Linux began as a labor of love by hippies and hackers. Now the suits are cutting checks and running the show. This pay-for-play arrangement may be standard operating procedure among high-tech companies and academic labs, but it represents a big change for Linux, which first gained favor among hippie-esque programmers who disdained revenue and profit, advocating a “peace, love and software” vision of Linux as a free operating system developed without regard for corporate interests.
Peace, love and paychecks
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I thought Linux started out as an educational and fun hobby, a project that existed for its own sake. The “hippy ideals” and zealotry was added on later, just like the corporate interests and money which came after that.
That’s a funny article coming from MSNBC. But it’s very interesting. Nothing wrong with kernel developers making tons of chash. It’s only right that people that work hard get compensated and the community still gets to enjoy the rewards.
My companies employ open source developers, which not only helps the companies, it enables programmers to keep doing what they love and get paid for it. A win-win I say.
When they said hippie I think they meant the GNU folks, not Linus/Linux developers. You see, “Just For Fun” doesn’t sound like a title for a hippie book that’s not about pot.
Anyway, MSNBC needs to fix their site, it doesn’t align right…
This is absolutely wonderful, I don’t see how anyone would have any complaints that the markets are seriously beginning to interact w/ the OSS/Linux “community”.
Programmers can do what they love, whether for free or while being paid handsomely, and everybody wins.
We get a rapidly evolving, maturing, high-quality operating system and like many emerging technologies, new markets are spawned, jobs are created, and the world keeps turning.
I’ve never been so excited about technology as I am today w/ open source and the classic business model finding a working relationship!
oh…and…viva la Gentoo!!
Torvalds cuts a deal to let NetApp pay for the privelege of fixing Linux’ broken NFS implementation. Brilliant play!
but I can say Linux achieved what it was set out to do.
Be a *nix that we can all freely use at home.
Out with the old and in with the new, Linux is simply the new unix standard.
The more mature systems will still play a role and be around but their lead will be caught up with and eventually surpassed.
But Chris WITHOUT GNU, there won’t be a “Linux OS” so to speak. Forget not that an OS is NOT just the kernel. Linux is but just a kernel NOT a complete OS on its own.
An OS consist NOT just of a kernel but tools/utilities e.g. Gcc, system tools e.g. Bash, Grep, GNU Make, Autoconf, Automake, Binutils, Bison, a2ps, Cpio, Diffutils, Emacs, Finutils, Indent, etc; as well as the applications e.g. GIMP i.e. GNU Image Manipulation Program.
Without the hippies and GNU folks, there would not have been the robust optimism dynamism, and growth we see today.
You know, I’m curious why noone’s built an OS using the Linux kernel with the BSD user-land.
I think because BSD uses some GNU software as well, let me think of an example, GCC
I think a lot of people here don’t really understand the GNU philosophy. GNU isn’t about no-cost software. It’s about free source code. At an ideological level, there is quite a difference between the two. Heck, the FSF itself sells a deluxe GNU software CD packages for $5000 per copy. Consider, also, that RedHat’s made $126 million in revenues the last fiscal year, $4.6 million in profit, and had a billion dollars in the bank. RedHat has managed to build a successful business selling entirely GPL’ed software.
Philosiphy shmilosiphy…
Why do folks insist upon taking such a highbrow philisophical approach to software?
What a person creates and produces of his own labor is his, that is the basis of all property rights and basic liberty. Liberty is directly proportional to personal property, starting with yourself, you own yourself, your labor, and all of that which you create and produce from your own blood, sweat, and tears.
If someone should create and produce some sort of property (a book, software, a wooden shed, etc.) and decides to give it away, fantastic! Thank you! Philanthropy is quite honerable, indeed.
However, should someone keep what he creates, the object created by his own labor inherently being his, that’s also honerable and that individual should not be ashamed for posessing his own property.
Was that black-and-white enough?
Personally, I don’t see what is so complicated about this issue. Sure, patents, copyright, etc. However, law doesn’t make things right or wrong, morality does. Without morality there is no property; without property there is no liberty.
