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

What about emacs

[nicolas.kassis]

GPL is cool but I think emacs was his greatest accomplishment. At least technical accomplishment.

Re:What about emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, vi is better.

Re:What about emacs

[yankpop]

GPL is cool but I think emacs was his greatest accomplishment. At least technical accomplishment.

Whoever modded this flamebait needs to have their privileges revoked. I'm not sure I agree with the parent post, but Emacs is unquestionably a substantial contribution in its own right, as is the GCC.

Flamebait is not a synonym for disagree.

Re:What about emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

Only emacs users go to Hell. All other sins are forgiveable.

Re:What about emacs

[LWATCDR]

Only a tiny percentage of people use Emacs.
Programers have the option of Vi, Eclipse.org, Netbeans, XCode, Notepad++, and any number of other free as in speech or beer IDEs.
Think of all the software that is available under the GPL including Linux.
Then think of all the software written using GCC.

While I do not agree with RMS's extremist dogmatic view that all software should be free, I tend to believe there is room for both models. I also really dislike his devoted followers.
But I will say this about him.
GPL was important in influenced a lot of people including myself to write and contribute free software. Emacs while I do not use it is a very powerful editor/ide/os/religion. GCC is wonderful and I use it often. And about the man himself. I wrote him an email once and he actually took the time to respond to me. I didn't agree with him but he was polite and passonate in his view point. I will say that my opinion of RMS is he is a gentalman that I respect but have an honest difference in opinion with.
 

Re:What about emacs

[Bigjeff5]

Technical accomplishments pale in comparison to cultural accomplishments.

Are you really arguing that emacs is a greater accomplishment than the entire open source software movement? GPL is what made OSS possible, without license the software would have been stolen before it could get off its feet. That's exactly what prompted the GPL in the first place - Stallman and his MIT buddies were writing software that vendors were picking up, incorporating into their own products, and then forcing Stallman and his buddies to pay for in the next iteration.

Re:What about emacs

[Eil]

You'll note that the negative moderation was balanced against at least 4 other positive moderations. The moderation system was built on the assumption that some people will moderate poorly but most will moderate appropriately. So Slashdot is working as it's supposed to. You can relax now.

Re:What about emacs

[nicolas.kassis]

I guess you are probably right but I still think he doesn't get the cred he deserves as a genius programmer. Before the GPL he was single handedly reverse engineering all of Symbolics stuff as a way to screw them for taking code from MIT's mac project and close sourcing it. That code was written by teams of very good hackers. That + emacs + gcc == incredible code writing. Some of the best MIT Hackers still say they we impressed by how much code he was churning out during that time.

Re:What about emacs

[bzipitidoo]

as a way to screw them for taking code

Perhaps that was a motive. But if it is, should it be characterized that way? You might as well say that people who don't buy movies are "screwing" movie producers. Even if they never watch movies-- never pirate them, go to theaters, or even see them while visiting friends. Or that the police are "screwing" criminals whenever they make an arrest. If anyone writes useful software and gives it away, some business "opportunity" is "lost". That's crazy thinking, based on a fundamentally unsound business model.

The truer characterization is that an underhanded rent-seeking scheme was foiled, or punished. The scheme may have been legal, but it sure wasn't ethical. I have no sympathy whatever for the perps. It only takes one effort for any capable programmer to make another alternative. Business people will have to get over that eventually. Neither monopolization of ideas, or of copies, can be a viable long term business. We want business conducted fairly and honestly. Limits will always be probed, and scoundrels will still try to pull off evil schemes, and even win praise and admiration when they are successful particularly if they've hoodwinked everyone into thinking they're honest. But we ought to make it as difficult as possible, for the sake of society, and sure don't need to be letting rent seeking schemes work, and even backing them with enforcement activities, or pushing public perceptions with name calling like "piracy" and that "screwing" word you used. I call it Justice.

Dear Richard,

[Max Romantschuk]

Thank you.

Re:Dear Richard,

[icebraining]

I agree. Thanks, Mr. Stallman and all the good people at the FSF and FSF Europe.

Re:Dear Richard,

[larry bagina]

Unfortunately, he is disqualified from the Nobel Peace Prize since he actually produced results.

Hrmph

[egibster]

I hate this article because I completely agree with it. I hate you.

The real question...

[grub]

Which came first, the Foundation or the Beard?

Re:The real question...

