LWN: Comments on "The road to freedom in the embedded world"

Free software, FOSS, RMS, and too much discursion

rs79 — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 07:42:24 +0000

Agreed Dave Conroy is the real hero here. In 1975 I worked for Teklogix in Canada where Dave had worked and was still doing some consulting. He'd just finished University of Waterloo and wrote a C compiler for RSX11M.

Vik Sondi and I were the first two people I know of to use it, presumably others at Waterlook did, although I went there the next year and met most of the Unix poeple and never saw Dave's compiler used there - we didn't need to we had real Bell Labs Unix on a PDP 11/45 and it *had* a C compiler already - they had no need of RSX there. And we sure coldn't use Unix for real work. And RT-11 Sucked. Badly.

Dave gave the compiler to DECUS, the DEC users group. It popped up on my radar in Los Angeles in 1984 when we used it to generate Z8000 code. I noticed Dave's name was still in it. By 1992 or so I'd noticed the free C compiler I got from John "hoptoad" Gilmore's site said it was a port of the DECUS C compiler - and was now called "gcc".

I dunno what RMS wrote, but from what I've seen Dave Conroy wrote what is now called gcc.

As an aside, I met Charles Forsyth briefly at Waterloo. He looked a bit like a grown up Harry Potter and always wore a blue blazer. Dave looked like a deadhead, they were quite the pair.

There's a picture of me and Dave at the 1975 Teklogix company picnic in Terra Cotta, Ontario here: http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoblog/2011/Feb/9/.rjsdgcs.j... I'm in the bicycle getup, I'd ridden 50 miles to get there, Dave is in the blue shirt and long hair.

Should it be GNU/Linux

muwlgr — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 08:29:01 +0000

... voice from the crowd : "petegn! petegn!"
:>

GNU/Busybox ?!?

k8to — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 00:57:13 +0000

But this of course clearly underscores my point. Any production Hurd system would invariably include all sorts of software besides the GNU software, much of it as indespensible for real work as the kernel, but that would be "GNU" regardless of all the other software. The difference is that Linux is the defacto, existing name that people use to refer to the collection; its necessity is not unique. Thus you can see the attempt to affix GNU to Linux is not motivated by giving due credit, as none is intended when for the eventual Hurd system.

Please do further the FSF and FSFE's goals of promoting freedom by promoting the GNU project. The freedom ideals are important and deserve mention. But do it as openly and honestly as possible. Affixing it to Linux is a bad strategy.

Gtk+ versus Qt

Duncan — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:19:46 +0000

There is, however, rather more to this picture. Trolltech has very
deliberately "poison-pilled" any hostile buyout or takeover attempt.
(Unlike many smaller companies here in the US, it seems they value their
independence and are /not/ simply there to eventually be bought out.) The
currently active licensing arrangement for Qt is GPL/QPL/proprietary. In
practice, what this does is ensure people contribute back to the community
either with code, or if they don't want to do that, at least with money,
so they can take their work built on top proprietary, but in the process
fund the base that's dual licensed GPL as well, thus contributing to
further development of the free software side with money if they refuse to
contribute to it with code. =8^)

This of course has so far done a good job of keeping Trolltech financially
viable, as well as providing a technically great toolkit for use both in
freedomware and in proprietaryware. The "poison-pill" aspect of the
FreeQTFoundation, however, is that should it be triggered, the code would
*NOT* just be "freed" (there's no need for that, it's already free as in
freedom to anyone wishing to make their own code likewise), but would be
BSD-style licensed, thus allowing commercial use without "giving back" in
the form of code or cash, as is now required. Since the code is the same
but for the license, this would immediately devalue the company in terms
of cash-out value, thus discouraging any action that might trigger the
release in the first place.

BTW, it should also be noted that the way the foundation is setup (two
board members each from Trolltech and KDE, with the KDE side ruling in
case of a tie vote), should Trolltech ever cease to act in the interest of
KDE, KDE has the upper hand. Not that they're likely to trigger it in
anything like the foreseeable future, since that would kill the mutually
beneficial relationship that has and continues to benefit KDE greatly, but
it's nice to know that one way or another, KDE has the legal trump card
should it ever be needed.

Duncan

GNU/Busybox ?!?

TRauMa — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:04:59 +0000

Debian doesn't insist on the IceWeasel name, Mozilla does (or, more correct, they insist on Debian not calling it Firefox), so your example is relevant how?

Seriously, I don't know what RMS did to you, but your insistence on voiding all his reputation because of the GNU/Linux thing just doesn't make sense to me. At least he doesn't flame around in the forums I read and calls ppl an "ass".

I don't think your problems with RMS are his fault.

First FOSS OS?

bronson — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:44:52 +0000

So did I, but not until early '95.

Personally, I think "Linux/GNU/X" is a great name.

GNU/Busybox ?!?

TRauMa — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:40:50 +0000

The GPL can't be all about users if it doesn't impose restrictions on users? Huh? I think you get it completely backwards here, the GPL imposes restrictions on distributors to ensure the freedom of the users.

First FOSS OS?

anton — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:15:10 +0000

>"GNU/Linux" was not used until 1994, pretty late in the game.

I installed Yggdrasil LGX (Linux/GNU/X) in 1993.

GNU/Busybox ?!?

greve — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 12:29:27 +0000

That is, I suspect he would insist on calling the whole thing GNU if he thought it would work.

All I can say to this is that when I spoke to him, he never gave me that impression. In fact, he always seemed to make it clear that only a combination of the GNU System with the GNU Hurd kernel would be "the GNU System" in his eyes.

But ultimately only RMS can tell us what RMS really thinks.

GNU/Busybox ?!?

k8to — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 10:11:54 +0000

> RMS even seems to give preference to the admittedly more cumbersome
> "GNU+Linux" form, which I believe is owed to his trying to make it
> very clear this is not a prefix for some independent project, but
> a combination of the two. If he had truly wanted to "claim fame" on
> the Linux kernel, he could just have proposed to rename the whole
> system to "GNU," but to my knowledge he never did that.

