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

to Carnegie Mellon,” recalls Reid. “I suspect that Sproull had been at Carnegie Mellon less than a month before this request came in.”

 

When asked directly about the request, however, Sproull draws a blank. “I can’t make a factual comment,” writes Sproull via email. “I have absolutely no recollection of the incident.”

 

With both participants in the brief conversation struggling to recall key details-including whether the conversation even took place-it’s hard to gauge the bluntness of Sproull’s refusal, at least as recalled by Stallman. In talking to audiences, Stallman has made repeated reference to the incident, noting that Sproull’s unwillingness to hand over the source code stemmed from a nondisclosure agreement, a contractual agreement between Sproull and the Xerox Corporation giving Sproull, or any other signatory, access the software source code in exchange for a promise of secrecy. Now a standard item of business in the software industry, the nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, was a novel development at the time, a reflection of both the commercial value of the laser printer to Xerox and the information needed to run it. “Xerox was at the time trying to make a commercial product out of the laser printer,” recalls Reid. “They would have been insane to give away the source code.”

 

For Stallman, however, the NDA was something else entirely. It was a refusal on the part of Xerox and Sproull, or whomever the person was that turned down his source-code request that day, to participate in a system that, until then, had encouraged software programmers to regard programs as communal resources.

Like a peasant whose centuries-old irrigation ditch had grown suddenly dry, Stallman had followed the ditch to its source only to find a brand-spanking-new hydroelectric dam bearing the Xerox logo.

 

For Stallman, the realization that Xerox had compelled a fellow programmer to participate in this newfangled system of compelled secrecy took a while to sink in. At first, all he could focus on was the personal nature of the refusal. As a person who felt awkward and out of sync in most face-to-face encounters, Stallman’s attempt to drop in on a fellow programmer unannounced had been intended as a demonstration of neighborliness.

Now that the request had been refused, it felt like a major blunder. “I was so angry I couldn’t think of a way to express it. So I just turned away and walked out without another word,” Stallman recalls. “I might have slammed the door. Who knows? All I remember is wanting to get out of there.”

 

Twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers, so much so that Stallman has elevated the event into a major turning point. Within the next few months, a series of events would befall both Stallman and the AI Lab hacker community that would make 30 seconds worth of tension in a remote Carnegie Mellon office seem trivial by comparison. Nevertheless, when it comes time to sort out the events that would transform Stallman from a lone hacker, instinctively suspicious of centralized authority, to a crusading activist applying traditional notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the world of software development, Stallman singles out the Carnegie Mellon encounter for special attention.

 

“It encouraged me to think about something that I’d already been thinking about,” says Stallman. “I already had an idea that software should be shared, but I wasn’t sure how to think about that. My thoughts weren’t clear and organized to the point where I could express them in a concise fashion to the rest of the world.”

 

Although previous events had raised Stallman’s ire, he says it wasn’t until his Carnegie Mellon encounter that he realized the events were beginning to intrude on a culture he had long considered sacrosanct. As an elite programmer at one of the world’s elite institutions, Stallman had been perfectly willing to ignore the compromises and bargains of his fellow programmers just so long as they didn’t interfere with his own work.

Until the arrival of the Xerox laser printer, Stallman had been content to look down on the machines and programs other computer users grimly tolerated. On the rare occasion that such a program breached the AI Lab’s walls-when the lab replaced its venerable Incompatible Time Sharing operating system with a commercial variant, the TOPS 20, for example-Stallman and his hacker colleagues had been free to rewrite, reshape, and rename the software according to personal taste.

 

Now that the laser printer had insinuated itself within the AI Lab’s network, however, something had changed.

The machine worked fine, barring the occasional paper jam, but the ability to modify according to personal taste had disappeared. From the viewpoint of the entire software industry, the printer was a wake-up call.

Software had become such a valuable asset that companies no longer felt the need to publicize source code, especially when publication meant giving potential competitors a chance to duplicate something cheaply. From Stallman’s viewpoint, the printer was a Trojan Horse. After a decade of failure, privately owned software-future hackers would use the term “

proprietary” software-had gained a foothold inside the AI Lab through the sneakiest of methods. It had come disguised as a gift.

 

That Xerox had offered some programmers access to additional gifts in exchange for secrecy was also galling, but Stallman takes pains to note that, if presented with such a quid pro quo bargain at a younger age, he just might have taken the Xerox Corporation up on its offer. The awkwardness of the Carnegie Mellon encounter, however, had a firming effect on Stallman’s own moral lassitude. Not only did it give him the necessary anger to view all future entreaties with suspicion, it also forced him to ask the uncomfortable question: what if a fellow hacker dropped into Stallman’s office someday and it suddenly became Stallman’s job to refuse the hacker’s request for source code?

