Stallman and the printer. The origin of free software licenses

Stallman and the printer

We had finished our previous article in the 80's when the software had ceased to become a non-commercial value to a profitable business, and, one of the major providers, AT&T had begun charging for upgrades to a captive market of governments and universities.

Even today, when the use of printed documents is declining, printers are still a headache. Jammed paper, ink cartridges that run out with suspicious speed and cost more than a kidney, drivers that don't work when updating the operating system and we could go on the list.
When this happens, most of us just insult the Hewlett and Packard ladies or wish COVID would hit Epson headquarters, of course most of us are not Richard M Stallman.

Stallman and the printer. The story that changed everything

In the early 80s, Stallman was a XNUMX-year-old programmer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. One day he sent a 50-page document to the lab's laser printer. When he went to look for him, several hours later, He found that not only had his document not printed, but a previous job had not yet been printed.

It was not the first time that the machine had forced him to interrupt his work, so he was tempted to do something about it.. Since he was not a hardware expert, he would have to figure out how to find the solution in another way.

Contrary to what one might think, it was not an outdated device. Donated to the university by the Xerox Corporation, it was a prototype of the line of printers to be marketed by the company.

In the beginning everything had worked well. The machine printed graphics with greater precision than it used to, and cut print times by 90%. The problem, discovered later, was frequent paper jams.

The printer was a design derived from a photocopier, that is, from a computer that has an operator next to it when it is operated. In the case of the copier, paper jams are not too serious a problem. But, for a printer that operates automatically and remotely, it was a serious inconvenience. To this must be added that the printer had to meet the demand of several users.

Stallman had fixed the problem with the old printer creating software that periodically monitored it and informed each user with a waiting print job when there was a problem. Since none of them knew if someone else had received the notification, it was certain that someone was going to fix it.

In trying to do the same with the Xerox model, Stallman found that Instead of providing the well-documented source code, the company had delivered the printer software in pre-compiled packages.

Stallman took a trip to Carnegie Mellon University to speak with a colleague who worked as a Xerox product developer to pedit a copy of the source code that was denied.

Today, Stallman's request may seem out of place to us, but in the 80s the rule of restricting software distribution was something new. One of the reasons companies donated hardware to computer research labs was because they knew that programmers were going to develop enhancements that companies could pass on to customers free of charge. In fact, nobody cared that others took software without permission and made improvements to it. It was enough that those improvements were also available to everyone.

Anyway, let's be clear that the printer was the latest in a series of events that would turn Stallman's professional life around. He had already begun to realize the end of the paradigm that had guided software development since World War II, the free availability of source code.

Unable to bear the thought that he would ever be the one forced to deny the source code to someone else, he decided that the time had come to do something.

But, that will be the reason for another post.


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  1.   cgdesiderati said

    And so free software was born… or am I wrong? ??

    1.    Diego German Gonzalez said

      Free software as a concept came a little later. But yes, it was from that

  2.   Marcelo said

    Great post. I knew the story but not in such detail.

    1.    Diego German Gonzalez said

      Thank you