Selected Quotes from Free for All

•   Battle --
  
  Microsoft looks for competitors and finds Linux.    
  
  [Microsoft witness Richard] Schmalensee didn't mention that most people thought of Linux as a strange tool created and used by hackers in dark rooms lit by computer monitors. He didn't mention that many people had trouble getting Linux to work with their computers. He forgot to mention that Linux manuals came with subheads like ``Disk Druid-like `fstab editor' available." He didn't delve into the fact that for many of developers, Linux was just a hobby they dabbled with when there was nothing interesting on television. And he certainly didn't mention that most people thought that the whole Linux project was the work of a mad genius and his weirdo disciples who still hadn't caught on to the fact that the Soviet Union had already failed big time. The Linux folks actually thought that sharing would make the world a better place. Fat cat programmers who spent their stock option riches on Porsches and balsemic vinegar laughed at moments like this.
•   Image --
  
  The Rag Tag Army of Volunteers, Wizards, Hackers, Gurus, and Assorted Random Computer Geniuses.   
  
  The battle between Linux and Microsoft is lining up to be the classic fight between the people like [Richard] Schamlensee and the people like [Alan] Cox. On one side are the armies of lawyers, lobbyists, salesmen, and expensive executives who are armed with patents, lawsuits, and legislation. They are skilled at moving the levers of power until the gears line up just right and billions of dollars pour into their pockets. They know how to schmooze, toady, beg, or even threaten until they wear the mantle of authority and command the piety and devotion of the world. People buy Microsoft because it's ``the standard". No one decreed this, but somehow it has come to be.

  On the other side are a bunch of guys who just like playing with computers and will do anything to take them apart. They're not like the guy in the song by John Cougar Mellancamp who sings, ``I fight authority and authority always wins.'' Some might have an attitude, but most just want to look at the insides of their computers and rearrange them to hook up to coffee machines or networks. They want to fidget with the guts of their machines. If they weld some spaghetti to the insides, so be it.

  Normally, these battles between the suits and the geeks don't threaten the established order. There are university students around the world building solar-powered cars, but they don't actually pose a threat to the oil or auto industries. 21 , a restaurant in New York, makes a great hamburger, but they're not going to put McDonalds out of business. The experimentalists and the perfectionists don't usually knock heads with the corporations who depend upon world domination for their profits. Except when it comes to software.

  Software is different from cars or hamburgers. Once someone writes the source code, copying the source costs next to nothing. That makes it much easier for tinkerers like Cox to have a global effect. If Cox, [Linus] Torvalds, and his chums just happen to luck upon something that's better than Microsoft, then the rest of the world can share their invention for next to nothing. That's what makes Cox, Torvalds, and their buddies a credible threat no matter how often they sleep late.

•   College --
  
  How the Publish or Perish World of Academia Created Free Software and then Betrayed It.    
  
  The revolution is also the latest episode in the battle between the programmers and the suits. In a sense, it's a battle for the hearts and minds of the people who are smart enough to create software for the world. The programmers want to write challenging tools that impress their friends. The suits want to reign in programmers and channel their energy toward putting more money in the pockets of the corporation. The suits hope to keep programmers devoted by giving them fat paychecks, but it's not clear that programmers really want the cash. The freedom to do whatever you want with source code is intrinsically rewarding. The suits want to keep software under lock and key so they can sell it and maximize revenues. The free software revolution is really about a bunch of programmers saying, ``Screw the cash. I really want the source code''.
  
  Stallman looked at this a bit differently. Yes, AT&T was being nice when they gave grants to the university, but weren't masters always kind when they gave bowls of gruel to their slaves? The binary versions AT&T started distributing to the world was just gruel for Stallman. The high priests and lucky few got to read the source code. They got to eat the steak and lobster spread. Stallman saw this central, controlling, corporate force as the enemy, and he began naming his work GNU, which was a recursive acronym that stood for ``GNU's Not UNIX''. The GNU project aimed to produce a complete working operating system that was going to do everything that UNIX did for none of the moral, emotional, or ethical cost. Users would be able to read the source code to Stallman's OS and modify it without signing a tough non-disclosure agreement drafted by teams of lawyers. They would be able to play with their software in complete freedom. Stallman notes that he never aimed to produce an operating system that didn't cost anything. The world may be entranced with the notion of a price tag of zero, but for Stallman, that was just a side effect of the unrestricted sharing.
•   Quicksand --
  
  The Last Battle that Sealed the Fate of Institutions Everywhere.    
  
  The battle raged in the courts for more than a year. It moved from Federal to California state court. Judges held hearings, lawyers took depositions, clerks read briefs, judges heard arguments presented by briefs written by lawyers who had just held depositions. The burn rate of legal fees was probably larger than most Internet startups.

