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

Salus’ email was conference committee member Eric S. Raymond. Although not the leader of a project or company like the various other members of the list, Raymond had built a tidy reputation within the hacker community as a major contributor to GNU Emacs and as editor of The New Hacker Dictionary, a book version of the hacking community’s decade-old Jargon File.

 

For Raymond, the 1996 conference was a welcome event.

Active in the GNU Project during the 1980s, Raymond had distanced himself from the project in 1992, citing, like many others before him, Stallman’s

“micromanagement” style. “Richard kicked up a fuss about my making unauthorized modifications when I was cleaning up the Emacs LISP libraries,” Raymond recalls.

“It frustrated me so much that I decided I didn’t want to work with him anymore.”

 

Despite the falling out, Raymond remained active in the free software community. So much so that when Salus suggested a conference pairing Stallman and Torvalds as keynote speakers, Raymond eagerly seconded the idea.

With Stallman representing the older, wiser contingent of ITS/Unix hackers and Torvalds representing the younger, more energetic crop of Linux hackers, the pairing indicated a symbolic show of unity that could only be beneficial, especially to ambitious younger (i.e., below 40) hackers such as Raymond. “I sort of had a foot in both camps,” Raymond says.

 

By the time of the conference, the tension between those two camps had become palpable. Both groups had one thing in common, though: the conference was their first chance to meet the Finnish wunderkind in the flesh. Surprisingly, Torvalds proved himself to be a charming, affable speaker. Possessing only a slight Swedish accent, Torvalds surprised audience members with his quick, self-effacing wit.Although Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his mother tongue

is Swedish. “The Rampantly Unofficial Linus FAQ” offers a brief explanation: Finland has a significant (about 6%) Swedish-speaking minority population. They call themselves “finlandssvensk” or “finlandssvenskar” and consider themselves Finns; many of their families have lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of Finland’s two official languages.

http://tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/linus/

Even more surprising, says Raymond, was Torvalds’

equal willingness to take potshots at other prominent hackers, including the most prominent hacker of all, Richard Stallman. By the end of the conference, Torvalds’ half-hacker, half-slacker manner was winning over older and younger conference-goers alike.

 

“It was a pivotal moment,” recalls Raymond. “Before 1996, Richard was the only credible claimant to being the ideological leader of the entire culture. People who dissented didn’t do so in public. The person who broke that taboo was Torvalds.”

 

The ultimate breach of taboo would come near the end of the show. During a discussion on the growing market dominance of Microsoft Windows or some similar topic, Torvalds admitted to being a fan of Microsoft’s PowerPoint slideshow software program. From the perspective of old-line software purists, it was like a Mormon bragging in church about his fondness of whiskey. From the perspective of Torvalds and his growing band of followers, it was simply common sense.

Why shun worthy proprietary software programs just to make a point? Being a hacker wasn’t about suffering, it was about getting the job done.

 

“That was a pretty shocking thing to say,” Raymond remembers. “Then again, he was able to do that, because by 1995 and 1996, he was rapidly acquiring clout.”

 

Stallman, for his part, doesn’t remember any tension at the 1996 conference, but he does remember later feeling the sting of Torvalds’ celebrated cheekiness. “There was a thing in the Linux documentation which says print out the GNU coding standards and then tear them up,”

says Stallman, recalling one example. “OK, so he disagrees with some of our conventions. That’s fine, but he picked a singularly nasty way of saying so. He could have just said `Here’s the way I think you should indent your code.’ Fine. There should be no hostility there.”

 

For Raymond, the warm reception other hackers gave to Torvalds’ comments merely confirmed his suspicions. The dividing line separating Linux developers from GNU/Linux developers was largely generational. Many Linux hackers, like Torvalds, had grown up in a world of proprietary software. Unless a program was clearly inferior, most saw little reason to rail against a program on licensing issues alone. Somewhere in the universe of free software systems lurked a program that hackers might someday turn into a free software alternative to PowerPoint. Until then, why begrudge Microsoft the initiative of developing the program and reserving the rights to it?

 

As a former GNU Project member, Raymond sensed an added dynamic to the tension between Stallman and Torvalds.

In the decade since launching the GNU Project, Stallman had built up a fearsome reputation as a programmer. He had also built up a reputation for intransigence both in terms of software design and people management.

Shortly before the 1996 conference, the Free Software Foundation would experience a full-scale staff defection, blamed in large part on Stallman. Brian Youmans, a current FSF staffer hired by Salus in the wake of the resignations, recalls the scene: “At one point, Peter [Salus] was the only staff member working in the office.”

 

For Raymond, the defection merely confirmed a growing suspicion: recent delays such as the HURD and recent troubles such as the Lucid-Emacs schism reflected problems normally associated with software project management, not software code development. Shortly after the Freely Redistributable Software Conference, Raymond began working on his own pet software project, a popmail utility called ” fetchmail.” Taking a cue from Torvalds, Raymond issued his program with a tacked-on promise to update the source code as early and as often as possible. When users began sending in bug reports and feature suggestions, Raymond, at first anticipating a tangled mess, found the resulting software surprisingly sturdy. Analyzing the success of the Torvalds approach, Raymond issued a quick analysis: using the Internet as his “petri dish” and the harsh scrutiny of the hacker community as a form of natural selection, Torvalds had created an evolutionary model free of central planning.

