[Fsf-friends] Just who is Richard M Stallman (a pen-potrait) / Long

[Frederick Noronha]

* * * Please excuse this long post... today is an unusual day in the
history of GNU/Linux in Goa. RMS speaks at the GEC at 4 pm on
November 6, 2002 (This article was written c. 2001) * * * 

OpenNews: OpenSource newz from India!
... Free(tm) news for a free future!                                  
>From http://opennews.indianissues.org

Beyond Market, Freedom Matters

BY K G KUMAR

What is it about the Free Software Movement that raises the hackles of the
world's most powerful software company? And what is it that causes Microsoft
executives to misconstrue the essence of the movement, and often
misattribute it to the Open Source initiative--a related, but
philosophically watered-down version of the same original vision, asks K.G.
Kumar in an article that was earlier published in the Economic and Political
Weekly of India.
       
By basing itself on moral rectitude and ethical resoluteness, the Free
Software Movement seeks to focus on the importance of "freedom" as in "free
speech" or "free elections", and not gratis, as in "free beer". In the
process, it has invited the wrath of the likes of Microsoft.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                                          
                                                                           
Q: Do you view Linux and the open-source movement as a threat to Microsoft?   
                                                                           

A: Yeah. It's good competition. It will force us to be innovative. It will
force us to justify the prices and value that we deliver. And that's only
healthy. The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds
open-source work.  Government funding should be for work that is available
to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way
the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to
make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put
something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public
domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property
sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.
                                                                        
    --- Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO and No. 2 in the company, responding
           to a question by Chicago Sun-Times reporter Dave Newbart
                                                                              
We could not establish a community of freedom in the land of proprietary
software where each program had its lord. We had to build a new land in
cyberspace -- the free software GNU operating system, which we started
writing in 1984. In 1991, when GNU Most read story was almost finished, the
kernel Linux written by Linus Torvalds filled the last in Linux: gap; soon
the free GNU/Linux system was available. 

-- Richard Matthew Stallman, Founder and President, Free Software
Foundation 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

ENTHUSIASTS GIVE IT A BOOST

It is easy -- and tempting -- to pitch these two opposing positions against
each other, and portray the whole "free" vs proprietary software debate in
antagonistic, David vs Goliath terms. It is even more tempting and dramatic
to view these differences as the contours of a battle between lowly, poorly
paid and equipped programmers and the world's largest software company,
Microsoft, led by what the international media incessantly reminds us is the
world's richest man.

In reality, though, the Free Software Movement is not a movement against
Microsoft or Bill Gates. Nor does it appear daunted by the gigantic
proportions or reputations of its foes. That is because the well-spring of
its raison d'etre is moral rectitude and ethical resoluteness. The Free
Software Movement is a movement for freedom, pure and simple--freedom as
defined in any combination of these dictionary meanings: "exemption or
release from slavery or imprisonment"; "the quality of self-determination
attributed to the will"; "the state of being able to act without hindrance
or restraint"; "liberty of action"; "exemption from arbitrary, despotic or
autocratic control"; "unfettered"; even, "independence" and "civil liberty".

That last sense is particularly apt, since Richard Matthew Stallman began
the Free Software Movement in 1984 inspired by the ideals of the American
War of Independence of 1776: "freedom, community and voluntary co-operation,
which leads to free enterprise, free speech and free software."

Yet, critics and opponents of the Free Software Movement choose to ignore
these allusions of the word "freedom", choosing to focus, instead, on the
economic and business aspects of "free" software. The mighty multinational
Microsoft, for instance, alleges that the very notion of free software is
"unAmerican". In an address at New York University on 3 May 2001, Craig
Mundie, Microsoft's senior vice president, described the movement as
"flimsy", "flawed", jeopardizing property rights and threatening to
undermine the software industry, a key economic growth engine. Reuters
reported that Mundie's language was "more in the spirit of a trash-talking
sports star than the typically ambiguous, jargon-filled phrasings of a
software executive."

What is it about the Free Software Movement that raises the hackles of the
world's most powerful software company? And what is it that causes Microsoft
executives to misconstrue the essence of the movement, and often
misattribute it to the Open Source initiative--a related, but
philosophically watered-down version of the same original vision?

