Copyright 2023 by Jon \u201cmaddog\u201d Hall
\nLicensed under Creative Commons BY-SA-ND
\nPhoto: \u00a9 Santiago Ferreira Litowtschenko<\/p>\n
Several people have opined on the recent announcement of Red Hat to change their terms of sales for their software.\u00a0 Here are some thoughts from someone who has been around a long time and been in the midst of a lot of what occurred, and has been on many sides of the fence.<\/p>\n
This is a fairly long article.\u00a0 \u00a0It goes back a long way.\u00a0 \u00a0People who know me will realize that I am going to tell a lot of details that will fit sooner or later.\u00a0 \u00a0Have patience.\u00a0 Or you can jump close to the bottom and read the section \u201cTying it all together\u201d<\/strong><\/em> without knowing all the reasoning.<\/p>\n I started programming in 1969.\u00a0 \u00a0I wrote my programs on punched cards and used FORTRAN as a university cooperative education student. I learned programming by reading a book and practicing.\u00a0 That first computer was an IBM 1130 and it was my first exposure to IBM or any computer company.<\/p>\n Back at the university I joined the Digital Equipment User’s Society (DECUS) which had a library of software written by DEC\u2019s customers and distributed for the price of copying (sometimes on paper tape and sometimes on magnetic tape).<\/p>\n There were very few \u201cprofessional programmers\u201d in those days.\u00a0 In fact I had a professor who taught programming that told me I would NEVER be able to earn a living as a \u201cprofessional programmer\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0If you wrote code in those days you were a physicist, or a chemist , or an electrical engineer, or a university professor and you needed the code to do your work or for research.<\/p>\n Once you had met your own need, you might have contributed the program to DECUS so they could distribute it…because selling software was hard, and that was not what you did for a living.<\/p>\n In fact, not only was selling software hard, but you could not copyright your software nor apply for patents in your software.\u00a0 \u00a0The way you protected your code was through \u201cTrade Secret\u201d and \u201cContract Law\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0This meant that you either had to create a contract with each and every user or you had to distribute your software in binary form.\u00a0 \u00a0Distributing your software in binary form back in those days was \u201cdifficult\u201d since there were not that many machines of one architecture, and if they did have an operating system (and many did not) there were many operating systems that ran on any given architecture.<\/p>\n Since there were so few computers of any given architecture and if they did have an operating system there were many operating systems for each architecture (the DEC PDP-11 had more than eleven operating systems) therefore many companies distributed their software in source code form or even sent an engineer out to install it, run test suites and prove it was working.\u00a0 \u00a0Then if the customer received the source code for the software it was often put into escrow in case the supplier went out of business.<\/p>\n I remember negotiating a contract for an efficient COBOL compiler in 1975 where the license fee was 100,000 USD for one copy of the compiler that ran on one IBM mainframe and could be used to do one compile at a time.\u00a0 It took a couple of days for their engineer to get the compiler installed, working and running the acceptance tests.\u00a0 Yes, my company\u2019s lawyers kept the source code tape in escrow.<\/p>\n Many other users\/programmers distributed their code in \u201cThe Public Domain\u201d, so other users could do anything they wanted with it.<\/p>\n The early 1980s changed all that with strong copyright laws being applied to binaries and source code.\u00a0 \u00a0This was necessary for the ROMs that were being used in games and (later) the software that was being distributed for Intel-based CP\/M and MS DOS systems.<\/p>\n Once the software had copyrights then software developers needed licenses to tell other users what their rights were in usage of that software.<\/p>\n For end users this was the infamous EULA (the \u201cEnd User License Agreement\u201d that no one reads) and for developers a source code agreement which was issued and signed in a much<\/strong> <\/em>smaller number.<\/p>\n Unix was started by Bell Labs in 1969.\u00a0 \u00a0For years it was distributed only inside of Bell Labs and Western Electric, but eventually escaped to some RESEARCH universities such as University of California Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, CMU and others for professors and students to study and \u201cplay with\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0These universities eventually were granted a campus-wide source code license for an extremely small amount of money, and the code was freely distributed among them.<\/p>\n Unique among these universities was the University of California, Berkeley.\u00a0 \u00a0Nestled in the tall redwood trees of Berkeley, California with a wonderful climate, close to the laid-back cosmopolitan life of San Francisco, it was one of the universities that Ken Thompson chose to take a magnetic tape of UNIX and use it to teach operating system design to eager young students.\u00a0 \u00a0Eventually the students and staff, working with Ken, were able to create a version of UNIX that might conceivably be said to be better than the UNIX system from AT&T.\u00a0 \u00a0BSD Unix had demand paged virtual memory, while AT&T was still a swapping memory model.\u00a0 \u00a0Eventually BSD Unix had native TCP\/IP while AT&T UNIX only had uucp.\u00a0 \u00a0BSD Unix had a rich set of utilities, while AT&T had stripped down the utility base in the transition to System V from System IV.<\/p>\n This is why many early Unix companies, including Sun Microsystems (with SunOS), DEC (with Ultrix) and HP (with HP\/UX) all went with a BSD base to their binary-only products.<\/p>\n Another interesting tidbit of history was John Lions.\u00a0 \u00a0John was a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia and he was very interested in what was happening in Bell Labs.<\/p>\n John took sabbatical in 1978 and traveled to Bell Labs.\u00a0 Working along with Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy and others he wrote a book on Version 6 of Unix that commented all the source code for the Unix kernel and a commentary on why that code had been chosen and what it did.