Posted on 10/23/2006 9:07:01 AM PDT by N3WBI3
Software radical Richard Stallman helped build the Linux revolution. Now he threatens to tear it apart.
The free Linux operating system set off one of the biggest revolutions in the history of computing when it leapt from the fingertips of a Finnish college kid named Linus Torvalds 15 years ago. Linux now drives $15 billion in annual sales of hardware, software and services, and this wondrous bit of code has been tweaked by thousands of independent programmers to run the world's most powerful supercomputers, the latest cell phones and TiVo video recorders and other gadgets.
But while Torvalds has been enshrined as the Linux movement's creator, a lesser-known programmer--infamously more obstinate and far more eccentric than Torvalds--wields a startling amount of control as this revolution's resident enforcer. Richard M. Stallman is a 53-year-old anticorporate crusader who has argued for 20 years that most software should be free of charge. He and a band of anarchist acolytes long have waged war on the commercial software industry, dubbing tech giants "evil" and "enemies of freedom" because they rake in sales and enforce patents and copyrights--when he argues they should be giving it all away.
Despite that utopian anticapitalist bent, Linux and the "open-source" software movement have lured billions of dollars of investment from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Red Hat and other tech vendors, plus corporate customers such as Wall Street banks, Google and Amazon and Hollywood special-effects shops. IBM has spent a billion dollars embracing Linux, using it as a counterweight to the Microsoft Windows monopoly and to Sun Microsystems' Unix-based business.
Now Stallman is waging a new crusade that could end up toppling the revolution he helped create. He aims to impose new restrictions on IBM and any other tech firm that distributes software using even a single line of Linux code. They would be forbidden from using Linux software to block users from infringing on copyright and intellectual-property rights ("digital rights management"); and they would be barred from suing over alleged patent infringements related to Linux.
Stallman's hold on the Linux movement stems from the radical group he formed in 1985: the Free Software Foundation. The Boston outfit, which he still runs, is guided by a "manifesto" he published that year, urging programmers (hackers) to join his socialist crusade. The group made Stallman a cult hero among hackers--and ended up holding licensing rights to crucial software components that make up the Linux system.
Stallman hopes to use that licensing power to slap the new restraints on the big tech vendors he so reviles. At worst it could split the Linux movement in two--one set of suppliers and customers deploying an older Linux version under the easier rules and a second world using a newer version governed by the new restrictions. That would threaten billions of dollars in Linux investment by customers and vendors alike.
A cantankerous and finger-wagging freewheeler, Stallman won't comment on any of this because he was upset by a previous story written by this writer. But his brazen gambit already is roiling the hacker world. His putsch "has the potential to inflict massive collateral damage upon our entire ecosystem and jeopardize the very utility and survival of open source," says a paper published in September by key Linux developers, who "implore" Stallman to back down. "This is not an exaggeration," says James Bottomley, the paper's chief author. "There is significant danger to going down this path." (Stallman's camp claims Bottomley's paper contains "inaccurate information.")
Simon Lok, chief of Lok Technology in San Jose, Calif., a maker of cheap wireless-networking gear, dumped Linux a few years ago in fear of the Stallman bunch. "I said, 'One day these jackasses will do something extreme, and it's going to kill us.' Now it's coming to fruition," Lok says. "Some of this stuff is just madness. These guys are fanatics." He adds: "Who do these people think they are?"
Even the Linux program's progenitor and namesake, Linus Torvalds, rejects Stallman's new push to force tech companies to design their software his way and to abandon patent rights. Torvalds vows to stick with the old license terms, thereby threatening the split that tech vendors so fear. The new license terms Stallman proposes "are trying to move back into a more 'radical' and 'activist' direction," Torvalds says via e-mail. "I think it's great when people have ideals--but ideals (like religion) are a hell of a lot better when they are private. I'm more pragmatic."
But then, Richard Stallman rarely is pragmatic--and in some ways he is downright bizarre. He is corpulent and slovenly, with long, scraggly hair, strands of which he has been known to pluck out and toss into a bowl of soup he is eating. His own Web site (www.stallman.org) says Stallman engages in what he calls "rhinophytophilia"--"nasal sex" (also his term) with flowers; he brags of offending a bunch of techies from Texas Instruments by plunging his schnoz into a bouquet at dinner and inviting them to do the same.