Any answers to these and related questions must inevitably point to a
bearded, long-haired, pun-loving genius of a programmer named Richard
Matthew ("Math You", as he once elaborated to an interviewer, referring to
his abiding love for mathematics) Stallman. Born in New York in 1953,
Stallman--or RMS as he is popularly known in the fraternity, after his login
identity name for the computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) where he started his programming career--is the only child of a
printing press owning father and a liberal-minded schoolteacher of a mother.

Growing up in New York's West Side, Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974
with a BA in physics. In 1971, during the end of his freshman year, he got a
job as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. (Contrary
to popular belief, reinforced by media reports of virus attacks and their
creators, a "hacker" is not a malevolent, evil-minded person tapping away at
the keyboard of a computer to break into distant security systems. Rather, a
hacker is merely someone who is obsessed with programming and writing code,
someone who would rather program than, say, eat or sleep, someone who has
imbibed the spirit of "playful cleverness". The more malicious type
portrayed in the media is more correctly referred to as a "cracker".)

At MIT's AI Lab, Stallman learned operating system development by doing it
as part of a long-standing software-sharing community. "Sharing of software
was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers, just
as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking," he notes. Stallman wrote the
first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975, for which, in 1991, he
received the Grace Hooper Award from the Association for Computing
Machinery. ("Calling Emacs an editor is like calling the Earth a nice hunk
of dirt," is what one commentator had to say about this powerful,
comprehensive Swiss Army knife-style piece of software.)

However, the AI Lab's hacker community and spirit soon collapsed, when
corporate interests began luring away all the talented hackers from MIT. For
Stallman, the last straw was when the AI Lab decided to use Digital's
non-free timesharing system, alongside the fact that the computers then
used, like the VAX or the 68020, featured operating systems that required
signing a non-disclosure agreement even to get an executable copy.

Stallman found himself confronted with a stark moral choice. He had to
choose to do something "for the good...so as to make a community possible
again." That was how he homed in on the idea of developing an operating
system (OS), the heart of any computer, without which no one can run one.

In January 1984, Stallman resigned from MIT to start the GNU Project to
develop the free operating system, GNU. GNU is a recursive acronymn (hackers
revel in puns and word play) for "GNU's Not Unix". Stallman quit MIT so that
the institute would not be able to interfere with the distribution of GNU as
free software. GNU is Unix-compatible software, i.e, it can run Unix
programs but is not identical to Unix, then the leading enterprise OS, known
for its portability.

In 1985, the year after he quit MIT, Stallman founded the Free Software
Foundation (FSF) in Boston,dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to
use, study, copy, modify and redistribute computer programs. (Those who
imagine that the Free Software Movement arose in response to Microsoft
should remember that the Redmont company's breakthrough OS, Windows 3.1,
shipped in June 1992, a full seven years after FSF was founded, while its
current flagship, Windows 2000, came almost another six years after that.)

FSF is a tax-exempt charity for free software development. It raises funds
by selling GNU CD-ROMs, T-shirts, manuals and deluxe distributions (all of
which users are free to copy and change), as well as from donations.

FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in "free speech", not
necessarily gratis, as in "free beer") software and free documentation. In
particular, FSF promotes the GNU operating system, used widely today in its
GNU/Linux variant, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds. It
is estimated that there are over 20 million users of GNU/Linux systems
today. These systems are often mistakenly called just "Linux"; calling them
"GNU/Linux" corrects this confusion.

They may not know it, but most Indian Internet users are already benefiting
from free software, because today, almost all Web servers run on free
software or variants of GNU/Linux. Even The Economist -- a magazine that
supports free enterprise and corporate energy -- admits that on the server
side, GNU/Linux has become so impressive and capable that it now represents
a real threat to the Microsoft Windows NT hegemony. According to The
Economist, over one million websites now run on GNU/Linux.

