Linux, hackers and the Free Culture

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Introduction

For people who managed to survive the Communist system and eventually return to the free world (that includes both Poles and Estonians!), it is sometimes extra difficult to explain why some people would be willing to 'give away' the results of their hard work. In the IT world, the prejudices are often fueled further by proprietary software companies who insist that 'freeware' can only be amateurish, unreliable and unsupported. "You get what you pay for" is their idea of software.

That said, the business model of Microsoft or Apple is probably easy to understand for manufacturers of boots, sausages or newspapers:

  • Investors raise money and found a company
  • The company buys tools (in the case of software industry, computers and development software)
  • Employees are hired
  • The work process is designed and run
  • The product is sold by unit
  • The profit is usually solid.

But how to survive when you give away the product for free, they ask. The proprietary software industry still uses 'freeware' sometimes, but either to capture new markets (Internet Explorer vs Netscape in the 90s) or to create a bonus ("Buy the operating system, get free media player!").

To find out, we need to start from early days of computing.

"Information wants to be free"

In order to understand the free culture and free licenses, it is often useful to go back in history and look at the pioneers of early computing along with their views as well as the development of the hacker ethic (which is the major factor behind the formation of free culture) and the 'hackerdom' or hacker culture. One of the best insights to this lost world is the Hackers: the Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.

A side note: while the term 'hacker' has regrettably been viewed as controversial by general public in recent times, its original roots are pretty clear. The Jargon File, a major source of historical terminology of the field (the printed form of which is known as the New Hacker's Dictionary), perhaps has got the most exhaustive definition. In short, a hacker is (mostly but not necessarily) a computer professional with innovative mindset and a passion for exploration. The File also gives a good all-round definition of the hacker ethic:

"The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing open-source code and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible."

Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in the 1950s, when "computer science" sounded much alike to "rocket science". There were but few people who had seen a computer, and even distinguished math professors were rather skeptical about 'computing machines' (Levy recalls an episode where a MIT student failed his math exam for solving the task using a computer - the professor was positively sure that a machine cannot solve the problem correctly). Even at the cradle of modern computing, the MIT, there was no computer science as a separate discipline and the first professors working in this field were actually employed at the Department of Electrotechnics.

The MIT Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) had been founded in 1946, and by the end of fifties there was already a strong subculture formed around it. Out of the Signals & Power Subcommittee (people who dealt with electricity and wires rather than modelling tasks) came the first hackers. It is interesting to see that there was a sort of hacker culture even before there was a computer to hack on - only in 1959 there were the first courses on computer science and the TX-0 computer was obtained which is considered to be the first hacker machine. In 1961 the MIT obtained a PDP-1 (later going to PDP-6 and PDP-10) which became the central device for the forming hacker culture, later formalised into the Project MAC and the famous MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

This world produced the first generation of hackers like Richard Greenblatt, Bill Gosper, Peter Samson, Richard Stallman and other "angry young men" who "went where no man has gone before" (after all, Star Trek is a long-time classic in hacker culture). And this world had no place for business and intellectual property. Some reasons for this were the following:

  • computing was for the elect few (the famous sentence "the world needs perhaps four or five computers"), there was no critical mass for a market to emerge.
  • most projects had state funding due to having more or less military undertones - the generals wrote the rules, the scientists had to obey them. And for dealing with finances, the universities had bookkeepers - hackers did not have to do that. Thanks to skillful management, the bureaucracy was kept separate and the creative minds were given ample space to work.
  • the resources were scarce - every mainstream PC of today is many times more powerful than the tools of the hackers of old.
  • software was almost always unique to any given computer, any transfer to another machine needed major rewrites.

All this created an atmosphere of creative and original intelligence that Richard Stallman has called playful cleverness. Similar units were also created at Stanford (SAIL) and a number of other universities in the US. All these shared similar ethical views - information is something that has value only when distributed. Artificial obstacles to spreading information are evil and must be removed. And due to the scarcity of resources, work results must be shared in order to prevent duplicate efforts.

The bottom line we see here is: the 'sensible business model' was not used in the world of software for the first ~30 years. Software business, even so influential today, is a relative newcomer.

RMS vs Business

The end of the 70s and the beginning of 80s brought along gradual shift towards business - the user base (or market) had grown wide enough and software had become much easily portable. Unix from 1969 is widely considered the first portable system - and while it was free for several years due to anti-monopoly legislation of the US (AT&T was entitled to make money only with telephone and telegraph, not software!), the 1984 reform of the AT&T removed most limits. And in 1981, the IBM PC was born.

An interesting detail - IBM did not "protect" the details of PC well enough and many companies started to build them. While at first seeming to be a major loss (no license fees), the opposite was actually true. Due to the "attack of the clones", the PC reached the level of universal domination which it has retained up to now. Apple Macintosh and others (which came to the market a bit later) were arguably better designs, but the train had already left the station.

