Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software Part 15

A student at the nearby University of Helsinki at the time, Torvalds regarded Stallman with bemus.e.m.e.nt. "I saw, for the first time in my life, the stereotypical long-haired, bearded hacker type," recalls Torvalds in his 2001 autobiography Just for Fun. "We don't have much of them in Helsinki."See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-59.

While not exactly attuned to the "sociopolitical" side of the Stallman agenda, Torvalds nevertheless appreciated the agenda's underlying logic: no programmer writes error-free code. By sharing software, hackers put a program's improvement ahead of individual motivations such as greed or ego protection.

Like many programmers of his generation, Torvalds had cut his teeth not on mainframe computers like the IBM 7094, but on a motley a.s.sortment of home-built computer systems. As university student, Torvalds had made the step up from C programming to Unix, using the university's MicroVAX. This ladder-like progression had given Torvalds a different perspective on the barriers to machine access. For Stallman, the chief barriers were bureaucracy and privilege. For Torvalds, the chief barriers were geography and the harsh Helsinki winter.

Forced to trek across the University of Helsinki just to log in to his Unix account, Torvalds quickly began looking for a way to log in from the warm confines of his off-campus apartment.

The search led Torvalds to the operating system Minix, a lightweight version of Unix developed for instructional purposes by Dutch university professor Andrew Tanenbaum. The program fit within the memory confines of a 386 PC, the most powerful machine Torvalds could afford, but still lacked a few necessary features. It most notably lacked terminal emulation, the feature that allowed Torvalds' machine to mimic a university terminal, making it possible to log in to the MicroVAX from home.

During the summer of 1991, Torvalds rewrote Minix from the ground up, adding other features as he did so. By the end of the summer, Torvalds was referring to his evolving work as the "GNU/Emacs of terminal emulation programs."See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 78.

Feeling confident, he solicited a Minix newsgroup for copies of the POSIX standards, the software blue prints that determined whether a program was Unix compatible.

A few weeks later, Torvalds was posting a message eerily reminiscent of Stallman's original 1983 GNU posting:

h.e.l.lo everybody out there using minix-

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu for 386 (486) AT clones). This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).See "Linux 10th Anniversary."

http://www.linux10.org/history/

The posting drew a smattering of responses and within a month, Torvalds had posted a 0.01 version of the operating system-i.e., the earliest possible version fit for outside review-on an Internet FTP site. In the course of doing so, Torvalds had to come up with a name for the new system. On his own PC hard drive, Torvalds had saved the program as Linux, a name that paid its respects to the software convention of giving each Unix variant a name that ended with the letter X. Deeming the name too "egotistical," Torvalds changed it to Freax, only to have the FTP site manager change it back.

Although Torvalds had set out build a full operating system, both he and other developers knew at the time that most of the functional tools needed to do so were already available, thanks to the work of GNU, BSD, and other free software developers. One of the first tools the Linux development team took advantage of was the GNU C Compiler, a tool that made it possible to process programs written in the C programming language.

Integrating GCC improved the performance of Linux. It also raised issues. Although the GPL's "viral" powers didn't apply to the Linux kernel, Torvald's willingness to borrow GCC for the purposes of his own free software operating system indicated a certain obligation to let other users borrow back. As Torvalds would later put it: "I had hoisted myself up on the shoulders of giants."See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 96-97.

Not surprisingly, he began to think about what would happen when other people looked to him for similar support. A decade after the decision, Torvalds echoes the Free Software Foundation's Robert Cha.s.sel when he sums up his thoughts at the time: You put six months of your life into this thing and you want to make it available and you want to get something out of it, but you don't want people to take advantage of it. I wanted people to be able to see [Linux], and to make changes and improvements to their hearts' content. But I also wanted to make sure that what I got out of it was to see what they were doing. I wanted to always have access to the sources so that if they made improvements, I could make those improvements myself.See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 94-95.

When it was time to release the 0.12 version of Linux, the first to include a fully integrated version of GCC, Torvalds decided to voice his allegiance with the free software movement. He discarded the old kernel license and replaced it with the GPL. The decision triggered a porting spree, as Torvalds and his collaborators looked to other GNU programs to fold into the growing Linux stew. Within three years, Linux developers were offering their first production release, Linux 1.0, including fully modified versions of GCC, GDB, and a host of BSD tools.

By 1994, the amalgamated operating system had earned enough respect in the hacker world to make some observers wonder if Torvalds hadn't given away the farm by switching to the GPL in the project's initial months. In the first issue of Linux Journal, publisher Robert Young sat down with Torvalds for an interview.

