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Revolution OS

Von Hash · Youtube · 4 HN points · 6 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention Von Hash's video "Revolution OS".
Youtube Summary
The film begins with glimpses of Raymond, a Linux IPO, Torvalds, the idea of Open Source, Perens, Stallman, then sets the historical stage in the early days of hackers and computer hobbyists when code was shared freely. It discusses how change came in 1978 as Bill Gates, in his Open Letter to Hobbyists, pointedly prodded hobbyists to pay up. Stallman relates his struggles with proprietary software vendors at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, leading to his departure to focus on the development of free software, and the GNU project.
Torvalds describes the development of the Linux kernel, the GNU/Linux naming controversy, Linux's further evolution, and its commercialization.
Raymond and Stallman clarify the philosophy of free software versus communism and capitalism, as well as the development stages of Linux.
Michael Tiemann discusses meeting Stallman in 1987, getting an early version of Stallman's GCC, and founding Cygnus Solutions.
Larry Augustin describes combining GNU software with a normal PC to create a Unix-like workstation at one third the price and twice the power of a Sun workstation. He relates his early dealings with venture capitalists, the eventual capitalization and commodification of Linux for his own company, VA Linux, and its IPO.
Brian Behlendorf, one of the original developers of the Apache HTTP Server, explains that he started to exchange patches for the NCSA web server daemon with other developers, which led to the release of "a patchy" webserver, dubbed Apache.
Frank Hecker of Netscape discusses the events leading up to Netscape's executives releasing the source code for Netscape's browser, one of the signal events which made open source a force to be reckoned with by business executives, the mainstream media, and the public at large.[1] This point was validated further after the film's release as the Netscape source code eventually became the Firefox web browser, reclaiming a large percentage of market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
The film also documents the scope of the first full-scale LinuxWorld Summit conference, with appearances by Linus Torvalds and Larry Augustin on the keynote stage.
Much of the footage for the film was shot in Silicon Valley.

INTERVIEW SUBJECT'S BIOS:

LINUS TORVALDS

In 1991 Torvalds created the Linux kernel (the unifying program for a Unix-like operating system) at age twenty-one while enrolled at the University of Helsinki in his native Finland.

RICHARD STALLMAN

Stallman founded the GNU Project in 1984 in an attempt to create his own Unix-like operating system that was freely shareable. He also started the Free Software movement to espouse his political agenda of freely-shared intellectual property. Stallman's philosophical and technical work became the foundation for Linux and the Open Source movement.

BRUCE PERENS

Perens authored the Open Source definition and currently works as an Open Source evangelist for Hewlett-Packard.

ERIC RAYMOND

Raymond authored the paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which brought outside attention and understanding to the sociological underpinnings of the Open Source movement.

BRIAN BEHLENDORF

Behlendorf is one of the original co-developers of the Apache Web Server. Apache is the most commonly used web server in the world with almost 60% of the market. Apache was the first "killer app" for Linux.

MICHAEL TIEMANN

In 1989 Tiemann co-founded the first company based upon the GNU Project technology and principles of the Free Software movement. Tiemann is currently the CTO of Redhat Software, the most prominent Linux company.

LARRY AUGUSTIN

Augustin co-founded VA Linux Systems, one of the first companies based upon the Linux operating system. VA Linux Systems was a key early supporter of Linux and the Open Source movement. VA Linux System also set the record for the highest opening price for and IPO. On December 9, 1999, its first trade was at $299 per share. Currently, the stock trades around $5 per share.

FRANK HECKER

Hecker is a former Netscape systems engineer that authored a key internal white paper that advocated Netscape releasing its source code to the public.

ROB MALDA

Malda (a.k.a. CmdrTaco) is the editor of the famous hacker website Slashdot.

MARC MERLIN

Merlin is the president of Silicon Valley Linux Users Group.
HN Theater Rankings

Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
Feb 18, 2019 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by tosh
Oct 24, 2017 · 2 points, 0 comments · submitted by tosh
Sep 17, 2017 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by tosh
So good to see RMS being recognized for his work. A lot of my interest in computers is due to being inspired by RMS. stallman.org is a good resource for anyone wanting to learn more. Stallman's commentary on politics is also second to none.