\u00a0 \u00a0Unfortunately in 1979 the licensing for Unix changed and John was not able to publish his book for over twenty years.<\/p>\n Unfortunately for AT&T John had made photocopies of drafts of his book and gave those to his students for comments, questions and review.\u00a0 \u00a0When John\u2019s book was stopped from publication, the students made photocopies of his book, and photocopies of the photocopies, and photocopies of the photocopies of the photocopies, each one becoming slightly lighter and harder to read than the previous generation.<\/p>\n For years Unix programmers measured their \u201cage\u201d in the Unix community by the generation of John\u2019s book which they owned.\u00a0 \u00a0I am proud to say that I have a third generation of the photocopies.<\/p>\n John\u2019s efforts educated thousands of programmers in how elements of the Unix kernel worked and the thought patterns of Ken and Dennis in developing the system.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n [Eventually John\u2019s book was released for publication1<\/sup><\/a>, and you may purchase it and read it yourself.\u00a0 \u00a0If you wish you can run a copy of Version 6 Unix2<\/sup><\/a> on a simulator named SIMH which runs on Linux.\u00a0 \u00a0You can see what an early version of Unix was like.]<\/p>\n Eventually some commercial companies also obtained source code licenses from AT&T under very expensive and restrictive contract law.\u00a0 \u00a0This expensive license was also used with small schools that were not considered research universities.\u00a0 I know, since Hartford State Technical College was one of those schools, and I was not able to get Unix for my students in the period of 1977 to 1980.\u00a0 Not only did you have to pay an astronomical amount of money for the license, but you had to tell Bell Labs the serial number of the machine you were going to put the source code on.\u00a0 \u00a0If that machine broke you had to call up Bell Labs and tell them the serial number of the machine where you were going to move the source code.<\/p>\n Eventually some companies, such as Sun Microsystems, negotiated a redistribution agreement with AT&T Bell Labs to sell binary-only copies of Unix-like systems at a much less restrictive and much less expensive licensing fee than getting the source code from AT&T Bell Labs directly.<\/p>\n Eventually these companies made the redistribution of Unix-like systems their normal way of doing business, since to distribute AT&T derived source code to their customers required that the customer have an AT&T source code license, which was still very expensive and very hard to get.<\/p>\n I should point out that these companies did not just take the AT&T code, re-compile the code and distribute them.\u00a0 \u00a0They hired many engineers and made a lot of changes to the AT&T code and some of them decided to use code from the University of California Berkeley as the basis of their products, then went on to change the code with their own engineers.\u00a0 Often this not only meant changing items in the kernel, but changing the compilers to fit the architecture and other significant pieces of engineering work.<\/p>\n Then, in the early 1980s Richard M. Stallman (RMS), a student at MIT received a distribution of Unix in binary only form.\u00a0 \u00a0While MIT had a site-wide license for AT&T source code, the company that made that distribution for their hardware did not sell sources easily and RMS was upset that he could not change the OS to make the changes he needed.<\/p>\n So RMS started the GNU (\u201cGNU is not Unix\u201d) project for the purpose of distributing a freedom<\/strong><\/em> operating system that would require people distributing binaries to make sure that the people receiving those binaries would receive the sources and the ability to fix bugs or make the revisions they needed<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n RMS did not have a staff of people to help him do this, nor did he have millions of dollars to spend on the hardware and testing staff.\u00a0 So he created a community of people around the GNU project and (later) the Free Software Foundation.\u00a0 \u00a0We will call this community the GNU community (or \u201cGNU\u201d for short) in the rest of this article.<\/p>\n RMS did come up with an interesting plan, one of creating software that was useful to the people who used it<\/strong> across a wide variety of operating systems.<\/p>\n The first piece of software was emacs, a powerful text editor that worked across operating systems, and as programmers used it they realized the value of using the same sub-commands and keystrokes across all the systems they worked on.<\/p>\n Then GNU worked on a compiler suite, then utilities.\u00a0 \u00a0All projects were useful to programmers<\/strong><\/em>, who in turn made other pieces of code useful to them<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n What didn’t GNU work on?\u00a0 \u00a0An office package.\u00a0 \u00a0Few programmers spent a lot of time working on office documents<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n In the meantime another need was being addressed.\u00a0 \u00a0Universities who were doing computer research were generating code that needed to be distributed.<\/p>\n MIT and the University of California Berkeley were generating code that they really did not want to sell.\u00a0 \u00a0Ideally they wanted to give it away so other people could also use it in research.\u00a0 \u00a0However the software was now copyrighted<\/strong><\/em>, so these universities needed a license<\/strong> <\/em>that told people what they could do with that copyrighted code.\u00a0 More importantly, from the University’s perspective, the license also told the users of the software that there was no guarantee of any usefulness, and they should not expect support, nor could the university be held liable for any damages from the use of the software<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n We joked at the time that the licenses did not even guarantee that the systems you put the software on would not catch fire and burst into flames.\u00a0 \u00a0This is said tongue-in-cheek, but was a real consideration.<\/p>\n These licenses (and more) eventually became known as the \u201cpermissive\u201d<\/strong><\/em> licenses of Open Source, as they made few demands on the users of the source code of the software known as \u201cdevelopers\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0The developers were free to create binary-only distributions and pass on the binaries to the end users without having to make the source code (other than the code they originally received under the license) visible to the end user.