Slashdot Mirror

In the last week I have read (literally) over 1000 online attacks aimed at an alleged attempt by Unisys to make everyone who uses GIFs on a Web site pay $5000 in royalties. A story posted here on Slashdot Sunday helped fan those flames. But nowhere, in any of the many "Unisys is evil" posts I read, here or elsewhere, did I see a single official statement from anyone at Unisys, so I decided to call Unisys and get their take on the matter. (More below)

The Real Unisys GIF Deal
According to Mark Starr, General Patent and Technology Counsel for Unisys, if the GIFs on your Web site were created with software that is licensed by Unisys, you are fine. Nobody at Unisys is going to try to get $5000 or even $0.50 out of you. Period.

And, Starr added, virtually all of the major, heavily-used, commercial graphics programs from what he calls "reputable companies" (e.g. Adobe, Corel, JASC, Macromedia, Microsoft, AOL/Netscape, etc.) are licensed by Unisys. He said that even the "included" software packaged with most scanners and digital cameras is licensed. Use it, create all the GIFs you want with it, post those GIFs to your heart's content, and relax. Unisys will not come after you.

But...
And it's a big but, too. If you use GIF graphics created with certain freeware programs, and your chosen program uses LZW compression to create GIFs without a license to use it, you may be violating a Unisys patent. How would Unisys know what software you used to create a particular GIF? Starr says they'll ask you, and, he says, "...assuming we made an inquiry, we would expect a Web site operator to tell us what he used." I did not ask, "What if someone creates a GIF using licensed software that came with a scanner, then modifies that image with the GIMP or another freeware program?" I really didn't want to know the answer to this question; all of my GIFs have passed through at least one Unisys-licensed program at some point, so if I am asked I can honestly say that they were created (at least partially) in accordance with the Unisys patent.

I specifically asked Starr about the GIMP. He had not heard of it, but said, "We give hundreds of licenses away to non-commercial, non-profit entities. We do not give our technology away to for-profit entities." The rub here is that if you use the GIMP - which was created by a non-profit group - to create GIF graphics for a non-commercial site, you're probably fine, but if you use it to create GIF graphics for a Web site that is intended to make a profit, Unisys wants a cut of the action. How much? E-mail them and ask. And if you want to write a program that incorporates LZW compression technology in its code base, you'd better ask, because you'll be in trouble if you don't - and you may be in trouble even if you do, according to these folks, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish we won't get into today.

Do not expect Unisys to release LZW technology under the GPL anytime soon. Unisys is not a free software booster. Starr said, "We do not use freeware in our own products as a matter of policy. It could violate someone's license, it could be trash. Anyone who uses freeware does so at their own risk."

Starr also said, "We have thought of a [GIF patent] giveway, but it's not in the best interests of our shareholders..." He does not believe the potential PR value involved in giving LZW technology away is worth much, either. He said, "We've [given free licenses to] hundreds of non-profit organizations, schools, and governments, but we haven't gotten much good publicity over it."

And, according to Starr, there are plenty of good reasons a company like Unisys should not allow its patented technology to be used for free, even in free software. He specifically described two common situations:

1) A company creates a $200,000 CAD package - then gives away a "free plug-in" that includes LZW. Should not Unisys charge a royalty under these circumstances? Isn't the freeness of the plug-in package that includes LZW somewhat of a sham, possibly made that way specifically to avoid paying royalties to Unisys?

2) A company that sells hardware of some sort (Starr mentioned "Japanese digital camera manufacturers" here) but includes accompanying software "free." Again, to Unisys this freeness is strictly bogus, and they want royalties on the "free" software that comes with the non-free hardware if that software uses LZW technology in any way.

That's Their Story and They're Sticking to It
The stack of e-mails Unisys has gotten this week from Slashdot readers and other free software boosters who disagree with the Unisys GIF patent policy hasn't done much to change Starr's mind. He and Unisys PR dude Oliver Picher both described the e-mail tirades with words like vile, vulgar, obscene, disgusting, and distasteful. Apparently, the dregs of the Open Source Community came out of the woodwork in full force, and, as usual, pissed off the people whose minds they might have had a chance to change if they had exercised a little courtesy.

Those of you who sent those e-mails don't need to apologize. I already did, profusely, on your behalf. And the person to whom I apologized most humbly was not Starr, but Cheryl, the low-paid secretary who had to read all the filth.

Cheryl does not set Unisys policy, and she does not own stock in the company, but she is the person whose job it is to read all the abusive e-mail sent to Unisys via the e-mail address on the relevant corporate Web page. All you do when you send her obscenities is make her - and by extension, her boss, Mark Starr - think that Open Source advocates are crackpots and idiots. But I am going to cut this potential tirade short, because Rob Malda has already given you a similar lecture, Eric S. Raymond has given it, Bruce Perens has given it, and Richard M. Stallman has given it so many times that he probably mumbles it in his sleep.

The Bottom Line
Unisys is unlikely to change its corporate position regarding free software in the near future (especially if they get attacked instead of asked politely) and they have the patent on LZW-compressed GIFs and you don't, so if you're going to use their technology you must play by their rules until or unless software patent laws in the U.S. get a radical makeover. Meanwhile, if you want to use LZW-compressed GIFs on your Intranet or public Web site, and you created them with a Unisys-licensed piece of software, no one from Unisys is going to come around and demand money from you.

And if you plan to create - or have already created - free image-processing software that uses Unisys-patented LZW technology, you might want to ask the company, very politely, for a giveaway license that would cover non-commercial use of your product. I suspect that Mr. Starr (who has final judgement in such matters) might just give you one if you approach him correctly and you manage to convince him that you aren't trying to burn Unisys with some sort of bogus giveaway deal that is really meant to make you or your program's users rich while denying Unisys shareholders the licensing fees that - like it or not - they are legally entitled to collect if you try to earn a profit from your use of their intellectual property.

Anonymous Coward writes "Canada has restarted talks on a tax of 74 cents per 15 minutes on digital recording media that is scheduled to begin on January 1st." It's interesting that when DAT was taxed, the format never caught on. Then again, CD-ROM is already a popular format. For more on the DAT issue, which this very closely parallels, RMS has an interesting article that appeared in Wired about 7 years ago, titled "The Right Way to Tax DAT".

Alistair Cunningham writes "The Sunday Telegraph is reporting that the British government is planning to allow voters to vote online at the next general election, in 2001. They hope to use this to overcome voter apathy. I wonder how secure this will be? " I can't wait for this to happen in the US. Voting is a pain- I want to click my way through the election and not have to wait in lines.

I'm sure a lot of you knew it was coming. The steady stream of emails asking "When is Slashdot gonna IPO" and messages from VCs pretty well proves that you guys knew it as well as I did. Well the cost and overhead of running Slashdot independently finally began to overwhelm us. After much deliberation and careful analysis, we're excited to announce that we've been acquired by Andover.net. Read more to learn what this means. Why did you do this?

Slashdot keeps growing. The overhead and costs associated with running this beast has become astronomical. Hemos and I work marathon weeks, and there still isn't enough time to get everything done. There are always banner ads needing selling, stories needing posting, perl needing hacking, and readers with questions needing answering. Besides that, our single channel ISDN connection is awfully saturated, and the "Business" work of running this website is beginning to be nearly as much work as the "Website" part of the site.

We had 2 options: get cash from some investors and hire a staff, or or find a company that we felt understood what we wanted to accomplish here, and use their money to hire help.

Hiring our own staff would mean hiring suits and marketing people. We decided that simply being acquried would allow someone else to worry about the suits and marketroids- we would simply benefit from their existing business infrastructure, and we could concentrate on what we already know how to do: Run a website.

What do we intend to do? Well for starters we'll be able to pay several of the guys who have been volunteering their time for so long. Plus, we'll be able to hire people to help sell banner ads, and the administer the servers, and maybe to debug code. Basically, a support staff so that Hemos and I can simplify our lives, and Slashdot won't have to depend on us 24/7. And we have new things that we want to do on Slashdot, so offloading tasks from me will us to focus on other things that we want to do around here.

We'll start doing things like content mirroring. We'll have more servers, and hopefully soon servers will pop up on each coast. And we'll be able to have experts help pull it all together. The end result will be a faster, more stable Slashdot.

Why Andover?

We talked to several companies: Some that you've heard of, and some that you haven't. We were looking for a company that would guarantee us complete and total creative control, but provide us the financial resources necessary to expand Slashdot in the way we consider best "right". And whoever became involved, they had to be "Outside" the linux/open source world to a certain degree: we didn't want anyone to think that a company might buy us simply to gain an advantage in the story select.

Andover is good for that- they aren't a "Linux" company - they run Linux, and they read Slashdot, but they don't sell a distribution, or Linux boxes, or anything related to Linux . In fact, we've only mentioned them on Slashdot a couple of times in the past.

Best of all- they're smart guys. They understand what Slashdot is, and they respect that they can't change it without destroying what it is. So they are happy to guarantee (it's even in the contract!) that Hemos and I would retain full control of the site, while taking advantage of their business resources to take care of that icky part of running this monster. To guarantee that, I've also been appointed to the Andover.Net board. (I'm still not sure if I'm supposed to wear a tie)

What is Andover

A Media Company. An internet company. They run websites. Sorta like Earthweb or Internet.com. All of their existing sites are done essentially in-house. They have several sharp hacks over there and I'm looking forward to working with them. They also have top notch guys-with-ties, and a real keen grasp of where things are going in this business.

Conclusion I couldn't be more excited about this. I finally will have the ability to expand Slashdot the way I want to. I'll have the ability to pay people that have been volunteering hundreds of hours of time to help. And I have complete control over Slashdot's future, without the financial burden that has been growing over the last year. This couldn't be better for Slashdot, and I hope I haven't offended anywone to bad. We fundamentally will not change anything, we'll just have a better infrastructure to do what we've always done.

The final cool part of this is that I get to say thanks to you guys. Most of what we're getting is a piece of Andover.Net. And after I pay off my student loans and Hemos pays off his credit cards, we want to make sizable donations to some causes that we think are important. This seems like the best way for us to give back to the community that made us successful.

• The Free Software Foundation - How can we not give back to them for making so much cool stuff possible.
• Debian - I love Debian. I just want to make sure that they keep going strong. Debian's success is critical to the future of Linux. Besides, I wanna make sure that my apt-get command gets the newest version of everything cool.
• Project Gutenberg - Keeping books online and making them available to the world is important.
• The Macatawa Area Community Network - They give free network access to our hometown. They were the original home of Slashdot- and they let us keep it there for several months even when we were saturating their T1 every afternoon.
• Hope College - We both graduated and we want to set up a scholarship or something there. I want it to be for a "Hot Chick Going into CompSci" but we'll have to see if they'll let me do that...
• Foresight Institute - So hemos is obsessed with nanotech. He wants to give them money in exchange for a campbell's soup can of nanites He's wierd, but hey.

We're happy about this, but I know not all of you will be. To those of you who think I'm wrong, I'm sorry. I really believe that this will allow me to make Slashdot into something even better then it is today, without sacrificing what it already is. Its been a crazy ride so far, and now its only going to get crazier.

If you want to contact jeff or I, you can email malda@slashdot.org or hemos@slashdot.org. We'll try to respond, but I suspect we're going to get flooded, so be patient.

Update: 06/29 02:12 by CT : Just FWIW, this has no effect on the Slash source code release. It will still be released whenever I have time to work on it. In fact, hopefully now since I'll have some help around here with the sysadmin stuff, I'll be able to focus on it some more...

RMS wrote in to send a reply to some of the discussions involing him and the FSF that appeared in the recent Metcalf Story that appeared here. Hit the link to read his comments.

People have been speaking of me in the context the Open Source movement. That's misleading because I am not a member of it. I belong to the Free Software movement. In this movement we talk about freedom, about principle, about the rights that computer users are entitled to.

The Open Source movement avoids talking about those issues, and that is why I am not joining it. The two movements can work together on software; I even occasionally recommend Eric Raymond as a speaker for a business-oriented conference. But we disagree on the basic issues. (See this document.)

For example, in the Free Software movement, we don't consider proprietary programs such as Applix or Wordperfect a contribution to our community. Instead, we work on free replacements for those non-free programs, just as we have worked for 15 years to develop a free replacement for Unix.

The Open Source people are entitled to present their views, but please don't cite the achievements of Free Software as their successes. GNU software and the GNU operating system come from the Free Software movement.

Also, for the record, I am not a Communist or anything similar. The idea that people ought to cooperate and help their neighbors is much older than Marx--in fact, one notable exponent of this view lived 2000 years ago. And the idea of inalienable rights embodied in the GNU GPL comes from the founders of the United States. People who disagree with me often find it convenient to call me a Communist, but they do so in order to misrepresent my views.

RMS wrote in to send a reply to some of the discussions involing him and the FSF that appeared in the recent Metcalf Story that appeared here. Hit the link to read his comments.

People have been speaking of me in the context the Open Source movement. That's misleading because I am not a member of it. I belong to the Free Software movement. In this movement we talk about freedom, about principle, about the rights that computer users are entitled to.

The Open Source movement avoids talking about those issues, and that is why I am not joining it. The two movements can work together on software; I even occasionally recommend Eric Raymond as a speaker for a business-oriented conference. But we disagree on the basic issues. (See this document.)

For example, in the Free Software movement, we don't consider proprietary programs such as Applix or Wordperfect a contribution to our community. Instead, we work on free replacements for those non-free programs, just as we have worked for 15 years to develop a free replacement for Unix.

