To Free or Not to Free the Code in Question
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Part II - Commodity code vs Hacker Ethics 1974-1978 2/2 - Supply. Academia retained right of free access to UNIX, as parents: the 'how UNIX was born' and raised. "Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion, more interesting than the inventions themselves." -- Gottfried Willhelm von Leibniz, mathematician. [Math Academy Online™ / Platonic Realms™]. A seismic chasm was opening in the heart of computer research, twinning two competing cultures. Seniority, intellectual preeminence, and quality, remained in the eastern US. "The AI Lab of the 1970s was by all accounts a special place. Cutting-edge projects and top-flight researchers gave it an esteemed position in the world of computer science. The internal hacker culture and its anarchic policies lent a rebellious mystique as well. Only later, when many of the lab's scientists and software superstars had departed, would hackers fully realize the unique and ephemeral world they had once inhabited." The financial and development shift west produced competing principles driven by stronger cash return rather than social ethics, and thus arguments and strategies from the baser level. Hereafter, computing would be market driven, from the west, as a direct assault on that eastern US quality and eminence. [The Emacs Commune "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 6, Sam Williams, O'Reilly 2002]. The east coast research preeminence expressed itself still primarily in OS innovation: "Although professors and administrators outnumbered hackers two-to-one inside the AI Lab, the hacker ethic prevailed. Indeed, by the time of [Richard] Stallman's arrival at the AI Lab, hackers and the AI Lab administration had coevolved into something of a symbiotic relationship. In exchange for fixing the machines and keeping the software up and running, hackers earned the right to work on favorite pet projects. Often, the pet projects revolved around improving the machines and software programs even further. Like teenage hot-rodders, most hackers viewed tinkering with machines as its own form of entertainment." "Nowhere was this tinkering impulse better reflected than in the operating system that powered the lab's central PDP-6 mini-computer. Dubbed ITS, short for the Incompatible Time Sharing system, the operating system incorporated the hacking ethic into its very design. Hackers had built it as a protest to Project MAC's original operating system, the Compatible Time Sharing System, CTSS, and named it accordingly. At the time, hackers felt the CTSS design too restrictive, limiting programmers' power to modify and improve the program's own internal architecture if needed. According to one legend passed down by hackers, the decision to build ITS had political overtones as well. Unlike CTSS, which had been designed for the IBM 7094, ITS was built specifically for the PDP-6. In letting hackers write the systems themselves, AI Lab administrators guaranteed that only hackers would feel comfortable using the PDP-6. In the feudal world of academic research, the gambit worked. Although the PDP-6 was co-owned in conjunction with other departments, A.I. researchers soon had it to themselves." "ITS boasted features most commercial operating systems wouldn't offer for years, features such as multitasking, debugging, and full-screen editing capability. Using it and the PDP-6 as a foundation, the Lab had been able to declare independence from Project MAC shortly before Stallman's arrival." "As an apprentice hacker, Stallman quickly became enamored with ITS. Although forbidding to most newcomers, the program contained many built-in features that provided a lesson in software development to hacker apprentices such as himself." "'ITS had a very elegant internal mechanism for one program to examine another,' says Stallman, recalling the program. 'You could examine all sorts of status about another program in a very clean, well-specified way.'" "Using this feature, Stallman was able to watch how programs written by hackers processed instructions as they ran. Another favorite feature would allow the monitoring program to freeze the monitored program's job between instructions. In other operating systems, such a command would have resulted in half-computed gibberish or an automatic systems crash. In ITS, it provided yet another way to monitor the step-by-step performance." [Impeach God "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 4, Sam Williams, O'Reilly 2002]. However the 1969 parting of MIT and AT&T boosted west-coast academia and industry, and continued the diversifying, war-driven interaction between public research and private enterprise. This was the period of the Vietnam War, President Nixon's rise and fall, and digitisation of the military-industrial complex. It was the backdrop to the Hippy movement and peace protest, politicising