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WHAT IS GNU?

THE BIG vendors might be rushing to join the Linux bandwagon, but they're hardly doing it out of ethical or ideological considerations. The bottom line for businesses, of course, is still revenue, which means keeping customers satisfied and riding the wave of computing developments like the Internet and Linux. More users happen to be demanding Linux and open source while more programmers are rallying around it, so the market dictates that big business has no choice but to offer more freedom of choice.

Still, vendors are now allying themselves with the free software or open source community, some of whom still consider themselves hackers in the old sense of people who find creative uses or shortcuts around established systems. From a Microsoft Corp. point of view with its campaign against software piracy and promotion of intellectual property rights, open source software development would already be disruptive, yet even more radical is the free software movement that spawned "open source" and was later eclipsed by it.

In 1984, the Free Software Foundation's (www.gnu.org) Richard M. Stallman launched the GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) Project to create a free operating system. This would be free not in the sense that it wouldn't be sold-although it would be a cheaper alternative-but in the sense that every line of code could be shared with a community of developers.

"I was working on a campaign for freedom for computer users, and I knew that the first step had to be a free operating system. So I set about developing the system. Precisely how it would be adopted, or how business would react was something I could not guess, and fortunately did not need to guess," he told the INQUIRER via e-mail.

Stallman's idea of free software was tied in with political freedom and an ethical argument against software copyrights. The GNU OS was almost completed through the efforts of Stallman and his collaborators over the years but it did not have a working kernel, the core component of an OS.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, primarily as a hobby in a desire to extend the capabilities of a Unix system called Minix. Torvalds used freely available components from the GNU application development environment, and Linux up to today is developed and distributed under the FSF's GNU General Public License. In Stallman's view, the term "Linux" properly refers to the kernel itself, but what we call Linux systems today are actually GNU/Linux environments.

How does Stallman view the rush of big vendors to support Linux (or GNU/Linux)?

"I wish they supported GNU/Linux and subscribed to the free software philosophy. But their supporting the open source philosophy is a step forward from what they used to do-provided that the burst of publicity for 'open source' does not cause the free software movement to be forgotten. Nowadays the newer movement is often given the credit for the work our idealism achieved. As a result, people often say our idealism is 'impractical.' Even users of GNU/Linux say this, not realizing that the system they enjoy or even love is our idealism made real," Stallman said.

The "newer movement" Stallman was referring to is the Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org), which came into prominence in 1998 when Netscape opened up its browser source code. It was at this time that the term "open source" started becoming a buzzword. Eric S. Raymond, who also collaborated with Stallman as another veteran in the fight against proprietary software, was one of the founders of the Open Source movement.

Raymond, however, does not agree with Stallman's use of the term GNU/Linux. In the early days of the Open Source Initiative, the debate over "free vs. open source" was fiercely fought in the hacker and developer community.

"With due respect to (Stallman's) achievements as a programmer and pioneer of free software, I regard this claim as an unjustified attempt to claim political territory-to reclaim ideological primacy in a Linux culture which has outgrown his confrontational rhetoric," Raymond told the INQUIRER.

In abandoning the confrontational stance of the earlier Free Software movement, the Open Source community has been more open to working with vendors.

"I'm happy about the big-vendor gold rush. I welcome their attempts to co-opt us, because I am confident that we will co-opt them. To get the advantages of our methods, they need to become what we are. In fact, this is already happening," Raymond pointed out.

He also stressed that it is wrong to think of the revolution happening today in the IT industry as return to the original roots of computing.

"I am confident that open source is the future. But I reject the widespread myth that it represents a return to the 'original vision.' I think many commentators have fallen victim to a tendency to romanticize the past-to over-generalize from a few exceptional centers of collaboration like the MIT AI Lab and SHARE. The open-source movement did not exist in the old days, and could not have existed, because we didn't have cheap computing and an Internet. The costs of communication and computing access were just too high for anyone other than a small and privileged elite to play," Raymond said.

Still, while vendors may not be moved by idealism, many of them do recognize that the future is open source. Take the popular Linux distributor Red Hat for example.

"It (open source) certainly changes the nature of the software industry as we know it today. Within Red Hat, we see this as an opportunity to provide our customers with control over better solutions. But it's also a revolution, and we are keen to ride the wave out front. Red Hat's 'brand promise' is that we commit to publishing every line of code that we write under the GPL. This is really not done out of ideology, but instead it's what our customers want, and why Red Hat maintains a large market share lead around the world," said Mark White, vice president of Red Hat Asia-Pacific.

For many Linux users today, it may no longer be about ideology. But confrontational or not, romanticized and idealized it may be, Stallman's free software rhetoric and hacker philosophy might still strike a chord: