Freedom, Speech, and Beer

I met Richard M. Stallman in 1990, at a conference “reception” con­sisting mostly of chips and free beer. Even then, Stallman was a celebrity hacker: the “free software” guy. Years earlier, Stallman had been a member of MIT’s AI Lab when it got an early Xerox laser writer.

But Stallman’s notion of “free” software isn’t quite what you might imagine. He has explained that: “ ‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer.’”⁴ To Stallman:

A program is free software, for you, a particular user, if:

You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose;

You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. (To make this freedom effective in practice, you must have access to the source code, since making changes in a program without having the source code is exceedingly difficult).

You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee;

You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements.

Since “free” refers to freedom, not to price, there is no contradiction between selling copies and free software. In fact, the freedom to sell copies is crucial: collections of free software sold on CD-ROMs are important for the com­munity, and selling them is an important way to raise funds for free software development.⁵

Now, I’d seen most of this material before I met Stallman, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it. At the time, I thought that he was just the “free software guy,” a talented hacker who’d written a few useful soft­ware tools. But he was more than that.

Richard Stallman and Bill Gates are yin and yang. Like Gates, Stallman sees software development in starkly moralistic terms. Whereas Gates was an early vocal advocate of keeping software proprietary to reward devel­opers, Stallman argues that ethical developers must share their software freely. In a curious way, Gates and Stallman straddle the IP clause. The Constitution authorized Congress to give innovators limited rights to motivate them to share their innovations with the world. Stallman sees the sharing as paramount; Gates tends to focus on the motivation. Whereas Gates admonished hobbyists about their casual attitude that “hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?”⁶ Stallman paraphrased this admonition as “If you share with your neighbor, you are a pirate.”⁷ His reply? “I don’t think that people should ever make promises not to share with their neighbor.”⁸ But their debate runs even deeper. Gates focused on motivation: developers unable to sell their object code would write less software, and what they did write would be of lower quality. Stallman stressed the aggregate nature of knowledge: developers who don’t share their source code waste time reinventing the wheel.

In Stallman’s free-software world, a developer gets an idea, writes a program, and posts it where other hackers can see it, grab it, and play with it. They like it and wish it did more. Being hackers, they soon figure out how to get it to do more, and post the improved version. And so an open-source project evolves. Shared source code thus leads to better software faster than proprietary code. Which is all well and good, as long as we can populate the world with people who’ve identified prob­lems that they themselves would like to solve, who are willing to share their solutions, and who have both the free time and the inclination to pursue paths that they consider neat or cool. As Gates might ask: Have you people forgotten about the profit motive?

The answer is “not entirely.” Even Stallman recognized that “collec­tions of free software sold on CD-ROMs are important for the commu­nity.” The FSF’s original revenue model, in fact, charged hackers a nominal fee to circulate free software. Granted, it wasn’t much of a busi­ness model, but it was a start.

From its earliest days, the hackers of the free-software movement gen­erated powerful tools, directed almost exclusively at software develop­ers. A few companies eventually emerged to help circulate this software. These companies also offered training and consulting services. In other words, these “software companies” viewed software as a service indus­try, rather than as a manufacturing industry. Rather than providing services to make people want to buy their software, they provided soft­ware to make people need their services. The idea was intriguing, but the market remained small. The efforts of proprietary-software compa­nies like Microsoft, Apple, Lotus, Novell, and Oracle continued to dwarf the efforts of the community creating free software.

Then something radical happened. The Internet enabled hackers to share their projects throughout the entire global hacker community. Sharing was no longer restricted to a single lab, a single university, or even the major U.S.

The community began to develop structure. The “hacker ethic” grew and gained further definition. Hackerdom adopted procedures to ensure that contributors were credited, that free software remained free, and that all contributed enhancements were compatible not only with the official release, but with each other. The culture developed both folkways and mores. And a collection of private companies began to tie their for­tunes to this “free” software.

Linus Torvalds, who had launched the Linux kernel in the early 1990s, moved from Helsinki to the Silicon Valley and emerged as a major player. Torvalds remains responsible for each “official” release of Linux. He posts that release on a Web site from which anyone can download it and play with it. Various developers around the world devise improvements and send them back to Torvalds. He posts them so that still other hackers can review, critique, and possibly improve them further. Periodically he incorporates selected enhancements into a new version—and announces a new “official” Linux release.

Linux quickly surpassed Unix as the hacker operating system of choice, and a number of longstanding Unix companies shifted or diver­sified into Linux. Perhaps most significantly, though, Linux emerged as the primary competitor to Microsoft’s Windows. It was quite a com­petitor, not in a market-share sense of course, but in a philosophical sense. It’s hard to imagine two systems more different. Windows exem­plified Gates’s emphasis on proprietary rights in closely held source code; Linux embodied Stallman’s emphasis on source code shared freely. Windows’s evolution integrated new features tightly within the code; Linux took the gospel of modularity to an extreme. Windows was sold as a single product, with auxiliary warranties and support contracts also made available; Linux was “distributed” by companies that assembled collections of free software modules and that offered installation advice and support.

Meanwhile, Stallman had taken steps to keep free software free. He was particularly concerned with the embrace-and-extend concept that Microsoft had used to neutralize Java—back when embrace-and-extend was little more than a concept, and long before Microsoft learned to use it so effectively. Stallman realized that nothing prevented anyone from taking free-software source code, tweaking it a bit, adding a couple of features, keeping their new, modified source code secret, and selling it as a proprietary product. If someone succeeded in distributing a proprietary version rather widely, consumers might get hooked on it, independent developers might begin to write to its proprietary APIs, and the software would no longer be free. Stallman realized that he must create a way to prevent that from occurring. And so he did. He and the FSF crafted the general public license (GPL), and invented copyleft.

GPL’s copyleft gives users permission to modify and redistribute copy­lefted materials however they see fit, but if they incorporate any copy­lefted materials into their own work, the combined product must be subject to the same GPL. Any program that contains any GPL code thus must be subject to the GPL—or it infringes the copyrights inherent in the original licensed product. As you might imagine, copyleft provisions are controversial. Various IP scholars have debated the provisions’ finer points, and Bill Gates has described them as being anticapitalist. To date, no one has challenged them in court—which means that no one is posi­tive that they’re enforceable.

But more than just copylefting and the GPL make people nervous about free software. In fact the key item making people nervous about free software can be summarized in two simple words: Richard Stallman.