The rule made by the owners of proprietary software was, "If you share with your neighbour, you are a pirate. If you want any changes, beg us to make them."
Richard Stallman's words are characteristically blunt about what he sees as an evil of the modern world - software that cannot be freely distributed and modified. When in 1982 the software-sharing atmosphere in which he had worked for 10 years at MIT ended he set out to right what he saw as a moral wrong by creating free alternatives to proprietary software.
This meant quitting his job and struggling to get his GNU project and Free Software Foundation off the ground. The sense of moral zeal is clear in his essay in Open Sources - Voices from the Open Source revolution, just published by O'Reilly & Associates.
In the book 14 leaders lights of the free software movement write about their vision, and it makes for an exciting, evangelistic and often rancorous read, with contributors firing off barbs at other writers a couple of chapters ahead of or behind them. The same zeal that had established free software as a concept bred disagreements and limited its appeal outside the hacker culture that had created it.
That changed just over a year ago when a coalition came together to promote "open source" rather than "free" as a label. GNU/Linux had proved that it was possible to create an operating system and whole computing environment of high quality for free distribution. The next step, it seemed, was to market that concept, reducing the emphasis on "free" (with its connotations of free beer or free lunch) and highlighting that the recipe for a piece of software - the source code - should be open to the user to examine, improve and share. Open Source has taken off over the past year. Netscape opened the source to its Navigator browser and one major company after another announced plans to work with open software such as Linux. Unsurprisingly, Tim O'Reilly was in there at the start, putting the weight of his company behind a logical offshoot of the sort of computing that it has documented and promoted all along. Open Sources is at once a history to date of free software, a one-year report on the Open Source initiative and a plan for a brave new future.
His own contribution to the book says basically that the ground is shifting under us. For millions of users the traditional ideas of hardware and software are being supplanted by the "infoware" of websites, where a site can be seen as an application in itself, and a compelling and easy-to-use one at that. The Web allows programmers across the world to co-operate on open-source projects. At the same time, the Web itself relies heavily on open source software for essential services like email and name resolution.
Speaking to him in Dublin, his enthusiasm is clear. "Often the technologies that are in use by what you might call the hackers are ignored by the traditional media and the traditional press. And that was why we started really deciding we needed to promote Open Source. . .
"Our whole publishing programme is based on the premise that what individuals do eventually adds up. In the old model a company becomes dominant and their products are what matters. Open Source is a sign that that model is changing. An individual can do it differently. They can distribute their software for nothing and they can develop a user base of millions without all of the paraphernalia that used to be required."
For more on Open Source, see:
www.oreilly.com
www.edventure.com/release1/1198.html
www.opensource.org