History of Gnu, Linux, Free and Open Source Software (Revolution OS)

Oh I was at agenda 2000 and one of the people who was there was Craig Mundy who is some kind of high mucky muck at Microsoft I think vice president of consumer products or something like that and I hadn't actually met him I bumped into him in an elevator and an elevator and I looked his badge and said I see you work for Microsoft and he looked back at me and said oh yeah and what do you do and I thought he seemed just a sort of a tad dismissive I mean here's the archetype well you know guy in a suit looking at a scruffy hacker and so I gave him the thousand-yard stare and said I'm your worst nightmare for most of its short but colorful history the computer industry has been dominated by the Windows operating system but that could soon change as Windows faces a strong challenge from Linux Silicon Valley has long been the place to develop new technology start new companies and get really rich now the valley is the frontline in a revolution fighting for that most politically incorrect of ideas individual freedom day and night a loose confederation of hackers and programmers saps bits and pieces of computer code around the world as it builds the tools to set computer users free using open information and the free exchange of technology to achieve its goals this revolution began in the 1980s with the free software movement and the canoe project and now is most commonly associated with Linux and the open source movement we do have one sector that is taking off today it is the Linux related sector and I thought this might be a good opportunity to say what is Linux and I'll answer this question for you many of you probably already know but there are 12 billion users out there a computer operating system developed by hundreds of programmers collaborating on the internet a challenge to Microsoft Windows NT very popular for its speed and so this is what the craze is about to kind of explain what Linux is you have to explain what an operating system is and the thing about an operating system is that you I mean you're not never ever supposed to see it because nobody really uses an operating system people use programs on their computer and the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run so an operating system never does anything on its own it's only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources or or ask for certain file and on the disk or ask for the program's to connect them to the outside world and then the operating system comes steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write open-source is a way for people to collaborate on software without being encumbered by all of problems of intellectual property having to negotiate contracts every time you buy a piece of software have a lot of lawyers involved in general we just want to get the software to work and we want to be able to have people contribute fixes to that etc so we sort of sacrifice some of the intellectual property rights and just let the whole world use the software before there could be Linux there was Richard Stallman and the free software movement when you think of Richard Stallman as the great philosopher right and think of me as the engineer Richard Stallman is the founding father of the free software movement through his efforts to build the new operating system he created the legal philosophical and technological foundation for the free software movement without these contributions it's unlikely that Linux and open-source would have evolved into their current forms today I joined the MIT artificial intelligence lab in 1971 I joined a thriving community of hackers people who loved programming loved exploring what they could do with computers and they had developed a complete operating system entirely written there and I became one of the that continued to improve the operating system adding new capabilities that was my job and I love that we all love that that's why we were doing it and we called our system the incompatible time sharing system which is an example of the playful spirit which defines a hacker hackers are people who enjoy playful cleverness well it first started going wrong as the outside world started pressuring us to have passwords we didn't have any passwords on our computer and the reason was that the hackers who originally designed the system realized that passwords were a way that the administrators could control all the users and they didn't want to build tools you know locks and keys for the administrators to control them so they just didn't do it they left that out and we had the philosophy that whoever sitting at the computer should be able to do whatever he wants and somebody else who was there yesterday shouldn't be controlling what you do today when they put passwords onto one of the machines at MIT I and a bunch of other hackers didn't like it I decided to try a subversive sort of hack I figured out how to decode the password so by looking at the database of encoded passwords I could figure out what each person would actually type to log in and so I sent messages to people saying hello I see that you've chosen the password mumble whatever it was how about if you do as I do just type enter for your password it's much shorter much easier to type and of course with this message I was implicitly telling them that the security was really just a joke anyway but in addition I was letting them in on this hack and eventually a fifth of all the users on that computer joined me in using just enter as their passwords where do the ideas that led to what it is now called open source how did that begin who began well it actually began with the start of computers because at that time software was just passed around between people and I think it was only a lie in the late 70s early 80s people started really closing up their software and saying no you can never get a look at the source code you can't change the software even if it's necessary for you to fix it for your own application and you can actually blame some of that on Microsoft they were one of the real pioneers of the proprietary software model in the mid-1970s a group of hackers and computer hobbyists in Silicon Valley formed the homebrew Computer Club in the clubs January 31st 1976 newsletter Bill Gates of the recently formed Microsoft wrote an open letter to the community where he made a point-by-point argument for the relatively new concept of proprietary software up to that point the practice of computer users had been to freely pass around software with not much thought given to its ownership known as an open letter to hobbies' Bill Gates writes to me the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses books and software itself without good software and an owner who understands programming a hobby computer is wasted will quality software be written for the hobby market Gates goes on to write the feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using basic has all been positive two surprising things are apparent however one most of these users never bought basic and to the amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyist makes the time spent on Altair basic worth less than two dollars an hour why is this as the majority of hobbyists must be aware most of you steal your software hardware must be paid for but software's something to share who cares if the people who worked on it get paid this fair one thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at mitts for some problem you may have had mitts doesn't make money selling software one thing you do do is prevent good software from being written who can afford to do professional work for nothing what hobbyist can put three men years of the programming finding all bugs documenting his product and distribute it for free the fact is no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software what about the guys who resell Altair basic are they making money on hobby software yes but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end they are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at I would appreciate letters from anyone who wants to pay up or has a suggestion or comment signed bill gates general partner Microsoft in the late 70s and early 1980s Richard Stallman was doing artificial intelligence research and coding at the MIT artificial intelligence lab Richard had a number of negative experiences during that period which soured him on the whole idea of commercial software such as some code that he wanted to work on whoop and one of the fix was locked up and he couldn't get the company that owned the code to let him fix it even though it would have been to their advantage to do so and that put me into a moral dilemma you see because to