We are reaching the end of our review for the events that made Linux possible and we have yet to finish the story of the birth of the GNU Project. Let's remember that it was the GNU project that would give Linus Torvalds the tools to create the Linux kernel.
It is impossible to separate the "invention" of free software from the personality of Richard Stallman. I put the invention in quotes because, as we said in previous articles, the software was originally freely shared. It was when companies began to see their commercial possibilities that proprietary licenses appeared.
Stallman says that when he arrived at the Artificial Intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) encountered an open door culture. In his previous experiences he had worked in places where there were people who decided who and when could use the equipment, and many times these were assigned by status and not by necessity.
In the MIT AI lab, hardware was considered everyone's. If someone, no matter how high in the hierarchy, kept a piece of equipment that someone else needed under lock and key, they would knock the door down.
As Stallman explains
... this spirit of breaking down doors was not something isolated, it was part of a whole way of life. The hackers in the AI lab were highly motivated to write good and interesting programs. And it was because they were so eager to get more work done, they couldn't bear to have equipment locked out, or many other things that people could do to obstruct useful work.
For the same reason, the laboratory systems did not have a file protection mechanism.Those who developed it did not want someone to be able to centralize the power to decide who could have access to what.
The good thing about this according to Stallman is that it isWhenever something went wrong with the systems, anyone who knew what the problem was could fix it.
In his own words it was an anarchy that worked:
… We also didn't let any teacher or boss decide what work was going to be done, because our job was to improve the system. We talk to users, of course; if you don't, you can't say what is needed. But after doing that, we were the best able to see what kinds of improvements were feasible, and we were always talking to each other about how we would like to see the system changed, and what kinds of clear ideas we had seen in other systems that we could use.
The path to GNU. Changes are not always good
However, over time, that open culture was lost. In the Free Software Foundation founder's own words:
Essentially all the competent programmers except me, in the AI lab were hired, and this caused more than a momentary change, it caused a permanent transformation because it broke the continuity of the hacker culture. New hackers were always attracted to old hackers; there were the funniest computers and the people who did the most interesting things, and also a spirit that was fun to be a part of. Once these things were lost, there was no longer anything to recommend the place to anyone new, so new people stopped coming. There was no one they could draw inspiration from, no one they could learn those traditions from. Also, no one to learn to do good programming from. With only a handful of professors and graduate students, who don't really know how to make a program work, you cannot learn to make good programs work. So the MIT AI lab that I loved was gone and after a couple of years of fighting the people who did it to try to punish them for it, I decided that I should dedicate myself to trying to create a new community in that spirit. .
One of the consequences of the change had to do with the decision not to use internally developed software. When the hardware was changed in the laboratory, those students and teachers who did not agree with the hacker culture were able to impose their points of view and chose to use commercial software
In the final article (I promise, it's the last one) we'll see how Stallman decides that if he can't beat them, it's best to create his own project.