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Chapter one: Boot time | page 1, 2, 3, 4
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - -- - -- - -- - - In 1956, for example, the United States federal government enjoined AT&T to abide by the terms of a consent decree that forbade the government-regulated monopoly from entering non-telephony markets such as computing -- and, even more importantly, required AT&T to license its patents. So, a little less than two decades later, when Dennis Ritchie* and Ken Thompson* invented the Unix operating system, AT&T lawyers, mindful of the consent decree, initially prohibited AT&T from commercializing the software. As a result, the source code to Unix was made available to universities and research laboratories at a nominal fee. Ken Thompson had received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1975 he took a year's sabbatical there. Later that same year, Bill Joy arrived as a graduate student. The combination of Thompson, Joy and cheap access to the Unix source code led to an explosion of creativity every bit as radical and world-changing as the political explosion that Berkeley helped unleash in the '60s. Joy and a team of talented programmers rewrote and enhanced Unix and redistributed their changes to other Unix enthusiasts, who, in turn, often contributed their own new features and improvements -- modeling, in striking fashion, the strategy of open-source software development that is embodied today by Linux and other free-software projects. The Berkeley programmers also added the networking capabilities to Unix that made it the ideal lingua franca for the Arpanet,* the Internet's predecessor -- a feat that held immense implications for the software industry and the evolution of the Internet. To this day, the most vigorous arena for free-software/open-source development occurs in the friendly ecological habitat of Unix. Linux is a clone of Unix, and many other free-software mainstays are most comfortable in a Unix/Linux environment. A generation of programmers have grown up with the ability, if they cared to, to upgrade Unix as they see fit. Through doing so, they created a flourishing culture indigenous to the Net. Did the consent decree of 1956, then, kick off open source? Is it the tap root supporting free software's mighty flowering? Maybe. According to Ritchie, "the consent decree, to the extent that it prevented AT&T from thinking at all about a Unix business, certainly influenced the licensing and distribution policy, which most likely would have been more closed without the restriction." At the very least, writes Peter Salus, author of "A Quarter Century of Unix," "the decree resulted in a much more rapid dissemination of technology than would otherwise have been possible." But before we get too excited about the potential for government intervention to aid the growth of the free-software industry, it must be recalled that the consequences of the consent decree were entirely unintended. At the time, in fact, the decree was widely viewed as a painless slap on the wrist that implied "no real injury" to AT&T. Certainly, in 1956, very few people foresaw that the eventual linking of computers together via telecommunication networks would become one of the defining technology advances of the 20th century. The consent decree was one kind of accident, albeit on a huge scale involving the classic thrust/counterthrust of government and business interaction. But accidents on a much smaller scale have also exerted profound influences. Consider, for example, the case of the printer paper jam. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - -- - -- - -- - -- In 1979, the hackers who populated M.I.T's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory received a laser printer. Not just any laser printer, but a Dover laser printer from Xerox -- the very first laser printer, one of the results of the groundbreaking research conducted at the Xerox PARC laboratories in Palo Alto. The Dover was a big clunky thing that had a tendency, as is common with printers, to get fouled up with paper jams and other mechanical problems. But not to worry. With a previous printer, the M.I.T. hackers had done what they did best: hacked the printer's software so that if it ran out of paper or jammed, a message would leap across the Lab's computer network announcing the fact. And somebody would get up and load in some new paper, or unjam the printer. Now that they had their spiffy new laser printer, the hackers saw no reason why they shouldn't incorporate their modifications in the software of the Dover, too. But they didn't have the source code to the printer's software. As Richard Stallman,* one of the lab's preeminent hackers, recalls, Xerox would not give the Lab a copy. He couldn't see it, couldn't fix it, couldn't upgrade it. In 1984, Stallman, a legendary and controversial figure in the programming world, founded the Free Software Foundation, an institution dedicated to promoting the notion that source code should be freely available. The incident with the Xerox printer, Stallman remembers, was one catalyst that launched him along his path. "At the time, I hadn't reached the conclusion that non-free software is unethical -- I just observed it was a pain in the neck," recalls Stallman. "If they had offered us a copy with a copyright notice on it, and said we couldn't republish it, at the time I might have been content with the arrangement. I might even have signed a nondisclosure agreement for the source code, for all I can tell today. It was after later reflection that I concluded nondisclosure agreements were wrong on principle." Principle. Richard Stallman is a controversial figure in the programmer community. He is stubborn and unyielding -- tact is not one of the weapons in his formidable arsenal. He's been called a communist and a crank, and some of the more business-oriented open-source entrepreneurs probably wish that the man would simply shut up and go away. In person, Stallman's long flowing hair, his steely green-eyed gaze and his tendency to take strong moral positions and hold them with unmovable tenacity make him seem more like an Old Testament prophet than a technological visionary. But his influence is undeniable and his contributions are enormous. Richard Stallman represents the ideological core of the free-software movement. His moral fervor for sharing source code is what drives many programmers forward. More than any other person, Stallman is responsible for promulgating the notion that free software is more than just a technique -- it is an ethical imperative. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - -- - -- - -- - - In what has to be one of the most ironic twists in the path to free software's origins, it can be argued that Microsoft's blistering campaign to win the so-called Web browser wars in the late '90s had the entirely unexpected result of boosting the free-software movement out of the recesses of the Net into the glare of public view. Microsoft's not inconsequential role in the free-software movement is all the more tantalizing when one considers that Bill Gates, as a young man of 19, personally played an instrumental role in turning the production of software into a proprietary profit center. In January 1998, Netscape, the company that kick-started the Web explosion with the release of its Netscape Navigator Web browser, announced its plans to join the free-software movement by declaring that it would release the source code to Netscape Navigator. Executives at Netscape declared that their thinking had been influenced in part by the online publication of a seminal paper describing the logistics of the open source software development methodology written by hacker Eric Raymond. But there were more factors driving the decision than simply some fortuitous Web surfing. Netscape had been battered by Microsoft, and the trade press portrayed the move as both a last gasp of desperation and a sign that free software was a force to be reckoned with. The Netscape announcement marked a sea change in how the technology press covered free software: Hitherto it had been either ignored, marginalized or treated as a fading remnant of long gone days of hacker idealism; now, suddenly, reporters began paying attention to the growth of Linux-based operating systems. Prior to Netscape's move, most software companies generally kept their source code private from all outsiders. After Netscape, the free-software gold rush began, and company after company rushed to announce their support for Linux and other open source success stories. |
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