Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software Part 14

And those things are so different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about them at once. If you hear somebody saying something about intellectual property, without quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join."

Years later, Stallman would describe the GPL's creation in less hostile terms. "I was thinking about issues that were in a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal," he says. "I had to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system that we're in. In spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for a new society, but since I wasn't a government, I couldn't actually change any laws. I had to try to do this by building on top of the existing legal system, which had not been designed for anything like this."

About the time Stallman was pondering the ethical, political, and legal issues a.s.sociated with free software, a California hacker named Don Hopkins mailed him a manual for the 68000 microprocessor. Hopkins, a Unix hacker and fellow science-fiction buff, had borrowed the manual from Stallman a while earlier. As a display of grat.i.tude, Hopkins decorated the return envelope with a number of stickers obtained at a local science-fiction convention. One sticker in particular caught Stallman's eye. It read, "Copyleft (L), All Rights Reversed." Following the release of the first version of GPL, Stallman paid tribute to the sticker, nicknaming the free software license "Copyleft." Over time, the nickname and its shorthand symbol, a backwards "C," would become an official Free Software Foundation synonym for the GPL.

The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all great religions are built upon the "routinization" or "inst.i.tutionalization" of charisma. Every successful religion, Weber argued, converts the charisma or message of the original religious leader into a social, political, and ethical apparatus more easily translatable across cultures and time.

While not religious per se, the GNU GPL certainly qualifies as an interesting example of this "routinization" process at work in the modern, decentralized world of software development. Since its unveiling, programmers and companies who have otherwise expressed little loyalty or allegiance to Stallman have willingly accepted the GPL bargain at face value. A few have even accepted the GPL as a preemptive protective mechanism for their own software programs. Even those who reject the GPL contract as too compulsory, still credit it as influential.

One hacker falling into this latter group was Keith Bostic, a University of California employee at the time of the GPL 1.0 release. Bostic's department, the Computer Systems Research Group (SRG), had been involved in Unix development since the late 1970s and was responsible for many key parts of Unix, including the TCP/IP networking protocol, the cornerstone of modern Internet communications. By the late 1980s, AT&T, the original owner of the Unix brand name, began to focus on commercializing Unix and began looking to the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, the academic version of Unix developed by Bostic and his Berkeley peers, as a key source of commercial technology.

Although the Berkeley BSD source code was shared among researchers and commercial programmers with a source-code license, this commercialization presented a problem. The Berkeley code was intermixed with proprietary AT&T code. As a result, Berkeley distributions were available only to inst.i.tutions that already had a Unix source license from AT&T. As AT&T raised its license fees, this arrangement, which had at first seemed innocuous, became increasingly burdensome.

Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project of porting BSD over to the Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 computer. It was during this period, Bostic says, that he came into close interaction with Stallman during Stallman's occasional forays out to the west coast. "I remember vividly arguing copyright with Stallman while he sat at borrowed workstations at CSRG," says Bostic. "We'd go to dinner afterward and continue arguing about copyright over dinner."

The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have liked. In June, 1989, Berkeley separated its networking code from the rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and distributed it under a University of California license. The contract terms were liberal. All a licensee had to do was give credit to the university in advertis.e.m.e.nts touting derivative programs.The University of California's "obnoxious advertising clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for a less restrictive alternative to the GPL, some hackers used the University of California, replacing "University of California" with the name of their own instution. The result: free software programs that borrowed from dozens of other programs would have to cite dozens of inst.i.tutions in advertis.e.m.e.nts. In 1999, after a decade of lobbying on Stallman's part, the University of California agreed to drop this clause.

In contrast to the GPL, proprietary offshoots were permissible. Only one problem hampered the license's rapid adoption: the BSD Networking release wasn't a complete operating system. People could study the code, but it could only be run in conjunction with other proprietary-licensed code.

Over the next few years, Bostic and other University of California employees worked to replace the missing components and turn BSD into a complete, freely redistributable operating system. Although delayed by a legal challenge from Unix Systems Laboratories-the AT&T spin-off that retained ownership of the Unix brand name-the effort would finally bear fruit in the early 1990s. Even before then, however, many of the Berkeley utilities would make their way into Stallman's GNU Project.

"I think it's highly unlikely that we ever would have gone as strongly as we did without the GNU influence,"

says Bostic, looking back. "It was clearly something where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea."

By the end of the 1980s, the GPL was beginning to exert a gravitational effect on the free software community.

A program didn't have to carry the GPL to qualify as free software-witness the case of the BSD utilities-but putting a program under the GPL sent a definite message. "I think the very existence of the GPL inspired people to think through whether they were making free software, and how they would license it,"

says Bruce Perens, creator of Electric Fence, a popular Unix utility, and future leader of the Debian GNU/Linux development team. A few years after the release of the GPL, Perens says he decided to discard Electric Fence's homegrown license in favor of Stallman's lawyer-vetted copyright. "It was actually pretty easy to do," Perens recalls.