The Open Source people are entitled to present their views, but please don't cite the achievements of Free Software as their successes. GNU software and the GNU operating system come from the Free Software movement.

Also, for the record, I am not a Communist or anything similar. The idea that people ought to cooperate and help their neighbors is much older than Marx--in fact, one notable exponent of this view lived 2000 years ago. And the idea of inalienable rights embodied in the GNU GPL comes from the founders of the United States. People who disagree with me often find it convenient to call me a Communist, but they do so in order to misrepresent my views.

Paul wrote in to point us to the GNU Jobs Page. ^BR wrote in to say that the may issue of Daemon News is out for your BSDies out there, and CaVi wrote in to say that the Linux Gazette is out (sorry that these took so long to announce... moving was a bitch). Bitscape sent us a Salon story about Coding in Vampire Mode. Mikesch noted that www.palmcolors.com is selling colored Palm Pilots rsn. Looking for new backgrounds? President John F. Kennedy wrote in to tell us that the Volume 7 of Propoganda is up. And for those who are curious, he actually did send me beer! robert@budzynski.ddns.org sent us this art gallery with fodder and dayeight sent us a photomosaic picture for you Lara Craft Perverts out there. HighJack noted that the latest version of JWZs X Screensaver distribution contains a new one that looks like those funky falling charachters from The Matrix. And finally for some crazy fun stuff, dave sent us hilarious proof that Star Trek is Satanic, and chrisd sent us one of the best ebay auction items in recent memory. Psst-this is Hemos. It was Rob's birthday on May 10-he thinks he escaped. E-mail him and tell him how much you love him.

Jonas Öberg writes "The GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 (succeeding the GNU Library General Public License) is now online at the GNU web site. Also available as text here. "

Jonas Öberg writes "The GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 (succeeding the GNU Library General Public License) is now online at the GNU web site. Also available as text here. "

Jonas Öberg writes "The GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 (succeeding the GNU Library General Public License) is now online at the GNU web site. Also available as text here. "

Time once again to clean up the submissions bin: First up, Georg C. F. Greve wrote in to tell us that the April issue of Brave GNU Word is up. As always, we have Linux websites popping up left and right: Michael wrote in to point us to LinuxPlanet for newbies, 23D sent us linuxartist.org for the non technical folks, and Popeye wrote in to show us The Linux Lounge for people who I guess want to sit. President John F. Kennedy wrote in to tell us that Propaganda for E is out if you need awesome (and gigantic) tilable background images. Frater 219 wrote in to say that ESR has updated the Jargon File to 4.1.1. Next up, some Slashdot ink: Shag hooked us up with a story about the Slashdot Effect taking down another site, Tomalak brought this Article about Slashdot in InternetWorld (thankfully there is no picture) and cgray wrote in with a link to an article about Jimmy Guterman experiencing the Slashdot Effect- except this one is mostly about the flame. Newton sent us www.ihatestarwars.com for those of you who are sick of the hype. jeth gave us a link to special agent Kimble a Flash Movie. The Wanderer submitted the Dysfunctional Faily Circus in response to last weeks quickie about the Circus reviews in Amazon. An anonyous reader sent us Goumet Ting's page. It looks exactly like my diet.

Time once again to clean up the submissions bin: First up, Georg C. F. Greve wrote in to tell us that the April issue of Brave GNU Word is up. As always, we have Linux websites popping up left and right: Michael wrote in to point us to LinuxPlanet for newbies, 23D sent us linuxartist.org for the non technical folks, and Popeye wrote in to show us The Linux Lounge for people who I guess want to sit. President John F. Kennedy wrote in to tell us that Propaganda for E is out if you need awesome (and gigantic) tilable background images. Frater 219 wrote in to say that ESR has updated the Jargon File to 4.1.1. Next up, some Slashdot ink: Shag hooked us up with a story about the Slashdot Effect taking down another site, Tomalak brought this Article about Slashdot in InternetWorld (thankfully there is no picture) and cgray wrote in with a link to an article about Jimmy Guterman experiencing the Slashdot Effect- except this one is mostly about the flame. Newton sent us www.ihatestarwars.com for those of you who are sick of the hype. jeth gave us a link to special agent Kimble a Flash Movie. The Wanderer submitted the Dysfunctional Faily Circus in response to last weeks quickie about the Circus reviews in Amazon. An anonyous reader sent us Goumet Ting's page. It looks exactly like my diet.

An anonymous reader sent us this page (its in german! Use babelfish) which says that EGCS has been accepted as the official compiler of the GNU Project by RMS. I've seen a lot of confirmation of this, but nothing official on the GNU website. Anyway, I'm glad to see it. EGCS is a great compiler- it'll be even cooler once its simply GCC! Update: 04/21 01:26 by J : The GNU website has been updated. The EGCS steering committee has been renamed, and is now officially in charge of GCC.

Jonas Oberg , chief webmaster of the GNU project has submitted an essay has calls "On the Subject of RMS" where he talks about Linux vs GNU/Linux, Free Software vs. Open Source, and other things that seem to pop up a lot these days. Check it out. The following was written by Slashdot Reader, Jonas Oberg. On the Subject of RMS

The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English defines ``eccentric'' to mean ``peculiar; not normal''. Is RMS eccentric? Yes, most definitly. He has got a meaning in his life and this alone would make him eccentric. True, he is also peculiar in many other ways. Who else would carry around his battered computer in a cloth bag? He does not care about what people think; he is on a mission. A mission to create a completely free operating system for everyone to use.

In his ideal world, all software is free software and sharing your code with your neighbor is standard practice. RMS lived in this world for some time when he was active around the AI lab on MIT. In some ways he lives in that world still. He is an eccentric idealist with a mission. It is not so surprising that normal people look at him strangely.

Someone once said to me that to be a hacker, you had to give up your normal life. Not true. There is a strong line between beeing a hacker and beeing a socially unfit hacker. Hackers like RMS, Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds are very clearly not socially unfit.

A few years ago, Linus got married with his wife Tova and they now have several kids. Alan Cox is married to Telsa (more commonly known as ``hobbit'' after her login name and email address). Even RMS had a sweetheat once named Alix. They eventually broke up, but that could have been for any reason. Neither I nor you have any business questioning what a hacker does on his private time. In many cases, I have a feeling we really do not want to know.

Hating, or atleast disliking, RMS has become a gimmick, much like hating Bill Gates and Windows. Linus Torvalds has managed to stay clear of that area by avoiding politics. When we judge Linus, we do it only by his coding. When we judge RMS, we do not do it based on his coding skills but rather on how his philosophical ideas differs from ours. I suppose that if Linus would get himself mixed up in these philosophical discussions, he too would be judged accordingly. It is fine that Linus does not do this as long as we all remember that we should not compare him with RMS the way most people do.

Free Software

When we speak of free software we speak of the right to study the program, distribute the program freely and improve the program with your own code. You do not need to do this, and many people probably do not even want to study how the program works or make their own improvements. But would it not be nice to know that you have that option?

Should you care? I think you should, but neither I, RMS or anyone else can force you to. We will try to get your attention to what we feel is important, but you don't have to follow us blindly. We want you to read our texts on philosophy and come to your own conclusion. If after you have read what we've written, you decide to walk some other path, we do not stop you. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html is a good start. Read what is written there and then come back here.

I do not think the BSD license is a good idea, nor do I think that the artistic license is a good idea. However, I'm accepting that people want to use them because their values in life differs from mine. I dislike those licenses because I do not agree with the philosophical issues of them. The same way as when I vote, I do not vote for the socialistic party because I do not agree with their philosophical issues.

Thinking that everyone in the whole world could agree to one specific license would be naive. Unless we all suddenly start to think very much the same, that will not happen. RMS knows this. I know this. The BSD followers know this. Everyone should know this. Frankly, would you want to live in a world where everyone thought the same way?

When I was writing this, I got an email from someone who had read about me on my home page. The core of the email was "I find you interesting because you are not normal." For me, that is a great compliment.

I will not go any further on the philosophical issues. For me, it is enough that everyone is happy with whatever license they choose.

The Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation has worked to support free software for 15 years now. The main project is the GNU project which aims at developing a completely free operating system. At least some of you should notice that 15 years is a very long time. Proprietary software companies get out new versions of their programs and operating systems almost every other year. What has taken the GNU system so long?

When RMS started out to create the GNU system, he began by publishing the GNU Emacs which is the standard text editor in the GNU system. He then needed a compiler, so he made the GNU C Compiler and the GNU Debugger. Pretty soon, there were utilities available for most standard tasks but you still needed a kernel to run them. So the GNU project started writing the GNU Hurd which is a kernel based on Mach.

While we were working on the GNU Hurd, Linus Torvalds released his Linux kernel and when people combined this kernel with the finished GNU utilities, they got a free operating system. For the first time, someone could run a completely free Linux-based GNU system. But it was still a system made by hackers, for hackers. To correct this, we sponsored the early development of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution which should enable everyone to use this Linux-based GNU system.

It might have taken some time to get this system done, but you should never rush software development. Doing so would result in bad coding and a bad design. We do what we think has to be done in order to create a completely free operating system; and we do it in our own time.

Linux

Linux is a great kernel and I use it every day. I will probably keep using it on some computers even after I switch to the Hurd. But it is important that people remember what Linux is; a kernel. It's not a complete system and it's not fair to the community to call it that. As a developer and user of both Linux, Hurd and the GNU utilities, I feel it is important that people understand the difference. Noone should come to me asking for help with the GNU Emacs just because I have said that I work with Linux; they should ask me for help because I have said that I am using several tools from the GNU system.

To help everyone understand this, I have made it a habit of calling my system a Linux-based GNU-system, in short a GNU/Linux system. This is not because I only use GNU-utilities, it is because I use programs that are part of the GNU system. Some people argue that XFree86 should be given as much credit as the GNU system. Those people do not understand that by calling my system a GNU/Linux system, I give credit not only to the GNU project but also to XFree86. Why? Because the XFree86 has been adopted by the GNU project for use in the GNU system, as has Lynx been which I use almost daily. So by calling it a GNU/Linux system I give credit to every program which are part of--or has been adopted by--the GNU project.

The specific name is not really important, though some people might want to think so. The importance is to give credit to the GNU project where credit is due. One way to do so is by calling the system a GNU/Linux system, but there are many more ways to do it and only your imagination will limit them.

Jonas Oberg , chief webmaster of the GNU project has submitted an essay has calls "On the Subject of RMS" where he talks about Linux vs GNU/Linux, Free Software vs. Open Source, and other things that seem to pop up a lot these days. Check it out. The following was written by Slashdot Reader, Jonas Oberg. On the Subject of RMS

The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English defines ``eccentric'' to mean ``peculiar; not normal''. Is RMS eccentric? Yes, most definitly. He has got a meaning in his life and this alone would make him eccentric. True, he is also peculiar in many other ways. Who else would carry around his battered computer in a cloth bag? He does not care about what people think; he is on a mission. A mission to create a completely free operating system for everyone to use.

In his ideal world, all software is free software and sharing your code with your neighbor is standard practice. RMS lived in this world for some time when he was active around the AI lab on MIT. In some ways he lives in that world still. He is an eccentric idealist with a mission. It is not so surprising that normal people look at him strangely.

Someone once said to me that to be a hacker, you had to give up your normal life. Not true. There is a strong line between beeing a hacker and beeing a socially unfit hacker. Hackers like RMS, Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds are very clearly not socially unfit.

A few years ago, Linus got married with his wife Tova and they now have several kids. Alan Cox is married to Telsa (more commonly known as ``hobbit'' after her login name and email address). Even RMS had a sweetheat once named Alix. They eventually broke up, but that could have been for any reason. Neither I nor you have any business questioning what a hacker does on his private time. In many cases, I have a feeling we really do not want to know.

Hating, or atleast disliking, RMS has become a gimmick, much like hating Bill Gates and Windows. Linus Torvalds has managed to stay clear of that area by avoiding politics. When we judge Linus, we do it only by his coding. When we judge RMS, we do not do it based on his coding skills but rather on how his philosophical ideas differs from ours. I suppose that if Linus would get himself mixed up in these philosophical discussions, he too would be judged accordingly. It is fine that Linus does not do this as long as we all remember that we should not compare him with RMS the way most people do.

Free Software

When we speak of free software we speak of the right to study the program, distribute the program freely and improve the program with your own code. You do not need to do this, and many people probably do not even want to study how the program works or make their own improvements. But would it not be nice to know that you have that option?

Should you care? I think you should, but neither I, RMS or anyone else can force you to. We will try to get your attention to what we feel is important, but you don't have to follow us blindly. We want you to read our texts on philosophy and come to your own conclusion. If after you have read what we've written, you decide to walk some other path, we do not stop you. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html is a good start. Read what is written there and then come back here.

I do not think the BSD license is a good idea, nor do I think that the artistic license is a good idea. However, I'm accepting that people want to use them because their values in life differs from mine. I dislike those licenses because I do not agree with the philosophical issues of them. The same way as when I vote, I do not vote for the socialistic party because I do not agree with their philosophical issues.

Thinking that everyone in the whole world could agree to one specific license would be naive. Unless we all suddenly start to think very much the same, that will not happen. RMS knows this. I know this. The BSD followers know this. Everyone should know this. Frankly, would you want to live in a world where everyone thought the same way?

When I was writing this, I got an email from someone who had read about me on my home page. The core of the email was "I find you interesting because you are not normal." For me, that is a great compliment.

I will not go any further on the philosophical issues. For me, it is enough that everyone is happy with whatever license they choose.

The Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation has worked to support free software for 15 years now. The main project is the GNU project which aims at developing a completely free operating system. At least some of you should notice that 15 years is a very long time. Proprietary software companies get out new versions of their programs and operating systems almost every other year. What has taken the GNU system so long?

When RMS started out to create the GNU system, he began by publishing the GNU Emacs which is the standard text editor in the GNU system. He then needed a compiler, so he made the GNU C Compiler and the GNU Debugger. Pretty soon, there were utilities available for most standard tasks but you still needed a kernel to run them. So the GNU project started writing the GNU Hurd which is a kernel based on Mach.

While we were working on the GNU Hurd, Linus Torvalds released his Linux kernel and when people combined this kernel with the finished GNU utilities, they got a free operating system. For the first time, someone could run a completely free Linux-based GNU system. But it was still a system made by hackers, for hackers. To correct this, we sponsored the early development of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution which should enable everyone to use this Linux-based GNU system.

It might have taken some time to get this system done, but you should never rush software development. Doing so would result in bad coding and a bad design. We do what we think has to be done in order to create a completely free operating system; and we do it in our own time.

Linux

Linux is a great kernel and I use it every day. I will probably keep using it on some computers even after I switch to the Hurd. But it is important that people remember what Linux is; a kernel. It's not a complete system and it's not fair to the community to call it that. As a developer and user of both Linux, Hurd and the GNU utilities, I feel it is important that people understand the difference. Noone should come to me asking for help with the GNU Emacs just because I have said that I work with Linux; they should ask me for help because I have said that I am using several tools from the GNU system.

To help everyone understand this, I have made it a habit of calling my system a Linux-based GNU-system, in short a GNU/Linux system. This is not because I only use GNU-utilities, it is because I use programs that are part of the GNU system. Some people argue that XFree86 should be given as much credit as the GNU system. Those people do not understand that by calling my system a GNU/Linux system, I give credit not only to the GNU project but also to XFree86. Why? Because the XFree86 has been adopted by the GNU project for use in the GNU system, as has Lynx been which I use almost daily. So by calling it a GNU/Linux system I give credit to every program which are part of--or has been adopted by--the GNU project.

The specific name is not really important, though some people might want to think so. The importance is to give credit to the GNU project where credit is due. One way to do so is by calling the system a GNU/Linux system, but there are many more ways to do it and only your imagination will limit them.

Jonas Oberg , chief webmaster of the GNU project has submitted an essay has calls "On the Subject of RMS" where he talks about Linux vs GNU/Linux, Free Software vs. Open Source, and other things that seem to pop up a lot these days. Check it out. The following was written by Slashdot Reader, Jonas Oberg. On the Subject of RMS

The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English defines ``eccentric'' to mean ``peculiar; not normal''. Is RMS eccentric? Yes, most definitly. He has got a meaning in his life and this alone would make him eccentric. True, he is also peculiar in many other ways. Who else would carry around his battered computer in a cloth bag? He does not care about what people think; he is on a mission. A mission to create a completely free operating system for everyone to use.

In his ideal world, all software is free software and sharing your code with your neighbor is standard practice. RMS lived in this world for some time when he was active around the AI lab on MIT. In some ways he lives in that world still. He is an eccentric idealist with a mission. It is not so surprising that normal people look at him strangely.

Someone once said to me that to be a hacker, you had to give up your normal life. Not true. There is a strong line between beeing a hacker and beeing a socially unfit hacker. Hackers like RMS, Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds are very clearly not socially unfit.

A few years ago, Linus got married with his wife Tova and they now have several kids. Alan Cox is married to Telsa (more commonly known as ``hobbit'' after her login name and email address). Even RMS had a sweetheat once named Alix. They eventually broke up, but that could have been for any reason. Neither I nor you have any business questioning what a hacker does on his private time. In many cases, I have a feeling we really do not want to know.

Hating, or atleast disliking, RMS has become a gimmick, much like hating Bill Gates and Windows. Linus Torvalds has managed to stay clear of that area by avoiding politics. When we judge Linus, we do it only by his coding. When we judge RMS, we do not do it based on his coding skills but rather on how his philosophical ideas differs from ours. I suppose that if Linus would get himself mixed up in these philosophical discussions, he too would be judged accordingly. It is fine that Linus does not do this as long as we all remember that we should not compare him with RMS the way most people do.

Free Software

When we speak of free software we speak of the right to study the program, distribute the program freely and improve the program with your own code. You do not need to do this, and many people probably do not even want to study how the program works or make their own improvements. But would it not be nice to know that you have that option?

Should you care? I think you should, but neither I, RMS or anyone else can force you to. We will try to get your attention to what we feel is important, but you don't have to follow us blindly. We want you to read our texts on philosophy and come to your own conclusion. If after you have read what we've written, you decide to walk some other path, we do not stop you. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html is a good start. Read what is written there and then come back here.

I do not think the BSD license is a good idea, nor do I think that the artistic license is a good idea. However, I'm accepting that people want to use them because their values in life differs from mine. I dislike those licenses because I do not agree with the philosophical issues of them. The same way as when I vote, I do not vote for the socialistic party because I do not agree with their philosophical issues.

Thinking that everyone in the whole world could agree to one specific license would be naive. Unless we all suddenly start to think very much the same, that will not happen. RMS knows this. I know this. The BSD followers know this. Everyone should know this. Frankly, would you want to live in a world where everyone thought the same way?

When I was writing this, I got an email from someone who had read about me on my home page. The core of the email was "I find you interesting because you are not normal." For me, that is a great compliment.

I will not go any further on the philosophical issues. For me, it is enough that everyone is happy with whatever license they choose.

The Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation has worked to support free software for 15 years now. The main project is the GNU project which aims at developing a completely free operating system. At least some of you should notice that 15 years is a very long time. Proprietary software companies get out new versions of their programs and operating systems almost every other year. What has taken the GNU system so long?

When RMS started out to create the GNU system, he began by publishing the GNU Emacs which is the standard text editor in the GNU system. He then needed a compiler, so he made the GNU C Compiler and the GNU Debugger. Pretty soon, there were utilities available for most standard tasks but you still needed a kernel to run them. So the GNU project started writing the GNU Hurd which is a kernel based on Mach.

While we were working on the GNU Hurd, Linus Torvalds released his Linux kernel and when people combined this kernel with the finished GNU utilities, they got a free operating system. For the first time, someone could run a completely free Linux-based GNU system. But it was still a system made by hackers, for hackers. To correct this, we sponsored the early development of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution which should enable everyone to use this Linux-based GNU system.

It might have taken some time to get this system done, but you should never rush software development. Doing so would result in bad coding and a bad design. We do what we think has to be done in order to create a completely free operating system; and we do it in our own time.

Linux

Linux is a great kernel and I use it every day. I will probably keep using it on some computers even after I switch to the Hurd. But it is important that people remember what Linux is; a kernel. It's not a complete system and it's not fair to the community to call it that. As a developer and user of both Linux, Hurd and the GNU utilities, I feel it is important that people understand the difference. Noone should come to me asking for help with the GNU Emacs just because I have said that I work with Linux; they should ask me for help because I have said that I am using several tools from the GNU system.

To help everyone understand this, I have made it a habit of calling my system a Linux-based GNU-system, in short a GNU/Linux system. This is not because I only use GNU-utilities, it is because I use programs that are part of the GNU system. Some people argue that XFree86 should be given as much credit as the GNU system. Those people do not understand that by calling my system a GNU/Linux system, I give credit not only to the GNU project but also to XFree86. Why? Because the XFree86 has been adopted by the GNU project for use in the GNU system, as has Lynx been which I use almost daily. So by calling it a GNU/Linux system I give credit to every program which are part of--or has been adopted by--the GNU project.

The specific name is not really important, though some people might want to think so. The importance is to give credit to the GNU project where credit is due. One way to do so is by calling the system a GNU/Linux system, but there are many more ways to do it and only your imagination will limit them.

A new monthly column Brave GNU World has started, with the mission to inform everybody about new GNU software. Apparently dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda does not completely delete the contents of you hard-drive. You should use shred instead. Paul Smith wrote in to plug a Free lecture by Richard Stallman which is going to be held tomorrow - Tuesday 23 March at 7pm at the Commonwealth Institute in London. Finally, jbc wrote in with "In his latest 'Ask Tim' piece, Tim O'Reilly talks about the differences between himself and RMS in terms of how they view OSS/FSF licensing issues." null -> zero (*blush*)

A new monthly column Brave GNU World has started, with the mission to inform everybody about new GNU software. Apparently dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda does not completely delete the contents of you hard-drive. You should use shred instead. Paul Smith wrote in to plug a Free lecture by Richard Stallman which is going to be held tomorrow - Tuesday 23 March at 7pm at the Commonwealth Institute in London. Finally, jbc wrote in with "In his latest 'Ask Tim' piece, Tim O'Reilly talks about the differences between himself and RMS in terms of how they view OSS/FSF licensing issues." null -> zero (*blush*)

Miguel de Icaza writes "The people that did the MOSIX cluster system have now made a port for Linux. But they do not provide all the source code of their work. They only provide a binary kernel module which allows the user to run only a cluster of six machines(they show a picture of their 100 cluster node). The binary module requires kernel modifications. (Thus breaking the Linus permission for binary modules). I think we should stand up against this blatant violation of the GPL. " Update: 02/27 11:34 by S : In related news, xose points out other license violations: Linux Network Drivers states "Several drivers have been distributed that are little more than renamed versions of my drivers. Some have my name, the copyright notice or the Gnu GPL license notice removed. The less flagrant violations merely fail to note that the driver has been modified from the original version. (The GPL requires such a note.)" Update: 02/27 11:05 by S : To clarify Miguel's point: Source must be available for any addition to a GPL'd product. Linus and the other core kernel developers gave a special dispensation to allow binary modules to be inserted into the kernel as long as they do not require kernel modifications of their own.

Some posters argue that this is whining, and we should be grateful for more software on Linux. Others argue Linux must let go of its licensing conditions to succeed. Neither argument is relevant. MOSIX is violating the Linux license: it is a binary kernel module that requires kernel modifications. Just as Microsoft would not tolerate violations of its license, the authors of Linux need not tolerate this violation. The fact Linux is available at no cost is irrelevant: the license is based on copyright law and Linux is not in the public domain.

Other posters believe that Mosix could fork the Linux code base and do what they want. This is incorrect. The license terms are determined by all the authors (copyright holders) of a product. Unless Linus and co agreed to change the license it would not change, fork or no fork.

If it is true that the Israeli government does not allow the source of the Mosix kernel module to be made available, it is my understanding that the GPL states that the Hebrew University may NOT distribute Mosix to anyone.

Amoeba Protozoa has the first Quickie for the day: The Linux Image Montage Project needs logos to create a montage poster. If you have a Linux related logo, send it to them. mazeone sent us a link to the always excellent NTK which has a great note about Bruce Perens at the start, (And yes, I read NTK too ;) And now a whole bunch of fun little links that have been building up: PopeClayton sent us a link to a Homer Simpson Fortune File. cpfeifer sent us a link to another O'Reily Book Parody. Zibalatz sent us a link to a MacBeth Star Wars Parody. rpm sent us a link to the Magic Nipple. It predicts the future. Sorta. Now we have a few more Porn Parody sites: desertAngel sent us Amish Porn and Gambit32 sent us telephone sex. Both are hilarious. The Only Anonymous Coward sent us a link to an emergency Security Alert: apparently a dangerous bug was found in GNU acronym. An anonymous reader sent us an important page: a Guide to Babes for Geeks. Follow these to the letter. Oh wait, most of us probably already do. That might explain my social life anyway.

el_nino writes "It seems glibc 2.1 has been withdrawn because of a license problem. A mail from Adam J. Richter to the bugs-glibc mailing list: "The source files in the db2 section of glibc-2.1 point to a nonexistant file named "LICENSE." The files are apparently written by Sleepycat software, and the copying conditions found on www.sleepycat.com for this package are the BSD copying conditions with the advertising restrictions that FSF claims are incompatible with the GPL." The glibc-2.1-README on ftp.gnu.org says: "glibc-2.1 has been (temporarily) removed, until some political issues are worked out." " Zack Weinberg wrote with an update: I'd like to correct some factual errors in the story you posted on Slashdot regarding glibc 2.1 being pulled from ftp.gnu.org. The pull has nothing to do with the license conditions for db2. There is some disagreement over whether the BSD license is compatible with the GPL, but FSF's official stance is that they are. The license for db2 is clearly stated in an appendix to the libc manual (see manual/contrib.texi).

glibc 2.1 has been pulled since it cannot be compiled with gcc 2.8 and this conflicts with FSF policy. We are working with RMS to resolve the issue. In the meantime, glibc 2.1 remains available from sourceware.cygnus.com and its mirrors.

zw

Couple of GNU tidbits today to report: First, Ethan James wrote in to say that WindowMaker has been Officially Named part of the GNU Project. The other notable is the link that Uruk sent us- this site tracks GNU apps and Y2k Problems.

Two stories have cropped up this week about IBM and patent-issues. The first is from Greg Aharonian of the Internet Patent News Service who discusses the implications of using a Open Source product which includes IBM patents given IBM's history of vigorously defending its patents even when they are included in open protocols. The second is from ZD Net which claims IBM would like to see the Linux license changed to take more patent issues into account, so that it feels legally protected if it provides 24x7 support and tweaks the code. The article concludes by listing potential new Linux ports. The GPL does discuss patents (see the GPL preamble for explanation). somebody else and Linux Weekly News contributed links. update The Kernel mailing list has some debate on this, ranging from people who would like to work something out with IBM (so that the free software community can use arithmetic compression, and other IBM patents for free), to people who argue that if IBM does not want to play by our rules (freedom), it should go make its money somewhere else. A list of patents currently restricting us as well as a prediction of the demise of the patent system were posted.

