
Richard Stallman on the Painful Birth of GNU - Tsiolkovsky
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/10/richard-stallman-on-the-painful-birth-of-gnu/index.htm
======
mjolk
"And one of the ideas was that they wouldn't get outside investors, because
outside investors would insist on imposing all the usual ways of doing things
that would make it ugly."

To me, this is really amusing to read on hacker news, given the rosy lenses we
put on when it comes to getting a startup running from venture capital. I
would go as far to say that most of us are building the business and enabling
this kind of management/carrot-holding types to continue their behaviors.

~~~
stelonix
Although this is true, I believe HN has two audiences: the startup people and
tech people. The former are the guys posting about VC, "How (not) to fire
someone", "How to choose a cofounder", postmortems, etc. The other group are
more like tech people who use HN as a tech/programming hub, much like Slashdot
or /r/programming. That second group is _probably_ more aligned with RMS's
world view, while the startup guys are mostly interested in the business side
of things.

So basically, there are both people who enjoy this kind of thought and people
who vehemently oppose it on HN. We can see it easily in HN's comments.

~~~
foobarbazqux
There's a third audience, those people who think capitalism and socialism each
have their pros and cons. It's larger than you think: since we find the
for/against VC/RMS debates rather tiresome and fruitless, except for the
purpose of clarifying our own world views, we don't end up saying much.

~~~
pfraze
The Hacker ethos isn't socialist by the modern definition (government-
run/public services). It's more about keeping business decisions from
affecting quality of engineering and user rights. That doesn't mean capitalism
can't happen - or socialism for that matter - it just means there's ethical
requirements which take priority.

~~~
foobarbazqux
Copyleft seeks to ensure public ownership of the means of production.

~~~
spacelizard
No, copyleft is fairly neutral and just seeks to mitigate some of the damage
done by copyright. Copyright is what has the serious political agenda, not
copyleft.

~~~
foobarbazqux
ownership : means of production :: source code : binaries

~~~
spacelizard
That analogy doesn't make any sense because computer software is not produced
in factories. Plus, the idea of copyleft is that software shouldn't have
owners, period.

~~~
foobarbazqux
You didn't get the analogy, but I was being extremely terse, so I apologize.

Your computer is the factory. The binaries running on your computer are the
means of production. You use your factory to do office work, for example
writing documents, whatever. Copyleft is all about protecting the user that is
running the binaries.

Now, if you control the source code to your computer, you control the
binaries. This means that you control (own) the means of production, as far as
a binary can be owned.

However, if you don't have the source code, I can sell you binaries but you
have no mechanism to control your own means of production. Really, you haven't
bought the software from me, you have bought a license to use it. It's as if
you work in a factory, and you have to pay someone else for the privilege to
use the machines in it.

Copyleft makes source code public among its recipients, meaning that control /
ownership is shared, and you can still do what you want on your own machine.

Copyleft depends on copyright law to ensure public ownership; if all RMS
wanted was a lack of ownership, as opposed to public ownership, he would
promote public domain and BSD code.

Note that at no point here have I said that public ownership is bad - there
are cases where it makes a lot of sense - but I do believe its not helpful to
deny that the model is fundamentally socialist, as opposed to the EULA model
which is fundamentally capitalist.

~~~
spacelizard
I don't believe the proprietary model is fundamentally capitalist. Copyright
is a monopoly that depends on law to manipulate people into giving up
ownership. Even if your analogy did hold up, everyone already DOES own their
own computers. Proprietary licensed software tries to convince you to co-opt
that ownership, by giving up some control of your computer. Your mistake is in
assuming that by default, control of your computer does not belong to you. It
does, but you give it up when you fall for the proprietary trap. The reason
why copyleft is set up the way it is is because it's an attempt to prevent
anyone from using the code in question to take advantage of copyright in that
manner.

I get the analogy but I don't think it draws a reasonable comparison because
it confuses the software with the license. The confusion is understandable
because proprietary companies deliberately spread it. They want to blur the
line between software and license so people have a harder time understanding
their politics. But like you said, the software is not the product, the
license is the product. Proprietary licenses aren't about restricting
someone's ability to sell licenses, it's about keeping you from using their
sales pitch. Copyleft is about making sure that no one can stifle anyone
else's ability to use a certain sales pitch.

