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--- a/data/v3/samples/free_as_in_freedom.richard_stallman_crusade_for_free_software.sam_williams.sst
+++ b/data/v3/samples/free_as_in_freedom.richard_stallman_crusade_for_free_software.sam_williams.sst
@@ -3,7 +3,11 @@
@title: Free as in Freedom
:subtitle: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software
-@creator: Williams, Sam
+@creator:
+ :author: Williams, Sam
+
+@date:
+ :published: 2002
@rights:
:copyright: Copyright (C) Sam Williams 2002.
@@ -14,30 +18,17 @@
:oclc: 49044520
:isbn: 9780596002879
-@date:
- :published: 2002
-
-@notes: March 2002
-
@links:
{ Home and Source }http://faifzilla.org/
- {Free as in Freedom (on Richard Stallman), Sam Williams @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_as_in_freedom.richard_stallman_crusade_for_free_software.sam_williams
- {@ Wikipedia}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom:_Richard_Stallman%27s_Crusade_for_Free_Software
- {@ Amazon.com}http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596002874
- {@ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0596002874
- {Viral Spiral, David Bollier@ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/viral_spiral.david_bollier
- {Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel
- {The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler
- {Two Bits, Christopher Kelty @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/two_bits.christopher_kelty
- {Free For All, Peter Wayner @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_for_all.peter_wayner
- {The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar.eric_s_raymond
- {Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig
- {CONTENT, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/content.cory_doctorow
- {Little Brother, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/little_brother.cory_doctorow
+ { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom:_Richard_Stallman%27s_Crusade_for_Free_Software
+ { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596002874
+ { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0596002874
+ { SiSU }http://sisudoc.org/
+ { sources / git }http://sources.sisudoc.org/
@make:
- :skin: skin_rms
:breaks: new=:A,:B,:C,1
+ :skin: skin_rms
:A~ @title @author
@@ -232,7 +223,7 @@ Once inside the auditorium, a visitor finds the person who has forced this tempo
% extended range for Microsoft
-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 General Public License, or 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 locks software programs into a form of communal ownership-what today's legal scholars now call the "digital commons"-through the legal weight of copyright. Once locked, programs remain unremovable. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright protection-even derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of the original source code. For this reason, some within the software industry have taken to calling the GPL a "viral" license, because it spreads itself to every software program it touches.~{ Actually, the GPL's powers are not quite that potent. According to section 10 of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 (1991), the viral nature of the license depends heavily on the Free Software Foundation's willingness to view a program as a derivative work, not to mention the existing license the GPL would replace.<br>If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software that is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.<br>"To compare something to a virus is very harsh," says Stallman. "A spider plant is a more accurate comparison; it goes to another place if you actively take a cutting."<br>For more information on the GNU General Public License, visit http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html }~
+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 General Public License, or 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 locks software programs into a form of communal ownership-what today's legal scholars now call the "digital commons"-through the legal weight of copyright. Once locked, programs remain unremovable. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright protection-even derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of the original source code. For this reason, some within the software industry have taken to calling the GPL a "viral" license, because it spreads itself to every software program it touches.~{ Actually, the GPL's powers are not quite that potent. According to section 10 of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 (1991), the viral nature of the license depends heavily on the Free Software Foundation's willingness to view a program as a derivative work, not to mention the existing license the GPL would replace. \\ If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software that is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally. \\ "To compare something to a virus is very harsh," says Stallman. "A spider plant is a more accurate comparison; it goes to another place if you actively take a cutting." \\ For more information on the GNU General Public License, visit http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html }~
={Mundie, Craig+2;NYU Stern School of Business;Stern School of Business (NYU)}
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 laughed it off as software socialism have come around to recognize the benefits. Linux, the Unix-like kernel developed by Finnish college student Linus Torvalds in 1991, is licensed under the GPL, as are many of the world's most popular programming tools: GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger, the GNU C Compiler, etc. Together, these tools form the components of a free software operating 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.
@@ -244,12 +235,12 @@ They've also come to rely upon it as a strategic weapon in the hacker community'
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, the company modern hackers view as the most powerful force in the worldwide software industry, was still a privately held startup. IBM, the company hackers used to regard as the most powerful force in the worldwide software industry, had yet to 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 like AOL, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, Compaq, and Dell. The list goes on and on.
={Amazon.com;AOL (America OnLine);Compaq computers;Dell computers;PCs (personal computers);personal computers (PCs)}
-The fact that the high-technology marketplace has come so far in such little time is fuel for both sides of the GPL debate. GPL-proponents point to the short lifespan of most computer hardware platforms. Facing the risk of buying an obsolete product, consumers tend to flock to companies with the best long-term survival. As a result, the software marketplace has become a winner-take-all arena.~{ See Shubha Ghosh, "Revealing the Microsoft Windows Source Code," Gigalaw.com (January, 2000).<br> http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/ghosh-2000-01-p1.html }~ The current, privately owned software environment, GPL-proponents say, leads to monopoly abuse and stagnation. Strong companies suck all the oxygen out of the marketplace for rival competitors and innovative startups.
+The fact that the high-technology marketplace has come so far in such little time is fuel for both sides of the GPL debate. GPL-proponents point to the short lifespan of most computer hardware platforms. Facing the risk of buying an obsolete product, consumers tend to flock to companies with the best long-term survival. As a result, the software marketplace has become a winner-take-all arena.~{ See Shubha Ghosh, "Revealing the Microsoft Windows Source Code," Gigalaw.com (January, 2000). \\ http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/ghosh-2000-01-p1.html }~ The current, privately owned software environment, GPL-proponents say, leads to monopoly abuse and stagnation. Strong companies suck all the oxygen out of the marketplace for rival competitors and innovative startups.
-GPL-opponents argue just the opposite. Selling software is just as risky, if not more risky, than buying software, they say. Without the legal guarantees provided by private software licenses, not to mention the economic prospects of a privately owned "killer app" (i.e., a breakthrough technology that launches an entirely new market),~{ Killer apps don't have to be proprietary. Witness, of course, the legendary Mosaic browser, a program whose copyright permits noncommercial derivatives with certain restrictions. Still, I think the reader gets the point: the software marketplace is like the lottery. The bigger the potential payoff, the more people want to participate. For a good summary of the killer-app phenomenon, see Philip Ben-David, "Whatever Happened to the `Killer App'?" e-Commerce News (December 7, 2000).<br> http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/5893.html }~ companies lose the incentive to participate. Once again, the market stagnates and innovation declines. As Mundie himself noted in his May 3 address on the same campus, the GPL's "viral" nature "poses a threat" to any company that relies on the uniqueness of its software as a competitive asset. Added Mundie:
+GPL-opponents argue just the opposite. Selling software is just as risky, if not more risky, than buying software, they say. Without the legal guarantees provided by private software licenses, not to mention the economic prospects of a privately owned "killer app" (i.e., a breakthrough technology that launches an entirely new market),~{ Killer apps don't have to be proprietary. Witness, of course, the legendary Mosaic browser, a program whose copyright permits noncommercial derivatives with certain restrictions. Still, I think the reader gets the point: the software marketplace is like the lottery. The bigger the potential payoff, the more people want to participate. For a good summary of the killer-app phenomenon, see Philip Ben-David, "Whatever Happened to the `Killer App'?" e-Commerce News (December 7, 2000). \\ http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/5893.html }~ companies lose the incentive to participate. Once again, the market stagnates and innovation declines. As Mundie himself noted in his May 3 address on the same campus, the GPL's "viral" nature "poses a threat" to any company that relies on the uniqueness of its software as a competitive asset. Added Mundie:
={Mundie, Craig+2}
-_1 It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.~{ See Craig Mundie, "The Commercial Software Model," senior vice president, Microsoft Corp. Excerpted from an online transcript of Mundie's May 3, 2001, speech to the New York University Stern School of Business.<br> http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp }~
+_1 It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.~{ See Craig Mundie, "The Commercial Software Model," senior vice president, Microsoft Corp. Excerpted from an online transcript of Mundie's May 3, 2001, speech to the New York University Stern School of Business. \\ http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp }~
The mutual success of GNU/Linux, the amalgamated operating system built around the GPL-protected Linux kernel, and Windows over the last 10 years reveals the wisdom of both perspectives. Nevertheless, the battle for momentum is an important one in the software industry. Even powerful vendors such as Microsoft rely on the support of third-party software developers whose tools, programs, and computer games make an underlying software platform such as Windows more attractive to the mainstream consumer. Citing the rapid evolution of the technology marketplace over the last 20 years, not to mention his own company's admirable track record during that period, Mundie advised listeners to not get too carried away by the free software movement's recent momentum:
={GNU Project:Linux and, mutual success of;Linux:GNU Project and;third-party software developers supporting Microsoft}
@@ -308,7 +299,7 @@ Richard Matthew Stallman's rise from frustrated academic to political leader ove
Most importantly, it speaks to the changing nature of political power in a world increasingly beholden to computer technology and the software programs that power that technology.
-Maybe that's why, even at a time when most high-technology stars are on the wane, Stallman's star has grown. Since launching the GNU Project in 1984,~{ The acronym GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix." In another portion of the May 29, 2001, NYU speech, Stallman summed up the acronym's origin:<br>_1 We hackers always look for a funny or naughty name for a program, because naming a program is half the fun of writing the program. We also had a tradition of recursive acronyms, to say that the program that you're writing is similar to some existing program . . . I looked for a recursive acronym for Something Is Not UNIX. And I tried all 26 letters and discovered that none of them was a word. I decided to make it a contraction. That way I could have a three-letter acronym, for Something's Not UNIX. And I tried letters, and I came across the word "GNU." That was it.<br>_1 Although a fan of puns, Stallman recommends that software users pronounce the "g" at the beginning of the acronym (i.e., "gah-new"). Not only does this avoid confusion with the word "gnu," the name of the African antelope, Connochaetes gnou, it also avoids confusion with the adjective "new." "We've been working on it for 17 years now, so it is not exactly new any more," Stallman says.<br>Source: author notes and online transcript of "Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation," Richard Stallman's May 29, 2001, speech at New York University.<br> http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt }~ Stallman has been at turns ignored, satirized, vilified, and attacked-both from within and without the free software movement. Through it all, the GNU Project has managed to meet its milestones, albeit with a few notorious delays, and stay relevant in a software marketplace several orders of magnitude more complex than the one it entered 18 years ago. So too has the free software ideology, an ideology meticulously groomed by Stallman himself.
+Maybe that's why, even at a time when most high-technology stars are on the wane, Stallman's star has grown. Since launching the GNU Project in 1984,~{ The acronym GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix." In another portion of the May 29, 2001, NYU speech, Stallman summed up the acronym's origin: \\ _1 We hackers always look for a funny or naughty name for a program, because naming a program is half the fun of writing the program. We also had a tradition of recursive acronyms, to say that the program that you're writing is similar to some existing program . . . I looked for a recursive acronym for Something Is Not UNIX. And I tried all 26 letters and discovered that none of them was a word. I decided to make it a contraction. That way I could have a three-letter acronym, for Something's Not UNIX. And I tried letters, and I came across the word "GNU." That was it. \\ _1 Although a fan of puns, Stallman recommends that software users pronounce the "g" at the beginning of the acronym (i.e., "gah-new"). Not only does this avoid confusion with the word "gnu," the name of the African antelope, Connochaetes gnou, it also avoids confusion with the adjective "new." "We've been working on it for 17 years now, so it is not exactly new any more," Stallman says. \\ Source: author notes and online transcript of "Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation," Richard Stallman's May 29, 2001, speech at New York University. \\ http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt }~ Stallman has been at turns ignored, satirized, vilified, and attacked-both from within and without the free software movement. Through it all, the GNU Project has managed to meet its milestones, albeit with a few notorious delays, and stay relevant in a software marketplace several orders of magnitude more complex than the one it entered 18 years ago. So too has the free software ideology, an ideology meticulously groomed by Stallman himself.
To understand the reasons behind this currency, it helps to examine Richard Stallman both in his own words and in the words of the people who have collaborated and battled with him along the way. The Richard Stallman character sketch is not a complicated one. If any person exemplifies the old adage "what you see is what you get," it's Stallman.
@@ -348,7 +339,7 @@ Thirty years after the fact, Lippman punctuates the memory with a laugh. "To tel
Seated at the dining-room table of her second Manhattan apartment-the same spacious three-bedroom complex she and her son moved to following her 1967 marriage to Maurice Lippman, now deceased-Alice Lippman exudes a Jewish mother's mixture of pride and bemusement when recalling her son's early years. The nearby dining-room credenza offers an eight-by-ten photo of Stallman glowering in full beard and doctoral robes. The image dwarfs accompanying photos of Lippman's nieces and nephews, but before a visitor can make too much of it, Lippman makes sure to balance its prominent placement with an ironic wisecrack.
={Lippman, Maurice}
-"Richard insisted I have it after he received his honorary doctorate at the University of Glasgow," says Lippman. "He said to me, `Guess what, mom? It's the first graduation I ever attended.'"~{ See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified Genius" (1999). This interview is one of the most candid Stallman interviews on the record. I recommend it highly.<br> http://www.mgross.com/interviews/stallman1.html }~
+"Richard insisted I have it after he received his honorary doctorate at the University of Glasgow," says Lippman. "He said to me, `Guess what, mom? It's the first graduation I ever attended.'"~{ See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified Genius" (1999). This interview is one of the most candid Stallman interviews on the record. I recommend it highly. \\ http://www.mgross.com/interviews/stallman1.html }~
={University of Glasgow}
Such comments reflect the sense of humor that comes with raising a child prodigy. Make no mistake, for every story Lippman hears and reads about her son's stubbornness and unusual behavior, she can deliver at least a dozen in return.
@@ -391,10 +382,10 @@ Seth Breidbart, a fellow Columbia Science Honors Program alumnus, offers bolster
"It's hard to describe," Breidbart says. "It wasn't like he was unapproachable. He was just very intense. [He was] very knowledgeable but also very hardheaded in some ways."
