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Stallman Free Software 20.Pdf 156 Free Software, ~ree Society: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman So, let me make the briefes possible introduction to somebody who doesn't need one. Richard is the perfect e ample of somebody who, by acting locally, started thinking globally-from probl ms concerning the unavailability of source cQde for printer drivers at the M.I. T. I Lab many years ago. He has developed a cqherent philosophy that has forced a I of us to re-examine our ideas of how software is produced, of what intellectua property means, and what the software community actually represents. Let me w lcome Richard Stallman. [applause] I Free Software: Free~om and Cooperation Richard M. Stallman: Can s meone lend me a watch? [audiencelaughs] Thank you. So, I'd like to thank Mi rosoft for providing me the opportunity to [audience laughs]be on this platform. F r the pastfew weeks, I have felt like an author whose book was fortuitously banne somewhere.! [audiencelaughs] Except that all the articles about it are giving th wrong author's name, becauseMicrosoft describes the GNU GPL as an open so rce license,and most of the presscoverage followed suit. Most people, of coursej st innocently don't realize that our work has nothing to do with open source,that i fact we did most of it before people evencoined the term "open source." We are in the free softwar movement,and I'm going to speak about what the free software movementis ab ut, what it means,what we have done, and, because this is partly sponsoredby a chool of business,I'll say some things more than I usually do about how free s ftware relates to business,and some other areas of social life. Now, someof you may not ver write computerprograms, but perhapsyou cook. And if you cook, unless you' e really great, you probably use recipes. And if you userecipes, you've probably ad the experienceof getting a copy of a recipe from a friend who's sharingit. And y u've probably also had the experience-unlessyou're a total neophyte-of changing a recipe. It says certain things, but you don't have to do exactly that. You can leav out someingredients. Add somemushrooms, , cause you like mushrooms.Put in I ss salt becauseyour doctor said you should cut down on salt -whatever. You can even make bigger changes,according to your skill. And if you've made changes n a recipe, and you cook it for your friends, and they like it, one of your friends ght say, "Hey, could I have the recipe?" And then, what do you do? You could rite down your modified version of the recipe and make a copy for your friend. These are the natural things to do with functionally useful recipesof any kind. Now a recipe is a lot like a computerprogram. A computerprogram is a lot like a recipe: a series of steps to be carried out to get some result that you want. So it's just as natural to do those ame things with computerprograms-hand a copy to your friend. Make changesi it becausethe job it was written to do isn't exactly what you want. It did a great ob for somebodyelse, but your job is a different job. And, after you've changed it that is likely to be useful for other people. Maybe~ 1 Less than a month before, Micr6soft vice presidentCraig Mundie gave a speechattackling free software(calling it "open ~ourcej'). Chapter20: Free Software: Freedom~d Cooperation 157 they have a job to do that's like the jo~ you do. So they ask, "Hey, can I have a copy?" Of course,if you're a nice person,you're going to give a copy. That's the way to be a decentperson. I So imagine what it would be like if [ecipes were packagedinside black boxes. You couldn't see what ingredients they re using, let alone changethem, and imag- ine if you made a copy for a friend, ~ey would call you a pirate and try to put you in prison for years. That world would createtremendous outrage from all the people who are used to sharing recipes; But that is exactly what the world of pro- prietary software is like. A world in w~ch common decencytowards other people is prohibited or prevented. Now, why did I notice this? I noticed this becauseI had the good fortune in the 1970's to be part of a community of prqgrammerswho sharedsoftware. Now, this community could trace its ancestryessentially back to the beginning of computing. In the 1970's, though, it was a bit rare ~orthere to be a community where people sharedsoftware. And, in fact, this was ~ort of an extreme case,because in the lab where I worked, the entire operating systemwas software developedby the people in our community, and we'd share any ,f it with anybody. Anybody was welcome to come and take a look, and take away a copy, and do whateverhe wanted to do. There were no copyright notices on theseprograms. Cooperationwas our way of life. And we were secure in that way lof life. We didn't fight for it. We didn't have to fight for it. We just lived that way. And, as far as we knew, we would just keep on living that way. So there was fr~e software,but there was no free software movement. I But then our community was destroyedby a seriesof calamities that happenedto it. Ultimately it was wiped out. mtimatfly, the PDP-I0 computer,2which we used for all our work, was discontinued. O\lf system-the Incompatible nmesharing System-was written starting in the '601s,so it was written in assemblerlanguage. That's what you used to write an opefflting system in the '60's. So, of course, assemblerlanguage is for one particular computerarchitecture; if that gets discon- tinued, all your work turns into dust-it,s useless.And that's what happenedto us. The 20 years or so of work of our community turned into dust. But before this happened,I had an e*perience that preparedme, helped me see what to do, helped prepare me to see ~hat to do when this happened,because at a certain point, Xerox gave the Artifici~ Intelligence Lab, where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsomeIgift, becauseit was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser p.rinter. It w~.svery fast, pri~ted a page a sec?nd, very fine in many respects, but It was unrelIable, becauseIt was really a high-speed office copier that had been modified into a printer. And, you know, copiers j~, but there's somebodythere to fix them.1rhe printer jammed and nobody saw. So It stayedjammed for a long time. Well we had an idea for how to deal With this problem. Changeit so that when- , . ever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can tell o~ timesharIng machine, and tell the userswho are waiting for printouts, go fix the pnnter-because --I 2 ProgrammedData Processormodel 10, a mr.nframe computerused by many top researchand governmentorganizations in the 1970's. 158 Free Software, Free ~ociety: SelectedEssays of Richard M. Stallman if they only knew it was jammed. ..of course,if you're waiting for a printout and you know that the printer is jamm d, you don't want to sit and wait forever, you're going to go fix it. I But at that point, we were comp etely stymied, becausethe software that ran that printer was not free software. It h d come with the printer, and it was just a binary. We couldn't have the source cod; Xerox wouldn't let us have the source code. So, despite our skill as programm rs-after all, we had written our own timesharing system-we were completely helpl ss to add this feature to the printer software. And we just had to suffer with aiting. It would take an hour or two to get your printout becausethe machine wo ld be jammed most of the time. You'd wait an hour figuring "I know it's going 0 be jammed. I'll wait an hour and go collect my printout," and then you'd s that it had beenjammed the whole time, and in fact, nobody else had fixed it. So you'd fix it and you'd go wait another half hour. Then, you'd come back, an you'd seeit jammed again-before it got to your output. It would print three minut s and be jammed thirty minutes. Frustration up the whazzoo. But the thing that ade it worse was knowing that we could have fixed it, but somebodyelse, for s own selfishness,was blocking us, obstructing us from improving the software. 0, of course,we felt someresentment. I And then I heard that somebo y at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy of that software. I was visiting there later, so I went to his office and I said, "Hi, I'm from MIT. Could I have a copy f the printer sourcecode?" And he said "No, I promised not to give you a copy." [audiencelaughs] I was stunned. I was so-I was angry,and I had no idea how I co ld do justice to it. All I could think of was to turn around on my heel and walk out 0 his room. Maybe I slammedthe door. [audience laughs] And I thought about it lat r on, becauseI realized that I was seeingnot just an isolatedjerk, but a social phe omenon that was important and affected a lot Iof people.
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