get one of the modern computers of the day which was the early 80s you would have to get a proprietary operating system the developers of those systems didn't share with other people instead they tried to control the users dominate the users restrict them saying if to get this system you have to sign a promise you won't share with anybody else and to me that was essentially a promise to be a bad person to betray the rest of the world cut myself off from society from the cooperating community and I had already experienced what happened when other people did that to us when they refused to share with us because they had signed these contracts and it hurt the whole Lab kept us from doing useful things before so I just wasn't going to do that I felt this is wrong not going to live this way and from experiences like this he developed a profound hostility to the idea of intellectual property and software he eventually acted this out by founding the Free Software Foundation so I look for another alternative and I realized I was an operating system developer if I were to develop another operating system and then as the author encouraged everyone to share it so everyone you come and get it use this form a new community not only could I give myself away to keep using computers without betraying other people but I'd give it to everybody else to everybody would have a way out of that moral dilemma and so I realized this was what I had to do with my life actually began the project in January of 1984 that's when I resigned from my job at MIT to start developing the new operating system now I should explain that the name GNU is a hack because it's a recursive acronym it stands for the gnu's not Unix you see so the G and new stands for new and what the name means is I was developing a system that was like the UNIX operating system but was not the UNIX operating system this was a different system we would have to write it completely from scratch because UNIX was proprietary we were forbidden to share UNIX we couldn't use UNIX it was useless for a community so we had to write a replacement for it throughout the 1980s as Richard Stallman was building the canoe project computer scientists from the University of California at Berkeley we're developing their own free operating system known as Berkeley UNIX or BSD it was based upon the UNIX kernel which had been licensed from a TMT however due to legal problems with a TMT and fragmentation of the source code hackers and other non institutional users were slow to adopt it well UNIX consisted of a large number of separate programs that communicated with each other so we just had to replace these programs one by one so what I started doing was writing a replacement for one program and then another and then another and then people started joining me because I published an announcement inviting other people to join me to help write these programs and and by around 1991 we had replaced practically all of them what were some of the programs the Chairman well we had to to have a complete system you need to have a kernel which is the program that allocates resources to all the other programs you need a compiler which translates a program from readable source code that programmers can understand into numbers mysterious numbers that the computer can actually run you need other programs that go with the compiler to help do this job you need a debugger you need a text editor you need text for matters you need mailers you need lots and lots of things there are hundreds of programs in a unix-like operating system I saw Stallman's announcement actually I met him in February of 1987 he came to give a five-day tutorial on Emacs at our company and during the day he would explain new ways to think about Emacs and ways to extend and enhance it and to use the Emacs source code for better or worse but in the evening he was he was busily working on this compiler and he had not yet released it to the public so he was a I was being a little bit careful about who who got to see the source code but I was very eager and when he first announced it in June I downloaded it immediately I I played with I got some some pointers from him and when I sent the source-code back to him he was so he was very actually amazed at how quickly I was able to ramp up on his technology whenever we worked on something at Stanford or in the university we would get mostly at the time we were working off of machines from digital equipment or Sun mostly Sun whenever we would get a Sun machine the first thing we would do is we would spend literally days downloading new free software from the internet building it installing it on that Sun machine the crucial thing about glue is that it's free software now free software refers not to price but to freedom so think of free speech not free beer the freedoms that I'm talking about are the freedoms to make changes if you want to or hire somebody else to make changes for you if you're using the software for your business to redistribute copies to share with other people and to make improvements and publish them so that other people can get the benefit of them too and those are the freedoms that distinguish free software from non free software these are the freedoms that enable people to form a community if you don't have all these freedoms you're being divided and dominated by somebody my first experience contributing to free software came in late 1989 early 1990 I was working as a graduate student at Stanford University on computer aided design tools one of the pieces I needed was a tool called a parser generator well the Free Software Foundation under Richard Stallman created a great tool called bison I needed a tool that worked with C++ bison worked with C I modified bison to create something called bison plus plus and as a tremendous feeling of empowerment to be able to take a piece of software that was available and create what you needed in a very short piece of time by modifying it I put it back on on the internet and I was amazed at the number of people that picked it up and started using it in fact I remember going to job interviews I did various times consider just going out getting a job and I'd gone to a job interview and I was talking with one of the people and I started asking them about what tools they used and they said gee we use bison plus plus and I said oh I'm the author of bison plus plus free software generally does have a copyright it does have an owner and it has a license it is not public domain if we put the software in the public domain somebody else would be able to make a little bit of changes and turn that into a proprietary software package which means that the users would be running our software but they wouldn't have freedom to cooperate and share to prevent that we use a technique called copyleft the idea of copyleft is that it's copyright flipped over and what we do is we say this software is copyrighted and we the author's give you permission to redistribute copies we give you permission to change it we give you permission to add to it but when you redistribute it it has to be under these terms no more and no less so that whoever gets it from you also gets the freedom to cooperate with other people if he wants to and then in this way everywhere the software goes the freedom goes to and it becomes an inalienable right to cooperate with other people and form a community and so what is that the license what it was like a well copyleft being a general idea in order to use it you have to have a specific example the specific example we use for most you know software packages is the gnu general public license particular document in legalese which accomplishes this job a lot of other people use that same license for example Leena's Torvald uses that license for linux as well well the license I use is the gnu general public license that's the one that richard stallman wrote and i think it's a really astounding contribution it's one of the few software licenses that was written from the standpoint of the community rather than from the standpoint of protecting a company or as is the case with the MIT and the BSD since performing the goals of a government grant program and the GPL is really unique in that it's not just a license it's a whole philosophy that I think motivated the open source definition I don't hide that a lot of what I do came from Stallman a crucial step in the growth of the gnu/linux and free software movement was the creation of businesses based upon the software and philosophy ground zero for the beginning of the business phase was the electronics research lab at Stanford University known as ERL the lab was the place where the first canoe and Linux businesses found their inspiration so right here is where er