2004.03_Projects-Free Software and Its Makers.pdf

Free Software Projects

COMMUNITY

Projects on the Move

Free software covers such a diverse

range of utilities, applications and

other assorted projects, that it can

be hard to find the perfect tool from

all that programming effort. We pick

the best of the bunch for you. In this

issue: The Windows NT clone

ReactOS, Software in the Public

Interest and trouble at GNU Hurd.

BY MARTIN LOSCHWITZ

operating system which looks set

to become a major desktop con-

tender. We will also be looking into

“Software in the Public Interest” and

reporting on the ousting of the Hurd

maintainer, Thomas Bushnell.

developers aim to provide a large range

of interfaces for various APIs. For exam-

ple, there are moves to support the direct

execution of Java programs. In addition,

subsystems for OS/2 and DOS programs

are planned.

The ReactOS project now has a tar

archive with the operating system kernel

sources, and ISO images, on its website,

but it hasn’t been easy going. The pro-

ject’s predecessor was launched way

back in 1996 with the aim of program-

ming a free Windows 95 clone. The

project’s initiators called it FreeWin95 to

reflect their goal. Their ambitions at the

time were to make the project multifunc-

tional and well-known. But that was not

to be. Kernel code was never produced.

Instead, the project members got bogged

down in tedious discussions on the oper-

ating system design. By the end of 1997,

FreeWin95 was more or less dead.

Jason Filby agreed to become the new

project co-ordinator. He immediately

contacted all the members of the

FreeWin95 mailing list with the aim of

instilling new life into the project. The

developers agreed to cancel their plans

for a Window 95 derivative and instead

concentrate on a Windows NT clone.

FreeWin95 became ReactOS. They also

reached another fundamental decision:

to concentrate on creating working code,

rather than those endless discussions.

After this, ReactOS went quiet for a

whole year. Not because the team mem-

bers had broken their resolutions, but

because they were all heavily involved in

creating a kernel and a set of major dri-

vers. As Linus Torvalds describes in his

book “Just for Fun” [4], this can be an

extremely tedious and fairly boring

process. What made things even more

difficult was the fact that only a few of

the developers in the ReactOS group

actually knew how to design kernel

code. This meant that the first lines of

ReactOS code were the work of just a

few programmers. The kernel hacker

group started growing after support for

basic hardware such as IDE controllers

and keyboards became available.

A port of the GNU compiler collection

is one of the biggest success stories in the

history of ReactOS development. This

makes it possible to compile new ver-

sions of ReactOS on ReactOS. ReactOS

also supports a few well-known Linux

ReactOS

Linux users occasionally need to run

Windows programs on Linux. In this

case, most users opt for commercial tools

such as VMware [1], which emulates a

computer with a BIOS of its own, or the

free Wine [2] software, although Wine

may not run the Windows programs you

need.

The ReactOS [3] operating system pro-

vides a completely new approach to this

issue. The idea is to create an operating

system with binary and driver com-

patibility to Windows NT 4.0. The

Martin Loschwitz is from a small Ger-

man town called Niederkrüchten and

a developer for Debian GNU/Linux.

Martin’s leisure time is mainly pre-

occupied with activities in the Debian

or GNU community.

www.linux-magazine.com

March 2004

An up-to-date overview of free software and its makers

T his issue looks at the ReactOS

COMMUNITY

Free Software Projects

programs, Midnight Commander being

one of the more prominent examples.

One or two minor Windows programs

also run on ReactOS. As Figure 1 shows,

we managed to launch the Windows 2000

calculator with the help of a shell32.dll

borrowed from the WINE project.

The roadmap the project has laid out

makes you want more. A functional net-

work interface is due in April. There is

some network code available, but the

code is unusable due to large gaps in

some places. Also, the GUI should be

available shortly – it will include pro-

grams such as a Task Manager, an

Explorer, and a calculator. More mile-

stones are planned for the fall: Open

Office, Mozilla, and DirectX should

work, and the kernel should be capable

of supporting USB and NTFS. It will be

interesting to see if ReactOS finally man-

ages to code a free NTFS implementation

capable of reading and writing. The aim

is to have ReactOS generally usable as a

desktop platform by early 2005.

If you want to try out ReactOS, check

[5] for the tools. But be aware of the cur-

rent obstacles: ReactOS will only install

on FAT16 and FAT32 partitions. The

setup program can format FAT32 parti-

tions, but it does not check for the exis-

tence of data on these partitions. There

is some danger of data loss if you acci-

dentally choose the wrong partition. If

you prefer to read a detailed installation

guide before you start, the ReactOS

download page provides a link.

ReactOS is an extremely interesting

approach to combining the advantages

of free software with Windows pro-

grams. If ReactOS 2005 is only half as

functional as the developers suggest in

their roadmap, it will certainly be an

interesting new alternative on the desk-

top front.

Bruce Perens finally had the charters for

Software in the Public Interest, or SPI for

short, completed by June 10 1997 (see

Figure 2). In 1999 the USA Internal Rev-

enue Service [6] finally recognized SPI as

a “not-for-profit” organization, which is

not subject to tax on income (including

donations).

There are two ways to run an organi-

zation of this kind in the US. The

founders can decide against opening up

membership to the general public; the

organization will then comprise a fixed

group of persons. The board of an orga-

nization of this type can still agree to

accept new members. This type of orga-

nization is typically chosen when there is

a defined goal and the organization will

be disbanded after achieving that goal.