-Such descriptions give rise to speculation: are judgment-laden adjectives like "intense" and "hardheaded" simply a way to describe traits that today might be categorized under juvenile behavioral disorder? A December, 2001, /{Wired}/ magazine article titled "The Geek Syndrome" paints the portrait of several scientifically gifted children diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome. In many ways, the parental recollections recorded in the Wired article are eerily similar to the ones offered by Lippman. Even Stallman has indulged in psychiatric revisionism from time to time. During a 2000 profile for the /{Toronto Star}/, Stallman described himself to an interviewer as "borderline autistic,"~{ See Judy Steed, /{Toronto Star}/, BUSINESS, (October 9, 2000): C03.<br>His vision of free software and social cooperation stands in stark contrast to the isolated nature of his private life. A Glenn Gould-like eccentric, the Canadian pianist was similarly brilliant, articulate, and lonely. Stallman considers himself afflicted, to some degree, by autism: a condition that, he says, makes it difficult for him to interact with people. }~ a description that goes a long way toward explaining a lifelong tendency toward social and emotional isolation and the equally lifelong effort to overcome it.
+Such descriptions give rise to speculation: are judgment-laden adjectives like "intense" and "hardheaded" simply a way to describe traits that today might be categorized under juvenile behavioral disorder? A December, 2001, /{Wired}/ magazine article titled "The Geek Syndrome" paints the portrait of several scientifically gifted children diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome. In many ways, the parental recollections recorded in the Wired article are eerily similar to the ones offered by Lippman. Even Stallman has indulged in psychiatric revisionism from time to time. During a 2000 profile for the /{Toronto Star}/, Stallman described himself to an interviewer as "borderline autistic,"~{ See Judy Steed, /{Toronto Star}/, BUSINESS, (October 9, 2000): C03. \\ His vision of free software and social cooperation stands in stark contrast to the isolated nature of his private life. A Glenn Gould-like eccentric, the Canadian pianist was similarly brilliant, articulate, and lonely. Stallman considers himself afflicted, to some degree, by autism: a condition that, he says, makes it difficult for him to interact with people. }~ a description that goes a long way toward explaining a lifelong tendency toward social and emotional isolation and the equally lifelong effort to overcome it.
={Asperger Syndrome+1;autism+5;Geek Syndrome, The (Silberman)+1;Wired magazine;Toronto Star;Silberman, Steve+1;Stallman, Richard M.:behavioral disorders+1}
-Such speculation benefits from the fast and loose nature of most so-called "behavioral disorders" nowadays, of course. As Steve Silberman, author of "The Geek Syndrome," notes, American psychiatrists have only recently come to accept Asperger Syndrome as a valid umbrella term covering a wide set of behavioral traits. The traits range from poor motor skills and poor socialization to high intelligence and an almost obsessive affinity for numbers, computers, and ordered systems.~{ See Steve Silberman, "The Geek Syndrome," Wired (December, 2001).<br> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html }~ Reflecting on the broad nature of this umbrella, Stallman says its possible that, if born 40 years later, he might have merited just such a diagnosis. Then again, so would many of his computer-world colleagues.
+Such speculation benefits from the fast and loose nature of most so-called "behavioral disorders" nowadays, of course. As Steve Silberman, author of "The Geek Syndrome," notes, American psychiatrists have only recently come to accept Asperger Syndrome as a valid umbrella term covering a wide set of behavioral traits. The traits range from poor motor skills and poor socialization to high intelligence and an almost obsessive affinity for numbers, computers, and ordered systems.~{ See Steve Silberman, "The Geek Syndrome," Wired (December, 2001). \\ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html }~ Reflecting on the broad nature of this umbrella, Stallman says its possible that, if born 40 years later, he might have merited just such a diagnosis. Then again, so would many of his computer-world colleagues.
={Stallman, Richard M.:childhood, behavioral disorders}
"It's possible I could have had something like that," he says. "On the other hand, one of the aspects of that syndrome is difficulty following rhythms. I can dance. In fact, I love following the most complicated rhythms. It's not clear cut enough to know."
@@ -598,7 +589,7 @@ Looking back, Stallman sees nothing unusual in the AI Lab's willingness to accep
To get a taste of "bureaucratic and stuffy," Stallman need only visit the computer labs at Harvard. There, access to the terminals was doled out according to academic rank. As an undergrad, Stallman usually had to sign up or wait until midnight, about the time most professors and grad students finished their daily work assignments. The waiting wasn't difficult, but it was frustrating. Waiting for a public terminal, knowing all the while that a half dozen equally usable machines were sitting idle inside professors' locked offices, seemed the height of illogic. Although Stallman paid the occasional visit to the Harvard computer labs, he preferred the more egalitarian policies of the AI Lab. "It was a breath of fresh air," he says. "At the AI Lab, people seemed more concerned about work than status."
={Harvard University:computer labs}
-Stallman quickly learned that the AI Lab's first-come, first-served policy owed much to the efforts of a vigilant few. Many were holdovers from the days of Project MAC, the Department of Defense-funded research program that had given birth to the first time-share operating systems. A few were already legends in the computing world. There was Richard Greenblatt, the lab's in-house Lisp expert and author of MacHack, the computer chess program that had once humbled A.I. critic Hubert Dreyfus. There was Gerald Sussman, original author of the robotic block-stacking program HACKER. And there was Bill Gosper, the in-house math whiz already in the midst of an 18-month hacking bender triggered by the philosophical implications of the computer game LIFE.~{ See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 144.<br>Levy devotes about five pages to describing Gosper's fascination with LIFE, a math-based software game first created by British mathematician John Conway. I heartily recommend this book as a supplement, perhaps even a prerequisite, to this one. }~
+Stallman quickly learned that the AI Lab's first-come, first-served policy owed much to the efforts of a vigilant few. Many were holdovers from the days of Project MAC, the Department of Defense-funded research program that had given birth to the first time-share operating systems. A few were already legends in the computing world. There was Richard Greenblatt, the lab's in-house Lisp expert and author of MacHack, the computer chess program that had once humbled A.I. critic Hubert Dreyfus. There was Gerald Sussman, original author of the robotic block-stacking program HACKER. And there was Bill Gosper, the in-house math whiz already in the midst of an 18-month hacking bender triggered by the philosophical implications of the computer game LIFE.~{ See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 144. \\ Levy devotes about five pages to describing Gosper's fascination with LIFE, a math-based software game first created by British mathematician John Conway. I heartily recommend this book as a supplement, perhaps even a prerequisite, to this one. }~
={Dreyfus, Hubert;Gosper, Bill;Greenblat, Richard;LIFE mathematical game;LISP programming language;MacHack;Project MAC;Sussman, Gerald+2}
Members of the tight-knit group called themselves "hackers." Over time, they extended the "hacker" description to Stallman as well. In the process of doing so, they inculcated Stallman in the ethical traditions of the "hacker ethic ." To be a hacker meant more than just writing programs, Stallman learned. It meant writing the best possible programs. It meant sitting at a terminal for 36 hours straight if that's what it took to write the best possible programs. Most importantly, it meant having access to the best possible machines and the most useful information at all times. Hackers spoke openly about changing the world through software, and Stallman learned the instinctual hacker disdain for any obstacle that prevented a hacker from fulfilling this noble cause. Chief among these obstacles were poor software, academic bureaucracy, and selfish behavior.
@@ -624,7 +615,7 @@ Using this feature, Stallman was able to watch how programs written by hackers p
By the end of 1970, hacking at the AI Lab had become a regular part of Stallman's weekly schedule. From Monday to Thursday, Stallman devoted his waking hours to his Harvard classes. As soon as Friday afternoon arrived, however, he was on the T, heading down to MIT for the weekend. Stallman usually timed his arrival to coincide with the ritual food run. Joining five or six other hackers in their nightly quest for Chinese food, he would jump inside a beat-up car and head across the Harvard Bridge into nearby Boston. For the next two hours, he and his hacker colleagues would discuss everything from ITS to the internal logic of the Chinese language and pictograph system. Following dinner, the group would return to MIT and hack code until dawn.
-For the geeky outcast who rarely associated with his high-school peers, it was a heady experience, suddenly hanging out with people who shared the same predilection for computers, science fiction, and Chinese food. "I remember many sunrises seen from a car coming back from Chinatown," Stallman would recall nostalgically, 15 years after the fact in a speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute. "It was actually a very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, 'cause that's such a calm time of day. It's a wonderful time of day to get ready to go to bed. It's so nice to walk home with the light just brightening and the birds starting to chirp; you can get a real feeling of gentle satisfaction, of tranquility about the work that you have done that night."~{ See Richard Stallman, "RMS lecture at KTH (Sweden)," (October 30, 1986).<br> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html }~
+For the geeky outcast who rarely associated with his high-school peers, it was a heady experience, suddenly hanging out with people who shared the same predilection for computers, science fiction, and Chinese food. "I remember many sunrises seen from a car coming back from Chinatown," Stallman would recall nostalgically, 15 years after the fact in a speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute. "It was actually a very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, 'cause that's such a calm time of day. It's a wonderful time of day to get ready to go to bed. It's so nice to walk home with the light just brightening and the birds starting to chirp; you can get a real feeling of gentle satisfaction, of tranquility about the work that you have done that night."~{ See Richard Stallman, "RMS lecture at KTH (Sweden)," (October 30, 1986). \\ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html }~
={Swedish Royal Technical Institute}
The more Stallman hung out with the hackers, the more he adopted the hacker worldview. Already committed to the notion of personal liberty, Stallman began to infuse his actions with a sense of communal responsibility. When others violated the communal code, Stallman was quick to speak out. Within a year of his first visit, Stallman was the one breaking into locked offices, trying to recover the sequestered terminals that belonged to the lab community as a whole. In true hacker fashion, Stallman also sought to make his own personal contribution to the art of lock hacking. One of the most artful door-opening tricks, commonly attributed to Greenblatt, involved bending a stiff wire into a cane and attaching a loop of tape to the long end. Sliding the wire under the door, a hacker could twist and rotate the wire so that the long end touched the door knob. Provided the adhesive on the tape held, a hacker could open the doorknob with a few sharp twists.
@@ -694,7 +685,7 @@ Ask anyone who's spent more than a minute in Richard Stallman's presence, and yo
To call the Stallman gaze intense is an understatement. Stallman's eyes don't just look at you; they look through you. Even when your own eyes momentarily shift away out of simple primate politeness, Stallman's eyes remain locked-in, sizzling away at the side of your head like twin photon beams.
-Maybe that's why most writers, when describing Stallman, tend to go for the religious angle. In a 1998 Salon.com article titled "The Saint of Free Software," Andrew Leonard describes Stallman's green eyes as "radiating the power of an Old Testament prophet."~{ See Andrew Leonard, "The Saint of Free Software," Salon.com (August 1998).<br> http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/08/cov_31feature.html }~ A 1999 /{Wired}/ magazine article describes the Stallman beard as "Rasputin-like,"~{ See Leander Kahney, "Linux's Forgotten Man," Wired News (March 5, 1999).<br> http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,18291,00.html }~ while a /{London Guardian}/ profile describes the Stallman smile as the smile of "a disciple seeing Jesus."~{ See "Programmer on moral high ground; Free software is a moral issue for Richard Stallman believes in freedom and free software." London Guardian (November 6, 1999).<br>These are just a small sampling of the religious comparisons. To date, the most extreme comparison has to go to Linus Torvalds, who, in his autobiography-see Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-writes "Richard Stallman is the God of Free Software."<br>Honorable mention goes to Larry Lessig, who, in a footnote description of Stallman in his book-see Larry Lessig, The Future of Ideas (Random House, 2001): 270-likens Stallman to Moses:<br>_1 ... as with Moses, it was another leader, Linus Torvalds, who finally carried the movement into the promised land by facilitating the development of the final part of the OS puzzle. Like Moses, too, Stallman is both respected and reviled by allies within the movement. He is [an] unforgiving, and hence for many inspiring, leader of a critically important aspect of modern culture. I have deep respect for the principle and commitment of this extraordinary individual, though I also have great respect for those who are courageous enough to question his thinking and then sustain his wrath.<br>In a final interview with Stallman, I asked him his thoughts about the religious comparisons. "Some people do compare me with an Old Testament prophent, and the reason is Old Testament prophets said certain social practices were wrong. They wouldn't compromise on moral issues. They couldn't be bought off, and they were usually treated with contempt." }~
+Maybe that's why most writers, when describing Stallman, tend to go for the religious angle. In a 1998 Salon.com article titled "The Saint of Free Software," Andrew Leonard describes Stallman's green eyes as "radiating the power of an Old Testament prophet."~{ See Andrew Leonard, "The Saint of Free Software," Salon.com (August 1998). \\ http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/08/cov_31feature.html }~ A 1999 /{Wired}/ magazine article describes the Stallman beard as "Rasputin-like,"~{ See Leander Kahney, "Linux's Forgotten Man," Wired News (March 5, 1999). \\ http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,18291,00.html }~ while a /{London Guardian}/ profile describes the Stallman smile as the smile of "a disciple seeing Jesus."~{ See "Programmer on moral high ground; Free software is a moral issue for Richard Stallman believes in freedom and free software." London Guardian (November 6, 1999). \\ These are just a small sampling of the religious comparisons. To date, the most extreme comparison has to go to Linus Torvalds, who, in his autobiography-see Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-writes "Richard Stallman is the God of Free Software." \\ Honorable mention goes to Larry Lessig, who, in a footnote description of Stallman in his book-see Larry Lessig, The Future of Ideas (Random House, 2001): 270-likens Stallman to Moses: \\ _1 ... as with Moses, it was another leader, Linus Torvalds, who finally carried the movement into the promised land by facilitating the development of the final part of the OS puzzle. Like Moses, too, Stallman is both respected and reviled by allies within the movement. He is [an] unforgiving, and hence for many inspiring, leader of a critically important aspect of modern culture. I have deep respect for the principle and commitment of this extraordinary individual, though I also have great respect for those who are courageous enough to question his thinking and then sustain his wrath. \\ In a final interview with Stallman, I asked him his thoughts about the religious comparisons. "Some people do compare me with an Old Testament prophent, and the reason is Old Testament prophets said certain social practices were wrong. They wouldn't compromise on moral issues. They couldn't be bought off, and they were usually treated with contempt." }~
={Wired magazine;Leonard, Andrew;London Guardian;Salon.com}
Such analogies serve a purpose, but they ultimately fall short. That's because they fail to take into account the vulnerable side of the Stallman persona. Watch the Stallman gaze for an extended period of time, and you will begin to notice a subtle change. What appears at first to be an attempt to intimidate or hypnotize reveals itself upon second and third viewing as a frustrated attempt to build and maintain contact. If, as Stallman himself has suspected from time to time, his personality is the product of autism or Asperger Syndrome, his eyes certainly confirm the diagnosis. Even at their most high-beam level of intensity, they have a tendency to grow cloudy and distant, like the eyes of a wounded animal preparing to give up the ghost.
