Free as in Freedom | Page 8

Xerox laser printer-the GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free software community. In simplest terms, the GPL locks software programs into a form of communal ownership-what today's legal scholars now call the "digital commons"-through the legal weight of copyright. Once locked, programs remain unremovable. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright protection-even derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of the original source code. For this reason, some within the software industry have taken to calling the GPL a "viral" license, because it spreads itself to every software program it touches. Actually, the GPL's powers are not quite that potent. According to section 10 of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 (1991), the viral nature of the license depends heavily on the Free Software Foundation's willingness to view a program as a derivative work, not to mention the existing license the GPL would replace.
If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software that is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.
"To compare something to a virus is very harsh," says Stallman. "A spider plant is a more accurate comparison; it goes to another place if you actively take a cutting."
For more information on the GNU General Public License, visit [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.]
In an information economy increasingly dependent on software and increasingly beholden to software standards, the GPL has become the proverbial "big stick." Even companies that once laughed it off as software socialism have come around to recognize the benefits. Linux, the Unix-like kernel developed by Finnish college student Linus Torvalds in 1991, is licensed under the GPL, as are many of the world's most popular programming tools: GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger, the GNU C Compiler, etc. Together, these tools form the components of a free software operating system developed, nurtured, and owned by the worldwide hacker community. Instead of viewing this community as a threat, high-tech companies like IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Sun Microsystems have come to rely upon it, selling software applications and services built to ride atop the ever-growing free software infrastructure.
They've also come to rely upon it as a strategic weapon in the hacker community's perennial war against Microsoft, the Redmond, Washington-based company that, for better or worse, has dominated the PC-software marketplace since the late 1980s. As owner of the popular Windows operating system, Microsoft stands to lose the most in an industry-wide shift to the GPL license. Almost every line of source code in the Windows colossus is protected by copyrights reaffirming the private nature of the underlying source code or, at the very least, reaffirming Microsoft's legal ability to treat it as such. From the Microsoft viewpoint, incorporating programs protected by the "viral" GPL into the Windows colossus would be the software equivalent of Superman downing a bottle of Kryptonite pills. Rival companies could suddenly copy, modify, and sell improved versions of Windows, rendering the company's indomitable position as the No. 1 provider of consumer-oriented software instantly vulnerable. Hence the company's growing concern over the GPL's rate of adoption. Hence the recent Mundie speech blasting the GPL and the " open source" approach to software development and sales. And hence Stallman's decision to deliver a public rebuttal to that speech on the same campus here today.
20 years is a long time in the software industry. Consider this: in 1980, when Richard Stallman was cursing the AI Lab's Xerox laser printer, Microsoft, the company modern hackers view as the most powerful force in the worldwide software industry, was still a privately held startup. IBM, the company hackers used to regard as the most powerful force in the worldwide software industry, had yet to to introduce its first personal computer, thereby igniting the current low-cost PC market. Many of the technologies we now take for granted-the World Wide Web, satellite television, 32-bit video-game consoles-didn't even exist. The same goes for many of the companies that now fill the upper echelons of the corporate establishment, companies like AOL, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, Compaq, and Dell. The list goes on and on.
The fact that the high-technology marketplace has come so far in such little time is fuel for both sides of the GPL debate. GPL-proponents point to the short lifespan of most computer hardware platforms. Facing the risk of buying an obsolete product, consumers tend to flock to companies with the best long-term survival. As a result, the software marketplace has become a winner-take-all arena.See Shubha Ghosh, "Revealing the Microsoft Windows Source Code,"