The Free Software Foundation states that the Wassenaar agreement does not apply to free-software. It'd be nice to know why. Is this a provision for research, or some sort of loophole? Link countesy of Linux Today.

The Free Software Foundation states that the Wassenaar agreement does not apply to free-software. It'd be nice to know why. Is this a provision for research, or some sort of loophole? Link countesy of Linux Today.

Ed Boraas writes "There has been considerable interest lately in the Hurd, a kernel being developed by the FSF. While the hurd itself is still at 0.2 (debian is helping the FSF get 0.3 ready, which will be a much friendlier install), which has a reputation for tricky installs (it's alphaware, after all), a lot of people have questions on how to get started. Matt Vernon has now posted his "Idiot's Guide to Installing Hurd", which aims to give a more step-by-step guide to installing Hurd. Of course, the FSF Hurd pages are an excellent companion resource. "

RMS wrote in to ask me to link this article over on the GNU website. This article talks about Halloween, and more specifically Microsoft and how it relates to the FSF. The title of the article is "Is Microsoft the Great Satan?" so those of you who enjoy that sort of thing will like this.

RMS wrote in to ask me to link this article over on the GNU website. This article talks about Halloween, and more specifically Microsoft and how it relates to the FSF. The title of the article is "Is Microsoft the Great Satan?" so those of you who enjoy that sort of thing will like this.

cbj writes "Oracle has posted its challenge to Microsoft. To summarize, there is no way SQL Server 7.0 can beat the iron Oracle can run against. I'm sure someone is going to laugh all the way to bank with this one! " They've got the actual query that they want tested (Its part of one of those standard database performance test suites) and they want it done on a huge amount of data. So ya think someone will get it?

Electric is a VLSI design tool with a long history, and it just went open-source. For the latest version, go here It supports VHDL, which should be of interest to the Freedom CPU project since they've decided to use VHDL (why not Verilog?). Unfortunately it does not support Verilog as of yet. Verilog is used in many CPU companies as many designers find it a more natural language in which to express state-machines.

Mark Wielaard writes "Lat week the Linux Weekly News had an editorial on "How do we come to terms with Richard M. Stallman?". This week a lot of readers wrote letters to the editor about this matter. I for one think it is a good thing for our community to discuss the similarities and differences between Open Source and Free Software. "

Lyno Sullivan has begun researching the GNU/Linux Desktop alternative for more mainstream usage in government. Click the link below and read what he has to say. It's a work in progress, but it's definately worth a read. Throw in your 2 bits and hopefully he can convince more than just Minnesota.

The following was written by Slashdot Reader Lyno Sullivan

I am advising a friend, who is planning a major upgrade of thousands of desktops, in a major department of Minnesota state government, that he ought to insist on a cost-benefit analysis that includes GNU/Linux and the GNU Office Suite (I need the list of these products). Windows NT and Microsoft Office seem to be a shoe in choice but are very expensive because of the software licensing cost and the cost of re-training support staff.

I am doing this as volunteer work. All of my writings are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and may be freely copied and modified provided that any derived works are under the GPL.

THE HELP I NEED FROM YOU

Please recommend URL's that show cost-benefit analyses of the GNU/Linux desktop alternative. Also, it would be helpful to have URL's for major installations that currently use GNU/Linux. Finally, if you were trying to persuade my friend of the efficacy of this choice, what would you say?

I intend to collect up the feedback I receive and forward it to my friend, post it on the web and, perhaps, inject it into an upcoming conference that looks at the technology futures for the department.

BACKGROUND The major thesis of my argument is that, since the department must re-train all their support staff anyway, that cost could be considered a wash. Therefore the decision should be made on other factors. I use the "good money after bad" argument to help diminish any residual value of previous training in "non-free software" .

I contend that the real needs of the government workers, in terms of where they spend their real computer usage time throughout the day, are primarily:

• TN3270 mainframe connectivity
• email
• occassional intranet browsing
• occasional, simple word processing outside email and document creation
• for some people, intensive web document preparation

I argue that the specialized workers doing desktop publishing will be converting to an HTML solution (I actually encourage SGML but that is another story). That is but one example of a specialized need. As we look at each kind of specialized worker's needs, I hope to identify usable, if not excellent free software alternatives. Where a non-free solution simply does not exist, I support using existing non-free products under the GNU/Linux DOS and Windows emulators.

I contend that the addiction to non-free software is costing state government, in his agency alone, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of taxpayer dollars per year. The cost for all of local, state and federal government is staggering but I am not making that legislative point at this time. I hope, instead, to persuade one major agency of government to make the transition and become a showcase that proves to the rest of government that becoming free (from their non-free software addiction) is possible, attainable and has wonderful side-effects. There is benefit in investing in human resources rather than pouring money out of state. There is a wellspring of net accessible volunteer talent waiting to be tapped.

If I fail to bring about this transition (from the non-free to the free) from the bottom of government upward, then I will ask the Legislature to declare a moratorium on all software and software training expenditures until the matter can be investigated. I believe that tens of millions are being needlessly spent each biennium and I am pretty sure I can prove it, if given the chance. I prefer bottom up solutions, rather than top-down solutions imposed from orders on high, and I hope to persuade one department to, at least, do a fair cost-benefit analysis and develop a prototype. If that gentle approach fails, I will go for the cold turkey, Legislature mandated withdrawal.

Let me say very clearly that I am in no way intending to disparage the fine work being done by any government employee. Any informed person you talk to in government is gravely concerned about the escalating costs of technology and wants viable solutions. They didn't sit down one day, a decade ago, and decide that they were going to become addicted to the latest whiz-bang technology. It just happened, fix by fix, and now they are addicted. I admit that there are people in the game to build their resumes. For the most part, I have observed that government managers have long been gravely concerned but have believed they had no alternative. It used to be that nobody in government could ever be reprimanded for recommending IBM. Today the same holds true for Microsoft. Tomorrow, I want the same to hold true for GNU software. This is the quintessential issue.

Nobody wants to stand out there and face the risks of recommending an unproven technology solutions. Any recommended solution must consider many things like: the stability and usability of the software, the cost of the software, the availability of adequate support and the cost of adequate support. I contend that GNU/Linux is proven technology and that the GNU/Linux development and support infrastructure is the best. It has the advantage that much support is donated by the GNU volunteers. It has the advantage that commercial support is available for the same price as the alternatives. If I can prove these assertions, then I may be able to persuade one manager to stand out there a little bit. I am recommending two steps to precede the final choice: 1) perform a cost-benefit study of the Common Desktop alternatives and 2) create a prototype of the primary alternative Common Desktop solutions (Windows NT, GNU/Linux, platform independent Java clients, and other reasonable alternatives).

Just so you know, I am also recommending consideration of a thin client, platform independent Java enabled browser solution. The department has lots of old hardware around that would get a lot of extra life with this solution. Also, I am trying to persuade them, in terms of their information and processes, to open themselves to the taxpaying public and the public they serve and the advocates. Many members of the public have older technology that could utilize a Java enabled browser to conduct a dialogue with the department's mainframe computer system. To my knowledge, only Java has this particular ability. This is a side issue to this posting but I thought I should disclose it.

That's kind of a thumbnail of this initiative. Those who remember my other writings will see this as a small piece of a bigger work that intends: 1) to bring copyleft to government information and software development, 2) to connect up the free software community with government, 3) to open photonic government to the people and 4) to help build photonic democracy. (Note: photonics is merely my preferred transport mechanism; you can substitute "electronic" if you prefer.)

Thank you for your time spent considering this matter and for any help you can provide.

August 27, 1998, posted to comp.os.linux.misc regarding The GNU/Linux Desktop Alternative by "Lyno Sullivan" lynosull@maroon.tc.umn.edu Posted to debian-user@lists.debian.org

Lyno Sullivan has begun researching the GNU/Linux Desktop alternative for more mainstream usage in government. Click the link below and read what he has to say. It's a work in progress, but it's definately worth a read. Throw in your 2 bits and hopefully he can convince more than just Minnesota.

The following was written by Slashdot Reader Lyno Sullivan

I am advising a friend, who is planning a major upgrade of thousands of desktops, in a major department of Minnesota state government, that he ought to insist on a cost-benefit analysis that includes GNU/Linux and the GNU Office Suite (I need the list of these products). Windows NT and Microsoft Office seem to be a shoe in choice but are very expensive because of the software licensing cost and the cost of re-training support staff.

I am doing this as volunteer work. All of my writings are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and may be freely copied and modified provided that any derived works are under the GPL.

THE HELP I NEED FROM YOU

Please recommend URL's that show cost-benefit analyses of the GNU/Linux desktop alternative. Also, it would be helpful to have URL's for major installations that currently use GNU/Linux. Finally, if you were trying to persuade my friend of the efficacy of this choice, what would you say?

I intend to collect up the feedback I receive and forward it to my friend, post it on the web and, perhaps, inject it into an upcoming conference that looks at the technology futures for the department.

BACKGROUND The major thesis of my argument is that, since the department must re-train all their support staff anyway, that cost could be considered a wash. Therefore the decision should be made on other factors. I use the "good money after bad" argument to help diminish any residual value of previous training in "non-free software" .

I contend that the real needs of the government workers, in terms of where they spend their real computer usage time throughout the day, are primarily:

• TN3270 mainframe connectivity
• email
• occassional intranet browsing
• occasional, simple word processing outside email and document creation
• for some people, intensive web document preparation

I argue that the specialized workers doing desktop publishing will be converting to an HTML solution (I actually encourage SGML but that is another story). That is but one example of a specialized need. As we look at each kind of specialized worker's needs, I hope to identify usable, if not excellent free software alternatives. Where a non-free solution simply does not exist, I support using existing non-free products under the GNU/Linux DOS and Windows emulators.

I contend that the addiction to non-free software is costing state government, in his agency alone, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of taxpayer dollars per year. The cost for all of local, state and federal government is staggering but I am not making that legislative point at this time. I hope, instead, to persuade one major agency of government to make the transition and become a showcase that proves to the rest of government that becoming free (from their non-free software addiction) is possible, attainable and has wonderful side-effects. There is benefit in investing in human resources rather than pouring money out of state. There is a wellspring of net accessible volunteer talent waiting to be tapped.

If I fail to bring about this transition (from the non-free to the free) from the bottom of government upward, then I will ask the Legislature to declare a moratorium on all software and software training expenditures until the matter can be investigated. I believe that tens of millions are being needlessly spent each biennium and I am pretty sure I can prove it, if given the chance. I prefer bottom up solutions, rather than top-down solutions imposed from orders on high, and I hope to persuade one department to, at least, do a fair cost-benefit analysis and develop a prototype. If that gentle approach fails, I will go for the cold turkey, Legislature mandated withdrawal.

Let me say very clearly that I am in no way intending to disparage the fine work being done by any government employee. Any informed person you talk to in government is gravely concerned about the escalating costs of technology and wants viable solutions. They didn't sit down one day, a decade ago, and decide that they were going to become addicted to the latest whiz-bang technology. It just happened, fix by fix, and now they are addicted. I admit that there are people in the game to build their resumes. For the most part, I have observed that government managers have long been gravely concerned but have believed they had no alternative. It used to be that nobody in government could ever be reprimanded for recommending IBM. Today the same holds true for Microsoft. Tomorrow, I want the same to hold true for GNU software. This is the quintessential issue.

Nobody wants to stand out there and face the risks of recommending an unproven technology solutions. Any recommended solution must consider many things like: the stability and usability of the software, the cost of the software, the availability of adequate support and the cost of adequate support. I contend that GNU/Linux is proven technology and that the GNU/Linux development and support infrastructure is the best. It has the advantage that much support is donated by the GNU volunteers. It has the advantage that commercial support is available for the same price as the alternatives. If I can prove these assertions, then I may be able to persuade one manager to stand out there a little bit. I am recommending two steps to precede the final choice: 1) perform a cost-benefit study of the Common Desktop alternatives and 2) create a prototype of the primary alternative Common Desktop solutions (Windows NT, GNU/Linux, platform independent Java clients, and other reasonable alternatives).

Just so you know, I am also recommending consideration of a thin client, platform independent Java enabled browser solution. The department has lots of old hardware around that would get a lot of extra life with this solution. Also, I am trying to persuade them, in terms of their information and processes, to open themselves to the taxpaying public and the public they serve and the advocates. Many members of the public have older technology that could utilize a Java enabled browser to conduct a dialogue with the department's mainframe computer system. To my knowledge, only Java has this particular ability. This is a side issue to this posting but I thought I should disclose it.

That's kind of a thumbnail of this initiative. Those who remember my other writings will see this as a small piece of a bigger work that intends: 1) to bring copyleft to government information and software development, 2) to connect up the free software community with government, 3) to open photonic government to the people and 4) to help build photonic democracy. (Note: photonics is merely my preferred transport mechanism; you can substitute "electronic" if you prefer.)

Thank you for your time spent considering this matter and for any help you can provide.

August 27, 1998, posted to comp.os.linux.misc regarding The GNU/Linux Desktop Alternative by "Lyno Sullivan" lynosull@maroon.tc.umn.edu Posted to debian-user@lists.debian.org

Lyno Sullivan has begun researching the GNU/Linux Desktop alternative for more mainstream usage in government. Click the link below and read what he has to say. It's a work in progress, but it's definately worth a read. Throw in your 2 bits and hopefully he can convince more than just Minnesota.

