Free Software - An Introduction

Background
As the computer continues to become increasingly pervasive in our personal, social and working lives,
the soul of the machine–software–is seemingly trapper in a battle of proprietary ownership.
In the early days of computing, it was customary for programmers to share software. Since the
1960’s, however, software has become proprietary, and users have been prevented from sharing, let
alone modifying, programs. By the 1980’s, proprietary software had become the norm, and the
computing community was no longer free to co-operate in using and altering software for specific
needs. Freedom had been lost.

“The owners of software had erected walls to divide us from each other.”

The Free Software Foundation

Those words come from the one person who has zealously campaigned to safeguard software freedoms
- Richard M Stallman, a celebrated programmer and an accomplished hacker. (Contrary to popular
belief, a hacker is not an antisocial being. S/he is someone who is passionate, even obsessive, about
programming, as opposed to a cracker, someone who breaks security on a system, often with malicious
intent.)
Stallman, then working at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, quit his job to launch the Free Software
Movement in 1984, inspired by “the ideals of 1776 (American Independence) : freedom, community
and voluntary co-operation, which leads to free enterprise, free speech and free software”. Simulta-
neously, he started the GNU project to develop the free operating system GNU (a recursive acronym
for “GNU’s Not Unix”)
The next year, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF), dedicated to promoting
computer users’ rights to use study, copy, modify and redistribute computer programs.
The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in “free speech”, not necessarily gratis, as in
“free beer”) software and free documentation. In particular, FSF promotes the GNU operating system,
used widely today in its GNU/Linux variant, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds.
It is estimated that, worldwide, there are now between 17 and 20 million users of GNU/Linux systems
today. These systems are often mistakenly called just “Linux”; calling them “GNU/Linux” corrects
this confusion. The FSF (http://www.gnu.org), whose headquarters is in Boston, Massachusetts,
USA, is a tax-exempt charity for free software development. It raises funds by selling GNU CD-
ROMs, T-shirts, manuals and deluxe distributions (all of which users are free to copy and change),
as well as from donations.
The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of
software. The FSF believes that free software is a matter of freedom, not price.

Free Software in India

A developing country like India has a special stake in promoting and encouraging the use of free
software. For one, India is economically backward and needs to constantly strive for cost-effective
solutions. For another, the “digital divide” in India is poised to widen, given the country’s diversity in
language, literacy levels, and access to computers and bandwidth. Free software can help bridge this
divide by encouraging solidarity, collaboration and voluntary community work amongst programmers
and computer users.

And in Kerala
Free software meshes in particularly will with Kerala’s long tradition of democracy, equity and public
action. Just as the state is often held up as a model of equitable social and human development
amidst lack-lustre industrial growth, Kerala can leverage the inherent strengths of free software to
evolve into an equitable Knowledge Society.

1
GNU General Public Licence
The GNU GPL gives each user the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the
software, based on unfettered access to the source code. Being free to do this means (among other
things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission.
While granting the user these freedoms, the GNU GPL defends them by saying that no one is
allowed to take them away from anyone else. Any published program, which incorporates all or a
substantial part of a GPL-covered program, must itself be released under the GNU GPL.
The GPL ensures that no person or community can privatize the community’s free software.
In Stallman’s words,

Whoever wishes to copy parts of our software into his program must let us use parts of
that program in our programs. Nobody is forced to join our club, but those who wish
to participate must offer us the same co-operation they receive from us. This makes the
system fair.

A Moral and Practical Choice

Our freedom is not permanently assured. The world does not stand still, and we cannot
count on having freedom five years from now, just because we have it today.

Anyone whose conscience resonates to these words will find comfort and refuge in Free Software.
Those who believe in freedom in general, and issues like copyright vs community in the age of computer
networks, and the danger of software patents, will be naturally drawn to Free Software.

More on Richard Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman, born in New York in 1953, graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA
in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence
Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text
editor there in 1975. In January 1984, he resigned from MIT to start the GNU Project. Stallman
is the principal author of the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc), a portable optimising compiler that
was designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports
over 30 different architectures and 7 programming languages. Stallman also wrote the GNU symbolic
debugger (GSD), GNU Emacs and various other GNU programs.
Stallman received the Grace Hooper Award for 1991 from the Association for Computing Machin-
ery for his development of the first Emacs editor in 1970s. In 1990, he was awarded a MacArthur
Foundation “genius grant” fellowship, and, in 1996, an honorary doctorate form the Royal Institute
of technology in Sweden. In 1998, along with Linus Torvalds, he received the Electronic Frontier
Foundation’s Pioneer award. In 1999, he received the Yuri Rubinski memorial award.
RMS, as he is often called, likes music, butterflies, caves, good food and, needless to add, com-
puters. He sometimes writes jokes, funny poetry and song parodies. When in the mood, he refers to
himself as St. IGNUcius in the Church of Emacs.
In the first edition of “the Hacker’s Dictionary”, this is the bio that Stallman wrote:

I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953, and moved to the MIT Artificial
Intelligence Lab in 1971. My hobbies include affection, international folk dance, flying,
cooking, physics, recorder, puns, science fiction fandom, and programming; I magically
get paid for doing the last one. About a year ago, I split up with the PDP-10 computer to
which I was married for ten years. We still love each other, but the world is taking us in
different directions, For the moment, I still live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among our
old memories. “Richard Stallman” is just my mundane name; you can call me “RMS”

For more information on free software and GNU/Linux check out http://www.gnu.org