Free Software: Nothing is more appropriate for India

India has made substantial progress in the use of computers: in businesses, in education and in governance. While Free Software has been present (and visible) in this growth, India has not yet woken up to the full importance of Free Software, says Satish Babu.

THE POST-INDUSTRIAL, "New Economy" has been characterised by an epochal transformation from a labour-based, mass production system to a new system where the imperatives of value creation, productivity and growth are achieved through creation, distribution and application of knowledge.

Manipulation of knowledge in this way is the domain of what has come to be known as information-communication technologies (ICT). The burgeoning global penetration of ICT, and ICT-centric re- engineering by a growing number of enterprises, indicate the increasing significance of both knowledge, and its articulated form, information. A vital component of ICT is the software that imparts specific intelligence to computers and computer networks, enabling them to carry out specific tasks.

Software is an economic good that has very few parallels in human history. As a "pure information" good, it is intangible. With near-zero marginal cost of reproduction, it responds differently to classical demand-supply behaviour. It is not exhausted by consumption. Transporting software is near-instantaneous and, in most cases, free.

These somewhat peculiar features of software are reflected in the treatment of software as an economic good. In the early days of computing, software was distributed along with the computer, almost always as source code (the input to a compiler or assembler, written in a source language, and then compiled into a machine-readable binary file of 1s and 0s). This source code would be compiled to generate the executable code that would then be installed by the operator for use. The availability of the source code ensured that the operators of the computer could handle bugs in the program (or "features" that they wanted to change). Even commercial, third-party software, was distributed in the source form.

A major change to this system came in 1979, when AT&T decided to commercialize its flagship operating system, Unix. Unix, originally created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at AT&T's Bell Labs in 1969, had been evolved in a collaborative way by a number of programmers, researchers and students over a decade. During this period, Unix was available in its source form, enabling these contributors to study the system, modify it where appropriate, and develop new utilities for it.

Unix Operating System

Various factors, including the need to raise revenue for itself, prompted AT&T to commercialise Unix. This decision raised protests from several quarters - especially from the many who had voluntarily contributed to the development of Unix. One significant response came from the University of California at Berkeley, which decided to develop its own, "free" variant of Unix, called the Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD). It is interesting to note that the U.S. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)-sponsored project that resulted in the development of the Internet was carried out on BSD.

Another response came from Richard M. Stallman, arch hacker and legendary programmer who, after quitting his job at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, set up the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in Boston, Massachusetts, in October 1985. Stallman's primary objective then was to deliver a free, Unix-like operating system, called GNU (a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix").

Stallman, or RMS as he is better known, went ahead with the GNU project, developing, along the way, such classics as gcc (the GNU C compiler), GNU-Emacs (an editor), and gdb (a debugger) - virtually a whole operating system, except for one crucial part - the "kernel", the nucleus of an operating system (OS), which provides basic services to other parts of the OS, assigns processing time and priority to various programs, and manages address spaces in memory and storage. GNU's own kernel, called Hurd, had long been in the development stage, but GNU itself could not be launched as a full-fledged OS without the kernel. Meanwhile, all the other tools and utilities developed by the GNU project began to be widely used by programmers on different platforms.

Free Software

Stallman fiercely advocated the concept of "Free Software" against the "proprietary" model of software, where, despite paying a price for the software all that the user gets is, in effect, a licence to run the software and little else. In contrast, the principle of Free Software enshrined four fundamental freedoms:

(a). The freedom to use (run) the software.

(b). The freedom to study how the software worked and adapt it to the specific needs of the user (this implicitly requires the source code to be distributed).

(c). The freedom to redistribute copies of the software.

(d). The freedom to improve programs and release the modified versions of the software to the public.

These four freedoms, together with measures for their protection, are embodied in the GNU Public Licence (GPL). The single biggest contribution of GPL has been the protection against appropriation of Free Software by commercial and proprietary interests. It is noteworthy that GPL has stood the test of time, while other public-domain licensing policies have been misused. Most recently, for instance, a well-known company was accused of taking up Kerberos, a product from MIT released under the BSD licence, and making it a part of its proprietary code; this wouldn't have happened if the product had been released under GPL.

It is also important to realise that thousands of companies, including IBM and Intel, have released products under the GPL. Even the Open Source movement - another group of developers who believe in the basic concepts of Free Software, but are more "pragmatic" in their views - use the GPL for protection of their software. The Open Source adherents have pointed out that Stallman's over-rigid emphasis on "Freedom" above everything else has made it difficult to promote the Free Software philosophy. Despite their differences, the two groups have been able to work together, whenever the situation demanded it.

Free Software, GNU and the GPL would have remained known only to a handful of hard-core programmers had it not been for an important development - that of the Linux Kernel.