<\/p>\n Only the \u201crestrictive\u201d<\/strong><\/em> license of the GPL forced the developer to make their changes visible to the end users who received their binaries.<\/p>\n Originally there was a lot of confusion around the different licenses.<\/p>\n Some people thought that the binaries created by the use of the GNU compilers were also covered by the GPL even though the sources that generated the licenses were completely free of any licensing (i.e. created by the user themselves).<\/p>\n Some people thought that you could not sell GPL licensed code.\u00a0 RMS refuted that, but admitted that GPL licensed code typically meant that just selling the code for large amounts of money was \u201cdifficult\u201d for many reasons.<\/p>\n However many people did sell the code.\u00a0 \u00a0Companies such as Walnut Creek (Bob Bruce) and Prime Time Freeware for Unix (Richard Morin) sold compendiums of code organized on CD-ROMs and (later) DVDs for money.\u00a0 \u00a0While the programs that were on these compendiums were covered by individual \u201cOpen Source\u201d licenses, the entire CD or DVD might have had its own copyright and license.\u00a0 Even if it was \u201clegal\u201d to copy the entire ISO and produce your own CDs and DVDs and sell them, probably the creators of the originals might have had harsh thoughts toward the resellers.<\/p>\n During all of this time the system vendors\u00a0 such as Digital Equipment Corporation, HP, Sun and IBM were all creating Unix-like operating systems based on either AT&T System V or part of the Berkeley Software Distribution (in many cases starting with BSD Unix 4.x).\u00a0 \u00a0Each of these companies hired huge numbers of Unix software engineers, documentation people, quality assurance people, product managers and so forth.\u00a0 \u00a0They had huge buildings, many lawyers, and sold their distributions for a lot of money.\u00a0 \u00a0Many were \u201csystem companies\u201d delivering the software bundled with their hardware.\u00a0 \u00a0Some, like Santa Cruz Operations (SCO), created only a software distribution.<\/p>\n Originally these companies produced their own proprietary operating systems and sold them along with the hardware, sensing that the hardware without an operating system was fairly useless, but later they separated the hardware sales from the operating system sales to offer their customers more flexibility with their job mix to solve the customer’s problems.<\/p>\n However this typically meant more cost for both the hardware and the separate operating system.\u00a0 \u00a0And it was difficult to differentiate from your competitors external to your company and<\/strong><\/em> internal to your company.\u00a0 \u00a0Probably the most famous of these conflicts was DEC’s VMS operating system and various Unix offerings\u2026.and even PDP-11 versus VAX.<\/p>\n DEC had well over 500 personnel (mostly engineers and documentation people) in the Digital Unix group along with peripheral engineering and product management to produce Digital Unix.<\/p>\n Roughly speaking, each company was spending on the neighborhood of 1-2 billion USD per year to sell their systems, investing in sophisticated computer science features to show that their Unix-like system was best.<\/p>\n In the meantime a software company in Redmond, Washington was producing and selling the same operating systems to run on the PC no matter whether you bought it from HP, IBM, or DEC, and this operating system was now moving up in the world, headed towards the lucrative hardware server market.\u00a0 \u00a0While there were obviously fewer servers than there were desktop systems, the license price of a server operating system could be in the range of 30,000 USD or more.<\/p>\n The Unix Market was stuck between a rock and a hard place.\u00a0 \u00a0It was becoming too expensive to keep engineering unique Unix-like systems and competing with not only other Unix-like vendors, but also to fight off Windows NT.\u00a0 \u00a0Even O’Reilly Publishers, who had for years been producing books about Unix subsystems and commands, was switching over to producing books on Windows NT.<\/p>\n Then the Linux kernel project burst on the scene.\u00a0 The kernel project was enabled by six major considerations:<\/p>\n Having started in late 1991, by late 1993 \u201cthe kernel project\u201d and many distribution creators such as \u201cSoft Landing Systems\u201d, \u201cYggdrasil\u201d, \u201cDebian\u201d, \u201cSlackware\u201d and \u201cRed Hat\u201d to flourish.<\/p>\n Some of these were started as a \u201ccommercial\u201d distribution, with the hope and dream of making money and some were started as a \u201ccommunity project\u201d to benefit \u201cthe community\u201d.<\/p>\n At the same time, distributions that were based on the Berkeley Software Distribution were still held up by the long-running \u201cUnix Systems Labs Vs BSDi\u201d lawsuit that was holding up the creation of \u201cBSDlite\u201d that would be used to start the various BSD distributions.<\/p>\n Linux (or GNU\/Linux as some called it) started to take off, pushed by the many distributions and the press (including magazines and papers).<\/p>\n I will admit the following is my own thoughts on the popularity of Linux versus BSD, but from my perspective it was a combination of many factors.<\/p>\n As I said before, at the end of 1993 BSD was still being held up by the lawsuit, but the Linux companies were moving forward, and because of this the BSD companies (of which there were only one or two at the time) had nothing new to say to the press.<\/p>\n Another reason that the Linux distributions moved forward was the difference in the model.\u00a0 The GPL had a dynamic effect on the model of forcing the source code to go out with the binaries.\u00a0 \u00a0Later on many embedded systems people, or companies that wanted an inexpensive OS for their closed system, might chose software with an MIT or BSD license that license would not force them to ship all their source code to their customers, but the combination of the GPL for the kernel and the large amount of code from the Free Software Foundation caught the imagination of a lot of the press and customers.<\/p>\n People could start a distribution project without asking ANYONE\u2019s<\/strong><\/em> permission, and eventually that sparked hundreds<\/strong> <\/em>of distributions.