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Free as in Freedom - Chapter 1
Go to the first, previous,
next, last section,table of contents.
Greek
---
Richard M. Stallman, a staff software
programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (AI Lab), discovered the malfunction the hard way. An hour after
sending off a 50-page file to the office laser printer, Stallman, 27, broke
off a productive work session to retrieve his documents. Upon arrival, he
found only four pages in the printer's tray. To make matters even more frustrating,
the four pages belonged to another user, meaning that Stallman's print job
and the unfinished portion of somebody else's print job were still trapped
somewhere within the electrical plumbing of the lab's computer network.
AI
AI
AI
In modifying the machine for printer use, Xerox engineers had changed the
user-machine relationship in a subtle but profound way. Instead of making
the machine subservient to an individual human operator, they made it subservient
to an entire networked population of human operators. Instead of standing
directly over the machine, a human user on one end of the network sent his
print command through an extended bucket-brigade of machines, expecting the
desired content to arrive at the targeted destination and in proper form.
It wasn't until he finally went to check up on the final output that he realized
how little of the desired content had made it through.
PDP-11 PDP-11
PDP-10
PDP-10
AI
AI AI
(1)
It was because of this give-and-take
philosophy that when Stallman spotted the print-jam defect in the Xerox laser
printer, he didn't panic. He simply looked for a way to update the old fix
or "hack" for the new system. In the course of looking up the Xerox laser-printer
software, however, Stallman made a troubling discovery. The printer didn't
have any software, at least nothing Stallman or a fellow programmer could
read. Until then, most companies had made it a form of courtesy to publish
source-code files--readable text files that documented the individual software
commands that told a machine what to do. Xerox, in this instance, had provided
software files in precompiled, or binary, form. Programmers were free to
open the files up if they wanted to, but unless they were an expert in deciphering
an endless stream of ones and zeroes, the resulting text was pure gibberish.
Although Stallman knew plenty about computers, he
was not an expert in translating binary files. As a hacker, however, he had
other resources at his disposal. The notion of information sharing was so
central to the hacker culture that Stallman knew it was only a matter of
time before some hacker in some university lab or corporate computer room
proffered a version of the laser-printer source code with the desired source-code
files.
After the first few printer jams, Stallman comforted himself with the memory
of a similar situation years before. The lab had needed a cross-network program
to help the PDP-11 work more efficiently with the PDP-10. The lab's hackers
were more than up to the task, but Stallman, a Harvard alumnus, recalled a
similar program written by programmers at the Harvard computer-science department.
The Harvard computer lab used the same model computer, the PDP-10, albeit
with a different operating system. The Harvard computer lab also had a policy
requiring that all programs installed on the PDP-10 had to come with published
source-code files.
PDP-11
PDP-10
PDP-10 PDP-10
Taking advantage of his access to the Harvard computer
lab, Stallman dropped in, made a copy of the cross-network source code, and
brought it back to the AI Lab. He then rewrote the source code to make it
more suitable for the AI Lab's operating system. With no muss and little fuss,
the AI Lab shored up a major gap in its software infrastructure. Stallman
even added a few features not found in the original Harvard program, making
the program even more useful. "We wound up using it for several years," Stallman
says.
AI
AI AI
From the perspective of a 1970s-era
programmer, the transaction was the software equivalent of a neighbor stopping
by to borrow a power tool or a cup of sugar from a neighbor. The only difference
was that in borrowing a copy of the software for the AI Lab, Stallman had
done nothing to deprive Harvard hackers the use of their original program.
If anything, Harvard hackers gained in the process, because Stallman had introduced
his own additional features to the program, features that hackers at Harvard
were perfectly free to borrow in return. Although nobody at Harvard ever
came over to borrow the program back, Stallman does recall a programmer at
the private engineering firm, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, borrowing the program
and adding a few additional features, which Stallman eventually reintegrated
into the AI Lab's own source-code archive.