@@ -756,7 +747,7 @@ Stallman's body bears witness to the tragedy. Lack of exercise has left Stallman
The walk is further slowed by Stallman's willingness to stop and smell the roses, literally. Spotting a particularly beautiful blossom, he tickles the innermost petals with his prodigious nose, takes a deep sniff and steps back with a contented sigh.
-"Mmm, rhinophytophilia,"~{ At the time, I thought Stallman was referring to the flower's scientific name. Months later, I would learn that rhinophytophilia was in fact a humorous reference to the activity, i.e., Stallman sticking his nose into a flower and enjoying the moment. For another humorous Stallman flower incident, visit:<br> http://www.stallman.org/texas.html }~ he says, rubbing his back.
+"Mmm, rhinophytophilia,"~{ At the time, I thought Stallman was referring to the flower's scientific name. Months later, I would learn that rhinophytophilia was in fact a humorous reference to the activity, i.e., Stallman sticking his nose into a flower and enjoying the moment. For another humorous Stallman flower incident, visit: \\ http://www.stallman.org/texas.html }~ he says, rubbing his back.
The drive to the restaurant takes less than three minutes. Upon recommendation from Tim Ney, former executive director of the Free Software Foundation, I have let Stallman choose the restaurant. While some reporters zero in on Stallman's monk-like lifestyle, the truth is, Stallman is a committed epicure when it comes to food. One of the fringe benefits of being a traveling missionary for the free software cause is the ability to sample delicious food from around the world. "Visit almost any major city in the world, and chances are Richard knows the best restaurant in town," says Ney. "Richard also takes great pride in knowing what's on the menu and ordering for the entire table."
={Ney, Tim}
@@ -781,7 +772,7 @@ The conversation shifts to Napster, the San Mateo, California software company,
Although based on proprietary software, the Napster system draws inspiration from the long-held Stallman contention that once a work enters the digital realm-in other words, once making a copy is less a matter of duplicating sounds or duplicating atoms and more a matter of duplicating information-the natural human impulse to share a work becomes harder to restrict. Rather than impose additional restrictions, Napster execs have decided to take advantage of the impulse. Giving music listeners a central place to trade music files, the company has gambled on its ability to steer the resulting user traffic toward other commercial opportunities.
-The sudden success of the Napster model has put the fear in traditional record companies, with good reason. Just days before my Palo Alto meeting with Stallman, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel granted a request filed by the Recording Industry Association of America for an injunction against the file-sharing service. The injunction was subsequently suspended by the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals, but by early 2001, the Court of Appeals, too, would find the San Mateo-based company in breach of copyright law,~{ See Cecily Barnes and Scott Ard, "Court Grants Stay of Napster Injunction," News.com (July 28, 2000).<br> http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-2376465.html }~ a decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later proclaim proclaim a "clear victory for the creative content community and the legitimate online marketplace."~{ See "A Clear Victory for Recording Industry in Napster Case," RIAA press release (February 12, 2001).<br> http://www.riaa.com/PR_story.cfm?id=372 }~
+The sudden success of the Napster model has put the fear in traditional record companies, with good reason. Just days before my Palo Alto meeting with Stallman, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel granted a request filed by the Recording Industry Association of America for an injunction against the file-sharing service. The injunction was subsequently suspended by the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals, but by early 2001, the Court of Appeals, too, would find the San Mateo-based company in breach of copyright law,~{ See Cecily Barnes and Scott Ard, "Court Grants Stay of Napster Injunction," News.com (July 28, 2000). \\ http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-2376465.html }~ a decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later proclaim proclaim a "clear victory for the creative content community and the legitimate online marketplace."~{ See "A Clear Victory for Recording Industry in Napster Case," RIAA press release (February 12, 2001). \\ http://www.riaa.com/PR_story.cfm?id=372 }~
For hackers such as Stallman, the Napster business model is scary in different ways. The company's eagerness to appropriate time-worn hacker principles such as file sharing and communal information ownership, while at the same time selling a service based on proprietary software, sends a distressing mixed message. As a person who already has a hard enough time getting his own carefully articulated message into the media stream, Stallman is understandably reticent when it comes to speaking out about the company. Still, Stallman does admit to learning a thing or two from the social side of the Napster phenomenon.
@@ -804,7 +795,7 @@ I turn to look, catching a glimpse of a woman's back. The woman is young, somewh
"Oh, no," he says. "They're gone. And to think, I'll probably never even get to see her again."
-After a brief sigh, Stallman recovers. The moment gives me a chance to discuss Stallman's reputation vis-ý-vis the fairer sex. The reputation is a bit contradictory at times. A number of hackers report Stallman's predilection for greeting females with a kiss on the back of the hand.~{ See Mae Ling Mak, "Mae Ling's Story" (December 17, 1998).<br> http://www.crackmonkey.org/pipermail/crackmonkey/1998q4/003006.htm <br>So far, Mak is the only person I've found willing to speak on the record in regard to this practice, although I've heard this from a few other female sources. Mak, despite expressing initial revulsion at it, later managed to put aside her misgivings and dance with Stallman at a 1999 LinuxWorld show.<br> http://www.linux.com/interact/potd.phtml?potd_id=44 }~ A May 26, 2000 Salon.com article, meanwhile, portrays Stallman as a bit of a hacker lothario. Documenting the free software-free love connection, reporter Annalee Newitz presents Stallman as rejecting traditional family values, telling her, "I believe in love, but not monogamy."~{ See Annalee Newitz, "If Code is Free Why Not Me?" Salon.com (May 26, 2000).<br> http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/26/free_love/print.html }~
+After a brief sigh, Stallman recovers. The moment gives me a chance to discuss Stallman's reputation vis-ý-vis the fairer sex. The reputation is a bit contradictory at times. A number of hackers report Stallman's predilection for greeting females with a kiss on the back of the hand.~{ See Mae Ling Mak, "Mae Ling's Story" (December 17, 1998). \\ http://www.crackmonkey.org/pipermail/crackmonkey/1998q4/003006.htm \\ So far, Mak is the only person I've found willing to speak on the record in regard to this practice, although I've heard this from a few other female sources. Mak, despite expressing initial revulsion at it, later managed to put aside her misgivings and dance with Stallman at a 1999 LinuxWorld show. \\ http://www.linux.com/interact/potd.phtml?potd_id=44 }~ A May 26, 2000 Salon.com article, meanwhile, portrays Stallman as a bit of a hacker lothario. Documenting the free software-free love connection, reporter Annalee Newitz presents Stallman as rejecting traditional family values, telling her, "I believe in love, but not monogamy."~{ See Annalee Newitz, "If Code is Free Why Not Me?" Salon.com (May 26, 2000). \\ http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/26/free_love/print.html }~
={Newitz, Annalee;Salon.com}
Stallman lets his menu drop a little when I bring this up. "Well, most men seem to want sex and seem to have a rather contemptuous attitude towards women," he says. "Even women they're involved with. I can't understand it at all."
@@ -848,7 +839,7 @@ Stallman asks me if I would be interested in hearing the folk filk. As soon as I
_1 How much wood could a woodchuck chuck,If a woodchuck could chuck wood? How many poles could a polak lock,If a polak could lock poles? How many knees could a negro grow, If a negro could grow knees? The answer, my dear, is stick it in your ear.The answer is to stick it in your ear.
-The singing ends, and Stallman's lips curl into another child-like half smile. I glance around at the nearby tables. The Asian families enjoying their Sunday lunch pay little attention to the bearded alto in their midst.~{ For more Stallman filks, visit<br> http://www.stallman.org/doggerel.html. To hear Stallman singing "The Free Software Song," visit<br> http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html. }~ After a few moments of hesitation, I finally smile too.
+The singing ends, and Stallman's lips curl into another child-like half smile. I glance around at the nearby tables. The Asian families enjoying their Sunday lunch pay little attention to the bearded alto in their midst.~{ For more Stallman filks, visit \\ http://www.stallman.org/doggerel.html. To hear Stallman singing "The Free Software Song," visit \\ http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html. }~ After a few moments of hesitation, I finally smile too.
"Do you want that last cornball?" Stallman asks, eyes twinkling. Before I can screw up the punch line, Stallman grabs the corn-encrusted dumpling with his two chopsticks and lifts it proudly. "Maybe I'm the one who should get the cornball," he says.
@@ -912,7 +903,7 @@ The waiter, uncomprehending or fooled by the look of the bill, smiles and scurri
The AI Lab of the 1970s was by all accounts a special place. Cutting-edge projects and top-flight researchers gave it an esteemed position in the world of computer science. The internal hacker culture and its anarchic policies lent a rebellious mystique as well. Only later, when many of the lab's scientists and software superstars had departed, would hackers fully realize the unique and ephemeral world they had once inhabited.
={AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory)+17}
-"It was a bit like the Garden of Eden," says Stallman, summing up the lab and its software-sharing ethos in a 1998 Forbes article. "It hadn't occurred to us not to cooperate."~{ See Josh McHugh, "For the Love of Hacking," Forbes (August 10, 1998).<br> http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1998/0810/6203094a.html }~
+"It was a bit like the Garden of Eden," says Stallman, summing up the lab and its software-sharing ethos in a 1998 Forbes article. "It hadn't occurred to us not to cooperate."~{ See Josh McHugh, "For the Love of Hacking," Forbes (August 10, 1998). \\ http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1998/0810/6203094a.html }~
Such mythological descriptions, while extreme, underline an important fact. The ninth floor of 545 Tech Square was more than a workplace for many. For hackers such as Stallman, it was home.
@@ -969,13 +960,13 @@ During the late 1960s, interface design made additional leaps. In a famous 1968
Such innovations would take another two decades to make their way into the commercial marketplace. Still, by the 1970s, video screens had started to replace teletypes as display terminals, creating the potential for full-screen-as opposed to line-by-line-editing capabilities.
={display terminals, replacing teletypes;video screens}
-One of the first programs to take advantage of this full-screen capability was the MIT AI Lab's TECO. Short for Text Editor and COrrector, the program had been upgraded by hackers from an old teletype line editor for the lab's PDP-6 machine.~{ According to the Jargon File, TECO's name originally stood for Tape Editor and Corrector.<br> http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/TECO.html }~
+One of the first programs to take advantage of this full-screen capability was the MIT AI Lab's TECO. Short for Text Editor and COrrector, the program had been upgraded by hackers from an old teletype line editor for the lab's PDP-6 machine.~{ According to the Jargon File, TECO's name originally stood for Tape Editor and Corrector. \\ http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/TECO.html }~
-TECO was a substantial improvement over old editors, but it still had its drawbacks. To create and edit a document, a programmer had to enter a series of software commands specifying each edit. It was an abstract process. Unlike modern word processors, which update text with each keystroke, TECO demanded that the user enter an extended series of editing instructions followed by an "end of command" sequence just to change the text.Over time, a hacker grew proficient enough to write entire documents in edit mode, but as Stallman himself would later point out, the process required "a mental skill like that of blindfold chess."~{ See Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor," AI Lab Memo (1979). An updated HTML version of this memo, from which I am quoting, is available at<br> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html }~
+TECO was a substantial improvement over old editors, but it still had its drawbacks. To create and edit a document, a programmer had to enter a series of software commands specifying each edit. It was an abstract process. Unlike modern word processors, which update text with each keystroke, TECO demanded that the user enter an extended series of editing instructions followed by an "end of command" sequence just to change the text.Over time, a hacker grew proficient enough to write entire documents in edit mode, but as Stallman himself would later point out, the process required "a mental skill like that of blindfold chess."~{ See Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor," AI Lab Memo (1979). An updated HTML version of this memo, from which I am quoting, is available at \\ http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html }~
To facilitate the process, AI Lab hackers had built a system that displayed both the "source" and "display" modes on a split screen. Despite this innovative hack, switching from mode to mode was still a nuisance.
-TECO wasn't the only full-screen editor floating around the computer world at this time. During a visit to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1976, Stallman encountered an edit program named E. The program contained an internal feature, which allowed a user to update display text after each command keystroke. In the language of 1970s programming, E was one of the first rudimentary WYSIWYG editors. Short for "what you see is what you get," WYSIWYG meant that a user could manipulate the file by moving through the displayed text, as opposed to working through a back-end editor program."~{ See Richard Stallman, "Emacs the Full Screen Editor" (1987).<br> http://www.lysator.liu.se/history/garb/txt/87-1-emacs.txt }~
+TECO wasn't the only full-screen editor floating around the computer world at this time. During a visit to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1976, Stallman encountered an edit program named E. The program contained an internal feature, which allowed a user to update display text after each command keystroke. In the language of 1970s programming, E was one of the first rudimentary WYSIWYG editors. Short for "what you see is what you get," WYSIWYG meant that a user could manipulate the file by moving through the displayed text, as opposed to working through a back-end editor program."~{ See Richard Stallman, "Emacs the Full Screen Editor" (1987). \\ http://www.lysator.liu.se/history/garb/txt/87-1-emacs.txt }~
={E edit program;Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory}
Impressed by the hack, Stallman looked for ways to expand TECO's functionality in similar fashion upon his return to MIT. He found a TECO feature called Control-R, written by Carl Mikkelson and named after the two-key combination that triggered it. Mikkelson's hack switched TECO from its usual abstract command-execution mode to a more intuitive keystroke-by-keystroke mode. Stallman revised the feature in a subtle but significant way. He made it possible to trigger other TECO command strings, or "macros," using other, two-key combinations. Where users had once entered command strings and discarded them after entering then, Stallman's hack made it possible to save macro tricks on file and call them up at will. Mikkelson's hack had raised TECO to the level of a WYSIWYG editor. Stallman's hack had raised it to the level of a user-programmable WYSIWYG editor. "That was the real breakthrough," says Guy Steele, a fellow AI Lab hacker at the time. ^39^
@@ -1014,7 +1005,7 @@ Stallman now faced another conundrum: if users made changes but didn't communica
Not everybody accepted the contract. The explosive innovation continued throughout the decade, resulting in a host of Emacs-like programs with varying degrees of cross-compatibility. A few cited their relation to Stallman's original Emacs with humorously recursive names: Sine (Sine is not Emacs), Eine (Eine is not Emacs), and Zwei (Zwei was Eine initially). As a devoted exponent of the hacker ethic, Stallman saw no reason to halt this innovation through legal harassment. Still, the fact that some people would so eagerly take software from the community chest, alter it, and slap a new name on the resulting software displayed a stunning lack of courtesy.
