Summary for Readings on May 10th

[1] outlined Stallman's motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU. Since the fundamental act of friendship between programmers is sharing of software, to forbid the sharing of software means to break the bond between programmers. Stallman refused to see the breakdown of solidarity within programmers as the software sellers are forbidding the users to share the properietary software with others, so he started writting the GNU operating system. GNU is free is the sense that everyone is permitted to modify and redistribute it.

Stallman is making analogy between software and air. Licensing each copy of software a user uses is like having a breather wearing a gas mask to meter the amount of air she uses if every breath of air is charged by liter. Wearing the gas mask can be intolerable even if the user can afford to pay for the air. Thus, it is the best for the breather to pay the tax to an anir plant and toss away the gas mask to breath the air openly. Since the programmer copies and modifies the software like the breather breathes air, the software ought to be as free.

In Stallman's perspectyive, it is inethical to make profit by restricting software usage. He sees the restriction as a destruction which can reduce the benefit that humanity would derive from the software. If everyone put restriction on the software she has written, the humanity would become poorer from this mutual destruction.

Stallman think people would program with irresistible fascination rather than monetary incentive. He points out people would program from fame and appreciation even if they are making less money than they they could have in other places. Finally, Stallman states a list of ways to make profit without selling the right to use software and to support the software development within the computing-using community..

[2] summarize acadamic life of Stallman and what he has achieve. As a grad student, Stallman is working at MIT AI lab as a programmer and hacker. In the late 70's and early 80's, MIT's hacker culture began to decline, because most of the manufactures stopped distributing source code in order to prevent their softwares being used competitors' hardwares. Softwares were protected by copyright and licenses to forbid the users to distribute the software copies. In 1980, Stallman was refused to access the software of a laser printer. This made Stallman had to use an older printer by modifing the software of the older printer. This incident convinced Stallman that the software users should have the freedom to share the software and to modify the softwares to meet their needs. he also argued that software manufactures' restrictions on softwares are unethical. As results of this incident, Stallman announced he was going to develop a Unix-like operating system called GNU which would be free to distributed. He also promoted the concept of copyleft which is a legal mechanism allows users to modify and re-distribute the software.

[3] descripts the printer incident which has inspired the GNU project. Xerox has donated cutting edge prototype printer to MIT's AI lab, where Stallman was working, to replace the old laser printer. After the new printer was installed and operated for a while, it was found that paper jams happened a lot to the new printer. Stallman had experience solving the similuar problem where he modified the printer software by inserting a software commend to order the computer to monitor the printer periodically and report the users when the paper jam happens. However, as he was inspecting the printer software, Stallman noticed that the printer software is binary files instead of human-readable cource codes. Thus, he was unable to modify the printer software.

In 70's, sharing software amoung programs was just like borrow a power tool or a cup of sugar from the neighbour.The only difference is that the sharing has helped to improve the software by introducing additional features to the software. Stallman has used the "city development" analogy to descript the developing of software where "parts would get replaced and rebuilt" and "new things would get added on" [3]. However, this senario did not work when asking Xerox for the printer software source code, and Xerox did not want to give the source code to Stallman. While visiting Carnegie Mellon University, Stallman went to see a Robert Sproull who used to work in the laser printer field in Xerox, but Sproull refused Stallman's request for the laser printer's software source codes. In 80's, many of his MIT colleagues departed the AI lab and sign nondisclosure agreements, and this actions were considered to be "first step down a lipperty slope" by Stallman. These encounter resulted Stallman's determination of his free software ideal.

[4] is by Eric S. Raymond, a life long friend of Stallman, and this essay is to critisize Willams's biography of Stallman titled "Free as in Freedom" (FAIF). Raymond has written this essay to supply FAIF with additional information about Stallman. Stallman is descripted as "the last true hacker" or as "the sole link between what came before him and the post-1985 hacker culture", but the author of [4] objects this description about Stallman by stating that this is unfair because there were other hackers besides Stallman at the time. Raymond also claimed he was the person who has suggested Emacs to be GNU project's first product. Stallman was noisy about the idea of anti-proprietary software while the author is quiet about it. The author thinks Stallman's idealogy is extreme at the time and would "lead to starving programmers and no good result" [4]. In reality, Stallman's experience was nowhere near as exceptional as FAIF makes it sound. Raymond states that the GNU project has failed to fullfile its central goal and Stallman is lossing his influence to others in the free software community.

Eric S. Raymond started involvement with hacker culture in 1976. Raymond's model of open source community was influenced by a paper by Keith Henson. Raymond is the co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in 1998 and took the role to be the ambassador of open source to the public. Some accomplishments of OSI include the releases of Mozilla and Netwcape source codes. Raymond has public dispute with Stallman in the free software movement. He rejected the moral and ethical rhetoric of Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, not because the principles are wrong, but the language used by Stallman does not persuade people to believe the principles.

Bruce Perens co-founded OSI with Raymond. Perens postulates an economic theory for business use of Open Source in his paper. The definition of Open Source was first created by Perens as the Debian Free Software Guildelines in the Debian Social Contract. In 1998, the term "Open Source" was mentioned to replace Stallman's "Free Software" a meeting at VA Linux Systems while ciscuss the promotion of Free Software to business from pragmatic terms. Perens was then recruited by Raymond to work with him on the formation of Open Source. Perens modified the Debian document into the Open Source Definition by replacing Debian references with "Open Source". Linus Torvalds was exposed to UNIX for the first time in 1990 and he began his work on Linux in 1991. Torvalds believes that " Open Source is the only right way to do software" [7], and and he only uses the best tool to do job even if that inclues properietary software. TTorvalds has been criticized for using proprietary software for version control in the Linux kernel. Miguel de Icaza started the GNOME project in 1997 to create a completely free desktop environment and component model for Linux and other UNIX-like operation systems.

The majority of this reading set is about Stallman and his idealogy.Through [1], Stallman clearly states the purpose of the GNU project and support that he is looking for. However, Stallman is unrealistic to suggest that programmers would develop free software. Stallman says programmer can still make living by developing free software with lesser pay, but I seriously doubt that people would program for less money. [3] descripts the event which triggers Stallman to start the GNU project, and [3] is a chapter from a biography about Stallman. [4] is by Stallman's life-long friend, and this essay is to supply additional information to the Stallman biography by author of [3].

REFERENCE
[1] The GNU Manifesto
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
[3] For Want of a Printer (Free as in Freedom)
[4] A Fan of Freedom: Thoughts on the Biography of RMS
[5] Eric S. Raymond (Wikipedia entry)
[6] Bruce Perens (Wikipedia entry)
[7] Linus Torvalds (Wikipedia entry)
[8] Migul de Icaza (Wikipedia entry)