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[fsf-community-team] Introduction from Mark Rosenthal


From: MBR
Subject: [fsf-community-team] Introduction from Mark Rosenthal
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:58:18 -0500
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (Windows/20090812)

I sent this about an hour ago, and it still doesn't seem to have been distributed by the mailing list server.  So I'm guessing that the server's disallowing email with attachments.  So I've uploaded my HistoryOfOpenSource.pdf to my webserver.
Mark



address@hidden wrote:
Welcome to the address@hidden mailing list! Thanks for
taking the first step in joining the FSF Community team.

Since you'll be helping the FSF get its free software message out, the
next step is for you to do some simple reading and writing to show
staff and other volunteers on this list that you're well-prepared for
the role.

Note: If you're already an FSF member, you probably have a very good
handle on all these questions. So please just bear with us and enjoy
the exercise :)

So, what we need you to do is pretty simple, just reply to the list at
address@hidden with the following:

1) Send us a quick introduction. What blogs, news sites, or
communities do you follow? Are there particular news topics that you
would like to focus on?
  
Greetings.  I'm Mark Rosenthal.  I wrote my first line of software in high school in 1967 -- at a time when it was extremely unusual for a high school to have access to a computer of any sort.  I've worked as a software engineer since the early 1970s.  In the mid-1970s, at the MIT Folk Dance Club, I encountered a fanatic who went on endless rants complaining that, "They're taking away our freedom to program!"  It wasn't until about 5 or 6 years later that the things he was worried about became as apparent to me as they were to him, and I realized that he truly was a visionary.  The "fanatic" was, of course, none other than RMS.  Sometime around 1987, at just the time that Sun decided to "unbundle" the C compiler from their OS (i.e. charge extra for it), GCC arrived on the scene.  It proved a better alternative and was free.  I've been a fan of and advocate for Free Software ever since.

And then of course there's Emacs.  As a devout member of the Church of Emacs, I profess my faith as instructed at http://stallman.org/saint.html:
There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels.
There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels.
There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels.
As for blogs, news sites, etc. that I frequent, there is no particular set.  But I do notice misinformation about the Free Software movement in a wide variety of venues, and I try to correct it whenever I can.  Several years ago I saw an article in the Boston Globe saying that Christopher Lydon, who has created WBUR's show "The Connection", was planning a comeback with a radio show called "Open Source".  This prompted me to get in touch with him because I suspected he might not fully understand the implications of his choice of name.  At http://www.arlsoft.com/mbr/public/HistoryOfOpenSource.pdf is an article I sent to Lydon at the time, in which I wrote up some of the history of the Free Software movement.  Since I was addressing his use of the name "Open Source" I had to start by mentioning "Open Source" software, but I made sure to explain that using that name redirects the emphasis away from the main reason that Stallman came up with the idea of copyleft -- that of preserving basic freedoms that corporate entities are constantly trying to wrest away from us.

2) Let us know that you've read these five articles about the FSF's
basic philosophy and common mistakes that people make. Please ask any
questions you have about them (questions are good!).

    * The Free Software Definition
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
    * Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
    * Did You Say Intellectual Property? It's a Seductive Mirage
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
    * What's in a Name? http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html
    * Words to Avoid http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
  
I've read many of Stallman's essays at one time or another, so I'm already familiar with the ideas he expresses in these.
3) Write some short responses to these excerpts below, as if you were
responding with a short comment to somebody's blog post. These are
representative of the sort of things we often find ourselves
responding to. Be polite, concise, and -- most of all -- make sure you
hit the most important points.

This will give us an idea of your writing style, and it gives FSF
staff and other volunteers on the list a chance to offer feedback and
show you the ropes.

    * Excerpt: Richard Stallman started the FSF in order to promote
open source software like the Linux operating system, as an
alternative to expensive software like Windows.
  
This is a rather mangled version of the history.  Here's what really happened.  Up until the late 1970s, it was common practice for programmers to share source code.  For you non-techies, source code is the human-readable version of a computer program.  Sharing source code made it easier for everybody, and among programmers it was viewed as the neighborly thing to do.  But in the mid- to late-1970s, many computer companies started trying to assert proprietary ownership of virtually everything in sight.  Most of us programmers at the time really despised what was happening, but nobody knew what to do about it.