an entire generation. The Christian - protestant and catholic - liberal intellectual politics of the east were supplanted, by a western, consumer-driven new age nihilism: a vacuum of faith lost with J.F. Kennedy and the Kent State University shootings (sacrifice of both elder and youth left a culturally disconnected society). Utilitarians prevailed, transcending lost Eden via space conquest: "unless we become Supermen, we are really nothing at all". [You're Really Nothing at All American Nihilism Association; Wikipedia; Nihilism's Home Page "Exiting The Circus Of Values"]. The University of California at Berkeley (UCB) was Ken Thompson's alma mater. UCB's "Bob Fabry.. received Unix edition 4 in January, 1974.. In 1975, graduate students Bill Joy and Chuck Haley started working with the Unix system" and "the sixth version of Unix was released, for the first time made available outside AT&T to educational and research institutions. Because US Federal Law prevented Bell Labs from selling products due to its status as a unique, monopoly institution, it was also made available at no cost." [Development of Unix & Unix - Wars Living Internet]. Bell Labs recall their relationship with UCB thus: "UNIX had been distributed via academic licenses, which were relatively inexpensive, and government and commercial licenses from about 1975. UCB became important in spreading the word about UNIX when it established a Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), originally under the direction of Robert Fabry. The CSRG obtained a grant from DARPA to support a version of UNIX for DARPA contractors, which were mostly academic and military organizations, and some commercial firms. Ritchie recalled, 'The contractors got the UNIX licenses from Bell Labs, but they got the BSD software from Berkeley.' The CSRG did much of the real work in making the TCP/IP protocols, which are the foundations of the Internet, accessible with their BSD distributions. The expansion of UNIX into academic environments also was aided by the fact that the Digital VAX machine was at a price that academic departments could afford. In addition, UNIX helped play a key role in the early days of the Internet, since most of the VAX computers supporting it ran on UNIX." "In 1976-77, Ken Thompson took a six-month sabbatical from Bell Labs to teach as a visiting professor at the Computer Science Department at [UCB]. What he taught, of course, was the UNIX system. While there, he also developed much of what eventually became Version 6. The system was an instant hit, and the word spread quickly throughout the academic community. When Thompson returned to Bell Labs, students and professors at Berkeley continued to enhance UNIX. Eventually, many of these enhancements were incorporated into what became known as Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Version 4.2, which many other universities also bought." [Sharing UNIX with the rest of the world Lucent-Bell]. Equally significant from the early seventies was delivery of the transistor and microprocessors to the consumer market. Interest in the minitiarised version of industrial computing, for home and small business use, went astronomic. Leading the data communications democratic revolution was the Intel chip series (8008, 8080, 8086 etc.), and their Motorolla equivalents. These were initially under-supplied and prohibitively expensive, but in the computer industry, demand was constantly reshaping supply. [Detail: Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present John Bayko]. "Computer user groups.. were central to the personal computer's history: Microcomputers arose in large part to satisfy demand for affordable, personal access to computing resources from electronics, ham radio, and other hobbyist user groups. Giants like IBM eventually discovered the PC to be a good and profitable thing, but initial impetus came from the grassroots." Thus began the tradition by which Linux User Groups continue meeting today. Garage swap-meets and workshops were the original consumer training and software distribution channel. The first credited was Silicon Valley's Homebrew Computer Club (HCC), from 1975 "a hybrid with elements from the radical student movement of the 60s, the Berkeley community computing activists, and electronic hobbyists". In California, brand new, computing pre-professional social organisms began mutating, from the MIT East-coast Hacker Ethic (see Part II). This was a conscious, counter-bureaucratic and anti-MIT popular cause, "unconcerned about the high magic they could produce and the exalted pantheon of canonical wizards they revered." [What is a Linux user group?, Linux User Group HOWTO, Rick Moen; 'Every Man a God', Chapter 9 of Steven Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" (Bantam books, 1984), on HCC founder Lee Felsenstein in 1974]. A decade after commercial connection with abstracted OS development, 1975 was its amplified resonance, on the US consumer market. IMSAI, and the Processor Technology Corp. Sol, followed the Mark-8 of July 1974, "the first personal computer to really be marketed"; the first computer stores opened, in Santa Monica, California etc..; Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) introduced the Altair 8800, "considered by many to be the first microcomputer", still with hand-cranked program I/O via switches and lights; IBM parallelled in launching its expensive 5100 Portable ('luggable') Computer math terminal, with inbuilt CRT screen, keyboard, magnetic tape storage, and "board-level microprocessor called 'PALM' (for 'Put All Logic in Microcode')" accepting both APL (System/360) and BASIC programming languages (the PC interface form factor development path here intersected with the more rapid hobbyist architecture selection process, and subsequent models would all be Intel-based); nascent opportunity saw Bill Gates dump Harvard university and, with hallmate Paul Allen, begin adapting BASIC for the Altair PC, and found Micro Soft (MS) on (vehicular) Traf-o-Data, as a new trans-platform OS emerged; CP/M version 1.0 was released, giving UNIX/BSD a cut-down rival. [Computer Science Museum & HCS Chronology; for a full, early PC model history see Blinkenlights Archaeological Institute; also BASIC programming with Unix linuxfocus Jan03]. The Control Program for Microcomputers (CP/M) was the pioneering single user single task OS for the new microcomputer technology from 1973. Gary Kildall created CP/M as a workaround "OS for a personal computer to test the compiler he was developing for Intel", following the DEC OS pattern on which he worked by using an Intel emulator. A popular, fast-loading, openly configurable OS, CP/M gave micros "the first 'industry standard'", the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), the command line interface, 8.3-character filename format, and most largely, the template for MS-DOS. "In 1978 alone, version 2.2 was sold on more [than] 500,000 computers and by 1980 it seemed hardly conceivable that any other OS would ever be used on Intel-based computers." Kildall formed (Intergalactic) Digital Research (DR) "to market and further develop CP/M and other products such as his abandoned PL/M". Customers bought the actual binaries and source code as a product from DR, rather than mere permission to use it. But the crucial license contract for IBM 8088 PCs was casually lost to MS-DOS in 1981, and the superior OpenDOS / DR-DOS slipped eventually into oblivion. More on this world-shaping coup follows in Part IV. [Advanced Computing Systems Dr Hoganson]. |
PC market brand competition subverted the Hacker Ethic of quality design, locking popular computing into substandard, restricted architectures to the current day. The mainframe multitasking dilemma was ultimately being solved, by means of mass distributed processors and OS. More efficiencies and freedoms would follow on from that, as did their opposite too. HCC was very focussed on PC hardware access, with software an afterthought, seeing promotion of writing it off-system using emulation on larger computers repsawned. Altair Users Club membership came free with purchase of an 8800, or for $30 per year as an associate, entitling one to a "newsletter, service desk phone number, trade for program listings from software library, and contest with prizes for best subroutine and major program submitted." So in 1976, HCC's Tom Pittman released to market his TINY BASIC product, with a new ethic: "Please help us to stay in business by respecting the Copyright notices on the software and the documentation." The popularisation of commercial software had begun. It would be three decades before Unix could even look at matching that development impetus. This will prove its greatest challenge, where the technical demands of competition are but slight by comparison as proven in the commercial sector.
[Memoir, Bob Lash, and gif]. "The Copyright Act of 1976 had overhauled U.S. copyright law, extending the legal protection of copyright to software programs. According to Section 102(b) of the Act, individuals and companies now possessed the ability to copyright the 'expression' of a software program but not the 'actual processes or methods embodied in the program.' Translated, programmers and companies had the ability to treat software programs like a story or song. Other programmers could take inspiration from the work, but to make a direct copy or nonsatirical derivative, they first had to secure permission from the original creator. Although the new law guaranteed that even programs without copyright notices carried copyright protection, programmers quickly asserted their rights, attaching coypright notices to their software programs." "Rare was the software program that didn't borrow source code from past programs, and yet, with a single stroke of the president's pen, Congress had given programmers