 

“It was my first encounter with a nondisclosure agreement, and it immediately taught me that nondisclosure agreements have victims,” says Stallman, firmly. “In this case I was the victim. [My lab and I]

were victims.”

 

It was a lesson Stallman would carry with him through the tumultuous years of the 1980s, a decade during which many of his MIT colleagues would depart the AI Lab and sign nondisclosure agreements of their own.

Because most nondisclosure aggreements (NDAs) had expiration dates, few hackers who did sign them saw little need for personal introspection. Sooner or later, they reasoned, the software would become public knowledge. In the meantime, promising to keep the software secret during its earliest development stages was all a part of the compromise deal that allowed hackers to work on the best projects. For Stallman, however, it was the first step down a slippery slope.

 

“When somebody invited me to betray all my colleagues in that way, I remembered how angry I was when somebody else had done that to me and my whole lab,” Stallman says. “So I said, `Thank you very much for offering me this nice software package, but I can’t accept it on the conditions that you’re asking for, so I’m going to do without it.’”

 

As Stallman would quickly learn, refusing such requests involved more than personal sacrifice. It involved segregating himself from fellow hackers who, though sharing a similar distaste for secrecy, tended to express that distaste in a more morally flexible fashion. It wasn’t long before Stallman, increasingly an outcast even within the AI Lab, began billing himself as “the last true hacker,” isolating himself further and further from a marketplace dominated by proprietary software. Refusing another’s request for source code, Stallman decided, was not only a betrayal of the scientific mission that had nurtured software development since the end of World War II, it was a violation of the Golden Rule, the baseline moral dictate to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

 

Hence the importance of the laser printer and the encounter that resulted from it. Without it, Stallman says, his life might have followed a more ordinary path, one balancing the riches of a commercial programmer with the ultimate frustration of a life spent writing invisible software code. There would have been no sense of clarity, no urgency to address a problem others weren’t addressing. Most importantly, there would have been no righteous anger, an emotion that, as we soon shall see, has propelled Stallman’s career as surely as any political ideology or ethical belief.

 

“From that day forward, I decided this was something I could never participate in,” says Stallman, alluding to the practice of trading personal liberty for the sake of convenience-Stallman’s description of the NDA bargain-as well as the overall culture that encouraged such ethically suspect deal-making in the first place.

“I decided never to make other people victims just like I had been a victim.”

 

2001: A Hacker’s Odyssey

 

The New York University computer-science department sits inside Warren Weaver Hall, a fortress-like building located two blocks east of Washington Square Park. Industrial-strength air-conditioning vents create a surrounding moat of hot air, discouraging loiterers and solicitors alike. Visitors who breach the moat encounter another formidable barrier, a security checkin counter immediately inside the building’s single entryway.

 

Beyond the security checkpoint, the atmosphere relaxes somewhat. Still, numerous signs scattered throughout the first floor preach the dangers of unsecured doors and propped-open fire exits. Taken as a whole, the signs offer a reminder: even in the relatively tranquil confines of pre-September 11, 2001, New York, one can never be too careful or too suspicious.

 

The signs offer an interesting thematic counterpoint to the growing number of visitors gathering in the hall’s interior atrium. A few look like NYU students. Most look like shaggy-aired concert-goers milling outside a music hall in anticipation of the main act. For one brief morning, the masses have taken over Warren Weaver Hall, leaving the nearby security attendant with nothing better to do but watch Ricki Lake on TV and shrug her shoulders toward the nearby auditorium whenever visitors ask about “the speech.”

 

Once inside the auditorium, a visitor finds the person who has forced this temporary shutdown of building security procedures. The person is Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, original president of the Free Software Foundation, winner of the 1990 MacArthur Fellowship, winner of the Association of Computing Machinery’s Grace Murray Hopper Award (also in 1990), corecipient of the Takeda Foundation’s 2001 Takeda Award, and former AI Lab hacker. As announced over a host of hacker-related web sites, including the GNU

Project’s own http://www.gnu.org site, Stallman is in Manhattan, his former hometown, to deliver a much anticipated speech in rebuttal to the Microsoft Corporation’s recent campaign against the GNU General Public License.

 

The subject of Stallman’s speech is the history and future of the free software movement. The location is significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU

Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting the General Public License, or GPL, a legal device originally conceived by Stallman 16 years before. Built to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy overtaking the computer industry-a wave first noticed by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox laser printer-the GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free software community. In simplest terms, the GPL locks software programs into a form of communal ownership-what today’s legal scholars now call the “digital commons”-through the legal weight of copyright. Once locked, programs remain unremovable.

Derivative versions must carry the same copyright protection-even derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of the original source code. For this reason, some within the software industry have taken to calling the GPL a “viral” license, because it spreads itself to every software program it touches. Actually, the GPL’s powers are not quite that potent.

According to section 10 of the GNU General Public License, Version 2