Well almost nobody.  Richard Stallman came up with an interesting way of using copyright to try to preserve the collegial community that had grown up around software in the 1960s and 1970s.  Copyright is a legally sanctioned statement of ownership of a work plus a license, which specifies the conditions under which you're allowed to copy that work.  The usual conditions are that you have to get explicit permission from the copyright owner, which is usually granted only if you pay them money.  But Stallman realized that nothing in copyright law requires the usual license.  So he came up with a different license, originally called "copyleft" and now known as the General Public License or GPL.  "Copyleft" today refers to the general concepts, and the GPL is one example of a copyleft-compatible license.

Proprietary companies like Microsoft typically distribute only executable files, but treat their source code like a state secret.  For any non-trivial program, examining the machine language in the executable files is so labor-intensive that, in the absence of source code, it becomes effectively impossible for a programmer to understand how a program works or to modify the program.  Code licensed under the GPL is distributed either as just the source code, in which case you have to compile it into executable files yourself, or distributed as pre-compiled executables plus the source code.  In layman's terms, what the GPL says is that you're free to use my program, examine how it works, and make any modifications you like, but since I've made it possible for you to understand how my code works and to modify it, my conditions for allowing you to use it are: 1) you must make it possible for those with whom you share copies of your modified version of my code to understand how that code works and to modify it, and 2) you must impose these same conditions on anyone you distribute the code to, and they in turn must impose those conditions on anyone they distribute the code to, etc.

Stallman's term for this is "Free Software".  Given the dual meanings of "free", ever since he coined the term "Free Software" roughly 30 years ago, he's had to explain that he means, "Free as in freedom, not free as in free beer."

In the mid-1980s, Stallman assembled a group of programmers to create a complete GPL-licensed OS (operating system) modeled on the Unix OS.  This was the GNU project, whose initials stand for "Gnu's Not Unix".  Sometime in the early 1990s, while Stallman was traveling in Europe giving presentations on the concept of Free Software and promoting use of the GPL, a 21 year old Finnish grad student in computer science named Linus Torvalds attended one of Stallman's presentations.  By this time, most of the software components necessary for a complete Unix replacement had been written and licensed under either the GPL or some other GPL-compatible license.  The main missing piece was the OS's kernel.  Linus Torvalds filled in that last missing piece by writing a kernel and licensing it under the GPL.  Following typical Unix naming tradition, he named his kernel Linux, for "Linus' Unix".

Unfortunately, the journalists who told the story to the world didn't understand that the complete distribution consisted of code from several different sources, the main ones being the GNU project's replacements for the Unix command line tools, a windowing system from MIT, networking code from Berkeley, and Linus Torvalds' kernel.  They'd been shoehorning all software stories into the stereotype of "teenage whiz-kid creates astounding software all by himself" for so long that they weren't about to acknowledge that the complete Linux distribution was a collaborative effort of thousands of programmers of all ages over the course of several years.  Instead they told the world a story they knew they could sell, truth be damned!  And that story was: "Teenage Whiz-Kid In Finland Outdoes Bill Gates By Writing An Operating System All By Himself And Giving It Away For Free!"  Thus the name Linux came to apply to the entire distribution rather than just Torvalds' kernel.  The entire distribution should more properly be called GNU/Linux.  Personally, I like the idea of calling it LiGnuX (Linus + GNU + X11), although even that leaves out the Berkeley networking piece, and I'm sure a few additional pieces I haven't thought of.

By the mid 1990s, this operating system consisting of the GNU code, the MIT-developed X-window system, the Berkeley-developed networking code, Torvald's kernel, and misc. other pieces, was so stable that it was the preferred operating system among most software developers and system administrators.  But it was an uphill struggle to get the non-technical people who run companies to adopt it.  The term "free" in "Free Software" was scaring them off.  They didn't understand that "free" meant "free as in freedom" and tended to think, "How good can a complex piece of software possibly be if it's free?"  So in the late 1990s, a group of people interested in promoting the use of this operating system held a brainstorming session to come up with another name that wouldn't scare businesspeople away.  Knowing how adamant Stallman was about his belief in freedom, he was not invited.  The term they came up with as a substitute for "Free Software" was "Open Source Software".  But it's a double-edged sword.  The term "open source" made it much easier to get businesspeople to consider using that software, while simultaneously obscuring the very principles of freedom that had motivated the creation of "free software" in the first place.