Rich Morin, the programmer who had viewed Stallman's initial GNU announcement with a degree of skepticism, recalls being impressed by the software that began to gather under the GPL umbrella. As the leader of a SunOS user group, one of Morin's primary duties during the 1980s had been to send out distribution tapes containing the best freeware or free software utilities. The job often mandated calling up original program authors to verify whether their programs were copyright protected or whether they had been consigned to the public domain. Around 1989, Morin says, he began to notice that the best software programs typically fell under the GPL license. "As a software distributor, as soon as I saw the word GPL, I knew I was home free,"

recalls Morin.

To compensate for the prior ha.s.sles that went into compiling distribution tapes to the Sun User Group, Morin had charged recipients a convenience fee. Now, with programs moving over to the GPL, Morin was suddenly getting his tapes put together in half the time, turning a tidy profit in the process. Sensing a commercial opportunity, Morin rechristened his hobby as a business: Prime Time Freeware.

Such commercial exploitation was completely within the confines of the free software agenda. "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price,"

advised Stallman in the GPL's preamble. By the late 1980s, Stallman had refined it to a more simple mnemonic: "Don't think free as in free beer; think free as in free speech."

For the most part, businesses ignored Stallman's entreaties. Still, for a few entrepreneurs, the freedom a.s.sociated with free software was the same freedom a.s.sociated with free markets. Take software ownership out of the commercial equation, and you had a situation where even the smallest software company was free to compete against the IBMs and DECs of the world.

One of the first entrepreneurs to grasp this concept was Michael Tiemann, a software programmer and graduate student at Stanford University. During the 1980s, Tiemann had followed the GNU Project like an aspiring jazz musician following a favorite artist. It wasn't until the release of the GNU C Compiler in 1987, however, that he began to grasp the full potential of free software. Dubbing GCC a "bombsh.e.l.l," Tiemann says the program's own existence underlined Stallman's determination as a programmer.

"Just as every writer dreams of writing the great American novel, every programmer back in the 1980s talked about writing the great American compiler,"

Tiemman recalls. "Suddenly Stallman had done it. It was very humbling."

"You talk about single points of failure, GCC was it,"

echoes Bostic. "n.o.body had a compiler back then, until GCC came along."

Rather than compete with Stallman, Tiemann decided to build on top of his work. The original version of GCC weighed in at 110,000 lines of code, but Tiemann recalls the program as surprisingly easy to understand.

So easy in fact that Tiemann says it took less than five days to master and another week to port the software to a new hardware platform, National Semiconductor's 32032 microchip. Over the next year, Tiemann began playing around with the source code, creating a native compiler for the C+ programming language. One day, while delivering a lecture on the program at Bell Labs, Tiemann ran into some AT&T developers struggling to pull off the same thing.

"There were about 40 or 50 people in the room, and I asked how many people were working on the native code compiler," Tiemann recalls. "My host said the information was confidential but added that if I took a look around the room I might get a good general idea."

It wasn't long after, Tiemann says, that the light bulb went off in his head. "I had been working on that project for six months," Tiemann says. I just thought to myself, whether it's me or the code this is a level of efficiency that the free market should be ready to reward."

Tiemann found added inspiration in the GNU Manifesto, which, while excoriating the greed of some software vendors, encourages other vendors to consider the advantages of free software from a consumer point of view. By removing the power of monopoly from the commerical software question, the GPL makes it possible for the smartest vendors to compete on the basis of service and consulting, the two most profit-rich corners of the software marketplace.

In a 1999 essay, Tiemann recalls the impact of Stallman's Manifesto. "It read like a socialist polemic, but I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise."7. See Michael Tiemann, "Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's Account," Open Sources (O'Reilly & a.s.sociates, Inc., 1999): 139.

Teaming up with John Gilmore, another GNU Project fan, Tiemann launched a software consulting service dedicated to customizing GNU programs. Dubbed Cygnus Support, the company signed its first development contract in February, 1990. By the end of the year, the company had $725,000 worth of support and development contracts.

GNU Emacs, GDB, and GCC were the "big three" of developer-oriented tools, but they weren't the only ones developed by Stallman during the GNU Project's first half decade. By 1990, Stallman had also generated GNU versions of the Bourne Sh.e.l.l (rechristened the Bourne Again Sh.e.l.l, or BASH), YACC (rechristened Bison), and awk (rechristened gawk). Like GCC , every GNU program had to be designed to run on multiple systems, not just a single vendor's platform. In the process of making programs more flexible, Stallman and his collaborators often made them more useful as well.

Recalling the GNU universalist approach, Prime Time Freeware's Morin points to a critical, albeit mundane, software package called h.e.l.lo. "It's the h.e.l.lo world program which is five lines of C, packaged up as if it were a GNU distribution," Morin says. "And so it's got the Texinfo stuff and the configure stuff. It's got all the other software engineering goo that the GNU Project has come up with to allow packages to port to all these different environments smoothly. That's tremendously important work, and it affects not only all of [Stallman's] software, but also all of the other GNU Project software."

According to Stallman, improving software programs was secondary to building them in the first place. "With each piece I may or may not find a way to improve it,"

said Stallman to Byte. "To some extent I am getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much better. To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long time and worked on many other systems.

I therefore have many ideas to bring to bear."See Richard Stallman, BYTE (1986).