I don’t mean to get off on a rant here………
Of course, all of your statements are mere assertions and nothing more. They make sense to anyone raised to appreciate western philosophy, but are far from universally true. In particular, the concept of private propebeing related to liberty is derived from classical English schools of thought. Many people reject that style of thinking. To look at it one way, the very concept of private property is an infringement on liberty — specifically, the right of the strongest to take whatever he can through strength.
In any case, my point is that the style of thinking in your comment is only applicable to a specific school of philosophy. While the argument is internally consistent, it can only be rationalized through the acceptance of some specific axioms, and not all people accept those axioms.
However, should someone keep what he creates, the object created by his own labor inherently being his, that’s also honerable and that individual should not be ashamed for posessing his own property.
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perhaps you misunderstood GPL?. the copyright rests with the author and he licenses the software under GPL or any such licenses. so it is indeed the invidual’s property.
What about when ‘distribution of labor’ comes into play (look up the term if you’re not sure what I mean)? That makes what you are talking about actually quite complicated, doesn’t it?
1. Computers can’t work without operating systems.
2. Someone has to write operating systems cause they don’t write themselves (yet
)
3. Academic institutions are (among other things) IT organizations with little cash, tons of brain power and ample supply of free labor.
4. Academic institutions decide to stop paying IT bills and build an OS themselves. In the nature of academic research it’s done openly with collaboration and special attention to credits — enter OSS.
5. Software vendors hurry to cash in on the free labor, change the code a bit to make differentiators and provide proprietary offerings.
6. Frustrated programmers that can’t make money out of their software make sure no one else make money out of it without paying something in return (maintaining the development and immortalizing the programmer’s name is a form of payment) — enter GPL.
7. IT managers in big organizations see the opportunity to become the heroes by saving money and adopting low cost operating systems.
8. Software vendors see the opportunity to cash in on free labor and hurry to make service/consulting offerings based on GPL software.
9. Software vendors make tons of money from service/consulting; they create a new market for themselves but have no competitive edge. To create a competitive edge, they fund the development and make sure they have a say in the matter.
10. Everything gets wrapped up in nice ideologies that discuss freedom, communism and beer.
“You know, I’m curious why noone’s built an OS using the Linux kernel with the BSD user-land.”
Well, there’s debian/netbsd, which is the NetBSD kernel with the BSD userland. Gentoo has proposals about BSD userlands. It’s an idea which has been thought about, but I don’t think many people are seriously backing it.
Linus Thorwalds said it didn’t affect his decision, but the fact that his parents were commited Communists (European style) must have influenced his sense of social responsibility. In his biography, he says he made the kernel open source to protect it from commercial predators and because it was a group project with a leader but no real owner. As best I can remember.
could someone explain to me the advantages of putting the BSD userland on top of the Linux kernel? What is contained therein? For instance, is the TCP/IP stack in the BSD kernels (in general,) or in the userland? Thanks.
It was actually a fairly decent article; much better than I’d expect from Lyons, considering the way he usually slants things.
That said, the whole “GNU/hippie” tagline is so old; it’s amusing to see someone other than slashdot trolls using it.
The summary seems more biased than the article.
Linux’s system makes sense – maintainers are contributers who have a combination of technical and leadership abilities [yes, it’s not perfect – that’s not the point.]
Maintainers keep one part of the kernel coherent, as it’s too much work for Linus/Andrew Morton. There’s nothing “socialist” about it; it’s a division of labor, which lets people with a certain amount of expertise filter the huge amount of changes [I’ve read 10 megs/month of patches are going into 2.6…] occuring. Maintainers are vital to linux’s continued development.
Large patches that come from out of nowhere are a lot of work to understand; it makes sense to hire a maintainer if you’re a company wanting to seriously change a major aspect, because that person will need to do a lot of work regardless, and will then be able to focus on your changes. He also knows what he will allow into the kernel vs need to change; this can keep a lot of unnecessary patch redesign from being done. Etc, etc.
The point is, maintainers already know the linux kernel, and have taken a lot of work upon themselves; they’re one of the major things that lets development progress at all.
“could someone explain to me the advantages of putting the BSD userland on top of the Linux kernel? What is contained therein? For instance, is the TCP/IP stack in the BSD kernels (in general,) or in the userland? Thanks.”
The TCP/IP stack is in the kernel.