But this is exactly what he believes. He believes it is the GNU system, whether or not the components are in fact GNU components or other components which work in harmony with the GNU ones. The necessity of using terms like "GNU/Linux" is simply because Linux already had the name recognition and branding trains in motion, and no direct means of raising the profile was found to be available.

That is, I suspect he would insist on calling the whole thing GNU if he thought it would work.

"GNU+Linux" at least has the minor amount of tact to not imply that Linux is a GNU component.

GNU/Busybox ?!?

greve — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 10:43:51 +0000

Wait, you're saying that GNU/Whatever was all just tongue in cheek?

No, I did not say it was all just tounge in cheek.

I was not personally involved in that decision, so take this with a grain of salt, please:

To my understanding, a major reason the FSF (there was no FSFE at the time) began talking about GNU/Linux was that in the second half of the 90s many newcomers to Free Software only heard about "Linux" and were not making contact with the GNU Project and its philosophical and scientific roots anymore.

Forgetting these roots is dangerous. It makes it impossible to see the full picture when having to make a decision about our projects or just our personal use of software. The result are bad decisions that sometimes affect only ourselves, and sometimes affect the entire community.

A less important reason was that there were GNU reference manuals, books, mouse pads and mugs being published that called themselves "Linux reference" even though they had no relation with the kernel. I think that every programmer should be able to emphasise with this situation. Yes, considering the amount of work and dedication that had gone into the GNU Project, the FSF was indeed unhappy about this development and sought to change it.

In order to serve both goals while not making the mistake of claiming recognition for someone else's work, RMS came up with the "GNU+Linux" or "GNU/Linux" names.

RMS even seems to give preference to the admittedly more cumbersome "GNU+Linux" form, which I believe is owed to his trying to make it very clear this is not a prefix for some independent project, but a combination of the two. If he had truly wanted to "claim fame" on the Linux kernel, he could just have proposed to rename the whole system to "GNU," but to my knowledge he never did that.

Both of these considerations existed, with the former being much more important than the latter in my eyes. This is the serious background of it. But yes: We also seem to take it much less grave than many people in this discussion and indeed often use it in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

Using it was not intended as a hostile act, and I hope I was able to make this clear now.

GNU/Busybox ?!?

greve — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 10:10:21 +0000

A very large part of my time -- 160 days of the year the last time I cared to count -- is spent on the road, meeting people from the community, from industry, governments and intergovernmental bodies, such as European Commission and United Nations. The majority of the remainder is spent working with the very same groups by means of the internet.

Based on that experience, it seems to me this strongly polarised reaction to "GNU/" is a phenomenon that only exists within a certain part of the Free Software community. It also seems predominant within the United States and among those focused on the US. It does exist in other countries, too, but is much less of an issue.

That also seems reflected in the nature of many comments in this thread, which seem predominantly directed at or referring to experience with our sister organisation in the United States, and often appear to have very little connection with FSFE or my article.

But as I wrote before: It probably would have been wise to take the feelings of the aforementioned group into account when writing the article, and I see this discussion as a learning experience in that sense.

First FOSS OS?

anonymous1 — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 04:05:24 +0000

>how about Benjamin Franklin founding the first public library in the country?

Your references are interesting. ACLU, EFF, Ben Franklin. "the country" by which i presume you mean USA.

I guess only 5% of the worlds population matters. The rest? ohh they can be slaves to copyright. Right? I have to reject that NorthAmerican centrisim.

Of all the orgs that you mentioned I have great respect for Micheal Hart of Project Gutenberg. He is an advocate of the Public Domain. and i dont think he likes more than 14 (maybe 28) year copyrights.

> And if you don't believe in copyrights, you should never
> release any code under the GPL but place it in the public domain
> instead (or at least an MIT/BSD license).

and allow other people to make put code back under the slavery of copyright. Nope. GPL defends Freedom, and I am not going to use anything inferior. Of course you understand this well

"[GPL] preamble explaining how it uses copyright law against itself, to effectively keep software in the public domain, and prevent it from being taken OUT of the public domain" -Rob Landley

> Of course the more _obvious_ way you're in conflict with reality
> is that the current legal system very extensively contradicts you

yeah... europe dominated the world for a 500 hundred years and copyright is ubiquitous since the colonial powers signed berne(?) in late 1800s. i see no reason to assume that law defines morality.

> only let you pay me for me to do it for you while you remain
> in ignorance of my secret, forever?

Good strawman. Read "Against Intellectual Monopoly"
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

most of what we produce is for local consumption, in our local societies. if you reveal a secret in your local community, they why should people who are shores away pay you a royalty. because you are royalty and can impose your will on them? you mean colonial subjects. Now i get it.

I notice that you did not bother to reply to my assertion the OSS people dont care "if under current laws 99% of the worlds non-western people are criminals under copyright law." I presume you read "Misinterpreting Copyright"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html

non-western goverments (in the 60's and 70's)tried and failed to get better copyright treaties

C.F. Johnson,'The Origins of the Stockholm Protocol',
Bulletin of the Copyright Society of the USA, XVIII (1970)
vol 18, pp91, 142-143, 180.

Access to Knowledge is another recent effort to deal with the salvery of copyright and other forms of "IP" .
http://www.cptech.org/a2k/

Can I mirror Galactic Guide?

anonymous1 — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 03:23:30 +0000

Do I the freedoms of free culture w.r.t. Galactic Guide?

Should it be GNU/Linux

nix — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 14:37:03 +0000

The rule-of-thumb the FSF uses is `if the fix is trivial, no assignment is required: things ten lines long or less are assumed trivial'.

It looks like you slipped in just above that limit.