_Revolution OS_ is a really good documentary that goes over the genesis of FSF and how Stallman played an in important role: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c

TL;DR Microsoft tried to leverage its desktop monopoly to become a browser monopoly to a server monopoly and thus own and tax and sanitize the early web, we wuz saved by Firefox.

The web freedoms we are losing today were hard won.

Back when browser choice was NCSA Mosaic or Netscape , Microsoft was ignoring the web as a fad - Gates thought little of it then - sounds crazy now but in the early 90's, before access was readily available outside Universities, BBS was dominant for the public.

The web was small then: registering a domain was altering a text file (no cost); SPAM didn't exist, every email was answered; all very university nice nice; ecommerce wasn't a thing.

Microsoft 'awoke' to the webs potential and gave away Internet Explorer for free ( Netscape's browser cost money to buy unless you used the latest beta ) - this is what the antitrust case of win95 was about - Microsoft leveraging it's monopoly ( no Linux back then ) to aquire browser share.

Why was this seen as a problem ?

Because of Microsoft's strategy of embrace , extend , extinguish.

It was feared Microsoft browsers would only talk 'properly' to Microsoft servers ( the server market was the 'big' money ) - thus Microsoft would dictate the web rather than Berners-Lee's democratic W3C.

Everone else would be shut out of spec by dint of Microsoft end user browser monopoly leveraged from it's Desktop monopoly.

This would certainly have slowed adoption as every site and every server would have to pay Microsoft's large costs - 1 server per site then so the Microsoft tax was then ~$2000, recurring, per site.

Then only way to compete with the behometh of Microsoft's developers & emerging browser monopoly was the Free (GPL) development model - Netscape gave away their whole browser business to the public domain, inspired by Eric Raymond's analysis of the power of the public domain to attract developers - "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

Raymond argued that ensuring developer contributions couldn't be locked away by proprietry companies would attract developers. This had happened before with UNIX, necessitating GNU & LINUX.

The GPL, the Free software license of Richard Stallman's GNU toolchain, adopted by Torvalds for LINUX, was the model for a public domain that avoided the 'tragedy of the commons'.

The GPL ensured the 4 freedoms remained intact on downstream contributions.

Free GNU software meant basically: if you improve public code, you must give the source code of improvements back to the public domain.

Free Firefox ( in freedom & price ) coupled with the LINUX kernel (or BSD) and the GNU toolchain provided a Free server OS. With A Patchy Server ( renamed Apache ) this provided a way for the web to grow unencumbered.

They had to dilute Free by calling it Open Source as some business types feared Free (as in beer) & Freedom - but it was Stallman's GPL in all but name.

Imagine a building filled with floors of rackservers , if every server, every OS was forced to pay Microsoft rates - and perhaps also be content Microsoft didn't disapprove of.

Microsoft licenses in a Monopoly market - the web would have been strangled at birth.

Only for the wealthy and approvable - basically Encarterised.

Lillywhite rather than everything and everyone.

So the GNU toolchain and license, and LINUX kernel and (GPLed) Apache server meant that building of servers could be had for the price of traing staff - zero cost of entry, everyone gets to play.

A server farm could be set up by a devotee in a cupboard for zero cost rather than ~$2000 per site, ~yearly to Microsoft.

This is why Stallman is the granfather of all our freedoms.

He saw UNIX stolen and LISP crushed by and invented GNU Free toolchain early enough (80's) to have it useable to write the LINUX kernel and be a complete Operating System by the 90's.

The truth of the crappiness of the Microsoft web vision became the nightmare of late 90's early 00's web devs having to write for IE6 bizzaro HTML.

Yes the W3C became stagnant later and Mozilla support of legacy httprequest allowed modern web to AJAX, etc, HTML5 blah, etc, continual revolution.

