OneAndOneIs2

There's an interesting article linked from places like Linux Devices and Linux Watch on the whole GPL v2 / GPL v3 thing.

I haven't been able to read it in any great depth - too many other things are sapping my concentration - but it seems a worthwhile read. I'll no doubt come back to it later.

But it reminded my of something I wondered about a while ago: Namely, if software companies had had more faith in copyright in the early days, would GNU or Linux ever have happened?

Here's the basis for the speculation:

In 1980, Stallman and some other hackers at the AI Lab were refused the software's source code for the Xerox 9700 laser printer (code-named "Dover"), the industry's first. Stallman had modified the software on an older printer (the XGP, Xerographic Printer), so it electronically messaged a user when the person's job was printed, and would message all logged-in users when a printer was jammed. Not being able to add this feature to the Dover printer was a major inconvenience, as the printer was on a different floor from most of the users. This one experience convinced Stallman of the ethical need to require free software.

(Wikipedia)

The whole FOSS ethic as we know it was kicked off by this event: Stallman couldn't edit the software, so he opted to start a crusade for freely available and editable software. The GNU utilities were a direct result.

But software wasn't split entirely into "closed" and "free" back then - any more than it is today, really. One particularly well-known example is Linux's inspiration, Minix.

Minix was originally a copyrighted piece of software: If you wanted a copy, you had to buy Tanenbaum's book or pay Prentice Hall, the publishers, a royalty. But all the source code was available, on floppies or printed in the book. You couldn't distribute it, modified or untouched, because it was copyright. But it was available.

So imagine if all software had gone with that: Instead of closing the source code and shipping binary-only, they shipped source code. Copyrighted, illegal to distribute, source code. But source code that you could patch and recompile for yourself.

When RMS came to try and hack that Xerox printer, he wouldn't have had to get in touch with Xerox and be told "No" - he'd have simply taken out the disk the printer driver had come on, grabbed the source code, and edited it as desired.

He wouldn't have been able to distribute the modified driver, but he would (probably) have been able to distribute the patch, so anybody else who had the printer, and therefore the driver, would have been able to patch it - in the same way that newsgroups like comp.os.minix traded in Minix patches. You had to buy the Minix software, but once you had it you could freely share patches for it.

Minix was proprietary but still had a huge hacker following. Like Linus himself, for example..

If proprietary software had still been fully-hackable, would FOSS ever have gained the momentum that it did? If explaining the difference wasn't "It's modifiable vs. unmodifiable" but "They're both modifiable, but you can only distribute the modifications and that makes it hard to keep organized" how would the non-hacking PHBs get a handle on this new kind of software development they're being asked to fund? Black & white is much easier to grasp than different shades of grey.

Even more interestingly: If Microsoft had released DOS and Windows as copyright-but-available code, they would still have been proprietary, but they would have been MORE attractive than Unix in many ways for hackers. They'd have been hackable! They'd have been able to cherry-pick all the best hacks and buy them very cheaply for official inclusion in the next version. They'd have been able to brag about the extensive, free, (admittedly un-guaranteed) third-party patching and debugging available.

If they'd played their cards right, they might have owned the most hacker-friendly OS in the world, with the biggest community of developers as well as the biggest userbase. And that would have stolen a huge amount of GNU and Linux's thunder, had they ever existed at all. And best of all, from their standpoint, Microsoft would still have owned and controlled their code completely. Oh sure, it would have been easily-pirated, but then, it was easily pirated anyway: Before the web made ubiquitous online registration a possibility, there was nothing MS could do to stop you using one set of installation discs on a hundred different machines.

Makes you think, doesn't it?