All aboard the groovy trainS am Williams and his publisher, O’Reilly, have taken a brave step into the unknown with Free As In Freedom, a biography of Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement. Not only are they giving the text away free, as in “without charge’, they will let you rewrite and re-use the text in your own projects. In other words, they have released FAIF under much the same terms as free software. Stallman is an ber hacker, and undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest programmers. In 1984, he set out to write, single-handed if necessary, GNU (Gnu’s Not Unix), a free clone of the Unix operating system, or die in the attempt. The joke was that it would require several hundred years of work.
Even coding at his prodigious speed, he would die of old age first. Since there were no free tools to write with, he had to develop those first, including the GNU C compiler. Since there was no way to support the effort, he created the Free Software Foundation. Since there was no suitable copyright licence, he developed the GPL (General Public Licence), which is now in widespread use. One way or another, the FSF wrote or assembled the largest part of what is now usually called Linux, and Linus Torvalds wrote its kernel with Stallman’s tools and released it under Stallman’s licence.
Williams failed to write his biography using Emacs, Stallman’s word processor, and did not put drafts on the net for comment and review. But he has released it under the GNU Free Documentation Licence, the equivalent of the GPL, originally intended for manuals. Of course, with books, the “source code’ has never been hidden. Still, under traditional copyright rules, you would not be able to take large chunks of the Guardian, or the Harry Potter books, change the bits you didn’t like, and republish them for profit. Copyright lawyers would be on your back in seconds. So with FAIF, you can buy the book or download the “open text’ from two sources: O’Reilly’s website, and Williams’ Faifzilla website, where he describes himself as “the initial author’ of the work.
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There may be others later. This does not mean FAIF is copyright free. It is protected by the same copyright laws as everyone else’s work, but neatly twisted into what is often called “copyleft’, or jokingly described as “all rights reversed’. You can use the text in ways that commercial publishers almost never allow, but only if you release your version on the same terms.
Stallman’s aims are to encourage sharing, and to ensure that those who take from the community, give back to the community. Stallman’s licence enables users to do legally what they usually do criminally, both at home and via remote file-sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella and KaZaA. Publishing the book in some sort of free (as in freedom) form was the price of Stallman’s cooperation, but the intended publisher would not go along with that. O’Reilly was willing to take the gamble. The company’s main business includes selling books about free software and the open source movement, and it had already published manuals under the GFDL. Andy Oram, from O’Reilly, is very keen on the idea, though “there are differing views within the company’, he says.
“We ” re still not sure what it might do to sales. Some people are convinced certain books are selling less well because we have published them in this form.’ Oram admits to being disappointed with the response. With one book, he says, “we thought the audience would jump in, and we wondered if we would be able to handle the flood of changes’ as Linux users debugged and enhanced the text. “That hasn’t happened. No one has submitted any, up to now.’ It remains to be seen whether the GFDL will arouse the kind of interest and concern in the publishing business that the GPL has created in the software business, or that sampling and file-sharing have had on the music business. “A few people are ideologically committed, but I don’t think most users really care,’ says Oram.
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“It is left to a few of us to argue what the rights should be…’ Free As In Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software, by Sam Williams, is published by O’Reilly priced? 15. 95. 33 e.