The following was written by Slashdot Reader Lyno Sullivan

I am advising a friend, who is planning a major upgrade of thousands of desktops, in a major department of Minnesota state government, that he ought to insist on a cost-benefit analysis that includes GNU/Linux and the GNU Office Suite (I need the list of these products). Windows NT and Microsoft Office seem to be a shoe in choice but are very expensive because of the software licensing cost and the cost of re-training support staff.

I am doing this as volunteer work. All of my writings are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and may be freely copied and modified provided that any derived works are under the GPL.

THE HELP I NEED FROM YOU

Please recommend URL's that show cost-benefit analyses of the GNU/Linux desktop alternative. Also, it would be helpful to have URL's for major installations that currently use GNU/Linux. Finally, if you were trying to persuade my friend of the efficacy of this choice, what would you say?

I intend to collect up the feedback I receive and forward it to my friend, post it on the web and, perhaps, inject it into an upcoming conference that looks at the technology futures for the department.

BACKGROUND The major thesis of my argument is that, since the department must re-train all their support staff anyway, that cost could be considered a wash. Therefore the decision should be made on other factors. I use the "good money after bad" argument to help diminish any residual value of previous training in "non-free software" .

I contend that the real needs of the government workers, in terms of where they spend their real computer usage time throughout the day, are primarily:

• TN3270 mainframe connectivity
• email
• occassional intranet browsing
• occasional, simple word processing outside email and document creation
• for some people, intensive web document preparation

I argue that the specialized workers doing desktop publishing will be converting to an HTML solution (I actually encourage SGML but that is another story). That is but one example of a specialized need. As we look at each kind of specialized worker's needs, I hope to identify usable, if not excellent free software alternatives. Where a non-free solution simply does not exist, I support using existing non-free products under the GNU/Linux DOS and Windows emulators.

I contend that the addiction to non-free software is costing state government, in his agency alone, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of taxpayer dollars per year. The cost for all of local, state and federal government is staggering but I am not making that legislative point at this time. I hope, instead, to persuade one major agency of government to make the transition and become a showcase that proves to the rest of government that becoming free (from their non-free software addiction) is possible, attainable and has wonderful side-effects. There is benefit in investing in human resources rather than pouring money out of state. There is a wellspring of net accessible volunteer talent waiting to be tapped.

If I fail to bring about this transition (from the non-free to the free) from the bottom of government upward, then I will ask the Legislature to declare a moratorium on all software and software training expenditures until the matter can be investigated. I believe that tens of millions are being needlessly spent each biennium and I am pretty sure I can prove it, if given the chance. I prefer bottom up solutions, rather than top-down solutions imposed from orders on high, and I hope to persuade one department to, at least, do a fair cost-benefit analysis and develop a prototype. If that gentle approach fails, I will go for the cold turkey, Legislature mandated withdrawal.

Let me say very clearly that I am in no way intending to disparage the fine work being done by any government employee. Any informed person you talk to in government is gravely concerned about the escalating costs of technology and wants viable solutions. They didn't sit down one day, a decade ago, and decide that they were going to become addicted to the latest whiz-bang technology. It just happened, fix by fix, and now they are addicted. I admit that there are people in the game to build their resumes. For the most part, I have observed that government managers have long been gravely concerned but have believed they had no alternative. It used to be that nobody in government could ever be reprimanded for recommending IBM. Today the same holds true for Microsoft. Tomorrow, I want the same to hold true for GNU software. This is the quintessential issue.

Nobody wants to stand out there and face the risks of recommending an unproven technology solutions. Any recommended solution must consider many things like: the stability and usability of the software, the cost of the software, the availability of adequate support and the cost of adequate support. I contend that GNU/Linux is proven technology and that the GNU/Linux development and support infrastructure is the best. It has the advantage that much support is donated by the GNU volunteers. It has the advantage that commercial support is available for the same price as the alternatives. If I can prove these assertions, then I may be able to persuade one manager to stand out there a little bit. I am recommending two steps to precede the final choice: 1) perform a cost-benefit study of the Common Desktop alternatives and 2) create a prototype of the primary alternative Common Desktop solutions (Windows NT, GNU/Linux, platform independent Java clients, and other reasonable alternatives).

Just so you know, I am also recommending consideration of a thin client, platform independent Java enabled browser solution. The department has lots of old hardware around that would get a lot of extra life with this solution. Also, I am trying to persuade them, in terms of their information and processes, to open themselves to the taxpaying public and the public they serve and the advocates. Many members of the public have older technology that could utilize a Java enabled browser to conduct a dialogue with the department's mainframe computer system. To my knowledge, only Java has this particular ability. This is a side issue to this posting but I thought I should disclose it.

That's kind of a thumbnail of this initiative. Those who remember my other writings will see this as a small piece of a bigger work that intends: 1) to bring copyleft to government information and software development, 2) to connect up the free software community with government, 3) to open photonic government to the people and 4) to help build photonic democracy. (Note: photonics is merely my preferred transport mechanism; you can substitute "electronic" if you prefer.)

Thank you for your time spent considering this matter and for any help you can provide.

August 27, 1998, posted to comp.os.linux.misc regarding The GNU/Linux Desktop Alternative by "Lyno Sullivan" lynosull@maroon.tc.umn.edu Posted to debian-user@lists.debian.org

Matthew T writes "The one and only RMS is on a tour of New Zealand, and he gave a talk at the University of Canterbury this afternoon ... if you're interested in what he had to say (about Hurd's mistake, why KDE is a Bad Thing^TM, and why WordPerfect, Oracle etc. for GNU/Linux are ultimately irrelevant, among other topics), I've done a rough write-up of the talk. "

Well, maybe it isn't actually an introduction for everyone, but for a lot of us, Lalo Martins has written a nice article to reacquant ourselves with Ox, an Object Model for computers. Check it out if you're interested in learning about it. The following was written by Slashdot reader Lalo Martins. The Ox project

Shortly, Ox is a complete full object model, meaning it wishes to make possible to access anything you expect from a computer in an object-oriented interface. An object-oriented interface means everything you could want to access is an object and, as such, has a class, and benefits from inheritance and polymorphism.

To use my favourite example, in Ox you won't write a "word processor" application; instead you will write a "word-processing-document" class, and objects of this class (documents) would contain all information they need to edit and print themselves, and all other functions you would expect from a word processor, plus others that are made possible by a pure object-oriented environment.

Hovever, Ox does not want to trash all existing software; one of its minor goals is to have hooks to make possible compatibility with anything - and no, I'm not exagerating, the idea is being able to using anything from grep to perl to self (a programing language) to PNG images to old MSX games.

Context

There are many object models. There are many good object-oriented programming languages. There are many object-oriented databases. There are even many good object-oriented tools to make programs cooperate - such as CORBA and ILU. But they are not object-oriented environments.

The very phrase I used to describe CORBA and ILU shows their shortcomings; they're object-oriented tools to make programs cooperate. You still have to write programs, and not classes. Well, I'm tired of writing programs - excuse me sir, I want to write classes. I don't want a tool for cooperation between programs, but a tool for cooperation between persistant objects.

Actually, few people have realized it, but object-oriented databases come far closer to a true, full object-oriented environment than CORBA or ILU. Herectic am I? I would be honoured to be called so :-) people much better than me have. Most of them were not afraid to defenestrate dusty concepts and introduce new ones. I'm a little more of a coward; I'm not introducing a new concept, I'm just trying to explore an old one (OOP) to its full potential.

On the other hand, now I got addicted to my GNU/Linux system and I want to do it "the Unix way" - I want to be able to modify stuff by modifying files by hand, or by moving files around etc. I want to be able to clone an object with "cp" and send it to a friend attached in a MIME mail message. I grew used to knowing which file has what, and I want an object environment where I can keep working this way.

Finally, once the system is working, I don't want to wait for it to reimplement everything from malloc to the X window system before I can use it. And I sure don't want to throw away the zillions lines of working code running around. This ideal system would have to have "hooks" where I could plug compatibility with any existing piece of software. One of the early examples is the hability of writing an "audio-cd" class using the excellent "cdtool" package (cdplay, cdstop, cdpause...) as methods. Alas, instant object-oriented functionality.

These are the major reasons I'm working in Ox, and are the explanations for some of the design decisions. However, these don't say everything about Ox yet; there's another, very important factor:

I'm in the Free Software community (also referred to as Open Source Software).

The Free Software community has its own way of doing things. We do things to share; sharing is an important part of it. We are opposed to binary-only software (because we want to be able to know how something works, and fix it if it doesn't work right), to interface copyrights, API copyrights, and above all, we absolutely despise NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements - contracts where you will gain knowledge of something but you must promise not to tell anyone else, essentially) when applied to software. The Free Software Community believes that software has to be shared to achieve its full potential.

The idea of "open development", more formally known as "bazzar-style" development, is another important concept that was born in the Free Software community. It's about writing the code in the open, making development versions frequently available, so that people can read it, fix it, and even help write it - actually, it's about inviting people to do that. Ox doesn't do anything useful, but it has two mailing lists set up so that anyone who wants to participate may join as soon as desired.

Status

The Ox project was born about two years ago. In this period, it died twice already. In my opinion this happened because I did everything wrong in the point of view of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" paper. I wanted to first have a good spec, then start coding. Now I want to build the two things together, so that one helps the other - the coders find a missing feature, suggest it to the specwriters, and so on. Also, with no coding going on the interest vanished quickly.

The second time I concentrated in writing a spec alone. This was even worse.

This is the third try. I'm opening up the process and inviting you to participate - either in specbuilding, coding, or both. I would have given up on Ox entirely, but in a partially-related mail RMS said he thinks Ox is a very good idea.

The result of this talk with RMS is that the Ox project is now a GNU project. Don't know if many people care, but I do, a lot. It makes me really proud to stamp in the webpages "Ox: the GNU next generation object model".

Contact

Please by all means give it a try. Help coding, help building the spec. IMHO Ox can give a fantastic advantage to the Free Software world. Draw the icons that are missing in the webpage. If you have a place for hosting lists that you think is better than makelist contact me. Or a ftp site, CVS repository... whatever. But anyway, visit the webpage and see what you think. And if this article isn't enought for an opinion, you may jump straight to the what is Ox page (this article is based on it).

Thanks,
Lalo

Copyright © 1998 Lalo Martins lalo@webcom.com http://www.webcom.com/lalo

For information on permissions to reproduce this document, consult the pertaining section in the Ox website.

Any mention to products, trademarks or copyright material of third parties does not constitute any challenge to these rights.

jake meister wrote in to tell everyone that the GNU Project is seeking nominations for their first Free Software Award. Click the link below to read the details. "The GNU project is asking for nominations for the first Free Software Award. We want to give this award on Oct 9 to a person who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software (free as in freedom; see link for the definition), through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Any kind of activity could be eligible--writing software, writing documentation, publishing CDs, even journalism--but whatever the activity, we want to recognize long-term central contributions to the development of the world of free software. "Accord with the spirit" means, for example, that software, manuals or collections of them (on tape or CD) must be entirely free. (Once again, that's free as in freedom; see link Work done commercially is eligible, but we want to give awards to individuals, not companies.

People such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, who have already received other awards for their contributions, are not eligible for the Free Software Award.

Please send your nominations to award-nominations@gnu.org, on or before August 9. In addition to the name of the person you want to nominate, please include an explanation of the work the person has done and why you think it is especially important.

The awards committee will consider nominations and decide who will receive the award. The committee's decision will be final. The committee's members are Peter Salus (Chairman), Scott Christley, Rich Morin, Adam Richter, Richard Stallman, and Vernor Vinge."

jake meister wrote in to tell everyone that the GNU Project is seeking nominations for their first Free Software Award. Click the link below to read the details. "The GNU project is asking for nominations for the first Free Software Award. We want to give this award on Oct 9 to a person who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software (free as in freedom; see link for the definition), through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Any kind of activity could be eligible--writing software, writing documentation, publishing CDs, even journalism--but whatever the activity, we want to recognize long-term central contributions to the development of the world of free software. "Accord with the spirit" means, for example, that software, manuals or collections of them (on tape or CD) must be entirely free. (Once again, that's free as in freedom; see link Work done commercially is eligible, but we want to give awards to individuals, not companies.

People such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, who have already received other awards for their contributions, are not eligible for the Free Software Award.

Please send your nominations to award-nominations@gnu.org, on or before August 9. In addition to the name of the person you want to nominate, please include an explanation of the work the person has done and why you think it is especially important.

The awards committee will consider nominations and decide who will receive the award. The committee's decision will be final. The committee's members are Peter Salus (Chairman), Scott Christley, Rich Morin, Adam Richter, Richard Stallman, and Vernor Vinge."

jake meister wrote in to tell everyone that the GNU Project is seeking nominations for their first Free Software Award. Click the link below to read the details. "The GNU project is asking for nominations for the first Free Software Award. We want to give this award on Oct 9 to a person who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software (free as in freedom; see link for the definition), through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Any kind of activity could be eligible--writing software, writing documentation, publishing CDs, even journalism--but whatever the activity, we want to recognize long-term central contributions to the development of the world of free software. "Accord with the spirit" means, for example, that software, manuals or collections of them (on tape or CD) must be entirely free. (Once again, that's free as in freedom; see link Work done commercially is eligible, but we want to give awards to individuals, not companies.

People such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, who have already received other awards for their contributions, are not eligible for the Free Software Award.

