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Story: Expunging the myths of open source

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I started using freely distributable software in 1969, through the facilities of the Digital Equipment Corporation's User's Society (DECUS). It was kept in a library, listed in a catalog, and delivered for a small copying fee on paper tape. Most software in those days was owned by either the person or company who wrote it or who paid to have it written. Most software was very expensive, and as a college student I was grateful for having access to software and its source code that was contributed by DECUS members.

In the 1980s the "production software market" started up, and people began to produce software for the masses. By this time the Unix operating system had a great following in engineering, scientific and academic circles, with the University of California hosting a huge effort to create what became known as the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). But this distribution's license allowed vendors to create different "spin-offs" of code, and did not require them to ship the source code, so their customers could not (for the most part) change the code to meet their needs or even fix bugs they found. They were dependent on the manufacturer's programmers, who were often overloaded with work.

Lots of people continued to write software that they distributed without charge, and with the source code available. But Richard Stallman decided to write an entire operating system called "GNU" (for "GNU is Not Unix"). And he wrote a software license (GPL) that guaranteed the freedoms that he enjoyed:

o Freedom to read the source code
o Freedom to change the source code
o Freedom to distribute the source code

would be available to anyone who used or modified his code.

Richard, as the evangelist of Free Software, build an army of followers and believers. He then founded the Free Software Foundation.

The software tools, compilers, libraries, and other things that the Free Software Foundation wrote was not what most people would consider a complete system, but it was headed that way. And along the way millions of people benefited from using the exisiting GNU code on top of other operating systems.

In 1991 Linus Torvalds started his kernel project. It was the right project at the right time, and mated with the GNU code and other free software code such as sendmail, BIND, the X Window System sparked people's imaginations as to what could be done.

At first I did not understand Richard's insistance on inserting the word "Free" in the equation. The Open Source people felt that the word "Free" was confusing business people, since they thought that the software was gratis, and should always be gratis. Somehow the software would appear by "magic". However, in the twenty years I have known Richard, I have never heard him say that you should not get paid for writing software. He only feels that after the software is written, the source code should be available to those who want it.

After ten years as executive director of Linux International, and thirty-five years in the computer industry, I agree with Richard that not having the source code freely available to the customer is an impediment to doing business. Not everyone will agree with the GPL license, just as not everyone agrees with BSD. That is their right. That is their "freedom".

We do not live in the same environment of the 1980s that spawned the proprietary system market. Software then was expensive and the people who wrote software for those expensive computers were few. Knowledge about how to write whole systems was scarce and communications were much slower than today.

Now there are too many customers with too many unique needs for any company to meet those needs. the companies' "telephone support lines" today just get busy signals, dropped lines and intollerable waits. Free Software's insistance on the availability of source code offers competition and choice that proprietary software does not allow. It offers freedom. When p

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