His site also boasts a recording of him singing--a capella and badly--his own anthem to free software. ("Hoarders can get piles of money / that is true, hackers, that is true. / But they cannot help their neighbors, that's not good, hackers, that's not gooood," he warbles, which culminates in polite applause from his followers.) He hasn't hacked much new code in a decade or more. Instead he travels the world to give speeches and pull publicity stunts, donning robes and a halo to appear as a character he calls "St. IGNUcius" and offer blessings to his followers. (GNU, coined in his first manifesto, is pronounced "Ga-NEW" and stands for "Gnu's Not Unix"; the central Linux license is known as the GNU license.)
And though he styles himself as a crusader for tech "freedom," Stallman labors mightily to control how others think, speak and act, arguing, in Orwellian doublespeak, that his rules are necessary for people to be "free." He won't speak to reporters unless they agree to call the operating system "GNU/Linux," not Linux. He urges his adherents to avoid such terms as "intellectual property" and touts "four freedoms" he has sworn to defend, numbering them 0, 1, 2 and 3. In June Stallman attempted to barge into the residence of the French prime minister to protest a copyright bill, then unrolled a petition in a Paris street while his adoring fans snapped photos.
Long ago Stallman was a gifted programmer. A 1974 graduate of Harvard with a degree in physics, he began graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology but dropped out and took a job in an MIT lab. There he grew furious that companies wouldn't let him tinker with the code in their products. A Xerox laser printer was a key culprit. In the early 1980s he called on hackers to fight their oppressors by helping him create a free clone of Unix, naming it GNU.
Stallman and his allies hacked away for nearly a decade but couldn't get GNU to work. In 1991 Torvalds, then an unknown college kid in Finland, produced in six months what Stallman's team had failed to build in years--a working "kernel" for an operating system. Torvalds posted this tiny 230-kilobyte file containing 10,000 lines of code to a public server, dubbing it "Linux" and inviting anyone to use it.
Soon people were combining Torvalds' Linux kernel with Stallman's GNU components to make a complete operating system. The program was a hit. But to Stallman's dismay people referred to it as Linux, not GNU. Torvalds became famous. Stallman got pushed aside. The ultimate insult came in 1999 when his Free Software Foundation was given a "Linus Torvalds Award." Stallman accepted but said it was "like giving the Han Solo award to the Rebel Alliance."
As programmers wrote hundreds of building blocks to add to Linux, Stallman's Free Software Foundation persuaded them to hand over their copyrights to the group and let it handle licensing of their code. Stallman wrote the central license for Linux: the GNU General Public License or GPL. For his part, Linux creator Torvalds never signed his creation over to the group--but he did adopt the GNU license, granting Stallman further sway.
In recent years Stallman and the FSF have been cracking down on big Linux users, enforcing terms of the existing license (GPLv2, for version 2) and demanding that the big tech outfits crack open their proprietary code whenever they inserted lines from Linux. Cisco and TiVo have been targets; Cisco caved in to Stallman's demands rather than endure months of abuse from his noisy worldwide cult of online jihadists. Nvidia, which makes graphics cards for Linux computers but won't release enough of the code behind them to satisfy Stallmanites, also came under attack. "It's an enemy of the free software community, so we call them 'inVideous,'" says Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation.
Now the Stallman stalwarts are pushing a new version of the Linux license--GPLv3, with its tougher restrictions and a ban on anything that would protect or enforce copyright and other digital rights. Thus Stallman is living an anarchist's dream: The tech giants he has spent his career attacking send lawyers to sit at his feet and beg. Stallman has invited companies to comment on his drafts but insists he alone decides what goes into the final version, due in early 2007.
Often he won't listen. HP suggested changes in patent language in the new license. In a sign of how much fear Stallman inspires even at the largest tech company in the world, HP's lawyers emphasize they didn't "ask for changes"--they merely "suggested modifications." Whatever. Stallman rejected them.
In September a committee of leading Linux companies spent two days in Chicago discussing the GPLv3 with Stallman's representatives--and left worried. Stallman's camp refused to answer even simple questions about whether v2 and v3 code will be able to coexist. "They've been at this for nine months, and it's time to clarify. Everyone wants to make sure that Linux keeps accelerating," says Stuart Cohen, chief executive of Open Source Development Labs, a vendor-funded consortium in Beaverton, Ore. that employs Linus Torvalds and supports Linux development.