(I find it very little effort to do the occasional copyright assignment dance: the *really* annoying part is getting your employer to disclaimer-of-rights forms, because even if they agree they can be *so* damn slow at it it's not true. I've had to wait >6mths for these sometimes.)

Should it be GNU/Linux

man_ls — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 21:55:28 +0000

[about RMS, and his visionary qualities]
>Why is that "reactionary"?
He was striving to maintain the status quo. Return to the glorius past.

That is like saying that Mohandas Gandhi was reactionary because he just wanted to "return to the glorious past" when the English did not rule India. True, but lopsided.

Stallman wanted not to return to a naïve past where kind people shared code, but go on to a new situation where people wrote free software because they wanted it to be free, and companies (a new concept) pooled their effort. Guess what, it works.

[again about RMS, and his cathedralicious model of development]
It's in the book, though, if you look for it:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathed...

Ah, you worried me. For a moment I thought it was there, plain for all to see as a central recurrent theme and I had missed it: that instead of talking about closed, proprietary software Raymond was speaking about his old buddy Stallman all the time. But it is sort of hidden, isn't it?

GNU/Busybox ?!?

bronson — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:01:49 +0000

Wait, you're saying that GNU/Whatever was all just tongue in cheek? Not serious? Ten years of just for fun antics??

GNU/Busybox ?!?

k8to — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:10:38 +0000

You should really reconsider this blithe view towards the prefixing of "GNU/".

Within the faithful fold, where you are apparently spending most of your time, you may view the prefix as without charge, and thus as something to use descriptively, playfully, as well as in the course of promotion. In the larger world, however, as you have seen, this prefix is a highly charged issue. The goal of mentioning the GNU project where its works are used and relevant can easily be accomplished without resorting to affixing its name to independent software projects. If you honestly wish to simply give the GNU project mention, then do that.

Every time I see the prefix "GNU/" attached to an independent software project, I am not reminded of the goals and noble ideals of the Free Software Foundation. I am instead reminded of the rigidity and unwillingness to listen or compromise of the organization. I suspect this is similar for many people who encounter Linux first, and GNU later. While I would be ecstatic if the FSF would learn to compromise (not their ideals!) on practical matters with other members of the free ecosystem, and to appear less rigid, I would be pleased as punch if the FSF would simply cease reminding me of these weaknesses.

Should it be GNU/Linux

bronson — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 16:53:08 +0000

Sure they did. Back in the late 90s, I wanted to submit a 15 line rather obvious bugfix to the viper elisp package. It took a snail mail letter and three weeks to clear up the copyright assignment. I almost didn't bother.

I do hope you're right and the FSF is being more realistic now. Not to long ago, though, they required papers for just about anything. I think I still have the proof in my filing cabinet!

GNU/Busybox ?!?

nix — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:02:53 +0000

RMS is an awful social discourse lawyer ;)

Computer historian?

nix — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:02:20 +0000

Cygnus forked egcs? Almost the entire development community forked it (even the original maintainer, kenner, participated in both forks for a while, until the pace of development on egcs forced abandonment of the original fork). The fork was done with RMS's agreement, as an experiment.

That doesn't seem like a unilateral one-company fork to me.

GNU/Busybox ?!?

nix — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:59:20 +0000

The only panicker (and conspiracy theorist) on this thread seems to be you.

Should it be GNU/Linux

nix — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:58:05 +0000

`A line here, a bugfix there' do not and have never required copyright assignment papers.

Using Emacs requires learning Lisp?

nix — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:53:56 +0000

Doing anything much with Emacs customization used to require learning Lisp, but this hasn't been true for perhaps a decade. One of the problems with long-lived projects is that they acquire reputations which they then drag around long after they are no longer accurate.

(In any case, it's not as if elisp is very hard to learn, at least not to the depth required to customize Emacs. I learnt that much of it in two hours when I was twelve from the emacs-lisp-intro...)

GNU/Busybox ?!?

greve — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:32:47 +0000

Oh, come on.. You are the president of the FSF Europe. If you talk about the achievement of the GNU project like this, you are singing your own praises.

Yes, I am the president of FSFE and I have my own roots in the GNU Project through some software and the monthly Brave GNU World column that I wrote for many years. So I openly concede a positive emotional attachment of myself to the GNU Project.

At the same time it is our sister organisation in the United States, the original FSF, that is taking care of most of the legal and administrative issues of the GNU Project, which is a project that otherwise spans individuals, companies, and countries.

So if you try to see this as an issue of praise, I'd see this as singing the praises of all the individuals and companies involved in the GNU Project, the praises of our sister organisation, and that of RMS. But I don't see this as an issue of praise primarily, and am fairly sure this view is shared by most in FSFE, possibly most people outside the US.

Only speaking for those that I have discussed this with now: We like the "GNU/" because it reminds us of the principles, thoughts and plan behind starting the GNU Project, and using it will help to not forget that background.

At the same time we don't seem to take using it half as seriously as some people in this discussion are about not using it. We regularly use it tongue-in-cheek, some people even prefixed their own name.

Yesterday it was GNU/Linux, today it is GNU/Busybox, what are you going to GNU/ next?

Based on the above, I'd have two answers for you.

The one that should be understood with my tongue in my cheek would be: "GNU/ your life!"

The more serious one would be to not take this so seriously, and have some patience with those of us who like the GNU Project and what it stands for. This is why people are using the "GNU/" prefix for things that they see as based on or growing out of that original declaration of software freedom.

To most of these people this would be a badge of honor. If the recipient of that badge and affection finds it objectionable, I'd hope for some patience, tolerance and possibly humor in the reception of that badge.

There's a lesson here: This minor detail is drowning out some of the effect of your good article. Think about it the next time you GNU/ a program.

First of all: Thank you for the feedback. I am glad you found the article useful.

Secondly: Yes. The rather strong reaction to four specific characters out of 10k of article seems to have created a disproportionate and distracting discussion. So yes, I'll keep this in mind as a learning experience.

