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the steering wheel and pulling himself towards it twice.

The image of Stallmanā€™s lurching frame is like that of a child throwing a temper tantrum in a car seat, an image further underlined by the tone of Stallmanā€™s voice. Halfway between anger and anguish, Stallman seems to be on the verge of tears.

 

Fortunately, the tears do not arrive. Like a summer cloudburst, the tantrum ends almost as soon as it begins. After a few whiny gasps, Stallman shifts the car into reverse and begins executing his own U-turn.

By the time we are back on the main drag, his face is as impassive as it was when we left the hotel 30

minutes earlier.

 

It takes less than five minutes to reach the next cross-street. This one offers easy highway access, and within seconds, we are soon speeding off toward Paā€™ia at a relaxing rate of speed. The sun that once loomed bright and yellow over Stallmanā€™s left shoulder is now burning a cool orange-red in our rearview mirror. It lends its color to the gauntlet wili wili trees flying past us on both sides of the highway.

 

For the next 20 minutes, the only sound in our vehicle, aside from the ambient hum of the carā€™s engine and tires, is the sound of a cello and a violin trio playing the mournful strains of an Appalachian folk tune. Endnote

 

Continuing the Fight

 

For Richard Stallman, time may not heal all wounds, but it does provide a convenient ally.

 

Four years after ā€ The Cathedral and the Bazaar,ā€

Stallman still chafes over the Raymond critique. He also grumbles over Linus Torvaldsā€™ elevation to the role of worldā€™s most famous hacker. He recalls a popular T-shirt that began showing at Linux tradeshows around 1999. Designed to mimic the original promotional poster for Star Wars, the shirt depicted Torvalds brandishing a lightsaber like Luke Skywalker, while Stallmanā€™s face rides atop R2D2. The shirt still grates on Stallmans nerves not only because it depicts him as a Torvaldsā€™ sidekick, but also because it elevates Torvalds to the leadership role in the free software/open source community, a role even Torvalds himself is loath to accept. ā€œItā€™s ironic,ā€ says Stallman mournfully. ā€œPicking up that sword is exactly what Linus refuses to do. He gets everybody focusing on him as the symbol of the movement, and then he wonā€™t fight. What good is it?ā€

 

Then again, it is that same unwillingness to ā€œpick up the sword,ā€ on Torvalds part, that has left the door open for Stallman to bolster his reputation as the hacker communityā€™s ethical arbiter. Despite his grievances, Stallman has to admit that the last few years have been quite good, both to himself and to his organization. Relegated to the periphery by the unforeseen success of GNU/Linux, Stallman has nonetheless successfully recaptured the initiative. His speaking schedule between January 2000 and December 2001 included stops on six continents and visits to countries where the notion of software freedom carries heavy overtones-China and India, for example.

 

Outside the bully pulpit, Stallman has also learned how to leverage his power as costeward of the GNU General Public License (GPL). During the summer of 2000, while the air was rapidly leaking out of the 1999 Linux IPO

bubble, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation scored two major victories. In July, 2000, Troll Tech, a Norwegian software company and developer of Qt, a valuable suite of graphics tools for the GNU/Linux operating system, announced it was licensing its software under the GPL. A few weeks later, Sun Microsystems, a company that, until then, had been warily trying to ride the open source bandwagon without giving up total control of its software properties, finally relented and announced that it, too, was dual licensing its new OpenOffice application suite under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL).

 

Underlining each victory was the fact that Stallman had done little to fight for them. In the case of Troll Tech, Stallman had simply played the role of free software pontiff. In 1999, the company had come up with a license that met the conditions laid out by the Free Software Foundation, but in examining the license further, Stallman detected legal incompatibles that would make it impossible to bundle Qt with GPL-protected software programs. Tired of battling Stallman, Troll Tech management finally decided to split the Qt into two versions, one GPL-protected and one QPL-protected, giving developers a way around the compatibility issues cited by Stallman.

 

In the case of Sun, they desired to play according to the Free Software Foundationā€™s conditions. At the 1999

Oā€™Reilly Open Source Conference, Sun Microsystems cofounder and chief scientist Bill Joy defended his companyā€™s ā€œcommunity sourceā€ license, essentially a watered-down compromise letting users copy and modify Sun-owned software but not charge a fee for said software without negotiating a royalty agreement with Sun. A year after Joyā€™s speech, Sun Microsystems vice president Marco Boerries was appearing on the same stage spelling out the companyā€™s new licensing compromise in the case of OpenOffice, an

office-application suite designed specifically for the GNU/Linux operating system.

 

ā€œI can spell it out in three letters,ā€ said Boerries. ā€œGPL.ā€

 

At the time, Boerries said his companyā€™s decision had little to do with Stallman and more to do with the momentum of GPL-protected programs. ā€œWhat basically happened was the recognition that different products attracted different communities, and the license you use depends on what type of community you want to attract,ā€ said Boerries. ā€œWith [OpenOffice], it was clear we had the highest correlation with the GPL community.ā€œSee Marco Boerries, interview with author (July, 2000).

