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| Wednesday, April 21 | | · | The Choice of a GNU Generation |
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| The Choice of a GNU Generation |
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 What is that a picture of to the right? Why that is a gnu of course (also known as a wildebeest); a cute little gnu with a blanket what else? Oh yeah and Linux has to do with it somehow, or rather, vice versa and likewise. If this is suddenly getting interesting for you read on... otherwise... you are not a true geek so just ignore my essay that I worked so very, very hard to create just so I could spread the gospel that is GNU.
Any avid reader of a particular periodical has probably encountered some of the hype surrounding Linux. Maybe even if they don’t know what a “Linux” is exactly, it seems to be one of those words that the average citizen has picked up as a tech buzzword. In the same way the internet was once just a buzz word, you know, “information superhighway”; thank you Al Gore. Until now... now the internet is not a buzz word, it is a big part of our lives; maybe even something most of us cannot picture ourselves living without. Although internet bubble stocks like pets.com were also once buzzwords and they are now long gone; perhaps some people have no memory of them at all. So where does Linux fit into all the new tech hype nowadays? Is it a long term winner, or is it just a pumped up loser? Will it eventually become as unequivocally massively adopted as part of our future culture just as the internet has been?
Linux is somewhat an esoteric specialty at the moment. Linux is simply a computer operating system just as Microsoft Windows is an operating system; one that surely many are very familiar with and use on a regular basis. The average users who utilize Microsoft Windows and Microsoft’s Office suite products daily may not even know what the difference between the two softwares are and may simply call the whole package “Microsoft”. To those people the following discussion may seem the least bit interesting and may be thought to have little impact on their lives. This, however, could not be further from the truth because although many people think the stock market is over their head, or the details of physics are over their head, these things still impact all our lives and eventually we are forced to care. You can’t avoid some things, like heavy objects falling from the sky.
"A computer program's source code is the collection of files that can be converted from human-readable form to an equivalent computer-executable form" (Wikipedia). Source code is the flow of ideas and fundamental overlying logic behind a program's operation. Source code is created by a human to tell a computer to translate what they wrote into binary language that the computer can understand and execute. It is not possible to convert binary code back to clearly written source code however because the human meaning has all been lost. That is why source code is in many ways more important than the actual binary program itself. And an open-source license, simply put, means that a piece of software's code is available for anyone to edit and improve and then they must give it back to the community (Perens). However, there are many different types of open-source licensing and a few stick out of the crowd as better ways protecting the philosophy of copyrighted source code.
Linux itself is not the matter that is most important, and it is not the matter that will be directly reverberating change across the world. Linux is rather more of an effect of a cause. That cause is the GNU, which stands for “GNU's Not Unix''. For programming geeks in the know out there that is what would be called a recursive acronym. The GNU is perhaps the most important and yet the least well known piece of the puzzle in the open-source movement. It is this specific open-source license in the open-source movement that is fundamentally changing the future of how technology will be implemented and shared (Free Software Foundation).
Contrary to popular belief, software wasn’t always prepackaged in a shinny box with pretty colors and sold off a self with an End User License Agreement inside for you to unconditionally comply with before you were allowed to use it. Software also wasn’t always so obscure and closed down to the hobbyist programmers out there, but unfortunately much of it is now (Raymond 37). Software, before it became a commodity, used to be distributed in an open academic way because software’s birth took place in academia. It used to be that if someone wanted the source code to the software they were using they could get their hands on it and modify it to their hearts content, no problem. It took a company like AT&T to start to use a somewhat locked down proprietary software selling model to sell its System V UNIX system and it took someone like Bill Gates to solidly perfect the model later on and make billions off of it with Windows. These actions were a wake up call to the hobbyist, a.k.a. hacker, programming community. A model so simple and open couldn’t last long until people seeking new ways to profit locked down the code (Stallman).
The GNU Project was created in 1984 by Richard M. Stallman a graduate of Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics (Stallman Bio). After spending some time programming at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Stallman began to come into contact with the first instances of proprietary software and became frustrated. He found that many times he wanted to get something simple done and he would have to beg the software provider to create a feature for him that he could have easily created himself must faster and more efficiently. He had already experienced the openness and freeness that software design could be. Unlike the younger generation computer scientist crowd of today Mr. Stallman did not have any predetermined notions that all software is intrinsically proprietary and that that's just the way it has to be.
What it basically comes down to though is efficiency, ease of implementation, and always in the end, price. That is how capitalism works, that is how the reality of the world works. Mr. Stallman is a very loud self proclaimed liberal and the GNU General Public Licensing scheme is dubbed a copyleft, a pun on the word copyright, and has come under attack as something very akin communism within software licensing. In fact, “red” things do resonate within the GNU programmer community that do indeed make it seem communistic (Konya). In the end though, the goal of the GNU/GPL can be simply explained as creating freedom in a programming community. The problem with submitting something you create into the public domain is that once it is out there anyone may improve upon it and not have to give back the improvements to the community. This is effectively stealing the hard work of another adding very little value to it and then charging for it as if you did all the work.