Most major tech vendors declined comment rather than risk tangling with Stallman's enforcers, such as his sidekick and attorney, Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen. A spokesman for Novell, the second-biggest Linux distributor, says the company won't comment because negotiations are ongoing. Red Hat also declined to comment. Privately some Linux vendors say they hope Stallman will relent and soften the terms of GPLv3.
One big potential victim of the Stallman stunt is Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor, with 61% market share. Red Hat bundles together hundreds of programs contributed by thousands of outside coders. If Linus Torvalds sticks with his old kernel under the older and less restrictive version-2 license, and Stallmanites ship version-3 code, what is Red Hat to do? The two licenses appear to be incompatible. There's also the problem of forfeiting patent enforcement rights if Red Hat ships v3 code. Red Hat could stay with an entirely "v2" Linux system, taking on the burden of developing its own versions of whatever programs move to v3. But it's not clear that Red Hat has the staffing to do that.
"Red Hat gets a lot of code from people who don't work for Red Hat. They would have to replace all that and do the work in-house," says Larry W. McVoy, chief executive of software developer Bitmover and a longtime Torvalds collaborator. Even then, however, Stallman and his loyalists may carry on developing their own v3 versions. This "forking" of multiple incompatible versions could lead to "Balkanization" and derail Linux, the Torvalds camp warns.
Red Hat and other Linux promoters also may find themselves in an awkward spot with customers. "IT managers want to buy stuff that puts them at as little risk as possible. If there was a risk that Stallman could become such a loose cannon, that's something most IT managers would have wanted to know before they bet their companies on Linux," McVoy says.
Some customers are wary. ActiveGrid, an open-source software maker in San Francisco, originally planned to distribute its program under a gpl license but changed plans after a big European bank declared it wouldn't use products covered by the gpl, says Peter Yared, chief executive of ActiveGrid.
The biggest beneficiaries of Stallman's suicide-bomber move could be other companies Stallman detests: the proprietary old guard--Microsoft, which pitches its Windows operating system as "safer" than Linux, and Sun, which lost customers to Linux but now hopes to lure them back to an open-source version of its Solaris system, which doesn't use the GPL.
And a big loser, eventually, could be Stallman himself. If he relents now, he likely would be branded a sellout by his hard-core followers, who might abandon him. If he stands his ground, customers and tech firms may suffer for a few years but ultimately could find a way to work around him. Either way, Stallman risks becoming irrelevant, a strange footnote in the history of computing: a radical hacker who went on a kamikaze mission against his own program and went down in flames, albeit after causing great turmoil for the people around him. Collateral Damage
Richard Stallman's kamikaze attack on Linux could hurt tech companies that have built thriving businesses on top of this free program. These are the top targets.
Our law is now BS? You seemed to be holding it so high and mighty recently.
I just established that according to the information in the article they are not criminals. They may be liable for civil tort, but not criminal prosecution. IOW, they are not criminals as you claim (even if we assume they would lose any trial).
I know simple facts are difficult for you, but please try to keep up with at least the first graders.
Don't dare try to speak on behalf of our laws. You've already shown you're willing to lie in support those that wish to break them. Quantaties of theft can in fact without question reach criminal levels, such as when hacks are released that allow the pirating of software all over the world. Criminals, stealing from U.S. companies. That you support, with your lies. Lies that you have now admitted to. So simple even I can understand LMAO.
Don't give me that. You just dismissed our entire system of punishing copyright infringement.
Quantaties of theft can in fact without question reach criminal levels, such as when hacks are released that allow the pirating of software all over the world.
Nope, you actually have to be distributing the copyrighted works themselves in excess of $1,000 value in a 180-day period to be eligible for criminal prosecution under the NET Act. The article didn't say they were distributing OS X itself.
Contributory infringement (creating the means by which another can infringe) is not criminal unless it falls under the DMCA provisions, which still require profit, and none is shown in the article. Didn't you notice how the recent victories against file sharing companies were in civil court, not criminal?
Sorry, but the facts and the law are against you. What these hackers did does not carry any criminal penalties in this country, only civil. That doesn't mean that what they did was necessarily right, it only means that you were wrong in saying they were committing criminal offenses.
Wrong as usual. Provably wrong as usual. The copyright law is before you, the NET Act and the DMCA, as well as the rest of Titles 17 & 18 USC.
Shut up or quote me some law to prove me wrong.
