New Unix Implementation Turns 30

Thirty years ago, rms wrote: "Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed." And thus began the revolution. Thirty years after posting the initial announcement, it's hard to find someone who hasn't interacted with Free Software at some point, even if they didn't realize it. To celebrate, the FSF is holding an anniversary celebration and hackathon this weekend at MIT.

To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.

GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems. In particular, we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen. Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages. We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol, far superior to UUCP. We may also have something compatible with UUCP.

Who Am I?

I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines.

Why I Must Write GNU

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.

So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, 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.

How You Can Contribute

I am asking computer manufacturers for donations of machines and money. I'm asking individuals for donations of programs and work.

One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine. But we could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date. The machine had better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require sophisticated cooling or power.

Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU.

If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or part time. The salary won't be high, but I'm looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money. I view this as a way of enabling dedicated people to devote their full energies to working on GNU by sparing them the need to make a living in another way.

For more information, contact me.
Arpanet mail:

• RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA

Usenet:

• ...!mit-eddie!RMS@OZ
• ...!mit-vax!RMS@OZ

Comments

Megalomanic

[CurryCamel]

"Ima gonna write a new unix". That's One Huge Task. Weird thing is - he pulled it off. Hats off to RMS. And thanks.

Re:Megalomanic

[DeKO]

Good troll, sir. Try removing everything except /boot, see how much your computer can do.

Re:Megalomanic

[Zero__Kelvin]

"It's worth remembering that Unix got its start as more or less as a fun project - there wasn't a plan to conquer the world."

I'm not sure if you actually believe that or it is more trolling. In case you really believe it, feel free to stand corrected. Unix was a very serious project funded by a monopoly (at the time) called AT&T - specifically AT&T's Bell Labs, and the C language was literally invented by Kerhnigan and Ritchie just so they could develop it. The goal was certainly not to have fun. You don't write a proposal and ask a company like AT&T to spend millions to have fun.

Furthermore, 30 years ago was 1983, meaning that Unix had been around for about 13 years already, and had already forked into BSD Unix and AT&T System V. It was already quite huge by that time.

Re:Megalomanic

[aardvarkjoe]

Ask yourself, "What software projects does RMS devote his time too?". To my knowledge, not many if any. He is a great advocate and he has done many things for our community but he did not complete what he set out to do.

Although to my understanding that's true today, he was largely responsible for several important projects, including emacs and gcc. The GNU project never achieved all of its goals, but his software contributions are integral to the free Unix(-like) operating systems of today.

Re: Megalomanic

[SpaghettiPattern]

You think Linux would have come this soon without GNU? Do you think early versions of Linux could have done without GanU? Do you really think one guy will write a FULL os on his own? All programs, all docs, distro etc...
Any huge achievement is a term work. Some members will be better. Some will get more exposure. Some will be awarded more. But in the end a team or community does it together.
I take my hat off to rms and to all contributors. Without you guys I'd probably be still at the mercy of businesses with undisclosed agendas.

Re:Megalomanic

[Skiron]

AS I said on here before - if it wasn't for GCC (or the Gnu C compiler as it was then) written by RMS, then Linus couldn't have even started doing his stuff with linux.

RMS is the seed of *all* the free open source code/projects available now (and in the future). He is GOD and well done to him and his principles.

Re:Megalomanic

[Stormbringer]

Are you saying he should have released it under an Autistic License?

Re:Megalomanic

[cold fjord]

"It's worth remembering that Unix got its start as more or less as a fun project - there wasn't a plan to conquer the world."

I'm not sure if you actually believe that or it is more trolling. In case you really believe it, feel free to stand corrected

Unix was a very serious project funded by a monopoly (at the time) called AT&T - specifically AT&T's Bell Labs, and the C language was literally invented by Kerhnigan and Ritchie just so they could develop it. The goal was certainly not to have fun.