The road to freedom in the embedded world

greve — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:35:31 +0000

You misunderstood me. (English is not my first language.)

No problem. It is also not my first language, so the misunderstanding might as well have taken place on my side.

BUT what I was trying to say is that Minimo is not (yet) an equivalent drop-in-and-forget replacement for Opera on the N800.

From some of the discussions it seems that people aren't exactly happy with Opera on the grounds of technology, either. So I am not entirely sure how the technological comparison would work out in the end. But this is somewhat besides the point: People who value their freedom high enough to allow for some inconvenience can choose to install a Free Software browser already. This to me is good enough to talk about "replacing" Opera.

And if enough people go down that road and also let Nokia know that they are unhappy about a proprietary browser on their tablets, maybe they will reconsider their default choice.

GNU/Busybox ?!?

k8to — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 02:14:47 +0000

> That insistence is not legally backed (and actually it's just RMS
> saying `I won't talk to you unless you call it GNU/foo', and RMS is
> quite within his rights to decide who he personally talks to, even
> if everyone else thinks this particular criterion is silly.)

I personally find it to transgress upon the "laws" of social discourse ;-)

GNU/Busybox ?!?

k8to — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 02:12:08 +0000

That was sarcasm.

Should it be GNU/Linux

landley — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 17:48:45 +0000

> > Ok, let's go to http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/ and read the bit
> > right above the download link:
>
> I'm not sure I follow you, the existence of large libraries of public
> domain code (even complete operating systems) at a moment in time is
> nice, but the real problem would come when IBM and the rest changed
> their view on copyright and started asserting it. Stallman set out to
> make an OS which could not be made proprietary.

IBM didn't make the existing versions proprietary, they stopped releasing
new open versions. (Keep in mind IBM didn't accept outside contributions
to their OS. The modern equivalent of this is that the sole copyright
holder were free to issue new licenses, as Sun is doing with the GPL.
But the code that was out there stayed out there.)

IBM's big change of heart was called the "Object Code Only (OCO) Policy",
issued February 8, 1983. Here's a copy of their original announcement:
http://landley.net/history/mirror/ibm/oco.html

Here's the final report of SHARE's attempt to get IBM to change its mind
(essentially giving up 5 years later):
http://www.redbug.org/dba/sharerpt/share71/s987.html

And an history article putting it in context:
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1369/LWD000606S390/

> > I repeat my earlier assertion that for most of the 1970's proprietary
> > software wasn't even an issue on the hobbyist programmer community's
> > radar.
>
> True, that is precisely why Stallman was being visionary by being
> concerned before the rest of the world saw the problem of the
> proprietary approach everyone was taking.

Going from a world that had less than a hundred thousand computers in it
to a world that has more than a hundred million in the space of about 15
years led to some impressive culture shock on the part of the programming
community. What happened is that most of the existing programmers didn't
see alternative ways of doing things as a _threat_, because they didn't
realize they were about to be outnumbered by a factor of 1000.

> > Which gets us back to "the FSF wasn't being visionary, it was being
> > reactionary and conservative from day 1".
>
> A bit contradictory (or again I'm not following you), Stallman saw the
> problem not only with proprietary development, but also with public
> domain and BSD-style licenses. That is why he created the GPLv2 and the
> FSF. Why is that "reactionary"?

He was striving to maintain the status quo. Return to the glorius past.
The way we did it in the good old days was superior to these newfangled
professional software development businesses.

He may have been right, but that doesn't change the nature of his
actions. And how right he was when what he was originally trying to
defend was the ITS system against the MIT administration, and the rebase
to Unix only came about when the PDP-10 hardware line and
proposed "Jupiter" follow-on project were cancelled (also in 1983),
rendering ITS (written entirely in PDP-10 assembly) a clear dead-end.
His move to Unix was forced upon him when ITS died, he just wanted to
move as little as possible.

Fast forward to _today_ and people are going "oh, what great new insights
do you have for us with your keen eye for the future" when all he ever
did was prefer 1977 to 1983. I do not look for great insights from this
man, I look for clever hacks to defend ideas from the 1970's, often with
long elaborate rationalizations for things he's already made up his mind
on. (Show me the last time he _changed_ his mind due to new information.
Yeah I know, he's not inflexible, he's making a stand on principle. I
honestly thought he might take up the cause of deCSS in 2000, but ITS
couldn't play DVDs. There still isn't a GNU deCSS implementation. Not a
battle he wants to fight.)

> > The Cathedral and the Bazaar was a paper about how Linus's working
> > style differed from that of the FSF. (The cathedral was specifically
> > the FSF.)
>
> I have seen this assertion of yours a couple of times, and it is what
> made me answer this post: where do you get this impression?

From Eric Raymond directly, while editing The Art of Unix Programming
(check the intro for my name), and outright co-authoring things like the
OSI reaction paper to the SCO lawsuit, Halloween 9, and the 64-bit paper
(which he insisted on titling "world domination 201")...

It's in the book, though, if you look for it:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathed...

> But few of us really thought very hard about what we were doing, or
> about what the very existence of that archive suggested about problems
> in the FSF's cathedral-building development model.

A couple times he's talked about a specific 1996 conference that Tim
O'Reiley put together (and that he, Linus, and RMS attended) where worked
it all out for the first time, seeing them next to each other and
thinking about the differences. I could ask him for details...

> I don't see why not. The piece of paper is just needed once per
> developer;

Needed at precisely the wrong time.

I touched on it here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2002/1/29/9

Most developers start out as casual contributors. A line here, a bugfix
there. The less they have invested in participating in a project's
development, the more easily discouraged they are. Needing a sign-off to
get cvs commit access is one thing, but needing a sign-off to take your
five line function? Eh, it wasn't that important anyway.

> developers do not change that much,

In a project with 1000 semi-regular contributors, the top 20 don't change
that much month to month. Call the newspapers.

