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Part IV. Prophet

The process of radicalization of RMS views gradually moved his position in both in licensing and other intellectual property issues toward classic and a very convenient  albeit slightly isolated position that is called "my way or highway"(MWOH). Actually MWOH can be called as a synonym for the RMS interpretation of GPL (and the license itself) starting with late 90th.

Programmers generally have different expectations of how their work should be valued, protected, and distributed. This manifests itself in different licensing decisions made by programmers.  But RMS position is that all this complex activity and complex, vastly different expectations of the creators of free software should be put into the straitjacket of GPL. If not,  then is this is an "unholy activity".  And that bring us to the discussion of Stallmanism as a software cult. 

Building Free Software Temple and the Emergence of  Stallmanism as a Software Cult

The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all great religions are built upon the "routinization" or "institutionalization" of charisma. Every successful religion, Weber argued, converts the charisma or message of the original religious leader into a social, political, and ethical apparatus more easily translatable across cultures and time.

Sam Williams in RMS biography

People with a sense of fulfillment think the world is good, while the frustrated blame the world for their failures. Therefore an anarchist mass movement's appeal is not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self.  In a very deep sense FSF zealot (end, later, Linux zealots) cannot be convinced, only converted.  That means that to a certain extent movements like FSF strive to impose a fact proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world.

And, that that faith becomes the things the fanatic declines to see. That means that Microsoft is really  necessary to make FSF belief possible, and that faith manifests itself not in moving mountains, but in not seeing mountains move.

In the context of mass movement's faith should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity, or truth, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from himself and the world as it is.  All in all GNU project provided all the necessary for a small "self-contained" cult with Stallman as the chief ideologist and preacher.  The cornerstone of the philosophy of  "Stallmanism" ((the term was introduced by Eugene Kim, the president of Harvard Computer Society, in 1984[Kim1984]) is  the notion that the entire concept of intellectual property is wrong and should be abolished. As a left philosophy it is very attractive, especially for young people, simplistic vision (see  BSD vs. GPL for details).

But the problem was with the followers: starting from 1994 they flocked to another cult named Linux. The latter was supported by financial heavyweights that realized the crazy IPO can be a very profitable business.  In the cover story "Net Money Game: How top financial firms reaped billions, while investors got burned" Business Week noted that for years, venture capitalists declared that their mission was to build sustainable businesses. But when Linux IPO mania hit, they began rushing companies onto the public market with just promising business plans, but not sustainable business model.  Unfortunately both Linus Torvalds and Linux companies were part of the "make money fast" game played on unsuspecting public by investment banks and venture capitalists firms; in this sense Linus was simply a pawn in well trained hands of PR staff of  investment banks. And companies like Red Hat were a willing conspirators and diligently tried to create a new slightly different cult, the cult that needed RMS neither as a preacher or a follower.

 GNU General Public License
and the "License Separatism" Movement

If I make code available under the GPL, I'll lose control of it. The Europeans have this notion of artistic rights, and it seems to me an artist -- the person who creates something -- has some right over the ultimate use of what they do. Artists' rights also allow an artist to get paid on resale of their stuff later. My view is that programmers are like artists. I think there's got to be some economic reward back to the people who do the creative work that turns out to matter.

Bill Joy
"The GPL, also known as the copyleft, uses copyright...  to counterfeit the phenomena of anarchism"

Eben Moglen, general counsel to FSF

I think that GPL is one of the major if not the major achievement of Richard Stallman. Unlike gcc, this is a very controversial achievement. You might even ask was Stallman an agent of some lawyer association and  "Was the GPL intended to provide jobs for lawyers instead of programmers?" I doubt that the this was an original intension of RMS, but road to hell is paved with good intensions and yes, now, it really looks that way.

Like his programming crown jewel, gcc, GPL affected millions of people around the globe. Despite being highly controversial (or may be because of it) the license received a significant following from the very beginning. It was adopted by Linus Torvalds for his POSIX-compatible kernel project that eventually overtook GNU project and sent FSF to a dustbin of history.

I analyzed GPL and its connections with software anarchism in a special paper so here I can be brief.  The license was essentially an opening shot in two distinct wars "

This "license separatism" movement that RMS created and the most prominent figure of which he was from the very beginning is probably the most controversial part of RMS heritage.  I see GPL as a reaction to the fact that the fair use provisions deteriorated in common software licenses to an unacceptable level. That situation created a distinct need for an aggressive pro-user license and it was that need that was fulfilled by GPL. The license, essentially,  became a banner of social movement: software anarchist movement.  That's why GPL probably is the most lasting and the most controversial achievements of Richard Stallman that will influence people long after all the code he wrote in GCC and Emacs will be completely rewritten or both of the product superseded by a better and forgotten. 

Stallman was one of the first and the most prominent apologist of  an "aggressively free/open" software as opposes to BSD "academically free" stance  (RMS will definitely disagree with equaling those terms of "open" and "free" but here he really has his political agenda).  Therefore I see him not only as a brilliant programmer and a gifted programming manager (of an over controller type), but as an important left (anarchist)  philosopher -- software freedom is the topic he consistently, religiously advocate and the concept of free software is the notion that consistently distorts to fit into his movements. He is also a gifted PR spokesmen for the movement. His eccentric personally affacts journalists like flies. He was also probably one of  the first who linked free software with the free speech  in public minds -- a brilliant socialist-style PR move.

Once you start thinking of computer source code as a human language, you see that this analogy has some grounds, but still it is very shaky. Actually I see it more like a deviation from the concept of academic publishing when a scientists published his invention for the benefit of mankind and does not ask anything instead. This "culture of giving" is the currency of science and of western civilization,  the cornerstone of the Western academic tradition dating back to the Romans and Greek. But RMS position is a deviation from the Europian cultural tradition that advocates artistic rights.

As Bill Joy noted in the quote above, European tradition presuppose that the author's creativity and effort in bringing about a creative work creates a claim that must be recognized because it is only just to do so. Although it is a more European than American law notion, it is not completely foreign to the American law. For example in the US, artists' moral rights have been invoked to prevent the destruction of artistic works. But the assumption of the creator moral rights creates a very serious problem for RMS. Without moral rights, it's much easier to say "copyright is bad, freedom is good".

Only if  copyright is an economic bargain favoring the privileged few, it has no intrinsic, independent value. If we assume that copyright has some intrinsic ethical value, this assumption essentially undermines the foundation of GPL and exposes Stallman as Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale  ""The Emperor's New Clothes" personage: "But the Emperor has nothing at all on!"

Initially the GNU Project did not have a single license to cover all its software. The idea of GPL (GNU General Public License, now in v.2) that was formulated rather late, and GPL v.2 was published only in 1991 almost ten years after the project started and when both Emacs and gcc were already in pretty mature stages.  So it was a kind of post-factum philosophical justification.

The proposed licensing scheme not only made it illegal to hide source code, but in a very seducing way played the "envy" card prohibiting to hide the source from works derived from GPL-based software. GPL allows users to sell, copy, and change covered programs, but you should release all your modifications under GPL if you decided to distribute it (all modification within a particular company can remain proprietary, unless they are distributed as a product to the "external world"; the meaning of distribution in GPL is pretty controversial and may or may not include "hardware appliances" ).

The stimulus to the creation of GNU license was RMS experience with reusing Gosling Emacs code for GNU project. As I mentioned before, Stallman always looked for a base implementation to start any of his GNU products. Gosling initially allowed free distribution of the Gosling Emacs source code and Stallman happily used it for the creating of  the first version of GNU Emacs. But Gosling later sold rights to Gosling Emacs to UniPress, and the editor became UniPress Emacs. UniPress asked Stallman to stop distributing the Gosling source code. Essentially he was advised to rewrite those parts.  See the Emacs Timeline for details.  There was nothing special about this requirement and as Stallman attests himself, the editor only benefited from this rewriting.

Still Stallman wrote the GPL with the explicit aim to prevent similar attempts to force rewriting of the originally freely distributable code after commercialization by commercial companies or the original author. He also managed to catch the spirit of resentment in the academic and larger programming community caused by AT&T lawsuit against Berkeley; in its stupidity instead of going after Berkeley Software Design, Inc.(BSDI), formed in 1992 by several former members of BSD project, which started to sell BSD version of Unix as their own OS,  the AT&T  sued the university (see AT&T lawsuit helps to launch Linux into mainstream).

My own, and admittedly biased opinion is that the BSD License was and still is better suited for many commercial applications than the GPL, especially in the embedded space. In a way AT&T should be considered to be a co-author of GPL. 

