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If Linux Wasn't Open Source
ColourCure asks: "Maybe this has already been asked (definitely not an original thought), but how much of an impact do you think Linux would have made as a non-open source operating system? There's definitely more to open sourcing than being able to peek at the code. Would the open source movement even be that big without Linux backing it up? " Ah, I expect this to generate some controversy, but my personal feeling is that the time for Open Source has come. Linux just accelerated the time table.
If Linux wasn't Open Source, it wouldn't be Linux. Period
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Linux wouldn't be Linux if it weren't open source. It would have never spread the way it did, and as a result it would be an entirely different OS. I don't see how this can be debated. Linux when it was first released was extremely crude. Who is going to want to use such an OS amidst all the other alternatives?
If Linux wouldnt have released the Linux source code under the GPL, there definitely wouldnt have been as much cooperation from the Internet community. Programmers tend to stick to lofty (to them) ideals, and giving the world a totally free operating system was probably what interested most of the original Linux hackers (and most of the current ones too). There definitely would be a lot less cooperation from the hacker-community if it were not for that GPL license... we really owe RMS a big one here.
My opinion is that Linux would have remained a obscure project, from some Linus guy somewhere in Europe. And that would be about it... maybe most of us would be using and hyping FreeBSD by now.
Just my two cents...
First, it was the closest thing at that time to the "holy grail"- a low-cost, high performance, Unix-like system that was not in some way compromised. Back then, running a personal Unix box usally meant one of three things: a) A surplus commercial Unix system, usually one that had been retired because of obsolescence or was deeply discounted after the maker dropped it (anyone remember the AT&T UnixPC "Fire Sale"?), b) A PC running a very expensive copy of Xenix or Interactive Unix, c) A PC running a Unix-alike like Minix or Coherent at the cost of some feature like swap, virtual memory, or networking.
Secondly, it became a focal point for all the open source (praticularly GNU) software which already existed. Hurd was still a long way off, but here was an OS which could run the GNU tools, gcc, and X11.
Was the fact that Linux was open source important? I think it was somewhat, but not as much as some might think. The fact that Linux was open source allowed it to be quickly enhanced to support a wide range of "real world" hardware (back then, building a spare box out of parts that included an XT disk controller was important- these days, you'd just run down to CompUSA and buy another 20GB). A closed source OS could have conceivably captured as much interest, but the person/company maintaining it would have had to dance quickly.
(A case in point is the downfall of Coherent, a competing, closed source OS which was targeted at many of the same markets Linux is moving into now. )
Would the Open Source community be as big/imnportant today? Probably, but the rallying point would be very different. My personal guess would be gcc/egcs, though a closed source Linux might have hastened the development of Hurd; just so that the FSF could point to an Open Source OS which ran the GNU tools.
One final thought... let's not forget that early Linux was also a contemporary of 386BSD, the direct progenitor of FreeBSD and NetBSD. Now there is a "what-if" for you... what if Jolitz had been more responsive to providing fixes/updates? What if the USL suit hadn't occurred? Etc.
I first met RMS back in 1987, when a mutual friend from MIT who had recognized him and called out to say hello, introduced us in front of the Harvard Square T stop. Right up front, even back then, he was promoting his GNU Operating System as a free clone of UNIX with all the source available. I smiled, said "That's interesting" while on the inside I thought he was completely nuts.
I didn't realize that some pieces of his OS puzzle were already written and that a roadmap for the rest was well underway, but at the time I couldn't help but think that the whole idea was just plain stupid. I remember talking with my friend about the endevour afterward and basically pointing out that nobody much cared about UNIX as an Operating System, they bought hardware. People paid huge sums of money for high powered LISP machines from LMI and Symbolics -- not because they ran LISP (for the most part) but because with that hardware and a talented programmer one could do amazing things. At the time I figured the same was true for the emerging UNIX Workstation market, and that these machines would always be far too expensive for a free Operating System to matter at all. Who would throw away a vendor supplied OS and support just to run GNU? Idiotic.
Even though it was obvious given that superior hardware like the Macintosh was getting close to Workstation potential at almost PC prices, I just didn't see that the PC class computer would gain the CPU horsepower and instruction set necessary to run a UNIX class operating system -- even though low end UNIXen were already available for the PC. The idea that end users, not developers might want to run UNIX seemed more far fetched than a vegetarian pigging out in the Central Square MacDonalds (this is Cambridge, mind you).