={Eine (Eine is not Emacs) text editor;Zwei (Zwei was Eine initially) text editor;Sine (Sine is not Emacs) text editor}
-Such rude behavior was reflected against other, unsettling developments in the hacker community. Brian Reid's 1979 decision to embed "time bombs" in Scribe, making it possible for Unilogic to limit unpaid user access to the software, was a dark omen to Stallman. "He considered it the most Nazi thing he ever saw in his life," recalls Reid. Despite going on to later Internet fame as the cocreator of the Usenet alt heirarchy, Reid says he still has yet to live down that 1979 decision, at least in Stallman's eyes. "He said that all software should be free and the prospect of charging money for software was a crime against humanity."~{ In a 1996 interview with online magazine MEME, Stallman cited Scribe's sale as irksome, but hesitated to mention Reid by name. "The problem was nobody censured or punished this student for what he did," Stallman said. "The result was other people got tempted to follow his example." See MEME 2.04.<br> http://memex.org/meme2-04.html }~
+Such rude behavior was reflected against other, unsettling developments in the hacker community. Brian Reid's 1979 decision to embed "time bombs" in Scribe, making it possible for Unilogic to limit unpaid user access to the software, was a dark omen to Stallman. "He considered it the most Nazi thing he ever saw in his life," recalls Reid. Despite going on to later Internet fame as the cocreator of the Usenet alt heirarchy, Reid says he still has yet to live down that 1979 decision, at least in Stallman's eyes. "He said that all software should be free and the prospect of charging money for software was a crime against humanity."~{ In a 1996 interview with online magazine MEME, Stallman cited Scribe's sale as irksome, but hesitated to mention Reid by name. "The problem was nobody censured or punished this student for what he did," Stallman said. "The result was other people got tempted to follow his example." See MEME 2.04. \\ http://memex.org/meme2-04.html }~
={Reid, Brian+1;Unilogic software company;time bombs, in software;Scribe text-formatting program}
% additional reference to Unilogic; also time bombs; also scribe text-formatting program
@@ -1026,7 +1017,7 @@ Although Stallman had been powerless to head off Reid's sale, he did possess the
Over time, Emacs became a sales tool for the hacker ethic. The flexibility Stallman and built into the software not only encouraged collaboration, it demanded it. Users who didn't keep abreast of the latest developments in Emacs evolution or didn't contribute their contributions back to Stallman ran the risk of missing out on the latest breakthroughs. And the breakthroughs were many. Twenty years later, users had modified Emacs for so many different uses-using it as a spreadsheet, calculator, database, and web browser-that later Emacs developers adopted an overflowing sink to represent its versatile functionality. "That's the idea that we wanted to convey," says Stallman. "The amount of stuff it has contained within it is both wonderful and awful at the same time."
-Stallman's AI Lab contemporaries are more charitable. Hal Abelson, an MIT grad student who worked with Stallman during the 1970s and would later assist Stallman as a charter boardmember of the Free Software Foundation, describes Emacs as "an absolutely brilliant creation." In giving programmers a way to add new software libraries and features without messing up the system, Abelson says, Stallman paved the way for future large-scale collaborative software projects. "Its structure was robust enough that you'd have people all over the world who were loosely collaborating [and] contributing to it," Abelson says. "I don't know if that had been done before."~{ In writing this chapter, I've elected to focus more on the social significance of Emacs than the software significance. To read more about the software side, I recommend Stallman's 1979 memo. I particularly recommend the section titled "Research Through Development of Installed Tools" (#SEC27). Not only is it accessible to the nontechnical reader, it also sheds light on how closely intertwined Stallman's political philosophies are with his software-design philosophies. A sample excerpt follows:<br>_1 EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight. }~
+Stallman's AI Lab contemporaries are more charitable. Hal Abelson, an MIT grad student who worked with Stallman during the 1970s and would later assist Stallman as a charter boardmember of the Free Software Foundation, describes Emacs as "an absolutely brilliant creation." In giving programmers a way to add new software libraries and features without messing up the system, Abelson says, Stallman paved the way for future large-scale collaborative software projects. "Its structure was robust enough that you'd have people all over the world who were loosely collaborating [and] contributing to it," Abelson says. "I don't know if that had been done before."~{ In writing this chapter, I've elected to focus more on the social significance of Emacs than the software significance. To read more about the software side, I recommend Stallman's 1979 memo. I particularly recommend the section titled "Research Through Development of Installed Tools" (#SEC27). Not only is it accessible to the nontechnical reader, it also sheds light on how closely intertwined Stallman's political philosophies are with his software-design philosophies. A sample excerpt follows: \\ EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight. }~
={Abelson, Hal}
Guy Steele expresses similar admiration. Currently a research scientist for Sun Microsystems, he remembers Stallman primarily as a "brilliant programmer with the ability to generate large quantities of relatively bug-free code." Although their personalities didn't exactly mesh, Steele and Stallman collaborated long enough for Steele to get a glimpse of Stallman's intense coding style. He recalls a notable episode in the late 1970s when the two programmers banded together to write the editor's "pretty print" feature. Originally conceived by Steele, pretty print was another keystroke-triggerd feature that reformatted Emacs' source code so that it was both more readable and took up less space, further bolstering the program's WYSIWIG qualities. The feature was strategic enough to attract Stallman's active interest, and it wasn't long before Steele wrote that he and Stallman were planning an improved version.
@@ -1044,7 +1035,7 @@ The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI Lab. S
On September 27, 1983, computer programmers logging on to the Usenet newsgroup net.unix-wizards encountered an unusual message. Posted in the small hours of the morning, 12:30 a.m. to be exact, and signed by rms@mit-oz, the message's subject line was terse but attention-grabbing. "New UNIX implementation," it read. Instead of introducing a newly released version of Unix, however, the message's opening paragraph issued a call to arms:
={GNU Project:new UNIX implementation;net.unix-wizards newsgroup}
-_1 Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.~{ See Richard Stallman, "Initial GNU Announcement" (September 1983).<br> http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/gnu/initial-announcement.html }~
+_1 Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.~{ See Richard Stallman, "Initial GNU Announcement" (September 1983). \\ http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/gnu/initial-announcement.html }~
={Unix operating system:GNU system and}
To an experienced Unix developer, the message was a mixture of idealism and hubris. Not only did the author pledge to rebuild the already mature Unix operating system from the ground up, he also proposed to improve it in places. The new GNU system, the author predicted, would carry all the usual components-a text editor, a shell program to run Unix-compatible applications, a compiler, "and a few other things." ^44^ It would also contain many enticing features that other Unix systems didn't yet offer: a graphic user interface based on the Lisp programming language, a crash-proof file system, and networking protocols built according to MIT's internal networking system.
@@ -1077,7 +1068,7 @@ The breaking point came in 1982. That was the year the lab's administration deci
"Without hackers to maintain the system, [faculty members] said, `We're going to have a disaster; we must have commercial software,'" Stallman would recall a few years later. "They said, `We can expect the company to maintain it.' It proved that they were utterly wrong, but that's what they did."~{ See Richard Stallman (1986). }~
-At first, hackers viewed the Twenex system as yet another authoritarian symbol begging to be subverted. The system's name itself was a protest. Officially dubbed TOPS-20 by DEC, it was a successor to TOPS-10, a commercial operating system DEC marketed for the PDP-10. Bolt Beranek Newman had deveoped an improved version, dubbed Tenex, which TOPS-20 drew upon.~{ Multiple sources: see Richard Stallman interview, Gerald Sussman email, and Jargon File 3.0.0.<br> http://www.clueless.com/jargon3.0.0/TWENEX.html }~ Stallman, the hacker who coined the Twenex term, says he came up with the name as a way to avoid using the TOPS-20 name. "The system was far from tops, so there was no way I was going to call it that," Stallman recalls. "So I decided to insert a `w' in the Tenex name and call it Twenex."
+At first, hackers viewed the Twenex system as yet another authoritarian symbol begging to be subverted. The system's name itself was a protest. Officially dubbed TOPS-20 by DEC, it was a successor to TOPS-10, a commercial operating system DEC marketed for the PDP-10. Bolt Beranek Newman had deveoped an improved version, dubbed Tenex, which TOPS-20 drew upon.~{ Multiple sources: see Richard Stallman interview, Gerald Sussman email, and Jargon File 3.0.0. \\ http://www.clueless.com/jargon3.0.0/TWENEX.html }~ Stallman, the hacker who coined the Twenex term, says he came up with the name as a way to avoid using the TOPS-20 name. "The system was far from tops, so there was no way I was going to call it that," Stallman recalls. "So I decided to insert a `w' in the Tenex name and call it Twenex."
={DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation);TOPS-20 operating system+1}
% ={Bolt, Beranek & Newman engineering firm;Tenex}
@@ -1097,7 +1088,7 @@ The disguise was a thin one at best. By 1982, Stallman's aversion to passwords a
"I'm eternally grateful that MIT let me and many other people use their computers for free," says Hopkins. "It meant a lot to many people."
-This so-called "tourist" policy, which had been openly tolerated by MIT management during the ITS years,~{ See "MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy."<br> http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/tourist-policy.html }~ fell by the wayside when Oz became the lab's primary link to the ARPAnet. At first, Stallman continued his policy of repeating his login ID as a password so outside users could follow in his footsteps. Over time, however, the Oz's fragility prompted administrators to bar outsiders who, through sheer accident or malicious intent, might bring down the system. When those same administrators eventually demanded that Stallman stop publishing his password, Stallman, citing personal ethics, refused to do so and ceased using the Oz system altogether. ^46^
+This so-called "tourist" policy, which had been openly tolerated by MIT management during the ITS years,~{ See "MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy." \\ http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/tourist-policy.html }~ fell by the wayside when Oz became the lab's primary link to the ARPAnet. At first, Stallman continued his policy of repeating his login ID as a password so outside users could follow in his footsteps. Over time, however, the Oz's fragility prompted administrators to bar outsiders who, through sheer accident or malicious intent, might bring down the system. When those same administrators eventually demanded that Stallman stop publishing his password, Stallman, citing personal ethics, refused to do so and ceased using the Oz system altogether. ^46^
"[When] passwords first appeared at the MIT AI Lab I [decided] to follow my belief that there should be no passwords," Stallman would later say. "Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime." ^46^
@@ -1160,7 +1151,7 @@ Nowhere was this state of affairs more evident than in the realm of personal com
One of the most notorious of these programmers was Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout two years Stallman's junior. Although Stallman didn't know it at the time, seven years before sending out his message to the net.unix-wizards newsgroup, Gates, a budding entrepreneur and general partner with the Albuquerque-based software firm Micro-Soft, later spelled as Microsoft, had sent out his own open letter to the software-developer community. Written in response to the PC users copying Micro-Soft's software programs, Gates' " Open Letter to Hobbyists" had excoriated the notion of communal software development.
={Gates, Bill+2;Micro-Soft;net.unix-wizards newsgroup;Open Letter to Hobbyists (Gates)+1}
-"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" asked Gates. "What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free?"~{ See Bill Gates, "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" (February 3, 1976).<br>To view an online copy of this letter, go to<br> http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html. }~
+"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" asked Gates. "What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free?"~{ See Bill Gates, "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" (February 3, 1976). \\ To view an online copy of this letter, go to \\ http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html. }~
Although few hackers at the AI Lab saw the missive, Gates' 1976 letter nevertheless represented the changing attitude toward software both among commercial software companies and commercial software developers. Why treat software as a zero-cost commodity when the market said otherwise? As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, selling software became more than a way to recoup costs; it became a political statement. At a time when the Reagan Administration was rushing to dismantle many of the federal regulations and spending programs that had been built up during the half century following the Great Depression, more than a few software programmers saw the hacker ethic as anticompetitive and, by extension, un-American. At best, it was a throwback to the anticorporate attitudes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like a Wall Street banker discovering an old tie-dyed shirt hiding between French-cuffed shirts and double-breasted suits, many computer programmers treated the hacker ethic as an embarrassing reminder of an idealistic age.
@@ -1180,7 +1171,7 @@ group{
If not now, when?
-}group ~{ See Richard Stallman, Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 56.<br>Stallman adds his own footnote to this statement, writing, "As an atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said." }~
+}group ~{ See Richard Stallman, Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 56. \\ Stallman adds his own footnote to this statement, writing, "As an atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said." }~
Speaking to audiences, Stallman avoids the religious route and expresses the decision in pragmatic terms. "I asked myself: what could I, an operating-system developer, do to improve the situation? It wasn't until I examined the question for a while that I realized an operating-system developer was exactly what was needed to solve the problem."