[rvw]

Which came first, the Foundation or the Beard?

BEER!

The GPL is the most important....

[GPLDAN]

...license or legal construction In the history of computing. Easily. It's not even close.



The Open Source movement owes its existence to it. Many a intellectual property lawsuit has been decided by it.

Re:The GPL is the most important....

[Reality Master 101]

The GPL is the most important license or legal construction In the history of computing. Easily. It's not even close.

No. Whoever invented the EULA and figured out that software should be licensed instead of sold was a far more important legal construction. That move changed the entire industry to such an extent that almost no software is sold these days. The GPL is only modestly important compared to that monumental legal change.

Re:The GPL is the most important....

[arielCo]

The GPL is the most beneficial license or legal construction In the history of computing.

RealityMaster above may be right - the limited, non-transferable EULA is terribly important right now; the GPL is a sane[r] alternative. Don't ask me about the "freer" BSD license - I haven't made my mind up about that.

Director of the AI Lab?

[No. 24601]

Citation, please? I think he worked there and was probably their most famous programmer. But besides that I don't think he held an executive position at that lab.

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?

[KlomDark]

Never heard of any of those guys. Stallman wins.

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.

Re:Director of the AI Lab?

[trb]

I think he worked there and was probably their most famous programmer.

it's hard to say he was their most famous hacker at that time

Never heard of any of those guys. Stallman wins.

Yes, he is their most famous hacker now, in 2010. The context of the discussion is 1985. At that time, he was not their most famous hacker.

I disagree

[93 Escort Wagon]

His most important contribution is GNU Hurd - it's the gift that keeps on giving.

I feel like...

[WED Fan]

Looking at the bearded one, holiness to his name, I feel like I need a bath.

GCC

[schmidt349]

I have a hard time believing that anything RMS is even partially responsible for is anywhere near as important as GCC, from its humble beginnings as a replacement for CC on UNIX to its present juggernaut Compiler Collection.

Thanks Richard for leaving your fingerprints on all of my object files! GCC is the awesome.

Re:GCC

[Bigjeff5]

GCC would not be important today at all without the license, because it would be proprietary software, therefore the license trumps it in my opinion. They are kinda two faces of the same coin though. Without GCC, the GPL probably would have never taken off at all.

So he's got two huge contributions, a lot of big ones (Linux was just GNU with Torvald's kernel at first), and then a bunch of crazy wacko rants.

Re:GCC

[jc42]

I have a hard time believing that anything RMS is even partially responsible for is anywhere near as important as GCC, from its humble beginnings as a replacement for CC on UNIX to its present juggernaut Compiler Collection.

There is an important symbiotic relationship between the GPL and the GCC. (And also with other "free" software tools, but the GCC is a good poster child.) One explanation came up in a number of projects that I worked on at Digital back in the 1980s and early 1990s. The question kept coming up there of why DEC supplied a number of BSD-based unix OSs, but not Sys/V. They had Sys/V ported internally, and provided it for a few customers that asked, but they didn't much market it. The explanation that kept coming up was that DEC's lawyers had looked into Sys/V software (with some engineers' help, of course), and had noted that the binaries all contained AT&T copyright notices, usually many copies that were inside various library routines. They suggested that, although the courts hadn't ever decided the status of such copyright claims, it was possible that AT&T could use these embedded strings to claim legal ownership of any software that they wanted. Thus, building your products on AT&T software was risking a court case that might give everything to AT&T.

Since then, I've worked on a number of projects at other companies whose lawyers use a similar argument for why they should use GCC rather than any proprietary compilers and libraries. Again, the legal status isn't clear. This means that you're taking a chance that any binaries produced by proprietary tools or using proprietary libraries could become legally the property of the companies that own the compilers or libraries. The GCC license makes it clear that, if you use GCC, you don't have to worry about this. It's about the only C compiler that provides such safety. We've read versions of this argument in the explanation of why google pushed for the Android platform, as a way of keeping their own software free from takeover by Microsoft or Apple (or AT&T or Comcast or ...).

This isn't a trivial concern. There are growing attempts to use "intellectual property" to take control of the work done by others. Look into how Apple now controls the software that runs on many of their devices such as the iPhone and iPad. Look at how Amazon controls what can be on the kindle, to the point of reaching out and deleting content that customers have bought. We even read here some time back that Microsoft is getting patents on some XML encodings, something we thought was beyond such takeovers because XML is a "public" standard.