Early public web culture was very BBS anarcho, democractic rules not central power - the public had after all built a functional web and email system without oversight or control - distrubuted over phone lines in the 1980's (q.v. FIDONet & BBS) before the gov & universities 'shared' TCP/IP. All early non-uni ISP's were BBS's.

Arguably the tie-down of broadband and 'mistrust thy neighbours surfing' crushed sharing access & many early freedoms & the anonimity of temporary copper dialup net & webbery ( crypto was an illegal munition then ).

If the web had failed, then we would be living in an info desert like the 1980s, where most people relied on newspapers & official propaganda was absolute.

Without the web Rupert Murdoch would now be absolute kingmaker and dissent to the big lies of authority would be absent without the blogosphere.

The freedoms we are losing today were hard won.

[ * ] sources, my greybeard.

[ ] references :

Jason's Scott's BBS documentary ep4 FIDONet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cm6EFYktRQ

"Revolution OS" - rise of Open Source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c

Yes Bill Gates is super nice now but he was ruthless to get there.

rdtsc
Good summary. Thanks.

Yeah, I often see on HN (what are presume are younger developers) who never lived in a world were OSes, languages, frameworks, toolkits were not free. Everything cost a pretty penny. Open source software en-large would have been such an alien concept telling people it was going to be the future, they'd think it was crazy talk. Now it is taken for granted ... too much for granted perhaps. And they love to hate GPL and make fun of Stallman and how if someone releases GPLed software they are being anachronistic and hostile and it is hurting their Uber for Dogs startup and so on.

cyphar
> Good summary. Thanks.

> Yeah, I often see on HN (what are presume are younger developers) who never lived in a world were OSes, languages, frameworks, toolkits were not free. Everything cost a pretty penny. Open source software en-large would have been such an alien concept telling people it was going to be the future, they'd think it was crazy talk. Now it is taken for granted ... too much for granted perhaps. And they love to hate GPL and make fun of Stallman and how if someone releases GPLed software they are being anachronistic and hostile and it is hurting their Uber for Dogs startup and so on.

Not all young developers are like that. I definitely recognise how lucky we are to live in a world where software freedom exists. And considering the fact that Torvalds doesn't believe in software freedom, it's astonishing that we even have a GNU/Linux system (if Linux had been BSD licensed I doubt it would be as prevalent). The GPL was definitely one of the most brilliant legal hacks in software history.

justinlardinois
> Torvalds doesn't believe in software freedom

Source for that? I thought I read a quote from him saying that GPL licensing the Linux kernel was the best decision he ever made.

cyphar
> > Torvalds doesn't believe in software freedom

> Source for that? I thought I read a quote from him saying that GPL licensing the Linux kernel was the best decision he ever made.

If you ever hear his explanation of why he used the GPL (which boils down to "I give you code, you give me code back, we're even"[1]) skips over the software freedom aspect. Not to mention that he's one of the advocates of the open source movement which doesn't have any views on software freedom.

I can't give you an explicit quote where he said "I don't care about software freedom", but it becomes quite clear if you look at his actions (particularly toward the GPLv3, where he clearly differentiates his views from the FSF's views[1] -- and he carefully avoids using the term "freedom").

There is a quote where he claims that vendor lock-in isn't morally bad[2], which is the best I could find after 10 minutes of searching:

> The GPLv3 doesn't match what I think is morally where I want to be. I think it is ok to control peoples hardware.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU

[2]: http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=118236278730043&w=4

deepnet
Voluntary control & choice of control vendors, maybe.

But enforced monopolistic control - c'mon there is no freedom there.

Not to mention legally enforced monopolies destroy the market for everyone, including themselves.

Pretty much the 1st observation Adam Smith makes.

Without freedom and thus competition there is no progress, everything stagnates.

Music & film industry is a case in point, every change they lobby against turns out to be insanely profitable when they are forced into it. ( 78's, radio, videos, mp3 , streaming - all were going to 'kill' the industry till they didn't )

Fat cats won't change or innovate without competition.

Control abates all innovation.

Enforced control of your hardware is slavery.

