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14 CHAPTER 2. 2001: A HACKER’S ODYSSEY Once inside the auditorium, a visitor finds the person who has forced this temporary shutdown of building security procedures. The person is Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, original president of the Free Software Foundation, winner of the 1990 MacArthur Fellowship, winner of the Association of Computing Machinery’s Grace Murray Hopper Award (also in 1990), corecipient of the Takeda Foundation’s 2001 Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, and former AI Lab hacker. As announced over a host of hacker-related web sites, including the GNU Project’s own http: //www.gnu.org site, Stallman is in Manhattan, his former hometown, to deliver a much anticipated speech in rebuttal to the Microsoft Corporation’s recent campaign against the GNU General Public License. The subject of Stallman’s speech is the history and future of the free software movement. The location is significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL, a legal device originally conceived by Stallman 16 years before. Built to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy overtaking the computer industry – a wave first noticed by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox laser printer – the GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free software community. In simplest terms, the GPL establishes a form of communal ownership – what today’s legal scholars now call the “digital commons” – through the legal weight of copyright. The GPL makes this irrevocable; once an author gives code to the community in this way, that code can’t be made proprietary by anyone else. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright license, if they use a substantial amount of the original source code. For this reason, critics of the GPL have taken to calling it a “viral” license, suggesting inaccurately that it spreads itself to every software program it touches. 1 In an information economy increasingly dependent on software and increasingly beholden to software standards, the GPL has become the proverbial “big stick.” Even companies that once derided it as “software socialism” have come around to recognize the benefits. Linux, the kernel developed by Finnish college student Linus Torvalds in 1991, is licensed under the GPL, as are most parts of the GNU system: GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger, the GNU C Compiler, etc. Together, these tools form the components of the free software GNU/Linux operat-
ing system, developed, nurtured, and owned by the worldwide hacker community. Instead of viewing this community as a threat, high-tech companies like IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Sun Microsystems have come to rely upon it, selling software applications and services built to ride atop the ever-growing free software infrastructure. 2 They’ve also come to rely upon it as a strategic weapon in the hacker community’s perennial war against Microsoft, the Redmond, Washington-based company that has dominated the PC-software marketplace since the late 1980s. As owner of the popular Windows operating system, Microsoft stands to lose the most in an industry-wide shift to the GPL license. Each program in the Windows colossus is covered by copyrights and contracts (End User License Agreements, or EULAs) asserting the proprietary status of the executable, as well as the underlying source code that users can’t get anyway. Incorporating code protected by the “viral” GPL into one of these programs is forbidden; to comply with the GPL’s requirements, Microsoft would be legally required to make that whole program free software. Rival companies could then copy, modify, and sell improved versions of it, taking away the basis of Microsoft’s lock over the users. Hence the company’s growing concern over the GPL’s rate of adoption. Hence the recent Mundie speech blasting the GPL and the “open source” approach to software development and sales. (Microsoft does not even acknowledge the term “free software,” preferring to use its attacks to direct attention towards the apolitical “open source” camp described in chapter 11, and away from the free software movement.) And hence Stallman’s decision to deliver a public rebuttal to that speech on the same campus here today. 20 years is a long time in the software industry. Consider this: in 1980, when Richard Stallman was cursing the AI Lab’s Xerox laser printer, Microsoft, which dominates the worldwide software industry, was still a privately held startup. IBM, the company then regarded as the most powerful force in the computer hardware industry, had yet to introduce its first personal computer, thereby igniting the current low-cost PC market. Many of the technologies we now take for granted – the World Wide Web, satellite television, 32-bit video-game consoles – didn’t even exist. The same goes for many of the companies that now fill the upper echelons of the corporate establishment, companies 15
Page 1: Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard S
Page 5 and 6: Contents Foreword by Richard M. Sta
Page 7 and 8: Foreword by Richard M. Stallman I h
Page 9 and 10: Preface by Sam Williams This summer
Page 11 and 12: that the hacker ethos no longer exi
Page 13 and 14: down a dead-end street, an accusati
Page 15 and 16: xiii Richard or myself, you can fin
Page 17 and 18: Chapter 1 For Want of a Printer I f
Page 19 and 20: operator, they made it subservient
Page 21 and 22: knew who had written the program, s
Page 23 and 24: Unilogic gave the AI Lab a gratis c
Page 25 and 26: thority, to a crusading activist ap
Page 27 and 28: ENDNOTES 11 commercial programmer w
Page 29: Chapter 2 2001: A Hacker’s Odysse
Page 33 and 34: Windows more attractive to the main
Page 35 and 36: For the uninitiated, Stallman dives
Page 37 and 38: To understand the reasons behind th
Page 39 and 40: ENDNOTES 23 for Something’s Not U
Page 41 and 42: Chapter 3 A Portrait of the Hacker
Page 43 and 44: own. Who knew that within 10 years
Page 45 and 46: them from the social ineptness that
Page 47 and 48: him,” says Lippman. “It was as
Page 49 and 50: write his first real program. His f
Page 51 and 52: ENDNOTES 35 protesters on his way t
Page 53 and 54: Chapter 4 Impeach God Although thei
Page 55 and 56: enewal plan that went beyond simply
Page 57 and 58: Although opposed to the war in Viet
Page 59 and 60: mate,” he says. In a rare stroke
Page 61 and 62: Taking the manuals home, Stallman w
Page 63 and 64: Stallman also learned the lore, sto
Page 65 and 66: “If you said, ‘Stop the job,’
Page 67 and 68: Such activities reflected a growing
Page 69 and 70: the user had chosen “starfish,”
Page 71 and 72: Stallman ordered a button with the
Page 73 and 74: ENDNOTES 57 11 See Richard Stallman
Page 75 and 76: Chapter 5 Puddle of Freedom [RMS: I
Page 77 and 78: Taking the words down in my reporte
Page 79 and 80: successful solution is both clever
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Brazil, Stallman has spent 12 of th
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chairman Bill Gates that same week.
