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A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log HotWired advertiser sponsors a blackout - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is free software finally gaining ground in the OS wars? Discuss Linux vs. NT and others in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Is there such a thing as a software monopoly? By Mike Romano Microsoft says no -- and its arguments could provoke changes in the antitrust laws (11/11/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg The New Yorker's portrait of PointCast displays once more the magazine's Internet ignorance (11/10/98) Music industry to webcasters: Pay up! By Janelle Brown Will the new copyright law's rules help Web radio flourish -- or smother the infant medium? (11/09/98) The ghosts in our machines By Andrew Brown "TechGnosis" traces the secret mysticism that motivates our love affair with technology (11/06/98) The god of the information age is a trickster By R.U. Sirius "TechGnosis" author Erik Davis talks about technology's habit of hoodwinking us (11/06/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

___Martin Luther, meet Linus Torvalds   Linux and free software challenge the Microsoft papacy. BY THOMAS SCOVILLE In 1517, Martin Luther ignited the Protestant Reformation with his assertion that no worldly power had the right to interpose itself between the individual and God. Nearly 500 years later, Linus Torvalds is insisting nobody should get between us and our CPUs, either. The Digital Reformation is here. In Luther's Day, the Roman Catholic Church had a near-monopoly on the cultural, intellectual and spiritual life of Europe. But the principal source text informing that life -- the Bible -- was off limits to ordinary people. Sixteenth-century Bibles were written in Latin, a language known only to the priesthood and a few other elites. Translations into more commonly spoken languages were rare. Needless to say, this situation suited the church just fine; Rome had been quite successful in parlaying its proprietary access to the Word of God into formidable economic power. The church was on a roll. Even the hereafter was becoming a Vatican profit center; purgatorial sentences could be commuted by clerical intercession with the purchase of a papal indulgence. Nobody likes to be exploited. Whenever an abusive power elite monopolizes one of life's essentials and offers it at ever-greater expense, people eventually get around to weighing that price against the cost of producing it themselves. And whether that essential is salvation or operating system source code, when the scales tip, people will find a way. Martin Luther began his career as a simple Catholic priest living far from Rome. He would eventually challenge the entire range of church doctrine and papal authority, but his reformation began by questioning the idea that timely salvation could be brokered by the church in the form of indulgences. Such egalitarian, anti-authoritarian habits of thought eventually led him to more general assertions, like the right of individual conscience over papal authority, the freedom of Christians everywhere from all "priest-craft" and direct access to the word of God via translation of the Bible into the language of common people. Most importantly, Luther sought to shift the power of spiritual authority back to where he felt it belonged: in the hands of the flock. Dissolving the clergy-congregation distinction, he declared the minister to be "one who, out of the body of the universal priesthood of man, has been set aside to perform a particular office." The cleric's proprietary access to the core sacraments was revoked in Luther's prescription that "the wine as well as the bread should be given to the laity." Linus Torvalds is an information-age reformer cut from the same cloth. Like Luther, his journey began while studying for ordination into the modern priesthood of computer scientists at the University of Helsinki -- far from the seats of power in Redmond and Silicon Valley. Also like Luther, he had a divine, slightly nutty idea to remove the intervening bureaucracies and put ordinary folks in a direct relationship to a higher power -- in this case, their computers. Dissolving the programmer-user distinction, he encouraged ordinary people to participate in the development of their computing environment. And just as Luther sought to make the entire sacramental shebang -- the wine, the bread and the translated Word -- available to the hoi polloi, Linus seeks to revoke the developer's proprietary access to the OS, insisting that the full operating system source code be delivered -- without cost -- to every ordinary Joe at the desktop. Just as in 1521, this radical idea turned the world on its head. Linux -- Torvalds' free UNIX-like operating system for Intel-based computers, among others -- may well prove to be the most threatening thing the digital Powers That Be have ever seen. It's nifty, it's compact, by all accounts it networks better and crashes less than Microsoft NT and it's free. Source code and development environment are included; if you have the inclination or the need, feel free to fix, hack or extend it any way you like. Why? Because Torvalds wants to shift the power back in your direction. Because Torvalds' God, like Luther's, wants you to know Him on a first-name basis. The Microsoft papacy is not amused. N E X T_P A G E .|."Crazed Linux zealots" overturn the old order