mediante decreto No. 1014 de 10 de abril del 2008, establece como política pública para las entidades de la administración pública central la utilización de Software Libre en sus sistemas y equipamientos informáticos.
[Via Google Translate:
The President of the Republic, Rafael Correa, by decree no. 1014 of April 10, 2008, establishes as public policy for institutions of the central administration, the use of free software in their computer systems and equipment.]
There are just three situations in which it is permissible to use proprietary software:
Además el decreto faculta la utilización de software propietario (no Libre), únicamente cuando no exista una solución de Software Libre que supla las necesidades requeridas, o cuando esté en riesgo la seguridad nacional, o cuando el proyecto informático se encuentre en un punto de no retorno.
[In addition, the decree authorizes the use of proprietary software (Free), only when there is no solution to free software to fill the needs required, or when national security at risk, or when the computer project is at a point of no return.]
It's not every day you see Stallman's "Four Freedoms" included in a presidential decree:Se conoce como Software Libre a los programas de computación que se pueden utilizar y distribuir sin restricción alguna y que permiten su acceso a los códigos y fuentes y que sus aplicaciones pueden ser mejoradas.
Los programas de computación incluyen las siguientes libertades; utilización del programa con cualquier propósito de uso común; distribución de copias sin restricción alguna; estudio y modificación del programa (requisito: código fuente disponible); y publicación del programa mejorado (requisito; código fuente disponible).
[It is known as Free Software to software that can be used and distributed without any restrictions and allowing her access to the codes and sources and their applications can be improved.
The software includes the following freedoms; use the software for any purpose in common use; distributing copies without restriction; study and modification of the program (requirement: source available), and publication of the enhanced programme (requirement; source available ).]
(Via Esteban Mendieta Jara.)
No good deed goes unpunished, they say.
A year ago, I wrote the following about the Open Source Jahrbuch series:All-in-all, I'd go so far as to say that this is the best book on open source that has been published in the few years or so. Taken together, the whole series of Yearbooks form perhaps the most important collection of writings on open source and related areas to be found in any language.
As a result of those rash words, I was asked whether I'd like to contribute to this year's tome, which, as ever, is freely available as a download. If you want to practise your German, my 'umble effort is on page 299 (they obviously believe in saving the best for last....)
It begins thus:Stallman's Golden Rule and the Digital Commons
In the wake of the high-profile successes of free software, the related movements of open access, open data, open content and the rest are starting to impinge on the public's consciousness. But when they do, they are generally seen as simple applications of the ideas behind free software – in other words, as imitations, albeit interesting ones. This misses the bigger picture: that, together, the combined results of their efforts form a vast and unprecedented digital commons of knowledge. The main obstacles to expanding that commons yet further are now legal, rather than technical. They are the result of political lobbying by content industries that have failed to adapt their thinking to a digital, rather than an analogue, world. The emerging viability of open source companies, which share their software freely with customers, points the way to new kinds of business models based on embracing rather than enclosing the commons.
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.)
Someone at Microsoft has a sense of humour:Developers are puzzling over recent clues blogged by a few Microsoft employees regarding a new “Emacs.Net” tool the company is building.
Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division (the folks who developed the Windows Communication Framework, a k a “Indigo”) is hiring developers to build a product that team member Doug Purdy described as “Emacs.Net.” Purdy hinted that Microsoft will divulge its Emacs.Net product/strategy plans at the company’s Professional Developers Conference in late October 2008.
Emacs is a text editor used primarily by the Unix community (though versions of Emacs that work on Windows systems already exist). Richard Stallman is credited as the father of Emacs, the name of which was derived from “Editing MACRoS.”
Er, Richard, why is there smoke coming out of your ears?
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