L was that would have been the entrance over there next to the Electrical Engineering McCullough building you walk in you come in you walk down the hallway down here my office would have been about about here and then right across the hall from that was Michael daemons office Michael Tiemann took and started a company Cygnus software but the idea was to sell consulting and services around the new free software and while Michaels done very well with Cygnus well I spent a lot of time working out how we were going to make money and in the original canoe manifesto which is the last chapter of the gönül Emacs manual Stallman proposed a number of different possible ways to make money from the beginning of the free software movement I've had the idea that there's room in it for business to be done one of the advantages of free software is that there's a free market for any kind of service or support so if you are using software in your business and you want good support you have a choice of people to go to for it you have a choice of businesses that are in the business of providing you with support so they're going to have to in general give you good support or you'll go to somebody else with proprietary software support is a monopoly there's one company typically that has the source code and only they can give you support so typically you're at the mercy of a monopoly that's the case for example with Microsoft so no wonder the support is so bad the benefits of free software were tremendous but the cost of supporting it internally made managers very very nervous and so the fundamental idea I had was if we could build a model that could deliver two to four times the support and and and hand-holding capability that an internal engineer could provide and we could do it at 1/2 to 1/4 of the cost that would meet the test of whether or not people would actually buy and by about the fall of that year we had all of the things worked out about who we needed on the technical team what the terms of the sale would be what the key price points were and we actually received our incorporation in November of 1989 one of the most difficult things in starting our company was actually finding a name for it I explained this to one of my friends we're having difficulty and he returned an email message that basically just had a bunch of words with the name good new in it and cygnus was the one that looked least obnoxious and least obscene I can say very clearly that Cygnus was the first business it specialized in free software Cygnus supported free software filled a very essential nish because we had this great software you could get it for nothing but you couldn't get support and they made their money by charging for support the GNU project started by building a toolkit of basic development tools such as a C compiler a debugger a text editor and other necessary apparatus and their intention was eventually to develop a kernel to sit underneath those and be the center of the operating system by about 1990 they had successfully developed that toolkit and it was in wide use on a great many variants of UNIX but there was still no free kernel the kernel happened to be one of the last things we started to do when we had started it not long before and that's when Mena's Torvalds came along Minister Linus what's exactly your preferred pronunciation when I speak Swedish its eNOS when I speak Finnish it's Lino's when I speak English its Linus and I really don't care how people browse my name but Linux is always Linux he developed a kernel and got it working faster than we got ours working and got it to work very nicely and solidly his kernel is called Linux the initial go was my very personal goal to be able to run a similar environment on my computer that I had grown used to at at the university computers and I could not find anything that suited me for that right so having been doing computers for all my life basically at that point I just decided that I'll do my own um most of the inspiration early on came from from Sun OS which was what I was using at the University at the time which University University of Helsinki in Finland from 1991 to about 1993 was really I guess the infancy period of Linux that was when it was still only alpha or a beta quality it was relatively unstable although even then it was a good deal more stable than a lot of what are now called production operating systems ninis used the traditional tried-and-true method of writing one program that does the job and he got it to work quickly in fact faster than I would have thought was possible the tempura is monolithic which means that basically the OS itself is one entity indivisible while in a microkernel a the the operating system kernel is actually just a collection of servers that do different things and then they have a common protocol for doing communication between themselves so why is it that if the canoe project that's had so much lead-time suspect doing this why was why is it that he was able to kind of come in at the tail as well we actually started the new herd not long before he started linux and as it happened though we chose a design that's a very advanced design in terms of the power it gives you but also turns out to be very hard to debug it we decided to divide up the kernel which traditionally had been one program to divide it up into a lot of smaller programs that would send messages to each other a synchronously to communicate the problem is that that style of programming has a great deal of potential for bugs which are often very hard to figure out because they depend on does this mess does this program send this message before or after this one sends that message and the result was it took us years to get the thing to work what is Linux relationship to the GNU project well there's there's relationships to new on multiple levels one is just a philosophical level of thinking that making your source open is a good idea when leanness developed the kernel he wasn't doing it for the new project he did it independently and he released it independently and we didn't know about it but some of the people who didn't know about it decided to look for what else they could find to put together with that kernel to make a whole system they looked around and lo and behold everything they needed was already available what could fortune they thought but actually there was no chance about it they had found all the pieces of the new system which was missing just the kernel so when they put all that together really they were fitting Linux into the gap in the new system but they didn't know that there's a lot of these programs done by the Free Software Foundation and then by other people like Linux and there's a symbiosis between Linux and the programs so that the program's run on Linux and at the same time and they take advantage of Linux as a platform while Linux takes advantage of the programs by just being able to use them if what what programs for the main one is actually the GNU C compiler which without a C compiler it would not have been possible to to make Linux or most of the open programs available Linux uses the GPL and I agree with kind of philosophy behind the GPL that said the GPL itself is is not a very pretty document which is probably just because of never lawyers can ever be very pretty I've been playing around with Linux for actually late 92 early 93 for about a year before I decided it was to the point where it actually had everything that I needed to really replace the Sun workstation and I was looking for a way to have a UNIX workstation at home at the time we used Sun SPARC stations in the office at Stanford those machines cost us about $7,000 now I desperately wanted a UNIX machine at home there's always this thought you get as a graduate student gee if I could work at home then I would be so much more productive I would graduate sooner because I would finish my thesis sooner well well is it is it true well you can judge you know most people end up spending a lot of their time becoming more productive so that if they ever actually worked on their thesis they'd finish it in the day it takes a while sometimes so I decided I wanted a UNIX machine at home and I went out there and was able to use Linux together with a PC for about $2,000 I put together a system that was one and a half to two times faster than that $7,000 Sun SPARC station that was absolutely amazing I had one-and-a-half to two times the speed at 1/3 to 1/4 the price light bulbs went off I knew there was an opportunity here this was a chance to to really do something better than what son has done around open-source and Linux I called it Linux originally as a working name and and that was just because Linus and the X has to be there it's Unix I mean