David A. Harding
Sunday, 16 Sep 2007
I celebrated Software Freedom Day this year by giving a speech about the history, features, and costs of software freedom to an audience of about 70 people at the Philadelphia Area Computer Society (PACS). The event was co-sponsored by the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Ubuntu Local Communities. Below you will find audio recordings and a transcript of the speech; and at the very end of this article, you will find my acknowledgements.
Audio
The speech is a
44 minute long and 12 MiB Ogg Vorbis file.
The question and
answer session is a 21 minute long and 5.6 MiB Ogg Vorbis file.
Transcript
[Speech lightly edited; time codes corresponding to above Ogg Vorbis
file follow each paragraph]
Note: I will attempt to transcribe about five minutes of audio each day into this blog entry until everything, including all of the questions, are transcribed. The process should take about two weeks. Please find the first ten minutes below.
Ron Homer, President of PACS:
I want to introduce Dave Harding with [gnuisance.net] to talk about
software freedom day and free software and all that fun stuff.
{00:12}
Before [Harding gets] started: after the main meeting, in the cafeteria, you'll get a copy of the free software that we're promoting today. {00:25}
Dave Harding, keynote speaker:
He just stole my entire speech! [Audience laughter] {00:27}
``First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.'' Those are the words Mahatma Gandi used to describe the states of resistance to non-violent movements for change. {00:47}
This afternoon, I'd like to introduce you to one of those movements: the free software movement. The free in free software stands for freedom; it's the same free as in the terms free speech or free market. {01:00}
I'm pleased to tell you that the enemies of free software are very clearly fighting us, placing us only one step away from victory according to Gandi. But the enemies of free software have also ignored us and they've laughed us, and I want to start my speech by telling you about how we overcame those challenges. {01:20}
After you hear the history of the free software movement, you may want to join us, or you may just want to use the tools we created in order to create freedom for ourselves. Either way, I will tell you to what it means to join the free software community and I will do it as fairly as possible: I will tell you about the good parts and I will conclude my speech by telling you about the not-so-good parts. {01:40}
So now let's start with the history of the free software movement, which begins during the heyday of the microcomputer revolution. {01:50}
In 1975, the Altair went on sale. The Altair was an early microcomputer produced by a company called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems [MITS]; it was named after the original destination of the Enterprise in the classic Star Trek episode Amok Time. The Altair was a kit: you bought it and you assembled it yourself, and after you assembled it, there wasn't much you could do with it because the only way to program the Altair was to flip a set of switches on the front of it and program in machine language op-codes. {02:26}
A teenage entrepreneur saw that as an opportunity: he contacted MITS and he offered to provide them with an interpreter for the BASIC programing language. The BASIC programing language would let people program their Altair in something resembling English. That young entrepreneur, Mr. [Bill] Gates, got his deal with MITS, and MITS contacted all of their customers and said, ``we will soon be able to sell to you a copy the interpreter for the BASIC programing language'' -- which they called Altair BASIC. {03:07}
But [MITS] didn't get around to selling Altair BASIC right away; they kept telling their customers it would happen, but it never did -- something like a lot of other Microsoft products in that regard. {03:16}
But the hobbyists, the people who wanted a copy of Altair BASIC so they could use the Altair computer they had bought, became frustrated. And one of them managed to surreptitiously acquire a pre-release version of Altair BASIC. He made 25 copies of it, and he brought it to the next general meeting of the Silicon Valley Homebrew Computer Club, a group like your own, and he gave away all 25 copies--for a promise: if you took a copy of Altair BASIC, you had to come back to the next meeting with two more copies you had to share with other people. {03:55}
Soon everybody in the Homebrew Computer Club who wanted a copy of Altair BASIC, had a copy, and Mr. Gates, who was supposed to receive part of the sales revenue for every copy of Altair BASIC sold, was quite upset. He wrote a letter to the members of the Homebrew Computer Club, which was published in the next newsletter; the letter was entitled An Open Letter to Hobbyists, and in the letter, Mr. Gates called the hobbyists thieves. And he said that they shouldn't expect anyone to write software for them if they were going to continue to share software among themselves. Except he didn't use the word share, he used the word steal. {04:34}
Mr. Gate's words, and the actions of the members of the homebrew computer club, are indicative of the status of the computer industry in 1976, when he wrote his letter (and when I hear your club was found). {04:47}
The people who were a part of the homebrew computer club, were used to the computer industry and apart of a community. And they shared: all communities are based upon sharing, whether its the sharing of information or its the sharing of the tools which that community depends upon. {05:03}
Sharing had never before been a serious problem in the computer industry. During the 1950s and the 1960s, computers costs hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, and the people who bought computers expected to receive the rights to use the programs on those computers and expected to receive the source code for the programs on those computers. They needed the source code to improve the programs. So everyone had the source code in the fifties and the sixties. {05:30}
During the 1970s, and the short-lived days of the minicomputer, people shared source code often -- some of the people in this room probably shared source code through groups like the DEC User Society (DECUS). {05:42}
So the hobbyists of the homebrew computer club were used to sharing. They had been exposed to it through their college days or through their work where they worked with computers. {05:53}
On the other hand, Mr. Gates saw a business opportunity: as the number of computers went from a few thousand in the seventies to a few million in the eighties, Mr. Gates saw an opportunity to sell software. If each person who owned a computer bought one copy of software, there would be an opportunity to make a lot of money. {06:14}
