First of all, a brief plug (as if the man needs it) for Eric S. Raymond's Armed And Dangerous blog. For those that don't remember his name, Raymond is the author of the seminal The Cathedral and the Bazaar, on which he details how enterprise-level software can be built by a distributed team of motivated developers just as well - or sometimes better - than by a monolithic corporation.
Raymond is a member of the Free Software Foundation and the president of the Open Source Initiative. As such, two of his main causes have recently come under attack by SCO who, wanting to cash in on their current holding of the Unix copyright - something that Novell is disputing, by the way - have started making a lot of noise about Linux (not GNU/Linux, the Kernel only - more on this later) infringing their copyrights. SCO then launched a lawsuit against IBM and have been spreading a lot of FUD around, including their licensing their Unix code exclusively to Microsoft (boy, what a coincidence!). In their mad crusade to get as many people working against them as they could, SCO also tried to have the Gnu Public License declared illegal.
Not surprisingly they succeeded. Not in declaring the GPL illegal, mind you, but on getting as many people as possible working against them. One of the most recent salvos has been Raymond's An Open Letter to Darl McBride, a brutally direct document detailing the how laughable SCO's claims are. Enjoy.
Going back to GNU and the FSF, I recently had the pleasure of attending a conference by Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project and a man who has been warning people about the dangers of software patents for decades. Stallman was in Costa Rica to give a couple of conferences, one of which was fortunately free (as in beer) so I was able to attend. I expected it to be an evangelization for business types on how free software was better for them than proprietary software, but attended anyway because I wanted to hear the visionary himself in person. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the conference was more about the philosophy of free software than the technological specifics.
Stallman, who gave the conference on a perfectly understandable Spanish (most of the time, anyway), didn't diverge much from the history of the project that you can find on their web site. He pointed out several times that Linux was merely the core of the operating system, where most utilities people needed such as the console and compiler were actually provided by GNU; so people would do the GNU project a lot of favor if they just called the operating system GNU/Linux instead of just Linux - and for some reason people thought he was joking. His analysis of the recent "trade agreement" and how it affects software was interesting, as was the questions and answers session that came after the conference.
But seeing the man himself give the conference was the real treat. His unassuming attitude got everyone's attention, while his obvious devotion to the topic hooked the audience immediately. His love-it-or-leave-it attitude is probably hard to swallow for most people, since he just doesn't believe closed or proprietary software should be used. There is no middle ground for him, a Tyler Durden of software, and he's not just rallying against Microsoft: he has no love for Java because of Sun's insistence on keeping their implementation closed and the standard under tight control, for example; and Open Source is a half-assed attempt for him, because what use is the source code if you don't have freedom to use it?
Which is the crux of his argument: software should be free. Not just open, but free for you to do with it what you want. His firm, uncompromising belief and his clear arguments on why this is the only way for the world to progress made me feel dirty about earning a living working on a closed platform developing a proprietary software to be licensed. Stallman, however, does not demand that you leave everything and follow him. Just asks that if you're going to follow him, you should do it properly.
I have the nagging idea that after this project, going back to Java will feel just as bad as working in Microsoft's .Net. Something else must be found.
It's the freedom that should be important above platform concerns.
Posted by Ricardo at September 8, 2003 12:36 AM