Many ISPs now base their Internet operations on GNU/Linux, in preference to
Windows NT or even Unix. Users in some niche segments like advanced graphics
and image processing, swear by GNU/Linux's robustness and reliability. In
fact, many of the effects for the film Titanic were created on GNU/Linux
machines. "Using 200 DEC Alpha-based systems running the Red Hat 4.1
distribution of GNU/Linux, after upgrading the kernel to support the PC164
mainboard, Digital Domain found a performance increase of three to four over
SGI systems. The combination of the GNU/Linux OS and Alpha CPUs also
delivered the most cost-effective solution to time and processing demands,"
according to Daryll Strauss of Digital Domain, the company that developed
graphics for Titanic.

GNU/Linux is now a robust operating system, complete with an entire set of
tools, utilities and applications, almost all of which are distributed with
source code, and free of cost. It is not just the near-zero cost of this
particular OS that wins the hearts of network administrators; it is its
greater stability. This matters a great deal for remote-managed network
servers.

Consider, also, these facts:

* gcc, the GNU C compiler, the flagship of the GNU suite, has consistently
outperformed the best of commercial compilers. (A compiler is a program that
translates a source program into an executable program, or that translates
instructions written in a high-level programming language into machine
language.)

* GNU/Linux has over 20 million users around the world, on eight processor
families.

* Apache, the free Web server from Apache Software Foundation, has 61% of
the global market share for Web servers (figures for May 2000), putting it
streets ahead of commercial products like Microsoft's IIS (21%) and
Netscape's Enterprise Server (5%).

* BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon), an open source program, runs over
80% of the domain name servers around the world.

* SendMail, the mailer programme used by nearly 80% of the world's
installations, is free software.

* Perl, TCL and Python are the public-domain languages that stitch together
thousands of websites.

* StarOffice, a complete office applications suite programmed in Java, which
can be a total substitute for Microsoft's Office, has been released under
the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL) by Sun Microsystems.

* AbiWord (www.abisource.com), a small (3.6 MB) open source GPL'd word
processor offers everything that MS Word does --- for free!

In media-related areas, free software has made impressive strides,
especially in the post-PC, post-Microsoft, post-Intel, post-Internet
Explorer architecture, as these examples prove:

1. TiVo uses GNU/Linux for its digital TV recorder.

2. GNU/Linux forms the basis for Kerbango Radio and PenguinRadio, two
Internet appliances that allow users to tune in to audio streams from around
the world.

3. ScreenPhone, a new cordless communications device from Sweden's Ericsson,
uses Red Hat Linux, with a graphical interface from Trolltech displayed on a
colour touch screen, to offer telephony, email and Web browsing. Ericsson
says this is the first of a new range of consumer products and services for
home communications that it aims to develop jointly with Red Hat, one of the
leading companies that distribute GNU/Linux.

4. LiViD, the Linux Video and DVD project, circumvents the Content Scramble
System (CSS) used to block unauthorized viewing of DVDs. While the US film
industry sees this as a ploy by hackers to subvert the encryption system,
hackers say they just want the freedom to see their favourite DVDs under
GNU/Linux (which was not an industry-supported platform).

5. Since 1994, the New York-based Sustainable Development Networking
Programme (SDNP) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has used
a GNU/Linux-based approach to provide approximately 45 nations with some of
their earliest connections to the Internet.

6. In Ethiopia, which was too small a market for the likes of Microsoft, the
free software typesetting programme TeX has been used to develop good fonts
in Amharic, the main national language.

7. The "Scholar Net" programme of Mexico hopes to use GNU/Linux to bring
computers and the Net to every elementary and mid-level school in the
country.

8. Back home, the Simputer project, born in the Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, uses free software (mainly, GNU/Linux, Perl and Tk) to bring a
simple, mobile computer into the hands of the average villager.

9. And finally, interestingly enough, the principles of free software have
created what has come to be called "open journalism". The best example is
Slashdot.org (slogan: "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."), run on free
software, and whose content is generated by readers submitting news and
stories, whetted and selected by a panel (named with each submission)--an
example of a sturdy distributed news gathering and filtering machine
independent of the large mainstream media companies.

