Free Software Foundation Turns 25

An anonymous reader writes "On this day, 25 years ago, Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation. He had been the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab. Tired of seeing software that he and others had written appropriated (without acknowledgment or compensation) by disreputable software companies and then told to pay for software they had written, Stallman took action, creating the foundation. The original license was written by Stallman. Stallman had subsequently written a large number of GNU tools, but the license was his most important contribution."

Uhm, no!

[kenh]

" He had been the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab.?

He was a system administrator, not the director of the lab! Minsky, Papert, et al didn't report to him...

Re:Director of the AI Lab?

[trb]

Not to diss Stallman, but he was not the director of the AI Lab, and it's hard to say he was their most famous hacker at that time - the AI Lab spawned many great hackers, and especially then, during the early years of Symbolics and LMI. The most famous AI Lab hackers were LISP hackers (at that time - remember, it was a AI Lab.) Gerald Sussman, Guy Steele, JonL White, David Moon, et al.

Re:Uhm, no!

[kenh]

" Tired of seeing software that he and others had written appropriated (without acknowledgment or compensation) by disreputable software companies and then told to pay for software they had written, Stallman took action, creating the foundation."

That doesn't seem right either - I thought the driving issue was the need to pay a fee to access driver software to modify it to use a product they already bought (I think it was a printer) - as I recall the issue was that software licenses were getting in the way of him doing the work he needed to do. He wasn't against paying for needed software, but in this case (his "tipping point"), but he was being required to pay to fix software he'd already paid for since the the manufacturer wouldn't/couldn't make it work.

Re:Director of the AI Lab?

[plasticsquirrel]

Yes, but Stallman was also doing a great amount of Lisp Machine work for LMI. Specifically, Symbolics was trying to shake off a prior agreement to share code with LMI. Stallman duplicated the new features from scratch for LMI, working around the clock. I believe he was their main programmer at the time. He didn't make Lisp history like the others did with Scheme or Common Lisp, but he was deeply a Lisp guy at that time, and wanted the GNU system to support two languages: C and Lisp. In fact, GNU Emacs was written because he wanted a powerful editor, and knew that Lisp was the best way to accomplish that extensibility. Now systems running GNU (Linux) use so many different languages that people have almost forgotten about the Lisp side of things, sadly.

Who wrote this claptrap?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Tired of seeing software that he and others had written appropriated (without acknowledgment or compensation) by disreputable software companies and then told to pay for software they had written, Stallman took action, creating the foundation.

What a terrible mis-representation of RMS's motivations. The EFF wasn't founded because RMS thought his software being "stolen" - it was created because he was locked out of fixing bugs in software on equipment in the lab where he worked. Read the first chapter of Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software. -- For Want of a Printer [faifzilla.org] for a description of that seminal moment.

Re:And it never would have amounted to anything...

[flyingfsck]

Uhmm, the BSDs are much older than Linux and they also use GCC and other GNU tools. BSD1 was released in 1977, which is before Linus was born! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg [wikipedia.org]

Re:What about emacs

[FreeFuture]

You're right. Not many people know that he is actually a recipient of the Grace Murray Hopper Award, which is usually considered the younger cousin of the Turing Award.
http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=9380313&srt=all&aw=145&ao=GMHOPPER&yr=1990 [acm.org]

Re:the license? really?

[VGPowerlord]

The BSD license was a consequence of being the product of a public university, receiving federal funds to work on projects. Even without the GPL, I suspect it is highly likely that the BSD license would have been created as-is anyway.

An early version of the BSD license was already in use before the GPLv1 was released. Granted, since then, there have been many modifications of it, including what's often referred to as the "Modified BSD License" that removes the advertising requirement.

Over dramatization

[viscous]

Tired of seeing software that he and others had written appropriated (without acknowledgment or compensation) by disreputable software companies and then told to pay for software they had written, Stallman took action, creating the foundation

The anonymous contributor needs to get a better grip on reality.

The software in question was mostly written by programmers who were MIT staff members and students. MIT held the copyright on the software that they developed. MIT subsequently licensed the software to at least three companies: Symbolics, LMI and Texas Instruments. (I don't recall if there were any others.)

The founders of Symbolics and LMI included many of the same people who had worked on the software as MIT staff. Stallman remained an MIT employee.

Nothing in this story makes Symbolics or LMI or Texas Instruments a "disreputable software company". MIT has a long history of licensing technology developed within its walls to industry, often to startups formed by ex-MIT employees. This was no different. (At least, at the time this was no different. I have no idea what MIT's current practice is for software developed by its employees.)

Stallman's unhappiness with the fate of the software he had worked on motivated him to invent the GPL. This was indeed a wonderful idea that has done an enormous amount of good for the world. He deserves a great deal of credit for this.

But there is no need to over dramatize the birth of the GPL by painting the companies who licensed the Lisp Machine software as some kind of evil villains. They weren't doing anything different from what many other computer companies of the day were doing.

And (as many others have noted) Stallman was never the director of the MIT AI Lab.