AI Bolt,
Beranek & Newman AI
"A program would develop the way a city develops," says Stallman, recalling
the software infrastructure of the AI Lab. "Parts would get replaced and
rebuilt. New things would get added on. But you could always look at a certain
part and say, `Hmm, by the style, I see this part was written back in the
early 60s and this part was written in the mid-1970s.'"
AI
Through this simple system of intellectual accretion, hackers
at the AI Lab and other places built up robust creations. On the west coast,
computer scientists at UC Berkeley, working in cooperation with a few low-level
engineers at AT&T, had built up an entire operating system using this
system. Dubbed Unix, a play on an older, more academically respectable operating
system called Multics, the software system was available to any programmer
willing to pay for the cost of copying the program onto a new magnetic tape
and shipping it. Not every programmer participating in this culture described
himself as a hacker, but most shared the sentiments of Richard M. Stallman.
If a program or software fix was good enough to solve your problems, it was
good enough to solve somebody else's problems. Why not share it out of a
simple desire for good karma
AI AT&T
Unix
The fact that Xerox had been unwilling to share its source-code files seemed
a minor annoyance at first. In tracking down a copy of the source-code files,
Stallman says he didn't even bother contacting Xerox. "They had already given
us the laser printer," Stallman says. "Why should I bug them for more?"
When the desired files failed to surface,
however, Stallman began to grow suspicious. The year before, Stallman had
experienced a blow up with a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University.
The student, Brian Reid, was the author of a useful text-formatting program
dubbed Scribe. One of the first programs that gave a user the power to define
fonts and type styles when sending a document over a computer network, the
program was an early harbinger of HTML, the lingua franca of the World Wide
Web. In 1979, Reid made the decision to sell Scribe to a Pittsburgh-area
software company called Unilogic. His graduate-student career ending, Reid
says he simply was looking for a way to unload the program on a set of developers
that would take pains to keep it from slipping into the public domain. To
sweeten the deal, Reid also agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions---"time
bombs" in software-programmer parlance--that deactivated freely copied versions
of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users
paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal
time-bomb feature.
For Reid, the deal was a win-win. Scribe didn't fall into the public domain,
and Unilogic recouped on its investment. For Stallman, it was a betrayal
of the programmer ethos, pure and simple. Instead of honoring the notion
of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel
programmers to pay for information access.
As the weeks passed and his attempts to track down
Xerox laser-printer source code hit a brick wall, Stallman began to sense
a similar money-for-code scenario at work. Before Stallman could do or say
anything about it, however, good news finally trickled in via the programmer
grapevine. Word had it that a scientist at the computer-science department
at Carnegie Mellon University had just departed a job at the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center. Not only had the scientist worked on the laser printer in
question, but according to rumor, he was still working on it as part of his
research duties at Carnegie Mellon.
Casting aside his initial suspicion, Stallman made a firm resolution to
seek out the person in question during his next visit to the Carnegie Mellon
campus.
He didn't have to wait long. Carnegie Mellon also had a lab specializing
in artificial-intelligence research, and within a few months, Stallman had
a business-related reason to visit the Carnegie Mellon campus. During that
visit, he made sure to stop by the computer-science department. Department
employees directed him to the office of the faculty member leading the Xerox
project. When Stallman reached the office, he found the professor working
there.
In true engineer-to-engineer fashion, the conversation was cordial but
blunt. After briefly introducing himself as a visitor from MIT, Stallman requested
a copy of the laser-printer source code so that he could port it to the PDP-11.
To his surprise, the professor refused to grant his request.
"He told me that he had promised not to give me a copy," Stallman says.
Memory is a funny thing. Twenty
years after the fact, Stallman's mental history tape is notoriously blank
in places. Not only does he not remember the motivating reason for the trip
or even the time of year during which he took it, he also has no recollection
of the professor or doctoral student on the other end of the conversation.
