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The offer of the Nyse today seems to be winningThe monopoly is more fragile than it seemsThe Fabec including will be in service of air routes more directAn argument repeated yesterday by François Fillon5 in 2007 while it increased during the same period in the EU27 from 20This is not to say that to be walking on the feetHappy initiative because since that time society Ulmann 12The anglonéerlandais especially has no other choiceThe challenges are changing over the yearsWe have not finished with the semantic confusionThis is a strange universe. A world populated by wildebeest and penguins. A world where an invisible army more of 300,000 developers around the world volunteer works seven days on seven and twenty-four hours a day, to the improvement of the software whose source code is published. "These last two months I spent between ten and fifteen hours a day to develop the code, seven days a week." "I diffuse this code on a Web site," says a developer, standing in an association.
This army is based on teachings dictated by ideologues who are today attempting to influence the computer selection of companies, but also the policy of European and American members on new technologies. All gathered around a unifying idea, that of free software. "This type of software complies with the fundamental freedoms of the users: access to the source code of a program, modify it as it sees fit and redistribute copies", says the man to the origin of the concept of free software, Richard Stallman, in twenty years become the "master suggests" of the community.
Access to the source code
It was in 1984 that Stallman, researcher in artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, launches its GNU (pronounced "GNU") computer project. At the time, the Unix operating system, used primarily in computer servers, is fragmented into various more or less incompatible grinds between them with additions by the manufacturers. A kind of Tower of Babel, where everyone speaks its own dialect without understanding the autres. Stallman project is to make the control users, says Nat Makarevitch, co-founder of the French-speaking Association of users of Linux and free software. Its aim is that all are equal and have at least the possibility of access in the heart of software and to amend, rather than buy a black box in cellophane in a store.
Access to the source code must ensure that software communicate with each other, and need to create the necessary translation tools which is often impossible without access to the heart of the program. To do this, the GNU project is developed without copyright, thereby preventing any sale of license commercial system. Source code is thus fully in the public domain (General Public License).
The Penguin frightens Microsoft
The project will become a real boom in 1991, when the Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds developed the Linux kernel. Combined with the GNU project and its applications, it will become a complete operating system, called GNU/Linux, with effigy for a Penguin. "Some people thought that a large Penguin poorly represented the grace of Linux, has told Linus Torvalds. But they have never seen a Penguin angry loading more than 160 km/h!
And this is not Microsoft who will tell the contrary. Steve Ballmer, CEO of the firm of Redmond, even called this system "repressor of the intellectual property" and "cancer". Because many companies have rallied to the GNU/Linux world by selling the service software, which remains mostly free. Red Hat, IBM and Sun Microsystems have invested heavily in this other way of doing non-commercial license software, by relying on a community of volunteer developers. Many jurisdictions around the world, in China, Korea, Germany, or England, adopt GNU/Linux or are used to put pressure on Microsoft to renegotiate down the price of the software.
The world of free software has become influential. One of his armed arms was created by Richard Stallman in 1985. Originally, his Free Software Foundation (the free software Foundation, represented by EUCD.info in France) was devoted to the promotion of the right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. But today, the combat of the Foundation goes beyond this first mission. "We are trying at the moment to help the campaign against the patentability of software," explains Richard Stallman.
Supporters of free software have become a lobbying force. "He should not see this world as a very structured and hyperorganisé in pyramidal form, but rather as a set of independent cells," explains François Pelegrini, one of the lobbyists who fought in Brussels against software patents. According to him, the establishment of patents for software could jeopardize the interoperability, i.e. the communication between different systems or computer networks. Indeed, traditional publishers require programmers to pay or to leave whenever they want to develop a program that communicates with another.
Victory in Brussels
To educate the members European, including the Socialist Michel Rocard, that he managed to win its case, François Pelegrini asked the the free software community to finance his travels to the Parliament. "Behind the battle for free software and Linux to profile geo-strategic independence of Europe computer Microsoft and the US", he says. This mobilization is not confined to the single French framework. Other initiatives in various European countries, such as England or the Germany, were created. "We have tried to mobilize the most possible world against patents with passion", said the Swedish David Axmark, the origin of the free MySQL database software.
The battle was successful: the European Community has finally authorized the filing of patents for technical inventions including the use of software, but not software as such, as provided for starting project.
The other major cause of the world of free software objects it to the music, and film majors, and including a European directive, the European Copyright Directive (EUCD). It is to condemn any person attempting to tackle the copy of the DVD-video systems, but also of CD audio, and prohibited the publication of any information allowing to bypass these systems. Because of these protection locks, the Wheeler fear of not being able to read the contents of some CDs and DVDs on their computers with Linux. To combat this directive, the EUCD association.Info already collected 27,000 euros to the community of developers and various associations.
"A quarter of European associations of free software collect funds, says Loïc Dachary, the founder of EUCD .info." "The most active are those based in England, Germany and France." In Britain, the Foundation for Information Policy Research received funding on the part of the Open Society Institute, supported by the famous financier George Soros. Billionaire is also one of the investors in the manufacturer of microprocessors American Transmeta, where is a working... Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux.
Yet, despite these different fields of battle, the largest combat is to carry out. A threat on the frail shoulders of the GNU/Linux penguin. The lawsuits by SCO (see next page) for violation of intellectual property against all companies using Linux may stifle the development of this alternative operating system.
