Free Software & Academic Mentality

[Kostas Boukouvalas]

> Συγγνώμη, αλλά *ΜΠΟΥΡΔΕΣ*!
> 
> Στις ιστορικές αναφορές[1,2,3,4,5] σχετικά με το ξεκίνημα του Linux δεν
> αναφέρεται ΠΟΥΘΕΝΑ αν το πανεπιστήμιο στο οποίο φοιτούσε ο Linus είχε
> σχέση με free software.
> 
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#History
> [2] https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rhasan/linux/#New%20Baby%20in%20the%20Horizon
> [3] http://www.educ.umu.se/~bjorn/linux/misc/linux-history.html
> [4] http://library.thinkquest.org/C003740/history.html
> [5] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html
> 
> Οπότε, πώς είσαι τόσο σίγουρος ότι το ξεκίνημα δεν ήταν απλά ένα σχετικά
> ανεβασμένο επίπεδο καΐλας, λόγω της μεγάλης Φινλανδικής νύχτας;

---

Επειδή η πηγή μου είναι πιο άμεση, δεν έκανα - ούτε πρόκειται να κάνω -
τον κόπο να κοιτάξω το παραπάνω link collection.

Abstract το κεφάλαιο ΙΙΙ από το βιβλίο του Linus Torvalds & David
Diamond "Just for Fun" εκδόσεις HarperBusiness: (ας ελπίσω οτι θα
φανούνε τα bold που δίνω έμφαση και τα πλάγια γράμματα). Ειδάλλως
παρακαλώ όσους κάνουν τον κόπο να το διαβάσουν, να τα προσέξουν.

III.

The academic year that began in the fall of 1990 was to be the
first time that the University of Helsinki would have Unix, the powerful
operating system that had benn bred in AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1960s
but had grown up elsewhere. In my first year of studies, we had a VAX
running VMS. It was a horrible operating system certainly not an
environment that made you say, "Gee, I'd like to have this at home,
too". Instead it made you say, "Hmmm. How do you do /that?/" It was hard
to use. It didn't have many tools. It wasn't suited to easily accessing
the Internet, which was running on Unux. You couldn't even easily figure
out how large a file was. Admittedly, it's not the kind of operating
system that you get excited about.

The university had realized it was time to move away from all that. Much
of the academic world was then growing enamored of Unix, so the
university acquired a MicroVAX running Ultrix which was Digital
Equipment Corporation version of Unix. It was a way of testing the
waters of Unix. I was eager to work with Unix by experimenting with what
I was learning in Andrew Tanenbaum's book, excited about all the things
I could explore if I had a 386 PC. There was no way I could get together
the 18,000 FIM to buy one. I knew that once the fall semester began, I
would be able to use my Sinclair QL to access the university's new Unix
computer until I could addord to buy a PC on which I could run Unix on
my own. So there were two things I did that summer. Nothing. And read
the 719 of /Operating Systems: Design and Implementation/. The red
soft-cover textbook sort of lived on my bed.

The university of Helsinki sprang for a sixteen-user licence for the
MicroVAX. That meant admittance to the "C and Unix" course was limited
to thirty-two students - I guess the thinking was that sixteen people
would be using it by day, sixteen by night. Like the rest of us, the
teacher was new to Unix. He admitted this text up front, so it wasn't
really a problem. But he would read the text only one chapter ahead of
the students, whereas the students were sometimes skipping ahead by
three chapters. So it became some thing of a game in which people tried
to trip up the teacher by asking questions that related to things we
would be learning three chapters later, just to see if he had read that
far. We were all babes in the Unix woods, with a course that was being
made up as we went along. But what was obvious from this course was that
there was a unique philosophy behind Unix. You grasped this in the first
hour of the course. The rest was explaining the details.

