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

class="calibre1">That January 14, a man in Great Britain, Roger Hardiman, was helping a man in Switzerland, Reto Trachsel, hook up a Hauppauge video card to his system. They were communicating on the Multimedia mailing list devoted to finding ways to add audio and video functions to FreeBSD systems. Trachsel posted a note to the list asking for information on how to find the driver software that would make sure that the data coming out of the Hauppauge television receiver would be generally available to the rest of the computer. Hardiman pointed out a solution, but cautioned, "If your Hauppauge card has the MSP34xx Stereo Decoder audio chip, you may get no sound when watching TV. I should get this fixed in the next week or two."

Solutions like these float around the FreeBSD community. Most people don't really care if they can watch television with their computer, but a few do. The easy access to source code and drivers means that the few can go off and do their own thing without asking some major company for permission. The big companies like Microsoft and Apple, for instance, have internal projects that are producing impressive software for creating and displaying multimedia extravaganzas on computers. But they have a strict view of the world: the company is the producer of high-quality tools that make their way to the consumer who uses them and pays for them in one way or another.

The list ecology is more organic and anti-hierarchical. Everyone has access to the source code. Everyone can make changes. Everyone can do what they want. There is no need for the FreeBSD management to meet and decide "Multimedia is good." There is no need for a project team to prioritize and list action items and best-of-breed deliverables. Someone in Switzerland decides he wants to hook up a television receiver to his computer and, what do you know, someone in Great Britain has already solved the problem. Well, he's solved it if you don't have an MSP34xx stereo decoder chip in your card. But that should be fixed sooner or later, too.

4.1 FREE DOESN'T MEAN FREELOADING

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There are thousands of other mailing lists linking thousands of other projects. It's hard to actually put a number to them because the projects grow, merge, and fade as people's interests wax and wane. The best flourish, and the others just drift away.

Life on the mailing lists is often a bit more brutal and short than life on earth. The work on the project needs to split up. The volunteers need to organize themselves so that great software can be written.

On that January 14, a new member of the WINE list was learning just how volunteering works. The guy posted a note to the list that described his Diamond RIO portable music device that lets you listen to MP3 files whenever you want. "I think the WINE development team should drop everything and work on getting this program to work as it doesn't seem like Diamond wants to release a Linux utility for the Rio," he wrote.

WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator," which is a joke that only programmers and free software lovers can get. It's first a play on the recursive acronym for the GNU project ("GNU is not UNIX"). It's also a bit of a political statement for programmers. An emulator is a piece of software that makes one computer act like another. A company named Connectix, for instance, sells an emulator that lets a Macintosh behave like a Windows PC so anyone can use their Windows software on the Mac. Emulators, however, are pretty slow because they're constantly translating information on the fly. Anyone who has tried to hold a conversation with someone who speaks a different language knows how frustrating it can be to require a translator.

The WINE project is an ambitious attempt to knock out one of the most important structural elements of the Microsoft monopoly. Software written for Windows only functions when people buy a version of Windows from Microsoft. When you purchase a Connectix emulator for the Mac, you get a version of Windows bundled with it.

The WINE project is a group of people who are trying to clone Windows. Well, not clone all of it. They just want to clone what is known as the Win32 API, a panoply of features that make it easier to write software for a Microsoft machine. A programmer who wants to create a new button for a Windows computer doesn't need to write all of the instructions for drawing a frame with three-dimensional shading. A Microsoft employee has already bundled those instructions into the Win32 API. There are millions of functions in these kits that help programmers. Some play audio files, others draw complex images or movies. These features make it easy for programmers to write software for Windows because some of the most repetitive work is already finished.

The WINE clone of the Win32 is a fascinating example of how open source starts slowly and picks up steam. Bob Amstadt started the project in 1993, but soon turned it over to Alexandre Julliard, who has been the main force behind it. The project, although still far from finished, has produced some dramatic accomplishments, making it possible to run major programs like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel on a Linux box without using Windows. In essence, the WINE software is doing a good enough job acting like Windows that it's fooling Excel and Word. If you can trick the cousins, that's not too bad.

