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Out of the Lab

The free software movement emerged in the early 80s. The stimulus that led to the creation of GNU, the GPL and the free software movement was the collapse of the hacker culture at MIT's AI Lab in the late 70s and early 80s, and the subsequent commercialisation of The Lisp Machine - a workstation (created by AI Lab hackers) dedicated to Lisp, by Symbolics, a company created by Russell Noftsker, a former administrator of the AI Lab who had left in strained circumstances in 1973.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the US Department of Defence had asked MIT to build six prototype Lisp machines at $50,000 a piece. As a response to this, Richard Greenblatt, "the hacker's hacker", proposed the founding of a hackers' company, to be called Lisp Machine Incorporated, or LMI, which would build and market Lisp machines in the spirit of the Lab community, paying its way on a sale by sale basis, resisting the corrupting influence of outside capital, while playing to the intellectual and technical strengths of the hackers themselves.

Nofstker disdained Greenblatt's idealism, and started a rival company, Symbolics, set up on a commercial footing with input from proprietary investors, and all the compromises that that would entail - a move that Richard Stallman called, with typical forthrightness, a "stabbing in the back, clearly a real businessman."

Stallman took his revenge the only way he knew how, by going on a two year coding binge to reproduce every advance that was made by the team of hackers at Symbolics, and match it feature-for-feature on behalf of Greenblatt and LMI. But it was an ultimately futile task, as he recognised himself, and by 1983 he gave up the task to dedicate himself to founding GNU (GNU's Not Unix), and lay the foundations of "free software".

Put that in your coffee cup

The stimulus for the creation of the GPL can be traced back to the early history of Emacs (an abbreviation of “Editor MACroS”), Stallman's greatest contribution to the culture of the AI Lab, which he gave away free. Stallman had one condition for its use, "that they give back all extensions they made so as to help Emacs improve. I called this arrangement 'the Emacs commune'." The first GNU software was a version of Emacs which appeared in 1985, mainly written by Stallman, but incorporating some code from a rewrite of Stallman's original MIT Emacs (in C for Unix) by James Gosling.

Gosling initially allowed free distribution of the source code, to which others had contributed, but as Stallman tells it: "He stabbed everyone in the back by putting copyrights on it, making people promise not to redistribute it, and then selling it to a software-house." Stallman was hurt by this betrayal, and was later to say of Gosling, "My later dealings with him personally showed that he was every bit as cowardly and despicable as you would expect from that history." The version of Emacs now available to download from the GNU site has had Gosling's code replaced.

The GPL had the simple goal of ensuring that code that was originally intended to be free to share, remained free to share. The means of doing this was a hack on copyright law that rewrote the rights and responsibilities of the end user, giving the user the right to use, copy, share, repackage or sell the software with the reservation that any changes to the code be made available under the same conditions.

This recursive adaptation of copyright law has become known as copyleft, and is the reason why opponents refer to the GPL as viral - the GPL is made to apply to additions and changes to the code, and all rights are reversed. The benefits of copyleft are that it encourages the rollback of code into a project, discourages forking, and gives assurance that code won't be hijacked for proprietary means and ends.

Next: Securing the source

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