  Any grownup should take one look at this battle royale and understand just how the free software movement got so far. While the Berkeley folks were meeting with lawyers and worrying about whether the judges were going to choose the right side, Linus Torvalds was creating his own kernel. He started Linux on his own and that made him a free man.

•   Outsider --
  
  The Rise of the Ronin and the Birth of Linux.   
  
  At first glance, he was making astounding progress. He created a working system with a compiler in less than half a year. But he also had the advantage of borrowing from the GNU Project. Stallman's GNU project group had already written a compiler (gcc) and a nice text user interface (bash). Torvalds just grabbed these because he could. He was standing on the shoulders of the giants who had came before him.
•   Growth --
  
  What Began as a Hobby Grew Into a Business and Then a Crusade.    
  
  [Jon] Hall went sailing with [Linus] Torvalds to talk about the guts of the Linux OS. Hall says, ``I took him out on the Mississippi River, went up and down the Mississippi in the river boat, drinking Hurricanes, and I said to him `Linus, did you ever think about porting Linux to a 64-bit processor, like the Alpha?' He said, `Well, I thought about doing that, but the Helsinki office has been having problems getting me a system, so I guess I'll have to do the PowerPC instead.'

  ``I knew that was the wrong answer, so I came back to Digital (at the time), and got a friend of mine, named Bill Jackson, to send out a system to Linus, and he received it about a couple weeks after that. Then I found some people inside Digital who were also thinking about porting Linux to an Alpha. I got the two groups together, and after that, we started on the Alpha Linux project. "

•   Freedom --
  
  The Price of Liberty Is An Eternal Debate About What It Means.    
  
  Tossing about the word ``free'' is easy to do. Defining what it means takes much longer. The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, but the colonial governments fought and struggled with creating a free government through the ratification of the current United States constitution in 1787. The Bill of Rights came soon afterwards and the Supreme Court is still continually struggling with defining the boundaries of freedom described by the document. Much of the political history of the United States might be said to be an extended argument about the meaning of the words ``free country''.

  The free software movement is no different. It's easy for one person to simply give their software away for free. It's much harder to attract a big army and organize them in order to take on Microsoft and dominate the world. That requires a proper definition of the word ``free'' so that everyone understands the rights and limitations behind the word. Everyone needs to be on the same page if the battle will be won. Everyone needs to understand what is meant by ``free software.''

•   Source --
  
  Use the Source, Luke.   
  
  Tim O'Reilly, the publisher of many books and a vocal proponent of the Open Source world, says ``We've gone through this period of thinking of programs as artifacts. A binary object is a thing. Open source is part of thinking of computers as a process.'' In other words, we've done a good job of creating computers you can buy off the shelf and software that can be bought in shrink-wrapped boxes, but we haven't done a good job making it possible for people to talk to the machines.
•   People --
  
  How to Make Generalizations About Thousands, Even Millions of People.    
  
  The large collection of dedicated individualists leads to many little moments of easy irony. Black is by far the most common color. Long hair and beards are common. T-shirts and shorts are the rule when it gets warm and t-shirts and jeans dominate when the weather turns cold. No one wears suits or anything so traditional. That would be silly because they're not as comfortable as t-shirts and jeans. Fitting in with the free thinkers isn't hard.
•   Politics --
  
  Communism Meets Libertarism In A No Holds Barred Match.   
  
  To some extent, the politics of the free source movement is such a conundrum that people simply project their wishes onto it. John Gilmore told me, ``Well, it depends. Eric Raymond is sort of a libertarian but Richard Stallman is sort of a communist. I guess it's both." The freedom makes it possible for people to mold the movement to be what they want. The Freudian psychologists always find sex, sex, and more sex at the root of the problem and the Jungians always discover that a misplaced animus stubbed its toe on an archetype.
•   Charity --
  
  If A Gift Falls From The Sky Without a Tax Deduction, Is It Charity?   
  
  Consider the example of imaginary proprietary software company called SoftSoft that gives away 1 million copies of its $50 WidgetWare product to schools and charities across the United States. This is, in many ways, generous because SoftSoft only sells 500,000 copies a year, giving them gross revenues of $25 million.

  If SoftSoft values the gift at the full market value, they have a deduction of $50 million which clearly puts them well in the red and beyond the reach of taxes for the year. They can probably carry the loss forward and wipe out next year's earnings too.

•   Love --
  
  Can This Marriage Between Millions of Brilliant, Iconoclastic Individuals Survive?    
  
  The important thing to realize is that free software people aren't any closer to saints than the folks in the proprietary software companies. They're just as given to emotion, greed, and the lust for power. It's just that the free software rules tend to restrain their worst instincts and prevent them from acting upon them.
•   Corporations --
  
  Can Free Software Avoid the Claustrophobia of Cubicles and the Legal Strictures of Corporate Structure?    
  