 

What’s more, Raymond decided, Torvalds had found a way around Brooks’ Law. First articulated by Fred P.

Brooks, manager of IBM’s OS/360 project and author of the 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month , Brooks’ Law held that adding developers to a project only resulted in further project delays. Believing as most hackers that software, like soup, benefits from a limited number of cooks, Raymond sensed something revolutionary at work. In inviting more and more cooks into the kitchen, Torvalds had actually found away to make the resulting software better.Brooks’ Law is the shorthand summary of the following quote taken from Brooks’ book: Since software construction is inherently a systems effort-an exercise in complex interrelationships-communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning.

Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule. See Fred P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison Wesley Publishing, 1995)

 

Raymond put his observations on paper. He crafted them into a speech, which he promptly delivered before a group of friends and neighbors in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Dubbed ” The Cathedral and the Bazaar,”

the speech contrasted the management styles of the GNU

Project with the management style of Torvalds and the kernel hackers. Raymond says the response was enthusiastic, but not nearly as enthusiastic as the one he received during the 1997 Linux Kongress, a gathering of Linux users in Germany the next spring.

 

“At the Kongress, they gave me a standing ovation at the end of the speech,” Raymond recalls. “I took that as significant for two reasons. For one thing, it meant they were excited by what they were hearing. For another thing, it meant they were excited even after hearing the speech delivered through a language barrier.”

 

Eventually, Raymond would convert the speech into a paper, also titled “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” The paper drew its name from Raymond’s central analogy. GNU

programs were “cathedrals,” impressive, centrally planned monuments to the hacker ethic, built to stand the test of time. Linux, on the other hand, was more like “a great babbling bazaar,” a software program developed through the loose decentralizing dynamics of the Internet.

 

Implicit within each analogy was a comparison of Stallman and Torvalds. Where Stallman served as the classic model of the cathedral architect-i.e., a programming “wizard” who could disappear for 18 months and return with something like the GNU C

Compiler-Torvalds was more like a genial dinner-party host. In letting others lead the Linux design discussion and stepping in only when the entire table needed a referee, Torvalds had created a development model very much reflective of his own laid-back personality. From the Torvalds’ perspective, the most important managerial task was not imposing control but keeping the ideas flowing.

 

Summarized Raymond, “I think Linus’s cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model.“See Eric Raymond, “The Cathredral and the Bazaar”

(1997).

 

In summarizing the secrets of Torvalds’ managerial success, Raymond himself had pulled off a coup. One of the audience members at the Linux Kongress was Tim O’Reilly, publisher of O’Reilly & Associates, a company specializing in software manuals and software-related books (and the publisher of this book). After hearing Raymond’s Kongress speech, O’Reilly promptly invited Raymond to deliver it again at the company’s inaugural Perl Conference later that year in Monterey, California.

 

Although the conference was supposed to focus on Perl, a scripting language created by Unix hacker Larry Wall, O’Reilly assured Raymond that the conference would address other free software technologies. Given the growing commercial interest in Linux and Apache, a popular free software web server, O’Reilly hoped to use the event to publicize the role of free software in creating the entire infrastructure of the Internet.

From web-friendly languages such as Perl and Python to back-room programs such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon), a software tool that lets users replace arcane IP numbers with the easy-to-remember domain-name addresses (e.g., amazon.com), and sendmail, the most popular mail program on the Internet, free software had become an emergent phenomenon. Like a colony of ants creating a beautiful nest one grain of sand at a time, the only thing missing was the communal self-awareness.

O’Reilly saw Raymond’s speech as a good way to inspire that self-awareness, to drive home the point that free software development didn’t start and end with the GNU

Project. Programming languages, such as Perl and Python, and Internet software, such as BIND, sendmail, and Apache, demonstrated that free software was already ubiquitous and influential. He also assured Raymond an even warmer reception than the one at Linux Kongress.

 

O’Reilly was right. “This time, I got the standing ovation before the speech,” says Raymond, laughing.

 

As predicted, the audience was stocked not only with hackers, but with other people interested in the growing power of the free software movement. One contingent included a group from Netscape, the Mountain View, California startup then nearing the end game of its three-year battle with Microsoft for control of the web-browser market.

 

Intrigued by Raymond’s speech and anxious to win back lost market share, Netscape executives took the message back to corporate headquarters. A few months later, in January, 1998, the company announced its plan to publish the source code of its flagship Navigator web browser in the hopes of enlisting hacker support in future development.

 

When Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond’s “Cathedral and the Bazaar” essay as a major influence upon the company’s decision, the company instantly elevated Raymond to the level of hacker celebrity.

Determined not to squander the opportunity, Raymond traveled west to deliver interviews, advise Netscape executives, and take part in the eventual party celebrating the publication of Netscape Navigator’s source code. The code name for Navigator’s source code was “Mozilla”: a reference both to the program’s gargantuan size-30 million