Free as in Freedom | Page 8

is Richard M. Stallman, founder of
the GNU Project, original president of the Free Software Foundation, winner of the 1990
MacArthur Fellowship, winner of the Association of Computing Machinery's Grace
Murray Hopper Award (also in 1990), corecipient of the Takeda Foundation's 2001
Takeda Award, and former AI Lab hacker. As announced over a host of hacker-related
web sites, including the GNU Project's own http://www.gnu.org site, Stallman is in
Manhattan, his former hometown, to deliver a much anticipated speech in rebuttal to the
Microsoft Corporation's recent campaign against the GNU General Public License.
The subject of Stallman's speech is the history and future of the free software movement.
The location is significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior vice president
Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU Stern School of Business, delivering a speech

blasting the General Public License, or GPL, a legal device originally conceived by
Stallman 16 years before. Built to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy
overtaking the computer industry-a wave first noticed by Stallman during his 1980
troubles with the Xerox laser printer-the GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free
software community. In simplest terms, the GPL locks software programs into a form of
communal ownership-what today's legal scholars now call the "digital
commons"-through the legal weight of copyright. Once locked, programs remain
unremovable. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright protection-even
derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of the original source code. For this
reason, some within the software industry have taken to calling the GPL a "viral" license,
because it spreads itself to every software program it touches. Actually, the GPL's powers
are not quite that potent. According to section 10 of the GNU General Public License,
Version 2 (1991), the viral nature of the license depends heavily on the Free Software
Foundation's willingness to view a program as a derivative work, not to mention the
existing license the GPL would replace.
If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose
distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For
software that is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software
Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the
two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of
promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.
"To compare something to a virus is very harsh," says Stallman. "A spider plant is a more
accurate comparison; it goes to another place if you actively take a cutting."
For more information on the GNU General Public License, visit
[http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.]
In an information economy increasingly dependent on software and increasingly
beholden to software standards, the GPL has become the proverbial "big stick." Even
companies that once laughed it off as software socialism have come around to recognize
the benefits. Linux, the Unix-like kernel developed by Finnish college student Linus
Torvalds in 1991, is licensed under the GPL, as are many of the world's most popular
programming tools: GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger, the GNU C Compiler, etc.
Together, these tools form the components of a free software operating system developed,
nurtured, and owned by the worldwide hacker community. Instead of viewing this
community as a threat, high-tech companies like IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Sun
Microsystems have come to rely upon it, selling software applications and services built
to ride atop the ever-growing free software infrastructure.
They've also come to rely upon it as a strategic weapon in the hacker community's
perennial war against Microsoft, the Redmond, Washington-based company that, for
better or worse, has dominated the PC-software marketplace since the late 1980s. As
owner of the popular Windows operating system, Microsoft stands to lose the most in an
industry-wide shift to the GPL license. Almost every line of source code in the Windows
colossus is protected by copyrights reaffirming the private nature of the underlying
source code or, at the very least, reaffirming Microsoft's legal ability to treat it as such.
From the Microsoft viewpoint, incorporating programs protected by the "viral" GPL into
the Windows colossus would be the software equivalent of Superman downing a bottle of
Kryptonite pills. Rival companies could suddenly copy, modify, and sell improved

versions of Windows, rendering the company's indomitable position as the No. 1 provider
of consumer-oriented software instantly vulnerable. Hence the company's growing
concern over the GPL's rate of adoption. Hence the recent Mundie speech blasting the
GPL and the " open source" approach to software development and sales. And hence
Stallman's decision to deliver a public rebuttal to that speech on the same campus here
today.
20 years is a long time in the software industry. Consider this: in 1980, when Richard
Stallman was cursing the AI Lab's Xerox laser