'Free software' concept breaks through, but cracks in movement spread

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff

Of all the products Microsoft Corp. has created, none will be more important to the company than its Windows 2000 operating system software. Windows 2000 is supposed to finally establish Microsoft as a producer of ultrareliable software for use in the biggest, toughest computing jobs.

Which is why the computer industry was stunned last week when two key Microsoft executives hinted that they might share the secrets of Windows 2000 with the world.

Microsoft and most other software companies make billions by selling programs that work even though users don't know exactly how they work. The underlying computer instructions or ''source code'' are guarded as closely as the ingredient list for Coca-Cola. Why should Microsoft open the black box of Windows 2000 and let rivals peer inside?

''Why not?'' comes the reply from the leaders of a powerful alternative software movement. The news last week proves that Microsoft is beginning to listen.

After years of obscurity, the ''free software'' or ''open source software'' movement is winning allies in remarkable places. Once considered a radical notion promoted by programmers on the fringe of the software industry, the open source principle is now being embraced in the boardrooms of the world's top computer companies. Firms like IBM Corp. are producing open source software products. Apple Computer Corp., notoriously protective of its Macintosh operating system, has said it will open part of the Mac's source code.

There are various ideas about what open source software means. But all of its supporters agree on one thing: The underlying source code of a program should be freely available, rather than concealed by the company that sells the software.

As a result, open source is now perceived as a significant threat to the power of Microsoft. But the movement is also a threat to itself - stressed by internal disputes that could one day tear it apart.

The open source movement has been fueled by the explosive growth of the Internet. First, the Internet makes it possible for programmers in the open source community to constantly collaborate. And the Net itself is based entirely on open software standards.

''Web server'' software that distributes Web pages to other computers depends on these open standards. Microsoft and other companies sell proprietary Web server software. But by far the most popular Web server software is an open source program called Apache, cobbled together by an international alliance of programmers and distributed for free. Apache's reputation for excellence is so strong that IBM Corp. last year began distributing copies of it to customers buying IBM server computers.

There's also the case of Larry Wall, who developed a new computer language called Perl in 1987, just to solve a particular problem he had run across at work. ''I had a job I needed to do and none of the tools available to me were good enough,'' says Wall.

Having invented Perl, Wall gave it away on the Internet. Today, Perl is one of the Web's most popular programming languages, used by thousands of Web site developers to add sophisticated capabilities to their pages.

But the best-known open software product is Linux, a powerful operating system that's an alternative to Microsoft's flagship office product, Windows NT.

The core of Linux was created in 1992 by a Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds. By 1998, Torvalds was on the cover of Forbes magazine. Last year, Linux became the fourth-most popular operating system for running powerful ''server'' computers, which drive corporate networks and the Internet.

Major firms like IBM Corp., Dell Computer Corp., and Intel Corp. are investing in companies that produce Linux software. IBM and Dell are even selling computers with Linux preinstalled, because many corporate clients are asking for them.

Meanwhile, firms like Oracle Corp., Lotus Development Corp., and Corel Computer Corp are making Linux versions of their major business application programs. You can download Linux from the Internet without paying a dime, but many users prefer to buy it on CD-ROM disks from firms like Red Hat Software Inc., which charges $50 and throws in free technical support.

But whether he pays for Linux or not, the owner is free to give copies of the software to anyone he chooses. In addition, the owner is free to rewrite features of the software that don't suit him. Linux comes with source code that lets programmers modify the software however they please.

This is what the ''free'' in free software really means. This is the kind of freedom that Richard Stallman of Cambridge had in mind when he founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985. The winner of a MacArthur Foundation ''genius grant,'' Stallman, who operates from a cluttered office at the MIT Computer Lab, could be pulling down hundreds of thousands of dollars at any of a hundred software firms. Instead, he's is leading a crusade to liberate software.

''We had the goal, the vision of an operating system where every part of the system was made of free software,'' says Stallman, strolling the halls in his stocking feet.

So he and hundreds of volunteers around the world launched the GNU Project to create a free version of the powerful Unix operating system, then owned by AT&T Corp. GNU created hundreds of programs, distributed for free, that performed key functions. By the early 1990s, the only thing GNU lacked was a vital core called a ''kernel'' that governs the basic interaction between the computer's hardware and software.

