Sam Williams

“ An atheist, Stallman rejects notions such as fate, dharma, or a divine calling in life. Nevertheless, he does feel that the decision to shun proprietary software and build an operating system to help others do the same was a natural one. ”

“ The Lisp Machine software was hacker-built, meaning it was owned by MIT but available for anyone to copy as per hacker custom. Such a system limited the marketing advantage of any company hoping to license the software from MIT and market it as unique. To secure an advantage, and to bolster the aspects of the operating system that customers might consider attractive, the companies recruited various AI Lab hackers and set them working on various components of the Lisp Machine operating system outside the auspices of the AI Lab. ”

“ Not only did Twenex boast built-in security, but the system's software engineers had designed the tools and applications with the security system in mind. What once had been a cat-and-mouse game over passwords in the case of the Laboratory for Computer Science's security system, now became an out-and-out battle over system management. System administrators argued that without security, the Oz system was more prone to accidental crashes. Hackers argued that crashes could be better prevented by overhauling the source code. ”

“ At a time when the Reagan Administration was rushing to dismantle many of the federal regulations and spending programs that had been built up during the half century following the Great Depression, more than a few software programmers saw the hacker ethic as anticompetitive and, by extension, un-American. ”

“ He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!"10 For Stallman, the months spent playing catch up with Symbolics evoke a mixture of pride and profound sadness. As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal whose father had served in World War II, Stallman is no pacifist. In many ways, the Symbolics war offered the rite of passage toward which Stallman had been careening ever since joining the AI Lab staff a decade before. At the same time, however, it coincided with the traumatic destruction of the AI Lab hacker culture that had nurtured Stallman since his teenage years. ”

“ Stallman included within the document a lengthy section devoted to the many arguments used by commercial and academic programmers to justify the proliferation of proprietary software programs. One argument, "Don't programmers deserve a reward for their creativity," earned a response encapsulating Stallman's anger over the recent Gosling Emacs episode:
"If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution," Stallman wrote. "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [sic] as society is free to use the results. ”

“ Not only did the author pledge to rebuild the already mature Unix operating system from the ground up, he also proposed to improve it in places. The new GNU system, the author predicted, would carry all the usual components—a text editor, a shell program to run Unix-compatible applications, a compiler, "and a few other things."1 It would also contain many enticing features that other Unix systems didn't yet offer: a graphic user interface based on the Lisp programming language, a crash-proof file system, and networking protocols built according to MIT's internal networking system. ”

“ In a desperate quest for new funds, laboratories and universities turned to the private sector. In the case of the AI Lab, winning over private investors was an easy sell. Home to some of the most ambitious computer-science projects of the post-war era, the lab became a quick incubator of technology. ”

“ In resigning from MIT, however, Stallman negated any debate about conflict of interest or Institute ownership of the software. The man whose early adulthood fear of social isolation had driven him deeper and deeper into the AI Lab's embrace was now building a legal firewall between himself and that environment. ”

“ At first, hackers viewed the Twenex system as yet another authoritarian symbol begging to be subverted. The system's name itself was a protest. Officially dubbed TOPS-20 by DEC, it was a successor to TOPS-10, a commercial operating system DEC marketed for the PDP-10. Bolt Beranek Newman had developed an improved version, dubbed Tenex, which TOPS-20 drew upon.4 Stallman, the hacker who coined the Twenex term, says he came up with the name as a way to avoid using the TOPS-20 name. ”

“ One such "tourist" during the early 1980s was Don Hopkins, a California programmer who learned through the hacking grapevine that all an outsider needed to do to gain access to MIT's vaunted ITS system was to log in under the initials RMS and enter the same three-letter monogram when the system requested a password. ”