@@ -1221,7 +1212,7 @@ In the course of reverse-engineering Gosling's interpreter, Stallman would creat
Despite the stress it generated, the dispute over Gosling's innovations would assist both Stallman and the free software movement in the long term. It would force Stallman to address the weaknesses of the Emacs Commune and the informal trust system that had allowed problematic offshoots to emerge. It would also force Stallman to sharpen the free software movement's political objectives. Following the release of GNU Emacs in 1985, Stallman issued " The GNU Manifesto," an expansion of the original announcement posted in September, 1983. Stallman included within the document a lengthy section devoted to the many arguments used by commercial and academic programmers to justify the proliferation of proprietary software programs. One argument, "Don't programmers deserve a reward for their creativity," earned a response encapsulating Stallman's anger over the recent Gosling Emacs episode:
={Emacs Commune:proprietary software and;Emacs text editor;GNU Emacs;GNU Manifesto}
-"If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution," Stallman wrote. "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [sic] as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs."~{ See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Manifesto" (1985).<br> http://www.gnu.org/manifesto.html }~
+"If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution," Stallman wrote. "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [sic] as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs."~{ See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Manifesto" (1985). \\ http://www.gnu.org/manifesto.html }~
With the release of GNU Emacs, the GNU Project finally had code to show. It also had the burdens of any software-based enterprise. As more and more Unix developers began playing with the software, money, gifts, and requests for tapes began to pour in. To address the business side of the GNU Project, Stallman drafted a few of his colleagues and formed the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to speeding the GNU Project towards its goal. With Stallman as president and various hacker allies as board members, the FSF helped provide a corporate face for the GNU Project.
={Free Software Foundation (FSF):GNU Project and;GNU Project:Emacs, release of}
@@ -1261,9 +1252,9 @@ Needless to say, Stallman, who stands in front of the room dressed in plain blue
As Stallman putters around the front of the room, a few audience members wearing T-shirts with the logo of the Maui FreeBSD Users Group (MFUG) race to set up camera and audio equipment. FreeBSD, a free software offshoot of the Berkeley Software Distribution, the venerable 1970s academic version of Unix, is technically a competitor to the GNU/Linux operating system. Still, in the hacking world, Stallman speeches are documented with a fervor reminiscent of the Grateful Dead and its legendary army of amateur archivists. As the local free software heads, it's up to the MFUG members to make sure fellow programmers in Hamburg, Mumbai, and Novosibirsk don't miss out on the latest pearls of RMS wisdom.
={Berkely Software Distribution (BSD);BSD (Berkely Software Distribution);Grateful Dead, The+1;Maui FreeBSD Users Group}
-The analogy to the Grateful Dead is apt. Often, when describing the business opportunities inherent within the free software model, Stallman has held up the Grateful Dead as an example. In refusing to restrict fans' ability to record live concerts, the Grateful Dead became more than a rock group. They became the center of a tribal community dedicated to Grateful Dead music. Over time, that tribal community became so large and so devoted that the band shunned record contracts and supported itself solely through musical tours and live appearances. In 1994, the band's last year as a touring act, the Grateful Dead drew $52 million in gate receipts alone.~{ See "Grateful Dead Time Capsule: 1985-1995 North American Tour Grosses."<br> http://www.accessplace.com/gdtc/1197.htm }~
+The analogy to the Grateful Dead is apt. Often, when describing the business opportunities inherent within the free software model, Stallman has held up the Grateful Dead as an example. In refusing to restrict fans' ability to record live concerts, the Grateful Dead became more than a rock group. They became the center of a tribal community dedicated to Grateful Dead music. Over time, that tribal community became so large and so devoted that the band shunned record contracts and supported itself solely through musical tours and live appearances. In 1994, the band's last year as a touring act, the Grateful Dead drew $52 million in gate receipts alone.~{ See "Grateful Dead Time Capsule: 1985-1995 North American Tour Grosses." \\ http://www.accessplace.com/gdtc/1197.htm }~
-While few software companies have been able to match that success, the tribal aspect of the free software community is one reason many in the latter half of the 1990s started to accept the notion that publishing software source code might be a good thing. Hoping to build their own loyal followings, companies such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett Packard have come to accept the letter, if not the spirit, of the Stallman free software message. Describing the GPL as the information-technology industry's "Magna Carta," ZDNet software columnist Evan Leibovitch sees the growing affection for all things GNU as more than just a trend. "This societal shift is letting users take back control of their futures," Leibovitch writes. "Just as the Magna Carta gave rights to British subjects, the GPL enforces consumer rights and freedoms on behalf of the users of computer software."~{ See Evan Leibovitch, "Who's Afraid of Big Bad Wolves," ZDNet Tech Update (December 15, 2000).<br> http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2664992,00.html }~
+While few software companies have been able to match that success, the tribal aspect of the free software community is one reason many in the latter half of the 1990s started to accept the notion that publishing software source code might be a good thing. Hoping to build their own loyal followings, companies such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett Packard have come to accept the letter, if not the spirit, of the Stallman free software message. Describing the GPL as the information-technology industry's "Magna Carta," ZDNet software columnist Evan Leibovitch sees the growing affection for all things GNU as more than just a trend. "This societal shift is letting users take back control of their futures," Leibovitch writes. "Just as the Magna Carta gave rights to British subjects, the GPL enforces consumer rights and freedoms on behalf of the users of computer software."~{ See Evan Leibovitch, "Who's Afraid of Big Bad Wolves," ZDNet Tech Update (December 15, 2000). \\ http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2664992,00.html }~
={Hewlett Packard;IBM;Sun Microsystems}
The tribal aspect of the free software community also helps explain why 40-odd programmers, who might otherwise be working on physics projects or surfing the Web for windsurfing buoy reports, have packed into a conference room to hear Stallman speak.
@@ -1275,7 +1266,7 @@ Unlike the New York speech, Stallman gets no introduction. He also offers no sel
Once again, Stallman quickly segues into the parable of the Xerox laser printer, taking a moment to deliver the same dramatic finger-pointing gestures to the crowd. He also devotes a minute or two to the GNU/Linux name.
-"Some people say to me, `Why make such a fuss about getting credit for this system? After all, the important thing is the job is done, not whether you get recognition for it.' Well, this would be wise advice if it were true. But the job wasn't to build an operating system; the job is to spread freedom to the users of computers. And to do that we have to make it possible to do everything with computers in freedom."~{ For narrative purposes, I have hesitated to go in-depth when describing Stallman's full definition of software "freedom." The GNU Project web site lists four fundamental components:<br>The freedom to run a program, for any purpose (freedom 0).<br>The freedom to study how a program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1).<br>The freedom to redistribute copies of a program so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).<br>The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3).<br>For more information, please visit "The Free Software Definition" at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html }~
+"Some people say to me, `Why make such a fuss about getting credit for this system? After all, the important thing is the job is done, not whether you get recognition for it.' Well, this would be wise advice if it were true. But the job wasn't to build an operating system; the job is to spread freedom to the users of computers. And to do that we have to make it possible to do everything with computers in freedom."~{ For narrative purposes, I have hesitated to go in-depth when describing Stallman's full definition of software "freedom." The GNU Project web site lists four fundamental components: \\ The freedom to run a program, for any purpose (freedom 0). \\ The freedom to study how a program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). \\ The freedom to redistribute copies of a program so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). \\ The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). \\ For more information, please visit "The Free Software Definition" at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html }~
Adds Stallman, "There's a lot more work to do."
@@ -1329,7 +1320,7 @@ The skit is a lighthearted moment of self-pardoy, a humorous return-jab at the m
Discussing the St. Ignucius persona afterward, Stallman says he first came up with it in 1996, long after the creation of Emacs but well before the emergence of the "open source" term and the struggle for hacker-community leadership that precipitated it. At the time, Stallman says, he wanted a way to "poke fun at himself," to remind listeners that, though stubborn, Stallman was not the fanatic some made him out to be. It was only later, Stallman adds, that others seized the persona as a convenient way to play up his reputation as software ideologue, as Eric Raymond did in an 1999 interview with the linux.com web site:
={linux.com;Raymond, Eric:St. Ignucius and+2}
-_1 When I say RMS calibrates what he does, I'm not belittling or accusing him of insincerity. I'm saying that like all good communicators he's got a theatrical streak. Sometimes it's conscious-have you ever seen him in his St. Ignucius drag, blessing software with a disk platter on his head? Mostly it's unconscious; he's just learned the degree of irritating stimulus that works, that holds attention without (usually) freaking people out.~{ See "Guest Interview: Eric S. Raymond," Linux.com (May 18, 1999).<br> http://www.linux.com/interviews/19990518/8/ }~
+_1 When I say RMS calibrates what he does, I'm not belittling or accusing him of insincerity. I'm saying that like all good communicators he's got a theatrical streak. Sometimes it's conscious-have you ever seen him in his St. Ignucius drag, blessing software with a disk platter on his head? Mostly it's unconscious; he's just learned the degree of irritating stimulus that works, that holds attention without (usually) freaking people out.~{ See "Guest Interview: Eric S. Raymond," Linux.com (May 18, 1999). \\ http://www.linux.com/interviews/19990518/8/ }~
Stallman takes issue with the Raymond analysis. "It's simply my way of making fun of myself," he says. "The fact that others see it as anything more than that is a reflection of their agenda, not mine."
@@ -1379,7 +1370,7 @@ By the spring of 1985, Richard Stallman had settled on the GNU Project's first m
The dispute with UniPress had highlighted a flaw in the Emacs Commune social contract. Where users relied on Stallman's expert insight, the Commune's rules held. In areas where Stallman no longer held the position of alpha hacker-pre-1984 Unix systems, for example-individuals and companies were free to make their own rules.
={UniPress software company}
-The tension between the freedom to modify and the freedom to exert authorial privilege had been building before GOSMACS. The Copyright Act of 1976 had overhauled U.S. copyright law, extending the legal protection of copyright to software programs. According to Section 102(b) of the Act, individuals and companies now possessed the ability to copyright the "expression" of a software program but not the "actual processes or methods embodied in the program."~{ See Hal Abelson, Mike Fischer, and Joanne Costello, "Software and Copyright Law," updated version (1998).<br> http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/int-prop/software-copyright.html }~ Translated, programmers and companies had the ability to treat software programs like a story or song. Other programmers could take inspiration from the work, but to make a direct copy or nonsatirical derivative, they first had to secure permission from the original creator. Although the new law guaranteed that even programs without copyright notices carried copyright protection, programmers quickly asserted their rights, attaching coypright notices to their software programs.
+The tension between the freedom to modify and the freedom to exert authorial privilege had been building before GOSMACS. The Copyright Act of 1976 had overhauled U.S. copyright law, extending the legal protection of copyright to software programs. According to Section 102(b) of the Act, individuals and companies now possessed the ability to copyright the "expression" of a software program but not the "actual processes or methods embodied in the program."~{ See Hal Abelson, Mike Fischer, and Joanne Costello, "Software and Copyright Law," updated version (1998). \\ http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/int-prop/software-copyright.html }~ Translated, programmers and companies had the ability to treat software programs like a story or song. Other programmers could take inspiration from the work, but to make a direct copy or nonsatirical derivative, they first had to secure permission from the original creator. Although the new law guaranteed that even programs without copyright notices carried copyright protection, programmers quickly asserted their rights, attaching coypright notices to their software programs.
={Copyright Act of 1976;copyright laws;GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs);software:copyright laws on}
At first, Stallman viewed these notices with alarm. Rare was the software program that didn't borrow source code from past programs, and yet, with a single stroke of the president's pen, Congress had given programmers and companies the power to assert individual authorship over communally built programs. It also injected a dose of formality into what had otherwise been an informal system. Even if hackers could demonstrate how a given program's source-code bloodlines stretched back years, if not decades, the resources and money that went into battling each copyright notice were beyond most hackers' means. Simply put, disputes that had once been settled hacker-to-hacker were now settled lawyer-to-lawyer. In such a system, companies, not hackers, held the automatic advantage.
@@ -1411,9 +1402,8 @@ As an example of this informality, Gilmore cites a copyright notice for trn, a U
% previous markup as 'poem' with footnote not satisfactory
-Copyright (c) 1985, Larry Wall<br>
-You may copy the trn kit in whole or in part as long as you don't try
-to make money off it, or pretend that you wrote it.~{ See Trn Kit README.<br> http://www.za.debian.org/doc/trn/trn-readme }~
+Copyright (c) 1985, Larry Wall \\
+You may copy the trn kit in whole or in part as long as you don't try to make money off it, or pretend that you wrote it.~{ See Trn Kit README. \\ http://www.za.debian.org/doc/trn/trn-readme }~
Such statements, while reflective of the hacker ethic, also reflected the difficulty of translating the loose, informal nature of that ethic into the rigid, legal language of copyright. In writing the GNU Emacs License, Stallman had done more than close up the escape hatch that permitted proprietary offshoots. He had expressed the hacker ethic in a manner understandable to both lawyer and hacker alike.
@@ -1439,7 +1429,7 @@ anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the
rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for
you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.
-}poem ~{ See Richard Stallman, et al., "GNU General Public License: Version 1," (February, 1989).<br> http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copying-1.0.html }~
+}poem ~{ See Richard Stallman, et al., "GNU General Public License: Version 1," (February, 1989). \\ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copying-1.0.html }~
In fashioning the GPL, Stallman had been forced to make an additional adjustment to the informal tenets of the old Emacs Commune. Where he had once demanded that Commune members publish any and all changes, Stallman now demanded publication only in instances when programmers circulated their derivative versions in the same public manner as Stallman. In other words, programmers who simply modified Emacs for private use no longer needed to send the source-code changes back to Stallman. In what would become a rare compromise of free software doctrine, Stallman slashed the price tag for free software. Users could innovate without Stallman looking over their shoulders just so long as they didn't bar Stallman and the rest of the hacker community from future exchanges of the same program.
={Emacs Commune+1}
@@ -1454,7 +1444,7 @@ As hacks go, the GPL stands as one of Stallman's best. It created a system of co
"The GPL developed much like any piece of free software with a large community discussing its structure, its respect or the opposite in their observation, needs for tweaking and even to compromise it mildly for greater acceptance," says Jerry Cohen, another attorney who helped Stallman with the creation of the license. "The process worked very well and GPL in its several versions has gone from widespread skeptical and at times hostile response to widespread acceptance."
