“I started crying right there in the equipment room”, he says. “Seeing the machine there, dead, with nobody left to fix it, it all drove home how completely my community had been destroyed”.
Stallman would have little opportunity to mourn. The Lisp Machine, despite all the furor it invoked and all the labor that had gone into making it, was merely a sideshow to the large battles in the technology marketplace. The relentless pace of computer miniaturization was bringing in newer, more powerful microprocessors that would soon incorporate the machine’s hardware and software capabilities like a modern metropolis swallowing up an ancient desert village.
Riding atop this microprocessor wave were hundreds-thousands-of commercial software programs, each protected by a patchwork of user licenses and nondisclosure agreements that made it impossible for hackers to review or share source code. The licenses were crude and ill-fitting, but by 1983 they had become strong enough to satisfy the courts and scare away would-be interlopers. Software, once a form of garnish most hardware companies gave away to make their expensive computer systems more flavorful, was quickly becoming the main dish. In their increasing hunger for new games and features, users were putting aside the traditional demand to review the recipe after every meal.
Nowhere was this state of affairs more evident than in the realm of personal computer systems. Companies such as Apple Computer and Commodore were minting fresh millionaires selling machines with built-in operating systems. Unaware of the hacker culture and its distaste for binary-only software, many of these users saw little need to protest when these companies failed to attach the accompanying source-code files. A few anarchic adherents of the hacker ethic helped propel that ethic into this new marketplace, but for the most part, the marketplace rewarded the programmers speedy enough to write new programs and savvy enough to copyright them as legally protected works.
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.
“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?”[11]
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.
For a man who had spent the entire 1960s as an embarrassing throwback to the 1950s, Stallman didn’t mind living out of step with his peers. As a programmer used to working with the best machines and the best software, however, Stallman faced what he could only describe as a “stark moral choice”: either get over his ethical objection for “proprietary” software-the term Stallman and his fellow hackers used to describe any program that carried private copyright or end-user license that restricted copying and modification-or dedicate his life to building an alternate, nonproprietary system of software programs. Given his recent months-long ordeal with Symbolics, Stallman felt more comfortable with the latter option. “I suppose I could have stopped working on computers altogether”, Stallman says. “I had no special skills, but I’m sure I could have become a waiter. Not at a fancy restaurant, probably, but I could’ve been a waiter somewhere”.
Being a waiter-i.e., dropping out of programming altogether-would have meant completely giving up an activity, computer programming, that had given him so much pleasure. Looking back on his life since moving to Cambridge, Stallman finds it easy to identify lengthy periods when software programming provided the only pleasure. Rather than drop out, Stallman decided to stick it out.
An atheist, Stallman rejects notions such as fate, dharma, or a divine calling in life. Nevertheless, he does feel that the decision to shun proprietary software and build an operating system to help others do the same was a natural one. After all, it was Stallman’s own personal combination of stubbornness, foresight, and coding virtuosity that led him to consider a fork in the road most others didn’t know existed. In describing the decision in a chapter for the 1999 book, Open Sources, Stallman cites the spirit encapsulated in the words of the Jewish sage Hilleclass="underline"
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?If I am only for myself, what am I?If not now, when?[12]
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”.
Once he reached that decision, Stallman says, everything else “fell into place”. He would abstain from using software programs that forced him to compromise his ethical beliefs, while at the same time devoting his life to the creation of software that would make it easier for others to follow the same path. Pledging to build a free software operating system “or die trying-of old age, of course”, Stallman quips, he resigned from the MIT staff in January, 1984, to build GNU.
The resignation distanced Stallman’s work from the legal auspices of MIT. Still, Stallman had enough friends and allies within the AI Lab to retain rent-free access to his MIT office. He also had the ability to secure outside consulting gigs to underwrite the early stages of the GNU Project. In resigning from MIT, however, Stallman negated any debate about conflict of interest or Institute ownership of the software. The man whose early adulthood fear of social isolation had driven him deeper and deeper into the AI Lab’s embrace was now building a legal firewall between himself and that environment.
11.
See Bill Gates, “An Open Letter to Hobbyists” (February 3, 1976).
To view an online copy of this letter, go to
12.
See Richard Stallman,
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”.