it's it's like a law and and what happened was that I initially thought that I can't call it links publicly because it's just too egotistical and that was before I had a big ego right they thought they were taking a whole bunch of components and putting them around Linux so they ended up calling the whole thing a Linux system and somehow that term caught on and the result is there are now 10 million people using this variant of the GNU system the gnu / linux operating and most of them don't know it some people advocate that be described as new / Linux I mean what's your thought on that is that justified well I think it's justified but it's justified if you actually make a new distribution of looks the same way that I think that Red Hat Linux is fine or souza Linux or Debian Linux because if you actually make your own distribution of Linux you get to name the thing but calling blanks and general gnu/linux I think is just ridiculous I got involved in fall 93 because I was set a copy of the first cd-rom commercial Linux distribution which was called egg drizzles produced by Adam Richter and I got a copy because I had been myself writing free software for a long time since the early 80s I was actually one of the early new contributors myself and I was absolutely astonished I was completely astonished because I've been a software engineer for nearly 15 years at that point and according to all the rules I knew about control and complexity keeping your project groups small having closely managed objectives Linux should have been a disaster and it wasn't instead it was something wonderful and I was determined to figure out how they were getting away with that in order for Linux to grow beyond the world of the computer programmer it needed a use an application that made it a must-have technology that threshold was crossed with the development of a program that made complex websites possible that program is the Apache web server the killer app of Linux was undoubtedly the Apache web server if you look at the history of Linux the adoption curve of Linux and the adoption curve of the Internet exactly track each other 1993 which was when the Apache web server project really got started was also the beginnings of the popular ISP explosion when the internet first became a mass-market commodity and the idea of web-based electronic commerce and mass communication became real I think it was one of the first applications that cause people to go well if I install Linux I get some tangible benefit from doing so right I mean clearly there were a lot of interesting applications on Linux at the time as me maybe two or three years ago when this route thing really started to take off but there wasn't you know you could almost say business case for someone to use Linux versus using NT until I think Apache and a lot of the things that plugged into Apache and enhanced Apache I mean when he went to go out build and go out and build a server farm it was much more cost effective cost-effective real dollar terms to build it on Linux and Apache than it was to build it on high asnt even if it meant that you had to spend a little bit of money to train your staff to learn how to use that or to find people who are knowledgeable but the good news was that that knowledge wasn't very expensive because there are all these college students out there who have been using Linux for a long time and were very familiar with it if you look at the trend curves in web servers Apache has steadily been gaining in market share ever since it's up to something like 66 percent now it's steadily clobbered all of the close source competition and that's because it's more reliable it's more flexible it's more extensible it does what let masters actually need and the combination of apache and linux found its way into a great many commercial shops essentially apache became the application that motivated internet service providers and e-commerce companies to choose linux over microsoft's windows it would probably runs best on linux and on freebsd and the reason is the communities around those operating systems are also the communities that contribute the most back to apache right and they were also the operating systems that internet service providers started using very heavily as well and Internet service providers really liked apache because it allowed them to do a lot of different things that some of the commercial web servers didn't such as the ability to host more than one website on a single box which clearly if you're an isp and you have 40 thousand users and they all want their own website is going to be pretty important to you one of the key factors in the growth of linux was the creation of companies that specialized in the distribution and support of the operating system itself among these companies Red Hat software's the best name where that started as the product of Marc Ewing while he was working at IBM he wanted a little better Linux distribution he started playing around found out he he spent more time maintaining his Linux distribution than he did and he did working on his new project so he he sort of started the distribution itself he met up with Bob Young who at the time was running something called a CC bookstore which was a mail-order PC UNIX catalog and Bob kind of knew he wanted something you know more his own to market rather than reselling other people's products and and he was fairly good at marketing and mark mark knew he needed some marketing help because he was fairly good at the technical part so they kind of got together I started working on breadhead in May of 1995 basically right out of NC State along with Eric Rowan who me and him combined make up employees number four and five and we actually reported to work at an apartment that Mark Ewing used to live in we took it over as kind of the development part of Redhead software and stay that way till about November of 1995 when when a toilet we had in the apartment kind of exploded flooded our downstairs neighbor and she got a little upset and and the apartment folks found out we were running a business there instead of actually living there at the same time so they decide to throw us out so at that point we had about a week to go find our first office which we did and get ourselves moved in a hurry we started going in again 95 or so to the venture capital firms asking saying there's something happening here there's a great business opportunity to build the next Sun for open source well the venture capitalists looked at this and said gee it's you're selling systems the software is free this is kind of scary we're not sure that we want to want to put money in and by the way we we funded other systems companies and and it hasn't really hasn't really panned out we're scared I came to the US about three years ago and the reason really was that I've been spinning like six or seven years at Helsinki University and decided that it was time to see the real world and not just university life especially this area had a lot of the most interesting work being done so I just decided that let's try to move halfway across the world and give this a try and it's turned out pretty well you see this temporary or a long term well we slide as temporary at first and I think it's certainly looking like it's turning it on term now our youngest daughter is both the US and a Finnish citizen because she was born here the older one is speaking both Swedish and English the next major event was one that I had a direct hand in I wrote a paper called the cathedral and the bazaar which was my observations my anthropological analysis of what it was that made the open-source world work we didn't call it that then we were still using the term free software primarily so it was my observation of what made the free software world work and why we were able to produce extremely high quality software in spite of constantly violating all of the standard rules of software engineering in that paper I was setting up a contrast between two different styles of development to oppose styles of development one which is the conventional closed development style which I called the cathedral style in that one you have tight specification of objectives small project groups which are run in a fairly hierarchical authoritarian manner and you have long release intervals on the other hand what identified is happening in the Linux world was a much more peer-to-peer decentralized market or bazaar alike style once you have very short release intervals and constant solicitation of feedback from people who are formerly outside the project a very intense intense peer review process and the startling thing was that the more I looked at this the more it seemed that trading away all the supposed advantages of conventional