-In a 1986 interview with Byte magazine, Stallman summed up the GPL in colorful terms. In addition to proclaiming hacker values, Stallman said, readers should also "see it as a form of intellectual jujitsu, using the legal system that software hoarders have set up against them."~{ See David Betz and Jon Edwards, "Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain [sic] Unix-compatible software system with BYTE editors," BYTE (July, 1996). (Reprinted on the GNU Project web site: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html )<br>This interview offers an interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at Stallman's political attitudes during the earliest days of the GNU Project. It is also helpful in tracing the evolution of Stallman's rhetoric.<br>Describing the purpose of the GPL, Stallman says, "I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage."<br>Contrast this with a statement to the author in August 2000: "I urge you not to use the term `intellectual property' in your thinking. It will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. And those things are so different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about them at once. If you hear somebody saying something about intellectual property, without quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join." }~ Years later, Stallman would describe the GPL's creation in less hostile terms. "I was thinking about issues that were in a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal," he says. "I had to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system that we're in. In spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for a new society, but since I wasn't a government, I couldn't actually change any laws. I had to try to do this by building on top of the existing legal system, which had not been designed for anything like this."
+In a 1986 interview with Byte magazine, Stallman summed up the GPL in colorful terms. In addition to proclaiming hacker values, Stallman said, readers should also "see it as a form of intellectual jujitsu, using the legal system that software hoarders have set up against them."~{ See David Betz and Jon Edwards, "Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain [sic] Unix-compatible software system with BYTE editors," BYTE (July, 1996). (Reprinted on the GNU Project web site: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html ) \\ This interview offers an interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at Stallman's political attitudes during the earliest days of the GNU Project. It is also helpful in tracing the evolution of Stallman's rhetoric. \\ Describing the purpose of the GPL, Stallman says, "I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage." \\ Contrast this with a statement to the author in August 2000: "I urge you not to use the term `intellectual property' in your thinking. It will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. And those things are so different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about them at once. If you hear somebody saying something about intellectual property, without quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join." }~ Years later, Stallman would describe the GPL's creation in less hostile terms. "I was thinking about issues that were in a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal," he says. "I had to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system that we're in. In spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for a new society, but since I wasn't a government, I couldn't actually change any laws. I had to try to do this by building on top of the existing legal system, which had not been designed for anything like this."
={Byte magazine}
About the time Stallman was pondering the ethical, political, and legal issues associated with free software, a California hacker named Don Hopkins mailed him a manual for the 68000 microprocessor. Hopkins, a Unix hacker and fellow science-fiction buff, had borrowed the manual from Stallman a while earlier. As a display of gratitude, Hopkins decorated the return envelope with a number of stickers obtained at a local science-fiction convention. One sticker in particular caught Stallman's eye. It read, "Copyleft (L), All Rights Reversed." Following the release of the first version of GPL, Stallman paid tribute to the sticker, nicknaming the free software license "Copyleft." Over time, the nickname and its shorthand symbol, a backwards "C," would become an official Free Software Foundation synonym for the GPL.
@@ -1478,7 +1468,7 @@ Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project of porting BSD over to t
% CSRG abbreviated to SRG above?
-The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have liked. In June, 1989, Berkeley separated its networking code from the rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and distributed it under a University of California license. The contract terms were liberal. All a licensee had to do was give credit to the university in advertisements touting derivative programs.~{ The University of California's "obnoxious advertising clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for a less restrictive alternative to the GPL, some hackers used the University of California, replacing "University of California" with the name of their own instution. The result: free software programs that borrowed from dozens of other programs would have to cite dozens of institutions in advertisements. In 1999, after a decade of lobbying on Stallman's part, the University of California agreed to drop this clause.<br>See "The BSD License Problem" at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html. }~ In contrast to the GPL, proprietary offshoots were permissible. Only one problem hampered the license's rapid adoption: the BSD Networking release wasn't a complete operating system. People could study the code, but it could only be run in conjunction with other proprietary-licensed code.
+The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have liked. In June, 1989, Berkeley separated its networking code from the rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and distributed it under a University of California license. The contract terms were liberal. All a licensee had to do was give credit to the university in advertisements touting derivative programs.~{ The University of California's "obnoxious advertising clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for a less restrictive alternative to the GPL, some hackers used the University of California, replacing "University of California" with the name of their own instution. The result: free software programs that borrowed from dozens of other programs would have to cite dozens of institutions in advertisements. In 1999, after a decade of lobbying on Stallman's part, the University of California agreed to drop this clause. \\ See "The BSD License Problem" at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html. }~ In contrast to the GPL, proprietary offshoots were permissible. Only one problem hampered the license's rapid adoption: the BSD Networking release wasn't a complete operating system. People could study the code, but it could only be run in conjunction with other proprietary-licensed code.
={AT&T+1}
Over the next few years, Bostic and other University of California employees worked to replace the missing components and turn BSD into a complete, freely redistributable operating system. Although delayed by a legal challenge from Unix Systems Laboratories-the AT&T spin-off that retained ownership of the Unix brand name-the effort would finally bear fruit in the early 1990s. Even before then, however, many of the Berkeley utilities would make their way into Stallman's GNU Project.
@@ -1547,14 +1537,14 @@ Jeremy Allison, a Sun user during the late 1980s and programmer destined to run
Stallman's growing stature as a software programmer, however, was balanced by his struggles as a project manager. Although the GNU Project moved from success to success in creation of developer-oriented tools, its inability to generate a working kernel-the central "traffic cop" program in all Unix systems that determines which devices and applications get access to the microprocessor and when-was starting to elicit grumbles as the 1980s came to a close. As with most GNU Project efforts, Stallman had started kernel development by looking for an existing program to modify. According to a January 1987 "Gnusletter," Stallman was already working to overhaul TRIX, a Unix kernel developed at MIT.
-A review of GNU Project "GNUsletters" of the late 1980s reflects the management tension. In January, 1987, Stallman announced to the world that the GNU Project was working to overhaul TRIX, a Unix kernel developed at MIT. A year later, in February of 1988, the GNU Project announced that it had shifted its attentions to Mach, a lightweight "micro-kernel" developed at Carnegie Mellon. All told, however, official GNU Project kernel development wouldn't commence until 1990.~{ See "HURD History."<br> http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history.html }~
+A review of GNU Project "GNUsletters" of the late 1980s reflects the management tension. In January, 1987, Stallman announced to the world that the GNU Project was working to overhaul TRIX, a Unix kernel developed at MIT. A year later, in February of 1988, the GNU Project announced that it had shifted its attentions to Mach, a lightweight "micro-kernel" developed at Carnegie Mellon. All told, however, official GNU Project kernel development wouldn't commence until 1990.~{ See "HURD History." \\ http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history.html }~
% ={Carnegie Mellon University}
The delays in kernel development were just one of many concerns weighing on Stallman during this period. In 1989, Lotus Development Corporation filed suit against rival software company, Paperback Software International, for copying menu commands in Lotus' popular 1-2-3 Spreadsheet program. Lotus' suit, coupled with the Apple-Microsoft "look and feel" battle, provided a troublesome backdrop for the GNU Project. Although both suits fell outside the scope of the GNU Project, both revolved around operating systems and software applications developed for the personal computer, not Unix-compatible hardware systems-they threatened to impose a chilling effect on the entire culture of software development. Determined to do something, Stallman recruited a few programmer friends and composed a magazine ad blasting the lawsuits. He then followed up the ad by helping to organize a group to protest the corporations filing the suit. Calling itself the League of Programming Freedom, the group held protests outside the offices of Lotus, Inc. and the Boston courtroom hosting the Lotus trial.
={Apple Computers;Lotus Development Corp.;Microsoft Corporation:Apple Computer lawsuit;Paperback Software International}
-The protests were notable.~{ According to a League of Programming Freedom Press, the protests were notable for featuring the first hexadecimal protest chant:<br>1-2-3-4, toss the lawyers out the door;<br>5-6-7-8, innovate don't litigate;<br>9-A-B-C, 1-2-3 is not for me;<br>D-E-F-O, look and feel have got to go<br> http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/demo.final.release }~ They document the evolving nature of software industry. Applications had quietly replaced operating systems as the primary corporate battleground. In its unfulfilled quest to build a free software operating system, the GNU Project seemed hopelessly behind the times. Indeed, the very fact that Stallman had felt it necessary to put together an entirely new group dedicated to battling the "look and feel" lawsuits reinforced that obsolescence in the eyes of some observers.
+The protests were notable.~{ According to a League of Programming Freedom Press, the protests were notable for featuring the first hexadecimal protest chant: \\ 1-2-3-4, toss the lawyers out the door; \\ 5-6-7-8, innovate don't litigate; \\ 9-A-B-C, 1-2-3 is not for me; \\ D-E-F-O, look and feel have got to go \\ http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/demo.final.release }~ They document the evolving nature of software industry. Applications had quietly replaced operating systems as the primary corporate battleground. In its unfulfilled quest to build a free software operating system, the GNU Project seemed hopelessly behind the times. Indeed, the very fact that Stallman had felt it necessary to put together an entirely new group dedicated to battling the "look and feel" lawsuits reinforced that obsolescence in the eyes of some observers.
In 1990, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation cerified Stallman's genius status when it granted Stallman a MacArthur fellowship, therefore making him a recipient for the organization's so-called "genius grant." The grant, a $240,000 reward for launching the GNU Project and giving voice to the free software philosophy, relieved a number of short-term concerns. First and foremost, it gave Stallman, a nonsalaried employee of the FSF who had been supporting himself through consulting contracts, the ability to devote more time to writing GNU code.~{ I use the term "writing" here loosely. About the time of the MacArthur award, Stallman began suffering chronic pain in his hands and was dictating his work to FSF-employed typists. Although some have speculated that the hand pain was the result of repetitive stress injury, or RSI, an injury common among software programmers, Stallman is not 100% sure. "It was NOT carpal tunnel syndrome," he writes. "My hand problem was in the hands themselves, not in the wrists." Stallman has since learned to work without typists after switching to a keyboard with a lighter touch. }~
@@ -1591,7 +1581,7 @@ things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
-}poem~{ See "Linux 10th Anniversary."<br> http://www.linux10.org/history/ }~
+}poem~{ See "Linux 10th Anniversary." \\ http://www.linux10.org/history/ }~
The posting drew a smattering of responses and within a month, Torvalds had posted a 0.01 version of the operating system-i.e., the earliest possible version fit for outside review-on an Internet FTP site. In the course of doing so, Torvalds had to come up with a name for the new system. On his own PC hard drive, Torvalds had saved the program as Linux, a name that paid its respects to the software convention of giving each Unix variant a name that ended with the letter X. Deeming the name too "egotistical," Torvalds changed it to Freax, only to have the FTP site manager change it back.
={Freax}
@@ -1605,7 +1595,7 @@ _1 You put six months of your life into this thing and you want to make it avail
When it was time to release the 0.12 version of Linux, the first to include a fully integrated version of GCC, Torvalds decided to voice his allegiance with the free software movement. He discarded the old kernel license and replaced it with the GPL. The decision triggered a porting spree, as Torvalds and his collaborators looked to other GNU programs to fold into the growing Linux stew. Within three years, Linux developers were offering their first production release, Linux 1.0, including fully modified versions of GCC, GDB, and a host of BSD tools.
-By 1994, the amalgamated operating system had earned enough respect in the hacker world to make some observers wonder if Torvalds hadn't given away the farm by switching to the GPL in the project's initial months. In the first issue of Linux Journal, publisher Robert Young sat down with Torvalds for an interview. When Young asked the Finnish programmer if he felt regret at giving up private ownership of the Linux source code, Torvalds said no. "Even with 20/20 hindsight," Torvalds said, he considered the GPL "one of the very best design decisions" made during the early stages of the Linux project.~{ See Robert Young, "Interview with Linus, the Author of Linux," Linux Journal (March 1, 1994).<br> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2736 }~
+By 1994, the amalgamated operating system had earned enough respect in the hacker world to make some observers wonder if Torvalds hadn't given away the farm by switching to the GPL in the project's initial months. In the first issue of Linux Journal, publisher Robert Young sat down with Torvalds for an interview. When Young asked the Finnish programmer if he felt regret at giving up private ownership of the Linux source code, Torvalds said no. "Even with 20/20 hindsight," Torvalds said, he considered the GPL "one of the very best design decisions" made during the early stages of the Linux project.~{ See Robert Young, "Interview with Linus, the Author of Linux," Linux Journal (March 1, 1994). \\ http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2736 }~
={Young, Robert}
% robert young entry added
@@ -1637,7 +1627,7 @@ Or were they? To the pessimistically inclined, each sign of acceptance carried i
% Intel index ref added
-Finally, there was the curious nature of Linux itself. Unrestricted by design bugs (like GNU) and legal disputes (like BSD), Linux' high-speed evolution had been so unplanned, its success so accidental, that programmers closest to the software code itself didn't know what to make of it. More compilation album than operating system, it was comprised of a hacker medley of greatest hits: everything from GCC, GDB, and glibc (the GNU Project's newly developed C Library) to X (a Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon, which lets users substitute easy-to-remember Internet domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. The arch's capstone, of course, was the Linux kernel-itself a bored-out, super-charged version of Minix. Rather than building their operating system from scratch, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux development team had followed the old Picasso adage, "good artists borrow; great artists steal." Or as Torvalds himself would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people actually do."~{ Torvalds has offered this quote in many different settings. To date, however, the quote's most notable appearance is in the Eric Raymond essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (May, 1997).<br> http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html }~
+Finally, there was the curious nature of Linux itself. Unrestricted by design bugs (like GNU) and legal disputes (like BSD), Linux' high-speed evolution had been so unplanned, its success so accidental, that programmers closest to the software code itself didn't know what to make of it. More compilation album than operating system, it was comprised of a hacker medley of greatest hits: everything from GCC, GDB, and glibc (the GNU Project's newly developed C Library) to X (a Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon, which lets users substitute easy-to-remember Internet domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. The arch's capstone, of course, was the Linux kernel-itself a bored-out, super-charged version of Minix. Rather than building their operating system from scratch, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux development team had followed the old Picasso adage, "good artists borrow; great artists steal." Or as Torvalds himself would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people actually do."~{ Torvalds has offered this quote in many different settings. To date, however, the quote's most notable appearance is in the Eric Raymond essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (May, 1997). \\ http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html }~
={BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon);Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND);C programming language:glibc;GNU Debugger (GDB):Linux and;GDB (GNU Debugger): Linux and;glibc (GNU C Library);GNU C Library (glibc);kernel (Linux);X graphic user interface;Laboratory for Computer Science:X, developing;Minix operating system:kernel, used for Linux;TCP/IP;Torvalds, Linus:Minix, reworking for Linux+2}
Such laziness, while admirable from an efficiency perspective, was troubling from a political perspective. For one thing, it underlined the lack of an ideological agenda on Torvalds' part. Unlike the GNU developers, Torvalds hadn't built an operating system out of a desire to give his fellow hackers something to work with; he'd built it to have something he himself could play with. Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence, Torvalds' genius lay less in the overall vision and more in his ability to recruit other hackers to speed the process.