Please send your nominations to award-nominations@gnu.org, on or before August 9. In addition to the name of the person you want to nominate, please include an explanation of the work the person has done and why you think it is especially important.

The awards committee will consider nominations and decide who will receive the award. The committee's decision will be final. The committee's members are Peter Salus (Chairman), Scott Christley, Rich Morin, Adam Richter, Richard Stallman, and Vernor Vinge."

Nir Arbel has taken some time out of his reading of this vertiable compendium of software construction to give us a review of Object Oriented Software Construction, 2nd Edition. So, click below to read more about this behometh of words. Review of Object Oriented Software Construction, 2nd Edition
Author: Dr. Bertrand Meyer
Reviewed by:Nir Arbel

I have to be honest. I have not read the entirety of "Object Oriented Software Construction / 2nd Edition," although I did read most of it. The enormity of this thirteen hundred page behemoth is my official excuse. But first, a short introduction for the book and a good deal of why you, and myself as well, should read this book, cover-to-cover.

Object Oriented Software Construction / 2nd Edition, often acronymized by its fans to OOSC2E, was written by Dr. Bertrand Meyer, which is the designer of the Eiffel programming language, and head of Interactive Software Engineering, whose primary product is an Eiffel integrated development environment which they call Eiffel Bench. They have recently released a Linux port of their latest version of this product.

Now for the important stuff. OOSC2E is a must-read book for anyone who takes their programming seriously. This, however, might not be automatically gleaned out of its name. Object-orientation has generated as much mistrust and disbelief as it did praise and following. Take the hackers' development community and try to relate the object-oriented development model to it. Chances are you'd instinctively disregard this option as impractical, and there would be quite much to support this notion. For instance, the hacker's attitude of "everyone's code is everyone's code" seems to stand in opposition to the Object Oriented model's principle of "hide everything but that which should be absolutely necessarily exposed", but that may be a simple misinterpretation of this directive. The hiding principle's aim is not to support the anti-GNU notion of private code, but rather to help avoid misuse of code. I have no idea whether a true object-oriented development model would work for a disorganized group of hackers, but after reading the better half of OOSC2E, I'm not at all sure it's not worth a try. Furthermore, I am utterly convinced that the object-oriented method would yield numerous benefits in any software project large enough, if it were correctly implemented. But enough about Object Orientation. On with the book.

One thing that sets OOSC2E apart from other books that discuss the same subject is the non-condescending, all-telling manner of Dr. Meyer's writing. While many other books which deal with Object-Orientation hit you on the head with dry methodologies and principles, with little or not attempt to explain why you should even bother putting in the extra effort to correctly implement Object-Orientation, OOSC2E is written for the skeptic; for those of us who heard a bit too much about it and are beginning to suspect it to be a red herring. A conspiracy brought upon the heads of die-hard coders to diminish their belief in their abilities. Dr. Meyer does a brilliant job of stressing the importance of the Object Oriented method. First he begins with describing which areas in software development most direly need improvement at the moment, which he does by example, he then goes on to present feasible and reasonable solutions for the problems presented at their simplest and most abstract form. Then he goes on to define a set of more specific rules, from which he derives a set of principles. Thus endeth the book's introduction. By the time you traverse this part of the book (which is rather massive, actually), you're almost guaranteed to have acquired a better understanding of why and how the software development process should be improved.

Starting with the second part of the book, Dr. Meyer takes the reader through the process of implementing the principles that concluded the first part of the book. He does this by developing a rather simple, coherent notation which would allow the reader to better understand the ideas presented in the book. Little by little the notation is developed. Add a language construct here; insert a rule there. By the end of the book you have something which might as well be a programming language, although many programmers would consider it to be too simplistic to be of any use. There's also a dirty little secret concerning the notation which is kept from the reader until the very last page of the book, but most readers would catch on to it very quickly, if not while reading this review. If you'd rather find out for yourself then skip on to the next paragraph, as this may be considered a spoiler. As the book ends, the reader is told that the notation that was so meticulously developed as the book progressed is in fact Eiffel. Many would consider this a shameless commercial plug, since Dr. Meyer's company, as noted earlier, sells an Eiffel development environment. This would also explain why he chose to keep this a secret from the reader until the very last page of the book. Many would resent buying a book that claims to teach the Object-Oriented method, then discover that a good part of it teaches you Eiffel. But Morality aside, spreading Eiffel thin all through the book does nothing to harm its effectiveness. It may be argued that it's a big plus, because by the time you reach the last page, not only have you gained a better understanding of the programming practice as a whole, you've also learned another programming. Fact is that Eiffel is simple enough to aid the learning process rather than hamper it.

Luckily enough, the good writing that characterizes the first part of the book also carries over to the rest of it. But clarity of presentation alone does not make a book the classic that OOSC2E is. The book is virtually paved with mind-blowing and intellectually exciting ideas and concepts. So much that you'll often find yourself smacking your forehead and wonder why certain things have been, and still are, done so differently. Every page oozes uncompromising perfectionism. Ironically, that is exactly why some readers would find this book exasperating at times. One should understand that Dr. Meyer's point of view on the Object Oriented method is just that -- a point of view. There are many other conflicting views expressed by people no less creditable. And whenever the book comes to a debated or debatable point the reader often has to deal with a dogmatic, rather fanatic rationalization of the author's opinions. It is important to remember as one reads the book, not to take everything written as gospel. Dr. Meyer makes many, many excellent points and makes perfect sense most of the time. Just beware of the times he doesn't.

Another group of readers that may find this book exasperating is that composed of programmers of non-Eiffel, Object-Oriented languages, for the same perfectionism discussed in the previous paragraph. The book is filled with many examples taken from other programming, such as C++, Java and Ada, usually under the rubric of "how not to do things correctly". For instance, while it's true that automatic garbage collection is a very powerful programming aid, saying that its absence is unthinkable (C++ implementations, for example, almost never feature automatic garbage collection) may irritate programmers of languages which do not answer to Dr. Meyer's strict criteria, which have, in many cases, proved their usefulness as object-oriented programming tools.

A final note: A thorough read of this book may send you on the search for a good Eiffel tool. As mentioned earlier, ISE does sell a Linux version of their Eiffel Bench, but since I know many of you guys feel religious about the GNU license and since the Linux version is still rather unstable due to it being rather new, you might fancy an alternative. I can recommend two: SmallEiffel, which is a GNU-licensed Eiffel compiler, and Sather, which is a different language based on Eiffel. Sather, mind you, was originally conceived as a free product, which means that everything Sather is freely downloadable, including the language standard, the programmer's manual, tons of additional documentation, a compiler (which works just fine on Linux as far as I can tell), an Emacs major-mode and lots and lots more. It's quite a gem, really. Grab it over here.

The one and only Richard M. Stallman wrote in to clarify his views on Proprietary Software running on free OSs. Hit the link below to read his statement on the subject.

The following is written by Richard M. Stallman

I'd like to clear up a misunderstanding about my views on the issue of proprietary software running on free operating systems, by distingushing two separate questions:

1. Is it a good thing?
2. Would prohibiting it be a good thing?

Sometimes it is counterproductive to prohibit something, even though the thing itself is wrong. I think that's the case here.

If the GNU C library were released under the ordinary GPL instead of the LGPL, that would prohibit proprietary applications for GNU/Linux systems (all use some version of the GNU C Library, perhaps modified). So the question is, which strategy would be better for the free software movement? Which would lead to more free software development, more densely covering a broader range of tasks, in the long term?

This question is academic today, since the decision was made years ago, and practically speaking we couldn't change it now. But it seems to me that permitting proprietary applications has led to more free software development. It has probably made GNU/Linux systems more popular, and that has probably led to a lot more development of free applications; meanwhile, it has probably done little (so far!) to encourage making applications proprietary, because people who want to do that would not have hesitated to host them exclusively on other operating systems.

This doesn't mean that proprietary applications are a good thing. People deserve the freedom to share; software should be free. Now that free operating systems give you the possibility of using a computer with free software exclusively, it would be a shame to retreat from freedom by installing some proprietary software.

PS: Strategic choices depend on the magnitude of various pros and cons, and all sorts of details can affect them. Two analogous situations can call for different strategies. That's why it is better to use the GNU Library GPL for some libraries, and better to use the ordinary GPL for other libraries, to limit them to free software only.

The one and only Richard M. Stallman wrote in to clarify his views on Proprietary Software running on free OSs. Hit the link below to read his statement on the subject.

The following is written by Richard M. Stallman

I'd like to clear up a misunderstanding about my views on the issue of proprietary software running on free operating systems, by distingushing two separate questions:

1. Is it a good thing?
2. Would prohibiting it be a good thing?

Sometimes it is counterproductive to prohibit something, even though the thing itself is wrong. I think that's the case here.

If the GNU C library were released under the ordinary GPL instead of the LGPL, that would prohibit proprietary applications for GNU/Linux systems (all use some version of the GNU C Library, perhaps modified). So the question is, which strategy would be better for the free software movement? Which would lead to more free software development, more densely covering a broader range of tasks, in the long term?

This question is academic today, since the decision was made years ago, and practically speaking we couldn't change it now. But it seems to me that permitting proprietary applications has led to more free software development. It has probably made GNU/Linux systems more popular, and that has probably led to a lot more development of free applications; meanwhile, it has probably done little (so far!) to encourage making applications proprietary, because people who want to do that would not have hesitated to host them exclusively on other operating systems.

This doesn't mean that proprietary applications are a good thing. People deserve the freedom to share; software should be free. Now that free operating systems give you the possibility of using a computer with free software exclusively, it would be a shame to retreat from freedom by installing some proprietary software.

PS: Strategic choices depend on the magnitude of various pros and cons, and all sorts of details can affect them. Two analogous situations can call for different strategies. That's why it is better to use the GNU Library GPL for some libraries, and better to use the ordinary GPL for other libraries, to limit them to free software only.

This is the first of a series of articles investigating the interplay between Open Source Software and commercial vendors. The common thread will be to find out how authors have earned a living from writing and servicing GPL/Open Source Software.

The series kicks off with Michael Tiemann, one of the founders of Cygnus Solutions, and author of the C++ component of GCC. Cygnus is one of the pioneers in commercial support for open-source software. It sells support and customization services for the gnu programming tools (gcc, gdb, ld, etc). Initially, the Free Software Foundation applauded this, but more recently, RMS feels that by also selling proprietary software Cygnus has betrayed the principle of free software.

In this interview, Michael discusses what it takes to set up a business based on open source software, what Cygnus hopes to add to GCC, and why they took the decision to sell closed source software.

What is written in red, is what Michael wrote to me in an email
What is written in green, is what I transcribed from my notes of our telephone interview. Any mistakes therein are mine.

• How difficult was it for you to set up Cygnus Solutions?
• • How did the banks cope with Cygnus' non orthodox business model?
  • How difficult was it to find the first customers?
  • What advice could you give someone who has written a GPL'd (or similar) program, and wants to live off it by providing services to commercial users?
  • Can one survive purely on the provision of services?
  • What types of services have you found to be the most important for commercial customers? What sort of guaranties do they want? What should one pay special attention to?

• • The greatest challenge in setting up Cygnus was in finding a name under which we could do business. This is not a joke...for three months we went through a process of finding a name, submitting it to the dept. of corporations, only to learn that the name had already been taken. We were about to give up hope when such an ugly name as "Software Support, Inc." had been registered the same year we tried to get it. When we learned that Cygnus Support (note the embedded GNU in Cygnus) was ours to use, we were overjoyed.

    Cygnus was started with virtually no money. At the time, I wanted John Gilmore (whose userid was gnu@sun.com) to be one of the founders (he was employee #5 at Sun, and was the guy who ported BSD Unix to the 68020), not for his money, but for hus programming skills. I put _my_ money where my mouth was, proposing that all three founders put in the same amount of money at the start. At that time, I had less than $3000 in the bank, so I proposed we each put in $2000 at the start, and raise the ante to $5000 when I could afford it. As you can see, we did _nothing_ to try to get banks interested, so there was nothing to explain to them.

    As for finding the first customers...it was just a matter of knocking enough times on the correct doors. As the author of GNU C++, it was pretty easy for me to talk to high-level technical people, who would then introduce me to mid-level managers. We sold GNU support primarily as a cost-saving measure, so we did not need VP level approval. Nowadays we have a much more strategic sell, but we're also much better established, so we can call on and get VP level approvals.

    I've always advised everybody that if they want to start a free software business, they should not let anything stop them. Of those who did, most managed to break even or make a small profit, leading me to believe that there's more to Cygnus's success than merely addressing a market opportunity. We've always been willing to make tough decisions, and we've always listened to customers, even when they were yelling at the top of their voices. Those who do free software for love, rather than money, are not going to survive what we've been through.

    As far as what customers really want...they want somebody who will listen to their needs, formulate a long-term plan, and then deliver without a lot of hassle or risk. Some customers like to see you work; others like to see the work you do; still others think you are doing a great job if they never see you. In the end, it's not the guarantees you offer that make customers come back..it's what you can deliver. The free software model is unique in that it actually gives an incentive for customers to work with you, not independently from you. In the fast-moving high tech world, that advantage has put us in the #1 spot in our market...no mean feat.

• Cygnus and the FSC (Free Software Community)
• • What exactly are you providing to the FSC?

• • We pour about $10M/year into the development of new free software. We run the servers from which 500,000 people have downloaded our stuff. We promote the concept of free software in articles, conferences, and advertising. We sponsor free software projects and pay free software contractors who do work that's related to our business requirements (though not something we'd directly commercialize). We provide a generous matching fund so that employees and customers who want to donate to the FSF can see their donation multiplied.

