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Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation held forth on his
ideals for software as an instrument for freeing individuals to do
useful work and creating communities of cooperation where sharing
enables a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Mr. Stallman,
in town for the Conference on World Affairs, talked for over 2 hours to a
standing-room-only crowd who appeared based on a single day's notice.
Richard described his early experiences with software that was both
free (source available without limitations) and proprietary at MIT
where he worked in the early days of computing (PDP-10s). Due to this
experience he decided to dedicate his life to creating free software.
While Mr. Stallman preaches that software needs to be free ("without
source, it's not SOFTware") he also practices what he preaches, refusing
to develop code for customers that want to keep a proprietary advantage
and living an ascetic, low cost lifestyle that enables him to give away
the results of his work. He lives in a single room and doesn't own
a car, subsisting on his MacArthur Foundation grant and money saved
from his free software support contracts. He founded the Free Software
Foundation to create an operating system that would be free from
proprietary restrictions and has been successful in creating a community
of developers dedicating their time to his cause.
Richard described his strategy of piecemeal replacement of UNIX utilities
with free versions starting with the editor EMACS and which has culminated
in the free UNIX he calls GNU-Linux (Linux kernel with GNU utilities).
Although most people refer to the distribution as Linux, he asked that
people use the GNU designation to acknowledge the contributions of the GNU
community (although by rights it should then be called the BSD-GNU-X-Linux
distribution). Not content with the mono-lithic Linux implementation of the
UNIX kernel, he is continuing an effort called HURD (Hurd of UNIX Replacement
Daemons). The HURD kernel is composed of multiple multithreaded servers
servicing system calls built directly into the GNU C library and running
atop the message passing Mach micro kernel from CMU. This architecture
should make it much easier to debug and enhance the operating system's
functionality. For example, users can add their own file systems as user
tasks, rather than having to re-write the operating system kernel.
Although Mr. Stallman may come across as a bit of religious fanatic to those
employed by the companies who's proprietary software he skewers, he finished
up poking fun at his own software religion by donning a robe and disk platter
"halo" and impersonating his "friend" St. Ignacio to exhort his followers to
pledge to run only free software on their computers.
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