THE WORLD OF FREE SOFTWARE
Introduction
Present
Future

Topics on this page - (quick links)
Brooks Law
Open Letter to Hobbyists
Gnu Project
World Wide Web
Linux
Open Source

Topics on other pages - (quick links)
Mark Preston's homepage

HISTORY OF SOFTWARE
To examine the reasons for the prevalence of "closed source" software it is necessary to do a whisltle stop tour of the history behind the Personal Computer and computing in general. I'm not going to dwell on Joseph-Marie Jacquard , Charles Babbage , Herman Hollerith or Alan Turing. Computer coding is basically using a series of 0s and 1s to instruct the hardware to co something. In the early days the 0s and 1s were input directly into the machine. Then primitive languages were developed to make the job of programming easier. One such language was Assembly. Later, as these languages developed so called compilers were used to change the language used by the programmer into an intermediate code that could be used by the computer machine. This was called an executable file and contained the machine code. This meant that people could be given the machine code to run the program without having the source code.
DEMONSTRATION
Source code file --> compiled --> executable file -->run program

One of the most famous books about software development was written in 1974 by Fred Brooks entitled The Mythical Man Month. As a manager of IBM he oversaw the development of the OS/360 from 1961 to 1964. This was a software project that ran late and took over 5000 man years to complete. It was Brooks who specified that a byte would consist of 8 bits. This book is somewhat similar to Black's book on cavity design for dentists in that it is regarded as a classic. From Black we get "extension for prevention". From Brooks computer programmers get "Brooks Law" - adding computer programmers late to a late large software project makes it later. The complexity (vulnerability to bugs) and communication costs of a project rise linearly with the square of the number of developers, while the work done rises linearly. This was widely believed to be true, and tended to mean that most software companies had a small number of highly talented programmers running their projects.

In 1976 Bill Gates published what he called an Open letter to Hobbyists. He addressed the users of the first personal computer the MITS Altair. Together with the co-founder Paul Allen of Micro-soft (the hyphen was later dropped) he had written a version of BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Simple Instruction Code) that would run on this machine. In the letter he condemned the practice of making illegal copies of the program. "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?" He went on to say that this is preventing good software from being written. "Who can do professional work for nothing?" What hobbyist can put in three man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his project and give it away for free?"
At the time this line of reasoning must have seemed unanswerable. The Altair PC which forms the basis of the home PC of today had just been built and the market was about to expand. Bill Gates and his company Microsoft set about providing reliable, well supported software.

Against this backdrop in the late 1970s most software went "closed source" - the source codes became hidden from most users. In 1979 version 7 of Unix went closed source. This represented the end of the road for what had been the ultimate student hackers system (written originally by Ken Thompson in 1969 in what has been described as the "true mythical man month", when his wife and daughter travelled across America to see relatives and he stayed at home). You can see from the above it was thought that you don't need to give access to the source code to large numbers of people to produce good software. Far better to have a small dedicated team.
The basic model for closed source software is one where the users report bugs/problems to the company/programmers, who correct the problems and issue updates in a compiled form often called a binary or an executable. This is the machine code required by the computer, but unintelligible as far as humans are concerned.
The business model is basically:-
Sell executable --> get feedback from users --> debugging + enhancements made by programming team --> make upgrade --> sell new executable etc...
In this way companies could produce so called killer applications - software that killed off all competition to occupy a role which could be highly profitable. Examples include Oracle database software, Novell networking software, Apple Macs for GUIs, and of course DOS and Windows. These "cash cows" would enable financing of further projects and "locking in" of users to virtually guarantee further income streams.

Not everybody in computing were happy about this change from the hacker tradition of sharing software, although most talented programmers consoled themselves that they had highly paid jobs as a result producing "proprietary" or closed source software as a result. One person who was very unhappy about the move to closed source programs was Richard Stallman. He thought this was immoral and disgusting and he decided to dedicate his life to producing a free unix like operating system so that people could "get along" without having to rely on closed source software. In 1984 he resigned from his job at Harvard's highly respected AI (Artificial Intelligence) Lab and started his GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) project. Another man called Andy Tanenbaum Professor at Free University of Amsterdam decided to write his own operating system that would be system call compatible with unix. He wanted it to be all his own code and to use it for teaching his students. From 1979 to 1984 he had stopped teaching practical Unix and just taught theory. He called his project Minix, and it was his "hobby". He started writing the code in 1984. In 1987 Tanenbaum released his code to the world and started a usenet newsgroup. He also sold Minix on floppy discs and a book. This proved very popular.
By 1991 Stallman and his Free Software Foundation had produced a fairly complete free set of Unix tools as free software. But the development of their kernel called HURD was causing problems, and the commercial Unix suppliers were failing. Unix's promise of cross platform portability was being lost by bickering amongst half a dozen or so proprietary versions. This enabled Microsoft to grab a large portion of their market with their Windows operating system. The demise of Unix ten years after it went closed-source was widely predicted at this time, and for the next few years Microsoft did indeed go from strength to strength. It seemed the software industry would become increasingly dominated by closed-source colossi like Microsoft. However two things that went unnoticed by virtually everybody involved in computing occurred in October 1991 that were to have major ramifications just a few years later.
Tim Berners-Lee began a mailing list called WWW-Talk for those interested in the World Wide Web which he had just released to the public. He had written a line browser capable of displaying lines of text along with hypertext links. In November 1991 he wrote:-


"The concept of the web is of universal readership. If you publish a document 
on the web it is important that anyone who has access to it can read it."