So, several years later, around early '93 or so, I found myself with a 386sx running Windows -- and hating every minute of it. Upon bitching to my friend about the piece of crap that is Windows, and beating myself over the head for not taking the hit and buying a Macintosh (price gouging or no) my friend pointed out that a BSD clone for the x86 was available called 386BSD, and that some folks were working on another called FreeBSD. He also told me about another cheesy UNIX kernel clone called Linux, but steered me to BSD and offered to make me a set of install floppies.
"Oh, and by the way -- it runs Stallman's 'Idiotic' software," he pointed out.
Brainy MIT blowhards; always ready to point out that you missed the obvious. So, given his amazing net pipe and my funding a few boxes of floppies, I was able to install the software and check it out. And it was good but not terribly usable (mostly because I had a hard time configuring a serial port for a modem, and X wasn't usable) so I shelved the whole thing again until my friend again told me I was being an idiot and gave me an Yggdrasil CDrom in '94. That Worked! I had the thing installed with X running in an hour, and was able to figure out the serial port stuff within a day or so.
I haven't run Windows on my home computer since. Not that RMS cares about my opinion (he is a wacko -- but the good kind), still I thank him for all the effort against such adversity. I also thank him for not listening to the likes of me because there must have been an avalanche of people telling him his idea was stupid and pointless. It takes a certain kind of crazy to persevere through many years of careful building, stage by stage, to success while the whole world views your endevour as Quixotic folly. They, and I, were wrong -- he was right. Period.
Thank you RMS.
--Maynard
Other factors in the success of Linux seem to be overlooked, as it's fashionable to credit the whole success of Linux on the fact that it's Open Source(tm).
In the early 90's, the power of the average PC was on the rise. With the 386 and 486 processor, it became ludicrous to run a single-user real mode operating system on such powerful hardware.
The Internet came into wide use, and the bandwidth to move big blocks of data around became very cheap. Email became "almost free" which made widespread collaboration efforts possible.
With the advent of low-cost CD-rom drives in almost all machines, it became easy to ship around a lot of data.
As the hardware become more and more cheap, it became an 'easy out' for people needing to harness a lot of raw power to just apply all the old designs to the new cheaper hardware. The 70's and 80's designs, developed for expensive proprietary hardware, could be pasted into a project like Linux. (it's no coincidence that Linux developed as a Unix-like project, it filled the hardware void for all that old code).
It fun, and it gets certain Open Source(tm) Evangalists their honorarium fees and plane fair, but the fact that it's Open Source(tm) is only one of many factors that lead to the popularity of a Unix-like OS for PC hardware called Linux.
I just slid over to an alternate universe where Linus Torvalds was hit by a bus in 1990, but everything else from 1990 to 1992 was pretty much the same. Thus in this alternate universe there was a free Unix-compatible kernel (actually several: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Jolitz BSD).
Many of the BSDers jumped to a proprietary company called BSDI. The alternate RMS, fearing a repeat of the Lisp Machines days when all the free software became proprietary again, jumped into action. He kicked the Hurd hackers off the BSD payroll and managed to hire Bill Jolitz, who was so pissed off at the BSDI founders that he abandoned his old opposition to the GPL. RMS put out version 3 of the GPL, which blessed the BSD advertising clause, when he realized that otherwise the GNU/BSD kernel wouldn't be legal.
Now there was a closed group of folks in the GPL camp, and another closed group of folks in the BSD camp. Releases from both of them were eagerly anticipated, but only the elite could play ... until along came a group of more democratically minded folks that started a project called, as in this universe, Debian. In an attempt to heal the rift between the two warring camps, they named their project ...
Debian GNU/BSD.
Meanwhile the antitrust settlement had split Microsoft into an OS and an application software division, and forced Microsoft to make the MSHTTP spec free (hardly anyone used the web after Microsoft knocked off Netscape in this universe, since they put so many bells and whistles into the spec that no one could write working web pages).
Soon Megasoft Office BSD was out, thanks to porting help from a Scandanavian company named Troll Tech. Within a year, Microsoft (the OS company) had lost significant market share, but every business was forced to buy Megasoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. An idealistic group of folks who found this intolerable founded a project called GNOME.