The point is where do they come from? Let's look at a couple of
examples:

Con Koliavs: scheduler dude. When he got into Linux his day job was as
an Australian anesthesiologist, he started poking around Linux for fun.
First time he wandered away, two years later he tried again and got
hooked:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/465

Andrew Morton, current #2 in the development community. Only got involved
in the project in 2000, because a NIC he was using had been declared
obsolete and he sent in a patch fixing it. (Was anybody other than him
still _using_ that NIC? Dunno. He could have maintained it out of tree,
but it was easier to get it merged so it wouldn't break again.)
http://kerneltrap.org/node/10

Even the early adopters did stuff before Linux. Alan Cox used to do
Amiga stuff and MUDs, Peter Anvin first used Linux to put together
terminal servers...

Back when I read the first year or so of the linux kernel mailing list, I
collected a few interesting posts (with links back to the originals in
the archive):
http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1991.html
http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1992.html

Now ask yourself: how many of those people would have just wandered away
again if Linus had asked them to fill out paperwork as a condition of
participating?

Attracting and breaking in new developers is extremely important to the
long-term health of a project. This is why things like kernelnewbies.org
exist.

Rob

Should it be GNU/Linux

man_ls — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 00:40:22 +0000

Ok, let's go to http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/ and read the bit right above the download link:

I'm not sure I follow you, the existence of large libraries of public domain code (even complete operating systems) at a moment in time is nice, but the real problem would come when IBM and the rest changed their view on copyright and started asserting it. Stallman set out to make an OS which could not be made proprietary.

I repeat my earlier assertion that for most of the 1970's proprietary software wasn't even an issue on the hobbyist programmer community's radar.

True, that is precisely why Stallman was being visionary by being concerned before the rest of the world saw the problem of the proprietary approach everyone was taking.

Which gets us back to "the FSF wasn't being visionary, it was being reactionary and conservative from day 1".

A bit contradictory (or again I'm not following you), Stallman saw the problem not only with proprietary development, but also with public domain and BSD-style licenses. That is why he created the GPLv2 and the FSF. Why is that "reactionary"?

The Cathedral and the Bazaar was a paper about how Linus's working style differed from that of the FSF. (The cathedral was specifically the FSF.)

I have seen this assertion of yours a couple of times, and it is what made me answer this post: where do you get this impression? Even in the abstract we read:

I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the ``cathedral'' model of most of the commercial world versus the ``bazaar'' model of the Linux world.

Or this paragraph:

Perhaps this is not only the future of open-source software. No closed-source developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem. Very few could afford even to hire the more than 200 (1999: 600, 2000: 800) people who have contributed to fetchmail!

I don't think Raymond considers GNU as "closed-source". There are a thousand examples all over the text where "cathedral" is equated with "closed-source", "proprietary", "commercial" etc. It is true that FSF development seems to be more "cathedralicious" or centralized than other free software projects, but saying that they were the epitome of cathedral development is quite misguided IMHO.

The FSF insisted on physical copyright assignments with a signature on a piece of paper, and still do. Linus often merges over a hundred patches in a day, that kind of bureaucracy just wouldn't work.

I don't see why not. The piece of paper is just needed once per developer; after that you can contribute as much as you want. Given that developers do not change that much, that many of them come from companies (which can ease much of the paperwork) and that copyright assignment is not needed for one-line patches, it is not a significant entry barrier.

We all forgot rockbox

coriordan — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:50:16 +0000

I just noticed that there's no mention of rockbox, not in the article and not in the hundred comments. Maybe it's a simpler project than internet pads and telephones, but it's still a fantastic project, and they seem to be starting to get cooperation from hardware manufactures (see this about their discussions with Austria Microsystems).

Gtk+ versus Qt

oak — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:36:51 +0000

>> Another issue is that Qt doesn't really have a community developing
>> the widget set like is with Gnome/Gtk,
>
> You mean like the KDE devs

Don't they develope things atop Qt, instead developing Qt itself?
AFAIK Trolltech doesn't accept changes from others because they
need to have full ownership of everything in Qt to be able
to dual-license its code. Or do they offer also an option
of contributor resigning all the rights to his code to Trolltech?

> http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

Yes, the code will be freed if Trolltech is bought, but the
foundation doesn't come with the Qt developers currently in
the Trolltech payroll. Code without a proper knowledge transfer
from the previous maintainers (or without clear owner / decision
process in technical matters) is much harder to maintain. I don't
know whether this would be a problem in practice. It depends a bit
what would happen with Trolltech and its employees and how much
involvement e.g. current KDE devs have with Qt.

Should it be GNU/Linux

landley — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:30:03 +0000

> IMHO it is reasonable for the FSF to ask people to use the
> name "GNU/Linux"; after all, it was Stallman who came out with the idea
> of a libre, complete operating system, and they are the only ones
> providing it...

Ok, let's go to http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/ and read the bit right
above the download link:

> This site contains copies of distribution tapes, other source and
> object code libraries, and pregenerated, runnable distributions of IBM
> public domain software written for the System/360 and System/370
> mainframe computers.
>
> All of the software on this site is in the public domain. IBM, by
> corporate policy, does not assert copyright ownership of any software
> which it distributed without copyright notices. US copyright law, until
> 1978, placed such materials in the public domain.

I repeat my earlier assertion that for most of the 1970's proprietary
software wasn't even an issue on the hobbyist programmer community's
radar. When Gates did his "letter to hobbyists" in 1976 the response was
essentially to laugh it off. The Lyons book was published before anyone
knew if it was even legally possible to copyright source code, which was
made explicit by a new law passed in 1979, and whether or not that
copyright extension covered binaries wasn't settled until Apple sued
Franklin over the ROM images in its' Apple II clones in 1983. (So
between 1979 and 1983 if you wanted to be sure copyright covered your
work you made darn sure to distribute source code with prominent
copyright notices.)

Which gets us back to "the FSF wasn't being visionary, it was being
reactionary and conservative from day 1".