~~~
foobarbazqux
The structure of pure capitalism means the majority of people do not have a
great deal of control. It's in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and so the people
with capital are the people with control. If you have capital, you are a
proprietor, and if you ship software for a living it's likely to be
proprietary. Hence my initial association of capitalism and proprietary
software with VCs.

I'm not assuming I don't control my computer (it's mine to burn), I'm assuming
I don't control the specific binaries on my computer unless I have the source
code to them.

~~~
spacelizard
Anyone with capital has SOME level of control, the point of capitalism is it
allows the distribution of power to fluctuate. Compare to proprietary
licensing where the developer has near complete control and the users have
nothing and will likely never have anything. The software isn't the capital,
the license is the capital. Of course you don't control the software when you
deliberately pay for a license that literally says you don't control the
software.

~~~
foobarbazqux
Yeah, it's more of an absolute split with proprietary software, except where
vendors respond directly to customer needs and thus grant them indirect
control.

But, the amount of capital required to produce a binary of OS X or Windows is
beyond anything you or I or the vast majority of users will obtain in the
forseeable future, compared to a Debian binary which we could do today.

~~~
spacelizard
I'm not sure what it is you're trying to say. I can produce a binary of OS X
or Windows right now by ripping the iso and then hitting ctrl-C and crtl-V,
but their license makes it illegal for me to hack it or to redistribute it.
Are you talking about the cost to pay them for a source license? It's true
that if they even sell one at all the cost is going to be astronomical. This
isn't a real cost or an issue of ownership, it's a protectionist monopoly.

~~~
foobarbazqux
Yes, for a (full, four freedoms) source license. I'm equating being able to
compile source code into binaries with owning the means of production, where
"owning" means "controlling" (which is what it usually means anyway).

~~~
spacelizard
I don't think that is a reasonable distinction. Anyone who has a copy to the
source code can pretty easily compile it. The "means of production" in the
analogy you're drawing is the compiler, and the source code is the
instructions on how to operate the compiler. The big social problem that
people are trying to tackle isn't access to compilers, it's access to those
instructions. We've gotten to the point where most programs are written in
common languages, and most common languages have free (as in freedom)
compilers, interpreters, runtimes, etc.

It's true that some people have definitely tried to write programs in their
own languages with their own secret compilers just to make things even more
difficult for potential copyright infringers, but thankfully that practice is
not common because it has way more drawbacks than it does advantages.

~~~
foobarbazqux
Oh, I didn't mean "having a compiler" by "being able to compile source code
into binaries". I meant having source code, having a compiler, and having a
machine that will run the binaries you produce.

------
hga
" _Greenblatt wasn 't daunted by this, he went ahead and formed a company too.
So there were two companies to make Lisp machines. And Greenblatt's plan was
successful enough even without the help of all the other old Lab hackers, that
it's clear they were mistaken in thinking that it was a hopeless idea...._"

Ummm, no, not even close. Speaking as a LMI employee during this critical
period who then became for a few months one of RMS's roommates after leaving
the company, right when he formally started the GNU project:

Yeah, LMI was with some angel investment able to build a run of CADR Lisp
Machines just like the AI Lab did (25 vs. 75 or so that Symbolics did of its
repackaged LM-2 version), but the company came to a dead end long before its
next generation machine was ready. And went to Texas Instruments for money (TI
even ended up buying Western Digital's engineering workstation unit, which
LMI's processor was designed to work in).

For a couple of months the management said "We've cut your paychecks and put
them in the safe, working is of course optional", we all continued to work and
TI then made their investment (a loan followed by buying a 25% stake exactly
30 years and 1 month ago). But even then the company would have failed, for
the hardware talent consisted of Greenblatt and a physics student who'd
learned the basics of digital design on the job and they couldn't get the
wirewrapped prototype(s) to work.

I even considered doing that (I was also a scientist type, could program and
do system administration, was hired as the only person in the community with a
foot in both Lisp Machine and UNIX(TM)), but I managed to recruit a graduating
classmate who'd in his digital design class made a baby Lisp Machine (and I
then left the company in frustration after about 9 months of never being in a
position to do what I'd be hired to do and ran out of "make work" like sending
a software update to our existing clients).

He then put in many "100 hours weeks" and with Greenblatt and the physics
student (and perhaps some help from a couple of other friends I'd recruited)
got the LMI-LAMBA processor working.