According to Reid, the person most likely to have fielded Stallman's request
is Robert Sproull, a former Xerox PARC researcher and current director of
Sun Laboratories, a research division of the computer-technology conglomerate
Sun Microsystems. During the 1970s, Sproull had been the primary developer
of the laser-printer software in question while at Xerox PARC. Around 1980,
Sproull took a faculty research position at Carnegie Mellon where he continued
his laser-printer work amid other projects.
"The code that Stallman was asking for was leading-edge state-of-the-art
code that Sproull had written in the year or so before going to Carnegie Mellon,"
recalls Reid. "I suspect that Sproull had been at Carnegie Mellon less than
a month before this request came in."
When asked directly about the request, however, Sproull draws a blank.
"I can't make a factual comment," writes Sproull via email. "I have absolutely
no recollection of the incident."
With both participants in the brief conversation struggling to recall key
details--including whether the conversation even took place--it's hard to
gauge the bluntness of Sproull's refusal, at least as recalled by Stallman.
In talking to audiences, Stallman has made repeated reference to the incident,
noting that Sproull's unwillingness to hand over the source code stemmed
from a nondisclosure agreement, a contractual agreement between Sproull and
the Xerox Corporation giving Sproull, or any other signatory, access the
software source code in exchange for a promise of secrecy. Now a standard
item of business in the software industry, the nondisclosure agreement, or
NDA, was a novel development at the time, a reflection of both the commercial
value of the laser printer to Xerox and the information needed to run it.
"Xerox was at the time trying to make a commercial product out of the laser
printer," recalls Reid. "They would have been insane to give away the source
code."
For Stallman, however, the NDA
was something else entirely. It was a refusal on the part of Xerox and Sproull,
or whomever the person was that turned down his source-code request that
day, to participate in a system that, until then, had encouraged software
programmers to regard programs as communal resources. Like a peasant whose
centuries--old irrigation ditch had grown suddenly dry, Stallman had followed
the ditch to its source only to find a brand-spanking--new hydroelectric
dam bearing the Xerox logo.
For Stallman, the realization that Xerox had compelled a fellow programmer
to participate in this newfangled system of compelled secrecy took a while
to sink in. At first, all he could focus on was the personal nature of the
refusal. As a person who felt awkward and out of sync in most face-to-face
encounters, Stallman's attempt to drop in on a fellow programmer unannounced
had been intended as a demonstration of neighborliness. Now that the request
had been refused, it felt like a major blunder. "I was so angry I couldn't
think of a way to express it. So I just turned away and walked out without
another word," Stallman recalls. "I might have slammed the door. Who knows?
All I remember is wanting to get out of there."
Twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers, so much so that Stallman
has elevated the event into a major turning point. Within the next few months,
a series of events would befall both Stallman and the AI Lab hacker community
that would make 30 seconds worth of tension in a remote Carnegie Mellon office
seem trivial by comparison. Nevertheless, when it comes time to sort out
the events that would transform Stallman from a lone hacker, instinctively
suspicious of centralized authority, to a crusading activist applying traditional
notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the world of software development,
Stallman singles out the Carnegie Mellon encounter for special attention.
"It encouraged me to think about something that I'd already been thinking
about," says Stallman. "I already had an idea that software should be shared,
but I wasn't sure how to think about that. My thoughts weren't clear and
organized to the point where I could express them in a concise fashion to
the rest of the world."
Although previous events had raised Stallman's ire, he says it wasn't until
his Carnegie Mellon encounter that he realized the events were beginning to
intrude on a culture he had long considered sacrosanct. As an elite programmer
at one of the world's elite institutions, Stallman had been perfectly willing
to ignore the compromises and bargains of his fellow programmers just so
long as they didn't interfere with his own work. Until the arrival of the
Xerox laser printer, Stallman had been content to look down on the machines
and programs other computer users grimly tolerated. On the rare occasion
that such a program breached the AI Lab's walls--when the lab replaced its
venerable Incompatible Time Sharing operating system with a commercial variant,
the TOPS 20, for example--Stallman and his hacker colleagues had been free
to rewrite, reshape, and rename the software according to personal taste.