LOL, this is hysterical. antiRepublican defending Russian hackers with the "180 day period to be eligible" rule. LMAO.
the NET Act and the DMCA, as well as the rest of Titles 17 & 18 USC.
Don't insult us again with your slander of our laws. Your only concern is how to exploit them, not enforce them. You're even willing to lie about these things, as you've admitted you've done before, on purpose, to confuse the facts as you wage your defense of these criminals.
17 U.S.C. § 506(a)(2). And it's not "180 day period to be eligible," you can qualify for criminal prosecution in seconds. Again, it's the law, and it helps if you know it.
Don't insult us again with your slander of our laws.
If I'm wrong, then cite some law to the contrary, otherwise shut up or admit you're wrong. You did say you were capable of it.
Those were your words not mine. I simply quoted them. Sounds like you may even have a job defending criminal Russian hackers. Do you lie for them in court as well? You've already been busted for lying for them on this site.
Taken out of context to twist their meaning as usual. It was "in excess of $1,000 value in a 180-day period to be eligible" That means that giving away $1,000 worth of software in one second makes you eligible. I cited the law, I didn't write it. Talk to Congress if you have any complaints, but as it stands now they are potentially liable for civil infringement at most. IOW, your "criminal" statement is libel (but libel is nothing new for you, is it?).
You've already been busted for lying for them on this site.
No I haven't. You try to make it sound like I got busted leading you on, when I disclosed the truth myself after I felt the joke had run on long enough. You never even caught it, and you could not have caught it because you didn't have enough knowledge to do so (which was the whole point, mister security expert).
So is this your next case antiRepublican? Suing me for libel on behalf of your criminal Russian hacker clients? Good Luck LMAO.
I disclosed the truth myself
Yes, we know, you finally admitted you had lied, on purpose, in defense of the criminal Russian hackers. I have the link of course, from just the other day, in case you need it.
Yes, we are aware you see yourself as a master liar, that feels he can get away with lying for months while defending Russian hackers. Which is why no one can believe a word you say.
Wow that was a thing of beauty.... I never get tired of watching you string him along until he hangs himself.
It's bad enough we have globalist scum at the helm of Microsoft...but I figured Stallman's true colors of globalism would rear its ugly head one day. I guess I was right. Eventually Linux security will be no better than Windows security.
LOL so here comes some hacker that goes by the ID of "N3WBI3" telling antiRepublican his defense of criminal Russian hackers "was a thing of beauty". Hilarious, obviously, it was the ultimate incrimination LMAO.
You have still failed to define their crime..
Violating the license that governs the use of Apple's software, quite obviously. If it was Richard Stallman's GPL license that was being violated, you'd be running in the streets screaming bloody murder LOL. But Apple's software is a premium product, not some freeware givaway that already has 400 versions.
If it was Richard Stallman's GPL license that was being violated ....
I would not call the offenders criminal.
You have not shown any evidence whatsoever that their actions could be criminal. Subject to civil tort, yes. Criminal, no. Unlike you, I actually brushed up on the LAW before I made a claim on a law-related issue. You apparently like to make up the law as you go.
Yes, we know, you finally admitted you had lied, on purpose, in defense of the criminal Russian hackers.
No, to show you for a fraud. Big difference, and quite successful.
Your rantings can't distract from the fact that you've been had a second time, buried by your own ignorance. And this time I made sure to lead you on in the form of questions so you can't go running around saying I lied.
I would, depending on the case. Cisco/Linksys, for example, distributed copyrighted works without a license for the purposes of commercial advantage and financial gain. This is a violation of 17 U.S.C. § 506(a)(1), part of the criminal provisions of the Copyright Act. If convicted, those responsible would have been subject to prison terms and the forfeiture of all their routers (at least the firmware) and the equipment used to produce them. Cisco got off lightly.
The amusing part is that in this article Lyons defends these "criminals," and GE defends Lyons. Thus, by proxy, GE is the one here defending criminals. And unlike GE I actually cited the section of criminal code and how they violated it.
Thanks for not blowing it early like that spoil-sport Swordmaker did earlier. ;^)
I obviously can, and will. You've already admitted to it, multiple times, including on this very thread when you yourself said quote "Yes, I lied". You won't ever lie your way out of that LOL.
You'll go running around saying I lied when all I did was ask you questions in order to force you to plainly state your false position so that I could counter it with the law? Now THAT'S a lie.
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