The WINE home page (www.winehq.com) estimates that more than 90,000 people use WINE regularly to run programs for Microsoft Windows without buying Windows. About 140 or more people regularly contribute to the project by writing code or fixing bugs. Many are hobbyists who want the thrill of getting their software to run without Windows, but some are corporate programmers. The corporate programmers want to sell their software to the broadest possible marketplace, but they don't want to take the time to rewrite everything. If they can get their software working well with WINE, then people who use Linux or BSD can use the software that was written for Microsoft Windows.

The new user who wanted to get his RIO player working with his Linux computer soon got a rude awakening. Andreas Mohr, a German programmer, wrote back,

Instead of suggesting the WINE team to "drop everything" in order to get a relatively minor thing like PMP300 to work, would you please install WINE, test it, read documentation/bug reports and post a useful bug report here? There are zillions of very useful and impressing Windoze apps out there. .. (After all that's only my personal opinion, maybe that was a bit too harsh ;-)

Most new free software users soon discover that freedom isn't always easy. If you want to get free software, you're going to have to put in some work. Sometimes you get lucky. The man in Switzerland who posted his note on the same day found out that someone in Britain was solving his problems for him. There was no one, however, working on the RIO software and making sure it worked with WINE.

Mohr's suggestion was to file a bug report that ranks the usability of the software so the programmers working on WINE can tweak it. This is just the first step in the free software experience. Someone has to notice the problem and fix it. In this case, someone needs to hook up their Diamond RIO MP3 player to a Linux box and try to move MP3 files with the software written for Windows. Ideally, the software will work perfectly, and now all Linux users will be able to use RIO players. In reality, there might be problems or glitches. Some of the graphics on the screen might be wrong. The software might not download anything at all. The first step is for someone to test the product and write up a detailed report about what works and what doesn't.

At the time of this writing, no one has stepped up to the plate. There are no reports about the Diamond player in the WINE database. Maybe the new user didn't have time. Maybe he wasn't technically sophisticated enough to get WINE running in the first place. It's still not a simple system to use. In any case, his bright idea fell by the wayside.

The mailing lists buzz with idle chatter about neat, way-out ideas that never come to fruition. Some people see this as a limitation of the free software world. A corporation, however, is able to dispatch a team of programmers to create solutions. These companies have money to spend on polishing a product and making sure it works. Connectix, for instance, makes an emulator that lets Mac users play games written for the Sony PlayStation. The company employs a substantial number of people who simply play all the Sony games from beginning to end until all of the bugs are gone. It's a rough job, but someone has to do it.

WINE can't pay anyone, and that means that great ideas sometimes get ignored. The free software community, however, doesn't necessarily see this as a limitation. If the RIO player were truly important, someone else would come along and pick up the project. Someone else would do the work and file a bug report so everyone could use the software. If there's no one else, then maybe the RIO software isn't that important to the Linux community. Work gets done when someone really cares enough to do it.

These mailing lists are the fibers that link the open source community into the network of minds. Before e-mail, they were just a bunch of rebels haunting the moors and rattling around their basements inventing monstrous machines. Now they're smoothly tuned mechanisms coordinated by messages, notes, and missives. They're not madmen who roar at dinner parties about the bad technology from Borg-like corporations. They've got friends now. One person may be a flake, but a group might be on to something.

IMAGE

Consider this picture: Microsoft is a megalith built by one man with a towering ego. It may not be fair to lump all of the serfs in the corporate cubicle farms in Redmond into one big army of automatons, but it sure conjures a striking image that isn't altogether inaccurate. Microsoft employees are fiercely loyal and often more dedicated to the cause than the average worker bee. Bill Gates built the company from scratch with the help of several college friends, and this group maintains tight control over all parts of the empire. The flavor of the organization is set by one man with the mind and the ego to micromanage it all.

Now consider the image of the members of the free software revolution. Practically every newspaper article and colorful feature describing the group talks about a ragtag army of scruffy, bearded programmers who are just a bit too pale from spending their days in front of a computer screen. The writers love to conjure up a picture of a group that looks like it came stumbling out of some dystopian fantasy movie like Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog. They're the outsiders. They're a tightly knit band of rebel outcasts who are planning to free the people from their Microsoft slavery and return to the people the power usurped by Mr. Gates. What do they want? Freedom! When do they want it? Now!

There's only one problem with this tidy, Hollywood-ready image: it's far from true. While Microsoft is one big corporation with reins of control that keep everyone in line, there is no strong or even weak organization that binds the world of open source software. The movement, if it could be called that, is comprised of individuals, each one free to do