 

Such comments point out the under-recognized strength of the GPL and, indirectly, the political genius of man who played the largest role in creating it. ā€œThere isnā€™t a lawyer on earth who would have drafted the GPL

the way it is,ā€ says Eben Moglen, Columbia University law professor and Free Software Foundation general counsel. ā€œBut it works. And it works because of Richardā€™s philosophy of design.ā€

 

A former professional programmer, Moglen traces his pro bono work with Stallman back to 1990 when Stallman requested Moglenā€™s legal assistance on a private affair. Moglen, then working with encryption expert Phillip Zimmerman during Zimmermanā€™s legal battles with the National Security Administration, says he was honored by the request. ā€œI told him I used Emacs every day of my life, and it would take an awful lot of lawyering on my part to pay off the debt.ā€

 

Since then, Moglen, perhaps more than any other individual, has had the best chance to observe the crossover of Stallmanā€™s hacker philosophies into the legal realm. Moglen says the difference between Stallmanā€™s approach to legal code and software code are largely the same. ā€œI have to say, as a lawyer, the idea that what you should do with a legal document is to take out all the bugs doesnā€™t make much sense,ā€ Moglen says. ā€œThere is uncertainty in every legal process, and what most lawyers want to do is to capture the benefits of uncertainty for their client. Richardā€™s goal is the complete opposite. His goal is to remove uncertainty, which is inherently impossible. It is inherently impossible to draft one license to control all circumstances in all legal systems all over the world.

But if you were to go at it, you would have to go at it his way. And the resulting elegance, the resulting simplicity in design almost achieves what it has to achieve. And from there a little lawyering will carry you quite far.ā€

 

As the person charged with pushing the Stallman agenda, Moglen understands the frustration of would-be allies.

ā€œRichard is a man who does not want to compromise over matters that he thinks of as fundamental,ā€ Moglen says, ā€œand he does not take easily the twisting of words or even just the seeking of artful ambiguity, which human society often requires from a lot of people.ā€

 

Because of the Free Software Foundationā€™s unwillingness to weigh in on issues outside the purview of GNU

development and GPL enforcement, Moglen has taken to devoting his excess energies to assisting the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the organization providing legal aid to recent copyright defendants such as Dmitri Skylarov. In 2000, Moglen also served as direct counsel to a collection of hackers that were joined together from circulating the DVD decryption program deCSS. Despite the silence of his main client in both cases, Moglen has learned to appreciate the value of Stallmanā€™s stubbornness. ā€œThere have been times over the years where Iā€™ve gone to Richard and said, `We have to do this. We have to do that. Hereā€™s the strategic situation. Hereā€™s the next move. Hereā€™s what he have to do.ā€™ And Richardā€™s response has always been, `We donā€™t have to do anything.ā€™ Just wait. What needs doing will get done.ā€

 

ā€œAnd you know what?ā€ Moglen adds. ā€œGenerally, heā€™s been right.ā€

 

Such comments disavow Stallmanā€™s own self-assessment: ā€œIā€™m not good at playing games,ā€ Stallman says, addressing the many unseen critics who see him as a shrewd strategist. ā€œIā€™m not good at looking ahead and anticipating what somebody else might do. My approach has always been to focus on the foundation, to say `Letā€™s make the foundation as strong as we can make it.ā€™ā€

 

The GPLā€™s expanding popularity and continuing gravitational strength are the best tributes to the foundation laid by Stallman and his GNU colleagues.

While no longer capable of billing himself as the ā€œlast true hacker,ā€ Stallman nevertheless can take sole credit for building the free software movementā€™s ethical framework. Whether or not other modern programmers feel comfortable working inside that framework is immaterial. The fact that they even have a choice at all is Stallmanā€™s greatest legacy.

 

Discussing Stallmanā€™s legacy at this point seems a bit premature. Stallman, 48 at the time of this writing, still has a few years left to add to or subtract from that legacy. Still, the autopilot nature of the free software movement makes it tempting to examine Stallmanā€™s life outside the day-to-day battles of the software industry and within a more august, historical setting.

 

To his credit, Stallman refuses all opportunities to speculate. ā€œIā€™ve never been able to work out detailed plans of what the future was going to be like,ā€ says Stallman, offering his own premature epitaph. ā€œI just said `Iā€™m going to fight. Who knows where Iā€™ll get?ā€™ā€

 

Thereā€™s no question that in picking his fights, Stallman has alienated the very people who might otherwise have been his greatest champions. It is also a testament to his forthright, ethical nature that many of Stallmanā€™s erstwhile political opponents still manage to put in a few good words for him when pressed.

The tension between Stallman the ideologue and Stallman the hacker genius, however, leads a biographer to wonder: how will people view Stallman when Stallmanā€™s own personality is no longer there to get in the way?

 

In early drafts of this book, I dubbed this question the ā€œ100 yearā€ question. Hoping to stimulate an objective view of Stallman and his work, I asked various software-industry luminaries to take themselves out of the current timeframe and put themselves in a position of a historian looking back on the free software movement 100 years in the future. From the current vantage point, it is easy to see similarities between Stallman and past Americans who, while somewhat marginal during their lifetime, have attained heightened historical importance in relation to their age. Easy comparisons include Henry David Thoreau, transcendentalist philosopher and author of On Civil Disobedience, and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and progenitor of the modern environmental movement. It is also easy to see similarities in men like William Jennings Bryan, a.k.a. ā€œThe Great Commoner,ā€ leader of the populist movement, enemy of monopolies, and a man who, though powerful, seems to have faded into

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