@@ -1666,7 +1656,7 @@ The message represented a dramatic about-face on Stallman's part. Until 1993, St
The friend's report was correct. Built to run on 386-based machines, Linux was firmly rooted to its low-cost hardware platform. What the friend failed to report, however, was the sizable advantage Linux enjoyed as the only freely modifiable operating system in the marketplace. In other words, while Stallman spent the next three years listening to bug reports from his HURD team, Torvalds was winning over the programmers who would later uproot and replant the operating system onto new platforms.
-By 1993, the GNU Project's inability to deliver a working kernel was leading to problems both within the GNU Project and within the free software movement at large. A March, 1993, a Wired magazine article by Simson Garfinkel described the GNU Project as "bogged down" despite the success of the project's many tools.~{ See Simson Garfinkel, "Is Stallman Stalled?" Wired (March, 1993). }~ Those within the project and its nonprofit adjunct, the Free Software Foundation, remember the mood as being even worse than Garfinkel's article let on. "It was very clear, at least to me at the time, that there was a window of opportunity to introduce a new operating system," says Chassell. "And once that window was closed, people would become less interested. Which is in fact exactly what happened."~{ Chassel's concern about there being a 36-month "window" for a new operating system is not unique to the GNU Project. During the early 1990s, free software versions of the Berkeley Software Distribution were held up by Unix System Laboratories' lawsuit restricting the release of BSD-derived software. While many users consider BSD offshoots such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD to be demonstrably superior to GNU/Linux both in terms of performance and security, the number of FreeBSD and OpenBSD users remains a fraction of the total GNU/Linux user population.<br>To view a sample analysis of the relative success of GNU/Linux in relation to other free software operating systems, see the essay by New Zealand hacker, Liam Greenwood, "Why is Linux Successful" (1999). }~
+By 1993, the GNU Project's inability to deliver a working kernel was leading to problems both within the GNU Project and within the free software movement at large. A March, 1993, a Wired magazine article by Simson Garfinkel described the GNU Project as "bogged down" despite the success of the project's many tools.~{ See Simson Garfinkel, "Is Stallman Stalled?" Wired (March, 1993). }~ Those within the project and its nonprofit adjunct, the Free Software Foundation, remember the mood as being even worse than Garfinkel's article let on. "It was very clear, at least to me at the time, that there was a window of opportunity to introduce a new operating system," says Chassell. "And once that window was closed, people would become less interested. Which is in fact exactly what happened."~{ Chassel's concern about there being a 36-month "window" for a new operating system is not unique to the GNU Project. During the early 1990s, free software versions of the Berkeley Software Distribution were held up by Unix System Laboratories' lawsuit restricting the release of BSD-derived software. While many users consider BSD offshoots such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD to be demonstrably superior to GNU/Linux both in terms of performance and security, the number of FreeBSD and OpenBSD users remains a fraction of the total GNU/Linux user population. \\ To view a sample analysis of the relative success of GNU/Linux in relation to other free software operating systems, see the essay by New Zealand hacker, Liam Greenwood, "Why is Linux Successful" (1999). }~
={Garfinkel, Simson;GNU Project:kernel;Wired magazine:GNU Project and}
% ={Chassell, Robert}
@@ -1682,7 +1672,7 @@ Stallman cites a number of issues when explaining the delay. The Lotus and Apple
"I figured, OK, the [Mach] part that has to talk to the machine has already been debugged," Stallman says, recalling the HURD team's troubles in a 2000 speech. "With that head start, we should be able to get it done faster. But instead, it turned out that debugging these asynchronous multithreaded programs was really hard. There were timing books that would clobber the files, and that's no fun. The end result was that it took many, many years to produce a test version."~{ See Maui High Performance Computing Center Speech. }~
-Whatever the excuse, or excuses, the concurrent success of the Linux-kernel team created a tense situation. Sure, the Linux kernel had been licensed under the GPL, but as Murdock himself had noted, the desire to treat Linux as a purely free software operating system was far from uniform. By late 1993, the total Linux user population had grown from a dozen or so Minix enthusiasts to somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000.~{ GNU/Linux user-population numbers are sketchy at best, which is why I've provided such a broad range. The 100,000 total comes from the Red Hat "Milestones" site,<br> http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/milestones.html }~ What had once been a hobby was now a marketplace ripe for exploitation. Like Winston Churchill watching Soviet troops sweep into Berlin, Stallman felt an understandable set of mixed emotions when it came time to celebrate the Linux "victory."~{ I wrote this Winston Churchill analogy before Stallman himself sent me his own unsolicited comment on Churchill:<br>_1 World War II and the determination needed to win it was a very strong memory as I was growing up. Statements such as Churchill's, "We will fight them in the landing zones, we will fight them on the beaches . . . we will never surrender," have always resonated for me. }~
+Whatever the excuse, or excuses, the concurrent success of the Linux-kernel team created a tense situation. Sure, the Linux kernel had been licensed under the GPL, but as Murdock himself had noted, the desire to treat Linux as a purely free software operating system was far from uniform. By late 1993, the total Linux user population had grown from a dozen or so Minix enthusiasts to somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000.~{ GNU/Linux user-population numbers are sketchy at best, which is why I've provided such a broad range. The 100,000 total comes from the Red Hat "Milestones" site, \\ http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/milestones.html }~ What had once been a hobby was now a marketplace ripe for exploitation. Like Winston Churchill watching Soviet troops sweep into Berlin, Stallman felt an understandable set of mixed emotions when it came time to celebrate the Linux "victory."~{ I wrote this Winston Churchill analogy before Stallman himself sent me his own unsolicited comment on Churchill: \\ _1 World War II and the determination needed to win it was a very strong memory as I was growing up. Statements such as Churchill's, "We will fight them in the landing zones, we will fight them on the beaches . . . we will never surrender," have always resonated for me. }~
Although late to the party, Stallman still had clout. As soon as the FSF announced that it would lend its money and moral support to Murdock's software project, other offers of support began rolling in. Murdock dubbed the new project Debian-a compression of his and his wife, Deborah's, names-and within a few weeks was rolling out the first distribution. "[Richard's support] catapulted Debian almost overnight from this interesting little project to something people within the community had to pay attention to," Murdock says.
={Debian+19}
@@ -1694,7 +1684,7 @@ In January of 1994, Murdock issued the " Debian Manifesto." Written in the spiri
_1 The Free Software Foundation plays an extremely important role in the future of Debian. By the simple fact that they will be distributing it, a message is sent to the world that Linux is not a commercial product and that it never should be, but that this does not mean that Linux will never be able to compete commercially. For those of you who disagree, I challenge you to rationalize the success of GNU Emacs and GCC, which are not commercial software but which have had quite an impact on the commercial market regardless of that fact.
-_1 The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux rather than on the destructive goal of enriching oneself at the expense of the entire Linux community and its future. The development and distribution of Debian may not be the answer to the problems that I have outlined in the Manifesto, but I hope that it will at least attract enough attention to these problems to allow them to be solved.~{ See Ian Murdock, "A Brief History of Debian," (January 6, 1994): Appendix A, "The Debian Manifesto."<br> http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/apA.html }~
+_1 The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux rather than on the destructive goal of enriching oneself at the expense of the entire Linux community and its future. The development and distribution of Debian may not be the answer to the problems that I have outlined in the Manifesto, but I hope that it will at least attract enough attention to these problems to allow them to be solved.~{ See Ian Murdock, "A Brief History of Debian," (January 6, 1994): Appendix A, "The Debian Manifesto." \\ http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/apA.html }~
Shortly after the Manifesto's release, the Free Software Foundation made its first major request. Stallman wanted Murdock to call its distribution "GNU/Linux." At first, Murdock says, Stallman had wanted to use the term " Lignux"-"as in Linux with GNU at the heart of it"-but a sample testing of the term on Usenet and in various impromptu hacker focus groups had merited enough catcalls to convince Stallman to go with the less awkward GNU/Linux.
={Lignux (Linux with GNU)}
@@ -1707,7 +1697,7 @@ The deepest split, Murdock says, was over glibc. Short for GNU C Library, glibc
In the hacker world, forks are an interesting phenomenon. Although the hacker ethic permits a programmer to do anything he wants with a given program's source code, most hackers prefer to pour their innovations into a central source-code file or "tree" to ensure compatibility with other people's programs. To fork glibc this early in the development of Linux would have meant losing the potential input of hundreds, even thousands, of Linux developers. It would also mean growing incompatibility between Linux and the GNU system that Stallman and the GNU team still hoped to develop.
={forks (code)+3;tree (source code)}
-As leader of the GNU Project, Stallman had already experienced the negative effects of a software fork in 1991. A group of Emacs developers working for a software company named Lucid had a falling out over Stallman's unwillingness to fold changes back into the GNU Emacs code base. The fork had given birth to a parallel version, Lucid Emacs, and hard feelings all around.~{ Jamie Zawinski, a former Lucid programmer who would go on to head the Mozilla development team, has a web site that documents the Lucid/GNU Emacs fork, titled, "The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism."<br> http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html }~
+As leader of the GNU Project, Stallman had already experienced the negative effects of a software fork in 1991. A group of Emacs developers working for a software company named Lucid had a falling out over Stallman's unwillingness to fold changes back into the GNU Emacs code base. The fork had given birth to a parallel version, Lucid Emacs, and hard feelings all around.~{ Jamie Zawinski, a former Lucid programmer who would go on to head the Mozilla development team, has a web site that documents the Lucid/GNU Emacs fork, titled, "The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism." \\ http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html }~
={Emacs text editor:Lucid software company and;GNU Emacs:Lucid software company and;Lucid software company}
Murdock says Debian was mounting work on a similar fork in glibc source code that motivated Stallman to insist on adding the GNU prefix when Debian rolled out its software distribution. "The fork has since converged. Still, at the time, there was a concern that if the Linux community saw itself as a different thing as the GNU community, it might be a force for disunity."
@@ -1758,7 +1748,7 @@ Ready or not.
In November , 1995, Peter Salus, a member of the Free Software Foundation and author of the 1994 book, A Quarter Century of Unix, issued a call for papers to members of the GNU Project's "system-discuss" mailing list. Salus, the conference's scheduled chairman, wanted to tip off fellow hackers about the upcoming Conference on Freely Redistributable Software in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Slated for February, 1996 and sponsored by the Free Software Foundation, the event promised to be the first engineering conference solely dedicated to free software and, in a show of unity with other free software programmers, welcomed papers on "any aspect of GNU, Linux, NetBSD, 386BSD, FreeBSD, Perl, Tcl/tk, and other tools for which the code is accessible and redistributable." Salus wrote:
={Free Software Foundation (FSF);FSF (Free Software Foundation);FreeBSD;Conference on Freely Redistributable Software+1;Linux;NetBSD;Perl programming language;386BSD;Salus, Peter+4}
-_1 Over the past 15 years, free and low-cost software has become ubiquitous. This conference will bring together implementers of several different types of freely redistributable software and publishers of such software (on various media). There will be tutorials and refereed papers, as well as keynotes by Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.~{ See Peter Salus, "FYI-Conference on Freely Redistributable Software, 2/2, Cambridge" (1995) (archived by Terry Winograd).<br> http://hci.stanford.edu/pcd-archives/pcd-fyi/1995/0078.html }~
+_1 Over the past 15 years, free and low-cost software has become ubiquitous. This conference will bring together implementers of several different types of freely redistributable software and publishers of such software (on various media). There will be tutorials and refereed papers, as well as keynotes by Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.~{ See Peter Salus, "FYI-Conference on Freely Redistributable Software, 2/2, Cambridge" (1995) (archived by Terry Winograd). \\ http://hci.stanford.edu/pcd-archives/pcd-fyi/1995/0078.html }~
One of the first people to receive Salus' email was conference committee member Eric S. Raymond. Although not the leader of a project or company like the various other members of the list, Raymond had built a tidy reputation within the hacker community as a major contributor to GNU Emacs and as editor of /{The New Hacker Dictionary}/, a book version of the hacking community's decade-old Jargon File.
={New Hacker Dictionary, The;Raymond, Eric:open source and+56}
@@ -1767,7 +1757,7 @@ For Raymond, the 1996 conference was a welcome event. Active in the GNU Project
Despite the falling out, Raymond remained active in the free software community. So much so that when Salus suggested a conference pairing Stallman and Torvalds as keynote speakers, Raymond eagerly seconded the idea. With Stallman representing the older, wiser contingent of ITS/Unix hackers and Torvalds representing the younger, more energetic crop of Linux hackers, the pairing indicated a symbolic show of unity that could only be beneficial, especially to ambitious younger (i.e., below 40) hackers such as Raymond. "I sort of had a foot in both camps," Raymond says.
