• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Chapter1: The GNU Project 15 When I startedworking at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971, I became part of a software-sharingcommunity that had existed for many years. Sharing of software was not limited to our particular co unity; it is as old as computers,just as sharing of recipesis as old as cooking. But e did it more than most. The AI Lab used a timesharing operating s stem called ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System) that the lab's staff hack rs had designed and written in as- semblerlanguage for the Digital PDP-I0, one fthe large computersof the era. As a memberof this community, an AI lab staff sy tem hacker, my job was to improve this system. We did not call our software "free software," becausethat term did not yet exist; but that is what it was. Wheneverpeople fro another university or a company wanted to port and use a program, we gladly I t them. If you saw someoneusing an unfamiliar and interestingprogram, you coul always askto seethe sourcecode, so that you could readit, changeit, or cannibali e parts of it to make a newprogram. The use of "hacker" to mean "security break r" is a confusion on the part of the massmedia. We hackersrefuse to recognize t meaning, and continue using the word to mean, "Someonewho loves to pro and enjoys being clever aboutit."! The situation changeddrastically in the earl 1980s,with the collapseof the AI Lab hacker community followed by the discon nuation of the PDP-10 computer. In 1981, the spin-off company Symbolics h red away nearly all of the hackers from the AI Lab, and the depopulatedcomm nity was unable to maintain itself. (The book Hackers, by StevenLevy, describe these events, as well as giving a 1 It is hard to write a simple definition of something varied as hacking, bu~ I think what most "hacks" havein commonis playfulness,cleverness, an exploration. Thus,hacking means explor- ing the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playfu cleverness.Activities that display playful clevernesshave "hack value." You can help correct e misunderstandingsimply by making a distinction between security breaking and hacking- y using the term "cracking" for security breaking. The peoplewho do it are "crackers." Some f them may also be hackers,just as some of them may be chessplayers or golfers; most of them are not ("On Hacking," RMS; 2002). Originally publishedin the book OpenSources: Voices from the0 en SourceRevolution; O'Reilly, 1999.This ver- sion is part of Free Software,Free Society: SelectedEssays ofRi hard M. Stallman,2002, GNU Press (http://www.gnupress.org);ISBN 1-882114-98-1. Verbatimcopying and distribution f this entire article is pemritted in any medium,provided is notice is preserved 1 16 Free Software, FreFSociety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman clear picture of this community n its prime.) When the AI Lab bought a new PDP- 10 in 1982,its administratorsd cided to use Digital's non-free timesharing system instead of ITS on the new mach ne. Not long afterwards,Digital discontinued the PDP-IO series. Its architecture, elegant and powerful in the 60 , could not extend naturally to the larger address spacesthat were becoming fea ible in the 80s. This meant that nearly all of the programscomposing ITS were bsolete. That put the last nail in the coffin of ITS; 15 years of work went up in sm ke. The modem computersof th era, such as the VAX or the 68020, had their own operating systems,but none of em were free software: you had to sign a nondis- closure agreementeven to get executablecopy. This meantthat the first stepi using a computerwas to promise not to help your neighbor. A cooperatingcomm nity was forbidden. The rule made by the owners of proprietary software was, "I you share with your neighbor, you are a pirate. If you want any changes,beg us t make them." The idea that the proprietary software social system-the systemthat says you are not allowed to shareor ch ge software-is antisocial, that it is unethical, that it is simply wrong, may come s a surprise to some readers. But what else could we say about a systembased dividing the public and keeping users helpless? Readerswho find the idea surp .sing may have takenthis proprietary-softwareso- cial system as given, or judge it on the terms suggestedby proprietarysoftware businesses.Software publishers have worked long and hard to convincepeople that there is only one way to look at the issue. When software publishers t lk about "enforcing" their "rights" or "stopping piracy," what they actually "sa " is secondary. The real messageof these state- ments is in the unstatedassum tions they take for granted; the public is supposed to acceptthem uncritically. So 1 t's examinethem. One assumptionis that softw e companieshave an unquestionablenatural right to own software and thus hav power over all its users. (If this were a natural right, then no matter how muc harm it does to the public, we could not object.) Interestingly, the U.S. Constitut on and legal tradition reject this view; copyright is not a natural right, but an ~fi ial government-imposedmonopoly that limits the users' natural right to copy. ! Another unstatedassumptio is that the only important thing about software is what jobs it allows you to d that we computerusers should not care what kind of society we are allowed to ha e. A third assumptionis that would have no usable software (or would never have a program to do this or t at particular job) if we did not offer a company power over the usersof the pro ram. This assumptionmay have seemedplausible before the free software movem nt demonstratedthat we can make plenty of useful software without putting chains on it. If we decline to acceptthes assumptions,and judge these issuesbased on or- dinary common-sensemorality while placing the usersfirst, we arrive at very dif- ferent conclusions. Computer sers should be free to modify programsto fit their needs,and free to sharesoftwar , becausehelping other people is the basisof soci- ety. ~ CChapter1: The GNU Project 17 With my community gone,to continue as efore was impossible. Instead,I faced a stark moral choice. The easychoice was to join the propriet software world, signing nondisclo- sure agreementsand promising not to help y fellow hacker. Most likely I would alsobe developingsoftware that was release undernondisclosure agreements, thus adding to the pressureon other people to be ay their fellows too. I could have made money this way, and erhapsamused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I ould look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent y life making the world a worse place. I had alreadyexperienced being on the r ceiving end of a nondisclosureagree- ment, when someonerefused to give me and eMIT AI Lab the sourcecode for the control program for our printer. (The lack 0 certainfeatures in this program made use of the printer extremely frustrating.) So I could not tell myself that nondisclo- sureagreements were innocent. I was very gry when he refused to sharewith us; I could not turn around and do the samethin to everyoneelse. Another choice, straightforward but unpl ant, was to leave the computerfield. That way my skills would not be misused, t they would still be wasted. I would not be culpable for dividing and restricting computer ~sers, but it would happen nonetheless. ! So I looked for a way that a programme could do something for the good. I askedmyself, was there a program or progr s that I could write, so as to make a community possibleonce again? The answerwas clear: what was needed rst was an operating system. That is the crucial software for starting to use a co puter. With an operating system, you can do many things; without one, you cann t run the computer at all. With a free operating system,we could againhave a co unity of cooperating hackers-and invite anyoneto join. And anyonewould be ble to use a computer without starting out by conspiring to deprive his or her frien s. As an operating system developer, I had the right skills for this job. So even though I could not take successfor grante , I realized that I was elected to do the job. I chose to make the system com atible with Unix so that it would be portable, and so that Unix users could eas'ly switch to it. The name GNU was chosenfollowing a hackertradition, as a rec rsive acronymfor "GNU's Not Unix." An operating system does not mean just a kernel, barely enough to run other programs. In the 1970s,every operating sys em worthy of the name included com- mand processors,assemblers, compilers, int rpreters,debuggers, text editors, mail- ers, and much more. ITS had them, Multic had them, VMS had them, and Unix had them. The GNU operating systemwoul include them too. Later I heard thesewords, attributedto H.llel: "If I am not for myself, who will be for e? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?" The decision to start the GNU project wa basedon a similar spirit. As an atheist, I don't follow any religiqus leaders,but I sometimesfind I admire something one of them has said. I Free Software,Free Societyf SelectedEssays of Richard M. 18 Free as in Freedom The term "free software" is sometimesmisunderstood-it has nothing to do with price. It is about freedom. Here, there ore, is the definition of free software: a programis free software, for you, a parti ular user,if: .You have the freedomto run the pr gram, for any purpose.

Load more

  18

Copy Link