Richard Stallman at the First Hackers Conference in 1984 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf2pfzzWPYE

by schmuckonwheels • 7 months ago

160 39 7 months ago

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AlexeyBrin• 7 months ago

If you want to see the full documentary search for "Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age".

conradev• 7 months ago

This was a great watch with my family - thank you!

geremiiah• 7 months ago

In a parallel universe RMS read Ayn Rand, joined her cult of selfish greed and the world is running a closed source UNIX clone developed by JLU (Just Like Unix), the $5T corporation funded by him.

All of this to say, it's amazing how this man's personality had such a profoundly positive effect on the computing landscape of today and how different things might have been otherwise, especially because he's more the exception than the rule in terms of personalities in the hacker space.

dangus• 7 months ago

Well, a UNIX clone that was proprietary wouldn’t have become popular like GNU did. If you have to pay for it why not just use the real one?

linguae• 7 months ago

I think if Richard Stallman had no qualms about proprietary software, he would have remained in the Lisp machine world, either working for Symbolics or Lisp Machines, Inc., or perhaps starting his own thing. Stallman was a Lisp hacker before starting GNU, and even when deciding on cloning Unix instead of creating a free Lisp-based OS, one of his first projects was GNU Emacs.

An interesting thought experiment is what Stallman would’ve done in that alternate timeline in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Lisp machines were killed off by advances in commodity hardware and compiler technology, the end of the Cold War (the US military was a large customer of Lisp machines), and the AI winter (Lisp used to be synonymous with AI).

pjmlp5• 7 months ago

UNIX originally wasn't closed source anyway, and most people like nowadays, only cared about the freebeer parts.

GNU only took off when Sun created the split between user and developer UNIX SKUs, which other UNIX vendors were quick to follow as well.

Suddenly having access to UNIX no longer meant having development tools around, if the server wasn't to be used by developers themselves.

Thus installing GNU became a common workaround to pay for a UNIX developer license.

neilv6• 7 months ago

Point taken, but as an aside, I'm just guessing that RMS was way too smart and knowledgeable to fall for Ayn Rand, for long.

Some people with no other frame (e.g., very insulated teenagers) might accept the given values she proposes (because, why not), but if you read when she tries to make a direct argument, it's clearly shoddy and manipulative, with confident big leaps of logic that she's trying to sneak past the listener.

randallsquared• 7 months ago

I don't think the point was taken. Whether someone found Rand illuminating and convincing is more about path dependence than intelligence.

DANmode• 7 months ago

This would be a better comment with an example.

german_dong• 7 months ago

In any timeline, software, as a frictionlessly distributable commodity, would have become effectively free just as music did.

positron263• 7 months ago

1984 was published in 1949. GNU and the FSF are contemporary with Neuromancer. The BSD license predates the GPL and the idea of copyleft by several years. It takes a village to raise a child.

throwaway815233• 7 months ago

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses the 4-clause (GPL incompatible) BSD license was 1988, 3-clause (the one everyone uses now) was 1990. It got rid of the advertising clause at RMS's behest. RMS spent a long time wrangling for that change.

GPL1 was 1989. I'm not sure if RMS was involved with BSD3. The MIT license as used in MIT Athena and X windows was somewhat earlier, like 1986, and is similar to BSD3.

GNU Emacs as released around 1984 had its own license similar to GPL1, called the Emacs General Public License (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft). The term "copyleft" per that article originated in 1984 or 1985.

I semi-remember that GPL1 was mostly ported from the Emacs GPL, basically substituting "The Program" for "Emacs". I don't remember if the Emacs GPL used the term "Copyleft".

The informal distribution terms for PDP-10 Emacs in the 1970's were an antecedent of copyleft that RMS called the "Emacs Commune". Distribute freely but you were (informally) required to send in changes and improvements. See: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom_(2002)/Cha... The GPL's were somewhat a codification of the Emacs Commune.

It wasn't like the MIT and BSD stuff happened with with RMS in a state of ignorance either. He obviously wasn't in control of anything outside the GNU project, but he was involved in lots of discussions with MIT and Berkeley about licensing and other issues.

runjake• 7 months ago

Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOP1LNr70aU

The bushy eyed fellow is Bill Budge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Budge

Wozniak and the Macintosh team in there, as well.

ViktorRay• 7 months ago

Seeing Wozniak and the Macintosh team in the same room as Stallman is kind of like the beginning of Game of Thrones.

When the Starks and the Lannisters are eating and drinking in the room together. Before they go their seperate ways and fight and all that.

neilv6• 7 months ago

Interesting thought.

On RMS and Woz specifically, how much have they ever been opposed?

I only know a little about them, but I think of both as good-natured, high-impact, little-bit weird hackers, with substantial common ground in philosophies or thinking.

They went very different life directions, with pretty young career decisions. But I could imagine Woz today supporting what RMS has done, while not seeing a need for all the philosophy and seriousness.

RMS is certainly critical of Apple. But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.

userbinator2• 7 months ago

But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.

Apple has always been patronising and thought of users as exploitables to be controlled and herded; the Macintosh, and even more so the Lisa that came before it, were far more closed systems in comparison to the IBM PC.

neilv6• 7 months ago

Funny: maybe it's my ad blocker, but if go to https://old.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ (old-school Reddit UI), the right sidebar says:

"With software there are only two possibilities: either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power. " -- Richard M Stallman
Essential reading [...] People with similar ideas: [...] Vaguely related: [...]
Rules:
1. Memes and shitposts allowed only on Mondays
2. Try to flair your posts
3. WWRMSD?

But if I go to https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ (new-style Reddit UI), the right sidebar says:

Stallman was Right
Nobody listens to him. But he was right all along.*
r/StallmanWasRight Rules
1 Memes only on Mondays
2 no-spam-brigading

Is the first UI for hackers, and the second one for mindless doomscrolling?

howenterprisey• 7 months ago

Two different systems; on the mod side there are two different UIs (one to set each) as well. Yeah it's weird.

neilv6• 7 months ago

I'd guess nobody sat down and said "Here's the target demographic profile for the new UI, so let's rework our messaging, people!" It's just a funny accident of maintenance over time that the result looks like that.

KwisatzHaderack• 7 months ago

I was pleasantly surprised to see my former CS professor Brian Harvey at 0:18. What a cool dude!

Richard Stallman at the First Hackers Conference in 1984 [video]

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