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1.1     ! snw         1: .TL
        !             2: The History of FreeM
        !             3: .AU
        !             4: Serena Willis
        !             5: .AI
        !             6: Coherent Logic Development
        !             7: .AB
        !             8: Since 2014, The author has been the maintainer of the primary fork of the FreeM implementation of the M programming language and database. In this paper, we will share some of the history of FreeM, as well as its current status and goals.
        !             9: .AE
        !            10: .SH
        !            11: Initial Involvement
        !            12: .PP
        !            13: The author's mentor in computer programming and UNIX was Larry Landis, who got involved heavily in the M/MUMPS programming language ca. 1991. Mr. Landis promoted the M language to the author from 1991 forward, and first demonstrated FreeM to her in August 1998. In 2010, the author incorporated her company, Coherent Logic Development, learned M, and began doing contract work in M through Mr. Landis's company, Fourth Watch Software.
        !            14: .PP
        !            15: Mr. Landis was the owner of FreeM's SourceForge repository, which had not been touched in a number of years, following Fidelity National Information Services' decision to release GT.M under a free software license. In August 2011, the author downloaded the source code for FreeM and did enough work on it to enable building and running under modern GNU/Linux systems and posted it to the mumpster.org forums.
        !            16: .PP
        !            17: In 2014, Mr. Landis gave the author administrator access to the FreeM SourceForge repository and transferred maintainership of the project to her.
        !            18: .SH
        !            19: Early History
        !            20: .PP
        !            21: FreeM was developed in Germany in the mid-1990s by a developer who went by the pseudonym \fIShalom ha-Ashkenaz\fR, whose actual identity remains unknown, though it is thought by some that they are a dentist who learned C and developed FreeM on their own time. Shalom developed FreeM at a time when InterSystems Corporation (the company that developed the ISM implementation of M) was acquiring the majority of its  competitors and shutting them down. Shalom wished to provide a community-driven, open-source implementation of M as a bulwark against the growing threat of single-vendor hegemony over the M language. Its design\(emas well as some of the documentation included with the original sources\(emindicate that FreeM was originally targeted to the MS-DOS family of operating systems. It made use of a very limited subset of the C library, and included instructions for renaming the MS-DOS style 8.3 filenames in order to compile under UNIX.
        !            22: .PP
        !            23: At one point in FreeM's early history, Shalom ported FreeM from MS-DOS to SCO UNIX, the UNIX System V Release III-derived descendant of Microsoft XENIX, now known as SCO OpenServer\(ema platform still supported by FreeM. This port brought support for the \fIscoansi\fR terminal type, including colors and ANSI X3.64 control mnemonics.
        !            24: .SH
        !            25: Enter the GUMP
        !            26: .PP
        !            27: Around the time Shalom ha-Ashkenaz was developing FreeM, Richard F. Walters, a professor from U.C. Davis, conceived of the GUMP, an acronym standing for \fIGeneric Universal M Project\fR. The GUMP, following the object-oriented programming craze of the 1990s, was intended to be a toolkit allowing M implementations to be built from discrete components with a well-defined and well-specified public interface among these components. These components included the global handler (supplying the persistent functionality), and the interpreter/compiler (responsible for implementing M language commands). The components would have been able to communicate over a network, or in-process on the same host, enabling distributed computing functionality.
        !            28: .PP
        !            29: Although the specification for the GUM interface to global handlers attained a reasonably well-specified level of completeness, and Larry Landis and others developed a mostly-complete implementation of a GUM global handler, none of the other envisioned components were ever completed, and specifically, the interpreter component was missing.
        !            30: .SH
        !            31: Shalom's Gift
        !            32: .PP
        !            33: In July of 1998, Shalom ha-Ashkenaz donated the FreeM source code (then known as FreeMUMPS) to the M User's Group-Deutschland (MUG-D), hoping that the community would take the nascent implementation from its infancy through to a state of production-ready completeness and robustness. Shalom also placed a few conditions on his gift: a public release could not be made until a substantial set of milestones were reached. Per his conditions, the FreeMUMPS project must:
        !            34: .IP \(bu 2
        !            35: Implement the entirety of \fIANSI X11.1-1995\fR
        !            36: .IP \(bu 2
        !            37: Use Structured System Variables instead of \fIVIEW\fR commands and \fI$VIEW\fR functions
        !            38: .IP \(bu 2
        !            39: Raise the string size limits
        !            40: .IP \(bu 2
        !            41: Implement MWAPI, OMI, X11 bindings, and GKS bindings
        !            42: .IP \(bu 2
        !            43: Be substantially free of major bugs
        !            44: .PP
        !            45: Although MUG-D readily accepted the contribution of FreeMUMPS, the organization itself lacked the manpower and expertise to complete the implementation. Just as it is now, the intersection of M community members who know enough of the M language and C language to work on a project this ambitious was quite small.
