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Analysis GNU fans have celebrated their software movement's thirtieth birthday - a movement that started as rebellious bits and bytes of tools, and is now a worldwide phenomenon.

Today, servers, PCs, mobile phones, tablets, and all manner of devices run operating systems and applications that owe their genesis to the idea of software freedom articulated by GNU founder Richard Stallman.

In September 1983 he announced he was creating GNU: Gnu is Not Unix. And, for his second trick, the Emacs programmer founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and wrote the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) - the lifeblood of the whole project.

Stallman is a liberal who has distanced himself from the label libertarian - a label that, perhaps for most Brits, conjures a right-leaning American stereotype who owns lots of guns, lives in Nebraska and inhabits the Tea Party fringes of the Republican Party. Basically, someone who likes to look others square in the eye and say: "You arent the boss of me."

But Stallman has expressed his liberal views though code, and defined four freedoms that boil down to the simple belief software should be free - and that's free as in freedom, not free as in free beer.

He felt that if his code wasnt free - if it could not always be freely altered, improved and shared under the same conditions - then neither was he free because it would mean he lost his rights to do what he liked with his software and the computer running it. If the software wasn't free, in Stallman's eyes, that meant somebody else was being the boss of him, telling him what he could and couldn't do with his machine and his life built around it.

The bearded firebrand's rallying cry was "free Unix!" and he created GNU during what was a pivotal time for the technology industry: Unix - a capable multiuser, multitasking operating system - was really picking up steam and the Unix vendors had to play a canny game. They implemented ever-more proprietary features to differentiate themselves. This was the Unix Wars.

And while they duked it out, Stallman was busy writing a set of compatible software of which the source code was completely available and licensed so that it will always remain so: in other words, the GNU operating system stack, complete with a C compiler and other build tools, text editors, the familiar Unix utilities, plus games, spreadsheets, and so on.

Three decades on, what started as a toolkit of software components, became a movement that moved from the fringes to take on the IT mainstream.

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Stallman's GNU at 30: The hippie OS that foresaw the rise of Apple - and is now trying to take it on

News

By Jon Gold

October 4, 2013 02:01 PM ET

Network World - The latest version of the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Working Group charter includes provisions for ongoing work on restrictive content protection systems a decision that has angered groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Software Foundation.

The main opposition centers on the controversial Encrypted Media Extension proposal, which would build robust digital rights management capabilities directly into future HTML standards. While EME is still some distance from being officially accepted, its inclusion in the latest draft charter makes that outcome more likely.

[MORE OPEN-SOURCE:HP says open sourcing SDNs is wrong]

DRM, which is used to control access to online media content like streaming video, is a contentious topic, particularly among free and open-source software advocates.

EME, the FSF wrote in a form letter earlier this year, would expose users to a wide array of restrictions on their web experience.

"[EME] would fly in the face of the W3C's principle of keeping the Web royalty-free -- this is simply a back door for media companies to require proprietary player software. It is willful ignorance to pretend otherwise just because the proposal does not mention particular technologies or DRM schemes by name," the group said.

The EFF echoes the thrust of those remarks in a statement responding to the news that EME would be retained, saying on Wednesday that the group is "deeply disappointed" by the decision.

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Critics slam W3C over inclusion of DRM in HTML5

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Last month, global engineering firm Siemens made one of its largest donations, valued at $750 million, to the University of Maryland.

It wasnt a financial contribution. Instead, it was a license for its engineering software. Called Product Lifecycle Management, the software simulates the design and manufacturing processes for products such as cars and airplanes. PLM uses real data about the life span of certain parts to predict, for instance, how long a car might last.

In-kind software donations arent new. Microsoft, Apple and Google, among others, have been providing free software or hardware to schools, nonprofit groups and others for more than a decade. Tech companies often use such handouts not only to further a good cause, but also to gain exposure for their products and test new markets.

IT philanthropy can take other forms, as well. Siemens, whose U.S. subsidiary in the District of Columbia took in $22 billion in fiscal 2012, has a separate philanthropic arm donating about $7million annually to educational initiatives in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.

The company distributes its PLM licenses through a program called GoPLM, which makes hundreds of such donations to academic institutions each year. But its not purely philanthropic. Its also intended to develop a cadre of engineers familiar with Siemens products, said Bill Boswell, director of partner strategy. Its a long-term investment in that pipeline of people, he said.

As products become more sophisticated, engineering students need training in technology to help them manage the design of complex products, Boswell said. Cars have hundreds of computers in them, and the cellphone has more processing power and memory than an entire Apollo moon mission, he said.

Although the software is free, universities receiving PLM grants typically pay Siemens an annual fee of a few thousand dollars for access to tech support and software maintenance.

Hardly alone

Siemens is hardly the only enterprise that has built a structure behind its donations. A new collaboration between nonprofit, academic and for-profit ventures called Journey Forward is offering free software to breast cancer survivors and oncologists, helping them to manage care after a patient is discharged from the hospital and to raise awareness of the emerging field of survivorship care.

Journey Forward developed and released the software this year. The group consists of the advocacy nonprofit groups the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (NCCS), the Oncology Nursing Society, UCLAs Cancer Survivorship Center, health benefits company WellPoint and biotechnology corporation Genentech.

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Tech companies help others, themselves with donations of software

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