Eric Raymond's words helped change the world (Cathedral essay). He inspires me every time I read his work, sometimes I disagree, often agree, usually both but he never fails to get me thinking in new ways.

IMHO Eric is one of the elders and I pay tithe to this man who I respect and learn from. I value his forthrightness, especially in these times of chilling effects - he head is firmly above the parapet and of course he takes flak.

Eric's list of Open Source & Free Software contributions http://www.catb.org/esr/software.html

For me personally, it is an honour and a priviledge to be on the same planet at the same time as Eric S Raymond - super stoked to fund his work - his work merits it.

Eric on the Cathedral & Bazaar from the browser wars (when M$ nearly pwnd the net) https://youtu.be/jw8K460vx1c?t=38m30s

Aug 18, 2015 · larrydag on How I came to find Linux
My encounter with Linux was somewhat similar but mostly from having enough with windoze. I had called a PC repair guru for the third time because of virus's on my windoze PC in 2007. He told me about a Linux but I was skeptical thinking it was more for the uber elite hackers. I tried out the Knoppix CD and then installed SuSE. I was hooked immediately. Much like the article writer's hook with being my own "superuser".

For those that haven't seen Revolution OS I would highly recommend it for much of the Linux backstory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c

gegtik
amazing that in 2015 people are still saying stuff like "windoze", "micro$haft", etc.
roghummal
>amazing

It really isn't.

WalterGR
Yup. Slashdot is still one of the ~1,500 most popular sites on the web.
yellowapple
Ain't that what they're supposed to be called? :)
larrydag
I'll give you that. I did it without thinking. Yet my experience with windows has been really awful. I've had various issues including viruses, firewalls, bloatware, support deprecation to name a few. I guess I'm really happy with the Linux distributions I use.

That said Microsoft is still an innovative company. They still create good applications and have robust data software.

Mar 20, 2015 · stolio on Ten Years of Kubuntu
> I've personally tried a few distros of Linux, originally developed by Linus Torvalds.

Is there some Intro To Linux we can point just people to in order to avoid things like this? The "GNU slash Linux" conversation is wearing pretty thin but it should be common knowledge at this point that the GNU project did 10 ten years of work so Linus could add the kernel and have it be the first completed system.

Should we point to Revolution OS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c)?

Should we point to GNU's page about the issue (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html)?

Without getting into any finger-pointing, it's just history and we should all know it.

amyjess
And GNU zealots persistently deny that Linux became successful because of XFree86 and Apache, neither of which GNU had anything to do with.
stolio
Grow up. There's a world of difference between being a zealot and pointing out that Torvalds didn't clone the Unix system in a year. He built the kernel, he did it well and he deserves credit for it. For the same reasons he deserves credit the GNU project deserves credit for their contributions.

edit: Really. This is a thread celebrating 10 years of Kubuntu. Kubuntu's downstream from Debian, probably 1/2 - 3/4 of their packages are untouched from their state in the Debian repositories. Debian was sponsored by the FSF (Richard Stallman's foundation) back in the early 90's. Good for Kubuntu, I wish them the best. I also think it's important to recognize the others who have made projects like this possible. It takes nothing away from Kubuntu.

aruggirello
IMHO your comment was informative and did not deserve downvotes.

ElectricFeel's comment may well signal a shift in Linux desktop adoption, in that the less-technical public enters the game. IMHO this is an Ubuntu success story. He's an Ubuntu user that probably does not even know what Debian is, and though this isn't good in itself, it might be good for GNU/Linux adoption. We all called for the "year of the Linux desktop" but due to various reasons, there aren't enough users, so it didn't materialise yet. But there is hope. And KDE is going the right way. I love it. IMHO Kubuntu 15.04 will rock!

All the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt) Gates' ilk produced to scare people from Freedom will bring tears to future generations' eyes. How could someone so ruthlessly oppose voluntary, community-led development (which by now we can safely say won)? Answer: Look at his company's financial investors.

Relevant Revolution OS snippet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c&t=6m40s

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