The second type of public interest

organization is open to the general pub-

lic. It has to allow anyone so wishing to

join, although it can define different lev-

els of membership. The members hold

periodic elections to elect the board or

change the statutes. SPI is an organiza-

tion of this type.

SPI distinguishes between two types of

members: anyone who agrees to uphold

the principles of SPI, and registers with

SPI, can become a “non-contributing”

member. In contrast to this, “contribut-

ing” members are required to prove their

active participation in a project sup-

ported by SPI. “Contributing” members

regularly elect new members to the

“Board of Directors”. And the board

votes for a President once a year.

The general intention of SPI is to sup-

port free software globally. Free software

projects can apply to SPI to become

officially supported projects. Once the

application has been approved, the

project can apply for sponsorship or

legal aid.

The other aims of Software in the Pub-

lic Interest are to promote the public

distribution of software and support

school involvement on the Internet. This

includes events designed to show users

how to draw maximum benefit from the

Internet.

The projects SPI supports, besides

Debian, are the Fresco graphics system

[7], Gnome [8], Linux Standard Base [9],

the OFTC IRC network [10], the Open

Source Initiative [11] and the GNU Tex-

macs Editor [12]. If you want to help SPI

Software in the

Public Interest

Most free software projects, such as

Debian, have a fundamental problem:

they are not legal entities. This means

they cannot issue tax-deductible receipts

for donations, although a receipt is a

major prerequisite for many potential

donors.

The people behind the Debian project

realized this back in 1997, and this led

them to found a non-profit organization

thus avoiding taxation. The Debian pro-

ject leaders at that time, spearheaded by

Figure 1: As the website of the ReactOS Windows NT clone demonstrates: the Windows 2000 calculator

runs on ReactOS with the WINE shell32.dll .ReactOS will be able to run Linux programs, and Java code

directly.

March 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

Free Software Projects

COMMUNITY

The developer and maintainer of

Hurd, Thomas Bushnell, is one of

the FDL’s critics, and this was his down-

fall just recently. Stallman dismissed

Bushnell as maintainer for criticizing

the FDL too often and too openly.

This was seen as unacceptable for a

representative of the GNU project. Imme-

diately after this news broke, there were

fierce reactions from the developer

community. Even Werner Koch, well-

known for GnuPG, criticized Stallman’s

approach. He failed to understand how a

community that propagates “freedom as

in free speech” could withdraw its sup-

port for a person simply for using this

right.

Stallman is unlikely to reconsider his

decision, although the GNU FDL is fairly

certain to continue to provide material

for controversial discussions.

Figure 2: Charters of the not-for-profit organization Software in the Public Interest (SPI). SPI is one of the

biggest organizations actively involved in supporting free software. In 1999, SPI was recognized as a

charity and exempted from income tax.

That’s all folks…

… for this month at least, but we do

have one request before we go: If you

can recommend a program that you

would like to see featured in Projects on

the Move , why not mail me with your

suggestion [14]? I look forward to your

comments!

and the projects it supports, you can

now donate online at [13].

The GPL has a free documentation

counterpart known as the Free Docu-

mentation License (FDL), which is quite

controversial on the Open Source scene.

It contains paragraphs that allow authors

to add passages with non-technical con-

tent that cannot be changed by later

editors. For many developers the FDL

thus constitures a license that is clearly

not free.

■

Trouble at Hurd

People often say that Richard Stallman

does not get on too well with Linus Tor-

valds. After Stallman completed the first

GNU tools, Torvalds released the first

Linux versions, and thus indirectly

inherited the success of the GNU tools.

Richard Stallman probably had a differ-

ent plot in mind for his programs. They

were intended for release with the GNU

operating system Hurd, and were to

mark the victory of Open Source.

This is ten-year-old history by now,

and Hurd has more or less detoriorated

to vaporware. Release 1.0 has been post-

poned numerous times by the

developers. Hurd is not state-of-the-art.

Current versions cannot efficiently use

hard disks with 160 GBytes or more, as

the faulty system design prevents Hurd

from handling filesystems of more than a

few GBytes. Hurd also fails to support

modern soundcards. Historians can now

open a new chapter in the continuing

story of Hurd. But this time history

relates a tale of differing philosophies

rather than technical aspects.

INFO

[1] VMware: http://www.vmware.com/

[2] Wine: http://www.winehq.org/

[3] ReactOS: http://www.reactos.com/

[4] Linus Torvalds and David Diamond,

“Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental

Revolutionary”, ISBN: 1587991519

[5] ReactOS-Tools: http://www.reactos.com/

content/view/full/62

[6] USA Internal Revenue Service:

http://www.irs.gov/

[7] Fresco: http://www.fresco.org/

[8] Gnome: http://www.gnome.org/

[ 9] Linux Standard Base: http://www.lsb.org/

[10] Open and Free Technology Community:

http://www.oftc.net/

[11] Open Source Initiative:

http://www.opensource.org/

[12] GNU Texmacs: http://www.gnu.org/

directory/GNU/GNUTeXmacs.html

[13] Donations to SPI: http://www.guidestar.

org/partners/networkforgood/donate.

jsp?ein=11-3390208

[14] Tips and suggestions:

projektekueche@linux-magazin.de

Figure 3: Richard Stallman is well-known for his

extreme views. A short while ago, he ousted Hurd

maintainer Thomas Bushnell for criticizing the

GNU Free Documentation License.

www.linux-magazine.com

March 2004

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