• How long does it take for your new code to be released in Egcs, or other freely downloadable source code?

• • The std deviation of this number makes an average number meaningless. If you download EGCS, I'll bet that the ChangeLog entries are no more than 45 days old. Compare that to other FSF-controlled packages where they can be months or years old. It is important to realize that we don't control when the FSF releases code.

• How much do you feel you are getting from the FSC? Would it have been simpler to write you own compiler?

• • Simpler, perhaps. But we would not have been able to distinguish ourselves from the other N proprietary companies. I mentioned earlier that people are now chosing Cygnus not because we are cheaper, but because we are _strategic_. We could not have achieved that strategic positioning in the compiler space in any other way.

• What overhead is there with working with the FSC?

• • It's whatever you want. Some people like to spend hours arguing about indentation styles. Others just decide they are going to do somthing and they do it. I wrote the first native-code C++ compiler in 6 month in 1987. It was hard work, and it was rough, but once I demonstrated the momentum I could sustains, dozens joined to the GCC/G++ team.

    In 1989, when GCC 1.x was getting fairly mature, I wrote an instruction scheduler, re-wrote a branch scheduler that had been abandoned, and wrote several cool new optimizations that could not easily fit with GCC 1.x. I declared that we should start GCC 2, with the goal of integrating this new work, new C++ language features, and an eye towards optimal code generation for RISC machines.

    GCC 2.x is now reaching maturity, and it's just not possible to preserve that kind of stability with the while working on advanced/experimental/cool new stuff we want to do. Hence we created EGCS. I've been amazed at the number and quality of volunteers who are now working on that branch. Thus, for GCC 2, the overhead is high, whereas for EGCS, the overhead is negative.

• What sort of friction is there between immediate customer concerns and the interests of the FSC?

• • No difference to any other scarce-resource problem.

• • The FSF's objective is a free software world. The customer's objective is a solution that satisfies his needs. The problem is that commercial work always pays more, so more people do that, which frustrates the FSF that not more people are on its bandwagon.

• Which strengths do you see in the Bazaar and Cathedral models of free software development?

• • Although Eric Raymond is very good at coming up with beautiful theories, I dispute whether they are a true reflection of reality. I see GNU and Linux as two cathedrals. Both Linux and RMS are benevolent dictators. What sets them apart is that Linus is willing to take more risks, to rewrite more of his software, while RMS is a perfectionist. Overall, I believe that risks win, and the risk of reimplementing things lead to a better result. Eric and I were both at the Foresight institute to discuss Netscape releasing their source code. Eric said that Cygnus's model was to provide service to commercial customers for free software products, while Netscape was going to lead the standards with its Free software strategy. I disagree with this since Cygnus too is leading the standards in the embedded market with free software.

• Why did you decide to sell software without source-code, given that this soured your relation with the FSF?

• • We measure success in $$, not FSF relationship. Free software works great for support, not for products.

    Cygnus has been very successful at its challenge. In 8 years we've become the number one tool supplier for the embedded market. Our growth is limited only by the number of sales and technical people we can find to employ. I expect our business will be eventually worth 100 of millions dollars per year. But this has taken lots of effort, and is only achieved by making life easy for our customers. For instance, we support 17 different host-target combinations for Cisco alone. Their routers' CPUs vary from the very simple basic RISC chip to very complex CISC chips with fancy features, yet they want the same code to work on any host-target combination. Contrast this to Sun or Microsoft where the same code will not work on SunOS 4/Solaris or Windows 95/NT. We support SGI, HP, NT (etc) so that our customers do not have to decide on their platform because of us. In total we support 170 different host-target combinations.

    The proprietary model and the free software model provide two different kinds of simplicity. The free software model provides simplicity of APIs: there is no need to waste time reverse-engineering things if you have source. The proprietary model provides simplicity of control: your software does not go off and have a life of its own, you can control your investment, your price points and focus on command performance rather than spend time on building a consensus. For instance, say we have two customers, one of whom has a bad bug he needs fixed, the other of whom has sent us an enhancement to our product. Say furthermore that we only have enough time to service one of their needs. If we fix the bug, then the customer who sent us the enhancement will be disappointed -- they did what the GPL said to do --, and they will wonder why they need support from us, since the guys on the net included their enhancement while we did not. If we add the enhancement, then one of our customers still has a bug, and if he cares nothing for having the source-code, he will look somewhere else for business. So adopting the proprietary model allows us to control our strategy. If the need for strategic control disappears then the software can become free, but this might never happen. For instance, dejagnu was not planned to be commercial software, so we put on the net to get help from the people out there.

    In my opinion, Sun has done a bad job at being a software leader, as has Microsoft. What GNU and Linux are doing is pushing the envelope back up.

• You provide compilers for the embedded market

• • Yes. The embedded market is very different from the traditional desktop market. For instance, the object files that became popular in the embedded market differ from those used in the desktop/workstation markets. Originally embedded people worked on Sun 3's and cross-compiled 68000 code into a.out executables. But a.out has limitations such as not allowing multiple data sections. New formats were devised to address this and other issues.

    Another difference is the embedded market is extremely cost-conscious. For instance, the money made on cellular telephones is made on the subscription. Thus the bill of materials for a cellular telephone must be extremely low. Similarly, end-product functionality is more of a concern that compatibility. Because RISC processors provide approximately twice the compute-power for half the electric power of a CISC processor, they are being adopted more rapidly than in the PC market. MIPS is now dethroning the previous king of the embedded world, the 68000 family, having sold 44 million units last year versus 68000's 42 million.

    Providing one same set of compilers for a wide variety of chips has made us into the standard for the embedded market. We have close ties with CPU companies, such as Toshiba, so that each new chip is released with a new version of our compiler. This makes it easy for our customers to choose which ever chip will give the best cost/performance ratio, without worrying about high porting costs.

• What features did you have to add for this market?

• • We added many features that improve code performance and code size. We provide a very lean and mean implementation of C++ to allow embedded programmers to use the C++ features they need. Indeed, we were the first to ship C++ for the embedded world, for Nortel in 1990. We've added the ability to control via #pragmas the type of return code the compiler should use, so that interrupt routines can be written in C. Another embedded feature is the ability to specify into which segment each function should go. And to help our customers migrate rapidly from chip architecture to chip architecture, we have a whole series of #pragmas to control the way in which data structures are laid out in memory. This allows them to have binary compatibility of data structures even if the code was originally written to access words at odd boundaries, but the target processor does not allow this.

• Are there any new #pragma like commands to control code size at a lower granularity (e.g.: for single functions)

• Are there any new #pragma like commands to control speed as a lower granularity (e.g.: for single functions)

• • We find generally that programmers want the same level of optimization for a particular module. However some optimizations of that kind are described in the processor specific optimization documentation: these are processor dependent trade-offs. For instance, on an R10000 (MIPS), bigger code is faster in that keeps all 4 pipes full. On the other hand, we had to deal with very high space constraints when we worked with Sega. They used the Gnu compiler for the Sega Saturn. And although the SH (Super Hitachi processor) encodes 32 bit instructions into 16 bits, we had to change the compiler significantly to cope with the fact that loading immediate values (such as 57) is very convoluted: you read the value then jump over it, making immediate value loads very expensive when the compiler assumed they would be cheap.

    Generally, we think code size will become less and less of an issue: at the rate at which chips are shrinking and processes are improving (such as the extreme Ultra Violet process), the average DRAM chip will contain 1.7 Gbits in 2001 and 237 Gbits in 2012. Bandwidth problems will be alleviated by developments such as Mitsubishi's M32R chip, which has a core on a 16 Mbit ram, and has a huge bandwidth.

• Do you have any benchmarks to compare the current GCC levels of compilation (code size, speed) with compilers from Metaware, IBM, Microsoft, Borland, Symantec, Intel's VTUNE, etc?

• • We use the Bench++ benchmark. In contrast to SPEC benchmarks, this uses Stepanov's abstraction benchmark to determine the cost of various C++ features. For instance at the 0th level of abstraction, the code uses an integer, at the 1st it uses a double, then a class with a double member, then a class with a double pointer member... including template iterators until the 12th level is reached. GNU beats Sun and HP's compilers by a factor of 10. Similarly, GNU exception handling is 10 times faster than HP's.

    In terms of the SPEC base benchmarks EGCS attains the same level as SGI's compiler (the best in the business) with -O and -O2 options. Beyond that, SGI allows one to specify tons of options, such as cache size, which generates better code. However no one actually uses these options, so it's not much of an issue.

    As a company, other than the CygWin guys, we don't compare ourselves with the PC guys, so I can't give you a comparison. The DJGPP guys may have some info. Metaware is a non factor for us, since none of our customers complain about our performance.

• Future trends
  • What new features would you like to see in future revisions of GCC?

• • We'd like to see a good implementation bridging the gap between C/C++ and Java. There are good ideas in Java. It provides open standards that are very important to the downloadable world I believe will arise in the future: it provides a simple way to connect to the web, which essential to achieving an information aware infrastructure.

    However Sun's current behaviour is very worrying. Anything that Sun writes becomes a Java API. This is not unlike Microsoft, who redefined C APIs, even though a standard existed (POSIX), to such an extent that even "hello world" will not work (stdout and stderr are not available from winMain()). Sun is playing a similar game with Java, and we fear it will lead to incompatibilities, balkanizing Java, and letting the competition win. Although Sun snipes free versions of Java, all it is doing is replaying the Unix wars. We hope that GCC will be the free standard wedge that keeps the door open.

• What do you think of the idea that programs are JIT compiled to optimize the features being used, to maximize memory efficiency (as Intel's VTUNE does) while minimizing total footprint by leaving most of the code in a compressed bytecode format (as www.tao.co.uk is suggesting).

• • We view the problem rather differently: what do you want to use your CPU power for? Do you want to use it for JIT compilation, or for running the application? We think the latter. So the JIT should be done on the server. There is no reason why your processor could not identify itself to the server and let the server produce whatever native implementation is best for it. Profile information could also be sent to the server in this way. We will be showing in an upcoming Dr Dobbs Journal, that the performance one can achieve in native-compiled Java is comparable to that of C. Speedwise, this is a better solution than a Java chip, because Lisp Machines have already shown us that register based machines present many more opportunities for optimizations than stack machines. Powerwise it is also advantageous as compilation is rather expensive on a battery. Even in terms of code size, gzip compressed 32 bit RISC code is comparable in size to the equivalent byte-code.

• What do you think of IBM's idea of simplifying processor state-machines to increase frequency by moving more of the complexity to software?

• • Like EPIC, the proof will be in the proverbial pudding. Different RISC implementations vary greatly in power, although in principle they should provide similar levels of performance. For instance, a 200 Mhz R10000 provides a similar level of performance to a 600 Mhz Alpha.

• Do you anticipate commercial proprietary source-code will at the end of the day dominate the market-place, or do you feel that free software backed up by a service industry will take over?

• • I think the distinction will be like the difference between public and private life. While we may let all the people on the net look at our source-code we don't let them play with our money. I believe that free software will determine the standards in the world. Proprietary software will exist in niches, where customers don't care for the source code. Instead of spending time building a concensus, proprietary software allows a company to focus on producing a piece of software as quickly as possible to catch a market opportunity. For instance, we use ORACLE's database software. We don't have the source-code, and don't want it because its internal complexity is irrelevant to us: we just want to use it.

This is the first of a series of articles investigating the interplay between Open Source Software and commercial vendors. The common thread will be to find out how authors have earned a living from writing and servicing GPL/Open Source Software.

The series kicks off with Michael Tiemann, one of the founders of Cygnus Solutions, and author of the C++ component of GCC. Cygnus is one of the pioneers in commercial support for open-source software. It sells support and customization services for the gnu programming tools (gcc, gdb, ld, etc). Initially, the Free Software Foundation applauded this, but more recently, RMS feels that by also selling proprietary software Cygnus has betrayed the principle of free software.

In this interview, Michael discusses what it takes to set up a business based on open source software, what Cygnus hopes to add to GCC, and why they took the decision to sell closed source software.

What is written in red, is what Michael wrote to me in an email
What is written in green, is what I transcribed from my notes of our telephone interview. Any mistakes therein are mine.

• How difficult was it for you to set up Cygnus Solutions?
• • How did the banks cope with Cygnus' non orthodox business model?
  • How difficult was it to find the first customers?
  • What advice could you give someone who has written a GPL'd (or similar) program, and wants to live off it by providing services to commercial users?
  • Can one survive purely on the provision of services?
  • What types of services have you found to be the most important for commercial customers? What sort of guaranties do they want? What should one pay special attention to?

• • The greatest challenge in setting up Cygnus was in finding a name under which we could do business. This is not a joke...for three months we went through a process of finding a name, submitting it to the dept. of corporations, only to learn that the name had already been taken. We were about to give up hope when such an ugly name as "Software Support, Inc." had been registered the same year we tried to get it. When we learned that Cygnus Support (note the embedded GNU in Cygnus) was ours to use, we were overjoyed.

    Cygnus was started with virtually no money. At the time, I wanted John Gilmore (whose userid was gnu@sun.com) to be one of the founders (he was employee #5 at Sun, and was the guy who ported BSD Unix to the 68020), not for his money, but for hus programming skills. I put _my_ money where my mouth was, proposing that all three founders put in the same amount of money at the start. At that time, I had less than $3000 in the bank, so I proposed we each put in $2000 at the start, and raise the ante to $5000 when I could afford it. As you can see, we did _nothing_ to try to get banks interested, so there was nothing to explain to them.