Now that the laser printer had insinuated itself within
the AI Lab's network, however, something had changed. The machine worked
fine, barring the occasional paper jam, but the ability to modify according
to personal taste had disappeared. From the viewpoint of the entire software
industry, the printer was a wake-up call. Software had become such a valuable
asset that companies no longer felt the need to publicize source code, especially
when publication meant giving potential competitors a chance to duplicate
something cheaply. From Stallman's viewpoint, the printer was a Trojan Horse.
After a decade of failure, privately owned software--future hackers would
use the term "proprietary" software--had gained a foothold inside the AI
Lab through the sneakiest of methods. It had come disguised as a gift.
That Xerox had offered some programmers access to additional gifts in exchange
for secrecy was also galling, but Stallman takes pains to note that, if presented
with such a quid pro quo bargain at a younger age, he just might have taken
the Xerox Corporation up on its offer. The awkwardness of the Carnegie Mellon
encounter, however, had a firming effect on Stallman's own moral lassitude.
Not only did it give him the necessary anger to view all future entreaties
with suspicion, it also forced him to ask the uncomfortable question: what
if a fellow hacker dropped into Stallman's office someday and it suddenly
became Stallman's job to refuse the hacker's request for source code?
"It was my first encounter with a nondisclosure agreement, and it immediately
taught me that nondisclosure agreements have victims," says Stallman, firmly.
"In this case I was the victim. [My lab and I] were victims."
It was a lesson Stallman would carry with him through the tumultuous years
of the 1980s, a decade during which many of his MIT colleagues would depart
the AI Lab and sign nondisclosure agreements of their own. Because most nondisclosure
aggreements (NDAs) had expiration dates, few hackers who did sign them saw
little need for personal introspection. Sooner or later, they reasoned, the
software would become public knowledge. In the meantime, promising to keep
the software secret during its earliest development stages was all a part
of the compromise deal that allowed hackers to work on the best projects.
For Stallman, however, it was the first step down a slippery slope.
"When somebody invited me to betray all my colleagues in that way, I remembered
how angry I was when somebody else had done that to me and my whole lab,"
Stallman says. "So I said, `Thank you very much for offering me this nice
software package, but I can't accept it on the conditions that you're asking
for, so I'm going to do without it.'"
As Stallman would quickly learn, refusing such requests involved more than
personal sacrifice. It involved segregating himself from fellow hackers who,
though sharing a similar distaste for secrecy, tended to express that distaste
in a more morally flexible fashion. It wasn't long before Stallman, increasingly
an outcast even within the AI Lab, began billing himself as "the last true
hacker," isolating himself further and further from a marketplace dominated
by proprietary software. Refusing another's request for source code, Stallman
decided, was not only a betrayal of the scientific mission that had nurtured
software development since the end of World War II, it was a violation of
the Golden Rule, the baseline moral dictate to do unto others as you would
have them do unto you.
Hence the importance of the laser printer and the encounter that resulted
from it. Without it, Stallman says, his life might have followed a more ordinary
path, one balancing the riches of a commercial programmer with the ultimate
frustration of a life spent writing invisible software code. There would
have been no sense of clarity, no urgency to address a problem others weren't
addressing. Most importantly, there would have been no righteous anger, an
emotion that, as we soon shall see, has propelled Stallman's career as surely
as any political ideology or ethical belief. </p>
<p>"From that day forward, I decided this was something I could never participate
in," says Stallman, alluding to the practice of trading personal liberty
for the sake of convenience--Stallman's description of the NDA bargain--as
well as the overall culture that encouraged such ethically suspect deal-making
in the first place. "I decided never to make other people victims just like
I had been a victim." </p>
<hr>
<p>Go to the <a href="faif_1.html">first</a>, <a href="faif_1.html">previous</a>,
<a href="faif_3.html">next</a>, <a href="faif_19.html">last</a> section,<a
href="faif_toc.html">table of contents</a>.</p>
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+
Free as in Freedom - Chapter 1
Go to the first, previous,
next, last section,table of contents.
