The halloween document...

[richard at aoi.ultranet.com (Richard Royston)]

I have a comment on the historical background of all this.

The belief appears to be growing that open source, or free software, were 
invented by Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds. I don't believe that's really 
true. They both responded to contemporary pressures on free software in highly 
effective and innovative ways, but the tradition of free software dates back 
to the beginning of computers.

There has been a constant to-ing and fro-ing between commercial and free 
software.

The first operating system for the IBM 704 was written by users in the late 
1950's, and later taken over by IBM. Even then, for many years IBM continued 
to distribute the source, at least to large users who could contribute to its 
debugging and enhancement.  At the same time, and for a long while thereafter, 
most available software for technical and scientific applications (as opposed 
to that which people wrote for themselves) was distributed at no charge (or 
for a nominal one) by organizations like SHARE, the IBM users' group, CERN 
(the international research laboratory in Switzerland), the Argonne Code 
Center, and many other similar academic and non-profit organizations.

Later, in the 60's and 70's, as computer use spread into more commercial 
areas, vendors of computers took increasing proportions of the system 
software, like operating systems and compilers, out of the free arena. Many 
technical applications continued to be developed by non-commercial means - 
even when the authors worked for commercial companies their products were not 
viewed as commercial. Collective development of quite large projects even 
antedated the Internet, such as the "National Activity to Test Software" which 
involved many American national laboratories and universities, as well as some 
institutions in other countries, and produced software that is still an 
important component of many libraries of mathematical software in use today.

I believe that PC's were the first computers for which open source (or 
whatever you choose to call it) was not generally and widely available from 
the beginning. Microsoft and its hangers-on have used the extension of 
computer use to non-traditional computer users to gradually force out much of 
the traditional free software. As long as their products don't prevent users 
from having access to high quality software at reasonable prices it'll be hard 
to break their grip, but as the experience with linux vs NT in web servers 
indicates, it's unlikely that Microsoft will be able to provide technically 
competitive software in all areas, or keep free software out indefinitely, 
without resorting to tactics that even the most biased courts would be able to 
declare don't violate anti-trust laws with a straight face.

I also believe that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and we will 
have to continue to support activities to combat Microsoft's monopolistic 
tendencies.


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Richard J. Royston                             68 Baldwin Street
richard at aoi.ultranet.com                       Apartment 22
(617) 242-5280                                 Charlestown, MA 02129




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