When Young asked the Finnish programmer if he felt regret at giving up private owners.h.i.+p of the Linux source code, Torvalds said no. "Even with 20/20 hindsight," Torvalds said, he considered the GPL "one of the very best design decisions" made during the early stages of the Linux project.See Robert Young, "Interview with Linus, the Author of Linux," Linux Journal (March 1, 1994).

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2736

That the decision had been made with zero appeal or deference to Stallman and the Free Software Foundation speaks to the GPL's growing portability. Although it would take a few years to be recognized by Stallman, the explosiveness of Linux development conjured flashbacks of Emacs. This time around, however, the innovation triggering the explosion wasn't a software hack like Control-R but the novelty of running a Unix-like system on the PC architecture. The motives may have been different, but the end result certainly fit the ethical specifications: a fully functional operating system composed entirely of free software.

As his initial email message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup indicates, it would take a few months before Torvalds saw Linux as anything less than a holdover until the GNU developers delivered on the HURD kernel.

This initial unwillingness to see Linux in political terms would represent a major blow to the Free Software Foundation.

As far as Torvalds was concerned, he was simply the latest in a long line of kids taking apart and rea.s.sembling things just for fun. Nevertheless, when summing up the runaway success of a project that could have just as easily spent the rest of its days on an abandoned computer hard drive, Torvalds credits his younger self for having the wisdom to give up control and accept the GPL bargain.

"I may not have seen the light," writes Torvalds, reflecting on Stallman's 1991 Polytechnic University speech and his subsequent decision to switch to the GPL. "But I guess something from his speech sunk in ."See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 59.

interview offers an interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at Stallman's political att.i.tudes during the earliest days of the GNU Project. It is also helpful in tracing the evolution of Stallman's rhetoric. Describing the purpose of the GPL, Stallman says, "I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage." Contrast this with a statement to the author in August 2000: "I urge you not to use the term 'intellectual property' in your thinking. It will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. 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."

GNU/Linux

By 1993, the free software movement was at a crossroads. To the optimistically inclined, all signs pointed toward success for the hacker cultur. Wired magazine, a funky, new publication offering stories on data encryption, Usenet, and software freedom, was flying off magazine racks. The Internet, once a slang term used only by hackers and research scientists, had found its way into mainstream lexicon. Even President Clinton was using it. The personal computer, once a hobbyist's toy, had grown to full-scale respectability, giving a whole new generation of computer users access to hacker-built software. And while the GNU Project had not yet reached its goal of a fully intact, free software operating system, curious users could still try Linux in the interim.

Any way you sliced it, the news was good, or so it seemed. After a decade of struggle, hackers and hacker values were finally gaining acceptance in mainstream society. People were getting it.

Or were they? To the pessimistically inclined, each sign of acceptance carried its own troubling countersign. Sure, being a hacker was suddenly cool, but was cool good for a community that thrived on alienation? Sure, the White House was saying all the right things about the Internet, even going so far as to register its own domain name, whitehouse.gov, but it was also meeting with the companies, censors.h.i.+p advocates, and law-enforcement officials looking to tame the Internet's Wild West culture. Sure, PCs were more powerful, but in commoditizing the PC marketplace with its chips, Intel had created a situation in which proprietary software vendors now held the power. For every new user won over to the free software cause via Linux, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were booting up Microsoft Windows for the first time.

Finally, there was the curious nature of Linux itself.

Unrestricted by design bugs (like GNU) and legal disputes (like BSD), Linux' high-speed evolution had been so unplanned, its success so accidental, that programmers closest to the software code itself didn't know what to make of it. More compilation alb.u.m than operating system, it was comprised of a hacker medley of greatest hits: everything from GCC, GDB, and glibc (the GNU Project's newly developed C Library) to X (a Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon, which lets users subst.i.tute easy-to-remember Internet domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. The arch's capstone, of course, was the Linux kernel-itself a bored-out, super-charged version of Minix. Rather than building their operating system from scratch, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux development team had followed the old Pica.s.so adage, "good artists borrow; great artists steal." Or as Torvalds himself would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people actually do."Torvalds has offered this quote in many different settings. To date, however, the quote's most notable appearance is in the Eric Raymond essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (May, 1997).

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html

Such laziness, while admirable from an efficiency perspective, was troubling from a political perspective. For one thing, it underlined the lack of an ideological agenda on Torvalds' part. Unlike the GNU developers, Torvalds hadn't built an operating system out of a desire to give his fellow hackers something to work with; he'd built it to have something he himself could play with. Like Tom Sawyer whitewas.h.i.+ng a fence, Torvalds' genius lay less in the overall vision and more in his ability to recruit other hackers to speed the process.

That Torvalds and his recruits had succeeded where others had not raised its own troubling question: what, exactly, was Linux? Was it a manifestation of the free software philosophy first articulated by Stallman in the GNU Manifesto? Or was it simply an amalgamation of nifty software tools that any user, similarly motivated, could a.s.semble on his own home system?

