Sam Williams

“ A student at the nearby University of Helsinki at the time, Torvalds regarded Stallman with bemusement. "I saw, for the first time in my life, the stereotypical long-haired, bearded hacker type," recalls Torvalds in his 2001 autobiography Just for Fun. "We don't have much of them in Helsinki."14
While not exactly attuned to the "sociopolitical" side of the Stallman agenda, Torvalds nevertheless appreciated the agenda's underlying logic: no programmer writes error-free code. By sharing software, hackers put a program's improvement ahead of individual motivations such as greed or ego protection. ”

“ Although it would take a few years to be recognized by Stallman, the explosiveness of Linux development conjured flashbacks of Emacs. This time around, however, the innovation triggering the explosion wasn't a software hack like Control-R but the novelty of running a Unix-like system on the PC architecture. The motives may have been different, but the end result certainly fit the ethical specifications: a fully functional operating system composed entirely of free software. ”

“ A program didn't have to carry the GPL to qualify as free software—witness the case of the BSD utilities—but putting a program under the GPL sent a definite message. "I think the very existence of the GPL inspired people to think through whether they were making free software, and how they would license it," says Bruce Perens, creator of Electric Fence, a popular Unix utility, and future leader of the Debian GNU/Linux development team. A few years after the release of the GPL, Perens says he decided to discard Electric Fence's homegrown license in favor of Stallman's lawyer-vetted copyright. ”

“ For the most part, businesses ignored Stallman's entreaties. Still, for a few entrepreneurs, the freedom associated with free software was the same freedom associated with free markets. Take software ownership out of the commercial equation, and you had a situation where even the smallest software company was free to compete against the IBMs and DECs of the world. ”

“ Following the release of the first version of GPL, Stallman paid tribute to the sticker, nicknaming the free software license "Copyleft." Over time, the nickname and its symbol, a backwards "C," would become general Free Software Foundation shorthand for any copyright method "making a program free software and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free software as well."
The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all great religions are built upon the "routinization" or "institutionalization" of charisma. ”

“ Although Torvalds had set out to build a full operating system, both he and other developers knew at the time that most of the functional tools needed to do so were already available, thanks to the work of GNU, BSD, and other free software developers. One of the first tools the Linux development team took advantage of was the GNU C Compiler, a tool that made it possible to process programs written in the C programming language. ”

“ The dispute with UniPress had highlighted a flaw in the Emacs Commune social contract. Where users relied on Stallman's expert insight, the Commune's rules held. In areas where Stallman no longer held the position of alpha hacker—pre-1984 Unix systems, for example—individuals and companies were free to make their own rules.
The tension between the freedom to modify and the freedom to exert authorial privilege had been building before GOSMACS. The Copyright Act of 1976 had overhauled U.S. copyright law, extending the legal protection of copyright to software programs. ”

“ Stallman's growing stature as a software programmer, however, was balanced by his struggles as a project manager. Although the GNU Project moved from success to success in creation of developer-oriented tools, its inability to generate a working kernel, the central "traffic cop" program that determines which devices and applications get access to the microprocessor in all Unix systems, was starting to elicit grumbles even before the 1980s came to a close. ”

“ Encouraging others to adopt the same licensing practices meant closing off the escape hatch that had allowed privately owned versions of Emacs to emerge. To close that escape hatch, Stallman and his free software colleagues came up with a solution: users would be free to modify GNU Emacs just so long as they published their modifications. In addition, the resulting "derivative" works would also have to carry the same GNU Emacs License. ”

“ Every successful religion, Weber argued, converts the charisma or message of the original religious leader into a social, political, and ethical apparatus more easily translatable across cultures and time. ”

“ Integrating GCC improved the performance of Linux. It also raised issues. Although the GPL's "viral" powers didn't apply to the Linux kernel, Torvalds' willingness to borrow GCC for the purposes of his own free software operating system indicated a certain obligation to let other users borrow back. ”

“ And those things are so different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about them at once. If you hear somebody saying something about intellectual property, without quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join. ”

“ The original version of GCC weighed in at 110,000 lines of code, but Tiemann recalls the program as surprisingly easy to understand. So easy in fact that Tiemann says it took less than five days to master and another week to port the software to a new hardware platform, National Semiconductor's 32032 microchip. Over the next year, Tiemann began playing around with the source code, creating a native compiler for the C++ programming language. One day, while delivering a lecture on the program at Bell Labs, Tiemann ran into some AT&T developers struggling to pull off the same thing. ”