- by Paul Murphy -
Jefferson's dictum that "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" has been offered as both rationale and mantra for probably hundreds of distinct political and economic movements including the Berkeley Free Speech Movement led by Mario Savio in the early to mid sixties. I haven't seen it quoted with respect to Linux, open source, and the Free Software Foundation, but it may be time to remember Jefferson's advice with respect to Stallman's "information wants to be free."
Stallman, of course, wasn't talking about free as in beer, but free as in speech. As he explains it:
"I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By `free' I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses".(Quoted in : Dorothy E. Denning "Concerning Hackers Who Break into Computer Systems" (1990))
There are at least two levels to this. On the surface "free" refers to dollar cost, as in "there's no free lunch." Dig a bit deeper, however, and the diminution of freedom in the absence of vigilance can be seen to apply to our freedom to think, and to express those thoughts, without peer censorship.
In last week's column, for example, I referred to Mr. Torvald's having started Linux by hacking on Minix. I don't think anyone actually denies this, but it unleashed a storm of protest from people who understood me to say that Linux is based on Minix; it is not, but the process through which it came about started with Minix and the very earliest Linux releases had Minix components.
What would have freaked out Savio about the responses, however, wasn't the confusion, but the fact that several people, two of them highly credible in other circumstances, cited an SCOsource filing saying much the same thing as sufficient proof of my error.
A bunch of lawyers nominally working for SCOsource say it in a legal filing, and not only does that make it wrong but justifies people threatening me for co-operating with the common enemy by saying it? That's McCarthyist nonsense - but dramatically illustrates the extent to which right thinking on the IBM v. SCOsource issue has become subject to community enforcement.
The interpretation of "free" at the level of dollar cost is easier to see and interpret, but how does anyone rationalise having to pay $995 to order Linux with an IBM PowerRISC 720 9174-720D? if everyone knows it's free?
In theory, of course, the answer is that you're not licensing Linux; in fact you're not even getting an IBM operating system, you're getting a "1 year Standard Subscription and Support license", from Red Hat - which you're then entitled to install on your machine.
It's a nice argument, but the fact that this thing quacks like a license, installs like license, and is called a license suggests that it probably is one. More importantly, I think the legal fiction about the right to download and compile your own wears a little thin against the impracticality of doing it if this is your first 720 --and if you don't agree that there's a legitimate concern here, check out the helpful footnote on IBM's Linux pricing page for the 720:
The Red Hat license agreement defines the RHEL AS 3 charge unit as per install, meaning that a license is required for each server or LPAR on which RHEL AS 3 is installed.
So does this mean you can install one copy, use it to download, modify, and compile a few others, and then install those on partitions without paying extra? I imagine so, but the nice lady from IBM didn't call me back on this, or any other questions, about the 720.
That doesn't mean that what they're doing isn't completely legal within the terms of the licenses they work under; you can bet it is, but I'm somewhat simple minded -and can't stop the oxymoronic feeling that $995 per Linux instance per year should buy a lot of free beer.
You can't get an IBM operating system for the 720 but you can get AIX for the closely related P-series 9117-570D. It'll cost you $3,900, formally broken out, but not actually separable, as $2,450 for AIX and $1,450 for one year of support. Notice two things about this: first, that this break-out is percentage, not cost, based with the eight processor (16 core) AIX licenses listed at $19,600 with the "must order" support charge at the same 37.1% of the total or another $11,600. That's not industry standard practice; buy Sun's comparable 490 or 890 servers, for example, and you get Solaris at no nominal along with the option of buying, or not buying, various levels of support.
My guess, therefore, is that this pricing structure for AIX is intended mainly to provide legal cover on Linux pricing.
Secondly you need to remember, when looking at this, that the whole SCOsource Vs. IBM thing is really just a contracts dispute about whether or not IBM had allowed protected AT&T code licensed for use in AIX to escape into Linux -and SCOsource's first major court action was to ask a court to enforce that its decision to lift IBM's license to use its code in AIX. That 720, with or without a "free" Linux, therefore looks like the way of the future and not a temporary abberation in pricing policy.
There's no point in maintaining eternal vigilance against attacks on basic freedoms if you're not also willing to face the costs of action once an attack is discovered. In this case, if you agree that even $799 for the x86 versions might not really be free, the indicated action is probably to focus on working with a genuinely free Linux distribution like Debian or Gentoo - even if that means foregoing spiffy hardware like IBM's PowerRISC series and giving up on some of the administrative tools that come with customized distributions like Red Hat's enterprise series.
There are other costs too, of course. Specifically, use of a general purpose release like Debian's will typically cost you personally some credibility and goodwill among the more MCSE influenced, while costing your employer something in terms of systems performance and ease of administration. You can't do anything about the former except train and educate, but the performance issue is easy to address: spend a few more dollars on faster disks, more ram, or an extra CPU or two. Since that won't come to more than a few hundred bucks per machine, you'll still be far enough ahead on the license costs to buy the people you work with a free lunch -so you can remind them that the real cost of freedom is the willingness to make hard choices in the face of intimidation.