Free Software Foundation Turns 25

An anonymous reader writes "On this day, 25 years ago, Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation. He had been the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab. Tired of seeing software that he and others had written appropriated (without acknowledgment or compensation) by disreputable software companies and then told to pay for software they had written, Stallman took action, creating the foundation. The original license was written by Stallman. Stallman had subsequently written a large number of GNU tools, but the license was his most important contribution."

Comments

Uhm, no!

[kenh]

" He had been the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab.?

He was a system administrator, not the director of the lab! Minsky, Papert, et al didn't report to him...

Re:Uhm, no!

[kenh]

" Tired of seeing software that he and others had written appropriated (without acknowledgment or compensation) by disreputable software companies and then told to pay for software they had written, Stallman took action, creating the foundation."

That doesn't seem right either - I thought the driving issue was the need to pay a fee to access driver software to modify it to use a product they already bought (I think it was a printer) - as I recall the issue was that software licenses were getting in the way of him doing the work he needed to do. He wasn't against paying for needed software, but in this case (his "tipping point"), but he was being required to pay to fix software he'd already paid for since the the manufacturer wouldn't/couldn't make it work.

Re:Director of the AI Lab?

[trb]

Not to diss Stallman, but he was not the director of the AI Lab, and it's hard to say he was their most famous hacker at that time - the AI Lab spawned many great hackers, and especially then, during the early years of Symbolics and LMI. The most famous AI Lab hackers were LISP hackers (at that time - remember, it was a AI Lab.) Gerald Sussman, Guy Steele, JonL White, David Moon, et al.

Re:Director of the AI Lab?

[plasticsquirrel]

Yes, but Stallman was also doing a great amount of Lisp Machine work for LMI. Specifically, Symbolics was trying to shake off a prior agreement to share code with LMI. Stallman duplicated the new features from scratch for LMI, working around the clock. I believe he was their main programmer at the time. He didn't make Lisp history like the others did with Scheme or Common Lisp, but he was deeply a Lisp guy at that time, and wanted the GNU system to support two languages: C and Lisp. In fact, GNU Emacs was written because he wanted a powerful editor, and knew that Lisp was the best way to accomplish that extensibility. Now systems running GNU (Linux) use so many different languages that people have almost forgotten about the Lisp side of things, sadly.

Who wrote this claptrap?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Tired of seeing software that he and others had written appropriated (without acknowledgment or compensation) by disreputable software companies and then told to pay for software they had written, Stallman took action, creating the foundation.

What a terrible mis-representation of RMS's motivations. The EFF wasn't founded because RMS thought his software being "stolen" - it was created because he was locked out of fixing bugs in software on equipment in the lab where he worked. Read the first chapter of Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software. -- For Want of a Printer for a description of that seminal moment.