The birth of GNU. Stallman and the road to Free Software

In our previous article We had told how the best programmers of the MIT Artificial Intelligence laboratory had left it to go to the most lucrative private activity and, as our friend Richard Stallman was left with people so little interested in how things work that he decided to abandon his own development and opt for commercial software.

The problem arose when they wanted to have the new machine connected to both the ARPANET network and the MIT network. The lab couldn't get anyone who could make the necessary changes to the software. The program was very difficult to understand and since it could not be shared, there were no people interested in doing it. Nor was the supplier interested in making the changes.

For Stallman, in addition to being misspelled and difficult to understand, the new system had such an ineffective security policy configured by default that not only did it not prevent people from accidentally making catastrophic mistakes. Also, it prevented someone who knew how to help another person until someone with the power to authorize it arrived.

Stallman used his programming skills to sabotage the security policy until it was enforced to such an extent that it made any attempt to do so difficult. He eventually stopped using that computer because it forced him to have a secret password.

The birth of GNU

By 82 it became clear to Stallman that the only way to bring back the original spirit of the MIT lab was to create a free operating system from scratch. He later decided that it should be similar to Unix to facilitate change and make people feel more willing to collaborate. To name it, he decided to resort to an old tradition of MIT hackers, a recursive acronym.

GNU stands for Gnu's Not Unix (GNU is not Unix)

So as not to reinvent the Richard wheel He started looking for free tools to help him with the project and found something called "Free University Compilation Kit" When he asked the developer if he could use it, he said yes on the condition that the compiler remains proprietary and the operating system built with it encourages people to buy it.

Stallman decided to develop his own compiler for which it was inspired by a free compiler of a language called Pastel (An extended version of Pascal) In parallel, he started working on one of his flagship projects: a text editor called GNU Emacs.

Originally GNU Emacs was based on another supposedly free distribution editor. As I worked with that editor, Stallman realized that it did not have the features he needed and was modifying it. By the time the company backtracked and banned further distribution, only a small part of the original code remained that only took a week and a half to replace.

These and other tools developed by Stallman and his collaborators would play a fundamental role in the development of Linux, derivatives of BSD and would be ported to Windows, Mac and Sony's PlayStation.

In 1985 the Free Software Foundation is created, the nonprofit organization in charge of ensuring that all the tools of the GNU project are freely available to those who want to use them. In addition to that, it carries out dissemination activities.

In 1989 Richard Stallman wrote the first version of the GNU General Public License (GPL) for its acronym in English which guarantees end users (individuals, organizations, companies) the freedom to use, study, share and modify the software.

Bibliography

According to what I promised, this is the bibliography of the article series

Chandler Jr AD Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer IndustriesHarvard University Press

RyanJ. A History of the Internet and the Digital Future. Reaction Books.

Banks M. On the way to the Web: The secret history of the Internet and its founders.press

Richard Stallmann. Talk at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.