The GPL in its various forms is one of the few tools we have to fight such control by the industry giants. Figuring out how to use the copyright laws to fight the slow privatization of what used to be public "intellectual" space was an important legal development. It's about the only thing we have left (at least in the US) that protects the efforts of individuals against the legal power of big corporations. So we should be encouraging the people who work on legal tools like this, at least if we want a society in which it remains legal for private individuals to work on anything that involves software.

Happy birthday to you,

[Rogerborg]

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday, dear Richard,
Happy bir- COPYRIGHT VIOLATION DETECTED - TRANSMISSION TERMINATED

Re:Happy birthday to you,

[commodore64_love]

According to the wikipedia article you linked, Wendy Williams owes $700 to WB when she & her audience sang the song. Meanwhile in Canada WB and other members of the CRIA owe nearly a billion dollars for using songs on "best of" albums without paying the original artists.

"One law for the commoners; one law for the masters."

Re:Happy birthday to you,

[multisync]

Happy birthday to you

Shouldn't that be "Happy birthday to GNU?"

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:Uhm, no!

[just_another_sean]

That's what I remember reading here in Chapter 1: For Want of a Printer.

Stallman had subsequently written a large number of GNU tools, but the license was his most important contribution.

Says the vi user who never wrote a line of code in his life! ;-)

Happy b-day!

[schnikies79]

Now get rid of Stallman and I will actively support you.

Re:And it never would have amounted to anything...

[jedidiah]

Nope. The GNU tools were already being used to augment commercial Unixen and as a foundation for bootstrapping the development environments of alternate hardware platforms like video game consoles. Free Software was already making it's mark before Linux came along. Many of us were exposed to the GNU tools first and then to Linux later.

Dogma

[bigredradio]

Bethany: What is Stallman like?

Rufus: He likes to listen to people talk. I remember the old days when we were sittin' around the computer lab. You know, whenever we were goin' on about unimportant shit, He'd always have a smile on his face. His only real beef with programmers is the shit that gets carried out His name. Wars. Bigotry. Mobile Operating Systems. The big one though, is the factioning of the distros. He said, "Linux got it all wrong by takin' a good idea and building a belief structure out of it."

Bethany: So you're saying that having beliefs is a bad thing?

Rufus: I just think it's better to have an idea. You can change an idea; changing a belief is trickier. People die for it, people kill for it. The whole of Free software is in jeopardy right now because of the Open Source belief system in this software as a service bullshit. RedHat and SuSE, whether they know it or not, are exploiting that belief, and if they're successful, you, me, all of this ends in a heartbeat. All over a belief.

Re:Dogma

[MonsterTrimble]

You, Sir, deserve mod points.

I at the very least owe you a coke.

Twenty-five years later...

[Dystopian Rebel]

I am running Gnu-Linux on an NSLU2, a DNS-323, and a SheevaPlug. I have a free compiler on these devices.

On another computer, I just downloaded MingW and Lighttpd (source and binary) last night.

I remember when "free software" usually meant crippleware, and there was no way a poor kid eager to write code could get a compiler for free.

Thanks for your vision, RMS. You changed culture and you helped the future.

Thanks RMS..

[nightfire-unique]

.. for your vision, contributions, and (and I know I'm not alone in this one).. helping me establish a career.

I make a living building and maintaining *nix hosts, and it probably wouldn't have happened if I didn't spend my childhood and teenage years playing with free software like Slackware, Debian, gcc, screen, bash, and a million other packages. Of course, a complete thank you list would be long enough to overflow my copy/paste buffer, but as this article is about GNU:

Thank you RMS! You've inspired millions of us, and pushed humanity forward yet another step.

Without the license, GCC would have been closed

[SmallFurryCreature]

GCC is what it is because of the license. Without the license, it would just be another compiler most likely closed or restricted in some way. That it isn't is because of the license, not because of the code.

To what do you attribute the Wright brothers plane? The internal combustion engine or the dream to fly? Without the engine there could have been a plane driven by say a rocket, but without the dream their would never have been a plane.

It can be very hard to truly comprehend just how big Stallman's contribution has been. Freedom is very hard to grasp, if you are used to it.

In another response to the story about net neutrality I linked the internet to the press and the contribution to freedom that this tech has made. But what is that contribution? The art of reproducing text quickly OR the power of the written word? The capability of human beings to pass on their thoughts to others without ever meeting them?