What is special about Unix is the set of fundamental ideals that it
strives for. It is a clean and beautiful operating system. It avoids
special cases. Unix has the notion of processes - a process is anything
that does anything. Here's a simple example. In Unix the shell command,
which is what you type to gain entry into the operating system, is not
built into the operating system, as with DOS. It's just a task. Like any
other task. It just happens that this task reads from your keyboard and
writes back to your monitor. Everything that does something in Unix is a
process. You also have files. This simple design is what intrigued me,
and most people, about Unix (well, at least us geeks). Pretty much
everything you do in Unix is done with only six basic operations (called
"system calls", because they are calls you make to the operating system
to do things for you). And you can build up pretty much everything from
those six  basic system calls.

There's the notion of "fork", which is one of the fundamental Unix
operations. When a process does a fork, it creates a complete copy of
itself. That way, you have two copies that are the same. The child copy
most often ends up executing another process - replacing itself with a
new program. And that's the second basic operation. Then you have four
other basic system calls: open, close, read and write - all designed to
access files. Those six system calls make up the simple operations that
comprise Unix. Sure, there are tons of other system calls to fill in all
the details. But once you understand the six basic ones, you understand
Unix. Because one of the beauties of Unix is realizing that you don't
need to have complex interfaces to build up something complex. You can
build up any amount of complexity from the interaction of simple things.
What you do is create channels of communication (called "pipes" in
Unix-speak) between simple processes to create complex problem-solving.

An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for
everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the
building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That's what
having a clean design is all about. It's the same thing with languages.
The English language has twenty-six letters and you can build up
everything from those letters. Or you have the Chinese language, in
which you have one letter for every single thing you can think of. In
Chinese, you start off with complexity, and you can combine complexity
in limited ways. That's more of the VMS approach, to have complex things
that have interesting meanings but can't be used in any other way. It's
also the Windows approach. Unix, on the other hand, comes with a
small-is-beautiful philosophy. It has a small set of simple basic
building blocks that can be combined into something that allows for
infinite complexity of expression.

This, by the way, is also how physics works. You try and find the
fundamental rules that are supposed to be fairly simple. The complexity
comes from the many incredible interactions you get from those simple
rules, not from any inherent complexity of the rules themselves. The
simplicity of Unix did not just happen on its own. Unix, with its notion
of simple building blocks, was painstakingly designed and written by
Dennis Richie and Ken Thompson at AT&T's Bell Labs. And you should
absolutely not dismiss simplicity for something easy. It takes design
and good taste to be simple. To go back to the example of human
languages: Pictorial writing like Chinese characters and hieroglyphics
tend to happen first, and be "simpler" whereas the building block
approach requires far more abstract thinking. In the same way, you
should not confuse the simplicity of Unix with a lack of sophistication
- quite the reverse.

Which is not to say that the original reasons for Unix were all that
sophisticated. Like so many other things in computers, it was all about
games. It took somebody who wanted to play computer games on a PDP-11.
Because that was what UNIX started but being developed for - Dennis and
Ken's personal project for playing Space Wars. And because the operating
system wan't considered a serious project, AT&T didn't think of it as a
commercial venture. In fact, AT&T was regulated monopoly, and one of the
things they couldn't do was to sell computers anyway. *So the people who
created Unix made it available quite freely along with source licenses,
especially to universities. It wasn't a big deal.* This all led to Unix
becoming a big project in academic circles.

By the time of the 1984 breakup, when AT&T was finally allowed to get
into the computer busines, computer business, computer scientists at
universities - particularly the University of California-Berkeley - had
been working on and improving Unix for years under the direction of
people like Bill Joy and Marshall Kirk McKusik. People hadn't always
necessarily put a lot of effort into documenting what they did. But by
the early 1990s, Unix had become the number-one operating system for all
supercomputers and servers. It was huge business. One of the problems
was that there were, by now, a host of competing versions of the
operating system. Some were derived from the more controlled confines of
the AT&T code base (the so-called "System V" flavors), while others were
derived from the Univeristy of California-Berkeley code-base BSD
(Berkeley Software Distribution). Yet others were a mixture of the two.