Greek
---
Richard M. Stallman, a staff software
programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (AI Lab), discovered the malfunction the hard way. An hour after
sending off a 50-page file to the office laser printer, Stallman, 27, broke
off a productive work session to retrieve his documents. Upon arrival, he
found only four pages in the printer's tray. To make matters even more frustrating,
the four pages belonged to another user, meaning that Stallman's print job
and the unfinished portion of somebody else's print job were still trapped
somewhere within the electrical plumbing of the lab's computer network.
AI
AI
AI
In modifying the machine for printer use, Xerox engineers had changed the
user-machine relationship in a subtle but profound way. Instead of making
the machine subservient to an individual human operator, they made it subservient
to an entire networked population of human operators. Instead of standing
directly over the machine, a human user on one end of the network sent his
print command through an extended bucket-brigade of machines, expecting the
desired content to arrive at the targeted destination and in proper form.
It wasn't until he finally went to check up on the final output that he realized
how little of the desired content had made it through.
PDP-11 PDP-11
PDP-10
PDP-10
AI
AI AI
(1)
It was because of this give-and-take
philosophy that when Stallman spotted the print-jam defect in the Xerox laser
printer, he didn't panic. He simply looked for a way to update the old fix
or "hack" for the new system. In the course of looking up the Xerox laser-printer
software, however, Stallman made a troubling discovery. The printer didn't
have any software, at least nothing Stallman or a fellow programmer could
read. Until then, most companies had made it a form of courtesy to publish
source-code files--readable text files that documented the individual software
commands that told a machine what to do. Xerox, in this instance, had provided
software files in precompiled, or binary, form. Programmers were free to
open the files up if they wanted to, but unless they were an expert in deciphering
an endless stream of ones and zeroes, the resulting text was pure gibberish.
Although Stallman knew plenty about computers, he
was not an expert in translating binary files. As a hacker, however, he had
other resources at his disposal. The notion of information sharing was so
central to the hacker culture that Stallman knew it was only a matter of
time before some hacker in some university lab or corporate computer room
proffered a version of the laser-printer source code with the desired source-code
files.
After the first few printer jams, Stallman comforted himself with the memory
of a similar situation years before. The lab had needed a cross-network program
to help the PDP-11 work more efficiently with the PDP-10. The lab's hackers
were more than up to the task, but Stallman, a Harvard alumnus, recalled a
similar program written by programmers at the Harvard computer-science department.
The Harvard computer lab used the same model computer, the PDP-10, albeit
with a different operating system. The Harvard computer lab also had a policy
requiring that all programs installed on the PDP-10 had to come with published
source-code files.
PDP-11
PDP-10
PDP-10 PDP-10
Taking advantage of his access to the Harvard computer
lab, Stallman dropped in, made a copy of the cross-network source code, and
brought it back to the AI Lab. He then rewrote the source code to make it
more suitable for the AI Lab's operating system. With no muss and little fuss,
the AI Lab shored up a major gap in its software infrastructure. Stallman
even added a few features not found in the original Harvard program, making
the program even more useful. "We wound up using it for several years," Stallman
says.
AI
AI AI
From the perspective of a 1970s-era
programmer, the transaction was the software equivalent of a neighbor stopping
by to borrow a power tool or a cup of sugar from a neighbor. The only difference
was that in borrowing a copy of the software for the AI Lab, Stallman had
done nothing to deprive Harvard hackers the use of their original program.
If anything, Harvard hackers gained in the process, because Stallman had introduced
his own additional features to the program, features that hackers at Harvard
were perfectly free to borrow in return. Although nobody at Harvard ever
came over to borrow the program back, Stallman does recall a programmer at
the private engineering firm, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, borrowing the program
and adding a few additional features, which Stallman eventually reintegrated
into the AI Lab's own source-code archive.