<\/p>\n I should also mention Project Athena at MIT, which was originally a research project to create a light-weight client-server atmosphere for Unix workstations.<\/p>\n Out of this project came Kerberos, a net-work based authentication system, as well as the X Window System.<\/p>\n At this time Sun Microsystems had successfully made NFS a \u201cstandard\u201d in the Unix industry and was trying to advocate for a Display Postscript-based windowing system named \u201cNews\u201d.<\/p>\n Other companies were looking for alternatives, and the client-server based X Window System showed promise.\u00a0 \u00a0However X10.3, one release from Project Athena, needed some more development that eventually led to X11.x and on top of that were Intrinsics and Widgets (Button Boxes, Radio Boxes, Scroll-bars, etc.) that gave the \u201clook and feel\u201d that people see in a modern desktop system.<\/p>\n These needs drove the movement of developing the X Window System out of MIT and Project Athena into the X Consortium, people paid full time to coordinate the development.\u00a0 \u00a0The X Consortium was funded by memberships from companies and people that felt they had something to get from having X supported.\u00a0 The X Consortium opened in 1993 and closed its doors in 1996.<\/p>\n Some of these same companies decided to go against Unix System Labs, the consortium set up by Sun Microsystems and AT&T, so they formed the Open Software Foundation (OSF) and decided to set a source-code and API standard for Unix systems.\u00a0 Formed in 1988, it merged with X\/Open in 1996 to form the Open Group.\u00a0 Today they maintain a series of formal standards and certifications.<\/p>\n There were many other consortia formed.\u00a0 \u00a0The Common Desktop Environment (I still have lots of SWAG from that) was one of them.\u00a0 \u00a0And it always seemed with consortia that they would start up, be well funded, then the companies funding them would look around and say \u201cwhy should I pay for this, all the other companies will pay for it\u201d and those companies would drop out to let the consortium\u2019s funding dry up.<\/p>\n At this point, dear reader, we have seen how software originally was written by people who needed it, whereas \u201cprofessional programmers\u201d wrote code for other people and who required funding to make it worthwhile for them.\u00a0 \u00a0The \u201cproblem\u201d with professional programmers is that they expect to earn a living by writing code.\u00a0 They have to buy food, housing and pay taxes.\u00a0 \u00a0They may or may not even use the code they write in their daily life.<\/p>\n We also saw a time where operating systems, for the most part, were either written by computer companies, to make their systems usable, or by educational bodies as research projects.\u00a0 \u00a0As Linux matures and as standards make the average \u201cPC\u201d from one vendor become more and more electrically the same, the number of engineers needed to make each distribution of Linux work on a \u201cPC\u201d is minimal.<\/p>\n PCs have typically had difficulty in differentiating one from another, and \u201cprice\u201d is more and more one of the mitigating issues.\u00a0 \u00a0Having to pay for an operating system is something that no company wants to do, and few users expect to pay for it either.\u00a0 So the hardware vendors turn more and more to Linux\u2026.an operating system that they do not have to pay any<\/strong> money to put on their platform.<\/p>\n Recently I have been seeing some cracks in the dike.\u00a0 \u00a0As more and more users of FOSS come on board, they put more and more demands on developers whose numbers are not growing sufficiently fast enough to keep all the software working.<\/p>\n I hear from FOSS developers that too few, and sometimes no, developers are working on blocks of code.\u00a0 Of course this can also happen to closed-source code, but this shortness hits mostly in areas that are not considered \u201csexy\u201d, such as quality assurance, release engineering, documentation and translations.<\/p>\n In the early days there were just a few people working on projects that had relatively few people using them.\u00a0 They were passionate about their work, and no one got paid.<\/p>\n One of the first times I heard any type of rumblings was when some people had figured out some ways of making money with Linux.\u00a0 \u00a0One rumble that came up was an indignation that came because the developers did not want people to make money on code they had written and contributed for free.<\/p>\n I understood the feelings of these people, but I advocated the fact that if you did not allow companies to make money from Linux that the movement would go forward slowly, like cold molasses.\u00a0 \u00a0Allowing companies to make money would cause Linux to go forward quickly.\u00a0 \u00a0While we lost some of the early developers who did not agree with this, most of the developers that really counted (including Linus) saw the logic in this.<\/p>\n About this time various companies were looking at \u201cOpen Source\u201d.\u00a0 Netscape was in battle with other companies who were creating browsers and on the other side there were the web-servers like Apache that were needed to provide servers.<\/p>\n At the same time Netscape decided to \u201cOpen Source\u201d their code in an attempt to bring in more developers and lower the costs of producing a world-class browser and server.<\/p>\n All through software history there were \u201ccommunities\u201d that came about.\u00a0 \u00a0In the early days the communities revolved around user groups, or groups of people involved in some type of software project, working together for a common goal.<\/p>\n Sometimes these were formed around the systems companies (DECUS, IBM’s SHARE, Sun Microsystems’ Sun-sites, etc) and later bulletin boards, newsgroups, etc.<\/p>\n Over time the \u201ccommunity\u201d expanded to include documentation people, translation people or even people just promoting Free Software and \u201cOpen Source\u201d for various reasons.<\/p>\n However, in the later years it turned more and more into people using gratis<\/strong><\/em> software and not understanding Freedom<\/strong> <\/em>Software.\u00a0 \u00a0The same people who would use pirated software, not giving back at all to the community or the developers.<\/p>\n One of the other issues of software is the concept of \u201cSoftware Piracy\u201d, the illegal copying and use of software against its license.<\/p>\n Over the years some people in the \u201cFOSS Community\u201d have downplayed the idea of Intellectual Property and even the existence of copyright, without acknowledging that without copyright they would have no control over their software whatsoever.