In a sense GPL from the beginning had a definite anti-author, anarchistic flavor: the idea was to explicitly deny the rights of the authors to commercialize their software by closing the source code as Gosling did and making them slaves to the Stallman's private charity, which due to huge PR effects of the "central authority" still can sell tapes (later CDs) with free software to support itself.  This private charity should be not be too afraid of competitors, as this is the law of jungles (anybody can try, but only strongest and/or already established distributor can survive) and the central, coordinating position is very important for the success.  Here is how RMS (mis) described his attempt to merge Gosling EMACS with Multix Emacs in his Speech at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden:

In the summer of that year, about two years ago now, a friend of mine told me that because of his work in early development of Gosling Emacs, he had permission from Gosling in a message he had been sent to distribute his version of that. Gosling originally had set up his Emacs and distributed it free and gotten many people to help develop it, under the expectation based on Gosling's own words in his own manual that he was going to follow the same spirit that I started with the original Emacs. Then he stabbed everyone in the back by putting copyrights on it, making people promise not to redistribute it and then selling it to a software-house. My later dealings with him personally showed that he was every bit as cowardly and despicable as you would expect from that history.

But in any case, my friend gave me this program, and my intention was to change the editing commands at the top level to make them compatible with the original Emacs that I was used to. And to make them handle all the combinations of numerical arguments and so on that one might expect that they would handle and have all the features that I wanted. But after a little bit of this, I discovered that the extension language of that editor, which is called MOCKLISP, was not sufficient for the task. I found that that I had to replace it immediately in order to do what I was planning to do. Before I had had the idea of someday perhaps replacing MOCKLISP with real LISP, but what I found out was that it had do be done first. Now, the reason that MOCKLISP is called MOCK, is that it has no kind of structure datatype: it does not have LISP lists; it does not have any kind of array. It also does not have LISP symbols, which are objects with names: for any particular name, there is only one object, so that you can type in the name and you always get the same object back. And this tremendously hampers the writing of many kinds of programs, you have to do things by complicated string-manipulation that don't really go that way.

So I wrote a LISP interpreter and put it in in place of MOCKLISP and in the process I found that I had to rewrite many of the editor's internal data structures because I wanted them to be LISP objects. I wanted the interface between the LISP and the editor to be clean, which means that objects such as editor buffers, sub-processes, windows and buffer-positions, all have to be LISP objects, so that the editor primitives that work on them are actually callable as LISP functions with LISP data. This meant that I had to redesign the data formats of all those objects and rewrite all the functions that worked on them, and the result was that after about six months I had rewritten just about everything in the editor.

In addition, because it is so hard to write things in MOCKLISP, all the things that had been written in MOCKLISP were very unclean and by rewriting them to take advantage of the power of real LISP, I could make them much more powerful and much simpler and much faster. So I did that, and the result was that when I started distributing this program only a small fraction remained from what I had received.

At this point, the company that Gosling thinks he sold the program to challenged my friend's right to distribute it, and the message was on backup tapes, so he couldn't find it. And Gosling denied having given him permission. And then a strange thing happened. He was negotiating with this company, and it seemed that the company mainly was concerned with not having anything distributed that resembled what they were distributing. See, he was still distributing, and the company where he worked, which is Megatest, was still distributing the same thing he had given me, which really was an old version of Gosling Emacs with his changes, and so he was going to make an agreement with them where he would stop distributing that, and would switch to using GNU Emacs, and they would then acknowledge that he really had the permission after all, and then supposedly everyone would be happy. And this company was talking to me about wanting to distribute GNU Emacs, free of course, but also sell various sorts of supporting assistance, and they wanted to hire me to help do the work. So it's sort of strange that they then changed their mind and refused to sign that agreement, and put up a message on the network saying that I wasn't allowed to distribute the program. They didn't actually say that they would do anything, they just said that it wasn't clear whether they might ever someday do something. And this was enough to scare people so that no one would use it any more, which is a sad thing.

(Sometimes I think that perhaps one of the best things I could do with my life is: find a gigantic pile of proprietary software that was a trade secret, and start handing out copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be a trade secret any more, and perhaps that would be a much more efficient way for me to give people new free software than actually writing it myself; but everyone is too cowardly to even take it.)

So I was forced to rewrite all the rest that remained, and I did that, it took me about a week and a half. So they won a tremendous victory. And I certainly wouldn't ever cooperate with them in any fashion after that. "

It's rather strange that one week of rewriting that definitely improved the product is considered by RMS as a major problem. But here we see the RMS already became is kind of  "true believer" in his own cult. It not surprising the first version of the GNU license was called the Emacs General Public License.  Other similar licenses, with references to particular packages, also existed, such as the Nethack General Public License.

The name GNU General Public License first appeared much later, in the June 1988 issue of the GNU Bulletin:

The copyleft used by the GNU project is made from a combination of a copyright notice and the GNU General Public License. The copyright notice is the usual kind. The General Public License is a copying license which basically says that you have the freedoms we want you to have and that you can't take these freedoms away from anyone else. (The actual document consists of several pages of rather complicated legalbol that our lawyer said we needed.) A copy of the complete license is included in all GNU source code distributions and many manuals, and we will send you a printed copy on request.

The January 1989 issue of the GNU Bulletin  the license was generalized to be applicable to any software:

In the past, each copylefted program had to have its own copy of the General Public License contained in it. Often it was necessary to modify the license to mention the name of the program it applied to. Other people who wanted to copyleft programs had to modify the text even more, to replace our name with theirs.

To make it easier to copyleft programs, we have been improving on the legalbol architecture of the General Public License to produce a new version that serves as a general-purpose subroutine: it can apply to any program without modification, no matter who is publishing it. All that's needed is a brief notice in the program itself, to say that the General Public License applies. Directions on doing this accompany the General Public License, so you can easily copyleft your programs.

We've also taken the opportunity to make it explicit that any subsequent changes in future versions the General Public License cannot take away the rights you were previously given...

The result was the GNU General Public License, version 1.  The GNU General Public License, version 2, and the GNU Library General Public License, version 2, were released in June 1991, right before the first release of Linux kernel.

Version 2 is still the current version.  The Library General Public License (LGPL) was renamed in a minor update to the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 in early 1999.

The key idea of GNU license is a specific limitation on derived software and as such affects only developers and not the users. That is often called the viral property of the license. A user can copy it freely, examine and modify the source code, and redistribute the GPLed software to others (free or for profit) as long as the redistributed software is also passed along with the copyleft license e.g. any redistributed software should contain source code and be based of GPL license (GNU virus). This idea -- mandatory GPLed distribution of derivative works -- has been the most controversial (and, potentially the most successful) aspect of GPL license. But this feature of GPL also limits commercial contributors to participate in large projects. But still as experience showed this was not always a limitation (IBM successfully commercialized Linux)  and moreover that are ways around it with Corba as one example.

Paradoxically GNU license can be considered as a consumer protection scheme -- it definitely favors the software user's rights and convenience over the interests of the original developer. It also reflects the belief that free redistribution and modification of software would encourage users to make improvements to it. While this can be true in some areas and with software of certain sizes and written in certain languages  it can be wrong in others. Actually the attractiveness (and usefulness) of the source code for modification by the users declines very quickly with the number of lines of the code.

I am convinced that this idea holds best for scripting languages where you can accomplish quite complex things with a few lines of code, but much less for C code. In any case it's developers who suffer. That's why Ousterhout called the GPL a "really bad idea." As he put it,

"If you use the GPL," which compels developers who make improvements to GPL-licensed software to release their changes open source and free of charge to the public, "you are ruling out a class of users."

His company Scriptics provided both free (but not GPLed) and commercial versions of TCL. See BSD vs. GPL for more details.

Software authors look completely unprotected in GPL but there is one additional and quite subtle nuance here: the author is the only one who has the knowledge of internals and (in case there are no significant contributors) can change the license at any time. Theoretically only the principal author can make the software commercial and that discriminates against co-developers. But as soon as he accepted some substantial contributions from other developers even the principal author might have difficulties to do so.

The other serious problem for authors  is the possibility of hijacking the software, but in reality that happens mostly when the original author lost his initial momentum and may be even lost all interest in the product. What really protects GPL product is the speed of development not GPL license. Complexity is also a factor. It's difficult to attract co-developers after the project reached some critical level of complexity. If the barrier of entry is high more often than not GPLed project simply quietly dies if original author abandoned it. Actually the most important crisis of any large free/open software development project is the stage when the original developers steps down. In many cases project stagnates. 

Than shows that openness is not magic key to the eternal survival in software world, you still need warm bodies doing the hard work to keep the software afloat.