Entry of Linux

It was in the early 1990s that a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds (in whose honour the kernel would later be christened "Linux"), began work on a Unix-like kernel as a part of his student project. Torvalds developed his kernel and released the first version 0.01 on 17 September 1991. A series of updates and revision cycles by Torvalds and fellow coders, all co-ordinated over the Internet, led to the historic date-stamp of 22:38 on March 13, 1994, a Sunday. That day, according to journalist and long-time Linux-watcher Glyn Moody, " one megabyte of compressed code was officially consigned to the world as Linux 1.0."

Soon enough, many OS enthusiasts downloaded it and started tinkering around. Some of them began developing utilities for the fledgling kernel, especially device drivers, that enabled it to work with different peripherals and devices. While the Linux kernel was fully functional, it was difficult to use in a production system as it lacked resources such as editors, compilers and other utilities.

As the popularity of Linux spread, people began to put together complete implementations of the Linux kernel with a collection of GNU utilities and other public-domain utilities (for example, the X11 graphical user interface), which could be packaged on a CD or Website and distributed for installation. These were called "distributions". There are several of these available right now, such as Red Hat, Debian or SuSe. As these distributions contained more GNU code than the "Linux" kernel code, several people--notably Stallman and the FSF fans--advocated the use of the term "GNU/Linux" to more accurately refer to the complete OS.

By the late 1990s, GNU/Linux began to be used widely, especially in back-end applications such as network, Web or mail servers. It was also clear that it was not merely the zero cost that endeared this particular OS to network administrators - GNU/Linux was reputed to be much more stable than other OSs. This was of great importance to remote-managed network servers.

Through the end of 1990s and the early part of this decade, GNU/Linux consolidated its position as a robust operating system, complete with an entire set of tools, utilities and applications, almost all of which were distributed with source code, and free of cost. Free Software had won its first major battle against overwhelming odds.

Perceptions

During its initial days, a naive prejudice against Free Software was common; many assumed that Free Software would be incomplete, unsupported, whimsical and ineffective. Today, through practical experience, users are learning that this is not true; in fact, Free Software is gaining a reputation for being powerful and reliable. Free Software is used extensively today, and by all types of consumers, ranging from business and research institutions to governments.

For example:

* 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 nearly 60 per cent of the global market share for Web servers.

* BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon), an Open Source program, runs over 80 per cent 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, Python, all public-domain languages, constitute the "glue" that holds together thousands of Websites

* StarOffice, a complete office applications suite programmed in Java, has been released under the GNU GPL by Sun Microsystems.

* Governments in several parts of the world, notably in Germany, Argentina and Brazil, consider Free Software to be more secure for government applications than proprietary applications.

* The Schools Projects of Mexico saved US$ 120 million last year by using GNU/Linux instead of proprietary software.

* China has adopted its own distribution of GNU/Linux as its "Official Operating System", reportedly on security grounds, whereas countries such as South Africa are considering it on price grounds.

Free Software and India

India has made substantial progress in the use of computers: in businesses, in education and in governance. While Free Software has been present (and visible) in this growth, India has not yet woken up to the full importance of Free Software.

It makes much better sense for India to go the Free Software way, developing its own solutions, than to blindly opt for proprietary software. In particular,

* Free Software lends itself to be adapted to diverse languages and applications by Indian programmers, working for local organisations and the government.

* Free Software is extremely cost-effective for low-resource applications (schools and colleges, local self-government institutions and small businesses).

* Free Software can cause a positive multiplier effect in the sense of encouraging the programmer community to explore and experiment with developing applications. As the barriers to entry in the case of proprietary software (high cost, poor availability, lack of online documentation, and lack of source code) do not apply to Free Software, freedom of experimentation is very high.

* Free Software can be an alternative to proprietary software for large-scale applications (such as those in e-governance). These projects are commissioned with taxpayer's money, and it is extremely important to realise that the costs of technology choice are not merely short-term. If a technology choice leads to vendor lock-in, the ramifications are obviously strategic. In such situations, Free Software can ensure that the interests of the communities concerned - not those of the companies promoting proprietary software, or those of the decision-makers - are preserved.

* Finally, the ethos of Free Software fits in well with Indian aspirations - of independence, and self-reliance.

It is clearly time for India to join the Free Software movement. Urged by this firm belief and commitment, a group of Free Software practitioners and enthusiasts in India have been successful in persuading Richard Stallman to establish an Indian Chapter of FSF. The Free Software Foundation of India (FSF-I) will be inaugurated by Stallman on July 20 in Trivandrum at the Freedom First! conference. (More details can be had at http://www.fsf.org.in or http://www.gnu/org.in).

The Free Software and GNU/Linux communities in India eagerly await the event , as it will officially give birth to an apex organisation that can effectively coordinate efforts to promote, standardise and, in other ways, popularise Free Software.

(The author is Chief Software Evangelist with an Internet application company).

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