\u00a0 \u00a0Software in the public domain has no protection from people taking the software, making changes to it, creating a binary copy and selling it for whatever the customer would pay.\u00a0 \u00a0However, some of these FOSS people condone software piracy and turn a blind eye to it.<\/p>\n I am not one of those people.<\/p>\n I remember the day I recognized the value of fighting software piracy.\u00a0 I was at a conference in Brazil when I told the audience that they should be using Free Software.\u00a0 \u00a0They answered back and said:<\/p>\n \u201cOh, Mr. maddog, ALL of our software is free!\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n At that time almost 90% of all desktop software in Brazil was pirated, and so with the ease of obtaining software for gratis, part<\/strong> <\/em>of the usefulness of Free Software (its low cost) was obliterated.<\/p>\n An organization, the [Business} Software Alliance (BSA), was set up by companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe and others to find and prosecute (typically) companies and government agencies that were using unlicensed or incorrectly licensed software.<\/p>\n If all the people using the Linux kernel would pay just one dollar for each hardware platform where it was running, we would be able to easily fund most FOSS development.<\/p>\n One person at IBM, by the name of Daniel Frye, became my liaison to IBM.\u00a0 \u00a0Dan had understood the model and the reasons for having Open Source.<\/p>\n Like many other computer companies (including Microsoft) there were people in IBM who believed in FOSS and were working on projects on their own time.<\/p>\n One of Daniel’s focuses was to find and organize some of these people into a FOSS unit inside of IBM to help move Linux forward.<\/p>\n From time to time I was invited to Austin, Texas to meet with IBM (which, as a DEC employee, felt very strange).<\/p>\n One time I was there and Dan asked me, as President of Linux International(TM), to speak to a meeting of these people in the \u201cLinux group\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0I gave my talk and was then issued into a \u201cgreen room\u201d to wait while the rest of the meeting went on.\u00a0 After a little while I had to go to the restroom, and while looking for it I saw a letter being projected on the screen in front of all these IBM people.\u00a0 \u00a0It was a letter from Lou Gerstner, then the president of IBM.\u00a0 \u00a0The letter said, in effect, that in the past IBM had been a closed-source company unless business reasons existed for it being Open Source.\u00a0 In the future, the letter went on, IBM would be an Open Source company unless there were business reasons for being closed source.<\/p>\n This letter sent chills up my back, because working at DEC, I knew how difficult it was to take a piece of code written by DEC engineers and make it \u201cfree software\u201d, even if DEC had no plans to sell that code … .no plans to make it available to the public.\u00a0 \u00a0After going through the process I had DEC engineers tell me \u201cnever again\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0This statement by Gerstner reversed the process.\u00a0 \u00a0It was now up to the business people to prove why they could not make it open source.<\/p>\n I know there will be a lot of people out there that will say to me \u201cno way\u201d that Gerstner said that.\u00a0 They will cite examples of IBM not being \u201cOpen\u201d.\u00a0 I will tell you that it is one thing for a President and CEO to make a decision like that and another for a large company like IBM to implement it.\u00a0 \u00a0It takes time and it takes a business plan for a company like IBM to change its business.<\/p>\n It was around this time that IBM made their famous announcement that they were going to invest a billion US dollars into \u201cLinux\u201d.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em> \u00a0They may have also said \u201cOpen Source\u201d, but I have lost track of the timing of that.\u00a0 \u00a0 This announcement caught the world by shock, that such a large and staid computer company would make this statement.<\/p>\n A month or two after this Dan met with me again, looked me right in the eye and asked if the Linux community might consider IBM trying to \u201ctake over Linux\u201d, could they accept the \u201cdancing elephant\u201d coming into the Linux community, or be afraid that IBM would crush Linux.<\/p>\n I told Dan that I was sure the \u201cpeople that counted\u201d in the Linux community would see IBM as a partner.<\/p>\n Shortly after that I was aware of IBM hiring Linux developers so they could work full time on various parts of Linux, not just part time as before.\u00a0 \u00a0I knew people who were working as disparate parts of \u201cLinux\u201d as the Apache Web Server that were paid by IBM.<\/p>\n About a year later IBM made another statement.\u00a0 \u00a0They had recovered that billion dollars of investment, and were going to invest another billion dollars<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n I was at a Linux event in New York City when I heard of IBM selling their laptop and desktop division to Lenovo.\u00a0 \u00a0I knew that while that division was still profitable, it was not profitable to the extent that it could support IBM.\u00a0 So IBM sold off that division, purchased Price Waterhouse Cooper (doubling the size of their integration department) and shifted their efforts into creating business solutions, which WERE more profitable.<\/p>\n There was one more, more subtle issue.\u00a0 \u00a0Before that announcement, literally one day before the announcement, if an IBM salesman had used anything other than IBM hardware to create a solution, there might have been hell to pay.\u00a0 \u00a0However at that Linux event it was announced that IBM was giving away two Apple laptops as prizes in a contest.\u00a0 \u00a0The implications of that prize giveaway was not lost on me.\u00a0 Two days before that announcement, if IBM marketing people had offered a prize of a non-IBM product, they probably would have been FIRED<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n In the future a business solution by IBM might use ANY hardware and ANY software, not just IBM’s.\u00a0 \u00a0This was amazing.\u00a0 \u00a0And it showed that IBM was supporting Open Source,\u00a0 because Open Source allowed their solution providers to create better solutions at a lower cost.