Free as in Freedom | Page 6

to audiences, Stallman has made
repeated reference to the incident, noting that Sproull's unwillingness to hand over the
source code stemmed from a nondisclosure agreement, a contractual agreement between
Sproull and the Xerox Corporation giving Sproull, or any other signatory, access the
software source code in exchange for a promise of secrecy. Now a standard item of
business in the software industry, the nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, was a novel
development at the time, a reflection of both the commercial value of the laser printer to
Xerox and the information needed to run it. "Xerox was at the time trying to make a
commercial product out of the laser printer," recalls Reid. "They would have been insane
to give away the source code."
For Stallman, however, the NDA was something else entirely. It was a refusal on the part
of Xerox and Sproull, or whomever the person was that turned down his source-code
request that day, to participate in a system that, until then, had encouraged software
programmers to regard programs as communal resources. Like a peasant whose
centuries-old irrigation ditch had grown suddenly dry, Stallman had followed the ditch to
its source only to find a brand-spanking-new hydroelectric dam bearing the Xerox logo.
For Stallman, the realization that Xerox had compelled a fellow programmer to
participate in this newfangled system of compelled secrecy took a while to sink in. At
first, all he could focus on was the personal nature of the refusal. As a person who felt
awkward and out of sync in most face-to-face encounters, Stallman's attempt to drop in
on a fellow programmer unannounced had been intended as a demonstration of
neighborliness. Now that the request had been refused, it felt like a major blunder. "I was
so angry I couldn't think of a way to express it. So I just turned away and walked out
without another word," Stallman recalls. "I might have slammed the door. Who knows?
All I remember is wanting to get out of there."
Twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers, so much so that Stallman has elevated
the event into a major turning point. Within the next few months, a series of events would
befall both Stallman and the AI Lab hacker community that would make 30 seconds
worth of tension in a remote Carnegie Mellon office seem trivial by comparison.
Nevertheless, when it comes time to sort out the events that would transform Stallman
from a lone hacker, instinctively suspicious of centralized authority, to a crusading
activist applying traditional notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the world of
software development, Stallman singles out the Carnegie Mellon encounter for special
attention.
"It encouraged me to think about something that I'd already been thinking about," says
Stallman. "I already had an idea that software should be shared, but I wasn't sure how to
think about that. My thoughts weren't clear and organized to the point where I could
express them in a concise fashion to the rest of the world."
Although previous events had raised Stallman's ire, he says it wasn't until his Carnegie
Mellon encounter that he realized the events were beginning to intrude on a culture he
had long considered sacrosanct. As an elite programmer at one of the world's elite
institutions, Stallman had been perfectly willing to ignore the compromises and bargains

of his fellow programmers just so long as they didn't interfere with his own work. Until
the arrival of the Xerox laser printer, Stallman had been content to look down on the
machines and programs other computer users grimly tolerated. On the rare occasion that
such a program breached the AI Lab's walls-when the lab replaced its venerable
Incompatible Time Sharing operating system with a commercial variant, the TOPS 20,
for example-Stallman and his hacker colleagues had been free to rewrite, reshape, and
rename the software according to personal taste.
Now that the laser printer had insinuated itself within the AI Lab's network, however,
something had changed. The machine worked fine, barring the occasional paper jam, but
the ability to modify according to personal taste had disappeared. From the viewpoint of
the entire software industry, the printer was a wake-up call. Software had become such a
valuable asset that companies no longer felt the need to publicize source code, especially
when publication meant giving potential competitors a chance to duplicate something
cheaply. From Stallman's viewpoint, the printer was a Trojan Horse. After a decade of
failure, privately owned software-future hackers would use the term " proprietary"
software-had gained a foothold inside the AI Lab through the sneakiest of methods. It had
come disguised as a gift.
That Xerox had offered some programmers access to additional gifts in exchange for
secrecy was also galling, but Stallman takes pains to note that, if presented with such