closed development for that one single advantage of massive independent peer review actually seemed to win actually seem to get you good results the reason Netscape is important is that they were the first large company to participate in open source we had Cygnus providing support but we didn't really have much business and that scape went open source essentially as a way to fight Microsoft which was giving away Internet Explorer but not letting anyone else have the source code not letting companies collaborate working is part of the sales force I got to I got a good idea of why people bought our software and what it took to make our software successful in the marketplace against competitive products however the problem was we were seeing is that is that as time went on our software was being competed against by other people suffer different Microsoft's and as time went on the price of our software had to drop because other people were giving their software away it had no charger it or little charge now the real problem was that they feared that Microsoft would achieve a monopoly lock on the browser market and they would then use that monopoly lock to pervert actually the HTTP and HTML standards that the web depends on and once they had turned those standards into lock end devices they could then use that control to drive Netscape out of the server market which is where it was making its real money my concern was that as time went on Netscape's business would be threatened by the fact that we didn't have people to do all the things we needed to do as a company in order to keep our software viable in the market place the Netscape release happened in early 1998 and I was told later I had no idea at the time that it came about as a direct result of the right people having read the cathedral and the bazaar the Cathedral in the bazaar the paper by eric raymond was in a significant influence on Netscape decision to release source code came as a complete shock to me I wasn't really ready for the thought that I was changing the world even by accident however it wasn't not by any means the only influence on that decision and not necessarily the most important one when when all is said and done as I said Netscape Netscape had already been talking about releasing source code for quite some time for anybody ever heard of Eric's paper Linux Congress in early 1997 which was the first place that I gave that paper and one of the people who heard it was Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly associates and he thought it was pretty intriguing and he asked me to give it at his first Perl conference which was later that year in fall of 97 and apparently what happened I was told later although I had no idea this was happening at the time is that some people from Netscape actually heard the the paper at the Perot conference and took those ideas back to Netscape and they kind of lit a fire there the roll of my paper was essentially to make the internal case at Netscape to make the business case for why Netscape should release its source code the paper was called Netscape source code as Netscape product a strange title essentially the what the title meant was that in my opinion we needed to think of source code not just as something that was used in creating our products but it's something that was a product in its own right something that customers might use other people might use I then looked at what the business models might be if we release source code for our products how would we license them how do we held we sell products in this environment then I looked at the competition a particular Microsoft what would they be likely to do we release source code was there some way they could use our source code against us I used Eric's paper as an example of how distributed development could work how a company could develop software not just using their own people but also working with people on the Internet and that's why I included a reference to Eric's paper in in my paper once my paper was circulated to people who read my paper would naturally enough find a reference to Eric's paper and read that as well and who was involved in making that happen in Netscape primarily the person who made the actual decision was Jim Barksdale and this turned out to be important later that our big win the big score that gave us mainstream visibility and credibility with investors came not because of bottom-up evangelism for a bunch of Engineers but because one strategist at the top saw the potential power of this method and then essentially imposed that vision on everyone underneath it when I completed the paper I first gave a copy to Marc Andreessen who was co-founder of Netscape and was was at the time when the senior management team at Netscape mark then gave a copy of paper to several other people within the scape management including Jim Barksdale I'm not sure exactly when Jim and the other senior managers made the actual decision I believe was in early January sometime Netscape actually announced that it was gonna release the source code On January 22nd at the same time that they released that they were going to give communicator away for free when Netscape decided to release the source code people sort of got a wake-up notice it said you know hey maybe there is something to this idea of releasing source code and doing development with people outside your company so Netscape decision brought a lot of public attention to the idea free software what you became known as open source and brought a lot of attention to the Linux operating system which was one of the most prominent examples of open source software at that time this is our first office Mountain View California we moved here in early 1995 this is 4,000 square feet it was an incredible leap of faith for us to move out and take the company to our own office now what's really important about this place is that this is the office where the term open source' was invented if you walk into an executives office and you say free software okay if you're lucky the response you'll get is something like mmm-hmm free software must be cheap shoddy worthless and if you're not lucky it has associations with with the free software foundations wholesale attack on intellectual property rights which regardless of what you think about the ethics of that it's lousy marketing it's not something that the businesses want to hear so Eric Raymond knew that there was a problem we've been calling this free software but people took the term free and associated with free of charge they thought that he could make money or couldn't sell which is exactly the wrong concept we wanted to get across the idea that the software was open that the source code was available very important pieces we had this meeting at the VA offices in Mountain View were Eric myself and Christine Peterson from the Forsyth Institute joined us as well as several other people Christi and Peterson was there by phone um Jon Maddog Hall was also there by phone um my name Todd Anderson who later worked for Sousa for a while was there Sam Bachman who now runs penguin computing was there he was he was an employee of a VA at the time well we came up with the concept of open source we called Linda's in fact and asked Linda city liked it he was interested he liked it eventually we came up with something replaced free software so that was the beginning of open source how did you choose the words open source do you remember you know I think Christine Peterson was the person who really came up with the idea we wanted again the idea that the source code was out there and it was open there weren't many choices well since the first three recipients have spoken for the open source movement I think I should speak about the free software movement the open source movement focuses on practical advantages that you can get by having a community of users who can cooperate on interchanging and improving software I agree completely with the points they make about that the reason why my views are different while I am in the free software movement rather than the open source movement is that I believe there's something more important at stake that freedom to cooperate with other people freedom to have a community is important for our quality of life it's important for having a good society that we can live in and that that is in my view even more important than having powerful and reliable software but I think some of the people in the free software camp are a little scared by the commercialization and you know of course a rebel is put off by success I think that commercialization is very important we want to mainstream this software and I work with Richard Stallman who's the gray-haired man of free software on a regular