There’s very little gain in using the BSD userland with a linux kernel. The GNU userland is more featureful, although the code makes people throw up their hands in agony. [typedef typedef typedef typedef!]
The BSD kernels are in some ways better written than the Linux one; a BSD kernel with a GNU userland makes a lot more sense, honestly. Debian’s on that one.
> Linus Thorwalds said it didn’t affect his decision, but the fact that his parents were commited Communists (European style) must have influenced his sense of social responsibility.
His -father-, who he did not live with after his parents divorced, was a communist. Linus is very apolitical.
He wrote Linux because he wanted to explore his 386 and because of limitations of minix; if he’d known about BSD, he would not have. [Specifically, he dialed his harddisk rather than his modem, and due to the lack of file system permissions, minix left him. As minix’s author did not, at that point, allow people to distribute their patches already-integrated into a ‘minix distribution’, rebuilding a usable minix system involved bootstrapping, followed by a lot of patching – the main minix author was only interested in having an academic kernel, while others wanted a system for actual use. (No, there’s nothing wrong with an academic kernel.)]
> In his biography, he says he made the kernel open source to protect it from commercial predators and because it was a group project with a leader but no real owner. As best I can remember.
The kernel was always ‘open source’ in the sense that the source was available, although it was not originally GPL. He could then leverage the patches that others sent.
What’s the proportion of programmers and sys admins in open source.
The point is that “commercial” programmers don’t always join the open source way, and I don’t see any inconvenience in a sys admin joining.
There are many perplexed programmers even in this forum.
If someone should create and produce some sort of property (a book, software, a wooden shed, etc.)
The difference is software has a zero-marginal cost benefit whereas a book (traditional form), a wooden shed, a house does not.
The point is that “commercial” programmers don’t always join the open source way, and I don’t see any inconvenience in a sys admin joining.
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commerical is a wrong term to use here. you probably mean proprietary software programmers because there are a hell lot of commerical open source programmers today. it is probably less than sys admins managing linux or bsd systems but it is in a non ignorable amount
Linus’ dad was/is a communist, but I doubt that had any influence on Linus’s development of linux. He has stated in Just for Fun that he prefers the meritorious form of compensation done in the United States over the european quasi-socialist style of as Linus puts it “here’s a little bit more money, keep it quiet”. Obviously, Linus is enjoying the benefits of American-style capitalism and has stated it in “Just for Fun”.
MSNBC has reprinted a Forbes smear piece.
Linux gathered momentum from college students and burgeoned from programmers who had a chance to work for the simple pleasure of doing the ‘Right Thing’, for love of craft, for the chance of personal investment in a programming project — i.e., all things militated against by a 9-5 job.
Perhaps their ‘hippy’ epithet is playing off of a shallow facile (and erroneous) perception of Stallman.
Given that Forbes writes for overcompensated-CEO wannabees, the slant and gossip are understandable: Forbes is only telling their demographic how to think.
.
I think the majority of the Linux movement was a disdain for the old proprietary, closed source and unstable software packages that existed at that time.
I think the majority of the Linux movement was a disdain for the old proprietary, closed source and unstable software packages that existed at that time.
That seems to be the opinion of the youngsters that have some kind of ideological reason for using open source, but the fact of the matter is that many people start contributing to and using linux was because it was unix and dos sucked – they had already been using commercial Unix at university. Not because of some idiotic Stallman ideology.
It’s not leftist psycho-babble. It’s fairly basic philosophy. Your drivel about the “real world” means nothing to logic — that speaks about higher truth. It is logically evident that Zambizzi’s statements only make sense if you start by accepting the axioms of western society. They are not “black and white” as he claims.
Your definitions of slavery and freedom are entirely couched in western thought. You claim that property rights increase freedom. Of course, that’s not true. Property rights are just away to trade the freedom of the strong (to take whatever they can through strength) for the safety of the weak. It’s not a bad compromise (in fact, it’s a great one), but it’s just one compromise in a whole system of possible compromises.
Your statement about “an example of a society which is affluent and which does NOT support property rights” is also logically flawed. Defining affluence as the critereon of success presupposes a capitalist outlook. If you’re trying to compare capitalist systems to other systems, you cannot predicate the test on capitalist assumptions!
