Toppling Linux

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.

Stallman is definitely in the position of power, since most of the developers of the GPL software currently in Linux adhere to his anti-DRM philosophy, and are likely convert to GPL3 in order to advance that philosophy. IBM and others can attempt to combat that, but only if they are willing to take on the significant expenses of forking those products and maintaining them independently. I'm sure you're aware of how difficult that will actually be, especially with products Linux is completely dependent on such as gcc.

FSF does not hold up any major cost in maintaining open software. Most of us work for various computer companies, on salary, or as contractors, to whomever will pay for our labors. We will continue to do that.

Forking various GNU projects has very little, if any, monetary impact to most of those involved. The key capital in these projects is the contributions of the current key developers. Wherever their code goes, so goes the project.

According to Linux, in a posting Sept 29, 2006 on lkml, when challenged by Andrew Tridgell <tridge@samba.org> on his suggestions that major GNU projects, such as gcc, would fork:

Quite frankly, the FSF isn't actually doing any of the work for any of the tools it maintains any more. And hasn't for a long while.
Hint: look up the glibc maintainers opinions on some of these same issues in the past. They had reason to clash with the FSF over a _much_ smaller license change (LGPL 2 -> 2.1).

the reality is the majority of any Linux distribution is comprised of software licensed under Stallman's GPL

The issue is not gpl software the issue is what software does stallman own the copyright on and maintain.

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.

Yea there is no way IBM can afford to maintain the fork of software under gpl2 that stallman copyrights /sarcasm. Between IBM, RedHat, Novell, and HP there is more than enough cash out there for a 'gpl2 foundation'..

Thanks, I'm very aware free software coders aren't being paid by the FSF, but as you indicated the FSF does still in many cases have those copyrights assigned to them because the developers believe in the FSF philosophy, and Stallman of course is the creator of the FSF.

Your comment was "There are currently over 5,000 such GNU software packages, as listed at FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory. These packages are critical to all BSD and Linux based systems, including Mac OS X. FSF owns this code.". That is Stallman's power, and unless that Army of developers suddently decides they'd rather commercial companies like IBM etc benefit from their work, instead of advancing Stallman's vision for free software, they will continue coding for the FSF and hence the GPL3.

I've not heard of any major GPL product other than the linux kernel that is advocating sticking with GPL2, there may be some, but are almost certainly a minority in the 5,000 different packages you cited, are they not?

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.

IBM supports the samba team and their own army of developers. *YOU* have said RedHat has 'literally hundreds of kernel developers'.

They're not easily bought off by bribe

So let them maintain a set of GNU tools for HURD in the mean time IBM and other companies will set up a foundation to maintain the forks if they don't decide to opt for direct control. You spit on the whole OSS community so believe me when I say Linux has a much larger following than Stallman.

so unless those companies are willing to invest the billions to rewrite or manage those products independently, Stallman is in the position of power.

They don't need to rewrite, they can fork and I would be willing to bet IBM will put the money need (it wont be billions). Stalman will learn what SCO is learning, IBM does not screw around when it comes to people who try and mess with their business..

IBM supports the samba team and their own army of developers. *YOU* have said RedHat has 'literally hundreds of kernel developers'.

The Samba team doesn't work for IBM and haven't said anything about sticking with GPL2. Yes IBM has an army of other developers directly employed but they already have other assignments, and gearing up to replace the GNU environment is not something they tack on in their spare time LMAO. So what about kernel devs, we already know they may be sticking with GPL2, but that appears to be it.

So let them maintain a set of GNU tools for HURD

I already pointed out they don't have to, Stallman can use the GPL2 version of the kernel and still make anti-DRM Linux, the only thing that seems assured at this point.

I would be willing to bet IBM will put the money need (it wont be billions)

We'll see, but money doesn't grow on trees and the group IBM already is already funding for the kernel - OSDL - suffered layoffs just last year.

That is Stallman's power, and unless that Army of developers suddenly decides they'd rather commercial companies like IBM etc benefit from their work, instead of advancing Stallman's vision for free software, they will continue coding for the FSF and hence the GPL3.

No - wrong.

His FSF holds copyright, but he licensed it under GPLv2.

Once he, or anyone, does that, they no longer control the use of software, so long as GPLv2 license terms are followed.

That "army of coders" bloody well doesn't code for Stallman. We code for various reasons, and get paid various ways. A well known computer company pays my salary, for instance. I'm sure as h**l not coding for Stallman's vision of the world. Most likely some small bit of my code is in that pile of GNU software, under FSF copyright, but Stallman has no power over our continued use of it. It is published under GPLv2, and you, me or anyone else can use, modify and distribute it, under the terms of that license.

I'm not currently actively involved in any GPL project other than the Linux kernel, so I can't tell you what will happen. But I'd expect work to continue on the GPLv2 available code, for all projects of interest.

There is way too much money, from too many big players, involved in this by now, and FSF has no choke hold, nor any significant resources, with which to change that now.

All it will take is for one of the major players to determine that they cannot accept GPLv3 code, and the die will be cast. Continue to code for GPLv2 distribution, and your code will be available to all. Let FSF take that copyright for any new code, and your code is on a dead end to nowhere.

It's not a fork if everyone goes one way.

It's not a fork if everyone goes one way.

Well right now it looks like out of the 5,000 packages you linked, only 1 product, the kernel group which you would be considered a member, has said they are going to stick with GPL2. For the third time now, who else, what other major GPL product has come out against GPL3? Right now it appears to only be ~1 in 5,000, so with the continued absence of anything contrary that would indeed appear to be everyone going one way, towards GPL3. Unfortunately, of course, but as I would expect since they typically sign their copyrights over to him anyway.

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