Free for All - Peter Wayner (the false prince series .txt) 📗

FREE FOR ALL

HOW LINUX AND THE FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT UNDERCUT THE HIGH TECH TITANS

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BY PETER WAYNER

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This is just a book about the free software movement. It wouldn't be possible without the hard work and the dedication of the thousands if not millions of people who like to spend their free time hacking code. I salute you. Thank you.

Many people spoke to me during the process of assembling this book, and it would be impossible to cite them all. The list should begin with the millions of people who write and contribute to the various free software lists. The letters, notes, and postings to these lists are a wonderful history of the evolution of free software and an invaluable resource.

The list should also include the dozens of journalists at places like Slashdot.org, LinuxWorld, Linux magazine, Linux Weekly News, Kernel Traffic, Salon, and the New York Times. I should specifically mention the work of Joe Barr, Jeff Bates, Janelle Brown, Zack Brown, Jonathan Corbet, Elizabeth Coolbaugh, Amy Harmon, Andrew Leonard, Rob Malda, John Markoff, Mark Nielsen, Nicholas Petreley, Harald Radke, and Dave Whitinger. They wrote wonderful pieces that will make a great first draft of the history of the open source movement. Only a few of the pieces are cited directly in the footnotes, largely for practical reasons. The entire body of websites like Slashdot, Linux Journal, Linux World, Kernel Notes, or Linux Weekly News should be required reading for anyone interested in the free software movement.

There are hundreds of folks at Linux trade shows who took the time to show me their products, T-shirts, or, in one case, cooler filled with beer. Almost everyone I met at the conferences was happy to speak about their experiences with open source software. They were all a great source of information, and I don't even know most of their names.

Some people went beyond the call of duty. John Gilmore, Ethan Rasiel, and Caroline McKeldin each read drafts when the book was quite unfinished. Their comments were crucial.

Many friends, acquaintances, and subjects of the book were kind enough to read versions that were a bit more polished, but far from complete: L. David Baron, Jeff Bates, Brian Behlendorf, Alan Cox, Robert Dreyer, Theo de Raadt, Telsa Gwynne, Jordan Hubbard, James Lewis Moss, Kirk McKusick, Sam Ockman, Tim O'Reilly, Sameer Parekh, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Richard Stallman.

There are some people who deserve a different kind of thanks. Daniel Greenberg and James Levine did a great job shaping the conception of the book. When I began, it was just a few ideas on paper. My editors, David Conti, Laureen Rowland, Devi Pillai, and Adrian Zackheim, were largely responsible for this transition. Kimberly Monroe suffered through my mistakes as she took the book through its production stages. They took a bunch of rambling comments about a social phenomenon and helped turn it into a book.

Finally, I want to thank everyone in my family for everything they've given through all of my life. And, of course, Caroline, who edited large portions with a slavish devotion to grammar and style.

Visit http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for updates, corrections, and additional comments.

FREE FOR ALL. Copyright 2000 by Peter Wayner.

Some Rights Reserved:

This is [a complete version of] the free electronic version of the book originally published by HarperCollins. The book is still protected by copyright and bound by a license granting you the limited rights to make complete copies for non-commercial purposes. You're welcome to read it in electronic form subject to these conditions:

1) You may not make derivative works. You must reproduce the work in its entirety.

2) You may not sell versions.

3) You refer everyone receiving a copy to the website where they may get the latest corrected version. http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/

A full license developed by the Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) will be forthcoming. Please write p3@wayner.org if you have any questions or suggestions.

See http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for the FIRST PDF EDITION Page layout for this and the original paper edition designed by William Ruoto, see Not printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wayner, Peter, 1964 Free for all: how Linux and the free software movement undercut the high-tech titans / Peter Wayner. p. cm. ISBN 0-06-662050-3 1. Linux. 2. Operating systems (Computers) 3. Free computer software. I. Title. QA76.76.063 W394 2000 005.4'469 dc21 00-023919 00 01 02 03 04 V/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Free For All may be purchased at Amazon.com

The world where cash was king, greed was good, and money was power fell off its axis and stopped rotating, if only for a second, in January 1999. Microsoft, the great software giant and unstoppable engine of cash, was defending itself in a courtroom in Washington, D.C. The Department of Justice claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly and was using this power to cut off competitors. Microsoft denied it all and claimed that the world was hurling threat after competitive threat its way. They weren't a monopoly, they were just a very competitive company that managed to withstand the slings and arrows of other equally ruthless competitors out to steal its market share.