One should not count on the possibility of releasing the same software under a different license for some remuneration from a commercial company too much. Any company that hates GPL can reengineer the software without too much troubles. So not the source code itself, but the speed of development and the author intimate knowledge of internals and design decisions taken (and those rejected along the road) is the only real intellectual asset that really counts. That means that in some cases the author can organize his own company or join some existing firm to continue development of the project that grow beyond the capabilities of the  voluntary contributors model.

Paradoxically the most innovative part of free/open software movement -- scripting languages developers were the most critical about GPL. And the first serious backlash against GPL occurred when Perl creator Larry Wall have found a really brilliant way to eliminate GPL viral restriction by using dual licensing with the second license (Artistic) devoid of GPL viral restriction.

Python developers also are very anti-GPL oriented.   As Guido van Rossum  noted in his Response to Python Licensing Issues Open Source ,Community,Software (Sep 7th, 2000):

In any case we don't want to use *just* the GPL for Python, because there are many proprietary software developers in the Python community who don't want to work with the GPL. Python has always had a BSD'ish license which was perfect for them. I see no reason to suddenly confront everyone in the Python world with the GPL.

As Stallman himself noted: 

In his column on September 8, he notes that he tells Guido van Rossum, "Don't give in to Stallman." From the context, it is clear Winer imagines that I am asking--or rather, demanding--that Python be released under the GPL and only the GPL.

As Guido can confirm, that is not the case. I have been pushing for the license of Python to be compatible with the GPL, so that it can be linked with GPL-covered programs as well as with other programs.

If the Python license is incompatible with the most popular free software license, that creates a major practical problem for the[GPL] community. Given the importance of this problem, all my efforts in talking with the Python developers have been aimed at solving it, at trying to propose some solution that they will accept. This isn't easy, and I am not going to make it harder by asking them for something else in addition.

Winer's description of my goals is equally inaccurate. I am not opposed to commercial software. When companies contribute to the Free World by developing free commercial software, I say more power to them. I started a free software business myself in 1985, selling tapes of GNU Emacs; I dropped it when the FSF took over selling these tapes.

The MacArthur Grant and the Beginning of the Decay,

In 1990, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation granted Stallman a MacArthur fellowship. The grant, a $240,000  which is more then $500K in 2000 dollars provided Stallman with a source of income and health insurance for five years. That made it less necessary to do consulting work to support himself. Although RMS now can devote more time to the writing GNU software, but actually he was almost 40 and his best years as a programmer were in the past. Programming is  a young men game and such grants usually are a clear signs of a starting decay. 

Unpleasant surprises followed. As leader of the GNU Project, Stallman experienced the first fork of Emacs in 1991. As we will see below by 1993, the GNU Project's completely lost the initiative due to an inability to deliver a working POSIX kernel.  In March, 1993, a Wired magazine article by Simson Garfinkel described the GNU Project as "bogged down".  GCC fork occurred a several years later (1997) and was the last straw... 

All-in-all after 1996 GNU project was relegated to a mainly political role and stop hiring developers. Best days of the project were in the past.  And it's unsurprising that nobody cared much about the FSF and GNU and all the glory went to the Linux camp. As Stallman recollect himself:

"We discovered that the people who considered themselves Linux users didn't care about the GNU Project," Stallman says. "They said, `Why should I bother doing these things? I don't care about the GNU Project. It's working for me. It's working for us Linux users, and nothing else matters to us.' And that was quite surprising given that people were essentially using a variant of the GNU system, and they cared so little. They cared less than anybody else about GNU."

Politically Stallman's influence started to fade too and Linus Torvalds became the most prominent free/open software star.

FSF: a very closed private charity that promoted free/open software

In 1985, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a tax-exempt charity, to provide an umbrella organization for the GNU project. Not much is known about the initial years of the organization, it looks there were some struggles as the following  email suggests: 

FROM: Michael Zeleny
DATE: 11/18/1998 07:01:53
SUBJECT: RE:  To Think Some Very Shitty Things About It
Klaus Schilling  <<EMAIL: PROTECTED>> wrote:
><EMAIL: PROTECTED> (Michael Zeleny) writes:
>>Michael Kagalenko <<EMAIL: PROTECTED>> wrote:
>>>Michael Zeleny (<EMAIL: PROTECTED>) wrote 

>>>>As a personal note, back in 1985, I was deceptively expelled from the
>>>>Free Software Foundation, to which I gave its name, by the underhanded
>>>>dealing of Richard Stallman, whose allies took exception to my argument
>>>>that "Free" meant just what it said.  This is a good time to concede
>>>>that Linus Torvalds` adoption of the GPL copyleft, which requires that
>>>>any derivative software be distributed under the same terms, thankfully
>>>>bereft of RMS` ersatz anarchism, has been most effective in preempting
>>>>the familiar native Microsoft strategy of embracing and extending the
>>>>competition, on which see its response to Java.  It is also a good time
>>>>to note that the success of free software was assured by a latecomer,
>>>>precisely because Linus` development strategy eschewed the controlling
>>>>obsessiveness that is second nature to RMS.  And in this connection, it 
>>>>is most gratifying to see the open source movement finally outgrow the
>>>>ideology of Frenetics, which was the name RMS had originally favored
>>>>for his private charity.

>>>Interesting anecdote. I am more sympathetic towards FreeBSD project
>>>for the similar reasons; GPL strikes me as creation of a control freak.
>>>Also, FreeBSD code is of higher quality, they say.

At the beginning (first 10 years) FSF employed some programmers. That practice seized to exist in 1996 after a walkout (see below)

FSF is not a regular non-profit. It's a very closed organization that guards its secrets probably more then any corporate or religious cult headquarters. It's not easy to recreate its history and its ups and downs. Here is some relevant information about early days of FSF from its first vice-president: 

developerWorks: How did you get 
				involved in open source and the Free Software Foundation?

Peter Salus: When I left IBM as "visiting faculty," I worked as a consultant for a very brief period, and I then got involved with what I will call the "user groups." I became the executive director of USENIX, which is the largest and oldest of all the Unix user associations. One of the things that USENIX had been doing for about seven years at that point was to have an annual distribution tape of contributed software, so I did that from '86 to '88. We decided at that point that there was sufficient ability to distribute by way of the net and on CD-ROM so that issuing tapes became redundant, and the association discontinued that.

In '89 I jumped ship, I guess might be the word, and became the executive director of the Sun User Group [an independent association of Sun users]. And I did that for several years and then I thought I was going to retire. I was going to sit at home and write, things of this sort. But that only lasted for about 18 months!

Through all of this period I had known Richard Stallman and a lot of the people involved in what was then known as free software, now the open source movement. And I've always been a very strong advocate of freely redistributable software. Or, if you want, I've been against the notion of proprietary and patented programs and operating systems. So Richard asked me to join the FSF. At first I said, "Well, I'll do a few chores for you." And the chores ended up being the first FSF conference, which was held at the very beginning of '96. He then appointed me Vice President of the FSF, and I did that for another year and a half.

dW: What did you do for the Free Software Foundation?

PS: Supervise the office, supervise publications, put together or determine what would appear on the next CD-ROM, try to organize donors to the foundation -- a dreadfully important thing to do -- and people who would receive either code or financial aid from the Foundation in order to produce code. I mean it's fairly straightforward but incredibly complex, because, of course, all the people are spread out over something on the order of 150 countries around the world. You are also dealing with some very large corporate entities, because especially the gcc, the GNU C compiler, is very widely used. You have a number of people who want to be able -- and are able -- to put it onto their machines when they ship. That is to say, the manufacturers. And so the network of people who contribute to the Foundation is very large and very diverse and spread out over the globe.

dW: How does the Free Software Foundation get most of its funding?

PS: FSF gets almost everything through individual or corporate donations.

dW: But they started out getting money from selling CDs?

PS: Yes, and they still do. They get a small amount of money from the CDs and a much larger amount from selling the manuals that they print. But when you compare the royalties on 2000 CDs or 1000 copies of an individual book with the possibility of a flat donation of ten or twenty thousand dollars, it's clear where the largest part of the funds comes from.

And some people have been incredibly fine long-term supporters of the FSF. Don Knuth is one of those. Among other things, he invented "tech" (the type setting system) and he is the author of those wonderful books on the art of computer programming. He's been a great supporter of the FSF over the years, so there you've got an individual who's not doing it as part of a corporate entity, a laudatory example.