See
[http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb....](http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-
to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi) as fsck--off
linked to for the viewpoint of a Symbolics founder, although not from the AI-
Lab (he took a detour to a LLL Navy supercomputer project), a very honest guy
who's name was also on the Lisp Machine manual like RMS's.

------
peter303
Ah the the unethical 80s. I remember Stanford had post new rules of
professorial entrepreneurship. Some were caught commercializing students' work
and/or forcing students to delay publication of the their thesis work. It
wasnt all computers; some of the biochemists did the same thing with drug
research.

~~~
chimeracoder
> Some were caught commercializing students' work and/or forcing students to
> delay publication of the their thesis work

I would just like to point out that comparably unethical behavior is,
unfortunately, still commonplace at some schools (and again, not limited to
computer science).

------
xradionut
"Well, Symbolics with its investors had more money and hired several of the
best hackers from the Lab, and a year later they hired the rest of the hackers
except for me and Greenblatt. And the result was that my community was wiped
out. It felt like a ghost town. It was desolate, and I was grief-stricken."

"By then, Symbolics had given everyone at the AI Lab an ultimatum. They said:
We demand that you choose a side. I had been neutral, I had been more
favourable towards Greenblatt's company, but not particularly involved with it
in any way. But at that point they demanded that I, like everyone else in the
Lab, choose a side. And I said, in that case, my choice is obvious, I'm
against you. "

Wow! It's interesting that arrogant actions by various corporations are still
pushing people towards OSS and away from closed source.

------
fsck--off
Oh no, not this again. This account is highly biased and inaccurate in many
places. Please read Dan Weinreb's rebuttal to this.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb....](http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-
to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi)

Edit (a partial summary of the above link but not a direct quote):

It is really hard to bootstrap a top of the line computer company, especially
when you need capital to pay for your own fab. Greenblatt insisted on
bootstrapping and being CEO too, and many hackers at the Lab did not think he
would be a good CEO. It had nothing to do with "backstabbing".

Symbolics hired AI Lab hackers full time because other AI spinoff companies
were inappropriately using AI Lab resources, so Symbolics wanted to make sure
this didn't happen. Hiring workers full time wasn't an "evil plan" to destroy
the AI Lab, it was actually a well thought out ethical course of action.

Since MIT owned the source code to Lisp Machines (read: it was copyrighted and
not free in any way), they licensed the software to several companies under
the conditions that all proprietary changes could not be distributed to anyone
else except MIT. AI Lab hackers got all the changes that came from a private
company, so they didn't need to leave the lab to work on Lisp Machines. The AI
Lab hackers had free will, too. No one forced them to leave, and Stallman's
suggestion otherwise is actually really offensive. In fact, if LMI had been
the only company, the same people would have left the lab.

Stallman thought that Symbolics's compliance with MIT's licensing agreement
was actually an evil plot. His essentially wanted Symbolics to support LMI by
giving them proprietary changes. If Symbolics had actually done this, they
would have been shut down by MIT for breaking their licensing agreement. The
same was true for LMI, which also had to make any changes proprietary.
Stallman should have been angry at MIT, not Symbolics.

Stallman completely misunderstood this and his offensive (and quite possibly
libelous) slander against honest and ethical Symbolics employees is a very off
putting.

Symbolics was a huge company and developed an entire OS, architecture, and
many programs for their platform that Stallman did not and could not copy.
Stallman mainly copied some features from Zmacs (the text editor). Symbolics
made high end machines that sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Nobody
would have ditched an expensive Symbolics machine, one of the leading CG
platforms of the 80s, because some other platform also an editor that sort of
looked like Zmacs. Stallman had pretty much no impact on Symbolics's revenue.

~~~
bane
> Stallman completely misunderstood this...

A constant theme with RMS is his complete misunderstanding of basic business
and economic principles.

~~~
Mikeb85
Business maybe, however free software undoubtedly has a positive economic
impact...

~~~
verbin217
That doesn't imply understanding or even intent for that matter.

~~~
gcb1
why should a peasant understand the reasoning for the king's tax?

------
bayesianhorse
In nature, GNUs are born rapidly and have to run with the hurd within hours.

------
16s
God bless Gnu. Best thing that ever happened to Free Software,

------
joeblau
I like the story the way @fat tells it.

~~~
jpmattia
Link? (That wouldn't be tfat? who was a grad student at the time iirc.)

~~~
joeblau
Sorry for the late delay:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os)