That's when Stallman found out about Torvalds, who was cobbling together a Unix-like kernel. Torvalds contributed his kernel to GNU and a powerful new operating system was born. Stallman, with the pride common to wizard programmers, is annoyed that the resultant product is called Linux. The proper name for it is GNU/Linux, he insists, because the GNU Project wrote far more of the software than Torvalds did.

Whatever you call it, GNU/Linux is mainly popular because it often works better than Windows and other commercial software products. Linux is particularly renowned for its stability - the software rarely crashes.

Such excellence is surprising. Just as a movie script written by more than two writers is usually bad, software tends to get buggier and less efficient as more people work on it. Thousands of people have worked on Linux, yet it's more reliable than commercial software.

It made no sense to programmer Eric Raymond. ''I was determined to become part of the community and to figure out how they got away with it,'' Raymond says. He wrote up his conclusion in a famous essay, ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar,'' published on the Internet - a reference to the elitism of proprietary software and the openness of free software code.

Raymond found surprisingly simple reasons for the excellence of Linux. For example, all programmers who contributed to the project published their code in open forums on the Internet. Other programmers from around the world were free to examine it, criticize it, improve upon it. ''People are less willing to write sloppy code, because a lot of people will see it,'' says Raymond. And any flaws that are present will quickly turn up when 100 or more people start poring over the code.

In a sort of peer review system, open source projects like GNU/Linux invite smart people around the world to contribute, thus tapping into more brainpower than even a firm like Microsoft can muster.

Raymond's essay became the intellectual manifesto of the open source movement. Among its readers were the desperate managers of Netscape Communications Corp., reeling from the declining market share of its Internet browsers. Raymond's work played a major role in encouraging Netscape to announce last year it would design its next browser, code-named Mozilla, as an open source project. The company invited programmers around the world to help.

A year later, however, no date has been set for the release of Mozilla. A key executive with the project, Jamie Zawinski, angrily resigned on April 1, bitterly criticizing the project's slow pace. A Netscape official insists that Mozilla is still on track and says that a trial version of the open source browser will be released by autumn. Mozilla's woes prove that the open source process doesn't guarantee the rapid creation of good software.

And the open source movement faces more serious threats.

Linux was designed to emulate Unix, a powerful operating system invented in the 1970s at AT&T Corp. Since that time, over a dozen different incompatible versions of Unix have appeared.

Already there are signs of the same thing happening to Linux. Several firms offer their own versions of the product. For now, they're generally compatible. But because the Linux source code is open, each distributor could introduce modifications to make his particular Linux package work better. In no time, Linux could become divided into squabbling fiefdoms, while Microsoft grabs the lion's share of the market by offering a single standard.

To avert this, many of the leading Linux companies have joined the Linux Standard Base, an organization to standardize Linux versions. But in a worrisome sign of the organization's prospects, the leading Linux distributor, Red Hat Software Inc., has so far refused to join the group.

Ideology also divides the movement. Richard Stallman believes with religious fervor that all software should be provided with source code and users should be free to modify it at will. But many companies have begun writing ''unfree'' software to run on Linux machines. The code for these programs is kept secret in the traditional way. For instance, a copy of the current Netscape browser is included with Red Hat Linux. But Netscape won't release the source code for this browser. For that reason, says Stallman, ''I can't recommend that anybody buy a Red Hat CD.''

To Raymond, this attitude is absurd. Linux and other open source products will only become popular if traditional commercial firms make programs to work with them. Inevitably, most of this software will not be open source, but that's no reason to reject it, he argues. ''Richard would cheerfully accept a world of inferior software if everything was shared and open,'' says Raymond. ''He cares more about doctrinal purity than about success.''

For now the two men remain friends, and agree to disagree. Raymond will continue to encourage firms to write commercial software that's compatible with Linux and other open source products; Stallman will continue to write pure, free code. And together with thousands of other programmers, they'll continue to make the top people at Microsoft very nervous indeed.

This story ran on page F01 of the Boston Globe on 04/11/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.