GNU Manifesto

Richard Stallman (b. 1953)

Richard Stallman, a staff programmer at the MIT AI laboratory, became a
proponent of what we now call open source software—software distributed in a
form that is easily modified by its users. His interest in open source started in
1980, when the lab’s xerographic printer (XPG), an early laser printer, was
replaced with a Xerox 9700. Unlike with the XPG, Xerox had not provided MIT
with the new printer’s source code, claiming it was proprietary intellectual
property. This prevented Stallman from modifying the 9700 to tell people in the
lab when the printer was finished with their print jobs, or if the printer had
jammed.
The following year, Stallman found himself in a fight between two groups of
programmers who had left the AI lab. One was making proprietary software in
the Lisp computer language for the new AI workstations that the lab had
purchased; the other was working on the older Lisp software that the lab had
designed. Stallman felt that creating software that was not open to anyone who
might want to use it damaged the lab’s hacker culture; he responded by
cloning the proprietary software and making it freely available.
In 1984, Stallman gave up on Lisp and the Lisp machine—they had both failed
in the marketplace—and decided to create a new community devoted to
creating and using software that could be freely shared, modified, improved,
and learned from. He called this software free software—free as in free speech
or freedom, although by design the software could be shared without cost.
Stallman based his new work on the popular UNIX operating system, which
would let it run on many different kinds of computer hardware. He called the
project GNU (really G.N.U.), a recursive acronym that means “GNU’s Not UNIX.”
Stallman wrote the “GNU Manifesto” announcing his project and published it
in the March 1985 issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal. He invited others to join him,
either with their time or by donating money to the cause. The nonprofit Free
Software Foundation (FSF) was incorporated seven months later, housed at the
MIT AI lab. Several companies, including Hewlett-Packard, donated computers
to the FSF to help fund the project.
SEE ALSO Dr. Dobb’s Journal (1976), Linux Kernel (1991)
Photograph of the GNU homepage as seen through a magnifying glass. GNU
(which stands for “GNU’s Not UNIX”) is a free operating system based on UNIX.