“Being involved with Linux in those early days was fun”, recalls Murdock. “At the same time, it was something to do, something to pass the time. If you go back and read those old [comp.os.minix] exchanges, you’ll see the sentiment: this is something we can play with until the HURD is ready. People were anxious. It’s funny, but in a lot of ways, I suspect that Linux would never have happened if the HURD had come along more quickly”.
By the end of 1996, however, such “what if” questions were already moot. Call it Linux, call it GNU/Linux; the users had spoken. The 36-month window had closed, meaning that even if the GNU Project had rolled out its HURD kernel, chances were slim anybody outside the hard-core hacker community would have noticed. The first Unix-like free software operating system was here, and it had momentum. All hackers had left to do was sit back and wait for the next major wave to come crashing down on their heads. Even the shaggy-haired head of one Richard M. Stallman.
Ready or not.
Chapter 11. Open Source
In November, 1995, Peter Salus, a member of the Free Software Foundation and author of the 1994 book, A Quarter Century of Unix, issued a call for papers to members of the GNU Project’s “system-discuss” mailing list. Salus, the conference’s scheduled chairman, wanted to tip off fellow hackers about the upcoming Conference on Freely Redistributable Software in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Slated for February, 1996 and sponsored by the Free Software Foundation, the event promised to be the first engineering conference solely dedicated to free software and, in a show of unity with other free software programmers, welcomed papers on “any aspect of GNU, Linux, NetBSD, 386BSD, FreeBSD, Perl, Tcl/tk, and other tools for which the code is accessible and redistributable”. Salus wrote:
Over the past 15 years, free and low-cost software has become ubiquitous. This conference will bring together implementers of several different types of freely redistributable software and publishers of such software (on various media). There will be tutorials and refereed papers, as well as keynotes by Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.[1]
One of the first people to receive Salus’ email was conference committee member Eric S. Raymond. Although not the leader of a project or company like the various other members of the list, Raymond had built a tidy reputation within the hacker community as a major contributor to GNU Emacs and as editor of The New Hacker Dictionary, a book version of the hacking community’s decade-old Jargon File.
For Raymond, the 1996 conference was a welcome event. Active in the GNU Project during the 1980s, Raymond had distanced himself from the project in 1992, citing, like many others before him, Stallman’s “micro-management” style. “Richard kicked up a fuss about my making unauthorized modifications when I was cleaning up the Emacs LISP libraries”, Raymond recalls. “It frustrated me so much that I decided I didn’t want to work with him anymore”.
Despite the falling out, Raymond remained active in the free software community. So much so that when Salus suggested a conference pairing Stallman and Torvalds as keynote speakers, Raymond eagerly seconded the idea. With Stallman representing the older, wiser contingent of ITS/Unix hackers and Torvalds representing the younger, more energetic crop of Linux hackers, the pairing indicated a symbolic show of unity that could only be beneficial, especially to ambitious younger (i.e., below 40) hackers such as Raymond. “I sort of had a foot in both camps”, Raymond says.
By the time of the conference, the tension between those two camps had become palpable. Both groups had one thing in common, though: the conference was their first chance to meet the Finnish wunderkind in the flesh. Surprisingly, Torvalds proved himself to be a charming, affable speaker. Possessing only a slight Swedish accent, Torvalds surprised audience members with his quick, self-effacing wit.[2] Even more surprising, says Raymond, was Torvalds’ equal willingness to take potshots at other prominent hackers, including the most prominent hacker of all, Richard Stallman. By the end of the conference, Torvalds’ half-hacker, half-slacker manner was winning over older and younger conference-goers alike.
“It was a pivotal moment”, recalls Raymond. “Before 1996, Richard was the only credible claimant to being the ideological leader of the entire culture. People who dissented didn’t do so in public. The person who broke that taboo was Torvalds”.
The ultimate breach of taboo would come near the end of the show. During a discussion on the growing market dominance of Microsoft Windows or some similar topic, Torvalds admitted to being a fan of Microsoft’s PowerPoint slideshow software program. From the perspective of old-line software purists, it was like a Mormon bragging in church about his fondness of whiskey. From the perspective of Torvalds and his growing band of followers, it was simply common sense. Why shun worthy proprietary software programs just to make a point? Being a hacker wasn’t about suffering, it was about getting the job done.
“That was a pretty shocking thing to say”, Raymond remembers. “Then again, he was able to do that, because by 1995 and 1996, he was rapidly acquiring clout”.
Stallman, for his part, doesn’t remember any tension at the 1996 conference, but he does remember later feeling the sting of Torvalds’ celebrated cheekiness. “There was a thing in the Linux documentation which says print out the GNU coding standards and then tear them up”, says Stallman, recalling one example. “OK, so he disagrees with some of our conventions. That’s fine, but he picked a singularly nasty way of saying so. He could have just said `Here’s the way I think you should indent your code.’ Fine. There should be no hostility there”.
For Raymond, the warm reception other hackers gave to Torvalds’ comments merely confirmed his suspicions. The dividing line separating Linux developers from GNU/Linux developers was largely generational. Many Linux hackers, like Torvalds, had grown up in a world of proprietary software. Unless a program was clearly inferior, most saw little reason to rail against a program on licensing issues alone. Somewhere in the universe of free software systems lurked a program that hackers might someday turn into a free software alternative to PowerPoint. Until then, why begrudge Microsoft the initiative of developing the program and reserving the rights to it?
As a former GNU Project member, Raymond sensed an added dynamic to the tension between Stallman and Torvalds. In the decade since launching the GNU Project, Stallman had built up a fearsome reputation as a programmer. He had also built up a reputation for intransigence both in terms of software design and people management. Shortly before the 1996 conference, the Free Software Foundation would experience a full-scale staff defection, blamed in large part on Stallman. Brian Youmans, a current FSF staffer hired by Salus in the wake of the resignations, recalls the scene: “At one point, Peter [Salus] was the only staff member working in the office”.
For Raymond, the defection merely confirmed a growing suspicion: recent delays such as the HURD and recent troubles such as the Lucid-Emacs schism reflected problems normally associated with software project management, not software code development. Shortly after the Freely Redistributable Software Conference, Raymond began working on his own pet software project, a popmail utility called “fetchmail”. Taking a cue from Torvalds, Raymond issued his program with a tacked-on promise to update the source code as early and as often as possible. When users began sending in bug reports and feature suggestions, Raymond, at first anticipating a tangled mess, found the resulting software surprisingly sturdy. Analyzing the success of the Torvalds approach, Raymond issued a quick analysis: using the Internet as his “petri dish” and the harsh scrutiny of the hacker community as a form of natural selection, Torvalds had created an evolutionary model free of central planning.
1.
See Peter Salus, “FYI-Conference on Freely Redistributable Software, 2/2, Cambridge” (1995) (archived by Terry Winograd).
2.
Although Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his mother tongue is Swedish. “The Rampantly Unofficial Linus FAQ” offers a brief explanation:
Finland has a significant (about 6%) Swedish-speaking minority population. They call themselves “finlandssvensk” or “finlandssvenskar” and consider themselves Finns; many of their families have lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of Finland’s two official languages.
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/linus/