and companies the power to assert individual authorship over communally built programs. It also injected a dose of formality into what had otherwise been an informal system. Even if hackers could demonstrate how a given program's source-code bloodlines stretched back years, if not decades, the resources and money that went into battling each copyright notice were beyond most hackers' means. Simply put, disputes that had once been settled hacker-to-hacker were now settled lawyer-to-lawyer. In such a system, companies, not hackers, held the automatic advantage." [The GNU General Public License "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 9, Sam Williams, O'Reilly 2002]. The essential change from this moment - the mass 'productization' of computers - was substitution of sales-speak for design quality in the devices being marketed. 'Snake oil' hyperbole immediately became the dominant dynamic to the industry, riding the massive upswing of the PC product cycle. An excellent essay on the subject was written by Neal Stephenson in 1999: In the Beginning was the Command Line. [See also Cryptonomicon & here]. The shallow promotionalism would go on to influence the Unix world to the same degree as every other operating system. We can usefully specify it as 'open shallowness'. It is an inevitable pressure from the fact that programming output had been lifted out of the public sphere and turned into a tradeable commodity. The struggle to retain a Unix in the commons would underpin the OS's development henceforth, and turn into a contest with open shallowness for the free Unix mantle. Apple I-II System & VMS proprietary 1977 BSD1 public domain Popularly accessible commercial programming surprised and dwarfed formal academic communal output, for hobbyist users and business individualists, as an unstoppable eclipse began. MicroSoft sold its BASIC to MITS in 1977, for their Altair PC, securing establishment of the first software house; first then and now. Commodore and Tandy began selling personal computers that year, also with MS BASIC programming "licensed.. on a 'pay once, no royalties' basis" that left them free to customise BASIC thereafter; the 1979 Texas Instruments TI99/4A had TI Basic. Apple, however, were the runaway success leading popular computing. Apple had MS BASIC licensed in rapidly too, replacing the Apple version, and accepting MS niche software production most largely. Unwittingly, Apple pioneered software market homogenisation and capture, as a vector and not for themselves. [Commodore BASIC Answers.com; Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer]. "The [1976] Apple I and II [1977] were designed strictly on a hobby, for-fun basis, not to be a product for a company.. Personal computer keyboards and video screens were not well established then. There was a lot of showing off to other members of the club [HCC]. Schematics of the Apple I were passed around freely, and I'd even go over to people's houses and help them build their own." Apple being the first to cheaply match IBM's graceful new PC form factor, with fewer and cheaper (Motorolla 6502) chips, explains much of their success. Adapting their design for playing the Atari Breakout game, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak "were the first to offer built-in BASIC", speaker sound, colour graphics, and several other features soon to become standard in PCs. The "small computer scene was based on the belief that we were all on top of a revolution.. This big thing that had so much value, and that we wanted to use and control, we finally were getting close to.. We managed to bring the computer revolution home." [Homebrew And How The Apple Came To Be, Stephen Wozniak]. The Apple OS was known to users as "System", and sold as part of the computer product, with no source access and no specific title. In buying this computer and software set, one needed no license. The Apple OS was fully proprietary, and not alone in that. Virtual Memory System (VMS) was developed by DEC from 1975 as 'Starlet', and marketed for the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) minicomputers DEC made for the VAX corporation from 1978. But in the academies, courtesy of Bell Labs, the economical VAXen would run UNIX instead, as the media-cost proprietary OS for minis. After the burgeoning microcomputer workshops, academic research remained an equivalent software distribution channel. And the brand of significance known to it was BSD-UNIX. Working for the public good and servicing businesses, Bill Joy of UCB assembled and released the Berkeley Standard Distributions - the first in early 1977 (1BSD / BSd1). This was a current toolset for addition to the UNIX kernel licensed from AT&T, including the Pascal compiler system and ex editor, that would henceforth be updated periodically. 