By the spring of 1985, Richard Stallman had settled on the GNU Project's first milestone-a Lisp-based free software version of Emacs. - freeasinfreedom richardstallman
To meet this goal, however, he faced two challenges. First, he had to rebuild Emacs in a way that made it platform independent. Second, he had to rebuild the Emacs Commune in a similar fashion.
Proponents of software copyright had their counter-arguments: without copyright, works might otherwise slip into the public domain. Putting a copyright notice on a work also served as a statement of quality. Programmers or companies who attached their name to the copyright attached their reputations as well. Finally, it was a contract, as well as a statement of ownership.
Mark Fischer, a Boston attorney specializing in intellectual-property law, recalls discussing the license with Stallman during this period. "Richard had very strong views about how it should work," Fischer says, "He had two principles. The first was to make the software absolutely as open as possible. The second was to encourage others to adopt the same licensing practices."
The GNU Emacs License made its debut when Stallman finally released GNU Emacs in 1985. Following the release, Stallman welcomed input from the general hacker community on how to improve the license's language. One hacker to take up the offer was future software activist John Gilmore, then working as a consultant to Sun Microsystems. As part of his consulting work, Gilmore had ported Emacs over to SunOS, the company's in-house version of Unix.
It wasn't long, Gilmore says, before other hackers began discussing ways to "port" the GNU Emacs License over to their own programs. Prompted by a conversation on Usenet, Gilmore sent an email to Stallman in November, 1986, suggesting modification: You should probably remove "EMACS" from the license and replace it with "SOFTWARE" or something. Soon, we hope, Emacs will not be the biggest part of the GNU system, and the license applies to all of it.
In fashioning the GPL, Stallman had been forced to make an additional adjustment to the informal tenets of the old Emacs Commune. Where he had once demanded that Commune members publish any and all changes, Stallman now demanded publication only in instances when programmers circulated their derivative versions in the same public manner as Stallman. In other words, programmers who simply modified Emacs for private use no longer needed to send the source-code changes back to Stallman.
"The GPL developed much like any piece of free software with a large community discussing its structure, its respect or the opposite in their observation, needs for tweaking and even to compromise it mildly for greater acceptance," says Jerry Cohen, another attorney who helped Stallman with the creation of the license. "The process worked very well and GPL in its several versions has gone from widespread skeptical and at times hostile response to widespread acceptance.
While not religious per se, the GNU GPL certainly qualifies as an interesting example of this "routinization" process at work in the modern, decentralized world of software development. Since its unveiling, programmers and companies who have otherwise expressed little loyalty or allegiance to Stallman have willingly accepted the GPL bargain at face value. A few have even accepted the GPL as a preemptive protective mechanism for their own software programs.
The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have liked. In June, 1989, Berkeley separated its networking code from the rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and distributed it under a University of California license. The contract terms were liberal. All a licensee had to do was give credit to the university in advertisements touting derivative programs.
Rich Morin, the programmer who had viewed Stallman's initial GNU announcement with a degree of skepticism, recalls being impressed by the software that began to gather under the GPL umbrella. As the leader of a SunOS user group, one of Morin's primary duties during the 1980s had been to send out distribution tapes containing the best freeware or free software utilities.
One of the first entrepreneurs to grasp this concept was Michael Tiemann, a software programmer and graduate student at Stanford University. During the 1980s, Tiemann had followed the GNU Project like an aspiring jazz musician following a favorite artist. It wasn't until the release of the GNU C Compiler in 1987, however, that he began to grasp the full potential of free software.
"There were about 40 or 50 people in the room, and I asked how many people were working on the native code compiler," Tiemann recalls. "My host said the information was confidential but added that if I took a look around the room I might get a good general idea." Teaming up with John Gilmore, another GNU Project fan, Tiemann launched a software consulting service dedicated to customizing GNU programs. Dubbed Cygnus Support, the company signed its first development contract in February, 1990. By the end of the year, the company had $725,000 worth of support and development contracts.
Nevertheless, as GNU tools made their mark in the late 1980s, Stallman's AI Lab-honed reputation for design fastidiousness soon became legendary throughout the entire software-development community. The protests were notable.According to a League of Programming Freedom Press, the protests were notable for featuring the first hexadecimal protest chant: 1-2-3-4, toss the lawyers out the door; 5-6-7-8, innovate don't litigate; 9-A-B-C, 1-2-3 is not for me; D-E-F-O, look and feel have got to goThey document the evolving nature of softwaresystems as the primary corporate battleground.
Interestingly, the ultimate success of the GNU Project and the free software movement in general would stem from one of these trips. In 1990, Stallman paid a visit to the Polytechnic University in Helsinki, Finland. Among the audience members was 21-year-old Linus Torvalds, future developer of the Linux kernel-the free software kernel destined to fill the GNU Project's most sizable gap.
The search led Torvalds to the operating system Minix, a lightweight version of Unix developed for instructional purposes by Dutch university professor Andrew Tanenbaum. The program fit within the memory confines of a 386 PC, the most powerful machine Torvalds could afford, but still lacked a few necessary features. It most notably lacked terminal emulation, the feature that allowed Torvalds' machine to mimic a university terminal, making it possible to log in to the MicroVAX from home.
Integrating GCC improved the performance of Linux. It also raised issues. Although the GPL's "viral" powers didn't apply to the Linux kernel, Torvald's willingness to borrow GCC for the purposes of his own free software operating system indicated a certain obligation to let other users borrow back. As Torvalds would later put it: "I had hoisted myself up on the shoulders of giants.
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