By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco forThe
Register.
This article has been reproduced with permission.
"I literally feel," wrote Torvalds, "that we do not, as software
developers, have the moral right to enforce our rules on hardware
manufacturers. We are not crusaders, trying to force people to bow
to our superior God."
Since the crusades were a foreign adventure responsible for the
deaths of tens of thousands, that's not the most diplomatic
response, and FSF counsel Eben Moglen refused to be drawn into
retaliation when we contacted him for comment.
Moglen did say that as part of the lengthy, worldwide
consultation process for GPL v3.0 he'd be issuing further
clarification on the two most controversial parts of the new
license, Sections three and seven. We'll examine the particulars in
a moment.
But stressing that he was speaking in general terms, Moglen told
us this –
"Freedom is not about what works well. It's about what defends
freedom when it can be given an intellectually rigorous and
internally rigorous conception. We want to have a conversation on
whether we are drafting it in a way to achieve this," he said.
"The question presented by DRM is not whether it can have good
purposes, or whether it serves socially useful ends sometimes. It's
whether user disempowerment at a time when technology is
moving to embrace the users' whole life is a risk we can run
to gain some particular benefit."
Don't let the means dictate the ends, he seems to be saying.
Torvalds' remarks have uncomfortable echoes of last year's
BitKeeper episode, when Torvalds dimissed the concerns of his
kernel developers and mocked the ethical dimension of software
development.
But if Linux isn't about ethics, then what is its
purpose? And if open source simply means 'free' (as in beer) code
at the end of the day, and it's not about changing the world, then
why is it different to a BSD?
Let's examine how we got here.
How GPL got Linux out of the lab
The Linux kernel which Torvalds controls (Torvalds also owns the
Linux trademark) is the best known and most popular piece of
software libre in the world, and owes its popularity and respect in
no small part to the freedoms guaranteed by the FSF General Public
License. This license gives the recipient the right to modify and
distribute the code, but more importantly, ensures a downstream
recipient fulfills the same obligations.
The FSF doesn't update this GPL very often. It last did so with
version 2.0 in 1991, with a minor addendum (the LGPL) appearing a
few years later, and version 3.0 has been racing our way with all
the speed of a continental plate stuck in a tectonic traffic jam
for several years now. Its ratification looks some way away too. As
it turns out, this is quite deliberate, as Linux is big business
now, and the FSF is engaging on a massive consensus building
project to make sure everyone's on board.
The FSF also has an additional issue to deal with that it didn't
have in 1991, which is that the words "free" and "open" are today
often used as broad-brush term, with the implication that they're
synonymous and interchangeable. They're not, but when Linux looked
set to conquer all before it, and was finding its way into computer
systems ranging from phones to mainframes, and world domination was
only a matter of time, the difference could be blamed on semantic
nit-picking. Didn't open and freedom just mean the same thing?
Something else happened, too. The phrase "open source" became an
invitation for any opportunistic wanker to hitch a free ride,
hoping some of this magic would rub off, and turn into a lucrative
pay day.
We saw the influential, Blair-ite think tank Demos team up with
Douglas Rushkoff to suggest "open source democracy", which amounted
to little more than a catchphrase. A rag bag, free-for-all trivia
website morphed into "Wikipedia", which laid claim to be the
world's greatest encyclopedia (that's turning out to be exactly
what you'd expect it to be). Some sophists claim to have created
"open source" cookies
the baked, not coded kind. And even the GPL has been disastrously
misapplied, to things that can be, but primarily don't need to
be "modified" to be successful, such as works of art.
But while all this opportunism and sloppy thinking took place in
public, the gears were slowing. Something was halting the momentum
of this great project.
Microsoft began to apply its deep pockets to buy off litigious
rivals. And nervous corporate and public sector customers, who'd
been looking at Linux with great interest, began to waver. Maybe
they got nervous about the fall-out from the SCO suit. Maybe Linux
advocates failed to prove the total cost of ownership case, which
had looked a slam dunk at one time. Maybe the notorious
factionalism of the technical community (eg GNOME vs KDE) proved to
be a turn off. Maybe Linux, and software libre, failed to
generate big ideas of its own. Big ideas, even if they're nebulous
and entirely without substance and Web 2.0 is a great
example of a load of nothing going nowhere, as you so eloquently
point out seem to be necessary to attract the glaze-eyed
attention of the corporate media, if only for a few weeks. Or maybe
too many nutballs climbed on board, hoping to catch a bit of the
"New Open Thing".
We don't know, but in the end it wasn't Microsoft that fomented
today's dispute about GPL 3.0, but of all things, a small consumer
electronics company.
Enter TiVo
The GPL always distinguished itself from other licenses by
stressing a peculiar symmetry: the freedom to modify or distribute
the source code would be passed to the end user in the form the
upstream benefactor had intended. A perpetuity of sorts was
established. You didn't have to tinker, but if you did, and made
your tinkering available, you'd have to obey the terms on which you
received the code.