\u00a0 It is as simple as that.<\/p>\n Lenovo, with its lower overhead and focused business, could easily make a reasonable profit off those low-end systems, particularly when IBM might be a really good customer of theirs.<\/p>\n IBM was no longer a \u201ccomputer company\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0They were a business solutions company<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n Later on IBM sold off their small server division to Lenovo, for much the same reason.<\/p>\n So when IBM wanted to be able to provide an Open Source solution for their enterprise solutions, which distribution were they going to purchase?\u00a0 Red Hat.<\/p>\n I mentioned \u201cSCO\u201d earlier as a distribution of Unix that was much like Microsoft.\u00a0 SCO created distributions, mostly based on AT&T code (instead of Berkeley) and even took over the distribution of Xenix from Microsoft when Microsoft did not want to distribute it anymore.<\/p>\n The was Santa Cruz Operations, located in the Santa Cruz mountains overlooking the beautiful Monterey Bay.<\/p>\n Started by a father\/son team Larry and Doug Michels, they had a great group of developers and probably distributed more licenses for Unix than any other vendor.\u00a0 \u00a0They specialized in server systems that drove lots of hotels, restaurants, etc. using character-cell terminals and later X-terms and such.<\/p>\n Doug, in particular, is a great guy.\u00a0 \u00a0It was Doug, when he was on the Board of Directors for Uniforum, who INSISTED that Linus be given a \u201cLifetime Achievement\u201d award at the tender age of 27.<\/p>\n I worked with Doug on several projects, including the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) and enjoyed working with his employees.<\/p>\n Later Doug and Larry sold off SCO to the Caldera Group, creators of Caldera Linux.\u00a0 \u00a0Based in Utah the Candera crew were a spin-off from Novell.\u00a0 From what I could see, Caldera was not so much interested in \u201cFreeDOM\u201d Linux as having a \u201ccheap Unix\u201d free of AT&T royalties, but still using AT&T code.\u00a0 \u00a0They continually pursued deals with closed-source software that they could bind into their Linux distribution to give value.<\/p>\n This purchase formed the basis of what became known as \u201cBad SCO\u201d (when Caldera changed their name to \u201cSCO\u201d), and who soon took a business tactic of suing Linux vendors because \u201cSCO\u201d said that Linux had AT&T source code in it and was a violation of their licencing terms.<\/p>\n This caused a massive uproar in the Linux Marketplace, with people not knowing if Linux would stop being circulated.<\/p>\n Of course most of us in the Linux community knew these challenges were false.\u00a0 One of the claims that SCO made was that they owned the copyrights to the AT&T code.\u00a0 I knew this was false because I read the agreement between AT&T and Novell (DEC was a licensee of both, so they shared the contract with us) and I knew<\/strong> <\/em>that, at most<\/strong><\/em>, Santa Cruz Operations had the right to sub-license and collect royalties\u2026.but I will admit the contract was very confusing.<\/p>\n However no one knew who would fund the lawsuit that would shortly occur.<\/p>\n IBM bellied up to the bar (as did Novell, Red Hat and several others), and for the next several years the legal battle went on with SCO bringing charges to court and the \u201cgood guys\u201d knocking them down.\u00a0 You can read more about this on Wikipedia.<\/p>\n In the end the courts found that at most SCO had an issue with IBM itself over a defunct contract, and Linux was in the clear.<\/p>\n But without IBM, the Linux community might have been in trouble.\u00a0 \u00a0And \u201cBig Blue\u201d being in the battle gave a lot of vendors and users of Linux the confidence that things would turn out all right.<\/p>\n Now we get down to Red Hat and its path.<\/p>\n I first knew Red Hat about the time that Bob Young realized that the most CDs his company ACC corps were from this little company in Raleigh, North Carolina.<\/p>\n Bob traveled there and found three developers who were great technically but were not the strongest in business and marketing.<\/p>\n Bob bought into the company and helped develop the policies of the company.\u00a0 He advocated for larger servers, more Internet connectivity, in order to give away more copies of Red Hat.\u00a0 \u00a0It was Bob who pointed out that \u201cLinux is catsup, and I will make Red Hat\u2122 the same as \u201cHeinz\u2122\u201d.<\/p>\n Red Hat developed the business model of selling services, and became profitable doing that.\u00a0 \u00a0Eventually Red Hat went out with one of the most profitable IPOs of that time.<\/p>\n Red Hat went through a series of Presidents, each one having the skills needed at the time until eventually the need of IBM matched the desires of the Red Hat stockholders.<\/p>\n It is no secret that Red Hat did not care about the desktop other than as a development platform for RHEL.\u00a0 \u00a0They gave up their desktop development to Fedora.\u00a0 Red Hat cared about the enterprise, the companies that were willing to pay hefty price tags for the support that Red Hat was going to sell them with the assurance that the customers would have the source code in case they needed it.<\/p>\n These enterprise companies are serious about their need for computers, but do not want to make the investment in employees to give them the level of support they need.\u00a0 So they pay Red Hat.\u00a0 \u00a0But most of those companies have Apple or Microsoft on the desktop and could care less about having Fedora there.\u00a0 \u00a0They want RHEL to be solid, and to have that phone ready, and they are willing to pay for it.<\/p>\n The alternatives are to buy a closed-source solution, and do battle to get the source code when you need it or deal (on a server basis) a solution that is not a hardware\/software system solution needed by IBM.<\/p>\n A few years ago Oracle made a decision to buy the Intellectual Property of Sun Microsystems.\u00a0 \u00a0Of course Oracle had its products work on many different operating systems, but Oracle realized that if they had complete control of the hardware, the operating system and the application base (in this case their premier Oracle database engine) they would create \u201cUnstoppable Oracle\u201d.<\/p>\n Why is a full-stack, systems company preferred?\u00a0 \u00a0You can make changes and fixes to the full-stack that benefits your applications and not have to convince\/cajole\/argue with people to get it in.