One BSD derivation in particular is worth mentioning. It was the 386BSD
project done by Bill Jolitz based on the BSD code-base, distributed over
the Internet. It was later to fragment and become the freely available
BSD flavors - Net BSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD - and it was getting a lot of
attention in the Unix community. That's why AT&T woke up and sued the
University of California-Berkeley. The original code had been AT&T's but
most of the subsequent work had been done at Berkeley. The University of
California regents contended that they had the right to distribute, or
sell for a nominal fee, theri version of Unix. And they demonstrated
that they had done so much work that they essentially rewrote what AT&T
had made available. The suit ended up being settled after Novell Inc.,
bought Unix from AT&T. Essentially, parts fo the system had to be
excised from what AT&T had made available.

Meanwhile, all the legal haggling had been intrumental in giving a new
kid on the block some time to mature and spread itself. Basically, it
gave Linux time to take over the market. But I'm getting ahead of
myself. Since I'm digressing anyway, I'd like to explain something. Unix
has this reputation for being a magnet for the eccentric fringe of
computing. It's a reputation not worth arguing against. It's true.
Frankly, there are a lot of fairly crazy people in Unix. Not postal-rage
crazy. Not poison-the-neighbor's-dog crazy. Just very
alternative-lifestyle people. Remember, muych of the initial Unix
activity took place in the late of 1960s and early 1970s, while I was
sleeping in a laundry basket in my grandparents' apartment. These were
flower power people - but /technical/ flower power people. *A lot of
Unix-must-be-free philosophy has more to do with the circumstances of
the time rather than with the operating system.* It was a time of
rampant idealism. Revolution. Freedom from authority. Free love (wich I
missed out on, and probably wouldn't have known what to do with,
anyway). *And the relative openess of Unix, even if it was mainly due to
the lack of commercial interests of the time, made it attractive to this
kind of person.*

*The first time I was introduced to this side of Unix was probably in
1991 or so when Lars Wirzenius dragged me along to an event at the
Polytechnic University of Helsinki (which, as everybody knows, is not
actually in Helsinki but right across the border in Espoo). They just
want to be associated with the glamorous Helsinki even if only the
name). The speaker was Richard Stallman.* Richard Stallman is the God of
Free Software. He started to work on an alternative to Unix in 1984,
calling it the GNU system. GNU stands for "GNU is Not Unix", being one
of many recursive acronyms where one of the letters stands for the
acronym itself - a kind of computer science in-joke that nobody else
ever gets. Geeks - we're just tons of fun to be around.

More importantly, RMS, as he prefers to be called, also wrote the Free
Software Manifesto, and the Free Software copyright license - the GPL
(General Public License). Basically he pioneered the notion of free
source-code availability as something intentional, not just an accident,
the way it happened with original Unix open development. *I have to
admit that I wasn't much aware of the sociopolitical issues that were -
and are - so dear to RMS.* I was not really all that aware of the Free
Software Foundation, which he founded, and all that it stood for.
Judging from the fact that I don't remember much about the talk back in
1991, it probably didn't make a huge impact on my life at that point. I
was interested in the technology, not the politics - I had had enough
politics at home. But Lars was an ideologist, and I taged along and
listened.

In Richard I saw, for the first time in my life, the stereotypical
longhaired, bearded hacker type. We don't much have them in Helsinki.
*I may not have seen the light, but I guess something from his speech
must have sunk in. After all, I later ended up using the GPL for
Linux.* There I go, getting ahead of myself again.

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Αφιέρωσα αρκετό χρόνο για να κάτσω να το μεταφέρω και πιστεύω αξίζει τον
κόπο. Όχι για να δείξω οτι έχω δίκιο απέναντι στον Γιώργο (άλλωστε ποτέ 
δεν είναι ο σκοπός της συζήτησης μου ένα ακόμα pointless dicksize war),
αλλά οτι πράγματι έχει μεγάλη μεγάλη μεγάλη σημασία το γενικότερο κλίμα
σε σχέση με το ελεύθερο λογισμικό που επικρατεί σε ένα Τμήμα ή σε ένα
Πανεπιστήμιο είτε αυτό λέγεται Α.Π.Θ. ή University of Helsinki.