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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.
Well. That would be a shame. [/sarcasm]
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Steve Jobs is looking pretty smart.
Open Solaris could benefit, but the biggest beneficiaries I see if Linux stumbles are the BSD people. The BSD license is much, much less restrictive. Basically, you can do whatever the hell you want with the code; you don't even have to make your changes public. You can make proprietary products with it. The only stipulation is that you give the original code writers credit when branching off. That's it.
Probabally correct. Apple has shown BSD is more than up to the task.. Still I dont think 'linux will stumble' if anything this will finally get the albatross (stallman) off the neck of Linux. In the event of a split all of the code license under gpl2 will stay 2 and improvements can be applied by anyone.
Lyons again I see, talking about that which he knows just enough to be dangerous. OTOH, while there are numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations in this article, he at least he gets across the state of the open source community, which is that there are a lot of people who don't agree with Stallman's fanaticism.
"Lyons again I see, talking about that which he knows just enough to be dangerous."
Utter BS. Dan has been covering Stallman and his antics for 20 years.
Stallman's agenda is so cracked that you need long exposure to it in order to intuit what he's up to.
Dan's nailed him to the wall on this one.
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.
I share his concern about DRM. I think it's not good for consumers. However, license restrictions is not the way to deal with this. Personally, I agree with Linus' more pragmatic stance to Stallmans.
Title should be forking gnu *not* Toppling linux. There would be a bunch of forks and I would guess a good deal of GPL3 stuff would die on the vine..
I care about how DRM is implemented, the concept itself is fine. So long as I can buy a CD and be allowed to rip it so I can listen on my mp3 player im all good. So long as I can copy a DVD for backup Im good. Its when DRM starts to interfere with fair use that I get upset. The problem with stallman, like most extremest, is they cant see the difference between a technology and how someone might abuse it.
Fork gnu sounds a bit rude.
Agreed. You said it better than I did.
Another problem I have with DRM is that perpetual copyright will pretty much destroy older works, because in just a few years, nothing will be able to read it.
And he's gotten the facts wrong or misrepresented issues so many times it's pathetic. Let's take a few:
"They would be forbidden from using Linux software to block users from infringing on copyright and intellectual-property rights "
That is incorrect. The GPL3 states that software can't be modified with DRM to the extent that it prevents a user from using the software anywhere, anyway he wants. Not all Linux software is GPL, therefore this statement is rediculous. The new terms apply equally to GPL3 software running on Windows.
In addition, the main thrust of the DRM clause is to prevent the "TiVoization" of GPL software. The TiVo scheme is that its hardware requires a digitally signed version of Linux before it will allow the OS to run. So Stallman is mad that people can't modify the installation of Linux that's on a TiVo and still have it work on a TiVo (the bastard actually wants to control hardware now). However, note that doing so doesn't infringe TiVo's copyright (you did buy the hardware, didn't you?). It's more like buying a Linux system from Dell and installing your own legal copy of Linux on it.
"and they would be barred from suing over alleged patent infringements related to Linux."
True. But then all of the better open source licenses, including Sun's, require patent grants. Stallman is just finally getting with the times, since the GPL2 was written when software patents weren't so common. So this is not a proper basis for a rant against Stallman.
"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"
Again, technically true. But he fails to mention that until then people in his position were pretty much free to tinker with all software. Stallman got mad because this new "closed-source" software that came along wouldn't let him fix the bugs and make enhancements himself -- he had to wait for the vendor.
"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"
This might be a valid comparison if they were trying to do the same thing, but they weren't. The fact is that the envisioned GNU kernel was a far more complicated feat to pull off, given that they wanted a true microkernel architecture. Linux has a monolithic kernel, which is a lot easier to write. But most people reading this article won't know that.
"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."
Wrong. Linus Torvalds did not come up with the name. He wanted to call it "Freax," but his friend Ari Lemmke who ran the FTP server Linux was first posted on named the folder for the project "Linux," and the name caught.
"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 (actually, a contractor for Linksys before the buy) used Linux and then put in their modifications and utilities. So did TiVo. He makes it sound like they used a few lines of Linux in their larger product, which is wrong -- it's the other way around.
"Cisco caved in to Stallman's demands rather than endure months of abuse from his noisy worldwide cult of online jihadists."
True, but generally those who are caught red-handed engaging in copyright infringement tend to settle rather than go to court. Would he take this tone with Microsoft chasing after an OEM that's been shipping systems loaded with free copies of Windows? Microsoft does this all the time, and rightly so. Where's the outrage?
BTW, they did not have to give up any code. They could have ripped Linux out of their systems, recalled all products using Linux, and paid some money. That probably would have cost more than what their code cost to produce, thus their decision.
Stallman's agenda is so cracked
You'll get no disagreement from me, or from a lot of open source advocates.
The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2, and copyright by a cast of thousands, beginning with Linus Torvalds. That part is not at any risk from Stallman's antics. His new license simply doesn't apply to the Linux kernel, and there is nothing he can do about it. Linus and all the top kernel maintainers have stated clearly and with certainty that they are not moving off the GPLv2 license.
But a great swath of user code, including the critical gcc compiler, and most of the classic Unix utilities, is under Free Software Foundation, Inc. (FSF) copyright. The FSF can re-release that code under any license it chooses, and can decide to accept any future changes only under some other license, such as GPLv3 instead of GPLv2.
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. Programmers cannot currently get any changes into the main line of code development for this software unless they hand over Copyright to FSF.
What programmers can do is to fork all this code, before -any- GPLv3 only changes are made to it, and continue to use, modify, and distribute it, under the GPLv2 license terms granted everyone. The major distributions, such as Red Hat, SuSE, Debian and Ubuntu, could seal the success of such a fork, by refusing to pick up GPLv3 code.
If that happened, the FSF would cease to be an active player. They would continue to hold copyright on this code in perpetuity. But almost no one would send them any more changes, and they would be out of the loop, both in terms of license affect, and in terms of code maintenance.
Thats the Rub, Linus, Red Hat, Novell, and IBM have far more power than Stalman does and this is perhaps the nutballs last gasp. If RedHat, Novell, and IBM said no to the GPLv3 and Linus backed them with the kernel the fork would keep the GPL2 going. The sad thing is stallman is going to obsolete him self (more than he already is) over nothing but DRM and Tivo.
I personally dont like what Tivo did but hey, its their hardware!
Actually it's yours -- you bought it. Or is everything licensed now?
But I am on Linus' side. That's a hardware issue, and Stallman has no business butting in with his software license. Absolutely nothing prevents us from downloading the TiVo software and modifying it to put on a different box, so IMHO the terms of the GPL (letter and spirit) are fulfilled.
The point is that if they do this, the projects will fork if the licence is whacked.
I agree with the rest of your post. FSF is going to screw themselves if they insist on putting out a license that the vast majority of programmers/companies can't support.
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