AI Bolt,
Beranek & Newman AI
"A program would develop the way a city develops," says Stallman, recalling
the software infrastructure of the AI Lab. "Parts would get replaced and
rebuilt. New things would get added on. But you could always look at a certain
part and say, `Hmm, by the style, I see this part was written back in the
early 60s and this part was written in the mid-1970s.'"
AI
Through this simple system of intellectual accretion, hackers
at the AI Lab and other places built up robust creations. On the west coast,
computer scientists at UC Berkeley, working in cooperation with a few low-level
engineers at AT&T, had built up an entire operating system using this
system. Dubbed Unix, a play on an older, more academically respectable operating
system called Multics, the software system was available to any programmer
willing to pay for the cost of copying the program onto a new magnetic tape
and shipping it. Not every programmer participating in this culture described
himself as a hacker, but most shared the sentiments of Richard M. Stallman.
If a program or software fix was good enough to solve your problems, it was
good enough to solve somebody else's problems. Why not share it out of a
simple desire for good karma
AI AT&T
Unix
Multics
The fact that Xerox had been unwilling to share its source-code files seemed
a minor annoyance at first. In tracking down a copy of the source-code files,
Stallman says he didn't even bother contacting Xerox. "They had already given
us the laser printer," Stallman says. "Why should I bug them for more?"
When the desired files failed to surface,
however, Stallman began to grow suspicious. The year before, Stallman had
experienced a blow up with a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University.
The student, Brian Reid, was the author of a useful text-formatting program
dubbed Scribe. One of the first programs that gave a user the power to define
fonts and type styles when sending a document over a computer network, the
program was an early harbinger of HTML, the lingua franca of the World Wide
Web. In 1979, Reid made the decision to sell Scribe to a Pittsburgh-area
software company called Unilogic. His graduate-student career ending, Reid
says he simply was looking for a way to unload the program on a set of developers
that would take pains to keep it from slipping into the public domain. To
sweeten the deal, Reid also agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions---"time
bombs" in software-programmer parlance--that deactivated freely copied versions
of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users
paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal
time-bomb feature.
Scribe WWW HTML Scribe Unilogic
For Reid, the deal was a win-win. Scribe didn't fall into the public domain,
and Unilogic recouped on its investment. For Stallman, it was a betrayal
of the programmer ethos, pure and simple. Instead of honoring the notion
of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel
programmers to pay for information access.
Scribe Unilogic
As the weeks passed and his attempts to track down
Xerox laser-printer source code hit a brick wall, Stallman began to sense
a similar money-for-code scenario at work. Before Stallman could do or say
anything about it, however, good news finally trickled in via the programmer
grapevine. Word had it that a scientist at the computer-science department
at Carnegie Mellon University had just departed a job at the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center. Not only had the scientist worked on the laser printer in
question, but according to rumor, he was still working on it as part of his
research duties at Carnegie Mellon.
Casting aside his initial suspicion, Stallman made a firm resolution to
seek out the person in question during his next visit to the Carnegie Mellon
campus.
He didn't have to wait long. Carnegie Mellon also had a lab specializing
in artificial-intelligence research, and within a few months, Stallman had
a business-related reason to visit the Carnegie Mellon campus. During that
visit, he made sure to stop by the computer-science department. Department
employees directed him to the office of the faculty member leading the Xerox
project. When Stallman reached the office, he found the professor working
there.
In true engineer-to-engineer fashion, the conversation was cordial but
blunt. After briefly introducing himself as a visitor from MIT, Stallman requested
a copy of the laser-printer source code so that he could port it to the PDP-11.
To his surprise, the professor refused to grant his request.
MIT PDP-11
"He told me that he had promised not to give me a copy," Stallman says.
Memory is a funny thing. Twenty
years after the fact, Stallman's mental history tape is notoriously blank
in places. Not only does he not remember the motivating reason for the trip
or even the time of year during which he took it, he also has no recollection
of the professor or doctoral student on the other end of the conversation.
