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

Open Source solution with their old proprietary code. And by contributing stuff to mod_SSL they implicitly make their own product better. This way both sides benefit."

Parekh and C2Net now have a challenge. They must continue to make the Stronghold package better than the free version to justify the cost people are paying.

Not all forks end with such a happy-faced story of mutual cooperation. Nor do all stories in the free software world end with the moneymaking corporation turning around and giving back their proprietary code to the general effort. But the C2Net/OpenSSL case illustrates how the nature of software development encourages companies and people to give and cooperate to satisfy their own selfish needs. Software can do a variety of wonderful things, but the structure often governs how easy it is for some of us to use. It makes sense to spend some extra time and make donations to a free software project if you want to make sure that the final product fits your specs.

The good news is that most people don't have much incentive to break off and fork their own project. If you stay on the same team, then you can easily use all the results produced by the other members. Cooperating is so much easier than fighting that people have a big incentive to stay together. If it weren't so selfish, it would be heartwarming.

CORE

Projects in corporations have managers who report to other managers who report to the CEO who reports to the board. It's all very simple in theory, although it never really works that way in practice. The lines of control get crossed as people form alliances and struggle to keep their bosses happy.

Projects in the world of open source software, on the other hand, give everyone a copy of the source code and let them be the master of the code running on their machine. Everyone gets to be the Board of Directors, the CEO, and the cubicle serfs rolled into one. If a free software user doesn't like something, then he has the power to change it. You don't like that icon? Boom, it's gone. You don't want KDE on your desktop? Whoosh, it's out of there. No vice president in charge of MSN marketing in Redmond is going to force you to have an icon for easy connection to the Microsoft Network on your desktop. No graphic designer at Apple is going to force you to look at that two-faced Picasso-esque MacOS logo every morning of your life just because their marketing studies show that they need to build a strong brand identity. You're the captain of your free software ship and you decide the menu, the course, the arrangement of the deck chairs, the placement of lookouts from which to watch for icebergs, the type of soap, and the number of toothpicks per passenger to order. In theory, you're the Lord High Master and Most Exalted Ruler of all Software Big and Small, Wild and Wonderful, and Interpreted and Compiled on your machine.

In practice, no one has the time to use all of that power. It's downright boring to worry about soap and toothpicks. It's exhausting to rebuild window systems when they fail to meet your caviar-grade tastes in software.

No one has the disk space to maintain an Imelda Marcos-like collection of screen savers, window managers, layout engines, and games for your computer. So you start hanging around with some friends who want similar things and the next thing you know, you've got a group. A group needs leadership, so the alpha dog emerges. Pretty soon, it all begins to look like a corporate development team. Well, kind of.

Many neophytes in the free software world are often surprised to discover that most of the best free source code out there comes from teams that look surprisingly like corporate development groups. While the licenses and the rhetoric promise the freedom to go your own way, groups coalesce for many of the same reasons that wagon trains and convoys emerge. There's power in numbers. Sometimes these groups even get so serious that they incorporate. The Apache group recently formed the Apache Foundation, which has the job of guiding and supporting the development of the Apache web server. It's all very official looking. For all we know, they're putting cubicles in the foundation offices right now.

This instinct to work together is just as powerful a force in the free software world as the instinct to grab as much freedom as possible and use it every day. If anything, it's just an essential feature of human life. The founders of the United States of America created an entire constitution without mentioning political parties, but once they pushed the start button, the parties appeared out of nowhere.

These parties also emerged in the world of free source software. When projects grew larger than one person could safely handle, they usually evolved into development teams. The path for each group is somewhat different, and each one develops its own particular style. The strength of this organization is often the most important determinant of the strength of the software because if the people can work together well, then the problems in the software will be well fixed.

The most prevalent form of government in these communities is the benign dictatorship. Richard Stallman wrote some of the most important code in the GNU pantheon, and he continues to write new code and help maintain the old software. The world of the Linux kernel is dominated by Linus Torvalds. The original founders always seem to hold a strong sway over the group. Most of the code in the Linux kernel is written by others and checked out by a tight circle of friends, but Torvalds still has the final word on many changes.