> Linux itself has already been replaced.

Plus existence of BSD and MacOSX and the Posix certifications of Windows
NT and OS/360...

Closer to home, Shawn Jackman built a subset of the BusyBox applets under
newlib+libgloss in 2005, running against the bare metal with no
underlying OS kernel.

What Linux pioneered was modern open source collaborative development
through the internet with release early/release often and all that jazz.
And he's pioneered scaling that mode with a driver maintainers layer
between the project's leader and the developers, and then it went to a
four-layer thing with the lieutenants (essentially subsystem maintainers
above the driver maintainers). Plus being the first project to apply a
modern distributed source control system to open source development.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar was a paper about how Linus's working style
differed from that of the FSF. (The cathedral was specifically the FSF.)
The FSF benefitted from the internet but Linux was the first development
project predicated on taking full advantage of it from day one. (The FSF
insisted on physical copyright assignments with a signature on a piece of
paper, and still do. Linus often merges over a hundred patches in a day,
that kind of bureaucracy just wouldn't work.)

Using Emacs requires learning Lisp?

GreyWizard — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:27:31 +0000

No, I use vi over Emacs because learning Lisp never struck me as a reasonable requirement for a text editor to impose on its' users.

How does editing text with Emacs require learning Lisp? I'll admit that I do know Lisp but I don't often apply that to Emacs. Even when I do I'm experimenting or adding some custom feature, which is not normal use. I appreciate the light footprint and ubiquity of vi and I have no trouble accepting that many people like it better than Emacs, but I hope you have some reasons less silly than this one.

Sic transit GNU

GreyWizard — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:04:47 +0000

I also use vi instead of Emacs, and I point out that Ubuntu has replaced bash with dash as its' default #!/bin/sh in Edgy and Feisty (although I actually object to this because dash is broken).

So? As far as I can tell your position is not merely that it's *possible* to get by without this or that GNU component (that's clearly true) but that GNU failed and is irrelevant. Since a substantial number of people depend on Emacs, Bash and other GNU components on a day to day basis that can't be true. Noting that there are other people who don't seems to be just another way to say, "there are certainly plenty of other important projects in the free software community" which I said above.

Unix won.

Yes, obviously. But that's beside the point. The GNU project didn't set out rewrite Unix for technical reasons. Their goal was to ensure that a complete, free software operating system would be available. Distributions such as Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu and others may not be all things to all people (and yes, I know "Saint Ignutius" himself is unwilling to bless them) but GNU components remain a vital part of each and the free software philosophy articulated and promoted by RMS played a substantial role in making them what they are.

Spinning history to obscure this is not productive. You don't have to personally like RMS, to call the Linux based operating system on your computer GNU, to use the forthcoming GPLv3 as a license for your own work or otherwise accept any suggestion from the Free Software Foundation to appreciate the contributions they have made and continue to make to this community.

Computer historian?

landley — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:47:59 +0000

> You consider yourself a historian?

It's a hobby, and your argument here seems to be that there were perhaps
a half-dozen low-volume examples about 18 months before the turn of the
decade. I knew about this. That was the "to speak of" part.

> > Back in the 1970's there _was_ no proprietary software market to
> > speak of.
>
> In 1978 Microsoft had 11 employees, all doing proprietary software. It

Yup. Which they sold to hardware manufacturers for bundling with their
product, because selling directly to end users was not a commercially
viable option. Right at the end of the 1970's the bespoke software
development market finally started to scale.

Microsoft big customers were computer manufacturers like Mits and IMSAI,
their sales to end-users sucked badly enough to prompt the famous "letter
to hobbyists" in 1976. Microsoft's big cash cow as late as 1980 was its
contract for TRS-80 ROM images, which Gates talks about at some length in
this 1980 audio interview:

http://landley.net/history/mirror/ms/gates.mp3

According to the book "On the Edge"
(http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Fall-Commodor...)
Microsoft sold commodore unlimited rights to ROM BASIC for a one time
payment of $10K, and went on to sell it to Radio Shack for $20k. (This
was something like 1979, I'd double check and cite a page number but the
book's at home and I'm not.)

I already mentioned that Paul Allen's day job was at Mits, not HP. This
is off the top of my head, I'm mostly not checking references for this
thread.

> DRI was hardly the first; by 1974 (the year DRI was founded) several
> companies were successfully selling business software.

For mainframes and minicomputers, sure. I mentioned the bespoke bit
where you comission very low volume software at extremely high per-unit
costs?

> By 1980 Apple had 1000 employees

Selling hardware.

> was the year when WordStar was published,

http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ does a decent job of covering that (starting
in chapter 3), but again: volume in the toilet back on CP/M.

> and VisiCalc was soon to follow.

Which I mentioned.

> But this is just in the microcomputer area; a fledging 1970s market saw
> the birth of such companies as Compuware (1973), Computer Associates
> (1976), SAS Institute (also 1976) or Oracle Corporation (as SDL, 1977);
> meanwhile Software AG had been founded in 1969 in Germany; and in 1972
> in the US. I would hardly call that "no proprietary software market".

This was the bespoke market I mentioned. Each copy of that software sold
for a year's salary of programmer time, because the total number of
machines it could run on was so limited. With a setup like that, each
copy is essentially tailored to that customer.

> According to Levenez, by 1983 there were already several commercial
> Unix variants, including Microsoft's Xenix and HP-UX. Presumably AT&T
> were making money from it, which counts as "commercializing" IMHO.

I've read his chart and exchanged email to the guy. Xenix was
commissioned in 1979 (SCO did the implementation as a two-person
consulting shop, and that was founded in 1979). And this gets us back
to "software bundled with a hardware purchase" again.