PS> I don’t disdain property rights. I am, in fact, a very strong supporter of capitalism. However, I am not deluded enough to believe that my preferred system is anything more than one particular option in a spectrum of options. Thus, I cannot logically criticize anybody who doesn’t accept those assumptions. Anybody who thinks they can is prey to his own circular reasonng.
Raynier,
Yeah, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jun Ill, Castro and others had ideas that property rights weren’t a good idea. I might have some wacko philosophy that we should all worship beetles, but that doesn’t make it valid.
Once again, without property rights you are a slave to the state. It’s that simple, no matter how much indoctrination you’ve gone through by leftist professors at Georgia Tech.
Property rights are just away to trade the freedom of the strong (to take whatever they can through strength) for the safety of the weak.
That’s not capitalism, you just described a social system that is not even remotely capitalist. Freedom is the pillar where other principles are built upon. Not a temporary structure at the mercy of a whim.
That was some wierd fud sent out by MS(nbc) there. They must think that EVERY person using linux must do it simply because of the “hippy philosophy”, hmmmm, there simply cannot be another reason other than using Linux because I can share it around my hippy mates.
Now if I publish an article showing that it is no longer the hippies that make the decisions, but money grabbing suits, (not like microsoft of course), that should stop people migrating to this evil os.
HOWEVER…. one thing them retards at msnbc forgot to check…. the site looks like shite under Konqueror, and from what I could read, I just could not be arsed opening Mozilla to read the site.
So how are all these Linux loving hippies going to get that very important message from MS(nbc) ????
Someone mentioned that there is a version of Debian that runs on the NetBSD kernel. While he is correct to say so, Debian kNetBSD as a project is nowhere near as advanced as Debian kFreeBSD is. The latter project has already created a ‘live’ bootable CD which like Knoppix can allow anyone interested to install onto his/her HD if that is what they desire. Do check out the links below.
All these talk of BSD userland on Linux and a GNU/Linux userland in the *BSDs made me wonder i.e. what if the *BSDs are stripped bare of GPL/LGPL licensed packages/ports, would not FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD then not meet the definition of a complete Operating Systems i.e. kernel + base utils/tools + applications?
What good will come out of using a flavour of BSD hollowed out of the e.g. GCC, bash i.e. ALL GPL/LGPL apps/libraries? Would such *BSD still appeal as an alterntive to Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux? 
Interesting links related to the Debian kFreeBSD Project:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2004/06/msg00014.html
http://people.debian.org/~rmh/livecd/
http://svn.debian.org/viewcvs/glibc-bsd/trunk/web/kfreebsd/INSTALL?…
…a thought experiment:
(i)My major asset is a large house. (ii)The land on which it was built was subdivided from a large farm. (iii) large farms in my country (England) were established by the seizing of common land by large landowners, as a result of legislation enacted by a body representing large landowners (the Enclosure Acts).
Given (iii) do I have a *moral* as opposed to legal right to the property? and if so WHY?…
What many people don’t seem to grasp, is that there isn’t any single philosophy supporting Linux. Everyone has their own motive to use and contribute to Linux.
For Linus himself it may have been a vision, or fun to hack code. For the FSF, it may be freedom (which has quickly become my #1 reason to use Linux). But now that corporate suits have come, and huge sums of money are involved, that doesn’t mean other motives don’t apply anymore.
There still remain many people that contibute to advance free software, and other people that hack kernel code just for fun. The good thing about Free software is that it allows all that. Whatever your motive, everybody can profit from your contribution, and vice versa.
I found this article interesting because it shows how Linus Torvalds manages to balance the interests of the community of Linux users (providing an operating system that is free of charge), the interests of application developers (providing an operating system whose source code is open and is a fair playing field, different from Windows) the interests of consultants and hardware developers (that can create companies that sell services and hardware around this free operating system) and operating system developers (creating opportunities for them to get sponsored to write this free operating system).
Of course he didn’t planned it all when he started to write a kernel for Minix that could run the GNU applications and allow him to run an Unix-like enviroment in a 386 computer. But this balance is done in a very intelligent way, anyway.
