Encouraging others to adopt the same licensing practices meant closing off the escape hatch that had allowed privately owned versions of Emacs to emerge. To close that escape hatch, Stallman and his free software colleagues came up with a solution: users would be free to modify GNU Emacs just so long as they published their modifications. In addition, the resulting “derivative” works would also have carry the same GNU Emacs License.
The revolutionary nature of this final condition would take a while to sink in. At the time, Fischer says, he simply viewed the GNU Emacs License as a simple contract. It put a price tag on GNU Emacs’ use. Instead of money, Stallman was charging users access to their own later modifications. That said, Fischer does remember the contract terms as unique.
“I think asking other people to accept the price was, if not unique, highly unusual at that time”, he says.
The GNU Emacs License made its debut when Stallman finally released GNU Emacs in 1985. Following the release, Stallman welcomed input from the general hacker community on how to improve the license’s language. One hacker to take up the offer was future software activist John Gilmore, then working as a consultant to Sun Microsystems. As part of his consulting work, Gilmore had ported Emacs over to SunOS, the company’s in-house version of Unix. In the process of doing so, Gilmore had published the changes as per the demands of the GNU Emacs License. Instead of viewing the license as a liability, Gilmore saw it as clear and concise expression of the hacker ethos. “Up until then, most licenses were very informal”, Gilmore recalls.
As an example of this informality, Gilmore cites a copyright notice for trn, a Unix utility. Written by Larry Wall, future creator of the Perl programming language, patch made it simple for Unix programmers to insert source-code fixes-“patches” in hacker jargon-into any large program. Recognizing the utility of this feature, Wall put the following copyright notice in the program’s accompanying README file:
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.
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.
It wasn’t long, Gilmore says, before other hackers began discussing ways to “port” the GNU Emacs License over to their own programs. Prompted by a conversation on Usenet, Gilmore sent an email to Stallman in November, 1986, suggesting modification:
You should probably remove “EMACS” from the license and replace it with “SOFTWARE” or something. Soon, we hope, Emacs will not be the biggest part of the GNU system, and the license applies to all of it.[3]
Gilmore wasn’t the only person suggesting a more general approach. By the end of 1986, Stallman himself was at work with GNU Project’s next major milestone, a source-code debugger, and was looking for ways to revamp the Emacs license so that it might apply to both programs. Stallman’s solution: remove all specific references to Emacs and convert the license into a generic copyright umbrella for GNU Project software. The GNU General Public License, GPL for short, was born.
In fashioning the GPL, Stallman followed the software convention of using decimal numbers to indicate prototype versions and whole numbers to indicate mature versions. Stallman published Version 1.0 of the GPL in 1989 (a project Stallman was developing in 1985), almost a full year after the release of the GNU Debugger, Stallman’s second major foray into the realm of Unix programming. The license contained a preamble spelling out its political intentions:
The General Public License is designed to make sure that you have the freedom to give away or sell copies of free software, that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things. To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid 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.
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.
Looking back, Stallman says the GPL compromise was fueled by his own dissatisfaction with the Big Brother aspect of the original Emacs Commune social contract. As much as he liked peering into other hackers’ systems, the knowledge that some future source-code maintainer might use that power to ill effect forced him to temper the GPL.
“It was wrong to require people to publish all changes”, says Stallman. “It was wrong to require them to be sent to one privileged developer. That kind of centralization and privilege for one was not consistent with a society in which all had equal rights”.
As hacks go, the GPL stands as one of Stallman’s best. It created a system of communal ownership within the normally proprietary confines of copyright law. More importantly, it demonstrated the intellectual similarity between legal code and software code. Implicit within the GPL’s preamble was a profound message: instead of viewing copyright law with suspicion, hackers should view it as yet another system begging to be hacked.
“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”.[5] 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”.
4.
See Richard Stallman, et al., “GNU General Public License: Version 1”, (February, 1989).
5.
See David Betz and Jon Edwards, “Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain [sic] Unix-compatible software system with BYTE editors”,
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”.