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What was the origin of the Free Software movement and how has it evolved?
Around 1983 I was in a situation where the only future I could see in front of me was one of using proprietary software and having to sign a non-disclosure agreement to get a copy. It was even harder to get permission to work on improving the operating system. I was an operating system developer; improving operating systems was just what I loved to do, and was my field. In order to be able to do it, I [would have] to promise to lock up my knowledge and refuse to share it with other people. My conscience revolted at that idea. The only thing I could do was to make an alternative, so I started the Free Software movement. I wanted to be able, once again, to use computers as part of a community where people have the freedom to cooperate with each other when they want to, when they are not individually imprisoned in solitary confinement. The obstacle was that at that time all operating systems were proprietary. There was no way you could use a computer using free software, because you had to have an operating system. So, from the very first step you had to do something wrong, you had to get involved in refusing to share with people. Our only solution was to develop another operating system that would be free. This alternative would give people the chance to use computers without promising they wouldn't help their neighbors. What was the main challenge you had to face at that time?
At the beginning I was writing software by myself--I just needed the computer to use. I quit my job at the MIT to start my project, but the lab at the MIT where I used to work let me keep using one of their computers to do this work. I started writing pieces of the GNU system, and then other people started helping. They found computers wherever, they joined individually, and the network worked well, after all. And what happened to the Free Software movement then?
A number of different things, as you could imagine. We achieved our initial goal of having completed the operating systems, so that computers could be used without having to put any proprietary software on them. Another success was [that] we had a lot of users. Then we discovered, by surprise, that free software was technically superior to the non-free alternatives, since the users helped improve it and make it suitable for their needs. This had both good and bad effects. We had lots of users, which in one sense looks like success; but it also brought many users to chose us just because the software doesn't crash. The result is that our values are getting forgotten. Many [users] don't even recognize there is an issue of freedom at stake here. They don't know that there is a freedom that they could choose to keep or to give up. So that's the big problem we face now, relating our intentions to people using our software. There's something more at stake here than just having powerful reliable software. There's an issue of ethics. There is an issue of domination versus subjugation of people. When a software developer makes every user promise not to share with anybody else, all the users are in a solitary confinement, they are unable to cooperate. How does GNU relate to Linux? What is the difference between 'Open Source Software' and 'Free Software'?
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