Here is some relevant information about FSF from the Net collected by Ciaran O'Riordan :

This document is a collection of information I have gathered about FSF. I've never been on the payroll of FSF, or worked in it's offices so this isn't "insider info", it's just the public info that I've gotten from talking to FSF staff and trawling the www.

NOTE: If your name is mentioned on this page and you feel I am violating your privacy, please email me and I'll replace your name with an obvious pseudonom (eg. Person00). When the content of this page becomes in any way significant, I will mail FSF to ask them for comments and corrections.

Who works for FSF?

FSF usually has 10 employees but with a high staff turnover, it's hard to keep track of the exact number.

The most current list of employees I'm aware of is:

Who runs FSF?

Richard Stallman is the President of FSF, he has held this position since the beginning.

There is a Board of Directors consisting of:

Richard Stallman has the final say but Bradley Kuhn seems to run the office. I'm not sure what the Board of Directors do.

How much money does FSF have?

All non-profits in America are required to publish a certain amount of financial info on www.guidestar.org. This info is quite out of date but you can see that in 2001 they had $1,056,544.

Sometime around November 2002, digitalspeech.org posted a page that stated FSF had $653,390 and the DigitalSpeech sub-project had $53,267. I'm not sure if the DigitalSpeech funds are counted among the FSF funds or not.

As of June 20th 2003 there are 1222 Associate Members of the FSF. Each member pays either $120 (standard) or $60 (student). If a third are students then FSF have netted $120,000 from this.

The Corporate Patronage Program was launched on the 27th of March 2003, it currently has 28 corporate members. Subscription fees are based on company size. These 28 companies provide an annual revenue of $78,000.

These two initiatives are (to the best of my knowledge) thanks to the work of employees Ravi Khanna and Bradley Kuhn.

Does FSF hire any programmers to work on GNU software?

No. FSF sometimes hires interns to work on small programming tasks.

In the early nineties, FSF had 15 programmers on it's pay roll but since many companies now hire Free Software developers, it's no longer necessary for a medium-sized nonprofit to use donations in this way.

What does RMS do at FSF?

RMS spends very little time in the FSF offices. In 2002, he spent only 116 days in America. He makes some decisions and requests but most people seem to work on their own and answer to Bradley Kuhn.

Who is Bradley Kuhn?

He's the "Executive Director". He took over from Tim Ney in 2000.

Who's Eben Moglen?

Eben serves on the FSF Board of Director, and acts as "General Counsel" for FSF. He works with RMS to write the licenses used in the GNU Project. His background is in Law but he is also a capable programmer. His use of GNU Emacs made him aware of the GNU project. He says that his pro bono work for FSF, is done to pay RMS back for GNU Emacs.

Not much is known about the current executive director of FSF (since March 2002). Here is a standard biographical info:

Bradley M. Kuhn is a supporter of the Free Software Movement: a movement that creates software that can be freely copied, shared, modified, and redistributed, and that brought the popular GNU/Linux operating system into existence.  Mr. Kuhn writes, teaches about and documents Free Software and advocates the importance of software freedom.  He began working with the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project as a volunteer in the mid-1990s.  In February 2001, he was hired full-time as Vice President of the FSF, and was officially named Executive Director in March 2002.  When not putting in overtime for his official duties, Mr. Kuhn contributes to GNU software as a volunteer by hacking on various Free Software programs and Free Documentation.

Mr. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola College in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from University of Cincinnati.  Before working full-time for the FSF, he worked as a Free Software consultant in the technology industry.

It's interesting that like in many other cults top hierarchy can and want to live lavishly. As was aptly noted in the post to The Joel on Software Forum - Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman

Open source makes the software development world look more like the rock star world:

- a handful of guys (RMS, ESR, Linus, Miguel) get a lot of money and recognition

- the other 99% of the guys barely make a living

In autumn 1996, the Free Software Foundation experienced a full-scale staff defection, blamed in large part on Stallman. Brian Youmans, a FSF staffer hired by Peter Salus (then vice-president of the FSF) in the wake of the resignations, recalls the scene: "At one point, Peter [Salus] was the only staff member working in the office." ( Free as in Freedom ).

The first vice-president of FSF, Peter Salus, best known as the author of Bookworm gossip column for Login magazine (Usenix) and a Usenix historian. He is a pretty interesting figure in itself. Actually as a historian he can be extremely boring: I was unfortunate enough to sit on one of his talks, when he essentially stole from Kirk McKusick more then an hour (out of two scheduled for BSD history section) with some paternalistic trivia insulting the intelligence of the Usenix audience instead of a short brief introduction he was expected to give; only after he eventually managed to finish, Kirk McKusick made a really interesting, but necessarily short (he had only 50 minutes left :-) presentation about history of BSD project, which was what this session was about. Bus history aside, Salus was a very unusual figure among typical "early adopters" of  Stallmanism ("true believers"). First of all he was a little bit too old for a member of a high demand cult ;-) Also his biography is very atypical for early adopters of Stallmanism. Here is his (quite glossy) "official biography" taken from Matrix News   press release (1998) when he joined this organization as a new Editorial Director:

Peter is one of the foremost chroniclers of computers and of the Internet and other networks. He holds a B.S. (Chemistry), an M.A. (Germanic Languages), and a Ph.D. (Linguistics), all from New York University. After 20 years as an academic (including stints as a chairman, associate dean, and dean), he went to IBM Research as "visiting faculty.'' From there he went into computer user groups, spending a half-dozen years at the USENIX Association and the Sun User Group. He has been Vice President of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and is currently the Director of The Tcl/Tk Consortium.

IMHO the cult itself was too primitive for anybody who "holds B.S. (Chemistry), an M.A. (Germanic Languages), and a Ph.D. (Linguistics)". It unsurprising that he did not last long (less then two years) in his capacity of vice-president of FSF (as later he recollected  "Richard is quite mad in an unfortunate sense of the word, hard to get along with and all the rest of that.") Anyway, Salus might be one of the earliest known example of what we can call "free/open source bureaucracy",  or as Alan Cox called it "The committee for the administration of the structural planning of the Linux kernel"  the role later (and with more success) played in FSF by Bradley Kuhn. 

Later, with Linux schism, when Stallmanism was split into two parts: Orthodox Stallmanism and Reform Raymondism (the development of commercial  GPL-based software is just a new, better way of creating software, not as an issue of personal freedom; see my first Monday papers on the subject), Salus defected to the Raymondism camp and even became a founder of at least one startup. Judging from his opinion about my First Monday Paper, it looks like in mid-2004 this "Usenix historian" was still a fun of (completely ahistorical) CatB  (his remark reproduced below was posted on Groklaw, which at this time probably converted itself from a useful site informing people about details of the SCO lawsuit from the point of view of OSS community to a propaganda site that expresses extreme zealot-style view on any OSS-related issues both connected and disconnected with the SCO lawsuit):

N. Bezroukov

Authored by: Peter H. Salus on Thursday, May 27 2004 @ 11:24 AM EDT


Back in 1999, Bezroukov published an incredibly idiotic piece in First Monday. ESR responded to it. At that time,
Bezroukov was listed as a Senior Staff member of BASF and a Professor at FDU (in New Jersey). He isn't listed there
now. He does reviewing on Amazon.com.

---
Peter H. Salus

Fighting Software Patents

The mixed success of FSF as a primary copyright holder for all GPL software soon became politically problematic for Stallman. Meanwhile he created another important organization League for Programming Freedom. This is organization that fights software patents and after all those years it looks much more positively that FSF. Actually it was League for Programming Freedom not FSF or GNU project that was sited in the MacArthur Foundation fellowship(1990):

Richard M. Stallman, president of the League for Programming Freedom and a former employee of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has been awarded a $240,000 fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Although he has severed all official ties with MIT, Stallman still works in offices at the AI lab. He describes himself as a "squatter" on the MIT campus.

Stallman is best known at MIT for having written the Emacs word processor, but he is also gaining prominence as an outspoken critic of software patents and copyrights on user interfaces. He founded the LPF about one year ago as a "grass-roots political organization, to fight for the freedom of programmers to implement what the users want."

The LPF is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to warn the public about encroaching monopolies in the software industry, and to develop countermeasures against them, according to the LPF's corporate charter. The LPF's major activities at present involve lobbying against Lotus Development Corp., developers of 1-2-3, and Apple Computer Inc., because of the user-interface copyright infringement lawsuits they have filed against their competitors.

The MacArthur fellowships, known as "genius grants," are awarded annually to exceptionally talented and creative people. This year's recipients include artists, human rights activists, mathematicians, and astronomers.

Prizes range from $150,000 to $375,000 in value, and include health insurance for the recipient. The grants have no strings attached and are disbursed over a five year period.

