@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ Only a handful of developers were considering the strange idea that code should
In 1976, Bill Gates wrote "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" where he claimed that developing software cost time, money and that people should not steal software.
Reactions were mitigated with Apple running an ad to tell that they were providing free software with their computer and the community of programmers, amongst theme Jim Warren, noting that it copying software make them more popular in the long term. He also noted that people were not trying to "steal" but that buying software was way harder than simply copying it from friends.
Reactions were mitigated with Apple running an ad to tell that they were providing free software with their computer and the community of programmers, amongst them Jim Warren, noting that it copying software make them more popular in the long term. He also noted that people were not trying to "steal" but that buying software was way harder than simply copying it from friends.
This Open Letter to Hobbyists is an important landmark because it illustrates how common copying and sharing were. It also illustrates that a business oriented minority was trying to advertise a new ideology in which "sharing is stealing". Spoiler alert: they managed to make that ideology so successful that the "poor" Bill Gates became the richest man on earth only twenty years later and that, nowadays, lot of students and professor are afraid of sharing knowledge.
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@@ -24,6 +24,10 @@ Everything comes to an end. One by one, Richard’s coworkers left for two big c
Refusing to be hired to not share code, Richard started to implement all the features the companies developed without having access at their code. Alone, he managed to code as much as two dedicated teams.
TODO : printer story
One day, the printer was replaced in the MIT department where Richard worked. Printers were (and still are) huge machines prone to being blocked. Richard had, long ago, modified the software of the printer to send a warning to the person requesting a print if the printer was blocked. As not everybody was working on the same story, this simple change prevented a lot of unnecessary walk through the MIT’s corridors.
TODO : 4 freedoms/GNU project/implementing all Unix alone
Richard knew that the Xerox company would not send him the sourcecode to allow modifying the new printer. But he know someone who worked on it and though he would simply ask him as he was visiting his university. Richard asked the source code and was expecting either a "yes, of course" or a "no". To his astonishment, he received a third answer:
"I can’t"
At that point, Richard Stallman understood that even good hacker and programmer could be forced to not share their work through contracts and licenses.
If you take an apple from a shop, it’s one apple less for someone else. This economical concept is called "rival good". Two persons cannot befenit from the same rival good at the same time. Taking a rival good without paying for it is called "stealing".
On the other hand, some economical goods are "non-rival". A toll for crossing a bridge, for example. If you manage to sneake under the barrier and cross the bridge without paying, are you stealing something? In fact, if nobody notices it, nothing has changed in the world. There’s no victim. It might be illegal and/or immoral but it is clearly not "stealing".
Computers have always been rival goods. In fact, there were so big that nobody could possibly imagine stealing them. Software was seen as the instruction on how to use the computers. At first, every single program was done for one single computer and it was not even imaginable to think that the program could be useful somewhere else.
Slowly, software became more and more complex and the idea of "portability" appeared. Maybe we could share how we use our computers and use the same software. UNIX was built with this exact philosophy.