2BSD was released in 1978. [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable Marshall Kirk McKusick in "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" O'Reilly Jan99; the second oil shock hit 1978-79]. A new era was opening after Unix's first decade of existence. Employment at Berkeley - especially in the Mathematics faculty - had connected learners with computers like never before. The creation of program tools was simplified and speeded up by the growing community around BSD Unix, reaching critical mass and momentum that would carry it forward perpetually. In this, emerged a new connundrum. Authorship of program code on this scale did two things: make the output a marketable commodity, and offer vastly extended career options to the creators. The extraction of value from the code product now revolved around various models of licensing, copyright, and patent law. The problem was how to ensure that the level of sharing that so enhanced Unix in academic research would also be perpetuated. At this point in time, the problem was not even recognised (see Part V). And once it was, distinction was still not clearly made that digital language expresses better when shared, freed from market constraint, and relieved of commodity value: "Information wants to be free" (in circulation). This was due to the ongoing pressure from the rising technocratic labouring class, to have their output commoditised in order that it be valued ever more highly - the natural struggle in any wage economy. Henceforth the free licensing debate amounts to oscillation between these two polar opposites: code for social (intellectual) value, or code for individual (monetary) value. Low awareness of the divide stems partly from the large grey area where both purposes are served simultaneously, and partly from the low general political consciousness achieved by an historic individualised consumer (materially distracted) first world. [Stewart Brand "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT" Viking 1987]. "Numbers are the highest degree of knowledge. It is knowledge itself. ..Then, my noble friend, geometry will draw the soul towards truth, and create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up that which is not unhappily allowed to fall down." -- Plato. [Platonic Realms™]. Hacker Ethics derived from Scientific Method - cooperative Platonic ideal - reflecting increasing academic development of high computing theory and practise in the 1970s. The idealism played out nowhere more strongly than in the expectation that a permanent BSD community would keep Unix vital and at the forefront of society. But BSD Unix would fall prey to raw commercial exploitation, that it promoted through its commercialisation of code and coding careers. Disorienated, competitors would displace it (Microsoft, Apple, and Linux). The future would prove the ineffectiveness of idealism, and the contradictory incompatibility of cooperation and exploitation. Hacker history is very well documented: "Eric Raymond has become a kind of self-appointed participant anthropologist to the Open Source community". [Introduction Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, & Mark Stone, in "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" O'Reilly Jan1999. More: Eric S Raymond (ESR) The Art of Unix Programming 2003, and The New Hacker's Dictionary 1996; Pekka Himanen The Hacker Ethic 2001; Jonas Lowgren Hacker culture(s) 2000]. Raymond's online writings reveal him to be three things further: not crediting (scientific) contributions made (to computing) from outside the USA (by 1940s England) - culturally narrowing; libertarian - fervently pro-capitalist; a proud advocate-bearer of firearms - of militant extreme. In the main, ESR comes across as your average American at large in the world - as viewed from outside the USA - 'a redneck firebrand' of individualism and nation. A broader Unix history gets written when this forceful influence is kept in perspective. Absolutely, ESR is involved in shaping the history he writes - the liberation of Unix, on the BSD model. There is no other option but to learn everything possible from Eric Raymond, because - more than anyone else, theoretically - 'Open Source' Unix belongs to ESR. Raymond has become as integral an influence on the Linux story - for example - as Linus Torvalds himself (see Part IX). So the rest of this thesis is often informed by - and a response to - ESR's 'Bazaar' account of Unix. Where the United States of America is known as culturally shallow, self-seeking, and aggressively extrovert, the Unix discourse contains the perfect example. [ESR A Brief History of Hackerdom in "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" O'Reilly Jan1999; The Cathedral and the Bazaar 1998]. The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin Peter Salus bk online groklaw "1BSD on the 9th March 1978. 2BSD was released almost exactly a year later, on the 10th May 1979"? Beware inaccurate sources. [http://clug.net.nz/index.php/BsdUnix]. [Draft 08Sep05 - to be cont'd..] |