Bill Gates, one of the two founders and the long-time leader of Microsoft, was among the first to promote the idea of software that is sold by unit. The famous Open Letter to Software Hobbyists attempted to explain the new model - not flawlessly, as even the early works of Microsoft and other companies were widely copied, disregarding the licenses. But gradually, the proprietary software model prevailed. A significant reason was the state of the IT infrastructure of the days - The 'PC compatibles' were rapidly spreading during the eighties, bringing easy computing within reach for more and more people. Yet these machines needed software to be used to the fullest. There was no Internet (for ordinary people) yet, distributing software on diskettes was awkward at best (and many clever methods were used by software companies to prevent people from copying the disks). There were few other options for getting software than to buy and pay.

Likewise, the original "hacker paradise" at MIT came to an end in early 80s when its staff was split between two competing commercial enterprises (LMI and Symbolics). The conflicts resulting from fierce competition almost emptied the Lab, one of the last ones to leave was a man named Richard Stallman (dubbed the last of the true hackers by Levy - fortunately, the title proved to be inaccurate). He was deeply unhappy with the outcome and in some years, decided to start the GNU project - a complete rewrite of Unix operating system which would be distributed freely, remaining true to the MIT hacker tradition.

While the project did not reach its main goal (or at least has not reached yet), it produced a number of important utilities and system software as well as the legal backbone of today's free and open-source software, the GNU General Public License (GPL) which had the user rights as starting point (so being totally different from corporate End User License Agreements exemplified by Microsoft and others). Yet he was been viewed by mainstream IT as a curiosity or a hopelessly hippie-minded idealist.


Enter the Penguin

In 1991, inspired by a small Unix variant called Minix, a young Finnish-Swedish man named Linus Torvalds (then a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland) started a new operating system project which was soon labelled Linux. Some months after the start of his project, Torvalds changed his system's license to the GPL proposed by Stallman, making it a suitable pickup for all disgruntled hackers who were discontent with the proprietary, closed systems of the day (especially Microsoft's DOS and Windows, but also Apple's early MacOS and various commercial variants of Unix). The system started to develop as a collaborative effort empowered by the widely spreading Internet (riding the tidal wave of the Web was a very strong booster for the project too). The hacker spirit came out of the academic enclaves where it had been forced by the proprietary model.

There are several major factors which have greatly contributed towards the rapid development of Linux. First, its birth fell into the period of the explosive growth of Internet (especially the Web) - from now on, it became possible to harness the brain potential of thousands of people all over the world, many of whom were not participating as a job, but out of interest towards the project. Second, a number of crucial components were already developed by the GNU project and became to be used in the Linux distributions (the latter fact has created some bad blood between the camps of Stallman and Torvalds, most notably as the GNU/Linux naming controversy). Third, the choice of license prevented one-directional use of the results by large companies, at the same time leaving them enough business motivation to participate.

Return of the hackers

Shortly after Linux, the three major free flavours of BSD Unix - FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD - were born. In 1994, Red Hat - the first large-scale commercial venture using open-source model - was founded. 1995 added a set of server technologies which made setting up an Internet server several times less expensive - collectively known as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python). In 1996-97, the new system got a pair of advanced graphical user interfaces in GNOME and KDE. Many free software projects - notably OpenOffice.org, Firefox, GIMP and others - have found their place in other platforms as well. And Apple built its new-generation operating system, MacOS X, on the base of a free variant of Unix called Darwin.

The new millennium brought along many interesting developments - not only in software (OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, Ubuntu Linux) but even more the extension of the hacker model into other fields. A good example is Wikipedia - a community-built, freely editable encyclopedia. There are music companies based on open models (Magnatune) as well as publishers (Lulu.com). In 2001 MIT, the original home of the hackers, launched the OpenCourseWare initiative to provide free access to learning materials. The hacker ethic keeps going strong into the XXI century.


But still - how do they make money?

The first popular treatise of Linux business model was probably 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by E.S. Raymond.


From Free Software to Free Culture

Benkler!

While it all started with free software movement, at least comparable impact on other areas of culture has brought along by Creative Commons. Starting with relatively hobbyist things like Flickr (a free online environment for photographs released under a CC license) and gradually moving into more central cultural areas. Some examples: Science Commons – a sub-community of CC, formed in early 2005. Works in three main areas: publishing (with goals similar to the Open Access Movement, see below), licensing (to promote more free, socially responsible licensing) and data (to prevent raw data becoming subject to IP). A good example which has some ties to SC project is MIT's OpenCourseWare – an open-access repository of courses which, according to their website, contained materials of 1250 MIT courses in December 2005. The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project (http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/) aims to restore the early phonograph recordings, making them freely available in digital form, using CC license. A vinyl record label UnlockedGroove (http://unlockedgroove.com/) is releasing all its records under a CC license. Some Danes picked up the Stallman's famous “free as in freedom, not as in free beer” and brewed an open-source beer... The recipe and process is freely available under a CC license (see http://www.voresoel.dk/main.php?id=70).



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Additional Reading