“I want to talk about the beginning of open source. At the MIT AI lab you didn’t sign your own code, that was thought of as arrogant. You might have started a file but others edited and added. You could tell we were building something bigger than ourselves. The whole thing was about growing the machine and we were all the machine. In the meantime there was a law passed, the 1976 copyright rewrite act. It was a tragedy. It flipped opt-in to opt-out of copyright. Everything written was copyrighted automatically. If everything is copyrighted, MIT said, then we own the Lisp machine software. And if we own it, we can sell it. So they forked the lisp operating machine and sold to Symbolics, and there started to be a divergence. Grenblat and Stallman stayed at MIT to try to keep the MIT codebase going. Richard had an understanding of what was going to happen. If our fork didn’t keep up with the Symbolics it was going to die. The forking was a violent act. There’s only a few hackers I’ve known like Richard Stallman, he’d write flawless code at typing speed. He worked himself to the bone trying to keep up with really smart former colleagues who had been poached from MIT. Carpal tunnel, sleeping under the desk, really trying hard for a few years and it was killing him. So he basically says I give up, we’re going to lose the Lisp machine. It was going into this company that was flying high, it was going to own the world, and he said it was going to die, and with it the Lisp machine. He said all that work is going to be lost, we need a way to deal with the violence of forking. And he came up with the GNU public license. The GPL is a really elegant hack in the classic sense of a hack. His idea of the GPL was to allow people to use code but to let people put it back into things. Share and share alike. With contracts you have to do a contract with somebody else. Stallman came up with a public license. The public can use this but they have to give something back, share back results. A beautiful interesting weird legal hack that would only come from a computer geek who’s freaking desperate. So that’s GPL, a license between you and the public. A weird hack.”
Link: The Internet’s Old Guard
0