basis and I don't feel I have any philosophical differences Mia's author the open source definition and he is originator of free software as an organized thing except for one thing Richard once all software to be free and I think that free software and non-free software should coexist that's the only difference we have we decided early on that what we needed a definition we needed a kind of metal license to define the term open source' and what we came up with is a document called the open source definition it's derived from the Debian free software guidelines that were originally written by bruce perens I'd written the original draft of that discussed it for a month with the Debian developers Debian is a Linux distribution and made it their project policy and Eric and I decided to real Abel what we'd written for Debian as the open source definition and to say open sources software that gives you a list of nine rights which is in the open source definition the first ride is free redistribution this doesn't mean free as in no price it means Liberty you have to be free to redistribute your software to someone else and actually no price is a side-effect you can charge for that redistribution or not it has to come with source code so that someone can maintain a program if they go from a PC to a Mac for example they can change the software derived works have to be possible if someone has to improve your program they should be able to distribute the result there's a provision about integrity of the author source code which says that the author can sort of maintain their honor and if you make a change you might have to change the name of the program or mark out your change very clearly so that your change doesn't reflect on the author there is no discrimination against people or groups the example I usually use is you can't stop an abortion clinic or an anti-abortion activist from using the software there's no discrimination against fields of endeavor and that means the software has to be usable in a business as well as in a school the license has to be distributable in other words I have to be able to give that license to someone in that license then should work if that someone gives it to yet a third person the license can't be specific to a product in other words if I distribute my software on a Red Hat system the license can't say you can't distribute this on a Suzhou or a Debian system the license can't contaminate other software so if I distribute this on a CD with another program it can't say that other program must be free otherwise you can't distribute my software and then the only other part of the open source definition is a list of licenses that were accepted and the ones that we started with were the GPL which was actually the example for a lot of what's in the open source definition the BSD license because software for BSD system pre-existed Linux I think the next moment that I thought was really pivotal was when the database vendors flipped over which happened about three months sooner than I expected it to and actually happened in in late July early August that we were they to commitments to do Tier one ports from Oracle and and Sybase and the other key database vendors and why was that critical because we knew that in order for the open source story to be credible and especially in order for the Linux story to be credible we'd have to get commitments from independent software vendors to do ports of their applications to these platforms and I was actually kind of worried I felt that we were in a window of vulnerability between the time that we announced the open source campaign and the database vendors flipped over that was the point at which hostile action byte by Microsoft or other closed source software companies that was the point at which a serious marketing blitz might actually have sunk us but once the big database defenders flipped over that opened the way for other ISPs that started a snowball effect going every six months or so I would come back to the venture capitalists and I would show them the new numbers showing more and more people adopting Linux the new people porting new users and I'd show them our customer list and our customer list was getting much more impressive it was people like Cisco that we're beginning to appear people like you know the dot-com companies were starting to show up on our customer list and eventually the venture capitalists you know they kept looking at it they kept saying oh we can't quite do it finally Linda's appeared on the cover of Fortune there was something happening with open source well at that point the venture capitalists couldn't ignore it they just got sick of hearing about Linux everywhere and they got tired of me just you know showing it to them every every at that point almost almost every week so they they decided it was time to invest there was something happening well I announced open source to the world on the Internet I did a lot of the early administrative work of starting the open source initiative and I think six months later I was reading the words open source in the news all the time and was totally astounded and a year later I believe Microsoft was talking about releasing some source code and someone in the press a Steve Ballmer if they were going to open-source their code and Steve Ballmer said well open-source means more than just releasing the source code and I realized that he had read my document and understood it and was now telling the press about this now if you're like just a guy on the net who's not doing this for a job at all and you sort of write a manifesto and it spreads out through the world and a year later the vice-president Microsoft is talking about that you'd think you were on drugs wouldn't you but that's what really happened the local user groups tend to be more an issue of building a social network especially getting people familiarized with these shoes also just acting as a kind of support network for for people who do not for example have the ability to pay for for a commercial support network so one thing they are doing in this area for example is they're making these I think it's once a month they're having install fests which means that people who have problems getting Linux installed other on their machine or have some issue I mean maybe they've actually installed Linux but want to set up the network in a specific way can actually bring in their machines to this users work meeting and there's a lot of people there willing to help it may be seeing that problem before well actually things aren't going so well I tried it earlier myself I had problems and so I came to this install faster all the Guru's abound hopefully I'll have better luck getting it in instead of having sending emails or writing to news groups on the Internet and waiting several day for the answer sometimes it's easy to come here and find out the people who might know about your problem and may be able to help you and hopefully within a few hours you have your machine installed originally I wanted to install on my larger laptop and so I just did a search on the net and found where there were resources to get help and I'm here today cuz I'm trying to put Linux on this little guy right here which is a Toshiba libretto it's not the easiest thing in the world to do because it's a weird piece of hardware so Cheers I think the Department of Justice case has made people aware of the fact that you should at least look for alternatives to Microsoft and maybe Microsoft isn't the American dream after all and that kind of shifting perception you can very clearly see that people just took Microsoft for granted and maybe they're still buying Microsoft but at least they're kind of more aware of the issue these days Microsoft actually is Linux is defense they used Linux to ground a claim that they don't have a monopoly because Linux could essentially push them off their catbird seat at any time it's very ingenious argument totally specious because it didn't it didn't do anything to answer the charge that they had previously engaged in bullying and various anti-competitive practices but it was clever of them in an event the the judge didn't buy it well ordinarily we're in the Linux community are rather worried about letting Microsoft become the issue but there was a Slashdot article about December of 98 where a fella named Matt at the noodle had pointed out that the gentleman in Australia had managed to receive a refund for the unused copy of Windows that came with his computer so he declared the 19th of January was it January February I'm sorry the 19th of February he declared 19th of February windows refund day and he encouraged everyone to go to their computer manufacturers and return their unused copies of