But there was a problem in Mr. Gates's plan, and the problem was illustrated by the actions of the members homebrew computer club. The problem was that people who are a part of a community will share with each other. And when they're sharing a program, you're not making any money. {06:28}
Mr. Gates needed to alienate users from each other -- he needed to make them not be part of a community so that they wouldn't share And ironically, it was the invention of a member of the homebrew computer club, one of the people who could've shared Altair BASIC, that allowed Mr. Gates to alienate users from each other. {06:49}
That member of the Homebrew Computer Club was brilliant engineer Steve Wozniak, and his invention was the Apple. The first Apple was a kit, somewhat like the Altair, but the second Apple was a complete pre-assembled computer that you could buy, plug into the wall, plug into a monitor, press the power-on button, and expect it to work. {07:09}
The Apple II was targeted towards hobbyists, but hobbyists didn't buy it -- not very many of them at least. The problem was that hobbyists were quite content buying kits, going down into the basements where they could hide from their wives and their chores and assemble the computer in bliss. So the Apple computer didn't sell very well. {07:32}
What changed Apple's fortunes was the invention of a Harvard Business School undergraduate, and his invention was VisiCalc: the first spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was immediately deemed a business necessity, and 700,000 copies of VisiCalc were sold within its first few years. But VisiCalc only ran on one computing platform initially: the Apple II. So every new sale of VisiCalc was accompanied by a new sale of an Apple II computer. {07:58}
IBM executives, watching the sales figures for Apple, became quite interested in joining this microcomputer market, and they rushed to market their own microcomputer, the personal computer [(the PC)]. {08:12}
Built upon a mostly-open hardware platform, the ROMs for the IBM were soon cloned, allowing a commodity PC market to begin. As the people who were building PC-compatible computers didn't really innovate, at least initially, we had a deluge of very similar computers, and with all of these similar computers, there was only one thing they could compete upon: price. {08:42}
As the prices of PCs dropped precipitously, more and more people (like the people in this room), were able to buy their first computers. They all had the opportunity to come out and join user communities -- like PACS -- but a lot of them didn't. And they accepted for themselves self- imposed isolation from their fellow users. Because they weren't part of the community, they didn't care about sharing, and Mr. Gates found it quite easy to alienate them from each other -- to tell them that the price of getting software was that they couldn't share with each other. {09:13}
Mr. Gates used his business model to build the multi-billion dollar empire we're all familiar with today. {09:25}
Now before the microcomputer revolution, one of the most innovative computer research labs was the Massachutes Institute of Technology's Articifical Intellegence lab. The artifical intellegence lab was staffed by many of the original hackers -- hackers, being in this case, a term of great respect for someone's programing skills.
The hackers of the artificial intellegence lab did most of their programing in the lisp programing language. Lisp was a programing language ideally suited to solving artificial intellengence problems, but it also had a certain elegence, a certain grace.
The hackers at the articifical intellegence lab fell in love with lisp. They began writing programs in lisp that were unrelated to their work in artificial intellegence. One of the things they wrote was an entire operating system: written in lisp, configured through lisp, and completely based upon list. The problem was that, when they wrote this in the early seventies, there were no computers in the world powerful enough to effectively run the lisp operating sytem.
So they wrote it out on magnetic tape, and put it on the shelf, and they almost forgot about it. Until the late seventies and the early eighties when computing processor power had increased to the point when it became feasable that people could build a computer to run the lisp operating system.
Hackers began to leave the artificial intellegence lab to form companies, two comanies in particular, to build the computer to run the lisp operating system. They were very excited about it.
One of these companies was called Symbolics. Symbolics licensed a copy of the lisp operating system code from MIT and they began improving it. But they didn't give their improvements back to MIT. And the last systems programer at MIT's artificial intellence lab was quite upset about this. He had spent his own time adding features to it, working on it, and he wasn't able to see the improvements, he wasn't able to learn from them, and he wasn't able to improve the improvements himself. He saw this as a violation of his rights.
He spent about a year fighting back against Symbolics, but after a year he decided he was working on a small piece of a bigger puzzles. And he quit his job at MIT to start writing a new operating system. An operating system that would give every user of that operating system the rights to learn from the computer programs, to learn from the operating system, and to improve it.
The new operating system he decided to write was based upon an old operating system. That old operating system was called Unix. Its pronouced the same way you pronouce the word for a castrated man, but its spelled different; its spelled U-N-I-X.
And Unix was a commercial operating system from the AT&T compnay. It had some enviable features which Mr. Stallman wanted to add to his new operating system.
His new operating system was called GNU. Its spelled G-N-U. Its an acronym; its a particular type of acronymn called a recursive acronymn. It stands for Gnu is Not Unix.
[Transcription to be continued tomorrow with the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and the beginning of Richard Stallman's free software quest...]
Acknowledgements
I thank the members of CHLUG, RUSLUG, and LUG/IP for letting me practise
trial versions of this speech on them. In particular, I am deeply
indebted to comments from Bryan Quigley, Daniel Zuckerman, Sakuramboo,
and Chris Leyon. I thank Joe Terranova for driving me to the speech.
I especially thank Jim Fisher and the Pennsylvania Ubuntu Local
Community for inviting me and the Philadelphia Area Computer Society
(PACS) for hosting us all.