Free Software's Quiet Influence

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March 11, 1998 (2:22 PM EST)

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By Andy Patrizio,

STORY UPDATED 5/26/98 On the surface, Bill Gates and Richard Stallman have almost nothing in common. Gates owns a home that should have its own ZIP code, while until last year, Stallman didn't even have a home -- he lived in a cubicle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by choice.

Yet if you were to total the respective impact and influence of these two men on the overall world of software, you'd find they are pretty close in their influence. What differs are their philosophies. Gates, on one hand, made billions by selling software, then putting out upgrades that sold more software.

While many tout the advantages of the open source development process, others wonder: Is it good business to give away your code?

Stallman, on the other hand, salted away a $240,000 fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1990 to live off so he could devote his time to his real interest, the advancement of freely distributable software.

After nearly 20 years of effort, Stallman's sentiments have finally started to reach the mainstream: Netscape has become the most prominent player to release the source code to one of its applications by giving out the code to Communicator 5.0. Corel, too, is looking at open source code distribution. Some companies, such as Microsoft, however, remain holdouts.

"There's a small percentage of people in the industry who have the time and skills to step up to the plate and handle that kind of responsibility," says Ray Valdes, a research director for Internet strategies services at Gartner Group, in San Jose, Calif. "It's not likely Microsoft will ever do this. They don't need to -- they're winning."

"A Matter Of Freedom"
Stallman's influence is felt predominantly in the Unix world, where software he and his associates on the GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) project have developed over the years has been widely adopted. GNU creations include the DJGPP and GNU C compilers; Ghostscript, a PostScript interpreter; and the Emacs text editor, now one of the standard editors in Unix and mainframe systems.

st ignacious
Sainthood, according to Richard Stallman (above), requires living a life of purity -- but in the Church of Emacs, this means not installing any nonfree software on your computer. Photo by Wouter van Oortmerssen

Stallman, a former employee of MIT's Artifical Intelligence Laboratory, is a firm believer that customers should be free to modify software and redistribute it free. Granted, including the source code to the game Myst would be of zero value to most of the 5 million people who have purchased it, "but the option should be there for everyone," says Stallman, who is also president of the League for Programming Freedom and founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which opposes the copyrighting of software and the advancement of free software.

"Vendors won't necessarily do what you want -- they do what they want. If you have the code, you can go to a programmer and ask him to fix it [to your liking]. For this reason, free software is important to anyone that uses software."

Next: The GNU "copyleft" license

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