Windows as it was specified in the Windows end-user License Agreement it's important to remember that in the license itself it says that you can receive a refund if you don't use the software and that the manufacturer is is bound by law to do this or it was about my contract and we found that you know if you these manufacturers they basically said it stop bothering you can't hung up on you we didn't really want to sort of give out the location of where we were going to meet until you know at the very last second so it is we had people meet at places that we could control in the different towns around here so I was the San Jose Marshal and I believe Nick you were this I was Rick Moen and I did San Francisco right and so we had maps there and we handed them off to everybody who was coming well we actually met at a Denny's that's just outside the Foster City Limits Foster City City Limits which meant also that it was just outside the Foster City police jurisdiction which meant that anything any incidents that happened at the meeting point happened in the jurisdiction of San Mateo and if they told us to get lost we'd say fine we're going to foster city by it's sort of the dukes of hazzard method avoiding the cops so well actually we originally we marched on the other side of this building we marched around and up onto the parking structure that's up there and that's where Microsoft had a reception laid out for us with drinks and a big sign that said you know Microsoft welcomes the open-source community and the local we're news cameras got shots of Eric Raymond and the Microsoft representative the Microsoft story seemed to mostly be that this was not an issue for Microsoft but rather our from the OEMs so we all needed to go back to our computer manufacturers and try yet again to try and get a refund from them we respond to them saying you know that's we've tried that it's not possible we need Microsoft to take action at this point and they just repeated the tagline over and over again you need to go to the OEM manufacturers and get your refunds there bit about 150 people probably about half of which had signs and such so well we ended up actually right in this courtyard here basically we originally met gathered outside various people sent groups in people from the FreeBSD camps and a couple folks in we had eric raymond and chris actually tried to go up eventually yeah they had blocked the elevators off to us and we're off their arms were right up here on the ninth floor we we got some really nice press out of it and we think as a result toshiba made it possible for you to buy laptops without the operating system on it so it's a small victory but well and even then now companies such as IBM and a lot of other computer manufacturers are allowing you now to buy machines that don't have windows on them now when I was a kid and I went to school the teachers were trying to teach us to share they said if you bring some candy you can't eat all yourself you've got to share with the other kids but now the administration says teachers should be teaching kids to say yes to licensing if you bring some software to school oh no don't share it sharing means you're a pirate sharing means you'll be put in jail that's not the way society should work you'll the willingness to help other people at least when it's not too hard because that's the basis of society that's the fundamental resource that gives us a society instead of a dog-eat-dog jungle so what about people that say that if you have rampant piracy don't eliminate the profit motive and then in the creative work software will not well they're they're all on both counts for one thing people are making a profit from developing free software but for another the freedom to have a community is more important people that look at casually look at open source free software and think well because you're supposed to share and do it for people's goodwill is that seeing somewhat communist what's your response absolute nonsense it makes me really angry when people do that well back in back in 1989 actually communism would have been a compliment that the word that people were using at that time was crazy I wanted them to use capitalism communism is an inny ology that forces people to share if you don't share you get thrown in jail or killed in in 1990 we got a visit from a director of an institute in Moscow University and actually I saw him in Helsinki just two weeks ago but in any event he came by and Richard Stallman had suggested that he visits Cygnus because he was interested in in understanding how the free software model might apply to stimulating entrepreneurial innovation in Russia of all places and we had been kind of secretive about our business plan because you know we weren't really sure that it was going to work and we didn't want to look too stupid if it failed but I was very very open with him and the more I told him the more he started shaking his head like this and I finally said you know what's what's wrong and he said this sounds too much like communism to be successful in Russia you go to a gulag and end up in a mass grave with a bullet in the back of your head open source is not communism because it doesn't force people Karl Marx did not invent helping your neighbor it's it's not communist to have a commons a commons existed long before communism as a philosophy of government there are many Commons in our lives for example you drive on the highway something that is maintained for our common good actually labeling our business model it means that it misses the point a little bit whether it's communist or whether it's capitalist the label doesn't matter the real question is how much value can you deliver how scalable is the business what kind of problems what kind of rate of innovation can you sustain and then however you want to label that is is is really up to you a lot of people described that Auguste limits worldís Linux is coming out party lettuce Torvalds were very funny about that he said what was was Linux gay but some people said yeah that was our that was our debutante ball that was when the Linux guys the hardcore hackers really got it together with suits at 3:00 p.m. on August 10th 1999 Linda's Torvalds delivered the keynote address at Linux world the crowd of 6,000 people began lining up at 12:00 noon gentlemen please welcome Larry Augustine Lenox world conference chair and president and CEO VA Linux systems these guys have to clap I pay them thank you all for being here it looks like it's been a great show so far if you'll indulge me for a moment I'm gonna try and avoid the glare of the lights and just just I still think there's a lot of people even though this is the second show I still think there's a lot of people who don't quite get what it is it's so exciting about Linux there's this great show going on next door there's huge exhibits and everything but it's the people out here that are the real contributors not those companies the person on next I know you all know so I don't have to give anything in the way of introduction ladies and gentlemen I give you Linda's Torvalds calm down down say yes I don't want to just give one of my normal talks because I find them boring probably by now most of you find that boring too because you've heard them like ten times but after the technical update will actually try whether we can do a questions and answer session with 5,000 people or how many of you there are there and it may not actually work out because one of the 5,000 people is really loud the one thing I will do which I always do in all my talks is is the gratitude thing I want to kind of acknowledge the fact that I've obviously not been alone in doing links Red Hat up 228 percent this is the IPO that everybody was waiting for they of course are behind the Linux operating system Raj see all I've gotten today are comments about what the stock price is morning you know 41 to 42 is at 47th and it was in 53 it's at 51 every machine as far as I can tell on the show floor is pointed to their each rate accounts for their broker accounts they know the read a price I can't believe any six I'm mister 53 oh boy I got invited by no should have fun but no no that's that's great if it's if it's that guys don't know well you know Red Hat being successful just means that it legitimizes Linux so it's much easier for us to go out it's all yet are made for follow Hirata yeah it's kind of been a little bit divided you've got a lot of people that are a pretty hardcore and they're they're kind of offended by that because they work really hard and they're not really getting maybe their fair share out of that some people don't get ticked and you know the thing that you see that on a lot of mailing lists or on Slashdot you'll read this guy is