According to RMS, software patents are harmful to everyone except for a few large corporations. In hardware, he sees a clear role for patents, but with software they are very disturbing. Patents restrict how people can program,  and, although patents can be licensed, it doesn't mean that companies will not do their best to eliminate competition by charging unreasonable fees or by just refusing to license a particular patent. RMS voiced his concern about the US situation with software patterns extending to Europe. He explicitly calls for protesting Europe software patterns laws and called for support of Luuk van Dijk's efforts to fight Euro software patents.

RMS extends this approach to software interfaces to hardware that are implemented in drivers. He is firmly against binary-only drivers. The problem here is that you pay for the hardware, but the vendor hides from you the interfaces to the product in the driver.   Basically, you cannot use your legally bought hardware from your own software if the company does not provide a driver for this system. In this respect, RMS often mentioned the fact that over 20 million people are free software users. This is a significant market force. In RMS opinion many people do not realize the power of rejecting a hardware product that is not "free software ready". That why he advocates a selective buying, even if that means buying something less advanced or a little bit more expensive.

Linux schism -- commercially sold GPLed software
undermined GNU project and  FSF

"That crazy guy from Boston, Richard Stallman"

Eric Raymond

The initial phase of mass movements are usually dominated by a true believer, a man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause. Later opportunists hijack the idea and use it for achieving their, not exactly unselfish goals. That's exactly the situation that happened with GNU project after Linux moved to the front stage of events.

Linux  proved to be so successful that like a Russian revolutionary erased from a photograph, RMS and GNU project is being written out of history. With Linux as a major open OS, Stallman lost the battle for credit. Linus Torvalds became the banner on the movement, and Stallman has became a prophet that nobody recognize in his own country.

Also his philosophy of "software freedom" was replaced with a revisionism version that we will call Raymond's. The essence of Raymondism was analyzed by me elsewhere (see Raymondism FAQ and  Raymondism Critique ). Shlomi Fish the author of  The "In for Free Beer" Manifesto summarized them in his essay "Open Source", "Free Software" and other beasts as following: 

Stallmanism. Proprietary software is legal but illegitimate and immoral. Manufacturing and using proprietary software causes a lot of unhappy social and psychological side-effects. The knowledge that a software cannot be shared causes people to become reluctant to sharing, which is a natural and good part of living in a human society. The inability of people to modify software for their own needs, makes them feel helpless, and at the mercy of external software. Free software, on the other hand, is the natural conclusion derived from the basic facts of information, computing and software, and is highly moral. People, companies and other organizations can modify it, customize it and distribute it for their own use should the need arise, and so it actually benefits them.

Raymondism. Proprietary software is not illegitimate, just problematic from the economic sense. Open Source software gives many advantages to the end-users and is a generally a good thing. Copyleft licenses are important in making sure certain software is not abused. It is not immoral to use proprietary software, it’s just risky. Using or producing software that is not 100% open-source but pretty close, can be a good idea, depending on its license and the general attitude of its developers.

Here is how "open-source sympathetic" press  describes the role of FSF in creation and success of Linux:

You sort of have to feel sorry for Richard Stallman. Poor old RMS, sitting in his dingy office in the comp sci building at MIT, issuing proclamations about the difference between free software and open source software, and insisting that everyone call Linux "GNU/Linux", worrying that the efforts of the GNU Project might be forgotten.

But paradoxically in "free vs open source discussion" I am on the RMS side (Stalmanism side, if you wish ;-) and I think that RMS is right by saying that he's not sure to what extent the Free Software is compatible with corporate desire for profit. It's much more straightforward and truthful to say it that way, rather than jump over the head trying to sell open source projects to the highest bidder as ESR attempts.

There is one terminological problem: some people (RMS is one example) distinguish free software ("free software"="GPL-based software" in RMS interpretation ;-) from Open Source (umbrella term that includes BSD license, Artistic license and LGPL, among others), some do not. Open source is snappier, clearer, less ambiguous, and close enough to the same thing. As such it's preferable to the  99% of people. I know that RMS disagree, but so be it. And actually if you are language semantic fundamentalist you can see the GPL has problems with coercing the word  "free" (that's why so much material on GNU site is devoted to it ;-).  BSD license is more free that GPL in both "free like in beer" and "free like in freedom" meanings of this word. 

The principal advantage of open source means that for simple programs the possibility of adapting program for your needs largely  compensates for the shortcomings of this program.  Of course you need to be a programmer to use this advantage, but the programming code is useful for adaptation only if it is really short and simple. You can convert any open source project into an analogy of closed source project just by overcomplicating the code base. That means that commercializing of open source ("Linus revolution") is internally contradictive undertaking as Red Hat behavior clearly demonstrates. As RMS said:

... I would choose a bare-bones unreliable free program rather than ... reliable proprietary program...

Again the key advantage of open source for me that "bare-bone" open source program does have additional value that might compensate for many other real or perceived faults. This opportunity is not automatic and to a large extent disappear with the growth of the size of the program. So KISS principle is of paramount importance for open source.

Again it's important to understand that the principal advantage of open source exists only up to certain amount of lines in a program. That's why scripting languages are so important and Perl, TCL, PHP and Python, not Linux can be considered to be flagships of open source. Linux is a pretty conservative reimplementation of Unix that introduced almost nothing new into operating system kernel design. And BTW Unix introduced at least seven: C language as system programming language, hierarchical filesystem, pipes and a set of pipes friendly utilities/filters, regular expressions, devices as files, shell as the mother of all modern scripting languages, first built-in TCP/IP stack). If one compares Linux with BE OS, Inferno or even with OS/2 and Amiga one can see that in major design decisions Linux is an extremely conservative OS. As Rob Pike noted in his "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/rob/utah2000.pdf) Linux can be considered as a sign that computer science research became irrelevant and he claimed that the whole situation in OS design is generally bad and requires action.

Raymondism statement that open-source software is a new economic force for producing software that is inherently or inevitably superior to alternatives is very close to Vulgar Marxism (Economism).  As I mentioned in My responce to the letter by Paolo Pumilia to the FM:

I would like to reiterate that ERS's views on the economic superiority of open source are close to vulgar Marxism with it's economic determinism. Contrary to your impression "vulgar Marxism " is a legitimate scientific term. As Professor Robert M. Young stated in his work "Marxism and the history of science" [see R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie and M.J.S. Hodge (editors), Companion to the History of Modern Science. (1996), pp. 77-86.]:

"The defining feature of Marxist approaches to the history of science is that the history of scientific ideas, of research priorities, of concepts of nature and of the parameters of discoveries are all rooted in historical forces which are, in the last instance, socio-economic. There are variations in how literally this is taken and various Marxist-inspired and Marxist-related positions define the interrelations among science and other historical forces more or less loosely. There is a continuum of positions. The most orthodox provides one-to-one correlations between the socio-economic base and the intellectual superstructure. This is referred to as economism or vulgar Marxism."

All in all, I am trying here to communicating a more objective message that can mobilize free/open source developers by giving them a clear sense of what OSS is about, what are major ideological faction. You are encouraged to read BSD vs. GPL  and my first Monday papers for more information.

Returning to effect of CatB on the movement, this new "philosophy/religion" of Raymondism radically changed the place of FSF in the free/open software universe, moving it toward periphery. Soon Stallman had difficulties with funding GNU project. The fact that Stallman was the lighting rod of the free-software movement and that gcc is the basis of writing free/open software is difficult to see when Linux and Linus Torvalds got all the ink. And all the ink means all the money.  In the article Linux's Forgotten Man/Wired News  by Leander Kahney  she wrote:

... Does he not wish he were getting more recognition?

"I hope not. But how can I know for sure? I've got an ego like everyone else. I'm sure my ego wants me to be more famous. I don't know." In a nutshell, Stallman believes that software must be free, not necessarily available for nothing, but free to be copied, modified, distributed, shared, and fixed. "I'm not against commercial anything," Stallman said. "I'm against proprietary software that divides and conquers the users."

Unlike commercial software, which is proprietary, free-software programmers don't have to solve the same problems over and over. They keep improving on the work that came before, like the scientific methodology. However, in Stallman's eyes, the programming community is more interested in talking about practical issues, like performance -- an anathema to Stallman. And this conflict is partly why Stallman is marginalized. Most people don't want to talk about freedom. There's been a splintering of the movement: away from free software created by ideologues to open-source software created by business-friendly pragmatists like Torvalds.