As these examples and instances reveal, free software can -- and has --
worked well in the real, rough-and-tumble world of business and commerce.
This is simply because the term "free software" has nothing to do with
price; it is about freedom. In Stallman's words, a program is free software
if:

* You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose.

* You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. (To make
this freedom effective in practice, you must have access to the source code,
since making changes in a program without having the source code is
exceedingly difficult.)

* You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee.

* You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so
that the community can benefit from your improvements.

Free software is distributed under the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL)
or other licences approved by FSF in all domains. The GNU GPL gives each
user the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the
software, based on unfettered access to the source code. Being free to do
this means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for
permission.

While granting the user these freedoms, the GNU GPL defends them by saying
that no one is allowed to take them away from anyone else. Any published
program, which incorporates all or a substantial part of a GNU GPL-covered
program, must itself be released under the GNU GPL.

The GNU GPL ensures that no person or community can privatize the
community's free software. In Stallman's words, "Whoever wishes to copy
parts of our software into his program must let us use parts of that program
in our programs. Nobody is forced to join our club, but those who wish to
participate must offer us the same co-operation they receive from us. This
makes the system fair."

"Copyleft" is the method used by FSF to prevent GNU software from being
turned into proprietary software. Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it
over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means of
privatizing software, it becomes a means of keeping software free.

The central idea of copyleft is that FSF gives everyone permission to run
the program, copy it, modify it, and distribute modified versions--but not
permission to add restrictions of their own. Thus, the crucial freedoms that
define "free software" are guaranteed to everyone who has a copy; they
become inalienable rights.

Later, Stallman would say that the decision to start the GNU project was based on a
spirit similar to these words, attributed to Hillel, the rabbi scholar who
flourished in the time of Herod : "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I
am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?". "As an atheist," Stallman
hastens to add, "I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I
admire something one of them has said."

Stallman went on to become the principal author of the GNU C compiler (gcc),
a portable optimizing compiler that was designed to support diverse
architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over 30
different architectures and seven programming languages. Stallman also wrote
the GNU symbolic debugger (GSD), GNU Emacs, and various other GNU programs.

In 1990, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellowship,
and, in 1996, an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology
in Sweden. In 1998, along with Linus Torvalds, he received the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award. In 1999, he received the Yuri Rubinski
memorial award.

On a personal note, RMS likes music, butterflies, caves, good food and,
needless to add, computers. He sometimes writes jokes, funny poetry and song
parodies. When in the mood, especially in an evangelical, proselytizing
setting before an enraptured audience, he playfully refers to himself as
"St. IGNUcius in the Church of Emacs" -- even going so far as to don ethereal
robes and a halo of a hat!.

In the first edition of "The Hacker's Dictionary", this is how he described
himself:

I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953, and moved to the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. My hobbies include affection,
international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics, recorder, puns, science
fiction fandom, and programming; I magically get paid for doing the last
one. About a year ago, I split up with the PDP-10 computer to which I was
married for ten years. We still love each other, but the world is taking us
in different directions. For the moment, I still live in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, among our old memories. "Richard Stallman" is just my mundane
name; you can call me "RMS".

Not everyone, though, could get along famously with Stallman's purist and
uncompromising approach. In 1988, some of them rallied around another
celebrated hacker, Eric Raymond, to start the Open Source movement,
supposedly a more pragmatic, less dogmatic, apolitical initiative to focus
on the business and commercial aspects of free software. Erroneous media
coverage has given the impression that Richard Stallman's work was done by
the Open Source movement. The fact is, that latter movement was started only
in 1998, while Stallman began the project to develop the alternative free
operating system GNU in January 1984, almost two years before the Free
Software Foundation was founded.

In Stallman's own words, "These two movements are like two political parties
in our community. Labeling me or the GNU Project with the term 'open source'
is like labeling Jawaharlal Nehru as a member of the BJP."