Most folks thought that the Debian and GNOME efforts would fail, but they actually made unexpectedly rapid progress. Eric Raymond became famous when he wrote a paper that documented this.
You're right, users don't care about the source code - but developers do, and to make an OS you need developers, not users.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
If the source weren't available from the get-go, people like Alan Cox and DaveM (along with thousands of other developers) would never have jumped into kernel development. Without that kernel development, Linux would be one sorry-ass OS right now and no one in their right minds would use it.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Okay, I'll bite. :)
RMS made the GPL,and released gcc under it.
Linus made Linux, and turned it into a full-fledged Unix with the help of gcc. Therefore, he GPL'ed it out of respect to gcc and therefore RMS and GNU.
People looking for a free Unix found this, and it fit a niche, being in the right place at the right time.
This is the story of how that historical event happened.
You might not like the GPL, but it allows people to collaborate in a strict way. It encourages the kind of programming freedom that people used to have before people started programming for money instead of love.
Microsoft has always been too proud to do this, but it makes me feel better knowing that they write bad code for money, and can't write good code out of love. I'm sure there's a moral lesson there. Of course they don't love their customers: they love their money.
It got moderated up because it was a real, on-topic post about the historical events leading up to what Linux has done today. It's a thoughtful post, and remember: Open Source is the popular remarketing of Free Software, taking a different means to the desired end.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Public domain software has been around as long as computers have. Linux could have made it as public domain software, the same people who gave their work away to make it work would still have done so, even if perhaps some horribly evil corporation might have made the terrible sin of improving their own products with chunks of Linux-related code (I know, I know, none of us could have slept knowing that MS used Linux code to make a better Windows and the Linux community's work improved the lives of most users years ago, instead of just the cherished hacker elite; after all, it's not about helping people, it's about rebellion and communism and programmers making as little as street musicians).
I made this very same point in a comment in "Photogenics To Be Released For Linux" There is nothing about the GPL or Free Software which relates to Communism! If that were the case you should call the pope Communist for redistributing the wealth of donations given to the church for the needy. Or for that matter, you should call those Shriners, driving their petit cars around collecting money for burn victims "Communist." Bullshit!
Communism is a political ideology, and has nothing to do with non-political groups of people organizing together for common cause and purpose. To call RMS a Communist is to promote Fascism. Why? Because that is state sponsored and controlled Capitalism! And I'm guessing that if Free Software, The Shriners, and the Church are considered Communist because members of such share ideas and wealth, then we've just stepped down the sliperly slope toward enacting state sponsored criminalization of such activity. And that IS fascism.
BTW, how did this completely off-topic post get moderated to the top of this discussion? Not a single mention of "if I had to pay for Linux" or "if I couldn't get the source", just an apparently random tribute to a prominent figure in the world of free software.
It's obvious to me, though not directly stated: If Linux hadn't been released under the GPL, but had been released under something close to the Minux license, it would have whithered on the vine while the BSD's and GNU grew up to take it's place today. We would still have Free Software, and Linux would be an unknown afterthought.
Xlib
Not only that, the openness of the kernel, and the ever expanding uses that computers are put to virtually guarantees that development and extension will take place for some time to come.
In addition, there are many more high-profile personalities out there (than just ESR) now, that are heavily involved with Linux-based OSS projects.
Linux has gained:
These may strike some as needless distinctions, but it brings attention to the multiple levels of granularity and customizability in the Linux OS system. Some due to factors intrinsic to Linux itself, some due to the benefits and influences from the OSS movement.
Suffice it to say that, while Linux would probably still exist without OSS, it would probably not resemble the Linux we know today. In addition, OSS would still exist without Linux, but it would also bear little resemblence to the OSS community we know today. In either case, we would still be the poorer for not having said symbiosis.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The BSD licence embodies the Golden Rule. It sets a good example, gives of itself freely, and asks nothing in return.
The GPL is nothing like that. It is not a free gift, being kind and generous and decent even to those who use those gifts in ways that the doner disapproves of.
It is deeply ironic that you should ask God to damn the rule you cite, and then proceed to so disastrously misapply.
Be careful what you ask for.