Americans like to think that the only alternative to laissez-fare capitalism is soviet communism, but the European social democracy is a complex and interesting middle term – never forget that Torvalds is from Finland.
What is more interesting is that Linus never told Netapp to hire Trond, or their fixes to NFS wouldn’t be allowed into the mains Linux kernel tree. Netapp could always make their patches, and roll them to their costumers, as Linux is free software! He simply told them that fixes to the network stack should be reviewed by Trod. Netapp found that the Linux community was such an important partner that it would be better to compensate Trod for his work.
I only fear that, in 15 or 20 years, Linus might get tired or die, and the free software community wouldn’t have someone with his technical, political and business skills.
And before someone starts saying that “Linux is not an operating system, the operating system should be named GNU/Linux”… Well, strictly speaking, and operating system is a program that allows other programs to communicate with the hardware. If you substitute all the userland programs from common Linux distributions, you would still have the same operating system, but if you substitute the Linux kernel for Hurd, you would have a different operating system.
Any system where the marginal cost is near zero and a negligible or already sunk capital investment is subject to the exact same effect. There is no way to prevent it.
I might have some wacko philosophy that we should all worship beetles, but that doesn’t make it valid.
Of course not ideas are equally valid. However, Zambizzi’s argument doesn’t demonstrate the invalidity of socialist systems. It cannot, because it uses a capitalist argument to do so. That argument is invalid unless you accept the axioms of capitalism. That isn’t to say that the invalidity cannot be demonstrated, but rather that his particular argument is not such a demonstration. My beef, as it were, is not with Zambizzi’s point, but the poor logic he used to make it.
Once again, without property rights you are a slave to the state.
Property rights predate the formation of the state as you think of it. They were established very early on, along with organized societies. Their fundemental advance was to favor the productive over the strong. Without property rights, your society will not continually grow — people will produce just enough to sustain themselves, because those with strength will take anything they’ve accumulated away from them.
It’s that simple, no matter how much indoctrination you’ve gone through by leftist professors at Georgia Tech.
Did you just use “leftist” and “Georgia” in the same sentence? You do realize that this is the state that just sent a democratic senator to the Republican National Convention?
I disagree.
“His answer basically was, ‘No. I don’t trust companies, I trust people. The person I trust on this is Trond.”
This is not how one balances interests of different groups. This is how one says “I am the boss around here, I make the rules, you follow them.”
>Americans like to think that the only alternative to laissez-fare capitalism is soviet communism, but the European social democracy is a complex and interesting middle term
Except it does not apply here. Gentle dictatorship is not the European social democracy. It is more or less soviet communism.
>What is more interesting is that Linus never told Netapp to hire Trond.
You are from Brasil, right? You understand how it works in Brasil, right? America is not that different.
>Netapp found that the Linux community was such an important partner that it would be better to compensate Trod for his work.
I wonder if everyone who submits NFS pathces should consider compensating Trod for his importance?
“The problem … resided in Linux, which used a poor implementation of a file-moving technology called Network File System, or NFS”
If this is true statement, then NetApp should be compensated for paying its software developers to fix NFS implementation in Linux, for going through the process of submitting patches.
If story is true, Todd and Linus seem to be roadblocks on the way of improving NFS. I wonder, why?
I wonder if NetApp compensated anyone else in Linux community, or just a member of an inner circle? Who else, other than Todd, “has been collecting handsome monthly stipends from Network Appliance?”
If nobody- it is not about the importance of the community, but a person in that community, close to the community leader.
>I only fear that, in 15 or 20 years, Linus might get tired or die,
I only hope that in less than 15 years Linux inner circle will be dismissed, with or without Linus, and replaced by more fair process.
Not one described in the article.
That’s not capitalism, you just described a social system that is not even remotely capitalist. Freedom is the pillar where other principles are built upon. Not a temporary structure at the mercy of a whim.
If you’d read the sentences in context, you’d see that I didn’t say such a society is capitalistic. Let me draw this out for you:
Consider the word “freedom” to mean complete freedom (which is what it means, by definition!)
Let’s call the idea of property rights the “capitalist assumption.” It is the assumption that restricting the rights of the strong in favor of the safety of the productive is better for society as a whole.