\u00a0 \u00a0Likewise you can test the full stack for inefficiencies or weak points.<\/p>\n I have worked for \u201cfull-stack\u201d companies.\u00a0 \u00a0We supported our own hardware.\u00a0 \u00a0The device drivers we wrote had diagnostics that the operating system could make visible to the systems administrators to tell them that devices were ABOUT to fail, and to allow those devices to be swapped out.\u00a0 We built features into the system that benefited our database products and our networking products.\u00a0 \u00a0Things could be made more seamless.<\/p>\n IBM is a full-stack company.\u00a0 \u00a0Apple is a full-stack company.\u00a0 \u00a0Their products tend to be more expensive, but many serious people pay more for them.<\/p>\n Certain companies (those we call \u201centerprises\u201d) are not universities or hobbyists.\u00a0 \u00a0Those companies (and governments) use terms like \u201cmission critical\u201d and \u201calways on\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0They typically do not measure their numbers of computers in the tens or hundreds, but thousands\u2026.and they need them to work well.<\/p>\n They talk about \u201cMean Time to Failure\u201d (MTTF) and \u201cMean Time to Repair\u201d (MTTR) and want to have \u201cTerms of Service Agreements\u201d (TSA) which talk about so many hours of up-time that are guaranteed (99.999% up-time) with penalties if they are not met.\u00a0 And as a rule of thumb computer companies know that for every \u201c9\u201d to the right of the decimal point you need to put in 100 times more work and expense to get there.<\/p>\n And typically in these \u201cTerms of Service\u201d you also talk about how many \u201cPoints of Contact\u201d you have between the customer and the service provider.\u00a0 The fewer the \u201cPoints of Contact\u201d the less your contract costs because the customer supplied\u00a0 \u201cpoint of contact\u201d will have more knowledge about the system and the problem than your average user.<\/p>\n Also on these contracts the customer does not call into what we in the industry call \u201cfirst line support\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0The customer has already applied all the patches, rebooted the system, and made sure the mouse is plugged in.\u00a0 \u00a0So the customer calls a special number and gets the second or third line of support.<\/p>\n In other words, serious people.\u00a0 Really serious people.\u00a0 \u00a0And those really serious people<\/strong><\/em> are ready to spend really serious money<\/strong><\/em> to get it.<\/p>\n I have worked both for those companies that want to buy those services and those companies that needed to provide those services.<\/p>\n Many people will understand that the greater the number of systems that you have under contract the more issues you will have.\u00a0 \u00a0Likewise the greater number of systems you have under contract the lower the cost of providing service per system<\/strong><\/em> if spread evenly across all those customers and systems who need that enterprise support<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n IBM has typically been one of those companies that provided really serious support<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n IBM still had many operating systems and solutions that they used in their business solutions<\/strong><\/em> business, but IBM needed a Linux solution<\/strong><\/em> that they could use as a full-stack solution, just like Oracle did.\u00a0 \u00a0Giving IBM the ability to integrate the hardware, operating system and solutions to fit the customer better.<\/p>\n Likewise Red Hat Software, with its RHEL solution, had the reputation and engineering behind it to provide an enterprise solution<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n Red Hat had focused on enterprise servers, unlike other well-known distributions, with their community version \u201cFedora\u201d acting as a trial base for new ideas to be folded into RHEL at a later time.\u00a0 \u00a0However RHEL was the Red Hat business focus<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n It should also be pointed out that some pieces of software came only from Red Hat.\u00a0 \u00a0There were few \u201ccommunity people\u201d who worked on some pieces of the distribution<\/strong> <\/em>called \u201cRHEL\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0So while many of the pieces were copyrighted then released under some version of the GPL, many contributions that made up RHEL came only from Red Hat.<\/p>\n Red Hat also had a good reputation in the Linux community, releasing all of their source code to the larger community and charging for support.<\/p>\n However, over time some customers developed a pattern of purchasing a small number of RHEL systems, then using the \u201cbug-for-bug\u201d compatible version of Red Hat from some other distribution.\u00a0 \u00a0This, of course, saved the customer money, however it also reduced the amount of revenue that Red Hat received for the same amount of work.\u00a0 \u00a0This forced Red Hat to charge more for each license they sold, or lay off Red Hat employees, or not do projects they might have otherwise funded.<\/p>\n So recently Red Hat\/IBM made a business decision to limit their customers to those who would buy a license from them for every single system that would run RHEL and only distribute their source-code and the information necessary on how to build that distribution to those customers.\u00a0 Therefore the people who receive those binaries would receive the sources so they could fix bugs and extend the operating system as they wished\u2026..this was, and is, the essence of the GPL<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n Most, if not all, of the articles I have read have said something along the lines of \u201cIBM\/Red Hat seem to be following the GPL..but…but…but...the community!<\/strong><\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Which community?\u00a0 There are plenty of distributions for people who do not need the same level of engineering and support that IBM and Red Hat offer.\u00a0 \u00a0Red Hat, and IBM, continue to send their changes for GPLed code \u201cupstream\u201d to flow down to all the other distributions.\u00a0 \u00a0They continue to share ideas with the larger community.<\/p>\n In the early days of the DEC Linux\/alpha port I used Red Hat because they were the one distribution who worked along with DEC to put the bits out.