Just as the chattering monkey became more human by being able to write down speech, and then more free by being able reproduce it easily and even free'er(?) by being able to transmit what he had for breakfast around the globe (oh okay so it ain't all good), the GNU, FSF etc have given us a degree of freedom that once we couldn't imagine and now can't imagine being without.

The oldies MIGHT remember machines on which you paid for every single second of access. In which hardware was not owned but leased. Only the very powerful could own a computer and making it doing anything useful cost even more.

Today, I can own a computer far more powerful, own it completly and use countless pieces of software for free. Not saying I have to, but I can and the fact that I can already means that those who wish to control software/hardware and freedom are restricted in doing so. Good luck MS with their ActiveX and attempts to stop the internet. IE did NOT manage to make the web an MS experience. Can you imagine what MS would have been like if they had IBM mainframe style control of the IBM compatible? If there never had been a Compaq, never had been a Dr-DOS? It would have been the Apple from Hell.

Trying to explain this alternate reality would be like trying to explain the holocaust (godwin can kiss my hairy butt) in a universe were said holocaust never happened. We escape the complete control of our PC's by IBM, so how can we imagine what the world would have been like with IBM in control?

And of course Stallman didn't do it all alone. But he has been the most central figure who has stood firm for 25 years. He and everyone else who has helped create the idea of software not as an owned and controlled resource has made the world we live in today. How could countless websites have gotten started without free Apache, free Perl/PHP/Python/etc, free databases yes even free OS'es?

But isn't MS software as easily available? Yes, BUT and this is a HUGE BUT, without IBM loosing control over the PC, MS would also never have been. MS, the closed source control freak company owes it existence to "free" software/hardware. Proof? No MS on mainframes.

So yes. GCC is awesome, but it is a minor tool, the AK47 of the freedom movement. It is the fight, not the weapons that matter. The decleration of independe vs the guarilla tactics. The refusal to obey seperation laws rather then choosing a seat in a bus.

And to those who think free software is not comparable. It isn't. But lack of freedom in small areas can mean the lack of freedom is far larger areas. Wouldn't it be convenient for those who want to control freedom, if printing presses could only be bought with identification? If a website could only be setup with a real ID?

So thank you Richard Stallman. I would never have the courage to do what you did, but the world is a better place cause you did it. Not perfect, but better. Just that the rest of us must remember that if we take it all for granted, we might loose it all. DMCA, Trusted Computing etc are real treaths and they do NOT go away just because we managed to stop them once.

Re:the license? really?

[Bigjeff5]

GCC would not have mattered one lick without the license.

Really, it's just a C compiler. It's important, but rudimentary. Anybody with sufficient programming skills can write one for a given machine (and they do). The license was the stroke of genius. GCC only exists in its current form because of the license. Without it GCC would be just another compiler in the dustbin of history.

The real important contribution was the counter-culture he started, and that was only able to survive the extremely proprietary world of computers because of the license.

I don't even like Stallman (I think he's an asshole, frankly), but that's clearly one thing he got very right. It was a brilliant move to use the same copyright laws that were used to steal his (and his compatriates') software in order to ensure their software would be free to use by everyone forever.

In other words, open source software - GCC included - would likely not exist today without the GPL.

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.

Re:shouldn't it be...

[melikamp]

(eval (car (setq gnu '(gnu is not unix))))
(gnu is not unix)

Re:the license? really?

[bsDaemon]

The BSDs would exist without the GPL. Of course, getting to use GCC helps. Of all the things that RMS is responsible for, GCC is the only one I really use in any meaningful way. I think the majority of GPL software that I use isn't actually GNU or sponsored by the FSF, it just happens to be GPL. But the majority of my platform isn't GPL:
- FreeBSD is BSD licensed
- Apache is Apache (basically BSD) licensed
- PostreSQL uses a modified BSD-style license
- Perl is dual licensed with either the Artistic License or the GPL, depending on which you want to accept
- BIND is BSD licensed

I'm not particularly reliant on any GPL-based software other than GCC. That is the crux of my argument. Don't confuse "open source" with "free software" with the GPL.

Re:And it never would have amounted to anything...

[nicolas.kassis]

Yeah but without it, I think GNU would have struggled in the 90s. Unix was dying, Linux injected some life.