-By the time of the conference, the tension between those two camps had become palpable. Both groups had one thing in common, though: the conference was their first chance to meet the Finnish wunderkind in the flesh. Surprisingly, Torvalds proved himself to be a charming, affable speaker. Possessing only a slight Swedish accent, Torvalds surprised audience members with his quick, self-effacing wit.~{ Although Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his mother tongue is Swedish. "The Rampantly Unofficial Linus FAQ" offers a brief explanation:<br>_1 Finland has a significant (about 6%) Swedish-speaking minority population. They call themselves "finlandssvensk" or "finlandssvenskar" and consider themselves Finns; many of their families have lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of Finland's two official languages.<br> http://tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/linus/ }~ Even more surprising, says Raymond, was Torvalds' equal willingness to take potshots at other prominent hackers, including the most prominent hacker of all, Richard Stallman. By the end of the conference, Torvalds' half-hacker, half-slacker manner was winning over older and younger conference-goers alike.
+By the time of the conference, the tension between those two camps had become palpable. Both groups had one thing in common, though: the conference was their first chance to meet the Finnish wunderkind in the flesh. Surprisingly, Torvalds proved himself to be a charming, affable speaker. Possessing only a slight Swedish accent, Torvalds surprised audience members with his quick, self-effacing wit.~{ Although Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his mother tongue is Swedish. "The Rampantly Unofficial Linus FAQ" offers a brief explanation: \\ _1 Finland has a significant (about 6%) Swedish-speaking minority population. They call themselves "finlandssvensk" or "finlandssvenskar" and consider themselves Finns; many of their families have lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of Finland's two official languages. \\ http://tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/linus/ }~ Even more surprising, says Raymond, was Torvalds' equal willingness to take potshots at other prominent hackers, including the most prominent hacker of all, Richard Stallman. By the end of the conference, Torvalds' half-hacker, half-slacker manner was winning over older and younger conference-goers alike.
"It was a pivotal moment," recalls Raymond. "Before 1996, Richard was the only credible claimant to being the ideological leader of the entire culture. People who dissented didn't do so in public. The person who broke that taboo was Torvalds."
@@ -1785,7 +1775,7 @@ As a former GNU Project member, Raymond sensed an added dynamic to the tension b
For Raymond, the defection merely confirmed a growing suspicion: recent delays such as the HURD and recent troubles such as the Lucid-Emacs schism reflected problems normally associated with software project management, not software code development. Shortly after the Freely Redistributable Software Conference, Raymond began working on his own pet software project, a popmail utility called "fetchmail." Taking a cue from Torvalds, Raymond issued his program with a tacked-on promise to update the source code as early and as often as possible. When users began sending in bug reports and feature suggestions, Raymond, at first anticipating a tangled mess, found the resulting software surprisingly sturdy. Analyzing the success of the Torvalds approach, Raymond issued a quick analysis: using the Internet as his "petri dish" and the harsh scrutiny of the hacker community as a form of natural selection, Torvalds had created an evolutionary model free of central planning.
={fetchmail;FreeBSD;Conference on Freely Redistributable Software;Internet}
-What's more, Raymond decided, Torvalds had found a way around Brooks' Law. First articulated by Fred P. Brooks, manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of the 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks' Law held that adding developers to a project only resulted in further project delays. Believing as most hackers that software, like soup, benefits from a limited number of cooks, Raymond sensed something revolutionary at work. In inviting more and more cooks into the kitchen, Torvalds had actually found away to make the resulting software better.~{ Brooks' Law is the shorthand summary of the following quote taken from Brooks' book:<br>_1 Since software construction is inherently a systems effort-an exercise in complex interrelationships-communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule.<br>See Fred P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison Wesley Publishing, 1995) }~
+What's more, Raymond decided, Torvalds had found a way around Brooks' Law. First articulated by Fred P. Brooks, manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of the 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks' Law held that adding developers to a project only resulted in further project delays. Believing as most hackers that software, like soup, benefits from a limited number of cooks, Raymond sensed something revolutionary at work. In inviting more and more cooks into the kitchen, Torvalds had actually found away to make the resulting software better.~{ Brooks' Law is the shorthand summary of the following quote taken from Brooks' book: \\ _1 Since software construction is inherently a systems effort-an exercise in complex interrelationships-communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule. \\ See Fred P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison Wesley Publishing, 1995) }~
={Brooks, Fred P.;Mythical Man-Month, The (Brooks)}
Raymond put his observations on paper. He crafted them into a speech, which he promptly delivered before a group of friends and neighbors in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Dubbed " The Cathedral and the Bazaar," the speech contrasted the management styles of the GNU Project with the management style of Torvalds and the kernel hackers. Raymond says the response was enthusiastic, but not nearly as enthusiastic as the one he received during the 1997 Linux Kongress, a gathering of Linux users in Germany the next spring.
@@ -1823,7 +1813,7 @@ While in California, Raymond also managed to squeeze in a visit to VA Research,
Peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free software cause, offered an alternative: open source.
-Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the open source term while discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations industry. She doesn't remember where she came upon the term or if she borrowed it from another field, but she does remember her friend disliking the term.~{ See Malcolm Maclachlan, "Profit Motive Splits Open Source Movement," TechWeb News (August 26, 1998).<br> http://content.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980824S0012 }~
+Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the open source term while discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations industry. She doesn't remember where she came upon the term or if she borrowed it from another field, but she does remember her friend disliking the term.~{ See Malcolm Maclachlan, "Profit Motive Splits Open Source Movement," TechWeb News (August 26, 1998). \\ http://content.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980824S0012 }~
At the meeting, Peterson says, the response was dramatically different. "I was hesitant about suggesting it," Peterson recalls. "I had no standing with the group, so started using it casually, not highlighting it as a new term." To Peterson's surprise, the term caught on. By the end of the meeting, most of the attendees, including Raymond, seemed pleased by it.
@@ -1880,7 +1870,7 @@ http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html }~
Perens would later resign from the OSI, expressing regret that the organization had set itself up in opposition to Stallman and the FSF. Still, looking back on the need for a free software definition outside the Free Software Foundation's auspices, Perens understands why other hackers might still feel the need for distance. "I really like and admire Richard," says Perens. "I do think Richard would do his job better if Richard had more balance. That includes going away from free software for a couple of months."
-Stallman's monomaniacal energies would do little to counteract the public-relations momentum of open source proponents. In August of 1998, when chip-maker Intel purchased a stake in GNU/Linux vendor Red Hat, an accompanying New York Times article described the company as the product of a movement "known alternatively as free software and open source."~{ See Amy Harmon, "For Sale: Free Operating System," New York Times (September 28, 1998).<br> http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/biztech/articles/28linux.html }~ Six months later, a John Markoff article on Apple Computer was proclaiming the company's adoption of the "open source" Apache server in the article headline.~{ See John Markoff, "Apple Adopts `Open Source' for its Server Computers," New York Times (March 17, 1999).<br> http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/17apple.html }~
+Stallman's monomaniacal energies would do little to counteract the public-relations momentum of open source proponents. In August of 1998, when chip-maker Intel purchased a stake in GNU/Linux vendor Red Hat, an accompanying New York Times article described the company as the product of a movement "known alternatively as free software and open source."~{ See Amy Harmon, "For Sale: Free Operating System," New York Times (September 28, 1998). \\ http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/biztech/articles/28linux.html }~ Six months later, a John Markoff article on Apple Computer was proclaiming the company's adoption of the "open source" Apache server in the article headline.~{ See John Markoff, "Apple Adopts `Open Source' for its Server Computers," New York Times (March 17, 1999). \\ http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/17apple.html }~
={Apache web server;Apple Computers:open source software and;Intel;Markoff, John;Red Hat Inc.:success of+1}
Such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies that actively embraced the "open source" term. By August of 1999, Red Hat, a company that now eagerly billed itself as "open source," was selling shares on Nasdaq. In December, VA Linux-formerly VA Research-was floating its own IPO to historical effect. Opening at $30 per share, the company's stock price exploded past the $300 mark in initial trading only to settle back down to the $239 level. Shareholders lucky enough to get in at the bottom and stay until the end experienced a 698% increase in paper wealth, a Nasdaq record.
@@ -1890,7 +1880,7 @@ Such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies that activel
Among those lucky shareholders was Eric Raymond, who, as a company board member since the Mozilla launch, had received 150,000 shares of VA Linux stock. Stunned by the realization that his essay contrasting the Stallman-Torvalds managerial styles had netted him $36 million in potential wealth, Raymond penned a follow-up essay. In it, Raymond mused on the relationship between the hacker ethic and monetary wealth:
-_1 Reporters often ask me these days if I think the open-source community will be corrupted by the influx of big money. I tell them what I believe, which is this: commercial demand for programmers has been so intense for so long that anyone who can be seriously distracted by money is already gone. Our community has been self-selected for caring about other things-accomplishment, pride, artistic passion, and each other.~{ See Eric Raymond, "Surprised by Wealth," Linux Today (December 10, 1999).<br> http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-12-10-001-05-NW-LF }~
+_1 Reporters often ask me these days if I think the open-source community will be corrupted by the influx of big money. I tell them what I believe, which is this: commercial demand for programmers has been so intense for so long that anyone who can be seriously distracted by money is already gone. Our community has been self-selected for caring about other things-accomplishment, pride, artistic passion, and each other.~{ See Eric Raymond, "Surprised by Wealth," Linux Today (December 10, 1999). \\ http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-12-10-001-05-NW-LF }~
Whether or not such comments allayed suspicions that Raymond and other open source proponents had simply been in it for the money, they drove home the open source community's ultimate message: all you needed to sell the free software concept is a friendly face and a sensible message. Instead of fighting the marketplace head-on as Stallman had done, Raymond, Torvalds, and other new leaders of the hacker community had adopted a more relaxed approach-ignoring the marketplace in some areas, leveraging it in others. Instead of playing the role of high-school outcasts, they had played the game of celebrity, magnifying their power in the process.
@@ -2127,7 +2117,7 @@ During my research, I came across an essay titled "Freedom-Or Copyright?" Writte
% additional reference to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act
-_1 We still have the same old freedoms in using paper books. But if e-books replace printed books, that exception will do little good. With "electronic ink," which makes it possible to download new text onto an apparently printed piece of paper, even newspapers could become ephemeral. Imagine: no more used book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from the public library-no more "leaks" that might give someone a chance to read without paying. (And judging from the ads for Microsoft Reader, no more anonymous purchasing of books either.) This is the world publishers have in mind for us.~{ See "Safari Tech Books Online; Subscriber Agreement: Terms of Service."<br> http://safari.oreilly.com/mainhlp.asp?help=service }~
+_1 We still have the same old freedoms in using paper books. But if e-books replace printed books, that exception will do little good. With "electronic ink," which makes it possible to download new text onto an apparently printed piece of paper, even newspapers could become ephemeral. Imagine: no more used book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from the public library-no more "leaks" that might give someone a chance to read without paying. (And judging from the ads for Microsoft Reader, no more anonymous purchasing of books either.) This is the world publishers have in mind for us.~{ See "Safari Tech Books Online; Subscriber Agreement: Terms of Service." \\ http://safari.oreilly.com/mainhlp.asp?help=service }~
Needless to say, the essay caused some concern. Neither Tracy nor I had discussed the software her company would use nor had we discussed the type of copyright that would govern the e-book's usage. I mentioned the Technology Review article and asked if she could give me information on her company's e-book policies. Tracy promised to get back to me.
@@ -2218,9 +2208,9 @@ In July, a full year after the original email from Tracy, I got a call from Henn
Sure enough, the issue did come up. I learned through Henning that O'Reilly intended to publish the biography both as a book and as part of its new Safari Tech Books Online subscription service. The Safari user license would involve special restrictions,1 Henning warned, but O'Reilly was willing to allow for a copyright that permitted users to copy and share and the book's text regardless of medium. Basically, as author, I had the choice between two licenses: the Open Publication License or the GNU Free Documentation License.
={Open Publication License (OPL)+8;OPL (Open Publication License)+8;Safari Tech Books Online subscription service}
-I checked out the contents and background of each license. The Open Publication License (OPL)~{ See "The Open Publication License: Draft v1.0" (June 8, 1999).<br> http://opencontent.org/openpub/ }~ gives readers the right to reproduce and distribute a work, in whole or in part, in any medium "physical or electronic," provided the copied work retains the Open Publication License. It also permits modification of a work, provided certain conditions are met. Finally, the Open Publication License includes a number of options, which, if selected by the author, can limit the creation of "substantively modified" versions or book-form derivatives without prior author approval.
+I checked out the contents and background of each license. The Open Publication License (OPL)~{ See "The Open Publication License: Draft v1.0" (June 8, 1999). \\ http://opencontent.org/openpub/ }~ gives readers the right to reproduce and distribute a work, in whole or in part, in any medium "physical or electronic," provided the copied work retains the Open Publication License. It also permits modification of a work, provided certain conditions are met. Finally, the Open Publication License includes a number of options, which, if selected by the author, can limit the creation of "substantively modified" versions or book-form derivatives without prior author approval.
-The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL),~{ See "The GNU Free Documentation License: Version 1.1" (March, 2000).<br> http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html }~ meanwhile, permits the copying and distribution of a document in any medium, provided the resulting work carries the same license. It also permits the modification of a document provided certain conditions. Unlike the OPL, however, it does not give authors the option to restrict certain modifications. It also does not give authors the right to reject modifications that might result in a competitive book product. It does require certain forms of front- and back-cover information if a party other than the copyright holder wishes to publish more than 100 copies of a protected work, however.
+The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL),~{ See "The GNU Free Documentation License: Version 1.1" (March, 2000). \\ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html }~ meanwhile, permits the copying and distribution of a document in any medium, provided the resulting work carries the same license. It also permits the modification of a document provided certain conditions. Unlike the OPL, however, it does not give authors the option to restrict certain modifications. It also does not give authors the right to reject modifications that might result in a competitive book product. It does require certain forms of front- and back-cover information if a party other than the copyright holder wishes to publish more than 100 copies of a protected work, however.
={GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License)+1;GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)+1}
In the course of researching the licenses, I also made sure to visit the GNU Project web page titled "Various Licenses and Comments About Them."~{ See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html }~ On that page, I found a Stallman critique of the Open Publication License. Stallman's critique related to the creation of modified works and the ability of an author to select either one of the OPL's options to restrict modification. If an author didn't want to select either option, it was better to use the GFDL instead, Stallman noted, since it minimized the risk of the nonselected options popping up in modified versions of a document.