According to Reid, the person most likely to have fielded Stallman's request
is Robert Sproull, a former Xerox PARC researcher and current director of
Sun Laboratories, a research division of the computer-technology conglomerate
Sun Microsystems. During the 1970s, Sproull had been the primary developer
of the laser-printer software in question while at Xerox PARC. Around 1980,
Sproull took a faculty research position at Carnegie Mellon where he continued
his laser-printer work amid other projects.
Sun Laboratories
"The code that Stallman was asking for was leading-edge state-of-the-art
code that Sproull had written in the year or so before going to Carnegie Mellon,"
recalls Reid. "I suspect that Sproull had been at Carnegie Mellon less than
a month before this request came in."
When asked directly about the request, however, Sproull draws a blank.
"I can't make a factual comment," writes Sproull via email. "I have absolutely
no recollection of the incident."
With both participants in the brief conversation struggling to recall key
details--including whether the conversation even took place--it's hard to
gauge the bluntness of Sproull's refusal, at least as recalled by Stallman.
In talking to audiences, Stallman has made repeated reference to the incident,
noting that Sproull's unwillingness to hand over the source code stemmed
from a nondisclosure agreement, a contractual agreement between Sproull and
the Xerox Corporation giving Sproull, or any other signatory, access the
software source code in exchange for a promise of secrecy. Now a standard
item of business in the software industry, the nondisclosure agreement, or
NDA, was a novel development at the time, a reflection of both the commercial
value of the laser printer to Xerox and the information needed to run it.
"Xerox was at the time trying to make a commercial product out of the laser
printer," recalls Reid. "They would have been insane to give away the source
code."
-- -- NDA
For Stallman, however, the NDA
was something else entirely. It was a refusal on the part of Xerox and Sproull,
or whomever the person was that turned down his source-code request that
day, to participate in a system that, until then, had encouraged software
programmers to regard programs as communal resources. Like a peasant whose
centuries--old irrigation ditch had grown suddenly dry, Stallman had followed
the ditch to its source only to find a brand-spanking--new hydroelectric
dam bearing the Xerox logo.
NDA
For Stallman, the realization that Xerox had compelled a fellow programmer
to participate in this newfangled system of compelled secrecy took a while
to sink in. At first, all he could focus on was the personal nature of the
refusal. As a person who felt awkward and out of sync in most face-to-face
encounters, Stallman's attempt to drop in on a fellow programmer unannounced
had been intended as a demonstration of neighborliness. Now that the request
had been refused, it felt like a major blunder. "I was so angry I couldn't
think of a way to express it. So I just turned away and walked out without
another word," Stallman recalls. "I might have slammed the door. Who knows?
All I remember is wanting to get out of there."
Twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers, so much so that Stallman
has elevated the event into a major turning point. Within the next few months,
a series of events would befall both Stallman and the AI Lab hacker community
that would make 30 seconds worth of tension in a remote Carnegie Mellon office
seem trivial by comparison. Nevertheless, when it comes time to sort out
the events that would transform Stallman from a lone hacker, instinctively
suspicious of centralized authority, to a crusading activist applying traditional
notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the world of software development,
Stallman singles out the Carnegie Mellon encounter for special attention.
AI
"It encouraged me to think about something that I'd already been thinking
about," says Stallman. "I already had an idea that software should be shared,
but I wasn't sure how to think about that. My thoughts weren't clear and
organized to the point where I could express them in a concise fashion to
the rest of the world."
Although previous events had raised Stallman's ire, he says it wasn't until
his Carnegie Mellon encounter that he realized the events were beginning to
intrude on a culture he had long considered sacrosanct. As an elite programmer
at one of the world's elite institutions, Stallman had been perfectly willing
to ignore the compromises and bargains of his fellow programmers just so
long as they didn't interfere with his own work. Until the arrival of the
Xerox laser printer, Stallman had been content to look down on the machines
and programs other computer users grimly tolerated. On the rare occasion
that such a program breached the AI Lab's walls--when the lab replaced its
venerable Incompatible Time Sharing operating system with a commercial variant,
the TOPS 20, for example--Stallman and his hacker colleagues had been free
to rewrite, reshape, and rename the software according to personal taste.