And AT&T were _forbidden_ from making money from it due to their 1959
antitrust consent decree. They were a regulated monopoly and could not
diversify out of the telephone business. They agreed to be broken up in
1983 (the breakup was in 1984 but the judgement was in 83) to get out
from under that antitrust decress so they could diversify into things
like the computer industry. (Bell labs came out with the transistor, the
laser, and unix, and all they could do with any of it was upgrade their
phone switches.)

> > And the first complete reimplementation of Unix (BSD, again predating
> > the GNU manifesto) still has several forks active today.
>
> As has been mentioned before, not true: Coherent and a few other
> independent variants existed before BSD itself was independent.

BSD was clearly started before coherent, but coherent was finished first,
therefore it's "first". GNU was started before Linux. GNU still hasn't
been finished. Therefore GNU is first.

Pick one, will you?

> By the time I got acquainted with Solaris in 2000, the first thing
> everyone did to accomplish anything useful was to download several GNU
> packages such as Bash or GNU tar; not to speak about GCC. I am certain
> that GNU's popularity was not because it provided "FTP space".

In that case it's because Ed Zander decided to unbundle the compiler (and
other things) from Solaris so he could charge extra for it, and this made
gcc the de-facto compiler of Solaris. I mentioned this in another post.

(Personally I lump Solaris in with Desqview and OS/2 as "of only
historical interest", but I realize there remains a vocal minority who
will defend it for years to come. Just as OS/2 had.)

> GCC has not stagnated;

The original development line did. Cygnus forked egcs and took over the
name, and these days the driving force behind it seems to be
CodeSourcery.

I mentioned this.

> Unverifiable and biased statements are not (or should not be) the modus
> operandi for a historian.

I'm not currently trying to write an article with citations, I'm saying
I've done a lot of research here and this is what I remember off the top
of my head, away from my references and not spending time to look things
up for a simple message thread.

Historian isn't my day job. Programming is, and has been for years. (I
was offered a book contract once for a history of Linux, but didn't have
time.)

(P.S. Citing wikipedia to back anything up is hilarious. It's pretty
much the modern definition of "non-authoritative reference". A secondary
source at best.)

First FOSS OS?

landley — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:03:45 +0000

> But with freedom of knowledge?

http://lwn.net/Articles/177602/

And a couple hundred years earlier, how about Benjamin Franklin founding
the first public library in the country? (Do you honestly think this is
a recent development unique to one individual? Hello? Did you miss the
whole printing press thing?)

> > Yeah, Stallman took credit for BSD when I drove up to Boston to
> > interview
>
> Can you provide a link to his saying that? I know he claims to have
> influenced the BSD *License*, but I have not seen him take credit for
> the projects code. Link please.

Ok, you see above where I said "I drove up to Boston to interview him in
2000"? Spoke face to face? (He borrowed my car and left it unlocked on
the streets of Boston, and gave me a shirt someone had just given to him,
because he refuses to wear anything that has writing on it and it
says "snow" with a picture of a snowflake over the pocket. I still have
the shirt.)

He didn't claim credit for the code, he said that he spoke to someone (on
the phone, I think, might have been Keith Bostic?) when AT&T first
challenged them on copyright grounds and convinced them to fight back and
release a cleaned-out version. (It seems unlikely that they wouldn't
have without him, but it was a digression I didn't follow up on. I note
that McKusick's write-up of this history didn't mention a need for
outside prompting to do any of this:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html )

I've been doing my computer history research for a longish time. :)

During this interview I specificaly asked him what the FSF was doing
about deCSS and software patents. He wasn't intersted, said it wasn't
their fight, and that he had his hands full with what he was already
doing. (Which as far as I could tell, in 2000 consisted entirely of the
Gnu/Linux/Dammit campaign and traveling to brazil and czechoslovakia
giving speeches which Maddog was doing just as much of from a different
angle. I TRIED to convince him deCSS was important, to his face, in
2000, and he just wouldn't bite.)

> Please stop this. RMS is controversial enough without you making things
> up and smearing him. I am not objecting to you questiong GNUs
> contribution in todays FOSS world. But this is over the top.

I may be just a touch biased after my friends Kandy Danner and Stu Green
hosted a barbecue for him in Austin a few years back where he managed to
insult the hostess, hit on a 14 year old girl named Amber, and basically
Not Get Invited Back in a big way. (And no, I didn't make that up.)

However, my point was that Stallman taking credit for Minix-inspired
Linux makes exactly as much sense to me as Stallman taking credit for
Adam Smith.

> But Freedom of knowledge and Public Domain are even better than
> the "open source" that is where RMS philosophy comes in.

Back in the last 90's my roommate was a graduate student getting a
Master's of Library Science, and six months ago I had three different
coworkers doing clearances for Project Gutenberg. Also, Intellectual
Property Law has been a hobby of mine since sometime before I wrote this:

http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...

And I've been following the Electronic Frontier Foundation since the
Steve Jackson raid, as did everyone in the BBS world. I'd never heard of
the FSF back then, and they certainly didn't step up to defend him.

None of that has anything to do with the FSF.

> For a lot of people the slavery of copyright is OK.

Just a little over the top, don't you think?

> But for me it is not. d I wish not to be a slave to the "Intellectual
> Property" of anybody in the world.

There are five major kinds of IP law: copyrights, patents, trademarks,
contracts, and trade secrets. Very few people rail against trademarks or
contracts, and the point of both copyright and patent is to suck users
_away_ from trade secrets, which were dominant through the middle ages
and a _huge_ drag on historical progress (the whole "alchemy"
vs "chemistry" thing).

> Knowledge is not property. Deal with it.

If I have it and you don't and I'm never going to tell you what it is,
only let you pay me for me to do it for you while you remain in ignorance
of my secret, forever?

Patents are designed to expire, and they make you document the thing.
They've gotten screwed up recently but the original purpose made a whole
lot of sense. And if you don't believe in copyrights, you should never
release any code under the GPL but place it in the public domain instead
(or at least an MIT/BSD license).

