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 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 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