With all this in mind, it's obvious that the statement, "Richard Stallman started the FSF in order to promote
open source software like the Linux operating system, as an alternative to expensive software like Windows," contains a great many errors.  About the only true thing in that statement is that Richard Stallman is indeed the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).  But he did it not to promote the Linux operating system or to provide an inexpensive competitor to Windows, but rather to promote freedom -- specifically the freedom to examine, modify, and improve software.  Furthermore, Stallman would describe it as "free software", not "open source".  He'd call the operating system GNU with a Linux kernel, or GNU/Linux.  And he'd point out that the problem with Microsoft's Windows is not the cost in dollars.  The problem is the cost due to being prohibited from really knowing what your operating system might be doing to you behind your back, because nobody outside of Microsoft can examine the source code.  The problem is also the cost imposed by lack of access to the improvements that would be made to the software if a worldwide community of programmers were able to fix bugs and add features, as happens all the time with Free Software.

Oops!  You said I should write a short response to the excerpt.  I'll try to do better with the remaining excerpts.

    * Excerpt: Now with cloud computing and web-based applications,
even Linux users can use the same software as everyone else, through
their browsers. With other popular programs like Skype and Adobe Flash
producing Linux versions, the Linux desktop may finally be catching
on!
  
"Cloud computing" is an ill-defined marketing term that's used to cover almost anything that involves off-loading processing onto somebody else's remote computer.  So, what exactly do you mean by "cloud computing"?

You should also be aware that, by doing your processing and storing your data on somebody else's computer, you leave yourself very vulnerable.  First of all, if your data is stored on somebody else's computer, you lose control of who can access that data.  You're entirely dependent on the other company's security policies and practices.  This is equally true if your data is processed by code running on someone else's computer, even if you store your data locally.  Whether your data is stored on somebody else's computer or simply passes through someone else's computer, it's vulnerable to being leaked to competitors or others you may not want to have access to your data.

Also, the fact that the authors of Skype and Flash are distributing executable versions that run under Linux without distributing the source code violates the spirit of the Free Software Movement.  By keeping their source code secret, there's no way you can know whether or not these applications might be doing something nefarious in the background.  When the source code to software is available, even non-programmers can feel more secure because if there were malware of some sort in the software, it's almost inevitable that at least one programmer in the worldwide community of programmers in the Free Software movement will discover the malicious code and sound the alarm.

And finally, without source code, these programs will never be able to be improved by the community at large.  So, if your business desperately needs a bug fixed or a feature added, but it's not high priority for the software company, you may find yourself waiting for years, or forever.  With source code available, it's likely that some programmer somewhere in the world may need the same bug fixed or feature added, and will do it himself and release the fixed version.  And even if that doesn't happen, if the problem's enough of a showstopper for your business, you could hire a programmer to make the change you need.  You could never do that with proprietary software.
    * Excerpt: When combined with the other chapters that include
statutory damages, search and seizure powers for border guards,
anti-camcording rules, and mandatory disclosure of personal
information requirements, it is clear that there is no bigger
intellectual property issue today than the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade
Agreement being negotiated behind closed doors this week in Korea.

(From http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4510/125/)
  
ACTA is definitely a serious threat.  But any discussion that lumps copyright law, patent law, and trademark law together under the term "intellectual property" will inevitably lead to confused thinking about the issue.  I could explain it here, but Stallman explains it so much better.  I urge all of you to watch his presentation, "The Danger of Software Patents," which he gave to the Chaos Computer Club in Germany.  It's at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=669200964006594520&hl=en.  The relevant part runs from 0:04:14 through 0:10:00.
Mark Rosenthal
Thank you so much for volunteering,

-Holmes

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