Stallman elaborates the fundamental difference between the two initiatives:
"Some who favoured this term ('open source') aimed to avoid the confusion of
'free' with 'gratis' -- a valid goal. Others, however, aimed to set aside
the spirit of principle that had motivated the free software movement and
the GNU project, and to appeal instead to executives and business users,
many of whom hold an ideology that places profit above freedom, above
community, above principle. Thus, the rhetoric of 'Open Source' focuses on
the potential to make high quality, powerful software, but shuns the ideas
of freedom, community, and principle." 'Free software' and 'Open Source'
describe the same category of software, more or less, but say different
things about the software, and about values. The GNU Project continues to
use the term 'free software', to express the idea that freedom, not just
technology, is important."

The main argument for the term 'open source software' is that 'free
software' makes some people uneasy, says Stallman. "That's true: talking
about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as
convenience, is asking people to think about things they might rather
ignore. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may reject the idea for
that. It does not follow that society would be better off if we stop talking
about these things."

Which is all that he did during his recent trip to India to launch the Free
Software Foundation of India (FSF India) in Thiruvananthapuram (formerly,
Trivandrum) on 20 August at the Freedom First! conference. FSF India has
been functioning informally as a close-knit group of programmers and free
software users for some time. Though many of the core members of the group
are based in Thiruvananthapuram, the network is fairly widespread, and
encompasses programmers, students, IT professionals and lay persons from all
over the subcontinent. Some of them have been running commercially
successful businesses on free software. For instance, an Indo-UK publishing
venture, Focal Image, has, for the last two years, been doing very good
business out of Thiruvananthapuram, publishing scientific works using
entirely free software solutions, including the LaTeX document preparation
system.

Stallman was made a State government guest for the duration of his five-day
tour of Kerala. The day he arrived in Thiruvananthapuram, he met the
Minister for Industries and Information Technology, P. K. Kunhalikutty.
(Stallman was earlier scheduled to meet the Chief Minister, A. K. Antony,
who, being indisposed, had to cancel his appointment.)

An official press release from the minister's office said that "Mr.
Kunhalikutty informed Mr. Stallman that the government was happy that a
movement that represented the most discerning, yet increasingly mainstream
ethos amongst the software development community is taking roots in Kerala.
The free software movement, in his view, represented the distinctly open
approach that the State wishes to adopt for IT-driven industrial growth and
societal transformation..."

The release added that "the government is also keen to understand how well
free software can be leveraged in the context of e-governance, particularly
at the local self-government level. More specifically, Mr Kunhalikutty
requested the involvement of Mr Stallman and the Free Software Foundation in
developing free courseware (along the lines of free software) for the
education of young students in the colleges and those in need in the IT
industry in the State."

Stallman himself pointed out that free software has a special relevance for
the Indian educational sector. "Schools in India can benefit by
redistributing free software to save on licence fees. But free software
offers a deeper benefit for education: the knowledge in free software is
public knowledge, not secret. The sealed black box of a proprietary software
system is designed to keep people in the dark. With free software, students
can study the software they use, to learn how it works. They can write
improvements to the software, and thus learn the craft of software
development--which usually consists of improving existing programs."

"Computer users in India, as elsewhere, deserve the freedom to share and
change software, the way cooks share and change recipes," Stallman said. "So
I am delighted to inaugurate the Free Software Foundation of India, which
will promote the use and the development of free software in this country.
At first, FSF India will help individuals, communities, schools, governments
and enterprises in India to make use of the free software that the rest of
the world has already developed.

Over time, FSF India will lead Indian programmers to contribute to the human
knowledge that free software represents."

"It is natural for human beings to share ideas," Stallman added, "and by
doing so, we make the whole world richer. When our contributions can be
seen, used, enjoyed, and built on by others around the world, as they can in
the free software community, it gives us a sense of community that is
motivating and liberating."

According to its official spokespersons, FSF India, which is the first
sister organization of FSF in Asia, will strive to ensure that free software
is strengthened in all respects so as to form a genuine, credible and viable
alternative to proprietary software for every kind of application.

