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

lines of code-and to its heritage. Developed as a proprietary offshoot of Mosaic, the web browser created by Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois, Mozilla was proof, yet again, that when it came to building new programs, most programmers preferred to borrow on older, modifiable programs.

 

While in California, Raymond also managed to squeeze in a visit to VA Research, a Santa Clara-based company selling workstations with the GNU/Linux operating system preinstalled. Convened by Raymond, the meeting was small. The invite list included VA founder Larry Augustin, a few VA employees, and Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute, a Silicon Valley think tank specializing in nanotechnology.

 

“The meeting’s agenda boiled down to one item: how to take advantage of Netscape’s decision so that other companies might follow suit?” Raymond doesn’t recall the conversation that took place, but he does remember the first complaint addressed. Despite the best efforts of Stallman and other hackers to remind people that the word “free” in free software stood for freedom and not price, the message still wasn’t getting through. Most business executives, upon hearing the term for the first time, interpreted the word as synonymous with “zero cost,” tuning out any follow up messages in short order. Until hackers found a way to get past this cognitive dissonance, the free software movement faced an uphill climb, even after Netscape.

 

Peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free software cause, offered an alternative: open source.

 

Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the open source term while discussing Netscape’s decision with a friend in the public relations industry. She doesn’t remember where she came upon the term or if she borrowed it from another field, but she does remember her friend disliking the term.5

 

At the meeting, Peterson says, the response was dramatically different. “I was hesitant about suggesting it,” Peterson recalls. “I had no standing with the group, so started using it casually, not highlighting it as a new term.” To Peterson’s surprise, the term caught on. By the end of the meeting, most of the attendees, including Raymond, seemed pleased by it.

 

Raymond says he didn’t publicly use the term “open source” as a substitute for free software until a day or two after the Mozilla launch party, when O’Reilly had scheduled a meeting to talk about free software.

Calling his meeting “the Freeware Summit,” O’Reilly says he wanted to direct media and community attention to the other deserving projects that had also encouraged Netscape to release Mozilla. “All these guys had so much in common, and I was surprised they didn’t all know each other,” says O’Reilly. “I also wanted to let the world know just how great an impact the free software culture had already made. People were missing out on a large part of the free software tradition.”

 

In putting together the invite list, however, O’Reilly made a decision that would have long-term political consequences. He decided to limit the list to west-coast developers such as Wall, Eric Allman, creator of sendmail, and Paul Vixie, creator of BIND.

There were exceptions, of course: Pennsylvania-resident Raymond, who was already in town thanks to the Mozilla launch, earned a quick invite. So did Virginia-resident Guido van Rossum, creator of Python. “Frank Willison, my editor in chief and champion of Python within the company, invited him without first checking in with me,” O’Reilly recalls. “I was happy to have him there, but when I started, it really was just a local gathering.”

 

For some observers, the unwillingness to include Stallman’s name on the list qualified as a snub. “I decided not to go to the event because of it,” says Perens, remembering the summit. Raymond, who did go, says he argued for Stallman’s inclusion to no avail.

The snub rumor gained additional strength from the fact that O’Reilly, the event’s host, had feuded publicly with Stallman over the issue of software-manual copyrights. Prior to the meeting, Stallman had argued that free software manuals should be as freely copyable and modifiable as free software programs. O’Reilly, meanwhile, argued that a value-added market for nonfree books increased the utility of free software by making it more accessible to a wider community. The two had also disputed the title of the event, with Stallman insisting on “Free Software” over the less politically laden “Freeware.”

 

Looking back, O’Reilly doesn’t see the decision to leave Stallman’s name off the invite list as a snub.

“At that time, I had never met Richard in person, but in our email interactions, he’d been inflexible and unwilling to engage in dialogue. I wanted to make sure the GNU tradition was represented at the meeting, so I invited John Gilmore and Michael Tiemann, whom I knew personally, and whom I knew were passionate about the value of the GPL but seemed more willing to engage in a frank back-and-forth about the strengths and weaknesses of the various free software projects and traditions.

Given all the later brouhaha, I do wish I’d invited Richard as well, but I certainly don’t think that my failure to do so should be interpreted as a lack of respect for the GNU Project or for Richard personally.”

 

Snub or no snub, both O’Reilly and Raymond say the term “open source” won over just enough summit-goers to qualify as a success. The attendees shared ideas and experiences and brainstormed on how to improve free software’s image. Of key concern was how to point out the successes of free software, particularly in the realm of Internet infrastructure, as opposed to playing up the GNU/Linux challenge to Microsoft Windows. But like the earlier meeting at VA, the discussion soon turned to the problems associated with the term “free software.” O’Reilly, the summit host, remembers a particularly insightful comment from Torvalds, a summit attendee.

 

“Linus had just moved to Silicon Valley at that point, and he explained how only recently that he had learned that the word `free’ had two meanings-free as in `libre’ and free as in `gratis’-in English.”

 

Michael Tiemann, founder of Cygnus, proposed an alternative to the troublesome “free software” term: sourceware. “Nobody got too excited about it,” O’Reilly recalls. “That’s when Eric threw out the term `open source.’”