He decided to release his WWW code and technology into the public domain to ensure maximum deployment. i.e. no copyright restrictions at all.
The second thing that happened in October 1991 was that a young computer student from Finland put out the source code for his free fledgling operating system based on Minix. This was available for free via FTP download over the internet. Originally unlike the GNU GPL "Linux" as this OS became known was free and people could not even charge for redistribution handling costs. The license was soon changed to the GPL in what the creator Linus Torvalds would later call "a really smart move".
The simple nature of the World Wide Web and it's HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) would over the next few years transform the internet into a mass medium. Linux was not without competitors. The freeBSD (Berkeley Systems Design) version of Unix that appeared for the 386 following work done by William and Lynn Jolitz was regarded as superior at the time. However, Torvalds "hobby" differed in that he was actively taking submissions from anybody and everybody over the internet rather than relying on a close-knit group. The BSD based versions had TCP/IP support, but Linux could be run on the same hard disk as Windows. Alan Cox , probably Britain's leading Linux hacker gives an insight into the early days. He would go to the university armed with about 40 floppy disks and using the good internet connection at the university download Linux, then take the floppy disks home to install them on his home PC alongside Windows. "I didn't have Minix because that was Ł100, and 386BSD would not share a hard disk with DOS or Windows." The popularity of the World Wide Web soon became apparent, but by the end of 1992 Berners-Lee became concerned about the HTML standards fragmenting. He wrote on WWW-Talk


    If you are thinking of a smart extra to EITHER HTTP or HTML then 
    please define it and discuss it here on www-talk. Don't try just 
    to get it out before the next guy. He is probably doing it too, a
    different way, and these are all exciting ideas which benefit from 
    being hacked around the net.

However things came to a head the following year when Marc Andreessen, a college student, added an image tag (IMG). This was included in the very successful Mosaic web browser from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Andressen went on to establish the Netscape web browser. Browser wars had just begun. Netscape Navigator took the browser market by storm early in 1995. Microsoft was preparing for the launch of it's proprietary Microsoft Network (MSN), and was still dismissing the internet as too difficult to use and only of interest to academics.
Bill Gates' 1995 visionary tome The Road Ahead, failed to mention the Internet.
Even on August 25th 1995, the launch of Windows 95 Internet Explorer 1 was only available on the Windows Plus CDRom which was sold separately. The code came from the NCSA, and was issued under license from a company called Spyglass another company set up by Andreessen, amongst others. However by the end of 1995 in his Pearl Harbor day speech (7th December) Bill Gates placed the internet and Internet Explorer at the heart of Microsoft's future plans. Microsoft's huge resources were concentrated into making Internet Explorer the number one browser. By giving it away for free (but not the source code), they gradually increased their market share. Each company would try to outdo the other by adding new software features. The main casualty was lack of standards. By the end of 1997 Netscape was losing out, and the success of Internet Explorer would enable Microsoft to exploit the commercial possibilities of the internet.
However Microsoft's attempts to dominate the internet were less successful in other areas. Notably open-source Apache servers dominated the servers market compared with Microsoft's Internet Information Server. The open source computer programming language Perl (Practical Extraction and Replacement Language), introduced by Larry Wall, became a massive server side scripting language favourite. JavaScript, a computer language based on C, introduced by Netscape, and used to add interactivity an dynamic effects to websites has become the de facto standard client side language. This is in preference to Microsoft's JScript or VBScript offerings. JavaScript was introduced in December 1995 by Netscape Communications and is now owned by Sun Microsystems, who also own the much larger Java language pioneered by James Gosling. JavaScript standards are now set by a vendor neutral body based in Switzerland called the ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association). That is why it is now called ECMAScript sometimes.
Why is the browser so important?
Well the answer lies in the fact that the computer desktop and computer browser will eventually over the next few years become more or less the same thing. Therefore whoever controls the browser market will effectively control the desktop market. Despite the best efforts of people like Tim Berners-Lee to encourage universal standards, commercial companies like to exploit any advantage they have by tweaking their systems to make life awkward for rivals. It is interesting to note that when Netscape Navigator was the premier browser that Microsoft worked very closely with the W3 Consortium to stick to their standards. Netscape meanwhile did not, and now the tables have turned it is Microsoft who can now influence standards, but arguably it is the Mozilla open-source browser that adheres closest to standards set by W3 now. Eventually the browser could also replace the operating system on many computers.
Quote


      Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a
      Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web...
         -- Tim Berners-Lee

The point about browsers, which are software programs designed to view web pages, is that they all render pages differently.
OPEN SOURCE
The success of the World Wide Web and GNU/Linux lead to many people becoming interested in free software. To commercial companies the phrase free software seemed threatening. To make the software more appealing to these companies a sort of rebranding exercise occurred. "Open Source" was the phrase used. This term was suggested by Christine Peterson at a meeting of free software enthusiasts on 7th April 1998. Those present at the meeting included Eric Raymond and Tim O'Reilly. Richard Stallman was significantly not invited to this meeting. It is now apparent that his "fundamentalist" views were not welcomed by all those at the meeting. The "Open-Source" movement differs from the "Free Software" movement in that it views the release of source code as a practical benefit for debugging and improving software, rather than as a social or ethical issue. It also has few worries about adding proprietary add-ons which are not free or "open-source". In the eyes of some the "open source" movement allows more freedom because it allows software writers to decide what license they release any software. However this is not a view shared by Richard Stallman. "The open source movement is Eric Raymond's attempt to redirect the free software movement away from a focus on freedom".
Now, as other commercial operating systems flounder, for example BeOS. Bill Gates and his Microsoft empire look set to be challenged by the very things he claimed could never happen - that people could write and document reliable software without being paid for it. In fact the GNU/Linux operating system is remarkably stable precisely because of the "peer review" that access to the source codes allows.
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