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Conscious resistance

As the world of unrestricted code swapping slowly faded away, a counterreaction crystallized in the mind of at least one programmer. Richard Stallman worked in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s and early '80s, during what turned out to be a golden age and a golden location for code sharing. The AI Lab had a strong "hacker ethic",[3] and people were not only encouraged but expected to share whatever improvements they made to the system. As Stallman wrote later:

   We did not call our software "free software", because that term did not yet exist; but that is what it was. Whenever people from another university or a company wanted to port and use a program, we gladly let them. If you saw someone using an unfamiliar and interesting program, you could always ask to see the source code, so that you could read it, change it, or cannibalize parts of it to make a new program.

   (from http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html)

This Edenic community collapsed around Stallman shortly after 1980, when the changes that had been happening in the rest of the industry finally caught up with the AI Lab. A startup company hired away many of the Lab's programmers to work on an operating system similar to what they had been working on at the Lab, only now under an exclusive license. At the same time, the AI Lab acquired new equipment that came with a proprietary operating system.

Stallman saw the larger pattern in what was happening:

   The modern computers of the era, such as the VAX or the 68020, had their own operating systems, but none of them were free software: you had to sign a nondisclosure agreement even to get an executable copy.

   This meant that the first step in using a computer was to promise not to help your neighbor. A cooperating community was forbidden. The rule made by the owners of proprietary software was, "If you share with your neighbor, you are a pirate. If you want any changes, beg us to make them." 

By some quirk of personality, he decided to resist the trend. Instead of continuing to work at the now-decimated AI Lab, or taking a job writing code at one of the new companies, where the results of his work would be kept locked in a box, he resigned from the Lab and started the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The goal of GNU[4] was to develop a completely free and open computer operating system and body of application software, in which users would never be prevented from hacking or from sharing their modifications. He was, in essence, setting out to recreate what had been destroyed at the AI Lab, but on a world-wide scale and without the vulnerabilities that had made the AI Lab's culture susceptible to disintegration.

In addition to working on the new operating system, Stallman devised a copyright license whose terms guaranteed that his code would be perpetually free. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a clever piece of legal judo: it says that the code may be copied and modified without restriction, and that both copies and derivative works (i.e., modified versions) must be distributed under the same license as the original, with no additional restrictions. In effect, it uses copyright law to achieve an effect opposite to that of traditional copyright: instead of limiting the software's distribution, it prevents anyone, even the author, from limiting it. For Stallman, this was better than simply putting his code into the public domain. If it were in the public domain, any particular copy of it could be incorporated into a proprietary program (as has also been known to happen to code under permissive copyright licenses). While such incorporation wouldn't in any way diminish the original code's continued availability, it would have meant that Stallman's efforts could benefit the enemy—proprietary software. The GPL can be thought of as a form of protectionism for free software, because it prevents non-free software from taking full advantage of GPLed code. The GPL and its relationship to other free software licenses are discussed in detail in Chapter 9, Licenses, Copyrights, and Patents.

With the help of many programmers, some of whom shared Stallman's ideology and some of whom simply wanted to see a lot of free code available, the GNU Project began releasing free replacements for many of the most critical components of an operating system. Because of the now-widespread standardization in computer hardware and software, it was possible to use the GNU replacements on otherwise non-free systems, and many people did. The GNU text editor (Emacs) and C compiler (GCC) were particularly successful, gaining large and loyal followings not on ideological grounds, but simply on their technical merits. By about 1990, GNU had produced most of a free operating system, except for the kernel—the part that the machine actually boots up, and that is responsible for managing memory, disk, and other system resources.

Unfortunately, the GNU project had chosen a kernel design that turned out to be harder to implement than expected. The ensuing delay prevented the Free Software Foundation from making the first release of an entirely free operating system. The final piece was put into place instead by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer science student who, with the help of volunteers around the world, had completed a free kernel using a more conservative design. He named it Linux, and when it was combined with the existing GNU programs, the result was a completely free operating system. For the first time, you could boot up your computer and do work without using any proprietary software.[5]

Much of the software on this new operating system was not produced by the GNU project. In fact, GNU wasn't even the only group working on producing a free operating system (for example, the code that eventually became NetBSD and FreeBSD was already under development by this time). The importance of the Free Software Foundation was not only in the code they wrote, but in their political rhetoric. By talking about free software as a cause instead of a convenience, they made it difficult for programmers not to have a political consciousness about it. Even those who disagreed with the FSF had to engage the issue, if only to stake out a different position. The FSF's effectiveness as propagandists lay in tying their code to a message, by means of the GPL and other texts. As their code spread widely, that message spread as well.