Free as in Freedom - Sam Williams (read this if .TXT) 📗

went to check up on the final output that he realized how little of the desired content had made it through.

 

Stallman himself had been of the first to identify the problem and the first to suggest a remedy. Years before, when the lab was still using its old printer, Stallman had solved a similar problem by opening up the software program that regulated the printer on the lab’s PDP-11 machine. Stallman couldn’t eliminate paper jams, but he could insert a software command that ordered the PDP-11 to check the printer periodically and report back to the PDP-10, the lab’s central computer. To ensure that one user’s negligence didn’t bog down an entire line of print jobs, Stallman also inserted a software command that instructed the PDP-10

to notify every user with a waiting print job that the printer was jammed. The notice was simple, something along the lines of “The printer is jammed, please fix it,” and because it went out to the people with the most pressing need to fix the problem, chances were higher that the problem got fixed in due time.

 

As fixes go, Stallman’s was oblique but elegant. It didn’t fix the mechanical side of the problem, but it did the next best thing by closing the information loop between user and machine. Thanks to a few additional lines of software code, AI Lab employees could eliminate the 10 or 15 minutes wasted each week in running back and forth to check on the printer. In programming terms, Stallman’s fix took advantage of the amplified intelligence of the overall network.

 

“If you got that message, you couldn’t assume somebody else would fix it,” says Stallman, recalling the logic.

“You had to go to the printer. A minute or two after the printer got in trouble, the two or three people who got messages arrive to fix the machine. Of those two or three people, one of them, at least, would usually know how to fix the problem.”

 

Such clever fixes were a trademark of the AI Lab and its indigenous population of programmers. Indeed, the best programmers at the AI Lab disdained the term programmer, preferring the more slangy occupational title of hacker instead. The job title covered a host of activities-everything from creative mirth making to the improvement of existing software and computer systems. Implicit within the title, however, was the old-fashioned notion of Yankee ingenuity. To be a hacker, one had to accept the philosophy that writing a software program was only the beginning. Improving a program was the true test of a hacker’s skills.For more on the term “hacker,”

see Appendix B.

 

Such a philosophy was a major reason why companies like Xerox made it a policy to donate their machines and software programs to places where hackers typically congregated. If hackers improved the software, companies could borrow back the improvements, incorporating them into update versions for the commercial marketplace. In corporate terms, hackers were a leveragable community asset, an auxiliary research-and-development division available at minimal cost.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

“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.’”

 

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?

 

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