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.
The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all great religions are built upon the “routinization” or “institutionalization” of charisma. Every successful religion, Weber argued, converts the charisma or message of the original religious leader into a social, political, and ethical apparatus more easily translatable across cultures and time.
While not religious per se, the GNU GPL certainly qualifies as an interesting example of this “routinization” process at work in the modern, decentralized world of software development. Since its unveiling, programmers and companies who have otherwise expressed little loyalty or allegiance to Stallman have willingly accepted the GPL bargain at face value. A few have even accepted the GPL as a preemptive protective mechanism for their own software programs. Even those who reject the GPL contract as too compulsory, still credit it as influential.
One hacker falling into this latter group was Keith Bostic, a University of California employee at the time of the GPL 1.0 release. Bostic’s department, the Computer Systems Research Group (SRG), had been involved in Unix development since the late 1970s and was responsible for many key parts of Unix, including the TCP/IP networking protocol, the cornerstone of modern Internet communications. By the late 1980s, AT&T, the original owner of the Unix brand name, began to focus on commercializing Unix and began looking to the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, the academic version of Unix developed by Bostic and his Berkeley peers, as a key source of commercial technology.
Although the Berkeley BSD source code was shared among researchers and commercial programmers with a source-code license, this commercialization presented a problem. The Berkeley code was intermixed with proprietary AT&T code. As a result, Berkeley distributions were available only to institutions that already had a Unix source license from AT&T. As AT&T raised its license fees, this arrangement, which had at first seemed innocuous, became increasingly burdensome.
Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project of porting BSD over to the Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-11 computer. It was during this period, Bostic says, that he came into close interaction with Stallman during Stallman’s occasional forays out to the west coast. “I remember vividly arguing copyright with Stallman while he sat at borrowed workstations at CSRG”, says Bostic. “We’d go to dinner afterward and continue arguing about copyright over dinner”.
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.[6] 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.
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.
“I think it’s highly unlikely that we ever would have gone as strongly as we did without the GNU influence”, says Bostic, looking back. “It was clearly something where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea”.
By the end of the 1980s, the GPL was beginning to exert a gravitational effect on the free software community. A program didn’t have to carry the GPL to qualify as free software-witness the case of the BSD utilities-but putting a program under the GPL sent a definite message. “I think the very existence of the GPL inspired people to think through whether they were making free software, and how they would license it”, says Bruce Perens, creator of Electric Fence, a popular Unix utility, and future leader of the Debian GNU/Linux development team. A few years after the release of the GPL, Perens says he decided to discard Electric Fence’s homegrown license in favor of Stallman’s lawyer-vetted copyright. “It was actually pretty easy to do”, Perens recalls.
Rich Morin, the programmer who had viewed Stallman’s initial GNU announcement with a degree of skepticism, recalls being impressed by the software that began to gather under the GPL umbrella. As the leader of a SunOS user group, one of Morin’s primary duties during the 1980s had been to send out distribution tapes containing the best freeware or free software utilities. The job often mandated calling up original program authors to verify whether their programs were copyright protected or whether they had been consigned to the public domain. Around 1989, Morin says, he began to notice that the best software programs typically fell under the GPL license. “As a software distributor, as soon as I saw the word GPL, I knew I was home free”, recalls Morin.
To compensate for the prior hassles that went into compiling distribution tapes to the Sun User Group, Morin had charged recipients a convenience fee. Now, with programs moving over to the GPL, Morin was suddenly getting his tapes put together in half the time, turning a tidy profit in the process. Sensing a commercial opportunity, Morin rechristened his hobby as a business: Prime Time Freeware.
Such commercial exploitation was completely within the confines of the free software agenda. “When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price”, advised Stallman in the GPL’s preamble. By the late 1980s, Stallman had refined it to a more simple mnemonic: “Don’t think free as in free beer; think free as in free speech”.
For the most part, businesses ignored Stallman’s entreaties. Still, for a few entrepreneurs, the freedom associated with free software was the same freedom associated with free markets. Take software ownership out of the commercial equation, and you had a situation where even the smallest software company was free to compete against the IBMs and DECs of the world.
One of the first entrepreneurs to grasp this concept was Michael Tiemann, a software programmer and graduate student at Stanford University. During the 1980s, Tiemann had followed the GNU Project like an aspiring jazz musician following a favorite artist. It wasn’t until the release of the GNU C Compiler in 1987, however, that he began to grasp the full potential of free software. Dubbing GCC a “bombshell”, Tiemann says the program’s own existence underlined Stallman’s determination as a programmer.
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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