To do so, FSF India aims to :

1. promote awareness about free software among the general public and,
specifically, among programmers and students;

2. increase access to free software by users in India;

3. promote the development of local solutions to local problems by
empowering local programmers in the use of free platforms, tools and
technologies;

4. provide or support free software by way of documentation, expert help or
any other means;

5. help organize training for programmers and users of free software
platforms and software;

6. carry out R&D work for free software solutions to suit local
requirements;

7. provide services for the free software programmer community by, for
example, locating and distributing jobs;

8. assist the national and State governments in all aspects relating to free
software, such as evolving and maintaining standards; providing a quality
assurance mechanism for free software; and ensuring the use of free software
in government and quasi-government milieux; and

9. provide services such as adjudication and conflict redressal within the
free software domain.

To be sure, however, FSF India will not find the road ahead free of daunting
obstacles. Already, certain corporate interests have taken objection to
Stallman being feted as an official State guest of the government of Kerala.
And the West Bengal government's recent announcement of a tie-up with
Microsoft for its e-governance infrastructure is just an indication of the
shape of things (read battles) to come.

Stallman, however, remains unfazed. "More important than convenience and
reliability is freedom -- the freedom to co-operate. What I'm concerned
about is not individual people or companies so much as the kind of way of
life that we have. That's why I think it's a distraction to think about
fighting Microsoft," Stallman told a Salon writer.

Stallman believes that Microsoft has another, more specific purpose in
attacking the GNU General Public Licence. "Microsoft is known generally for
imitation rather than innovation," he explains. "When Microsoft does
something new, its purpose is strategic--not to improve computing for its
users, but to close off alternatives for them."

"Microsoft uses an anticompetitive strategy called 'embrace and extend'.
This means they start with the technology others are using, add a minor
wrinkle which is secret so that nobody else can imitate it, then use that
secret wrinkle so that only Microsoft software can communicate with other
Microsoft software. In some cases, this makes it hard for you to use a
non-Microsoft program when others you work with use a Microsoft program. In
other cases, this makes it hard for you to use a non-Microsoft program for
job A if you use a Microsoft program for job B. Either way, 'embrace and
extend' magnifies the effect of Microsoft's market power."

What does society need? Stallman's answer: "It needs information that is
truly available to its citizens---for example, programs that people can
read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate. But what software owners
typically deliver is a black box that we can't study or change."

"Society also needs freedom," he adds. "When a program has an owner, the
users lose freedom to control part of their own lives. And above all society
needs to encourage the spirit of voluntary co-operation in its citizens.
When software owners tell us that helping our neighbours in a natural way is
"piracy", they pollute our society's civic spirit. This is why we say that
free software is a matter of freedom, not price".

Anyone who talks so fervently about freedom, community and civic spirit must
surely be a rabble-rousing, fist-shaking, table-thumping commie -- that's
the general drift of corporate America's assessment of Stallman. "For the
record", he clarifies, "I am not a communist or anything similar. The idea
that people ought to co-operate and help their neighbours is much older than
Marx--in fact, one notable exponent of this view lived 2000 years ago. And
the idea of inalienable rights embodied in the GNU GPL comes from the
founders of the United States. People who disagree with me often find it
convenient to call me a communist, but they do so in order to misrepresent
my views."

Which are precise and unambiguous: "You deserve to be able to co-operate
openly and freely with other people who use software. You deserve to be able
to learn how the software works, and to teach your students with it. You
deserve to be able to hire your favorite programmer to fix it when it
breaks. You deserve free software. "

Even Stallman's most bitter critics readily acknowledge the debt that all of
them owe him one way or another. Most of them say, "If Richard did not
exist, it would have been necessary to invent him."

The same sentiment must have been in the mind of journalist and noted
GNU/Linux watcher Glyn Moody when he wrote about "...dedicated hackers as
Richard Stallman and the FSF who do not code to live, but live to code.
This, ultimately, is the reason free software does not depend on open source
companies for its own survival: It exists beyond the market."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

References:

* Moody, Glyn. Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. Allen Lane/The
Penguin Press. London. 2001.
* Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Penguin Books.
Harmondsworth. 2001.
* DiBona, Chris, Sam Ockman and Mark Stone (ed.). OpenSources: Voices from the
Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly & Associates. California. 1999.
* http://www.gnu.org
* http: //www.stallman.org
* http: //www.fsf.org.in