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This article appeared in the January 2002 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
It's not true that medieval philosophers used to argue about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Instead they argued about whether an angel could get from point A to point B without passing through any of the points in between. (Thomas Aquinas wrote a whole book about it.) There's a religious argument with just about the same importance going on in the computer world right now. It's not the eternal Mac versus Windows debate. The argument is between advocates of free software and advocates of open software.
Understanding the dancing angels in this case requires a bit of ancient (in computer terms) history.
Back in 1983, Richard Stallman, a worker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, announced "Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU, and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed." His project was recursively called GNU, which stands for GNU is not Unix, which stands for GNU is not Unix is not Unix, which stands for GNU is not Unix is not Unix is not Unix... (If you're not a programmer, it's probably not funny.)
Coming from just anybody else, this announcement wouldn't have garnered much attention. But Stallman is a genius programmer--one of the original hackers--and he'd found his life's calling. He'd already written EMACS, the Swiss Army Knife of programming editors. EMACS 21 is more vital today than when Stallman introduced it twenty versions and years ago. It's the original home for many of the ideas we now take for granted in our word processors.
Stallman set up the Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org) and recruited a hardy band of volunteers from all over the world to help him with his project. Remember that this predated the Internet and even e-mail was a novelty, so it was far harder than it would be today.
The operating system did not appear quickly, because they began by developing the tools needed to build an operating system. During the next ten years, a wealth of excellent programming tools and computer utilities appeared, all centered on GCC--the GNU C compiler. The GNU programs and source code are available for free. In fact, GCC and the other GNU tools became a base standard against which other Unix programming tools were (and still are) compared.
Integral to the whole GNU movement is the GNU Public License (GPL). Basically, it says that software distributed under the GPL must have its source code open for anyone to use, and any other program using code from a GPL program must also be distributed under the same GPL. Stallman calls its terms a copyleft. You can read the whole thing, along with many supporting documents on the FSF Web site.
Stallman and the FSF labored on in relative obscurity until the early 1990s, mainly because they didn't have an operating system. Then along came Linus Torvalds and Linux.
Torvalds released Linux under the GPL. Soon the GNU tools were standard with all Linux distributions. In fact, GNU is so central to the success of Linux that the distributions should probably be called GNU/Linux distributions. (Stallman does call them that.) It's somewhat unfair that Linus Torvalds has become a superstar, while so much of the hard groundwork was done by Stallman and the FSF.
Here's where the Macintosh comes into the picture.
Stallman may be a genius, but he's also completely devoted to his narrow vision of free software. More than one person has called him a zealot. His views are intractable and extreme. Sometimes his logic is a little hard to understand.
From the beginning, a goal of the FSF was to get its GNU tools running on all platforms. During the late 1980s, Apple filed a series of lawsuits against Microsoft and other companies accusing them of violating its "look and feel" copyrights and patents. For some reason this became a particular burr under Stallman's saddle. He announced an FSF boycott of Apple while still encouraging people to port the GNU tools to just about everywhere else, especially Microsoft's DOS.
That is why GNU programs have been uncommon on the Mac, and there was never a full version of GCC, or a decent EMACS running under the classic Mac OS.
It's apparent from his recent writings that Stallman still doesn't think much of Apple. (He's apparently also soured on Microsoft, by the way.) Mac OS X must set him adrift in a sea of conflict. Mac OS X is a real BSD Unix that ships with a large number of the GNU tools, including EMACS and GCC as its standard compiler. The core of the operating system, called the Darwin kernel is freely available on the Web--source code and all--and can be sliced and diced with EMACS and compiled with GCC (www.apple.com/darwin). It's even been ported to the Wintel clones.
Not good enough, says Stallman. Apple still keeps the source code for the Aqua shell and Classic secret, and uses its own open software license for Darwin rather than his copyleft.
Apple says it has to keep some secrets to stay in business, and it wants to retain control of the source for its own operating system. Stallman says software should be free like speech and air. There is a middle ground, but Stallman will not stand there.
From the beginning, professional programmers have accused Stallman of living somewhere other than the real world. There have long been other,more business-friendly, open-source licenses than the GPL, and many successful open-source projects have been distributed with their own licenses. The most well-known are probably FreeBSD (www.freebsd.org) and the most widely used Web server on the planet, Apache (www.apache.org), which is included with Mac OS X. These other licenses allow varying levels of secrecy and commercial protection, while still letting anyone tinker with the source code.
In recent years there's been a widespread feeling that Stallman's uncompromising stance about open source software is often doing more to alienate people than create converts. The argument came to a head in 1997 with Eric Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar (tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/). In that essay and several others, Raymond began outlining a philosophy that's come to be called open software. He points out that there are many advantages to open software, not the least of which is security.
A prime example of this is to compare Microsoft's IIS Web server to Apache.
When a security problem appears in IIS, Microsoft sometimes takes weeks or months to publish a patch. This is apparently because their closed source model makes it more difficult to modify installed software. As the recent Nimda worm was running rampant, they took weeks to distribute effective patches. Microsoft is often accused of hushing news of security problems until they can distribute a fix. This strategy is sometimes called security through obscurity.
When problems have appeared in Apache, fixes were often available on the Net within hours because there are many competent programmers who can look at the source and fix the problem.
Raymond, and several other like-minded programmers formed the Open Software Initiative in 1998 (www.opensoftware.org). They've identified a dozen or so open source licenses that satisfy their more lenient philosophy, including Apple's.
The arguments over open software aren't likely to be settled any time soon because all sides have powerful advocates. Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer recently said "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches..." On the other hand, IBM, Apple and Sun are spending billions to promote and enhance open software. Apple has become one of the world's largest Unix vendors and GNU distributors, while carefully standing on all three sides of the boundary between free, open and closed software.
The January 22 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will feature Lee Larson speaking about Video and the Web.
The Louisville Computer Society meets on the fourth Tuesday of the month from 7:00-9:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the Web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
The LCS also sponsors an e-mail discussion list devoted to Macintosh topics. To join, send e-mail containing only the words "subscribe macgroup" to majordomo@erdos.math.louisville.edu.
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