Free as in Freedom - Sam Williams (read this if .TXT) 📗

Project’s next major milestone, a source-code debugger, and was looking for ways to revamp the Emacs license so that it might apply to both programs. Stallman’s solution: remove all specific references to Emacs and convert the license into a generic copyright umbrella for GNU Project software. The GNU General Public License, GPL for short, was born.

In fashioning the GPL, Stallman followed the software convention of using decimal numbers to indicate prototype versions and whole numbers to indicate mature versions. Stallman published Version 1.0 of the GPL in 1989 (a project Stallman was developing in 1985), almost a full year after the release of the GNU

Debugger, Stallman’s second major foray into the realm of Unix programming. The license contained a preamble spelling out its political intentions:

The General Public License is designed to make sure that you have the freedom to give away or sell copies of free software, that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.See Richard Stallman, et al., “GNU General Public

License: Version 1,” (February, 1989).

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copying-1.0.html In fashioning the GPL, Stallman had been forced to make an additional adjustment to the informal tenets of the old Emacs Commune. Where he had once demanded that Commune members publish any and all changes, Stallman now demanded publication only in instances when programmers circulated their derivative versions in the same public manner as Stallman. In other words, programmers who simply modified Emacs for private use no longer needed to send the source-code changes back to Stallman. In what would become a rare compromise of free software doctrine, Stallman slashed the price tag for free software. Users could innovate without Stallman looking over their shoulders just so long as they didn’t bar Stallman and the rest of the hacker community from future exchanges of the same program.

Looking back, Stallman says the GPL compromise was fueled by his own dissatisfaction with the Big Brother aspect of the original Emacs Commune social contract.

As much as he liked peering into other hackers’

systems, the knowledge that some future source-code maintainer might use that power to ill effect forced him to temper the GPL.

“It was wrong to require people to publish all changes,” says Stallman. “It was wrong to require them to be sent to one privileged developer. That kind of centralization and privilege for one was not consistent with a society in which all had equal rights.”

As hacks go, the GPL stands as one of Stallman’s best.

It created a system of communal ownership within the normally proprietary confines of copyright law. More importantly, it demonstrated the intellectual similarity between legal code and software code.

Implicit within the GPL’s preamble was a profound message: instead of viewing copyright law with suspicion, hackers should view it as yet another system begging to be hacked.

“The GPL developed much like any piece of free software with a large community discussing its structure, its respect or the opposite in their observation, needs for tweaking and even to compromise it mildly for greater acceptance,” says Jerry Cohen, another attorney who helped Stallman with the creation of the license. “The process worked very well and GPL in its several versions has gone from widespread skeptical and at times hostile response to widespread acceptance.”

In a 1986 interview with Byte magazine, Stallman summed up the GPL in colorful terms. In addition to proclaiming hacker values, Stallman said, readers should also “see it as a form of intellectual jujitsu, using the legal system that software hoarders have set up against them.“See David Betz and Jon Edwards, “Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain [sic] Unix-compatible software system with BYTE editors,” BYTE (July, 1996).

(Reprinted on the GNU Project web site:

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html.) This interview offers an interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at Stallman’s political attitudes during the earliest days of the GNU Project. It is also helpful in tracing the evolution of Stallman’s rhetoric.

Describing the purpose of the GPL, Stallman says, “I’m trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage.” Contrast this with a statement to the author in August 2000: “I urge you not to use the term `intellectual property’ in your thinking. It will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks.

And those things are so different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about them at once. If you hear somebody saying something about intellectual property, without quotes, then he’s not thinking very clearly and you shouldn’t join.”

Years later, Stallman would describe the GPL’s creation in less hostile terms. “I was thinking about issues that were in a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal,” he says. “I had to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system that we’re in. In spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for a new society, but since I wasn’t a government, I couldn’t actually change any laws. I had to try to do this by building on top of the existing legal system, which had not been designed for anything like this.”

About the time Stallman was pondering the ethical, political, and legal issues associated with free software, a California hacker named Don Hopkins mailed him a manual for the 68000 microprocessor. Hopkins, a Unix hacker and fellow science-fiction buff, had borrowed the manual from Stallman a while earlier. As a display of gratitude, Hopkins decorated the return envelope with a number of stickers obtained at a local science-fiction convention. One sticker in particular caught Stallman’s eye. It read, “Copyleft (L), All Rights Reversed.” Following the release of the first version of GPL, Stallman paid tribute to the sticker, nicknaming the free software license “Copyleft.” Over time, the nickname and its shorthand symbol, a backwards “C,” would become an official Free Software Foundation synonym for the GPL.