The trial quickly turned into everyone's worst nightmare as the lawyers, the economists, and the programmers filled the courtroom with a thick mixture of technobabble and legal speak. On the stands, the computer nerds spewed out three-letter acronyms (TLAs) as they talked about creating operating systems. Afterward, the legal nerds started slicing them up into one-letter acronyms and testing to see just which of the three letters was really the one that committed the crime. Then the economists came forward and offered their theories on just when a monopoly is a monopoly. Were three letters working in collusion enough? What about two? Everyone in the courtroom began to dread spending the day cooped up in a small room as Microsoft tried to deny what was obvious to practically everyone.

In the fall and early winter of 1998 and 1999, the Department of Justice had presented its witnesses, who explained how Microsoft had slanted contracts, tweaked software, and twisted arms to ensure that it and it alone got the lion's share of the computer business. Many watching the trial soon developed the opinion that Microsoft had adopted a mixture of tactics from the schoolyard bully, the local mob boss, and the mother from hell. The Department of Justice trotted out a number of witnesses who produced ample evidence that suggested the computer customers of the world will buy Microsoft products unless Microsoft decides otherwise. Competitors must be punished.

By January, the journalists covering the trial were quietly complaining about this endless waste of time. The Department of Justice's case was so compelling that they saw the whole trial as just a delay in what would eventually come to be a ruling that would somehow split or shackle Microsoft.

But Microsoft wasn't going to be bullied or pushed into splitting up. The trial allowed them to present their side of the story, and they had one ready. Sure, everyone seemed to use Microsoft products, but that was because they were great. It wasn't because there weren't any competitors, but because the competitors just weren't good enough.

In the middle of January, Richard Schmalensee, the dean of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took the stand to defend Microsoft. Schmalensee had worked for the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice as an economist who examined the marketplace and the effects of anti-competitive behavior. He studied how monopolies behave, and to him Microsoft had no monopoly power. Now, he was being paid handsomely by Microsoft as an expert witness to repeat this view in court.

Schmalensee's argument was simple: competitors are popping up all over the place. Microsoft, he said in his direct testimony, "is in a constant struggle for competitive survival. That struggle--the race to win and the victor's perpetual fear of being displaced--is the source of competitive vitality in the microcomputer software industry."

Schmalensee even had a few competitors ready. "The iMac clearly competes directly and fiercely with Intel-compatible computers running Windows," he said without mentioning that Microsoft had bailed out Apple several months before with hundreds of millions of dollars in an investment. When Steve Jobs, the iCEO of Apple, announced the deal to a crowd of Mac lovers, the crowd booed. Jobs quieted them and tried to argue that the days of stiff competition with Microsoft were over. The scene did such a good job of capturing the total domination of Microsoft that the television movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley used it to illustrate how Bill Gates had won all of the marbles.

After the announcement of the investment, Apple began shipping Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser as the preferred browser on its machines. Microsoft's competitor Netscape became just a bit harder to find on the iMac. After that deal, Steve Jobs even began making statements that the old sworn enemies, Apple and Microsoft, were now more partners than competitors. Schmalensee didn't focus on this facet of Apple's new attitude toward competition.

Next, Schmalensee trotted out BeOS, an operating system made by Be, a small company with about 100 employees run by ex-Apple executive Jean-Louis Gass e. This company had attracted millions of dollars in funding, he said, and some people really liked it. That made it a competitor.

Schmalensee didn't mention that Be had trouble giving away the BeOS operating system. Gass e approached a number of PC manufacturers to see if they would include BeOS on their machines and give users the chance to switch between two operating systems. Gass e found, to no one's real surprise, that Microsoft's contracts with manufacturers made it difficult, if not practically impossible, to get BeOS in customers' hands. Microsoft controlled much of what the user got to see and insisted on almost total control over the viewer's experience. Schmalensee didn't mention these details in his testimony. BeOS may have been as locked up as a prisoner in a windowless cell in a stone-walled asylum on an island in the middle of the ocean, but BeOS was still a competitor for the love of the fair maiden.

The last competitor, though, was the most surprising to everyone. Schmalensee saw Linux, a program given away for free, as a big potential competitor. When he said Linux, he really meant an entire collection of programs known as "open source" software. These were written by a loose-knit group of programmers who shared all of the source code to the software over the Internet.

Open source software floated around the Internet controlled by a variety of licenses with names like the GNU General Public License (GPL). To say that the software was "controlled" by the license is a bit of a stretch. If anything, the licenses were deliberately worded to prohibit control. The GNU GPL, for instance, let users modify the program and give away their own versions. The license did more to enforce sharing of all the source code than it did to control or constrain. It was more an anti-license than anything else, and its author, Richard Stallman, often called it a "copyleft."

Schmalensee didn't mention that most people thought of Linux as a strange tool created and used by hackers in dark rooms lit by computer monitors. He didn't mention that many people had trouble getting Linux