\u00a0 \u00a0Later other distributions followed onto the Alpha from the work that Red Hat had done.\u00a0 Quite frankly, I have never used \u201cRHEL\u201d and have not used Fedora in a long time.\u00a0 Personal preference.<\/p>\n However I now see a lot of people coming out of the woodwork and beating their breasts and saying how they are going to protect the investment of people who want to use RHEL<\/strong><\/em> for free.<\/p>\n I have seen developers of various distributions make T-shirts declaring that they are not \u201cFreeloaders\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0I do not know who may have called any of the developers of CentOS or Rocky Linux, Alma or any other \u201cclone\u201d of any other distribution a \u201cfreeloader\u201d.\u00a0 I have brought out enough distributions in my time to know that doing that is not \u201cgratis\u201d.\u00a0 It takes work.<\/p>\n However I will say that there are many people who use<\/strong><\/em> these clones and do not give back to the community in any way, shape or form<\/strong><\/em> who I consider to be \u201cfreeloaders\u201d, and that would probably be the people who sign a business agreement with IBM\/Red Hat and then do not want to live up to that agreement.\u00a0 \u00a0For these freeloaders<\/strong> <\/em>there are so many other distributions of Linux that would be \u201chappy\u201d to have them use their distributions.<\/p>\n As I have stated above, I have been in the \u201cOpen Source\u201d community before there was Open Source, before there was the Free Software Foundation, before there was the GNU project.<\/p>\n I am 73 years old, and have spent more than 50 years in \u201cthe community\u201d.\u00a0 I have whip marks up and down my back for promoting source code and giving out sources even when I might have been fired or taken to court for it, because the customer needed it.\u00a0 Most of the people who laughed at me for supporting Linux when I worked for the Digital Unix Group are now working for Linux companies.\u00a0 \u00a0That is ok.\u00a0 I have a thick skin, but the whip marks are still there.<\/p>\n There are so many ways that people can help build this community that have nothing to do with the ability to write code, write documentation or even generate a reasonable bug report.<\/p>\n Simply promoting Free Software to your schools, companies, governments and understanding the community would go a long way.\u00a0 Starting up a Linux Club (lpi.org\/clubs) in your school or helping others to Upgrade to Linux (upgradetolinux.com) are ways that Linux users (whether individuals, companies, universities or governments) can contribute to the community.<\/p>\n But many of the freeloaders will not even do that. So far I have seen four different distributions saying that they will continue the production of \u201cnot RHEL\u201d, generating even more distributions for the average user to say \u201cwhich one should I use\u201d?\u00a0 If they really want to do this, why not just work together to produce one good one?\u00a0 \u00a0Why not make their own distributions a RHEL competitor?\u00a0 \u00a0How long will they keep beating their breasts when they find out that they can not make any money at doing it?<\/p>\n SuSE said that they would invest ten million dollars in developing a competitor to RHEL.\u00a0 Fantastic!\u00a0 COMPETE.\u00a0 Create an enterprise competitor<\/strong><\/em> to Red Hat with the same business channels, world-wide support team, etc. etc.\u00a0 You will find it is not inexpensive to do that.\u00a0 Ten million may get you started.<\/p>\n My answer to all this?\u00a0 RHEL customers will have to decide what they want to do.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 I am sure that IBM and Red Hat hope that their customers will see the value of RHEL and the support that Red Hat\/IBM and their channel partners provide for it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The rest of the customers who just want to buy one copy of RHEL and then run a \u201cfree\u201d distribution on all their other systems no matter how it is created,\u00a0 well it seems that IBM does not want to do business with them anymore, so they will have to go to other suppliers who have enterprise capable distributions of Linux and who can tolerate that type of customer.<\/p>\n I will also point out that IBM and Red Hat have presented one set of business conditions to their customers, and their customers are free to accept or reject them.\u00a0 \u00a0Then IBM and Red Hat are free to create another set of business conditions for another set of customers.<\/p>\n I want to make sure people know that I do not have any hate for people and companies who set business conditions as long as they do not violate the licenses they are under.\u00a0 Business is business.<\/p>\n However I will point out that as \u201cevil\u201d as Red Hat and IBM have been portrayed in this business change there is no mention at all<\/strong><\/em> of all the companies that support Open Source \u201cPermissive Licenses\u201d, which do not guarantee the sources to their end users, or offer only \u201cClosed Source\u201d Licenses\u2026.who do not allow and have never allowed clones to be made\u2026.these people and companies do not have any right to throw stones (and you know who you are).<\/p>\n Red Hat and IBM are making their sources available to all those who receive their binaries under contract.\u00a0 That is the GPL.<\/p>\n For all the researchers, students, hobbyists and people with little or no money, there are literally hundreds of distributions that they can choose, and many that run across other interesting architectures that RHEL does not even address.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>1<\/sup>https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/A_Commentary_on_the_UNIX_Operating_System<\/em>Ancient history for understanding<\/h2>\n
The origins and rise of Unix\u2122<\/h2>\n
The rise of Microsoft and the death of Unix<\/h2>\n
The rise of Linux<\/h2>\n
\n
Linux was cute penguins<\/h2>\n
The X Window System and Project Athena<\/h2>\n
From the few to the many<\/h2>\n
Funding the work<\/h2>\n
The community<\/h2>\n
Shiver me timbers\u2026.<\/h2>\n
Enter IBM<\/h2>\n
And then there was SCO<\/h2>\n
Red Hat and RHEL<\/h2>\n
\u201cFull Stack\u201d systems companies versus others<\/h2>\n
Why would companies pay to use RHEL?<\/h2>\n
Tying it all together<\/h2>\n
\/*
\nA personal note here:<\/h2>\n
\n*\/<\/p>\n
\n<\/a>2<\/sup>https:\/\/gunkies.org\/wiki\/Installing_UNIX_v6_(PDP-11)_on_SIMH<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"