The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all great religions are built upon the “routinization” or “institutionalization” of charisma. Every successful religion, Weber argued, converts the charisma or message of the original religious leader into a social, political, and ethical apparatus more easily translatable across cultures and time.

While not religious per se, the GNU GPL certainly qualifies as an interesting example of this “routinization” process at work in the modern, decentralized world of software development. Since its unveiling, programmers and companies who have otherwise expressed little loyalty or allegiance to Stallman have willingly accepted the GPL bargain at face value. A few have even accepted the GPL as a preemptive protective mechanism for their own software programs. Even those who reject the GPL contract as too compulsory, still credit it as influential.

One hacker falling into this latter group was Keith Bostic, a University of California employee at the time of the GPL 1.0 release. Bostic’s department, the Computer Systems Research Group (SRG), had been involved in Unix development since the late 1970s and was responsible for many key parts of Unix, including the TCP/IP networking protocol, the cornerstone of modern Internet communications. By the late 1980s, AT&T, the original owner of the Unix brand name, began to focus on commercializing Unix and began looking to the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, the academic version of Unix developed by Bostic and his Berkeley peers, as a key source of commercial technology.

Although the Berkeley BSD source code was shared among researchers and commercial programmers with a source-code license, this commercialization presented a problem. The Berkeley code was intermixed with proprietary AT&T code. As a result, Berkeley distributions were available only to institutions that already had a Unix source license from AT&T. As AT&T

raised its license fees, this arrangement, which had at first seemed innocuous, became increasingly burdensome.

Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project of porting BSD over to the Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-11 computer. It was during this period, Bostic says, that he came into close interaction with Stallman during Stallman’s occasional forays out to the west coast. “I remember vividly arguing copyright with Stallman while he sat at borrowed workstations at CSRG,” says Bostic. “We’d go to dinner afterward and continue arguing about copyright over dinner.”

The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have liked. In June, 1989, Berkeley separated its networking code from the rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and distributed it under a University of California license. The contract terms were liberal. All a licensee had to do was give credit to the university in advertisements touting derivative programs.The University of California’s “obnoxious advertising

clause” would later prove to be a problem. Looking for a less restrictive alternative to the GPL, some hackers used the University of California, replacing “University of California” with the name of their own instution. The result: free software programs that borrowed from dozens of other programs would have to cite dozens of institutions in advertisements. In 1999, after a decade of lobbying on Stallman’s part, the University of California agreed to drop this clause.

In contrast to the GPL, proprietary offshoots were permissible. Only one problem hampered the license’s rapid adoption: the BSD Networking release wasn’t a complete operating system. People could study the code, but it could only be run in conjunction with other proprietary-licensed code.

Over the next few years, Bostic and other University of California employees worked to replace the missing components and turn BSD into a complete, freely redistributable operating system. Although delayed by a legal challenge from Unix Systems Laboratories-the AT&T

spin-off that retained ownership of the Unix brand name-the effort would finally bear fruit in the early 1990s. Even before then, however, many of the Berkeley utilities would make their way into Stallman’s GNU Project.

“I think it’s highly unlikely that we ever would have gone as strongly as we did without the GNU influence,”

says Bostic, looking back. “It was clearly something where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea.”

By the end of the 1980s, the GPL was beginning to exert a gravitational effect on the free software community.

A program didn’t have to carry the GPL to qualify as free software-witness the case of the BSD utilities-but putting a program under the GPL sent a definite message. “I think the very existence of the GPL

inspired people to think through whether they were making free software, and how they would license it,”

says Bruce Perens, creator of Electric Fence, a popular Unix utility, and future leader of the Debian GNU/Linux development team. A few years after the release of the GPL, Perens says he decided to discard Electric Fence’s homegrown license in favor of Stallman’s lawyer-vetted copyright. “It was actually pretty easy to do,” Perens recalls.

Rich Morin, the programmer who had viewed Stallman’s initial GNU announcement with a degree of skepticism, recalls being impressed by the software that began to gather under the GPL umbrella. As the leader of a SunOS

user group, one of Morin’s primary duties during the 1980s had been to send out distribution tapes containing the best freeware or free software utilities. The job often mandated calling up original program authors to verify whether their programs were copyright protected