"[Torvalds] is basically an engineer," Stallman said. "He likes free software, but isn't concerned with issues of freedom. That's why I'm unhappy when the GNU system is called Linux.... People are no longer exposed to the philosophical views of the GNU project." Does nomenclature matter to the geeks on the show floor? A number of showgoers say they felt in their hearts the correct name was GNU/Linux, but it was easier just to call it Linux.

"I recognize it as GNU/Linux but I don't call it GNU/Linux because I'm lazy," says one attendee. "I agree that Stallman didn't get the recognition he deserves, but that's partly because of his abrasive personality."

The situation in which RMS is marginalized in the new world of Open Source is a self-inflicted wound and is partially rooted in his anarchist agenda and the luck of diplomatic skills.  The rule of the diplomatic game is respect for one's peers, a characteristic sadly lacking in some of RMS's public commentaries. For example, the fragment of the article above, he refers to Linus Torvalds as someone who "isn't concerned with issues of freedom." Apparently, releasing code under GPL, spending thousands of hours debugging it and working as the main configuration manager for the kernel code for almost a decade is a pretty good advocacy of freedom by any imaginable standard. His motives might not be as pure, but still his concern about software freedom is probably undeniable. He managed somehow to adapt himself to a new situation: 

For Richard Stallman, 
							time may not heal all wounds, but it does provide a 
							convenient ally.

Four years after " The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Stallman still chafes over the Raymond critique. He also grumbles over Linus Torvalds' elevation to the role of world's most famous hacker. He recalls a popular T-shirt that began showing at Linux tradeshows around 1999. Designed to mimic the original promotional poster for Star Wars, the shirt depicted Torvalds brandishing a lightsaber like Luke Skywalker, while Stallman's face rides atop R2D2. The shirt still grates on Stallmans nerves not only because it depicts him as a Torvalds' sidekick, but also because it elevates Torvalds to the leadership role in the free software/open source community, a role even Torvalds himself is loath to accept. "It's ironic," says Stallman mournfully. "Picking up that sword is exactly what Linus refuses to do. He gets everybody focusing on him as the symbol of the movement, and then he won't fight. What good is it?"

Then again, it is that same unwillingness to "pick up the sword," on Torvalds part, that has left the door open for Stallman to bolster his reputation as the hacker community's ethical arbiter. Despite his grievances, Stallman has to admit that the last few years have been quite good, both to himself and to his organization. Relegated to the periphery by the unforeseen success of GNU/Linux, Stallman has nonetheless successfully recaptured the initiative. His speaking schedule between January 2000 and December 2001 included stops on six continents and visits to countries where the notion of software freedom carries heavy overtones-China and India, for example.

GPL is only one of several successful models of free software development, although in late 90th it became the second most popular license after BSD license. It's important to understand that BSD license predates GPL and BSD style licensed software constitutes the majority of open source (if we use open source as an umbrella term), but GPL played a significant role in the "free/open software revolution" of late 90th.  And as with any revolution at some point "comrades" are displaced by profiteers or tyrants (revolutions ten to eat its children).

At the same time competition between BSD license and GPL positively influenced both BSD and GPL products and sometimes helped to move GPL products to more liberal licensing schemes. I am saying  "more liberal" deliberately, because with all due respect for GPL one should understand that there are many things that the GPL itself does not allow for; part of this is solved within LGPL, but much of it revolves around RMS personal attitude towards patent, copyright, commercial applications, and towards what constitutes "derivation".  Actually from the historical perspective LGPL can be considered as the first "revisionist" GPL-inspired software licenses (see SlashdotRMS Forum Transcript Online for an interesting discussion.)

The second popular form of open software development is when along with open sourced software, there is a closed source proprietary version. In this case a part of revenue from selling the latter funds the development of open source version. TCL, Ghostscript and several other products represent this important trend.  See You say open source I say freeware ( SunWorld, September 1998) for an interesting discussion.

In 1998 an eclectic attempt to merge several existing types of open source software in a form of a umbrella term open source and became quite popular. It was largely based on Debian GNU/Linux distribution experience and includes the following conditions:

1. Free Redistribution The license may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

2. Source Code The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of downloading the source code, without charge, via the Internet. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.

3. Derived Works. The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. [Please note the work allow - not require as in GPL  -- BNN]

4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code. The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups. The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons [BTW that rules out an important class of licenses that permit free non-commercial use -BNN]

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor. The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research. [That demand rules out frequently used clause "free for educational use only" -- BNN]

7. Distribution of License. The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties. [this presuppose the right to change the license, similar to BSD license - BNN]

8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product. The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.

9. License Must Not Contaminate Other Software. The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software [that permits distribution as part of commercial product and essentially rules out GPL as an open source license -BNN].

Although I like the term "open source" as a more clear term than the original Stallman's term "free software" I must admit that historically open source served mostly as a successful remarketing slogan for commercial repackaging of GPL software (see also my Critique of Vulgar Raymondism) and IMHO it does not introduce any important or interesting ideas. Politically OSL looks rather eclectic attempt to bring left (GPL) and right (BSD) parts of the free software movement under one (commercial) roof. The authors of open source license claim that it includes as variants:

1. You may make and give away verbatim copies of the source form of the Standard Version of this Package without restriction, provided that you duplicate all of the original copyright notices and associated disclaimers.

2. You may apply bug fixes, portability fixes and other modifications derived from the Public Domain or from the Copyright Holder. A Package modified in such a way shall still be considered the Standard Version.

3. You may otherwise modify your copy of this Package in any way, provided that you insert a prominent notice in each changed file stating how and when you changed that file, and provided that you do at least ONE of the following:

a) place your modifications in the Public Domain or otherwise make them Freely Available, such as by posting said modifications to Usenet or an equivalent medium, or placing the modifications on a major archive site such as ftp.uu.net, or by allowing the Copyright Holder to include your modifications in the Standard Version of the Package.

b) use the modified Package only within your corporation or organization.

c) rename any non-standard executables so the names do not conflict with standard executables, which must also be provided, and provide a separate manual page for each non-standard executable that clearly documents how it differs from the Standard Version.

d) make other distribution arrangements with the Copyright Holder.

4. You may distribute the programs of this Package in object code or executable form, provided that you do at least ONE of the following:

a) distribute a Standard Version of the executables and library files, together with instructions (in the manual page or equivalent) on where to get the Standard Version.

b) accompany the distribution with the machine-readable source of the Package with your modifications.

c) accompany any non-standard executables with their corresponding Standard Version executables, giving the non-standard executables non-standard names, and clearly documenting the differences in manual pages (or equivalent), together with instructions on where to get the Standard Version.

d) make other distribution arrangements with the Copyright Holder.

5. You may charge a reasonable copying fee for any distribution of this Package. You may charge any fee you choose for support of this Package. You may not charge a fee for this Package itself. However, you may distribute this Package in aggregate with other (possibly commercial) programs as part of a larger (possibly commercial) software distribution provided that you do not advertise this Package as a product of your own.

6. The scripts and library files supplied as input to or produced as output from the programs of this Package do not automatically fall under the copyright of this Package, but belong to whomever generated them, and may be sold commercially, and may be aggregated with this Package.

7. C or perl subroutines supplied by you and linked into this Package shall not be considered part of this Package.

8. The name of the Copyright Holder may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

I believe that claims of  open source software definition can bring these under one roof are unwarranted and does not bring us any further. It looks like there two different and equally influential wings within the free software developer community and those two wings have different view on what is good and what is bad for the free software.  Stallman was and still is an apostle of the left (anarchistic) wing of the movement.

Again, I would like to reiterate that essentially the main problem with GPL is connected with the fact that it without dual licensing it inhibits a proven software model when the author produce both free and commercial version of the same product and use money derived from commercial version to finance development of both commercial and free versions. That source of funding is distinct from donations which are the main source of income for FSF. The latter was a successful model that is used by several products ( TCL, Sendmail, Ghostscript, etc.) and we probably need to accept the existence of this additional model.

Linux schism and emergence of Raymondism,
 the growth of RMS' appetite for interpreting GPL License

Back in the mid-15th century, the Dominicans and Franciscans, those two great rival mendicant religious orders, went at each other hammer and tong over whether the blood that Christ shed while he hung on the cross was still hypostatically united to the Godhead and therefore worthy of adoration or whether, because the blood was outside Christ's body, it had ceased to be divine and therefore could not be adored. The friars raised such a ruckus that they drove the pope, Pius II, the only pope, I might add, to write his autobiography, to utter distraction. Things got so bad that Pius had to shelve his crusade against the Turks, who were pressing in on the West, to mediate the dispute.