You didn't get much right in your reply, in fact much of it is backwards. Allow me to correct you. They originally requested a computer to write an operating system, but that was denied. They then bootlegged a computer, wrote a game, and hacked on an operating system without it being an official project, and eventually got buy-in to buy a computer to build a text processing system, not an operating system. Unix was already in existence by the time they were allowed to purchase a computer for the text processing system. (I will also note that as a monopoly they were under very tight restrictions about what they could do with Unix in terms of sales.) From the above paper:

Throughout 1969 we (mainly Ossanna, Thompson, Ritchie) lobbied intensively for the purchase of a medium-scale machine for which we promised to write an operating system; the machines we suggested were the DEC PDP-10 and the SDS (later Xerox) Sigma 7. The effort was frustrating, because our proposals were never clearly and finally turned down, but yet were certainly never accepted. Several times it seemed we were very near success. The final blow to this effort came when we presented an exquisitely complicated proposal, designed to minimize financial outlay, that involved some outright purchase, some third-party lease, and a plan to turn in a DEC KA-10 processor on the soon-to-be-announced and more capable KI-10. The proposal was rejected, and rumor soon had it that W. O. Baker (then vice-president of Research) had reacted to it with the comment `Bell Laboratories just doesn't do business this way!' ....

Also during 1969, Thompson developed the game of `Space Travel.' First written on Multics, then transliterated into Fortran for GECOS (the operating system for the GE, later Honeywell, 635), it was nothing less than a simulation of the movement of the major bodies of the Solar System, with the player guiding a ship here and there, observing the scenery, and attempting to land on the various planets and moons. The GECOS version was unsatisfactory in two important respects: first, the display of the state of the game was jerky and hard to control because one had to type commands at it, and second, a game cost about $75 for CPU time on the big computer. It did not take long, therefore, for Thompson to find a little-used PDP-7 computer with an excellent display processor; the whole system was used as a Graphic-II terminal. He and I rewrote Space Travel to run on this machine. The undertaking was more ambitious than it might seem; because we disdained all existing software, we had to write a floating-point arithmetic package, the pointwise specification of the graphic characters for the display, and a debugging subsystem that continuously displayed the contents of typed-in locations in a corner of the screen. All this was written in assembly language for a cross-assembler that ran under GECOS and produced paper tapes to be carried to the PDP-7. ...

Space Travel, though it made a very attractive game, served mainly as an introduction to the clumsy technology of preparing programs for the PDP-7. Soon Thompson began implementing the paper file system (perhaps `chalk file system' would be more accurate) that had been designed earlier. A file system without a way to e

Re:30 years on

[Stormwatch]

That bit's been hard to get right, but some Finnish guy cobbled up something you can use while they finish this.

Raise a glass to you, RMS

[dkleinsc]

I was actually planning on installing Debian tonight on a spare box, completely unaware of this anniversary. Now I pretty much have to do it.

Re:Raise a glass to you, RMS

[spike_gran]

He may not have accomplished everything he set out to do, but, he certainly accomplished a great deal.

And while RMS and GNU alone didn't succeed at creating a free software OS and development stack, they got the ball rolling, and it exists now.

Today

[girlintraining]

"Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed."

If someone said that today, he'd be promptly sued by SCO, dragged into dark cavernous courtrooms filled with patent trolls, accused by the government of being a terrorist, and laughed at by the mainstream community of UNIX-like OS users, such as the ones reading this post; Absent Linux, we'd all be warring over which was better -- Macintosh or Windows. Both have UNIX buried in their guts.

My point is that RMS' achievement, organizing people into a cohesive political movement loosely termed 'open source', probably couldn't happen today. It is therefore particularly important that he did so thirty years ago, before the global international business and government communities were aware of the potential impact of his activities.

There are fewer and fewer like him every year -- old schoolers who grew up with the fervent belief that the internet, computers, all this digital technology, could empower, enlighten, and educate millions. And then set about proving just that. These days... the majority of people are content to watch Youtube videos of cats, and try not to see any potential beyond immediate gratification and entertainment. It's sad that the hacker ethic has become in such short supply, even within this community. Back then, nobody would think any less of you for going off on your own to reinvent the wheel... your peers thought, at worst, that it might be good practice for you. Today, it's a face full of rage and religious views if you even suggest things may not be as good as they could be.

