Free Software Alternative, The

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Winter 2006 by Gualtieri, Devlin M

My employer supplies me with an excellent office computer. It has a Microsoft Windows operating system, and the Microsoft Office suite with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and mail programs. I have added various scientific programs for statistics and graphing and a few programming languages for data analysis. If I were to duplicate this computing environment at home, it would cost me a small fortune. Instead, I have the equivalent functionality at no cost beyond the cost of the computer itself. My home computer uses the free Linux operating system and free application programs.

Computer hardware has become very inexpensive. It is possible to buy an excellent desktop computer system for less than $500. At the same time, software has become the major cost of computer ownership. Microsoft produces what is arguably the most successful computer software in the world. Microsoft was thirty years old on September 23, 2005, and such longevity is an indicator of the importance of its products. The Windows operating system is bundled with most personal computers sold, and Windows, along with the Microsoft Office suite of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and e-mail programs, is the standard in the corporate world. A typical corporate desktop computer would contain a combination of Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional and Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, for a total software list price of more than $800. It is rare, however, for large companies to pay this high list price because discount licenses are offered for large quantity purchases. Home users usually buy computers that have a minimal Windows operating system already installed, but if they want the typical suite of office programs, they need to purchase the Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003 (retail $399).

Because Windows is already present on nearly every personal computer purchased, most computer users do not realize that there are alternatives to Windows. The UNIX operating system existed long before Windows, and variations of UNIX-compatible operating systems are available for personal computers at no charge. UNIX was developed by programmers at Bell Telephone Laboratory for other programmers, and for a time it was very important intellectual property of AT&T. UNIX was not free. There were posters in the hallways at Bell Telephone Laboratory in the late 1970s that stated UNIX is a Five Letter Word, alluding to the trademark symbol that should follow UNIX. So familiar was UNIX to early programmers that several efforts were made to create a UNIX-compatible operating system for personal computers and to freely distribute these systems to programmers for further development. The fruits of these collective endeavors were intended to benefit everyone.

An important figure in the freesoftware movement is Richard M. Stallman. Stallman is so well known that programmers typically refer to him just by his initials, RMS. Stallman became a programmer at MIT after receiving a BA in physics from Harvard University in 1971. In the early days of computing, before the establishment of Computer Science as a separate discipline, quite a number of programmers came from math or science backgrounds. Stallman objected to the commercialization of computer software and believed that computer software should be free. As a consequence, he established the Free Software Foundation in 1985. His goal was the development of a free computer-operating system that would be compatible with UNIX, the preeminent operating system of the day. In the typical playful style of computer programmers, he named this operating system GNU, an acronym for GNU is Not UNIX. The GNU project was ambitious, so it was released a piece at a time. Fortunately, one of the first pieces was GCC, the GNU compiler for the popular C programming language. This compiler enabled Linux, another important development in the free software movement. Stallman was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, often called a "genius grant," in 1990. Stallman's Free Software Foundation now includes several nonprogrammers on its board of directors, including Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University, an indication that free software is starting to involve more than just programming code.

Stallman was not alone in his attempt to create a UNIX-compatible operating system. In 1985, Andrew Tannenbaum, a professor at Vrije University in Amsterdam, wrote Minix, a UNIX-compatible operating system for personal computers. Minix caught the attention of a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, who wanted to modify and extend Minix to make it more useful. However, Minix was not free. A small fee was required of each Minix user, so Torvalds decided to develop a UNIX-compatible operating system from scratch. He wrote the essential core of the system, called a kernel, and released the code under Stallman's General Public License for free software. This code was published on the Internet in 1991 for improvement and extension by other programmers. This operating system soon became known as Linux, in honor of Torvalds, and its logo is Torvalds' stuffed penguin mascot named Tux. In 1996, Torvalds received his master's degree from the University of Helsinki for the thesis "Linux: A Portable Operating System."