Of course the more _obvious_ way you're in conflict with reality is that
the current legal system very extensively contradicts you. Fundamentally
land itself doesn't actually belong to anyone, it was here a million
years before we were and is likely to remain long after. But I still
have the legal right to shoot you for trespassing.

Which of us has problem dealing with reality? Saying "it shouldn't be
this way" is not the same as saying "it currently isn't this way". You
have to recognize current reality before you can change it.

Rob

Free software, FOSS, RMS, and too much discursion

filker0 — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:38:14 +0000

I never meant to imply that RMS was unique in that regard. There were a number of us in the
free software community at the time who were just as upset about trends as he was. Our
motivations overlapped, but were not always the same. My mention of Unipress is because of
the Emacs debicle; that was Stallman's motive for becoming the advocate that he became. There
were people who worked at DEC who were at least RMS's equal when it came to software
freedom, but they had other motives as well (such as insuring the ability to run something they
liked on hardware that the authors didn't support, or no longer supported.)

About that same time, AT&T decided to try to make a commercial go at Unix, and the licensing
became much more restrictive (and expensive) than it had been. This made it more difficult for
software tinkerers to try out new OS ideas within an existing OS. (No other "full featured" OS was
available on so many different hardware architectures at the time.) This is where the "Pubix"
project came from, and a motivation for GNU (the original goal) as well. Keep in mind, this was
in the early to mid 1980s. The PC was not the target of most of these earlier projects; PDP-11s,
VAXen, other mini-computers, plus DEC-10/20s, and most likely Burroughs, Univac, IBM, CDC
and Honeywell mainframes, were the target systems. It wasn't until the 386 that GNU software
really had much penetration into the Intel based personal computer segment.

My motivation for getting into the free software community was a mix of expansion of
knowledge, sharing of ideas, support for odd environments and architectures, and to improve
the quality of software. I've never had the anti-commercial software / anti-copyright agenda,
though I am firmly and vocally anti software patents. I agree with Linus about GPLv2, and think
that GPLv3 is more a political statement than it needs to be. I think that the anti-* stuff that has
been added to the draft should be in "optional" parts that can be included or excluded as the
author of the original work chooses. My original view of free software was that if you incorporate
a free software component into your proprietary work, anyone should have the right to the
source for that component in its original form and, in most cases, your modification of it, but did
not extend to the entire composite that included that component. I saw some of the early GPL
stuff and thought it was over-reaching, and continued to release code into the public domain
well into the 90s before I ever released anything under the GPL. The library license made me
more comfortable.

I knew RMS at the time all this was happening, as he and I shared some friends. I doubt that he
ever took notice of me; I did help Martin Minow maintain Dave Conroy's DECUS C collection (I did
the POS version of libc, and contributed in one or two other minor places), and he invited me to
parties that Stallman also attended. I was not overly impressed with RMS, but then again, I never
worked with him nor dealt with him on any technical issues, just met him at parties in the Boston
area, and he tended to be a bit arrogant, and I was somewhat arrogant myself in my own quiet
way and found him a bit abrasive. It was a long time ago.

My heros in the Free Software arena include the afore mentioned David Conroy (now at
Microsoft), Martin Minow (greatly missed), Andrew S. Tannenbaum (or however he spells it), Larry
Wall (even though I've never liked Perl much), along with a few others who nobody reading this
are likely to have heard about and that I've lost track of.

RMS may still be involved in the development of software, but he has made himself into a full-
time fundimentalist Free Software evangelist. His stated positions are too absolute for my tastes,
but I believe that if he were to bend towards any middle ground, his position as avatar of the
Free Software movement will be forever compromised. You might want to view RMS as the Pope,
with ESR as Martin Luther. Me? I'm Jewish, so I have my own beliefs. At least neither Richard nor
Eric has ever tried to imprison me as a non-believer, though I think that Eric may have once
joked about doing me harm (at a filksing; I don't remember for sure) for a bad pun or some such.

I am not anti-RMS, but I'm not pro, either. I do believe that the GNU project has done a lot of
good. I have personally benefited from it. I believe that GNU and FSF have a place in today's
market of ideas. I do not believe that they should be able to retroactively add new restrictions to
existing GPL licensed software that they don't own; what they do with the stuff they do own is
their business. I am anti-DRM, anti-software patent, and anti-copyright abuse.

So getting back to the original point -- RMS was pushed over the edge to become the advocate
he became because of what happened with one of his creations, emacs. Had it not been him, it
would have been someone else. It took many years between the announcement of the GNU
project and the rise of FSF in the free software movement. GCC became what it is now because
hardware vendors saw it as a way to get a compiler for their new processor on the cheap, so they
helped with its development, either funding others to do it or doing the work themselves and
releasing that back "upstream" (as they were required to do).

I will not belittle what RMS has done, but I don't believe that he's the pioneer that some paint him
as (I'm not sure that he paints himself that way, I've not spoken to him personally since 1985).
He is a figure that looms large, and has a personality to go with it. He is no closer to the truth
than many others, but he's louder than most. He stands on the shoulders of giants, true, but
he's not alone, and others stand on his shoulders. Don't discount him; He has a lot of influence.
Don't take him too seriously; that leads to a narrowing of your own horizons. Think for yourself
and don't be afraid to agree with him on some things and disagree on others.

First FOSS OS?

vonbrand — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:22:45 +0000

To be totally accurate, libc5 for Linux was a early version of GNU libc, hacked up so it wasn't recognizable anymore (because the starting point was very sorely lacking abandonware; Linux needing a decent libc made GNU libc development (re)start in earnest).

GNU/Busybox ?!?

NigelK — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:20:42 +0000

As an exercise for the reader, read through the Groklaw articles and count the instances of phrases along the lines of

* "The community doesn't want that."

* "The community doesn't work like that."

* "CommunityMemberFooBar is not acting in the interests of the community."

She seems to write about what the community wants, and yet her views only represent a small part of it these days.