    As for finding the first customers...it was just a matter of knocking enough times on the correct doors. As the author of GNU C++, it was pretty easy for me to talk to high-level technical people, who would then introduce me to mid-level managers. We sold GNU support primarily as a cost-saving measure, so we did not need VP level approval. Nowadays we have a much more strategic sell, but we're also much better established, so we can call on and get VP level approvals.

    I've always advised everybody that if they want to start a free software business, they should not let anything stop them. Of those who did, most managed to break even or make a small profit, leading me to believe that there's more to Cygnus's success than merely addressing a market opportunity. We've always been willing to make tough decisions, and we've always listened to customers, even when they were yelling at the top of their voices. Those who do free software for love, rather than money, are not going to survive what we've been through.

    As far as what customers really want...they want somebody who will listen to their needs, formulate a long-term plan, and then deliver without a lot of hassle or risk. Some customers like to see you work; others like to see the work you do; still others think you are doing a great job if they never see you. In the end, it's not the guarantees you offer that make customers come back..it's what you can deliver. The free software model is unique in that it actually gives an incentive for customers to work with you, not independently from you. In the fast-moving high tech world, that advantage has put us in the #1 spot in our market...no mean feat.

• Cygnus and the FSC (Free Software Community)
• • What exactly are you providing to the FSC?

• • We pour about $10M/year into the development of new free software. We run the servers from which 500,000 people have downloaded our stuff. We promote the concept of free software in articles, conferences, and advertising. We sponsor free software projects and pay free software contractors who do work that's related to our business requirements (though not something we'd directly commercialize). We provide a generous matching fund so that employees and customers who want to donate to the FSF can see their donation multiplied.

• How long does it take for your new code to be released in Egcs, or other freely downloadable source code?

• • The std deviation of this number makes an average number meaningless. If you download EGCS, I'll bet that the ChangeLog entries are no more than 45 days old. Compare that to other FSF-controlled packages where they can be months or years old. It is important to realize that we don't control when the FSF releases code.

• How much do you feel you are getting from the FSC? Would it have been simpler to write you own compiler?

• • Simpler, perhaps. But we would not have been able to distinguish ourselves from the other N proprietary companies. I mentioned earlier that people are now chosing Cygnus not because we are cheaper, but because we are _strategic_. We could not have achieved that strategic positioning in the compiler space in any other way.

• What overhead is there with working with the FSC?

• • It's whatever you want. Some people like to spend hours arguing about indentation styles. Others just decide they are going to do somthing and they do it. I wrote the first native-code C++ compiler in 6 month in 1987. It was hard work, and it was rough, but once I demonstrated the momentum I could sustains, dozens joined to the GCC/G++ team.

    In 1989, when GCC 1.x was getting fairly mature, I wrote an instruction scheduler, re-wrote a branch scheduler that had been abandoned, and wrote several cool new optimizations that could not easily fit with GCC 1.x. I declared that we should start GCC 2, with the goal of integrating this new work, new C++ language features, and an eye towards optimal code generation for RISC machines.

    GCC 2.x is now reaching maturity, and it's just not possible to preserve that kind of stability with the while working on advanced/experimental/cool new stuff we want to do. Hence we created EGCS. I've been amazed at the number and quality of volunteers who are now working on that branch. Thus, for GCC 2, the overhead is high, whereas for EGCS, the overhead is negative.

• What sort of friction is there between immediate customer concerns and the interests of the FSC?

• • No difference to any other scarce-resource problem.

• • The FSF's objective is a free software world. The customer's objective is a solution that satisfies his needs. The problem is that commercial work always pays more, so more people do that, which frustrates the FSF that not more people are on its bandwagon.

• Which strengths do you see in the Bazaar and Cathedral models of free software development?

• • Although Eric Raymond is very good at coming up with beautiful theories, I dispute whether they are a true reflection of reality. I see GNU and Linux as two cathedrals. Both Linux and RMS are benevolent dictators. What sets them apart is that Linus is willing to take more risks, to rewrite more of his software, while RMS is a perfectionist. Overall, I believe that risks win, and the risk of reimplementing things lead to a better result. Eric and I were both at the Foresight institute to discuss Netscape releasing their source code. Eric said that Cygnus's model was to provide service to commercial customers for free software products, while Netscape was going to lead the standards with its Free software strategy. I disagree with this since Cygnus too is leading the standards in the embedded market with free software.

• Why did you decide to sell software without source-code, given that this soured your relation with the FSF?

• • We measure success in $$, not FSF relationship. Free software works great for support, not for products.

    Cygnus has been very successful at its challenge. In 8 years we've become the number one tool supplier for the embedded market. Our growth is limited only by the number of sales and technical people we can find to employ. I expect our business will be eventually worth 100 of millions dollars per year. But this has taken lots of effort, and is only achieved by making life easy for our customers. For instance, we support 17 different host-target combinations for Cisco alone. Their routers' CPUs vary from the very simple basic RISC chip to very complex CISC chips with fancy features, yet they want the same code to work on any host-target combination. Contrast this to Sun or Microsoft where the same code will not work on SunOS 4/Solaris or Windows 95/NT. We support SGI, HP, NT (etc) so that our customers do not have to decide on their platform because of us. In total we support 170 different host-target combinations.

    The proprietary model and the free software model provide two different kinds of simplicity. The free software model provides simplicity of APIs: there is no need to waste time reverse-engineering things if you have source. The proprietary model provides simplicity of control: your software does not go off and have a life of its own, you can control your investment, your price points and focus on command performance rather than spend time on building a consensus. For instance, say we have two customers, one of whom has a bad bug he needs fixed, the other of whom has sent us an enhancement to our product. Say furthermore that we only have enough time to service one of their needs. If we fix the bug, then the customer who sent us the enhancement will be disappointed -- they did what the GPL said to do --, and they will wonder why they need support from us, since the guys on the net included their enhancement while we did not. If we add the enhancement, then one of our customers still has a bug, and if he cares nothing for having the source-code, he will look somewhere else for business. So adopting the proprietary model allows us to control our strategy. If the need for strategic control disappears then the software can become free, but this might never happen. For instance, dejagnu was not planned to be commercial software, so we put on the net to get help from the people out there.

    In my opinion, Sun has done a bad job at being a software leader, as has Microsoft. What GNU and Linux are doing is pushing the envelope back up.

• You provide compilers for the embedded market

• • Yes. The embedded market is very different from the traditional desktop market. For instance, the object files that became popular in the embedded market differ from those used in the desktop/workstation markets. Originally embedded people worked on Sun 3's and cross-compiled 68000 code into a.out executables. But a.out has limitations such as not allowing multiple data sections. New formats were devised to address this and other issues.

    Another difference is the embedded market is extremely cost-conscious. For instance, the money made on cellular telephones is made on the subscription. Thus the bill of materials for a cellular telephone must be extremely low. Similarly, end-product functionality is more of a concern that compatibility. Because RISC processors provide approximately twice the compute-power for half the electric power of a CISC processor, they are being adopted more rapidly than in the PC market. MIPS is now dethroning the previous king of the embedded world, the 68000 family, having sold 44 million units last year versus 68000's 42 million.

    Providing one same set of compilers for a wide variety of chips has made us into the standard for the embedded market. We have close ties with CPU companies, such as Toshiba, so that each new chip is released with a new version of our compiler. This makes it easy for our customers to choose which ever chip will give the best cost/performance ratio, without worrying about high porting costs.

• What features did you have to add for this market?

• • We added many features that improve code performance and code size. We provide a very lean and mean implementation of C++ to allow embedded programmers to use the C++ features they need. Indeed, we were the first to ship C++ for the embedded world, for Nortel in 1990. We've added the ability to control via #pragmas the type of return code the compiler should use, so that interrupt routines can be written in C. Another embedded feature is the ability to specify into which segment each function should go. And to help our customers migrate rapidly from chip architecture to chip architecture, we have a whole series of #pragmas to control the way in which data structures are laid out in memory. This allows them to have binary compatibility of data structures even if the code was originally written to access words at odd boundaries, but the target processor does not allow this.

• Are there any new #pragma like commands to control code size at a lower granularity (e.g.: for single functions)

• Are there any new #pragma like commands to control speed as a lower granularity (e.g.: for single functions)

• • We find generally that programmers want the same level of optimization for a particular module. However some optimizations of that kind are described in the processor specific optimization documentation: these are processor dependent trade-offs. For instance, on an R10000 (MIPS), bigger code is faster in that keeps all 4 pipes full. On the other hand, we had to deal with very high space constraints when we worked with Sega. They used the Gnu compiler for the Sega Saturn. And although the SH (Super Hitachi processor) encodes 32 bit instructions into 16 bits, we had to change the compiler significantly to cope with the fact that loading immediate values (such as 57) is very convoluted: you read the value then jump over it, making immediate value loads very expensive when the compiler assumed they would be cheap.

    Generally, we think code size will become less and less of an issue: at the rate at which chips are shrinking and processes are improving (such as the extreme Ultra Violet process), the average DRAM chip will contain 1.7 Gbits in 2001 and 237 Gbits in 2012. Bandwidth problems will be alleviated by developments such as Mitsubishi's M32R chip, which has a core on a 16 Mbit ram, and has a huge bandwidth.

• Do you have any benchmarks to compare the current GCC levels of compilation (code size, speed) with compilers from Metaware, IBM, Microsoft, Borland, Symantec, Intel's VTUNE, etc?

• • We use the Bench++ benchmark. In contrast to SPEC benchmarks, this uses Stepanov's abstraction benchmark to determine the cost of various C++ features. For instance at the 0th level of abstraction, the code uses an integer, at the 1st it uses a double, then a class with a double member, then a class with a double pointer member... including template iterators until the 12th level is reached. GNU beats Sun and HP's compilers by a factor of 10. Similarly, GNU exception handling is 10 times faster than HP's.

    In terms of the SPEC base benchmarks EGCS attains the same level as SGI's compiler (the best in the business) with -O and -O2 options. Beyond that, SGI allows one to specify tons of options, such as cache size, which generates better code. However no one actually uses these options, so it's not much of an issue.

    As a company, other than the CygWin guys, we don't compare ourselves with the PC guys, so I can't give you a comparison. The DJGPP guys may have some info. Metaware is a non factor for us, since none of our customers complain about our performance.

• Future trends
  • What new features would you like to see in future revisions of GCC?

• • We'd like to see a good implementation bridging the gap between C/C++ and Java. There are good ideas in Java. It provides open standards that are very important to the downloadable world I believe will arise in the future: it provides a simple way to connect to the web, which essential to achieving an information aware infrastructure.

    However Sun's current behaviour is very worrying. Anything that Sun writes becomes a Java API. This is not unlike Microsoft, who redefined C APIs, even though a standard existed (POSIX), to such an extent that even "hello world" will not work (stdout and stderr are not available from winMain()). Sun is playing a similar game with Java, and we fear it will lead to incompatibilities, balkanizing Java, and letting the competition win. Although Sun snipes free versions of Java, all it is doing is replaying the Unix wars. We hope that GCC will be the free standard wedge that keeps the door open.

• What do you think of the idea that programs are JIT compiled to optimize the features being used, to maximize memory efficiency (as Intel's VTUNE does) while minimizing total footprint by leaving most of the code in a compressed bytecode format (as www.tao.co.uk is suggesting).

• • We view the problem rather differently: what do you want to use your CPU power for? Do you want to use it for JIT compilation, or for running the application? We think the latter. So the JIT should be done on the server. There is no reason why your processor could not identify itself to the server and let the server produce whatever native implementation is best for it. Profile information could also be sent to the server in this way. We will be showing in an upcoming Dr Dobbs Journal, that the performance one can achieve in native-compiled Java is comparable to that of C. Speedwise, this is a better solution than a Java chip, because Lisp Machines have already shown us that register based machines present many more opportunities for optimizations than stack machines. Powerwise it is also advantageous as compilation is rather expensive on a battery. Even in terms of code size, gzip compressed 32 bit RISC code is comparable in size to the equivalent byte-code.

• What do you think of IBM's idea of simplifying processor state-machines to increase frequency by moving more of the complexity to software?

• • Like EPIC, the proof will be in the proverbial pudding. Different RISC implementations vary greatly in power, although in principle they should provide similar levels of performance. For instance, a 200 Mhz R10000 provides a similar level of performance to a 600 Mhz Alpha.

• Do you anticipate commercial proprietary source-code will at the end of the day dominate the market-place, or do you feel that free software backed up by a service industry will take over?

• • I think the distinction will be like the difference between public and private life. While we may let all the people on the net look at our source-code we don't let them play with our money. I believe that free software will determine the standards in the world. Proprietary software will exist in niches, where customers don't care for the source code. Instead of spending time building a concensus, proprietary software allows a company to focus on producing a piece of software as quickly as possible to catch a market opportunity. For instance, we use ORACLE's database software. We don't have the source-code, and don't want it because its internal complexity is irrelevant to us: we just want to use it.

We wondered if it would happen, but Jani Halme just wrote in and told me it did. The GNUStep project has released v0.5 of their very exciting package. It's great to see code froming from a source that obviously has a lot of good stuff going for it. Snag the program from the web site or gnu.org.

ChunKing writes "I'm thinking of organising a geek documentary film festival and was wondering what Slashdotters would expect to see at such an event. I think we've probably all seen Revolution OS, Startup.com, and The Code a bazillion times and those films are getting a little long in the tooth now. Hackers Wanted would be great but I don't think it has been released yet. The Stephen Fry film out recently is ideal and will encourage discussion. Downloading content from YouTube for screening would be fine so what does the community recommend?"