The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty

jeremy · 03-17-2015, 10:38 AM

Quote:

Unix, one of the earliest computer-operating systems, was developed between the late nineteen-sixties and the early nineteen-eighties, by A.T. & T. Bell Laboratories and various universities around the world, notably the University of California, Berkeley. It was the product of a highly collaborative process, in which researchers and students built and shared their code in an atmosphere of excitement and discovery that was fostered, in part, by an agreement that A.T. & T. representatives had signed, in 1956, with the Department of Justice, circumscribing the companys commercial activities in exchange for an end to antitrust proceedings. But in 1982, A.T. & T. was broken up and its agreement with the department ended; before long, the company was selling copies of Unix without including the source code from which it was derived, effectively commercializing the operating system and hiding its building blocks within a proprietary program. The move greatly upset many in the programming community, including Richard Stallman, a software developer in his late twenties who was then working at M.I.T.s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Stallman was uneasy over the increasing encroachment of proprietary software. Hed seen evidence of it in his own lab, when he found himself unable to adapt a new Xerox printer with a program hed created to alert users to paper jams, and he believed that he had an obligation to protect and nurture the hacker ethos hed experienced at M.I.T., which valued intellectual curiosity, esprit de corps, and fun over profit. In late 1983, he posted to two newsgroup discussion forums an idea to create an alternative to Unix. If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or part time, he wrote. The salary wont be high, but Im looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money.

Stallman expanded and formalized his ideas in the GNU Manifesto, which he published in the March, 1985, issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal of Software Tools, thirty years ago this month. So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor, he wrote, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free. I have resigned from the AI Lab to deny MIT any legal excuse to prevent me from giving GNU away. The nearly forty-five-hundred-word text called for collaborators to help build a freely shareable Unix-like operating system, and set forth an innovative method to insure its legal protection.

The GNU Manifesto is characteristic of its authordeceptively simple, lucid, explicitly left-leaning, and entirely uncompromising. He explains the point of the project in short, declarative sentences: [A] user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in [the] sole position to make changes. The document is also funny, in keeping with the playful traditions of early hackers. For instance, GNU (pronounced guh-NOO, with a hard g) is a recursive acronym, spelling out GNUs Not Unix.

More at The New Yorker...

A good read and overall a fairly balanced article, with comments from both Stallman and Tim OReilly included.

--jeremy

jeremy · 03-17-2015, 03:54 PM

Some thoughts I have on the article: http://jeremy.linuxquestions.org/201...-turns-thirty/

--jeremy