The two of them are, of course, benign dictators, and the two of them don't really have any other choice. Both have a seemingly absolute amount of power, but this power is based on a mixture of personal affection and technical respect. There are no legal bounds that keep all of the developers in line. There are no rules about intellectual property or non-disclosure. Anyone can grab all of the Linux kernel or GNU source code, run off, and start making whatever changes they want. They could rename it FU, Bobux, Fredux, or Meganux and no one could stop them. The old threats of lawyers, guns, and money aren't anywhere to be seen.

19.1 DEBIAN'S CORE TEAM

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The Debian group has a wonderful pedigree and many praise it as the purest version of Linux around, but it began as a bunch of outlaws who cried mutiny and tossed Richard Stallman overboard. Well, it wasn't really so dramatic. In fact, "mutiny" isn't really the right word when everyone is free to use the source code however they want.

Bruce Perens remembers the split occurred less than a year after the project began and says, "Debian had already started. The FSF had been funding Ian Murdock for a few months. Richard at that time wanted us to make all of the executables unstripped."

When programmers compile software and convert it from human-readable source code into machine-readable binary code, they often leave in some human readable information to help debug the program. Another way to say this is that the programmers don't strip the debugging tags out of the code. These tags are just the names of the variables used in the software, and a programmer can use them to analyze what each variable held when the software started going berserk.

Perens continued, "His idea was if there was a problem, someone can send a stacktrace back without having to recompile a program and then making it break again. The problem with this was distributing executables unstripped makes them four times as large. It was a lot of extra expense and trouble. And our software didn't dump core anyway. That was really the bottom line. That sort of bug did not come up so often that it was necessary for us to distribute things that way anyways."

Still, Stallman insisted it was a good idea. Debian resisted and said it took up too much space and raised duplication costs. Eventually, the debate ended as the Debian group went their own way. Although Stallman paid Murdock and wrote much of the GNU code on the disk, the GPL prevented him from doing much. The project continued. The source code lived on. And the Debian disks kept shipping. Stallman was no longer titular leader of Debian.

The rift between the group has largely healed. Perens now praises Stallman and says that the two of them are still very close philosophically on the most important issues in the free software world. Stallman, for his part, uses Debian on his machines because he feels the closest kinship with it.

Perens says, "Richard's actually grown up a lot in the last few years. He's learned a lot more about what to do to a volunteer because obviously we're free to walk away at any time."

Stallman himself remembers the argument rather eloquently."The fact is, I wanted to influence them, but I did not want to force them. Forcing them would go against my moral beliefs. I believe that people are entitled to freedom in these matters, which means that I cannot tell them what to do," he told me. "I wrote the GPL to give everyone freedom from domination by authors of software, and that includes me on both sides."

There's much debate over the best way to be a benign dictator. Eric Raymond and many others feel that Torvalds's greatest claim to success was creating a good development model. Torvalds released new versions of his kernel often and he tried to share the news about the development as openly as possible. Most of this news travels through a mailing list that is open to all and archived on a website. The mailing list is sort of like a perpetual congress where people debate the technical issues behind the latest changes to the kernel. It's often much better than the real United States Congress because the debate floor is open to all and there are no glaring special interests who try to steer the debate in their direction. After some period of debate, eventually Torvalds makes a decision and this becomes final. Usually he doesn't need to do anything. The answer is pretty obvious to everyone who's followed the discussion.

This army is a diverse bunch. At a recent Linux conference, Jeff Bates, one of the editors of the influential website Slashdot (www.slashdot.org), pointed me toward the Debian booth, which was next to theirs. "If you look in the booth, you can see that map. They put a pushpin in the board for every developer and project leader they have around the world. China, Netherlands, Somalia, there are people coming from all over."

James Lewis-Moss is one of the members, who just happened to be in the Debian booth next door. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, which is four hours west of the Convention Center in downtown Raleigh. The Debian group normally relies upon local volunteers to staff the booth, answer questions, distribute CD-ROMs, and keep people interested in the project.

Lewis-Moss is officially in charge of maintaining several packages, including the X Emacs, a program that is used to edit text files, read email and news, and do a number of other tasks. A package is the official name for a bundle of smaller programs, files, data, and documentation. These parts are normally installed together because the software won't work without all of its component parts.

The packager's job is to download the latest software from the programmer and make sure that it runs well with the latest version of the other software to go in the Debian distribution. This crucial task is why groups like Debian are so