Re:Today

[girlintraining]

RMS has nothing to do with "open source". Sad that to this day trolls and idiots keep intentionally attributing it to him, in order to misinform. Do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up.

He was the principle author of the GNU GPL, the first real open source license. The entire open source movement is based on licensing; That's how open source is defined -- by licensing terms. And RMS was the first to come up with a license that captured this essential quality and formalized it. Richard Stallman wants to use the term "free software" instead of "open source", but that doesn't make me a troll for using a different term for it than he does.

A pity so many Anonymous Cowards love replying to me with a casual "STFU" and claim I know nothing, it's off topic, etc., and people believe them. Further proof of the sad, sad state slashdot has descended into... that an informed and long-time contributor to the community gets mod-bombed while the trolls get up-modded.

Re:Today

[Anonymous Coward]

RMS has some controversy, but I do remember in the early 1990s what was out there, UNIX-wise.

You had XENIX, ULTRIX, IRIX, A/UX, AIX PS/2, AIX/370, Dell UNIX, SunOS, and many other flavors. Almost none came with source, and if they did (Mt. Xinu was the only BSD that did), you had to get a special license for SVR4 programs.

If you wanted header files and libraries, pay up. C compiler? Better have that cash for the flexlm key. C++? Pony up a couple grand.

Had it not been for RMS and gcc, access to a C compiler would have been the bottleneck for most world software development.

Before 1991 and Jolitz and Linus inventions, if you were a college student and wanted to see a "#" prompt on a computer, good luck unless your blackhat skillz were good. Even just getting a "$" prompt (or a "%" prompt if you were a novice) took some doing as one had to be at a big university.

After 386BSD (not to be confused with Mt Xinu BSD-386) and Linux, a lot changed. Arguably, this allowed hardware and software to be less of what one had to concern themselves with, versus what application was being run. Had it not been for gcc, neither Linux, nor 386BSD would have been possible, because of EULA and copyright restrictions.

It is scary how much times have changed. Today, one did decide to go off and write a new OS, one might find themselves on the wrong side of the law because it didn't have a hardware-enforced DRM stack, or that "terrorists" might be able to use it. The irony of it all... In the mid 1990s, I remember a lot of improvements done on the SMP part of the Linux kernel by the the Iran University of Science and Technology. This wasn't even something that one would worry about, as back then, if you were on the Net, there was some respect [1]. These days, just the mention of that would get people screaming about terrorism and backdoors.

Of course, there was encouragement, especially if one had a reasonable effort going and mentioned it on USENET groups. You did have the occasional detractor, but generally writing something, anything was encouraged. Now, with the shills and trolls out there, one almost has to write something in a vacuum, release it, and expect consequences for the action like it was a crime.

[1]: At the time the buffoons were on the warez BBS systems bragging about their new US Robotics HST modems... well, until September came rolling around each year, and the wave of college freshmen came in only to get housebroken or access yanked by the sysadmins.

Re:Where can I get this?

[pesho]

Yeah, what have RMS and GNU ever done for us.

Re:Contrary to popular belief

[StormReaver]

His behavior in public forums and disrespect for others around him is a good example of [why] you should ignore him.

His consistent accuracy in predicting the consequences of disregarding Freedom is a great example of why you should listen to him.

Re:Where can I get this?

[serviscope_minor]

So credit where credit is due: GCC will let you shoot your own foot without complaint, but it's a bit slow on the feature list. Whereas the big-time Windows compiler... it's got all the latest features,

Wait what? Compared to gcc, VS has all the features?

Which planet do you hail from?

GCC has complete C99 support, VS doesn't.
GCC has complete C++11 support, VS doesn't.
GCC has a more complete support of C++14 than VS.

gcc is a far, far more up to date compiler than visual studio.

[*]I'm going to keep calling it FORTRAN for ever. suck it.