 

Although the term appealed to some, support for a change in official terminology was far from unanimous.

At the end of the one-day conference, attendees put the three terms-free software, open source, or sourceware-to a vote. According to O’Reilly, 9 out of the 15 attendees voted for “open source.” Although some still quibbled with the term, all attendees agreed to use it in future discussions with the press. “We wanted to go out with a solidarity message,” O’Reilly says.

 

The term didn’t take long to enter the national lexicon. Shortly after the summit, O’Reilly shepherded summit attendees to a press conference attended by reporters from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other prominent publications. Within a few months, Torvalds’ face was appearing on the cover of Forbes magazine, with the faces of Stallman, Perl creator Larry Wall, and Apache team leader Brian Behlendorf featured in the interior spread. Open source was open for business.

 

For summit attendees such as Tiemann, the solidarity message was the most important thing. Although his company had achieved a fair amount of success selling free software tools and services, he sensed the difficulty other programmers and entrepreneurs faced.

 

“There’s no question that the use of the word free was confusing in a lot of situations,” Tiemann says. “Open source positioned itself as being business friendly and business sensible. Free software positioned itself as morally righteous. For better or worse we figured it was more advantageous to align with the open source crowd.

 

For Stallman, the response to the new “open source”

term was slow in coming. Raymond says Stallman briefly considered adopting the term, only to discard it. “I know because I had direct personal conversations about it,” Raymond says.

 

By the end of 1998, Stallman had formulated a position: open source, while helpful in communicating the technical advantages of free software, also encouraged speakers to soft-pedal the issue of software freedom.

Given this drawback, Stallman would stick with the term free software.

 

Summing up his position at the 1999 LinuxWorld Convention and Expo, an event billed by Torvalds himself as a “coming out party” for the Linux community, Stallman implored his fellow hackers to resist the lure of easy compromise.

 

“Because we’ve shown how much we can do, we don’t have to be desperate to work with companies or compromise our goals,” Stallman said during a panel discussion.

“Let them offer and we’ll accept. We don’t have to change what we’re doing to get them to help us. You can take a single step towards a goal, then another and then more and more and you’ll actually reach your goal.

Or, you can take a half measure that means you don’t ever take another step and you’ll never get there.”

 

Even before the LinuxWorld show, however, Stallman was showing an increased willingness to alienate his more conciliatory peers. A few months after the Freeware Summit, O’Reilly hosted its second annual Perl Conference. This time around, Stallman was in attendance. During a panel discussion lauding IBM’s decision to employ the free software Apache web server in its commercial offerings, Stallman, taking advantage of an audience microphone, disrupted the proceedings with a tirade against panelist John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language. Stallman branded Ousterhout a “parasite” on the free software community for marketing a proprietary version of Tcl via Ousterhout’s startup company, Scriptics. “I don’t think Scriptics is necessary for the continued existence of Tcl,” Stallman said to hisses from the fellow audience members.See Malcolm Maclachlan, “Profit Motive Splits Open

Source Movement,” TechWeb News (August 26, 1998).

http://content.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980824S0012

 

“It was a pretty ugly scene,” recalls Prime Time Freeware’s Rich Morin. “John’s done some pretty respectable things: Tcl, Tk, Sprite. He’s a real contributor.”

 

Despite his sympathies for Stallman and Stallman’s position, Morin felt empathy for those troubled by Stallman’s discordant behavior.

 

Stallman’s Perl Conference outburst would momentarily chase off another potential sympathizer, Bruce Perens.

In 1998, Eric Raymond proposed launching the Open Source Initiative, or OSI, an organization that would police the use of the term “open source” and provide a definition for companies interested in making their own programs. Raymond recruited Perens to draft the definition.See Bruce Perens et al., “The Open Source Definition,”

The Open Source Initiative (1998).

http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html Perens would later resign from the OSI, expressing regret that the organization had set itself up in opposition to Stallman and the FSF. Still, looking back on the need for a free software definition outside the Free Software Foundation’s auspices, Perens understands why other hackers might still feel the need for distance. “I really like and admire Richard,” says Perens. “I do think Richard would do his job better if Richard had more balance. That includes going away from free software for a couple of months.”

 

Stallman’s monomaniacal energies would do little to counteract the public-relations momentum of open source proponents. In August of 1998, when chip-maker Intel purchased a stake in GNU/Linux vendor Red Hat, an accompanying New York Times article described the company as the product of a movement “known alternatively as free software and open source.“See Amy Harmon, “For Sale: Free Operating System,” New

York Times (September 28, 1998).

 

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/biztech/articles/28linux.html Six months later, a John Markoff article on Apple Computer was proclaiming the company’s adoption of the “open source” Apache server in the article headline.See John Markoff, “Apple Adopts `Open Source’ for its

Server Computers,” New York Times (March 17, 1999).

 

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/17apple.html Such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies that actively embraced the “open source”

term. By August of 1999, Red Hat, a company that now eagerly billed itself