really mad because he didn't get a chance to he's didn't get a chance to do to get stock from Red Hat he didn't get a chance to get to get a job from this other company you know but the the kind of the shocking secret there is that most of the really hardcore guys you know they don't they don't care so much the guys that are kind of really down in the trenches they're writing this code because they need this code we could bite Richard Stallman who's the founder of the free software Association and Tim ney who's the managing director there we go I hear it it hi Richard I saw you playing your recorder at in Paris at that Linux conference but I didn't have a audio track so you would you get them ahead audio to their video downstream next time I don't have any control over that unfortunately those things can only be done with non free software okay but we gave you the award and before you say a word we'll have Tim man yourself hold up a little representation of the contribution towards the free software Association so very ironic things have happened but nothing to match this giving the leanest Torvalds award to the Free Software Foundation is sort of like giving the Han Solo award to the rebel fleet you see some of you may not realize how far that analogy goes but actually let me tell you how this how we got here see what happened is 15 years ago if you wanted to use a computer the only way you could do it was to it was with proprietary software software that divides and subjugates the users and most people just a lot of people didn't like it but they saw no alternative but some of us were determined to make an alternative and we said we're going to develop a free operating system a free software operating system that will give users the chance to have freedom while they use their computers now a lot of people said well it's a nice idea but it's so hard it will never get it done so I don't want to participate I don't believe you can ever get it done luckily not everybody said that and clearly we knew we would eventually get the kernel done but as it happens somebody else did a better kernel before we did now in the old days we had an overall strategy for calling people's attention to the importance of freedom to the freedom that they can have or not have when they use a computer well what can we do about it as far as I can tell the only workable way of trying to change this and make that strategy work again is to spread the word that the operating system you're using is actually the GNU system somewhat modified of course and when people know this they'll take a look at the reasons we develop this system they'll think about these issues and some of them will decide they agree so I ask people please tell people this system your new system it's a combination of you know in Linux so we can call it your new slash lips so Larry when you were at Stanford eight nine years ago during your PhD did you ever think you did in this position no no I had no idea honestly when you um you know that's a good question I really didn't have a good idea I mean here we are on this huge show floor there are people just going crazy about Linux we had 6,200 people crammed into a room to see Linux speak loud let us speak last night here we are with you know all of these huge vendors all over the show it's just you have no idea that this is gonna happen I mean this is just this little operating system that we were happy with that a few people cared about you know I thought I'd have a nice little consulting business and Here I am suddenly with all over this huge show going on it's just incredible yeah year ago you could look and say you know this is gonna be big and everyone's standing at the show going you know the show was big last year is it gonna be is it gonna be as big this year then you remind them you know last year was only six months ago they go all linux time so leading up to the IPO we had arrived actually in San Diego on Tuesday night we spent Wednesday morning meeting investors in San Diego we flew up to San Francisco spent Wednesday afternoon meeting investment firms in San Francisco then on the Thursday morning of the IPO is when our stock would be traded publicly so it was nice that we had ended the tour in San Francisco because we could go to the Credit Suisse trading desk the next morning to watch the public offering and in San Francisco being close enough to the company into our families we could invite people up to actually join us in the first trade so I invited my wife and we invited Lennis and Tova and a number of other friends that people worked in the company to join us whenever we invite Linda's and Tova they have two young children and I have a daughter Andrea and we always bring the kids along so we went into the Credit Suisse trading floor with all these traders and there these three year old kids running around and chasing each other around the show around the trading floor so Linda's and I walked in and we walked up into the trading floor and everyone was very excited and they we kept asking them well how is it going I think's going okay and they said how it's what we're really excited we think things are going well we don't want to we don't want to say you know we don't want to jinx anything we walked in it was a big-screen TV showing CNBC and it's amazing to us but the theme for the day was Linux now we have an IPO that's gonna go today and when I mean go it is going to go the estimates I'm hearing are staggering but watch VA Linux systems it goes at 12:40 today the symbol is Ln UX a provider of large-scale computer service and workstations specially designed for the Linux operating system the original range on this IPO was 11 to 13 dollars then 21 to 23 then 28 to 30 priced of 30 and the estimates I'm hearing I don't wanna repeat because I don't have a confirmation but if they're true they will blow your mind when this stock takes off at 12:40 I turn to Linda's and I said gee did you ever think you know you'd walk in here someday and Linux would be the theme on CNBC and Lennis in his joking ways at all absolutely so we walk in and they show us the buy and sell orders coming in and it's incredible we're seeing numbers like $320 $340 of share and I'm just in complete shock you know this is this is over ten times where we price the offering him is incredible and I remember Linda's just kind of sort of patting me on the back it's like you know relax and it was pretty exciting to see that we were I was just amazing we were stunned we were lucky that we were able to get back to the offices we invented San Francisco so we could come back to VA offices talk to to see everyone in the office for the IPO we got back we had everyone was obviously very excited the IPO had done just tremendously well we we had a little party that we put together I was interesting while we were celebrating though honey of people that were still trying to work I recall cries of be quiet we're on the phone were working as we as we went into the offices one of the things I did was I gave the roadshow presentation for the employees back at the office so they could have an idea of what we've been telling investors and understand exactly what we put together but again the story of the day is VA Linux now up seven hundred sixty-six percent to two hundred thirty-five dollars to 265 sooo the best-performing IPO ever there goes Sycamore networks was a priced at $38 surged to $270 this has just beat it and by the way so how do you feel about potentially billions of dollars of wealth being created from your creation but you're not necessarily correctly cashing out so if I hadn't made links available I mean I wouldn't have gotten any money that way either syan it's a it's a win-win situation no just the the fact that there are a lot of commercial companies means that there are a lot of Linux people who used to work on Linux kind of on the side and now they get paid for doing what they wanted to do that helps me in the sense that I wanted them to work on Linux anyway you the whole new project is really one big hack it's one big act of subversive playful cleverness to change society for the better because I'm only interested in changing it for the better but in a clever way hi we're the canoe Stallman's and this is the free-software song join us now and share the software you'll be free hackers you'll be free Oh

Channel: Linux4UnMe

Views: 165,052

Keywords: history of linux, history of gnu, richard stallman, linus torvalds, revolution os, linux documentary, open source history, open source documentary, GNU/Linux (Operating System), Free Software (Software Genre), Free And Open-source Software (Software Genre)

Id: vjMZssWMweA

Length: 85min 10sec (5110 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2015