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which smell like boiled cabbage but
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serve a purpose that would be under
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and do: for instance, Red Hat contr
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ENDNOTES 75 3 See “Programmer on
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Chapter 6 The Emacs Commune The AI
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Hacker life, however, was not witho
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consists of positing tentative assu
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after the two-key combination that
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a statement within the source code
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ENDNOTES 87 glimpse of Stallman’s
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Chapter 7 A Stark Moral Choice On S
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a few companies, most notably Sun M
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PDP-10 processor with KL-10 (a PDP-
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“[When] passwords first appeared
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the Symbolics documentation appeare
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the dormant lights, lights that onc
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101 on computers altogether,” Sta
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103 share of the profits. “I ther
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105 the original announcement poste
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ENDNOTES 107 Endnotes 1See Richard
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Chapter 8 St. Ignucius The Maui Hig
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111 restrict fans’ ability to rec
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113 It is likewise lawful - though
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Raymond’s attempt to explain our
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Stallman dressed as St. IGNUcius. T
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119 are delivered. Most come so ste
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ENDNOTES 121 secret the little deta
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Chapter 9 The GNU General Public Li
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125 typically used, and designed to
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Copyright (c) 1985, Larry Wall You
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129 About the time Stallman was pon
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131 AT&T spin-off that retained own
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133 Labs, Tiemann ran into some AT&
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135 Jeremy Allison, a Sun user duri
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137 and had to vote as a “homeles
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139 course of doing so, Torvalds ha
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ENDNOTES 141 the latest in a long l
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ENDNOTES 143 16See Linus Torvalds a
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Chapter 10 GNU/Linux By 1993, the f
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147 philosophy would people associa
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149 a hot topic. Unfortunately, tha
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151 its distribution “GNU/Linux.
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153 a Unix-like system communicate
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155 the question to Linus Torvalds,
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ENDNOTES 157 superior to GNU/Linux
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Chapter 11 Open Source [RMS: In thi
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161 “It was a pivotal moment,”
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163 The executive director in quest
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165 Torvalds’ methods before Raym
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167 says he argued for Stallman’s
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169 Later in 1998, Stallman announc
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171 maker Intel purchased a stake i
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ENDNOTES 173 Murdock, for one, find
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Chapter 12 A Brief Journey through
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177 view, the kind that makes momen
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ENDNOTES 179 running. I’m sure th
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Chapter 13 Continuing the Fight For
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183 users would be able to have a g
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185 In addition to helping the Free
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187 GPL still be something software
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189 others to see computer technolo
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ENDNOTES 191 still resonating in th
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Epilogue from Sam Williams: Crushin
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his personality and background that
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197 For Stallman, the software issu
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199 contradiction here, because Sun
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201 and because the words do not fi
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203 In July, a full year after the
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205 program introduced lines linkin
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207 Before parting, Stallman handed
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Appendix A - Hack, Hackers, and Hac
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211 ing and reshaping the track’s
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213 “hacker ethic”: the yet-unw
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215 Once a vague item of obscure st
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Appendix B - GNU Free Documentation
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219 says that the Document is relea
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221 If the required texts for eithe
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223 L. Preserve all the Invariant S
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225 A compilation of the Document o
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227 can be used, that proxy’s pub
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Colophon The front and back covers
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