By late 1993, a growing number of Linux users had begun to lean toward the latter definition and began brewing private variations on the Linux theme. They even became bold enough to bottle and sell their variations-or "distributions"-to fellow Unix aficionados. The results were spotty at best.

"This was back before Red Hat and the other commercial distributions," remembers Ian Murdock, then a computer science student at Purdue University. "You'd flip through Unix magazines and find all these business card-sized ads proclaiming 'Linux.' Most of the companies were fly-by-night operations that saw nothing wrong with slipping a little of their own source code into the mix."

Murdock, a Unix programmer, remembers being "swept away" by Linux when he first downloaded and installed it on his home PC system. "It was just a lot of fun,"

he says. "It made me want to get involved." The explosion of poorly built distributions began to dampen his early enthusiasm, however. Deciding that the best way to get involved was to build a version of Linux free of additives, Murdock set about putting a list of the best free software tools available with the intention of folding them into his own distribution. "I wanted something that would live up to the Linux name,"

Murdock says.

In a bid to "stir up some interest," Murdock posted his intentions on the Internet, including Usenet's comp.os.linux newsgroup. One of the first responding email messages was from [email protected] . As a hacker, Murdock instantly recognized the address. It was Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and a man Murdock knew even back then as "the hacker of hackers." Seeing the address in his mail queue, Murdock was puzzled. Why on Earth would Stallman, a person leading his own operating-system project, care about Murdock's gripes over Linux?

Murdock opened the message.

"He said the Free Software Foundation was starting to look closely at Linux and that the FSF was interested in possibly doing a Linux system, too. Basically, it looked to Stallman like our goals were in line with their philosophy."

The message represented a dramatic about-face on Stallman's part. Until 1993, Stallman had been content to keep his nose out of the Linux community's affairs.

In fact, he had all but shunned the renegade operating system when it first appeared on the Unix programming landscape in 1991. After receiving the first notification of a Unix-like operating system that ran on PCs, Stallman says he delegated the task of examining the new operating system to a friend. Recalls Stallman, "He reported back that the software was modeled after System V, which was the inferior version of Unix. He also told me it wasn't portable."

The friend's report was correct. Built to run on 386-based machines, Linux was firmly rooted to its low-cost hardware platform. What the friend failed to report, however, was the sizable advantage Linux enjoyed as the only freely modifiable operating system in the marketplace. In other words, while Stallman spent the next three years listening to bug reports from his HURD team, Torvalds was winning over the programmers who would later uproot and replant the operating system onto new platforms.

By 1993, the GNU Project's inability to deliver a working kernel was leading to problems both within the GNU Project and within the free software movement at large. A March, 1993, a Wired magazine article by Simson Garfinkel described the GNU Project as "bogged down" despite the success of the project's many tools.See Simson Garfinkel, "Is Stallman Stalled?" Wired (March, 1993).

Those within the project and its nonprofit adjunct, the Free Software Foundation, remember the mood as being even worse than Garfinkel's article let on. "It was very clear, at least to me at the time, that there was a window of opportunity to introduce a new operating system," says Cha.s.sell. "And once that window was closed, people would become less interested. Which is in fact exactly what happened."Cha.s.sel's concern about there being a 36-month "window"

for a new operating system is not unique to the GNU Project. During the early 1990s, free software versions of the Berkeley Software Distribution were held up by Unix System Laboratories' lawsuit restricting the release of BSD-derived software. While many users consider BSD offshoots such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD to be demonstrably superior to GNU/Linux both in terms of performance and security, the number of FreeBSD and OpenBSD users remains a fraction of the total GNU/Linux user population. To view a sample a.n.a.lysis of the relative success of GNU/Linux in relation to other free software operating systems, see the essay by New Zealand hacker, Liam Greenwood, "Why is Linux Successful" (1999).

Much has been made about the GNU Project's struggles during the 1990-1993 period. While some place the blame on Stallman for those struggles, Eric Raymond, an early member of the GNU Emacs team and later Stallman critic, says the problem was largely inst.i.tutional. "The FSF got arrogant," Raymond says. "They moved away from the goal of doing a production-ready operating system to doing operating-system research." Even worse, "They thought nothing outside the FSF could affect them."

Murdock, a person less privy to the inner dealings of the GNU Project, adopts a more charitable view. "I think part of the problem is they were a little too ambitious and they threw good money after bad," he says. "Micro-kernels in the late 80s and early 90s were a hot topic. Unfortunately, that was about the time that the GNU Project started to design their kernel.

They ended up with alot of baggage and it would have taken a lot of backpedaling to lose it."