  Most of the true devotees are nervous about all of this attention. The free software world was easy to understand when it was just late night hack fests and endless railing against AT&T and UNIX. It was simple when it was just messing around with grungy code that did way cool things. It was a great, he-man, Windoze-hating clubhouse back then.
•   Money --
  
  How To Get By With A Little Help From Your Friends.    
  
  [David] Henkel-Wallace says, ``Cygnus was rarely the lowest bidder. People who cared about price more than anyone else were often the hardest customers anyway. We did deals on a fair price and I think people were happy with the result. We rarely competed on price. What really matters to you? Getting a working tool set or a cheap price?"
•   Fork --
  
  When Two Minds Diverged In the Open Woods, We Took Both of Them, And That Made All of the Difference.     
  
  The argument lasted months. [Theo] de Raadt felt he tried and tried to rejoin the project without giving away his honor. The core NetBSD team argued that they just wanted to make sure he would be positive. They wanted to make sure he wouldn't drive away perfectly good contributors with brash antics. No one ever gained any ground on the negotiations and in the end, de Raadt was gone.

  The good news is the fork didn't end badly. de Raadt decided he wasn't going to take the demotion. He just couldn't do good work if he had to run all of his changes by one of the team that kicked him off of the project. It took too long to ask ``mother, may I?'' to fix every little bug. If he was going to have to run his own tree, he might as well go whole hog and start his own version of BSD which he called ``OpenBSD". It was going to be completely open. There were going to be relatively few controls on the members. If the NetBSD core ran its world like the Puritan villagers in a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, then de Raadt was going to run his like Club Med.

•   Core --
  
  Turning A-List Programmers Into the A-Team.    
  
  These developers then coalesced into a core group and set up a structure for the code. They chose the basic, BSD-style license for their software which allowed anyone to use the code for whatever purpose without distributing the source code to any changes. Many of the group lived in Berkeley then and still live in the area today. Of course, the BSD-style license also made sense for many of the developers who were involved in businesses who often didn't want to jump into the open source world with what they saw as Stallman's absolutist fervor. Businesses could adopt the Apache code without fear that some license would force them to reveal their source code later. The only catch was that they couldn't call the product Apache unless it was an unmodified copy of something approved by the Apache group.
•   T-Shirts --
  
  Softwear versus Software.     
  
  Young jokes about this. He said he was at a tradeshow talking to a small software company that was trying to give him one of their free promotional t-shirts. He said, ``Why don't you try giving away the source code and selling the t-shirts?"
•   New --
  
  Why Free Software Is Just a Ho-Hum, Been-There, Done-That Thing for the Smokestack Industries.    
  
  In this context, the free source world isn't a new flowering of mutual respect and sharing, it's just a return to the good old days when you could take apart what was yours. If you bought the software, you could fiddle with it. This wasn't the Age of Aquarius, it was the second coming of Mayberry RFD, Home Improvement, and the Dukes of Hazzard.
•   Nations --
  
  The Omnipotence the State Meets the Omniscience of the Noosphere.     
  
  The Linux movement isn't really about nations and it's not really about war in the old fashioned sense. It's about nerds building software and letting other nerds see how cool their code is. It's about empowering the world of programmers and cutting out the corporate suits. It's about spending all night coding on wonderful, magnificent, software with massive colonades, endless plazas, big brass bells, and huge steam whistles without asking a boss, ``Mother May I?" It's very individualistic and peaceful.

  That stirring romantic vision may be moving the boys in the trenches, but the side effects are beginning to be felt in the world of global politics. Every time Linux, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD is installed, several dollars don't go flowing to Seattle. There's a little bit less available for the Microsoft crowd to spend on mega mansions, balsamic vinegar, and local taxes. The local library, the local police force, and the local schools are going to have a bit less local wealth to tax. In essence, the Linux boys are sacking Seattle without getting out of their chairs or breaking a sweat. You won't see this battle retold on those cable channels that traffic in war documentaries, but it's unfolding as we speak.

•   Wealth --
  
  Would You Rather Have A Million Dollars or A Computer That Doesn't Crash?    
  
  Most folks in the free source world may not have big bank accounts. Those are just numbers in a computer anyways and everyone who can program knows how easy it is to fill a computer with numbers. But, the free source world has good software and the source code that goes along with it. How many times a day must Bill Gates look at the blue screen of death that splashes across a Windows computer monitor when the Windows software crashes? How many times does Torvalds watch Linux crash? Who's better off? Who's wealthier?
•   Future --
  
  Will Success Spoil Rock Solid Code?     
  
  For all of these reasons, this grand free-for-all, this great swapfest of software, this wonderful nonstop slumberparty sleepover of cooperative knowledge creation, this incredible science project on steroids will grow in strange leaps and unexpected bounds until it swallows the world. There will be battles, there will be armies, there will be spies, there will be snakes, there will be court cases, there will be laws, there will martyrs, there will be heros, and there will be traitors. But in the end, information just wants to be free. That's what we love about it.