Are you Free Software or Open Source? Trusted or Treacherous?

I came across this interesting interview with Richard Stallman, the lead developer of the GNU operating system and one of the founders of the Free Software Movement. What I found interesting is that the story behind Linux and GNU actually represent two completely different ideologies that essentially produced the same outcome: that of software for free use/distribution/modification.

GNU is socially-motivated: it was created with the "goal of liberating cyberspace" from non-free software, based on four essential user freedoms. The first step needed for the Free Software Movement was to create an operating system, and so, from 1983-1992, Stallman and thousands of others hacked one out based on the non-free Unix platform, calling it GNU, which stands for "GNU is not Unix". (Stallman later comments on the obvious contradiction of needing non-free software in order to create free software, prompting the interviewer to point out Ghandi's similar dilemma when he asked, in his Hind Swaraj, "How can one argue against western civilization using a printing press and writing in English'?)

According to Stallman, Linus Torvalds was motivated to create his Linux kernel "in order to amuse himself and learn". He ended up making the kernel that would allow GNU to run--the missing piece that the GNU team needed (theirs was not getting very far, it seems). "Torvalds never agreed with our ideas. He was not a proponent of the ethical aspects of our ideas or a critic of the antisocial nature of non-free software. He just claimed that our software was technically superior to particular competitors."

And so, the GNU+Linux operating system was born, but everyone just calls it Linux. To Stallman, the name abbreviation represents two short-comings: the first fails to acknowledge the the thousands of people who started the project and did the majority of the grunt work, and who therefore deserve a share of the credit, and the second one undercuts the fight for freedom on which the initiative was based. According to Stallman, "Today tens of millions of users are using an operating system that was developed so they could have freedom -- but they don't know this, because they think the system is Linux and that it was developed by a student 'just for fun'...You cannot rely on accidents to defend freedom. Accidents can sometimes help, but you need people who are aware and determined to do this".

And so it was that by 1996 there was a split in the community on goals: the Free Software side was campaigning for the freedoms of the individual user, creating a superior product in the process, and the Open Source camp was driven to use the intelligence of crowd-outsourcing to create a superior product.

Essentially, the superiority of the product was as a positive by-product for the GNU/Free Software movement that upheld its ideals of freedom, whereas for Torvalds and the Open Sourcers, the superiority of the product was itself the goal.

In the case of operating systems, both sides can have their cake and eat it too. No one has to sacrifice any principals to get what they want. Would one have happened without the other? Are they two sides of the same coin?

The last third of the interview puts everything in a much larger persepective that minimizes the the differences between Free vs. Open Source ideologies relative to their similarities. Both are fighting proprietariness, encoded in the large machinery of patent laws and governement regulations. An analysis of Linux in 2004 showed that it violates 283 different US software patents. The US outlawed a free software program called DECSS that plays DVDs, and is pressuring other countries to do the same. And then there's "treacherous computing", or "trusted computing", depending on which side you are on. Apparently, the XBox produced by Microsoft (and now replaced by the XBox 360) is a mini-example: it prevents users from installing any software without Microsoft authorization. Stallman paints a pretty grim picture:

The technical idea underlying treacherous computing is that the computer includes a digital encryption and signature device, and the keys are kept secret from you. Proprietary programs will use this device to control which other programs you can run, which documents or data you can access, and what programs you can pass them to. These programs will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If you don't allow your computer to obtain the new rules periodically from the Internet, some capabilities will automatically cease to function.

Programs that use treacherous computing will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If Microsoft, or the US government, does not like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new instructions. Your writing would be subject to 1984-style retroactive erasure. You might be unable to read it yourself.

Is this a real possibility? Will a free hardware movement led by hardware engineers become necessary to sustain free/open software? Or, at the end of the day, will superiority of the product be the ultimate decidor?

Disclaimer: this post was written while booted in Windows.

An outfoxing wolverine

Another excerpt from Nunaga:

Another time a smart wolverine had the best of us. Nasarlulik, another Eskimo called Qurvik and I had killed some caribou, but couldn't get all the meat in our canoe to take back to our post. We decided to cache what was left. We skinned them out and put them on the ground, and gathered up a great pile of rocks to cover the carcasses. After the carcasses were well covered, we took a tea-pail and scooped up water, sloshing it all over the cache. Each pail of water froze, binding the rocks like cement. We were making certain that no wolves would get our caribou before we could return for it ourselves. The cache was frozen solid.

When we eventually got back to pick up that meat, we discovered that a clever wolverine had found a way to outwit us. Unable to tear the frozen rocks away, the cunning beast had lain on top of one rock until its body heat had melted the ice around it; it then plucked the rock out and did the same thing with the next rock, until it was able to pull enough rocks away to get at the caribou.

Wolverine linguistic roots

I'm in the mood for wolverines today. Here is a multi-lingual examination from wikipedia:

The wolverine's questionable reputation as an insatiable glutton (reflected in the Latin genus name Gulo) may be in part due to a false etymology. The animal's name in old Swedish, Fjellfräs, meaning "fjell (mountain) cat," worked its way into German as Vielfraß, which means roughly "devours much." Its name in other West Germanic languages is similar (e.g. Dutch Veelvraat).

The Finnish name is Ahma, derived from ahmatti, which is translated as "glutton." The Russian росомаха (rosomakha) and the Polish and Czech name rosomak, seem to be borrowed from the Finnish rasva-maha (fat belly). Similarly, the Hungarian name is rozsomák or torkosborz which means gluttonous badger.

Purported gluttony is reflected in neither English nor Germanic Scandinavian languages. The English word wolverine (alteration of the earlier form wolvering of uncertain origin) probably implies 'a little wolf'. The name in Old Norse, Jarfr, lives on in the regular Icelandic name jarfi, regular Norwegian name jerv, regular Swedish name järv and regular Danish name jærv.

Outfoxing the wolverine

Excerpt from Nunaga, by Duncan Pryde, a book about a Scotsman's life with Eskimos in the Canadian Arctic.

One day Palvik and I were checking traps along a trapline we were running together down the south coast of Kent Peninusla, north and east of Baychimo Harbour, and we discovered that a wolverine was working our line. This wolverine had followed the sled tracks we had made on our frist run down the line, and many traps we checked had been dug up by the sly spoiler and either srpung or exposed. In some cases we would find scraps of a fox in the trap to show that the wolverine had beat us us to the prize. A wolverine often seems to work a trapline not out of hunger, but just for fun. Sometimes it will simply take the fox out of the trap, drag it off thirty yards and bury it. Normally, however, it chews it up enough to ruin the pelt. A single wolverine could reduce our take of fur considerably.

But we had a few tricks of our own. We went back to our base camp for an old sawn-off shotgun Palvik had used before on wolverines. Back at the trapline, we dug a little pit in the snow near one of the traps that the wolverine had not yet visited, and buried the gun in the snow so that about two inches of the muzzle stuck out. Then we attached a string to the trigger of the shotgun and to a chunk of raw caribou meat, which we thawed out long enough to wrap around the mouth of the shotgun, where it froze tight. When we came back on our reverse trip down the trapline, we had our wolverine, minus its head.