        !            46: .SH
        !            47: Merging GUMP and FreeM
        !            48: .PP
        !            49: Very shortly after the contribution of FreeMUMPS to MUG-D, Richard F. Walters and a small team of developers and administrative staff who had been working on the GUMP assumed maintainership of the FreeMUMPS source code. This included representatives from the M Technology Association (an M vendor association having several foreign branches), the M Development Committee (the M standards organization hosting the ANSI/ISO standards for the M language, then sponsored by the M Technology Association), and others. The goals of this team were to:
        !            50: .IP \(bu 2
        !            51: Meet Shalom's requirements for a public release of FreeMUMPS
        !            52: .IP \(bu 2
        !            53: Convert FreeMUMPS into the first interpreter component of the GUMP
        !            54: .PP
        !            55: During this era, Ronald L. Fox of Hawaii (who passed in 2010) ported FreeMUMPS from SCO UNIX to Red Hat 5 and glibc-6. Steve "Saintly" Zeck also attempted to rewrite the symbol table code to lift string size limits, David Whitten enhanced some of the implementation-specific extensions, and Larry Landis integrated Saintly's symbol table work.
        !            56: .PP
        !            57: Early on in the GUMP maintainership of FreeM, the name of the implementation was changed from FreeMUMPS to Public Standard M, a change which was changed to Free Standard MUMPS and then FreeM when it was discovered that the PSM acronym was already in use for Patterson & Gray's M implementation. Dr. Walters also received the implementation ID of 49 from then secretary of the M Development Committee, Don Piccone.
        !            58: .PP
        !            59: One of the contributors to FreeM at this stage\(emmainly in the area of M vendor routines\(emwas Axel Trocha, who would go on to develop and maintain his own private fork of FreeM.
        !            60: .SH
        !            61: The GT.M Free Software Release
        !            62: .PP
        !            63: GT.M, an acronym for \fIGreystone Technology MUMPS\fR, is an M implementation that was released by Greystone Technology in 1986. Greystone was later acquired by Sanchez Computer Associates, which was in turn acquired by Fidelity National Information Services.
        !            64: .PP
        !            65: When GT.M was released under the GNU General Public License in 2000, it seemed to negate the entire \fIraison d'etre\fR for FreeM, as GT.M was a well-established, robust, and high-performance M implementation with which FreeM could not then compete. Unfortunately, at this time, the GUMP and FreeM projects lost all of their momentum, and new development along these lines rapidly ceased. The final GUMP team release of FreeM was 0.6.0. However, Axel Trocha's private port would continue to be developed for some years.
        !            66: .SH
        !            67: Axel Trocha's Fork
        !            68: .PP
        !            69: After FreeM's momentum ceased within the primary branch of development under Richard F. Walters' leadership, Axel Trocha, an aforementioned contributor of M vendor routines and member of Dr. Walters' team, continued development on the FreeM source code. Axel added many interesting features to the FreeM codebase, including:
        !            70: .IP \(bu 2
        !            71: A native port to Microsoft Windows
        !            72: .IP \(bu 2
        !            73: Compiling FreeM as an Apache web server module, allowing FreeM to be used easily for web development
        !            74: .IP \(bu 2
        !            75: The ability to output HTML code in a heredoc-style format, with any line of code beginning with a left angle bracket being interpreted as HTML with support for interpolated M locals and globals
        !            76: .IP \(bu 2
        !            77: Extensions allowing FreeM to be used as a command-line shell, along the lines of UNIX \fIbash\fR, Windows \fIcmd.exe\fR, etc.
        !            78: .PP
        !            79: Axel also maintains ownership of the freem.net Internet domain, and continued issuing public releases of his FreeM port on that site until sometime after 2003, at which point he took his port entirely private. Currently, freem.net is a blank page. However, Axel's fork of FreeM continues to this day as the back-end database and programming environment for the www.elvenrunes.de website. I have communicated with Axel occasionally.
        !            80: .SH
        !            81: Resuming Primary Development Branch
        !            82: .PP
        !            83: In 2011, the author downloaded the FreeM source code from the GUM Project's SourceForge repository\(emdormant since 2000\(emand updated it just enough that it would compile and run on modern GNU/Linux systems. The author also quickly updated FreeM to support terminal sizes larger than 80x24.
        !            84: .SH
        !            85: Taking Maintainership
        !            86: .PP
        !            87: In 2014, Larry Landis transferred administrative access of the GUMP repository, conferring maintainership of the primary branch of FreeM development to the author. Since then, many features have been added and many bugs corrected, including: