Free as in Freedom | Page 5

desire for good karma?
The fact that Xerox had been unwilling to share its source-code files seemed a minor
annoyance at first. In tracking down a copy of the source-code files, Stallman says he
didn't even bother contacting Xerox. "They had already given us the laser printer,"
Stallman says. "Why should I bug them for more?"
When the desired files failed to surface, however, Stallman began to grow suspicious.
The year before, Stallman had experienced a blow up with a doctoral student at Carnegie
Mellon University. The student, Brian Reid, was the author of a useful text-formatting
program dubbed Scribe. One of the first programs that gave a user the power to define
fonts and type styles when sending a document over a computer network, the program
was an early harbinger of HTML, the lingua franca of the World Wide Web. In 1979,
Reid made the decision to sell Scribe to a Pittsburgh-area software company called

Unilogic. His graduate-student career ending, Reid says he simply was looking for a way
to unload the program on a set of developers that would take pains to keep it from
slipping into the public domain. To sweeten the deal, Reid also agreed to insert a set of
time-dependent functions- "time bombs" in software-programmer parlance-that
deactivated freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid
deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the
internal time-bomb feature.
For Reid, the deal was a win-win. Scribe didn't fall into the public domain, and Unilogic
recouped on its investment. For Stallman, it was a betrayal of the programmer ethos, pure
and simple. Instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a
way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access.
As the weeks passed and his attempts to track down Xerox laser-printer source code hit a
brick wall, Stallman began to sense a similar money-for-code scenario at work. Before
Stallman could do or say anything about it, however, good news finally trickled in via the
programmer grapevine. Word had it that a scientist at the computer-science department at
Carnegie Mellon University had just departed a job at the Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center. Not only had the scientist worked on the laser printer in question, but according
to rumor, he was still working on it as part of his research duties at Carnegie Mellon.
Casting aside his initial suspicion, Stallman made a firm resolution to seek out the person
in question during his next visit to the Carnegie Mellon campus.
He didn't have to wait long. Carnegie Mellon also had a lab specializing in
artificial-intelligence research, and within a few months, Stallman had a business-related
reason to visit the Carnegie Mellon campus. During that visit, he made sure to stop by the
computer-science department. Department employees directed him to the office of the
faculty member leading the Xerox project. When Stallman reached the office, he found
the professor working there.
In true engineer-to-engineer fashion, the conversation was cordial but blunt. After briefly
introducing himself as a visitor from MIT, Stallman requested a copy of the laser-printer
source code so that he could port it to the PDP-11. To his surprise, the professor refused
to grant his request.
"He told me that he had promised not to give me a copy," Stallman says.
Memory is a funny thing. Twenty years after the fact, Stallman's mental history tape is
notoriously blank in places. Not only does he not remember the motivating reason for the
trip or even the time of year during which he took it, he also has no recollection of the
professor or doctoral student on the other end of the conversation. According to Reid, the
person most likely to have fielded Stallman's request is Robert Sproull, a former Xerox
PARC researcher and current director of Sun Laboratories, a research division of the
computer-technology conglomerate Sun Microsystems. During the 1970s, Sproull had
been the primary developer of the laser-printer software in question while at Xerox
PARC. Around 1980, Sproull took a faculty research position at Carnegie Mellon where
he continued his laser-printer work amid other projects.
"The code that Stallman was asking for was leading-edge state-of-the-art code that
Sproull had written in the year or so before going to Carnegie Mellon," recalls Reid. "I
suspect that Sproull had been at Carnegie Mellon less than a month before this request
came in."
When asked directly about the request, however, Sproull draws a blank. "I can't make a

factual comment," writes Sproull via email. "I have absolutely no recollection of the
incident."
With both participants in the brief conversation struggling to recall key details-including
whether the conversation even took place-it's hard to gauge the bluntness of Sproull's
refusal, at least as recalled by Stallman. In talking