Same Same But Different
A man with a moral fervor of the kind usually associated with priests and prophets proclaimed that proprietary software is EVIL because "it requires people to agree not to share, and that makes society ugly.”1 You might think this statement is a bit too much, but not for Richard Stallman – a math whiz who attended Harvard. In 1982, he decided to write a completely non-proprietary Operating System (OS) from scratch. Given his kooky sense of humor, he chose to call it GNU, where the G stands for – I kid you not – GNU, a recursive acronym. The N stands for "Not," and the U refers to the most popular operating system from that period, Unix. So effectively, GNU stood for ‘GNU is Not Unix’.
And so it went: the preacher continued to preach and the golden rule was if you like a program, you must share it with others. He said "Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.”2
It's easy to think you understand the essence of the free software movement after reading the previous statement, but most likely you don't, and it isn't your fault, dear reader. Despite Stallman's best efforts to clarify, the confusion persists to this day, and it all stems from the ambiguity around the use of the word ‘free.’
Stallman insisted, "When we call software ‘free,’ we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of ‘free speech,’ not ‘free beer.' In fact, selling 'free' software is not just okay but rather encouraged."3
Faith in freedom is indeed a truly remarkable thing, but as good as beliefs are, unfortunately, they aren't legally binding. Keenly aware of this fact, Stallman published the world's first-ever copyleft license, the GNU GPL, or the GNU General Public License, in the year 1989.
So, what exactly is a copyleft license, you may ask? Well, a copyleft license allows a piece of work to be copied, modified, and further redistributed with no restrictions whatsoever, except one: you are not allowed to add any additional restrictions. And yes, you can certainly choose to sell your ‘copylefted’ piece of work. In other words, if you are building upon a copylefted piece of work, you would not be able to obtain a copyright for it. The derived work has to be redistributed under the same license terms as the original underlying work.
Enough about licenses, but what happened to the OS? Did it ever come out? Well, as events unfolded, Stallman wrote many of the key components for the proposed OS, including a compiler, file systems, and text editors. However, even by 1991, nine years after the promise, he hadn't managed to complete a kernel. Unfortunately, without a kernel, you have no OS.
Interestingly enough, the real action was unfolding almost 4000 miles east of the headquarters of the Free Software Foundation, courtesy of a 21-year-old kid from Helsinki. This young individual, living with his parents and sister, would keep the curtains drawn even when the sun was out in a region where you only get sunlight for up to 6 months annually. Much to his sister's frustration, he would tie up the phone line because, you see, back in the day, being online meant you couldn't make phone calls. But, for what it's worth, he managed to pull off a miracle - the kernel was ready, something Stallman couldn't do. The kid was Linus Torvalds, and by the fall of 1991, his creation was nearly complete. The kernel he wrote would be called Linux.
Curiously, Linus also happened to have had the good fortune of attending a lecture delivered by the prophet himself. You see, by then Stallman's crusade had gone global, and he was giving lectures around the world, preaching from the pulpit and delivering sermons on the free software movement. To him, the philosophy behind the movement was a matter of moral imperative.
But Linus didn't seem to care much about the philosophy. Instead, what was instinctively obvious to him were the potential practical advantages of an unrestricted community-driven model of software development. Consequently, Linus decided to release Linux under the GNU GPL license. He would later go on to share exactly why: "My reasons for putting Linux out there were pretty selfish," he said. "I didn’t want the headache of dealing with parts of the operating system that I saw as the less interesting work. I wanted help."4
By the fall of 1992, which was just over a year later, there were thousands of collaborators contributing to the original source code. In fact, back in 1991 when Linus shared his kernel with the world, the original source code consisted of only around 10 thousand lines. Fast forward to 2021, and the Linux Git repository had amassed over 27 million lines of code.5
Today, it's impossible to imagine our digital world without Linux. All of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world run on Linux.6 Additionally, majority of the world’s top one million servers also operate on Linux. Furthermore, Linux powers 90% of all cloud infrastructure, and it is used by 85% of the world's smartphones.
These numbers are nothing short of staggering and loudly attest to the resounding success of this community-driven model of software development. However, by the 1990s, one of the movement's most ardent supporters, who championed a strict adherence to its philosophy, left many feeling drained. Not everyone embraced the notion of completely excluding businesses from participating in this revolution. While Stallman was an idealist, Torvalds wasn't; nor were many others. In fact, the Linux kernel that Torvalds eventually distributed included elements of proprietary features. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation addressed this by releasing a version that was entirely non-proprietary. But tensions persisted. Stallman's unwavering insistence on treating the movement as a moral imperative proved to be too much for many.
Thus, by 1998, there was room for a movement that wasn't overly preoccupied with philosophy, one where licenses were less restrictive. This was a movement in which businesses could also reap the benefits of this remarkably efficient model of collaboration and development. As a result, the open-source movement officially materialized in February 1998, with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) leading the way. This organization's formation was driven by the goal of enhancing software's suitability for commercial business use too.
Today every single piece of ‘free’ software is open source, but the reverse is not necessarily true.
It takes all kinds of kinds. Let me elaborate. It's easy to see why in a world profoundly shaped by the likes of Gates and Jobs, Stallman was an oddity – as was Torvalds. Together, they represented a continuum where software now had these multiple models of development. On one end of the spectrum, if Gates and Jobs stood for greed, on the other end was Stallman's pathological altruism, and somewhere in between was the Open-Source Initiative. To sum it up, as Walter Isaacson eloquently put it in his book "The Innovators," "Each model has its advantages, each has its incentives for creativity, and each has its prophets and disciples." The best part is that they all coexist, "providing a check against any one model becoming so dominant that it stifled innovation."