The Occupy protests are spreading.  This is in spite of quite a bit of silence in much of the mainstream media, who only covered them when ultimately forced to.  I should except Russia Today and Al Jazeera from the above statement, their coverage has been very good.  I’ll chat about my views on the protest movement another time, but something else has caught my attention.

The protest camp in New York made it into the IT media earlier this week.  This was in the form of an article covering their IT infrastructure, which I must give praise where it’s due, seems very nicely put together given the circumstances.  The sentence that caught me is in the above article, it’s a quote from a protester referring to the disappearance of a laptop during a police raid,  and I’ll quote it below.

“We’d love to get an Apple, because a lot of the software we’re used to is on the Mac,” one said. “Linux machines are always nice, given Linux is having the same revolutionary effect on the industry as we are on society, but even Windows machines would be a help.”

The above is quite accurate, GNU/Linux is having a revolutionary effect.  But the thought struck me a little later that this isn’t the entire story, is it?  GNU/Linux is a great system, a colleague of mine was at a presentation given by a Microsoft employee where the MS guy went through the Windows Server 2008 kernel and the Linux kernel.  After 1 hour 45 minutes, the conclusion was that they’re much of a muchness, he had to admit that the Linux kernel is every bit as good as the Microsoft offering.  Of course, with tools like openQA from the openSuSE team, the future is looking even brighter.

So the software is great, we know that, but revolutionary?  I submit that it isn’t by itself revolutionary.  You can get the code to BSD Unix, but that doesn’t really seem revolutionary in the way that is implied above, so what do I mean?  Enter stage left, the GNU General Public License, or GPL for short.

My understanding of things is this.  The BSD code can be referred to as “Open Source”, which means you get access to the source code and can play with it as you see fit to do so. However, you’re not required to give your changes back.  This means that BSD code has found it’s way into both Windows and the MacOS, but they are not required to return any improvements they made on other people’s hard work to the community.

The Linux kernel is under the GPL, which comes with a string attached.  If you modify the program and distribute it, then you have to make the modified source available so that others in the community can do the same.  For this reason, GPL’ed code is known as “Free Software“, it is not “Open Source”.  For a background to how the GPL came to be invented, I recommend “Free As In Freedom” a biography of the founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard M Stallman.

I’ve come to believe that the General Public license, and the associated “Four Freedoms” (see the “Free Software” link above), have been the thing that allowed the revolution to happen.  Think about it, a license that says high quality software and the improvements to said software are all available freely to everyone.  Individuals, communities and corporations alike.  We can study it, improve it, redistribute it, but not lock it away.

Now that’s revolutionary!