Now that the laser printer had insinuated itself within
the AI Lab's network, however, something had changed. The machine worked
fine, barring the occasional paper jam, but the ability to modify according
to personal taste had disappeared. From the viewpoint of the entire software
industry, the printer was a wake-up call. Software had become such a valuable
asset that companies no longer felt the need to publicize source code, especially
when publication meant giving potential competitors a chance to duplicate
something cheaply. From Stallman's viewpoint, the printer was a Trojan Horse.
After a decade of failure, privately owned software--future hackers would
use the term "proprietary" software--had gained a foothold inside the AI
Lab through the sneakiest of methods. It had come disguised as a gift.
That Xerox had offered some programmers access to additional gifts in exchange
for secrecy was also galling, but Stallman takes pains to note that, if presented
with such a quid pro quo bargain at a younger age, he just might have taken
the Xerox Corporation up on its offer. The awkwardness of the Carnegie Mellon
encounter, however, had a firming effect on Stallman's own moral lassitude.
Not only did it give him the necessary anger to view all future entreaties
with suspicion, it also forced him to ask the uncomfortable question: what
if a fellow hacker dropped into Stallman's office someday and it suddenly
became Stallman's job to refuse the hacker's request for source code?
"It was my first encounter with a nondisclosure agreement, and it immediately
taught me that nondisclosure agreements have victims," says Stallman, firmly.
"In this case I was the victim. [My lab and I] were victims."
It was a lesson Stallman would carry with him through the tumultuous years
of the 1980s, a decade during which many of his MIT colleagues would depart
the AI Lab and sign nondisclosure agreements of their own. Because most nondisclosure
aggreements (NDAs) had expiration dates, few hackers who did sign them saw
little need for personal introspection. Sooner or later, they reasoned, the
software would become public knowledge. In the meantime, promising to keep
the software secret during its earliest development stages was all a part
of the compromise deal that allowed hackers to work on the best projects.
For Stallman, however, it was the first step down a slippery slope.
"When somebody invited me to betray all my colleagues in that way, I remembered
how angry I was when somebody else had done that to me and my whole lab,"
Stallman says. "So I said, `Thank you very much for offering me this nice
software package, but I can't accept it on the conditions that you're asking
for, so I'm going to do without it.'"
As Stallman would quickly learn, refusing such requests involved more than
personal sacrifice. It involved segregating himself from fellow hackers who,
though sharing a similar distaste for secrecy, tended to express that distaste
in a more morally flexible fashion. It wasn't long before Stallman, increasingly
an outcast even within the AI Lab, began billing himself as "the last true
hacker," isolating himself further and further from a marketplace dominated
by proprietary software. Refusing another's request for source code, Stallman
decided, was not only a betrayal of the scientific mission that had nurtured
software development since the end of World War II, it was a violation of
the Golden Rule, the baseline moral dictate to do unto others as you would
have them do unto you.
Hence the importance of the laser printer and the encounter that resulted
from it. Without it, Stallman says, his life might have followed a more ordinary
path, one balancing the riches of a commercial programmer with the ultimate
frustration of a life spent writing invisible software code. There would
have been no sense of clarity, no urgency to address a problem others weren't
addressing. Most importantly, there would have been no righteous anger, an
emotion that, as we soon shall see, has propelled Stallman's career as surely
as any political ideology or ethical belief. </p>
<p>"From that day forward, I decided this was something I could never participate
in," says Stallman, alluding to the practice of trading personal liberty
for the sake of convenience--Stallman's description of the NDA bargain--as
well as the overall culture that encouraged such ethically suspect deal-making
in the first place. "I decided never to make other people victims just like
I had been a victim." </p>
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