[wplug] [wplug-announce] The Open Pitt, Issue 11

Tue Apr 26 00:29:36 EDT 2005

PDF version: <http://www.wplug.org/top/wplug-top011.pdf>

                              THE OPEN PITT
      What's cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania

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Issue 11                        April 2005                    www.wplug.org
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In this issue:
  Stallman Returns to Pittsburgh
  March Roundup

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                               Coming Events

Apr. 30: Special Presentation with PghSAGE, Topic: Flying Linux.  1pm to
         5pm, 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
May 21:  Installfest.  10am to 5pm, 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
May 28:  General User Meeting, Topic: Version Control with Subversion.
         10am to 2pm, 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
Jun. 4:  General User Meeting, Topic: MythTV.  10am to 2pm, 1507 Newell-
         Simon Hall, CMU
Jun. 11: Tutorial, Topic: Regular Expressions.  10am to 2pm, 1507 Newell-
         Simon Hall, CMU

                    The public is welcome at all events
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Stallman Returns to Pittsburgh

On April 7, the University of Pittsburgh chapter of the Association for
Computing Machinery hosted a lecture by Richard M. Stallman.  In addition
to being the founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, he
wrote key pieces of software infrastructure including the GCC compiler and
the Emacs text editor.

Stallman first formalized the definition of Free Software and created the
GNU General Public License, the license which covers the Linux kernel and
thousands of other software projects.  And it all grew out of an incident
which occurred twenty years ago right here in Pittsburgh.

In a Jam
In the late '70s and early '80s, Stallman worked at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's computer labs.  The community of programmers was
a small one indeed, and code was freely shared among them in the interest
of getting the system to do useful work.  Software wasn't much thought of
as a product; people bought hardware and support services, not code.

Xerox had donated one of the first laser printer models to MIT, and while
very useful, it was subject to frequent paper jams.  A similar problem with
an earlier printer had inspired Stallman to alter its code to alert users
to paper jams so someone could walk over and clear it.  Unlike before, he
didn't have the source code for this printer to make the necessary changes.

Having heard that someone at Carnegie Mellon University had the software he
wanted, he dropped into that individual's office on a trip to Pittsburgh.
He left empty-handed; the person had signed a non-disclosure agreement with
Xerox and could not reveal the code.  Accustomed to a culture of sharing
and cooperation, Stallman walked away from the encounter shocked and angry.

A GNU Beginning
In his view, this arrangement turned users into prisoners.  Without source
code, they were unable to improve the software or fix if it broke.  He
resolved to create a system which guaranteed the user's freedom.  At the
time, Unix was a popular and well-defined development environment, so he
decided to follow the same design.  Since everything would be built from
scratch, he called the project GNU, which stands for "GNU's not Unix."

Leaving MIT to work on the GNU project, he defined the four essential
conditions of Free Software:
  0. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
  1. The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs.
  2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
  3. The freedom to improve the program and release your improvements to
     the public.

Stallman explained each of these freedoms.  A program that doesn't respect
freedom 0 may only run for a limited period of time, or have certain
features disabled unless you pay the author for a secret key to unlock it.
Without freedom 1, you can't even be sure of what your computer is doing,
since you can't see the code that makes it run.  Freedom 2 means you never
have to choose between helping a friend by giving him a copy of a useful
program and obeying the copyright restrictions an author has placed on it.
And finally, freedom 3 allows you to share any improvements you've made to
the program with everyone.

Anyone can exercise freedoms 0 and 2, but what about 1 and 3?  If you're
not a programmer, how do they help you?  As Stallman pointed out, "This
works like freedom of the press.  Most people do not write articles for
publication, they don't exercise freedom of the press--but everybody gets
the benefit of freedom of the press, they get the benefit of seeing
different viewpoints expressed."

Throughout the 1980's, work on the GNU system moved slowly.  Many did, and
still do, deride Stallman as a hopeless idealist, but his attitude is "When
you're trying to do something big, there's nothing more practical than
idealism."  Free versions of most Unix utilities were created, but critical
pieces were missing.  One of these was a kernel, which talks directly to
the computer hardware and manages the programs running on the system.  An
effort called the Hurd was under way, but progress was glacial.  So at that
point, the only people who could use the GNU tools were the few who already
had access to an expensive Unix system to run them on.