Re:the license? really?

[pjabardo]

It is difficult to know what would happen without the GPL but what the parent says does have some merit: the counter culture was very important and it is possible that all those projects are so successful because of this "counter culture". In this sense the Free Software foundation and GPL are Stallman's greatest contribution.

Re:And it never would have amounted to anything...

[flyingfsck]

Uhmm, the BSDs are much older than Linux and they also use GCC and other GNU tools. BSD1 was released in 1977, which is before Linus was born! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg

Re:the license? really?

[Lennie]

He may or may not be an asshole, but it is his attitude what made this possible. Without the attitude nothing would have happend.

Re:the license? really?

[hairyfeet]

Actually I'd argue that it isn't the license so much as the man himself. Love him or hate him (I too think he's gone a little too far overboard and gets worse as he ages) his license would be worth exactly jack squat if it weren't for the man's ability to promote himself and the GPL. after all what good would have been the GPL if only he had used it?

A good example IMHO is the way he'll choose some boring normal proprietary software press conference, which nearly any reporter assigned to is figuring is gonna be as boring and dull as watching paint dry, and at just the right moment holds up one of his little hippy signs with a catchy slogan. If you think about it it is fucking brilliant, as every reporter is gonna lock onto him like a heat seeking missile because he is the only possible controversy in an otherwise boring as hell press release, thus ensuring he and his message gets front row coverage. That is a seriously brilliant piece of promotion right there, which costs him exactly nothing but really gets his point across.

So I'd say the whole argument of Emacs VS GPL VS GCC would be moot if the man hadn't gotten the word out, and with a non profit copyleft style organization promotion has to be not only damned cheap but damned effective too, and love him or hate him RMS is damned smart when it comes for getting himself and the GPL promoted. And I'd say one could safely argue it was that gift that allowed him to create a FOSS empire from nothing but an idea. So here is to you Stallman, we may not agree on hardly anything, but I give credit where credit is due and you've earned yours. Happy Bday FSF.

Re:the license? really?

[openfrog]

I don't even like Stallman (I think he's an asshole, frankly), but that's clearly one thing he got very right. ... open source software - GCC included - would likely not exist today without the GPL.

If you start such a movement and doing so frustrate self-interested grabbers of all kinds, you are naturally going to be the target of abuse and personal attacks on such a scale that you may have, or you may need to already have, a thick skin to merely survive.

But your post does underline the significance of the accomplishment, so I concur.

Re:the license? really?

[VGPowerlord]

The BSD license was a consequence of being the product of a public university, receiving federal funds to work on projects. Even without the GPL, I suspect it is highly likely that the BSD license would have been created as-is anyway.

An early version of the BSD license was already in use before the GPLv1 was released. Granted, since then, there have been many modifications of it, including what's often referred to as the "Modified BSD License" that removes the advertising requirement.

Re:That's 21 too many

[turgid]

What has the Free (as in Freedom) Software Foundation got to do with the State owning the means of production on behalf of the workers, authoritarian government and the elimination of dissent?

How's the printer?

[Trogre]

Thanks to RMS for all his (often colourful) advocacy. But has it done him any good - has he managed to get access to the driver for his labs Xerox 9700 yet?

Over dramatization

[viscous]

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 anonymous contributor needs to get a better grip on reality.

The software in question was mostly written by programmers who were MIT staff members and students. MIT held the copyright on the software that they developed. MIT subsequently licensed the software to at least three companies: Symbolics, LMI and Texas Instruments. (I don't recall if there were any others.)

The founders of Symbolics and LMI included many of the same people who had worked on the software as MIT staff. Stallman remained an MIT employee.

Nothing in this story makes Symbolics or LMI or Texas Instruments a "disreputable software company". MIT has a long history of licensing technology developed within its walls to industry, often to startups formed by ex-MIT employees. This was no different. (At least, at the time this was no different. I have no idea what MIT's current practice is for software developed by its employees.)

Stallman's unhappiness with the fate of the software he had worked on motivated him to invent the GPL. This was indeed a wonderful idea that has done an enormous amount of good for the world. He deserves a great deal of credit for this.

But there is no need to over dramatize the birth of the GPL by painting the companies who licensed the Lisp Machine software as some kind of evil villains. They weren't doing anything different from what many other computer companies of the day were doing.

And (as many others have noted) Stallman was never the director of the MIT AI Lab.