This distinguished the GPL from BSD-style licensees, which were
"open" in the sense you could look at the code, and "free" in the
sense you didn't pay for it, but weren't, as in the now famous
phrase, "free as freedom". And then a product was introduced that
broke this social contract, while obeying the letter of the GPL
version 2.0. This was TiVo.
When TiVo introduced its PVR time-shifting set top box, it did
so using a Linux PC with a proprietary front-end. You could only
tinker on the terms set by TiVo. This didn't deter a wave of
enthusiasts, a small portion of the technical community (we'll
unfairly, for convenience, call them the "O'Reilly crowd") who
latch onto anything that demands your attention because it's
"hackable", without quite seeing whether there are strings attached
or where these strings might lead.
Linus Torvalds professed himself delighted, and naturally he's
proud to see his kernel instantiated into real products. As you'd
expect, he feels it's a validation of his adult life's work.
But GPL supporters who flocked to the cause because of "freedom"
don't quite see it this way. What's the point of GPL, if it only
turns out to be a rebranding of BSD? A sort of BSD with added, 21st
century street cred? And a fat, drunken-looking Penguin as its
mascot?
And doubly painfully, what's the point of a GPL product that
ushers in a world of artificial technical restrictions on copyright
material, DRM?
Linus actually had something to say on this, but we need to dive
into the psychodrama that is Modern Copyright Discourse first,
before we can understand why this debate looks so peculiarly lopsy,
and so very heated.
Will the Matrix kill free software?
There are two sides to this argument, which we'll call "free"
and "open", and both have good claims to make. But both sides like
to throw off wild, metaphorical flares that light up the news
pages, but are of no use to anyone. Let's separate the flames and
see what lies behind their rationale.
If what I'm told by the GPL 3.0 advocates is true, then the
world is about to end fairly shortly.
One proponent told me that the difference between now, 2006, and
2009, is that the value of your home in 2009 will be determined by
the "freedom" your gadgets exhibit. This is a startling idea, one
I'm sure today's real estate agents haven't yet pencilled in as a
pre-printed tick-box on their forms. I'm paraphrasing, but the
argument is that if the property owner didn't have "control" over
all the technology in their home, then the home would have no
value, or a lesser value than a comparable home on offer.
"I don't want to use the phrase 'Matrix'," said one, who went on
to use the phrase Martrix by saying, fairly emphatically,
"it would be like living in the Matrix".
Utter nonsense, of course.
Your average property owner wants to get home, flick a switch,
and find that "stuff" comes out the stuff being, for
example, light, heat or cooling if (s)he flicks a switch, or
entertainment if (s)he flicks on the remote. Homes that don't
fulfill these basic obligations have a tendancy not to get
sold they're probably car parks. In fact, you'd have to
coral prospective home buyers in at gunpoint, and keep them there,
to accept such a lousy proposition.
But Torvalds' solution is equally obtuse.
Faced with the moral problems posed by DRM, Torvalds opts for
the 'stuckist' approach, of splendid isolation. Meaning he'd never
watch The Sopranos, or anything worth watching except for a giggle,
ever again.
Torvalds tells dissenters to go and build their own chips.
"Vote with your feet," he urges. "Join the OpenCores groups.
Make your own FPGA's."
I'm right behind you with my soldering iron, Mr Torvalds.
Then he added the now notorious sign-off about the crusades.
" ... we do not have the
moral right to enforce our rules on hardware
manufacturers. We are not crusaders, trying to
force people to bow to our superior God."
[Emphasis added, but hardly necessary].
As you can imagine, this accusation of moral laxity aimed at the
developers who actually do the work on the Linux kernel, and many
other projects across GPL land, has not been well received.
What appears to be moral, in Torvalds' own book, appears to be
contingent on whatever Torvalds is feeling that day, and that's
contingent on the market penetration of his kernel. Issues of
morality are best left to genocidal "crusaders", who Torvalds feels
are someone else entirely.
But if software libre isn't a moral crusade, what the heck is
it? A 30 year old operating system, passing off as new one? A
lifetime of dependency conflicts? A charity? The public can be
cruel, and horribly judgmental, when it flicks the switch, and
"stuff" doesn't come out. Torvalds may not imply that morality has
no place in the Linux kernel, but the invitation to infer this
doesn't really need our bold HTML markup. It's obvious.
A Linux without a moral element is a puzzling thing indeed. How
would you or I begin to explain its value. Without "freedom" all
one is left with is "free".
I don't think many Linux advocates would settle for this as the
last line of defence. But in a swoop, Torvalds appears to have
deprived "open source" advocates of arguing from a moral
position.
Perhaps, by the time the long consultation process for GPL 3.0
reaches a conclusion, it will be clear that the word "open" was
never really a substitute for "free". Until then, there's trouble
ahead.
© The Register
2006