Now, consider “capitalist freedom” to be “true freedom” + the “capitalist assumption.” It is evident that “capitalist freedom” must be strictly less free, because nothing can be freer than complete freedom.
Now, capitalists mistakenly redefine “freedom” to mean “capitalist freedom”. That’s logically flawed, because unless you accept the “capitalist assumption”, “capitalist freedom” has no meaning. Anytime you argue with someone who does not accept the “capitalist assumption”, you cannot use the capitalist definition of freedom, because that would make your argument logically incorrect. Instead, to make your point, you either have to stick to axioms both parties can agree on, or present emperical evidence.
You seem to be confused with the basic definition of what a capital is. Do you know what is the meaning of capital with respect to freedom and ownership?
Say, your computer is a capital, is that correct? Do you think your neighbor or roommate owns your computer too? When in fact it was you who paid for it.
> Someone mentioned that there is a version of Debian that runs on the NetBSD kernel. While he is correct to say so,
She, not he.
> Debian kNetBSD as a project is nowhere near as advanced as Debian kFreeBSD is. The latter project has already created a ‘live’ bootable CD which like Knoppix can allow anyone interested to install onto his/her HD if that is what they desire.
Nice to hear that; I may check it out.
You don’t understand. The concept of property isn’t a universal one. The idea of “property rights” is an axiom. It is an assumption. You can’t logically prove that you should have property rights, all you can say is that “in our society, we make the assumption that people should be able to have private property.” All the standard capitalist arguments are based on these sorts of assumptions. You thus, cannot apply these arguments, as some people are attempting to do, in situations where these assumptions do not hold.
Let me take your computer example. The idea that I own my computer because I paid for it presupposes both the concept of private property, and the concept of the ability to trade private property. In a culture that did not make the former assumption, the computer could legitimately belond to the leader of the society, or to the society as a whole. In a culture that does not make the latter assumption, you would have to say that the computer belongs to whomever built it.
Of course, in our society these assumptions hold, and I can say the computer is mine. But my point is that you need to realize that all the “freedom” arguments people on this board are using are logically incorrect, because they attempt to rationalize capitalism using arguments that are predicated on capitalist assumptions.
Yeah, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jun Ill, Castro and others had ideas that property rights weren’t a good idea.
Do you have a point somewhere in there? Your belief in capitalism doesn’t make it valid either. There is no scientific way to prove that capitalism is the best economic system, especially by comparing them to failed systems that never even approached their supposed idealogy.
I might have some wacko philosophy that we should all worship beetles, but that doesn’t make it valid.
You start to lose credibility when you call someone a “wacko”.
Once again, without property rights you are a slave to the state. It’s that simple, no matter how much indoctrination you’ve gone through by leftist professors at Georgia Tech.
Now you’ve lost all credibility. You’ve already lost the argument when all you can do is accuse someone of “leftist indoctrination” because you have no real argument. I wish people would provide evidence for their beliefs instead of shouting “communist”, or something like it, when faced with a position they disagree with.
And do you have something that is more viable than capitalism? Maybe you’re one of the “true communism hasn’t been tried yet” people.
The leftist sheeple will never understand and obviously don’t understand liberty. But feel free to enlighten me with one of these alternative economic systems.
Listen Raynier and Abraxas, we’re not talking about some tribe in Brazil that has no concept of property rights, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of first worlders.
Your idea of Property Rights as an axiom that can only hold within a given environment is true. The ‘faux pas’ in your logic states that it will be false when applied outside the environment, yet you did not cite concrete examples from this case which only shows the weakness in your argument.
You also implied a statement to the effect: a creator creates from materials not of his own property is true. Yet you never showed any examples of such. It seems that what your saying is: I can take my neighbor’s roof shingles out and use it to repair my roof is OK. And, I can walk-in to any house that I find fitting and rest for the night is also OK.
The leftist sheeple will never understand and obviously don’t understand liberty.
the problem is that capitalism in some circumstances lead to limited liberty. this must be taken into consideration when discussing property rights. this is especially true when it comes to so called intellectual property.
Modded my comment down? Pathetic.
Wonderful integrity the mods have here huh?
Mod this one down too, it speaks volumes about the site rather than about me.