Free our SOFTWARE!

Taking anything for granted is dangerous, so Jonni Bidwell and Mike Saunders revisit how the free software movement got started to help free us from proprietary tyranny!

- Jonni Bidwell, Mike Saunders

Without Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS), there would be no GNU, and without GNU, there would be no Linux distributions as we know them, and without Linux, there would be no Linux Format. So here we are, 300 issues on, celebrating the very thing that enables us to exist: the free software movement.

RMS started the GNU’s Not Unix Project in 1983 to create a totally free operating system, and later he established the General Public License to guarantee its software freedom. By 1991, much of GNU was finished, but it lacked a kernel – which is where Linus Torvalds and his Linux kernel came in. Combining the collaborative nature of online open source development, the benefits of the GPL licence and the pulling-as-one community that builds around projects, GNU/Linux took off beyond anything that could have been expected. But despite this success – indeed, perhaps because of it – the issues of software freedom persist and are perhaps more pressing than ever.

Bill Gates’s 1976 Open Letter to Hobbyists, (https:// bit.ly/lxf300gates), besides making people feel bad for pirating BASIC, engendered the idea that all software should be paid for, and its source code kept from prying eyes. The burgeoning microcomputer industry shared Gates’s sentiment and proprietary software quickly became the norm. Meanwhile, communications giant AT&T, which had hitherto provided the Unix OS to governments and universities for free, was forced by deregulation proceedings to commercialise it.