Free as in Freedom | Page 4

programs to places where hackers typically
congregated. If hackers improved the software, companies could borrow back the
improvements, incorporating them into update versions for the commercial marketplace.
In corporate terms, hackers were a leveragable community asset, an auxiliary
research-and-development division available at minimal cost.
It was because of this give-and-take philosophy that when Stallman spotted the print-jam
defect in the Xerox laser printer, he didn't panic. He simply looked for a way to update
the old fix or " hack" for the new system. In the course of looking up the Xerox
laser-printer software, however, Stallman made a troubling discovery. The printer didn't
have any software, at least nothing Stallman or a fellow programmer could read. Until
then, most companies had made it a form of courtesy to publish source-code
files-readable text files that documented the individual software commands that told a
machine what to do. Xerox, in this instance, had provided software files in precompiled,
or binary, form. Programmers were free to open the files up if they wanted to, but unless
they were an expert in deciphering an endless stream of ones and zeroes, the resulting
text was pure gibberish.
Although Stallman knew plenty about computers, he was not an expert in translating
binary files. As a hacker, however, he had other resources at his disposal. The notion of
information sharing was so central to the hacker culture that Stallman knew it was only a
matter of time before some hacker in some university lab or corporate computer room
proffered a version of the laser-printer source code with the desired source-code files.
After the first few printer jams, Stallman comforted himself with the memory of a similar
situation years before. The lab had needed a cross-network program to help the PDP-11
work more efficiently with the PDP-10. The lab's hackers were more than up to the task,
but Stallman, a Harvard alumnus, recalled a similar program written by programmers at
the Harvard computer-science department. The Harvard computer lab used the same

model computer, the PDP-10, albeit with a different operating system. The Harvard
computer lab also had a policy requiring that all programs installed on the PDP-10 had to
come with published source-code files.
Taking advantage of his access to the Harvard computer lab, Stallman dropped in, made a
copy of the cross-network source code, and brought it back to the AI Lab. He then
rewrote the source code to make it more suitable for the AI Lab's operating system. With
no muss and little fuss, the AI Lab shored up a major gap in its software infrastructure.
Stallman even added a few features not found in the original Harvard program, making
the program even more useful. "We wound up using it for several years," Stallman says.
From the perspective of a 1970s-era programmer, the transaction was the software
equivalent of a neighbor stopping by to borrow a power tool or a cup of sugar from a
neighbor. The only difference was that in borrowing a copy of the software for the AI
Lab, Stallman had done nothing to deprive Harvard hackers the use of their original
program. If anything, Harvard hackers gained in the process, because Stallman had
introduced his own additional features to the program, features that hackers at Harvard
were perfectly free to borrow in return. Although nobody at Harvard ever came over to
borrow the program back, Stallman does recall a programmer at the private engineering
firm, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, borrowing the program and adding a few additional
features, which Stallman eventually reintegrated into the AI Lab's own source-code
archive.
"A program would develop the way a city develops," says Stallman, recalling the
software infrastructure of the AI Lab. "Parts would get replaced and rebuilt. New things
would get added on. But you could always look at a certain part and say, `Hmm, by the
style, I see this part was written back in the early 60s and this part was written in the
mid-1970s.'"
Through this simple system of intellectual accretion, hackers at the AI Lab and other
places built up robust creations. On the west coast, computer scientists at UC Berkeley,
working in cooperation with a few low-level engineers at AT&T, had built up an entire
operating system using this system. Dubbed Unix, a play on an older, more academically
respectable operating system called Multics, the software system was available to any
programmer willing to pay for the cost of copying the program onto a new magnetic tape
and shipping it. Not every programmer participating in this culture described himself as a
hacker, but most shared the sentiments of Richard M. Stallman. If a program or software
fix was good enough to solve your problems, it was good enough to solve somebody
else's problems. Why not share it out of a simple