Sun Finds & Exploits Hole in the Precious GPL

With Linux they stole the fame and with Raymondism they stole the name ;-). It's now no longer free software, it's now "open source."  Since Jan. 1998 Eric Raymond successfully promoted "open source" as a distinct and slightly anti-Stallman philosophy. See for example his interview with Smart Reseller Straight From The Source where Eric was called a Godfather of Linux ;-) Note how skillfully an anti-Stallman stance was injected -- GPL essentially permit commercial use and that is probably the core reason of Linux popularity (after Linus permit commercial distribution of the kernel; that happened before CatB was published):

SR: Some of our readers may be confused by the "open source" movement you represent, which is significantly different from Richard Stallman's (a.k.a. RMS, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project) "free software" statements. Open source is not the same thing as Stallman's "free software," right?

 Raymond: The distinction between the open-source movement and what RMS is doing is that we push utility arguments while he publishes moralistic ones. RMS's basic stance is that intellectual property is evil and, therefore, sources must be open. Ours is that we want what gives the best engineering results, and that's open source.

First is was fuzzy messages like "we want what gives the best engineering results, and that's open source."  Later Raymonsim philosophy became more well-defined. In a quote below taken from the article Freedom's forgotten prophet (October9, 2000) by Judy Steed (Toronto Star) ESR seems to attacks RMS explicitly claiming that the technical superiority ("better software") of the open source software is the main reason of Linux popularity:

However, Torvalds' acolytes blame Stallman for his own displacement. "Richard could have been the leader of free software in the world, but he's standing in his own way,'' says Jon Hall, executive director of Linux International, an association of companies that promotes and develops "open source'' software.

"Linus came along, and he's one of the nicest, sweetest, friendliest people you could ever meet,'' says Hall, a godfather to Torvalds' two children. "People want to deal with him.''

Stallman failed in a number of ways, says Eric Raymond, a board member of VA Linux Systems (which sells work stations loaded with Red Hat Linux). "Richard is one of the best programmers to ever walk this earth, (he is) an innovative genius of design, but . . . His rhetoric didn't work. It turned off business. The term 'free software' is ambiguous. And he didn't produce a kernel.''

Raymond dislikes Stallman's ideology.

``Unlike Richard, we (in the open source movement) like capitalism, we don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with proprietary software. We think people should have a choice, but we believe open source is better software, because of the process.''

The superiority of free software's evolutionary development was illuminated by Raymond's article, ``The Cathedral and the Bazaar,'' in which he writes: ``No quiet, reverential cathedral building here - rather, the Linux community resembles a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches.''

Raymond also calls free/open source hackers, ``the native culture of the Internet. We built it and we largely still run it.''

At a Linux conference in Toronto earlier this year, Torvalds was mobbed by sales executives and hackers, who treated him with a reverence usually reserved for rock stars.

``People think I'm a poor, monk-like person living in squalor,'' Torvalds said, evoking Stallman's image. ``It's not true. I'm doing very well. Linux companies have given me stock options.'' (Stallman turns down stock options.)

Torvalds is employed at Transmeta Corp., a hot California start-up that provides Linux operating systems for Gateway Inc. and America Online Inc. When and if Transmeta goes public, Torvalds will likely make a fortune.

Yet Torvalds continues to acknowledge the man who fathered the system. ``Richard Stallman has been doing open source for 25 years,'' he told his Toronto fans. ``He built a lot of the tools used to develop Linux. I adopted the same (General Public) license that he came up with.''

Torvalds describes Stallman as ``the idealist, the black and white person. If you're not with him, you're evil, almost. He's utterly impractical.''

And in the second part of 1998 "open source" became a standard umbrella term encompassing commercialized GPL-based software and first of all major commercial Linux distributions (Caldera, Red Hat, Slackware, Suse, etc). Still like is often is the case in religious schisms, Raymodism overtake of Stallmanism was not complete and Eric Raymond had run into his own PR problems with his unsuccessful attempt to grab an "open source" trademark, that generated a lot of resentment in the  community. Later his "surprised by wealth" letter undermined his role of influential evangelist of "open source is the best economical model for the development of the software" message. He became an object of pretty nasty jokes, but that does not help RMS to restore the role of FSF. 

At the end of 1998 the term "open source" largely replaced old RMS term "free software" and FSF as a public organization promoting open source software was undermined by Raymond's puppet organization OSI (Open Software Initiative).  See also Whence the Source Untangling the Open SourceFree Software Debate that compares RMS and Eric Raymond positions. But generally "Embrace, extend, extinguish" approach by Raymond, who did a lot of  politically motivated self-marketing was pretty successful in eliminating FSF visibility.

This is a strange situation. I understand that "free software" is probably more accurate term ( "free speech" not  "free beer"), but this very important association with free speech got lost very early in favor of the second one, and it looks like the main association is with "free beer", which is actually not bad in its own right ;-). The reason I  prefer the term "open source" to "free software" is that the term "open source" stresses giving everyone  access to the source and to the future modifications.

But the programs themselves no matter how well written are not unique and need to evolve to survive the introduction of new hardware and new OSes. GPL does it at the expense of developer, but paradoxically this "first make a self-sacrifice, then came and get some IPO money" aspect of Raymondism interpretation of GPL proved to be an important marketing advantage that helped Linux in its epic struggle with BSD camp: indeed, Torvalds once said that adopting GPL license was the best decision he ever made. Essentially it was a political struggle in which technically inferior product won and GPL played important part in this battle. See Linus Torvalds biography for details.

And like with Hollywood stars there is noticeable backlash against Linux "new riches"  that somewhat increases exposure for RMS and FSF and provides for RMS a nice opportunity to travel around the globe.

At the same time in a bid to preserve his influence RMS's developed a growing appetite for interpreting GPL license. As one Slashdot reader put it:

It seems to be an axiomatic thing about politics, most visibly demonstrated by the behavior of the US Republican party under Clinton: the more the moderates rule the roost, the more extreme the standard bearers of the wings become. Linus Torvalds has created a system that uses the GPL to its fullest advantage, yet repudiates the ivory-tower extremism of the FSF: give it away or sell it, just don't think you can own it. Companies like RedHat and SuSE are proving that this can work.

The problem is that this leaves Richard Stallman on the fringe, no longer in control of the philosophical movement he created. So he does the human thing: he backlashes. He tries to force the GNU/Linux issue. He rails against the corporatization of Linux, forgetting that commercial acceptance is critical to its future. He slams the open source movement because it doesn't do things the GNU way (check out his comments about APSL, for example). He has even demoted the Library GPL to Lesser GPL.

It would be wrong to say that RMS doesn't have a point. But I'm not one of those people who agree with the phrase "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice" -- extremism is always a vice as it a) does not allow for the possibility of redefining a position if such proves to be necessary and b) tends to turn off those who you most have to reach -- those darned moderates again. Stallman is an extremist, and therefore (by *my* definition anyway, and that subjectivity should be very much acknowledged here) a crackpot.

In any case, I've often felt that RMS likes to play the same embrace-and-extend game as Microsoft with no purpose other than to lock people into GNU. I've felt that way for a long time, ever since I read the part of the GCC manual that talks about the purpose of other compilers being to compile GCC. The creation of GUILE is another example; IMHO its only reasons for existence are that a) Stallman is not fond of tcl/tk and b) Stallman is a scheme junkie. Not because another tool was needed, but because *RMS wants it that way*. The Apple boycott of years past is another thing -- the FSF was punishing A/UX and MacOS users for Apple's behavior, no matter that the Mac people might have as much to contribute as anyone else. In their own way, the FSF is no different from the commercial establishment they're fighting; it's like Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates. The question is not whether one is worse than the other, it's a matter of who's holding the hammer at the moment.

Actually, just as an exercise I'd like to see someone create a diminished-GNU linux distro. I don't think it would be especially popular, since GNU programs tend to be the best in their class, but someone should try it on principle. The FSF to me has long resembled a child who comes to a party with a game idea, but then wants to take it and go home when other kids start adding rules, the kicker being that they've already given it away! (Though at least the gcc->egcs->gcc split-countersplit indicates they're smart enough to know when there's a better way sometimes...)

Do I think open-source is a good thing? Yer damn straight. It's made a penguin-lover out of this longtime Machead. Do I think RMS should be honored for creating and managing the GNU project? Yes. The movement came before him and will outlast him, but he's the philosophical nexus. But do I think his behavior is a bit outlandish because of his unyielding philosophical positions?

 

The Start of GPL Jihad

(The growth of the paranoia about copyright infringement undermined the GPL usefulness)

The License Police, they live inside of the net;
The License Police, as dogmatic as they can get...
The License Police, they'll come and judge your code
Oh nooooooo......

