As leader of the GNU Project, Stallman had already experienced the negative effects of a software fork in 1991. A group of Emacs developers working for a software company named Lucid had a falling out over Stallman’s unwillingness to fold changes back into the GNU Emacs code base. The fork had given birth to a parallel version, Lucid Emacs, and hard feelings all around.[8]
Murdock says Debian was mounting work on a similar fork in glibc source code that motivated Stallman to insist on adding the GNU prefix when Debian rolled out its software distribution. “The fork has since converged. Still, at the time, there was a concern that if the Linux community saw itself as a different thing as the GNU community, it might be a force for disunity”.
Stallman seconds Murdock’s recollection. In fact, he says there were nascent forks appearing in relation to every major GNU component. At first, Stallman says he considered the forks to be a product of sour grapes. In contrast to the fast and informal dynamics of the Linux-kernel team, GNU source-code maintainers tended to be slower and more circumspect in making changes that might affect a program’s long-term viability. They also were unafraid of harshly critiquing other people’s code. Over time, however, Stallman began to sense that there was an underlying lack of awareness of the GNU Project and its objectives when reading Linux developers’ emails.
“We discovered that the people who considered themselves Linux users didn’t care about the GNU Project”, Stallman says. “They said, `Why should I bother doing these things? I don’t care about the GNU Project. It’s working for me. It’s working for us Linux users, and nothing else matters to us.’ And that was quite surprising given that people were essentially using a variant of the GNU system, and they cared so little. They cared less than anybody else about GNU”.
While some viewed descriptions of Linux as a “variant” of the GNU Project as politically grasping, Murdock, already sympathetic to the free software cause, saw Stallman’s request to call Debian’s version GNU/Linux as reasonable. “It was more for unity than for credit”, he says.
Requests of a more technical nature quickly followed. Although Murdock had been accommodating on political issues, he struck a firmer pose when it came to the design and development model of the actual software. What had begun as a show of solidarity soon became of model of other GNU projects.
“I can tell you that I’ve had my share of disagreements with him”, says Murdock with a laugh. “In all honesty Richard can be a fairly difficult person to work with”.
In 1996, Murdock, following his graduation from Purdue, decided to hand over the reins of the growing Debian project. He had already been ceding management duties to Bruce Perens, the hacker best known for his work on Electric Fence, a Unix utility released under the GPL. Perens, like Murdock, was a Unix programmer who had become enamored of GNU/Linux as soon as the program’s Unix-like abilities became manifest. Like Murdock, Perens sympathized with the political agenda of Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, albeit from afar.
“I remember after Stallman had already come out with the GNU Manifesto, GNU Emacs, and GCC, I read an article that said he was working as a consultant for Intel”, says Perens, recalling his first brush with Stallman in the late 1980s. “I wrote him asking how he could be advocating free software on the one hand and working for Intel on the other. He wrote back saying, `I work as a consultant to produce free software.’ He was perfectly polite about it, and I thought his answer made perfect sense”.
As a prominent Debian developer, however, Perens regarded Murdock’s design battles with Stallman with dismay. Upon assuming leadership of the development team, Perens says he made the command decision to distance Debian from the Free Software Foundation. “I decided we did not want Richard’s style of micro-management”, he says.
According to Perens, Stallman was taken aback by the decision but had the wisdom to roll with it. “He gave it some time to cool off and sent a message that we really needed a relationship. He requested that we call it GNU/Linux and left it at that. I decided that was fine. I made the decision unilaterally. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief”.
Over time, Debian would develop a reputation as the hacker’s version of Linux, alongside Slackware, another popular distribution founded during the same 1993-1994 period. Outside the realm of hacker-oriented systems, however, Linux was picking up steam in the commercial Unix marketplace. In North Carolina, a Unix company billing itself as Red Hat was revamping its business to focus on Linux. The chief executive officer was Robert Young, the former Linux Journal editor who in 1994 had put the question to Linus Torvalds, asking whether he had any regrets about putting the kernel under the GPL. To Young, Torvalds’ response had a “profound” impact on his own view toward Linux. Instead of looking for a way to corner the GNU/Linux market via traditional software tactics, Young began to consider what might happen if a company adopted the same approach as Debian-i.e., building an operating system completely out of free software parts. Cygnus Solutions, the company founded by Michael Tiemann and John Gilmore in 1990, was already demonstrating the ability to sell free software based on quality and customizability. What if Red Hat took the same approach with GNU/Linux?
“In the western scientific tradition we stand on the shoulders of giants”, says Young, echoing both Torvalds and Sir Isaac Newton before him. “In business, this translates to not having to reinvent wheels as we go along. The beauty of [the GPL] model is you put your code into the public domain.[9] If you’re an independent software vendor and you’re trying to build some application and you need a modem-dialer, well, why reinvent modem dialers? You can just steal PPP off of Red Hat Linux and use that as the core of your modem-dialing tool. If you need a graphic tool set, you don’t have to write your own graphic library. Just download GTK. Suddenly you have the ability to reuse the best of what went before. And suddenly your focus as an application vendor is less on software management and more on writing the applications specific to your customer’s needs”.
Young wasn’t the only software executive intrigued by the business efficiencies of free software. By late 1996, most Unix companies were starting to wake up and smell the brewing source code. The Linux sector was still a good year or two away from full commercial breakout mode, but those close enough to the hacker community could feel it: something big was happening. The Intel 386 chip, the Internet, and the World Wide Web had hit the marketplace like a set of monster waves, and Linux-and the host of software programs that echoed it in terms of source-code accessibility and permissive licensing-seemed like the largest wave yet.
For Ian Murdock, the programmer courted by Stallman and then later turned off by Stallman’s micromanagement style, the wave seemed both a fitting tribute and a fitting punishment for the man who had spent so much time giving the free software movement an identity. Like many Linux aficionados, Murdock had seen the original postings. He’d seen Torvalds’s original admonition that Linux was “just a hobby”. He’d also seen Torvalds’s admission to Minix creator Andrew Tanenbaum: “If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I’d not have bothered to even start my project”.[10] Like many, Murdock knew the opportunities that had been squandered. He also knew the excitement of watching new opportunities come seeping out of the very fabric of the Internet.
8.
Jamie Zawinski, a former Lucid programmer who would go on to head the Mozilla development team, has a web site that documents the Lucid/GNU Emacs fork, titled, “The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism”.
9.
Young uses the term “public domain” incorrectly here. Public domain means not protected by copyright. GPL-protected programs are by definition protected by copyright.
10.
This quote is taken from the much-publicized Torvalds-Tanenbaum “flame war” following the initial release of Linux. In the process of defending his choice of a nonportable monolithic kernel design, Torvalds says he started working on Linux as a way to learn more about his new 386 PC. “If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I’d not have bothered to even start my project”. See Chris DiBona et al.,