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.
Sorry when I say their hardware I mean they are the manufactures... i.e if I say its a dell box I dont mean dell owns it..
All good points--so I won't reiterate what's been said...
IMHO, we're better off with GPL v2--the third version is waaaaay too political.
Hey, as long as Slack doesn't contain v3 stuff--i'll be happy...8^)
BSD just doesn't have any significant commercial offerings except Apple, which requires a purchase of the Apple hardware and therefore significantly hampers distribution. OpenSolaris is already seeing a heightened interest since the GPL controversy erupted, there was a story just a couple of weeks ago that Google is considering if not preparing to switch to OpenSolaris from Linux, which would be the conversion of the largest Linux user in the world.
While it would be tremendously beneficial for Linux vendors to seperate themselves somewhat from the leftist Stallman and his radical anti-commercial philosophies, the reality is the majority of any Linux distribution is comprised of software licensed under Stallman's GPL, and Stallman owns the copyrights on much of that software. They can of course "fork it", but then they are left with having to completely manage all those pieces themselves, and with the tiny income that free software provides these companies it may not be possible. We'll know if they're serious about seperating from Stallman if/when someone sues him for patent infringement, too bad it hasn't already happened.
Absolutely, that poster antiRepublic has been defending Stallman for years, he'll flipflop whenever convenient like a good little liberal. One of his first posts ever to this website was some article showing Kerry Dean etc all using Linux which he renamed "Democrats ahead of Republicans on Open Source". Search the internet for that title and it'll come up.
Then you agree with the author.
If Stallman wants to publish a new license, he is certainly free to do so, but he doesn't have the power to make other people use it.
Stallman himself owns the copyrights on a large portion of GPL software, and since his current GPL2 license includes a sneaky "future versions" clause it appears he can legally convert anything he wants to the new version whether he owns the copyrights or not.
No, it doesn't. The copyright notices of many pieces of software contain the clause that it's covered by v2 or later versions, but the licencse itself does not.
ALso, the Linux kernel itself does not contain the "future versions" clause. Hence, the decision is entirely up to Linus, and no one else.
No, what is "ridiculous" is you claiming that the inclusion of any GPL3 software within the Linux O/S does not taint that O/S with the restrictions imposed by GPL3. If GPL3 code is included anywhere in the software, it can't be used for DRM purposes, per the license. And you can't do jack with just a kernel.
True...Again, technically true.
Sounds like even you are having trouble disputing the article.
This might be a valid comparison if they were trying to do the same thing, but they weren't.
Obviously they were trying to do the same thing - write a kernel - types of kernels may be a reason Torvalds succeeded first but the article remains correct, and you left reaching for straws.
True
LOL watching you try to discredit the Forbe's article was hilarious.
Excellent post (#16). I've not heard of any other major components to Linux that use GPL other than the kernel not wanting to convert, are there others? The impression I get is the true "free software" believers that wrote much of that code are actually looking forward to cripling Linux from being used in DRM systems.
They have more money than he does, but he has an army of programmers across the world that have dedicated their lives to his free software "manifesto" who wrote and manage most of the Linux O/S components. They're not easily bought off by bribe, so unless those companies are willing to invest the billions to rewrite or manage those products independently, Stallman is in the position of power.
It's possible to see it that way. However, the reality is that no one is "in the position of power" as both Stallman's (and all GPL3 software) and the linux kernel itself are all useless without the the other. If Linus doesn't like it, he won't convert the kernel over to GPL3, and linux users will be using older software versions, still covered under GPL2, while Stallman and his cadre will be developing software for nothing, as the newer versions won't be run by anyone.
Thanks for the correction, although the end result is the same. No tech ping?
the Linux kernel itself does not contain the "future versions" clause.
Which is why we're having this discussion, however as the kernel itself is only a tiny portion of any typical Linux "distribution", and many if not most of the developers of the other software components either transferred their copyrights directly to Stallman or will follow his anti-DRM lead to GPL3, a fork of Linux between the two licenses appears likely.
No. There was an OSS ping.
a fork of Linux between the two licenses appears likely.
I view it as merely possible--not likely.
Incorrect, as Stallman can use the very latest GPL2 Linux kernel released by Torvalds in Stallman's GPL3 Linux version that would include the lastest GNU tools, but GPL2 Linux would have to either fork off Stallman's tools and maintain them seperately, or find another list of utilities for the O/S which is almost impossible since Linux can't even compile without Stallman's tools. Bottom line, Stallman would get to use Torvalds latest, but Torvalds wouldn't be able to use Stallman's latest.
Incorrect. Stallman cannot change the license on a kernel. Only Linus can do that.
Torvalds and Stallman may very well agree on GPL3 in the end, this could just be some huge publicity stunt to try to gain one or the other some credibility. But it's starting to look like they are very much at odds over this, a dead giveaway was Torvald's appearance on Jokelaw that ended up with the site maintainer threatening to toss him for vulgar language and her final comment to him being that her mother uses Windows LOL.
Not Linus, not Stallman, not IBM, not Microsoft, not Novell, not SCO, not Red Hat. No one.
We (OSS developers) just have our personal reputations, a fleeting currency.
Sorry for the confusion, when I referred to "stallman's GPL3 Linux" I meant using a GPL2 kernel but the rest being GPL3, which is advantage for Stallman since Torvalds can't use the GPL3 tools without the overal O/S being anti-DRM as Stallman wishes. This is a clear advantage to Stallman, and based on his actions he obviously knows it.
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