Enter the Penguin
In 1991, Finnish student Linus Torvalds announced a project he was working
on, a primitive kernel for the IBM PC.  It rapidly improved, and the
following year he made it Free Software.  Before long, one could combine
the Linux kernel with the GNU tools and have a fully-functional operating
system on inexpensive personal computer hardware.

While pleased by this development, Stallman became concerned at the
tendency of users to describe their computers as "Linux systems," which he
felt neglected the GNU contributions.  Even today, he pointedly refers to
the "GNU/Linux" operating system and chastises anyone who leaves off the
GNU prefix.

Free, or Open?
Another ideological fault line opened up several years later.  Stallman was
steadfast that freedom was the prime need: "The question is not how much
Free Software are you using--it's how little non-Free Software are you
using, and when are you going to get that amount down to zero?"  Others
were more pragmatic, and while they felt closed software was inferior to
openly-developed code, they did not consider it odious.  They also found
the "Free" label off-putting to companies which might otherwise contribute
to the growing pool of software.  So the term "Open Source" was coined.

Despite what seem like great similarities between Free Software and Open
Source, Stallman continues to inveigh against the latter phrase, which he
feels devalues the user's freedom.

Education
Stallman concluded his talk with a discussion of the use of Free Software
in education.  He laid out the reasons why schools should use and teach
with Free Software.  First is to save money, although proprietary companies
have taken to providing copies of their software at no charge to get
students used to using their programs.

Second is their duty to, in his words, "teach students to live lives as
citizens of a free society, not lives of serfdom."  Third is that
proprietary software forbids studying it and learning how it works,
contrary to the mission of schools to educate.  Last is his view that
schools should not teach students the ethically and morally repugnant
practice of using and creating non-Free software.

On the Lighter Side
After about an hour of this deep philosophical talk, Stallman lightened the
mood by donning a halo and appearing as St. iGNUtius of the Church of
Emacs.  He encouraged all in attendance to exorcise their computers of
proprietary software.

Q&A
An audience member asked about the threat of software patents to Free
Software.  Unsurprisingly, he strongly opposed software patents, and noted
that developing a good and useful program requires combining hundreds or
thousands of techniques and methods.  Software patents sabotage this by
locking up certain techniques for the exclusive use of one person.

In response to a question on source code control, Stallman took the
opportunity to talk about BitKeeper, the proprietary revision control
system used for the Linux kernel until just the day before.  While happy
that its use was coming to an end, he attacked the decision to use it in
the first place, and said that the presence of a proprietary program in the
center of such an important project caused serious damage to the cause of
Free Software.

The next person asked Stallman to name the important trends of the next ten
to twenty years.  Joking that his crystal ball was cloudy, he instead
listed the items he felt were important now: Free Software to create and
view Flash files, a Free replacement for the Java platform, and an end to
the practice of having to load non-Free firmware into a device to get it
working.

In Conclusion
Whatever your view of Free Software and Open Source, this was an engaging
and thought-provoking lecture.  One hopes that it doesn't take another
twenty years for Richard Stallman to visit the city again.  A recording of
the speech can be downloaded from
<http://www.wplug.org/meetings/one-meeting?wp_meeting_id=3184>.

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March Roundup

Mar. 19 General User Meeting: Bill Moran of Potential Technologies gave an
overview of POSIX-like kernels, mainly BSD and Linux.  He described how the
kernel handles running multiple tasks, and the use of the _nice_ command to
assign priority levels to processes, as well as memory management and
caching data from disk.  By popular demand, he described the timeworn
"forkbomb" attack and preventing it using resource limits.

===========================================================================
The Open Pitt is published by the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group
<http://www.wplug.org/top/>

Editors: Elwin Green, Vance Kochenderfer

Copyright 2005 Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group.  Any article in
this newsletter may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, provided it is
not changed and attribution is given to the author and WPLUG.
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