As a way to send our best wishes for recovery to the father of free software and celebrate the 40 years of the GNU project We are doing a brief biography of Richard Stallman.
Lo we had described as a child interested in computers and a teenager who spent his free time attending university courses or volunteering in biology laboratories. His college years brought him into contact with the Boston hacker community and prompted him to abandon physics to focus on programming.
Second part of Stallman's biography
In the beginning all software was free. Programmers freely shared information until companies turned it into profitable products and proprietary licenses appeared. The young Stallman had worked in companies where there were strict rules about team assignments and these were based more on status than needs..
At the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, RMS, a completely different situation was encountered. If a boss kept a piece of equipment under lock and key and someone lower down the ladder needed it, he would literally break down his door. TOYears later, Stallman himself described the atmosphere like this:
…this decision to break down the doors was not something strange, it was an integral part of an entire way of life. The hackers in the AI lab were very inspired to write good and interesting software. And it was because they were so excited to do more work, they couldn't stand having their hardware locked down., or many other things that people could do to prevent the work from being done.
He also explained what the way of working was.
…we also did not allow any boss or teacher to determine what task was going to be done, because our mission was to make the entire system better. We listened to the users, of course; If you don't, you can't say what is needed. But after doing that, we were best placed to see what kind of improvements were possible, and we were always chatting among ourselves about how we would like to see the system changed, and what kind of interesting ideas we had seen in other systems that we could adapt.
Culture change
However, Richard Stallman's old colleagues retired, seduced by the better salaries of private activity, and were replaced by others who brought a different culture. Richard told it like this:
Basically all the competent developers except me in the AI lab got other jobs, and this caused more than a momentary change, it caused a permanent transformation because it broke the continuity of the hacker culture. New hackers were always attracted to older hackers; we had the funniest teams and people who did the most interesting things, and also a culture that was so fun to be a part of. Once these things were lost, there was nothing left to attract anyone new to the place, so new hackers stopped coming. There was no one they could model after, no one who could teach them those traditions. Also, no one to learn how to make quality software from. With just a small group of professors and graduate students, who really had no idea how to make a program work, you can't learn how to make good programs work.
One of the changes introduced by the new authorities was to install an access control system using passwords. RMS managed to discover those of all his colleagues and sent them a message with the password and the suggestion to leave it blank to allow anonymous access. Although 20 percent of his colleagues listened to him, the passwords stuck.
Meanwhile, a programmer named Brian Reid unleashed the wrath of RMS by placing software restrictions on those who accessed a word processing language called Scribe without a license.Stallman called it a "Crime against humanity."
In the next article we will see the straw that breaks the camel's back and makes Stallman leave the laboratory.