If looked at objectively one will find that GNU/GPL is not communistic at all because there is a price to pay for the software (Matzan). The price is in the form of improvements, or features. With a copy of Microsoft Office you pay something like $400 for every user of that software package. If Microsoft never added features to their product and they still had what you needed you would still pay $400 per a user for that software package. That’s how you pay in their model. With GNU software you pay nothing. Well, there is always the technicality of how to physically transport the electrons of the software onto your machine which does end up costing a little money deepening on the route you use, via the internet or burned CD-ROM. However, the effective price of GNU/GPL software itself for use per infinite amount of users still amounts to zero.
But then what if you want a new feature? With GPL software you pay for the improvements you want very much more directly perhaps even hiring a programmer to do it for you. With proprietary software you entrust Microsoft to improve the software around their schedule and improve upon whatever they feel is best fit for their user base. You are at the mercy of what Microsoft wants in their software, not necessarily what you want in their software. If you want Windows but you would like it more secure in a very specific way, too bad. If you want Windows but you would like to run it on different processor hardware architecture, too bad. If you just want to fix this one little bug that they have never gotten around to fixing, just this one little thing and you have talked to them about it but they still will not listen, too bad. In all these situations Linux has already enabled people to do these things because of it's openness and the GNU/GPL.
Then there is the problem of re-inventing the wheel. Ever wonder how Microsoft got to be a monopoly, enough that the government started to get involved? The US system of capitalism is very healthy and the grounds for calling a company a monopoly have to be fairly strong because there are usually are alternative companies that people can shop to. Nevertheless the longer Microsoft remains the market leader the larger their proprietary tool base gets and the more hooked customers get to their products. Unlike the automotive industry where you can buy your parts from someone else besides the dealer, in the proprietary software industry once you decide who to buy your car from you’ll be buying your tires from them. Not only that but you’ll be buying your next car from them also otherwise you’ll have to learn how to drive all over again with some other company’s vehicle. And any company that hopes to compete with Microsoft must expend an exorbitant amount of capital before entering the market to ensure backwards compatibility with the “wheel” Microsoft has already built. Only Apple computer has felt up to that task and most likely it would have failed if it wasn’t for Microsoft’s infusion of funds into that company and providing support with their Office suite on that platform. Microsoft would not wish for their only competition to die, for obvious reasons.
Ah, but now we have this new software package called Linux enter the fray. Also, as already mentioned, Linux has the most important advantage in that is using the GNU/GPL licensing scheme. In fact one would not be wrong to venture to say that Linux would not be what it has turned out to be today without the GNU philosophy so deeply infused within its community. Linux is software, and software is used for increased productivity. Right now Linux is somewhat limited in it’s applications for increased productivity. The average user would not be better served at the moment by moving away from a Windows operating system to a Linux operating system. Microsoft has produced what it calls the TCO, or Total Cost of Ownership reports through independent third parties and these reports, taken with a grain of salt, do have some merit to them (Microsoft). However, as time goes on Linux’s rapid development pace is still increasing and the future is unclear. As more people become aware of its presence and what it means to them and their future computing experience Linux’s adoption rate will also begin to increase.
Hopefully through this discussion I have created a base of highly informed software purchasers. Too often people feel that the technology sector is too confusing and changing too rapidly. Too often are people overwhelmed by these things and shut down and stop caring. But now by being more informed about the inner workings of the world of software one can make more insightful software investments in the future and feel more comfortable with their newly gained knowledge. So, now you know what Linux is and what it means for you. It means more choice in the market and less software vendor lock in, and these are good things. Linux is choice. The GNU is freedom. Together they will slowly, yet surely, change the world.
Bibliography
Free Software Foundation "GNU General Public License" http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html (13 March 2004)
Konya, Andras "Mozilla under AOLTW" http://www.andkon.com/stuf/mozilla3/ (13 March 2004)
Matzan, Jem "Debunking Common GNU/Linux Myths" http://www.thejemreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=113 (13 March 2004)
Microsoft Corporation "Get the facts on Windows and Linux" http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.asp (13 March 2004)
Perens, Bruce "The Open Source Definition" http://opensource.org/docs/definition_plain.html (13 March 2004)
Raymond, Eric S. The Art of UNIX Programming New York, New York: Addison-Wesley, 2004
Stallman, Richard "A Serious Bio" http://www.stallman.org/#serious (13 March 2004)
Stallman, Richard "The GNU Project" http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html (13 March 2004)
Wikipedia "Source Code" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code (13 March 2004)
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Posted on Wednesday, April 21 @ 19:53:09 PDT by GunPlay |
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