Well I can't write code 'cause they're lookin' at me...
And when I fall asleep bet they're griping 'bout me...
(tonight...TONIGHT!)

'Cause they're yelling at me, unbundling me...
...GEE..PEE..ELLL!
They're driiivin' me insane.....
...Those men at Deb-i-annnn....

(with apologies to Cheap Trick)

I admire Stallman as a programmer (he is not a hacker as he likes to claim, he is a professional of a very high caliber).  But recently he undergone a process of radicalization and more and more reminds me of some figures from the recent history ;-(. And some of his recent letters look like they have been written by a medieval theologian.

Historically, GPL-licensing schemes have been usually applied to software that was built from small, rather humble beginnings, and grown from there (GCC, Linux, but not Star Office), whereas BSD-licensed products often come from a university or some research company as a result of a finished research project that university/company cannot support any longer, but wanted a community to grow around it and take over the administration and development.

Putting a large pre-existing project under GPL is a mixed blessing because in many commercial projects there are large sections of code that have been used in other projects (although Sun for political reasons decided to put StarOffice under GPL as a second license); the "cookoo egg" (sometimes called viral) quality of GPL makes derivatives that use the same codebase easy targets for "negative marketing attacks" even if legally company can defend itself. 

This is why generally GPL is not very attractive for larger software development companies: in most cases it's simply not practical for them to use GPL. Tiny software company often are so paranoid of their larger competitors that GPL can be quite attractive option that at least partially can protect them for most often fake threat of stealing of the product.

Although GPL was successful beyond widest RMS dreams, BSD -- an earlier license still remains the most important and the most widely used free/open source software license.  It leads both in quantity and the quality of software that was produced under it and it's derivatives, and it is definitely a superior license for large software companies. It's better for them due to its simplicity and inambiguity, not necessary because "viral quality" is unacceptable (but paradoxically makes sole products quite suitable for marketing purposes, as  IBM demonstrated to the surprised world).

The main underling problem in that GPL was never tested in courts and as such is interpreted mainly by RMS himself and the group of his trusted lieutenants. But GPL is a long and complex license and its not very friendly to the other dominant license BSDL. Actually Stallman complained a lot about advertising close in BSD license that blocked BSD-licensed products from GPLed products and reached success in removing this restriction providing one-side advantages for GPL-based projects ;-)

But BSD allows companies to grow a development community consisting of both commercial and academic software developers (I include non-paid developers into academic category) while GPL makes the participation of commercial developers at least problematic unless they are rebels that try to create something that is not officially approved by their management (in this latter case GPL is quite attractive and paradoxically serve well the purpose).

But only if the product enjoy an active development community you can outsource the application's development, while maintaining the application forever is a curse of GPLed products). Only if a company can appropriate certain proprietary pieces of the code and to squeeze a few dollars out of their development costs the commercial company would support software development project. After all it should have a return of investment probably slowly reducing the company's financial commitment to some useful components, development tools, etc. Outside tools (gcc is a good example of pretty popular among commercial developers tool) GPL has no such ability, since there is some risk that any reuse might lead to the situation where the there are PR losses due to negative marketing, for example a pressure to open an application as a whole that uses some GPLed components.

Generally as the project mature the value of GPL diminishes and for successful projects GPL became more of a burden than an advantage. That's probably why Linus Torvalds no longer repeat that putting Linux under GPL was the smartest decision that he ever made, although it still probably the smartest decision that he ever made in view of competition with much technically stronger FreeBSD project ;-).  Here is a characteristic opinion expressed by PHP developers Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski: in LG interview :

LM: What were the motives behind changing the license between PHP 3 and PHP 4?

Suraski: There were several reasons. The main concern with the GPL was that commercial companies, such as IBM and others, avoid GPL'd code like the plague. The fact that the GPL is "contagious" discouraged many companies from putting effort into projects that are distributed under it. If we take a look at the few open source projects that IBM endorses, we would find Apache, Jakarta and PHP - none of which is released under the GPL, and we believe it is not a coincidence. These licenses are less restrictive, and we believe they work better in the real world. We also felt PHP was mature enough to let everyone use it, without having to ask for our permission, which is why the permission clause was dropped. Other than that, the license stayed pretty much the same.

With the emergence of  "open source"  movement as encompassing several different licenses it became clear that Stallman and GPL supporting community are synonymous with the radical left wing. At the same time BSD style license represent more moderate and in many cases more practical approach. 

But at some point especially after some GPL players became "absurdly rich" due to IPOs there was a radical backlash -- the fundamentalist elements in the community ware reinforced and radicalized. Radicalization of GPL community was increased by emergence of evangelists like Bruce Perens that used to switch into "jihad" mode seeing any transgressions. And here RMS himself played a role with his KDE GPL-compliance saga (see below). Balance is important both in case proprietary software and in the case of GPLed software.  There is a cultural space in the software movement that is similar to free press and where people have the right to share ideas and systems. In this "free software space" GPL represent a left wing and because it was never tested in courts it looks not only like a document, but more like a political doctrine that is interpreted by its "high priest" RMS.

One of the first manifestation of this growing "GPL jihad" was  appearance of GNU zealot test on Slashdot:

You might be a GNU zealot if:

1. All your software is GPL, or RMS says its ok to use.
2. You don't use software that RMS says it's not OK to use.
3. The license of a piece of software is more important than the software itself.
4. You get mad when you hear Linus say "He who writes the code chooses the license", and speculate that someone may have tricked him into saying that.
5. Anyone who doesn't philosophically agree with the FSF is just "spreading FUD"
6. Your skin crawls when somebody uses the term "Open Source"

Here is another pretty telling quote [No GNU for me thanks, I'm driving...]:

The following short essay is a piece I wrote in a Slashdot discussion about an interview with Mr. GNU himself, Richard Stallman. Although I appreciate what he has done for the hacker community and applaud the existence of the FSF and GNU, I feel that the point has arrived where Stallman's extreme insistence on his personal politics of freedom is doing more harm than good to the open source movement.

Above all, I believe what I have to say on the issue is a commentary about political extremism in general as much as it is a screed against one man's crusade. I do have issues with the FSF's behavior (most mentioned below), but the greater issue is what I point out below about how moderate dominance tends to push the true believers to the edge.

For the record, this was moderated up to "2;Interesting". My /. karma is very happy with me right now.

29 March 2000

Stallman *is* a crackpot, IMHO, but not because he's wrong. It's because he's too radical for most people's tastes.

It seems to be an axiomatic thing about politics, most visibly demonstrated by the behavior of the US Republican party under Clinton: the more the moderates rule the roost, the more extreme the standard bearers of the wings become. Linus Torvalds has created a system that uses the GPL to its fullest advantage, yet repudiates the ivory-tower extremism of the FSF: give it away or sell it, just don't think you can own it. Companies like RedHat and SuSE are proving that this can work.

The problem is that this leaves Richard Stallman on the fringe, no longer in control of the philosophical movement he created. So he does the human thing: he backlashes. He tries to force the GNU/Linux issue. He rails against the corporatization of Linux, forgetting that commercial acceptance is critical to its future. He slams the open source movement because it doesn't do things the GNU way (check out his comments about APSL, for example). He has even demoted the Library GPL to Lesser GPL.

It would be wrong to say that rms doesn't have a point. But I'm not one of those people who agree with the phrase "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice" -- extremism is always a vice as it a) does not allow for the possibility of redefining a position if such proves to be necessary and b) tends to turn off those who you most have to reach -- those darned moderates again. Stallman is an extremist, and therefore (by *my* definition anyway, and that subjectivity should be very much acknowledged here) a crackpot.

In any case, I've often felt that rms likes to play the same embrace-and-extend game as Microsoft with no purpose other than to lock people into GNU. I've felt that way for a long time, ever since I read the part of the GCC manual that talks about the purpose of other compilers being to compile GCC. The creation of GUILE is another example; IMHO its only reasons for existence are that a) Stallman is not fond of tcl/tk and b) Stallman is a scheme junkie. Not because another tool was needed, but because *rms wants it that way*. The Apple boycott of years past is another thing -- the FSF was punishing A/UX and MacOS users for Apple's behavior, no matter that the Mac people might have as much to contribute as anyone else. In their own way, the FSF is no different from the commercial establishment they're fighting; it's like Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates. The question is not whether one is worse than the other, it's a matter of who's holding the hammer at the moment.

Actually, just as an exercise I'd like to see someone create a diminished-GNU linux distro. I don't think it would