Nevertheless, as GNU tools made their mark in the late 1980s, Stallman's AI Lab-honed reputation for design fastidiousness soon became legendary throughout the entire software-development community.

Jeremy Allison, a Sun user during the late 1980s and programmer destined to run his own free software project, Samba, in the 1990s, recalls that reputation with a laugh. During the late 1980s, Allison began using Emacs. Inspired by the program's community-development model, Allison says he sent in a snippet of source code only to have it rejected by Stallman.

"It was like the Onion headline," Allison says.

"'Child's prayers to G.o.d answered: No.'"

Stallman's growing stature as a software programmer, however, was balanced by his struggles as a project manager. Although the GNU Project moved from success to success in creation of developer-oriented tools, its inability to generate a working kernel-the central "traffic cop" program in all Unix systems that determines which devices and applications get access to the microprocessor and when-was starting to elicit grumbles as the 1980s came to a close. As with most GNU Project efforts, Stallman had started kernel development by looking for an existing program to modify. According to a January 1987 "Gnusletter,"

Stallman was already working to overhaul TRIX, a Unix kernel developed at MIT.

A review of GNU Project "GNUsletters" of the late 1980s reflects the management tension. In January, 1987, Stallman announced to the world that the GNU Project was working to overhaul TRIX, a Unix kernel developed at MIT. A year later, in February of 1988, the GNU Project announced that it had shifted its attentions to Mach, a lightweight "micro-kernel" developed at Carnegie Mellon. All told, however, official GNU Project kernel development wouldn't commence until 1990.See "HURD History."

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history.html

The delays in kernel development were just one of many concerns weighing on Stallman during this period. In 1989, Lotus Development Corporation filed suit against rival software company, Paperback Software International, for copying menu commands in Lotus'

popular 1-2-3 Spreadsheet program. Lotus' suit, coupled with the Apple -Microsoft "look and feel" battle, provided a troublesome backdrop for the GNU Project.

Although both suits fell outside the scope of the GNU Project, both revolved around operating systems and software applications developed for the personal computer, not Unix-compatible hardware systems-they threatened to impose a chilling effect on the entire culture of software development. Determined to do something, Stallman recruited a few programmer friends and composed a magazine ad blasting the lawsuits. He then followed up the ad by helping to organize a group to protest the corporations filing the suit. Calling itself the League of Programming Freedom, the group held protests outside the offices of Lotus, Inc. and the Boston courtroom hosting the Lotus trial.

The protests were notable.According to a League of Programming Freedom Press, the protests were notable for featuring the first hexadecimal protest chant: 1-2-3-4, toss the lawyers out the door; 5-6-7-8, innovate don't litigate; 9-A-B-C, 1-2-3 is not for me; D-E-F-O, look and feel have got to go

http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/demo.final.release They doc.u.ment the evolving nature of software industry. Applications had quietly replaced operating systems as the primary corporate battleground. In its unfulfilled quest to build a free software operating system, the GNU Project seemed hopelessly behind the times. Indeed, the very fact that Stallman had felt it necessary to put together an entirely new group dedicated to battling the "look and feel" lawsuits reinforced that obsolescence in the eyes of some observers.

In 1990, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation cerified Stallman's genius status when it granted Stallman a MacArthur fellowship, therefore making him a recipient for the organization's so-called "genius grant." The grant, a $240,000 reward for launching the GNU Project and giving voice to the free software philosophy, relieved a number of short-term concerns. First and foremost, it gave Stallman, a nonsalaried employee of the FSF who had been supporting himself through consulting contracts, the ability to devote more time to writing GNU code.I use the term "writing" here loosely.

About the time of the MacArthur award, Stallman began suffering chronic pain in his hands and was dictating his work to FSF-employed typists. Although some have speculated that the hand pain was the result of repet.i.tive stress injury, or RSI, an injury common among software programmers, Stallman is not 100% sure. "It was NOT carpal tunnel syndrome," he writes. "My hand problem was in the hands themselves, not in the wrists."

Stallman has since learned to work without typists after switching to a keyboard with a lighter touch.

Ironically, the award also made it possible for Stallman to vote. Months before the award, a fire in Stallman's apartment house had consumed his few earthly possessions. By the time of the award, Stallman was listing himself as a "squatter"See Reuven Lerner, "Stallman wins $240,000 MacArthur award," MIT, The Tech (July 18, 1990).

http://the-tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html at 545 Technology Square. "[The registrar of voters]

didn't want to accept that as my address," Stallman would later recall. "A newspaper article about the MacArthur grant said that and then they let me register."See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified Genius" (1999).

Most importantly, the MacArthur money gave Stallman more freedom. Already dedicated to the issue of software freedom, Stallman chose to use the additional freedom to increase his travels in support of the GNU Project mission.

Interestingly, the ultimate success of the GNU Project and the free software movement in general would stem from one of these trips. In 1990, Stallman paid a visit to the Polytechnic University in Helsinki, Finland.

Among the audience members was 21-year-old Linus Torvalds, future developer of the Linux kernel-the free software kernel destined to fill the GNU Project's most sizable gap.