{"id":89929,"date":"2025-10-15T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/?p=89929"},"modified":"2025-12-04T07:03:05","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T04:03:05","slug":"silicon-tanks-richard-stallman-father-of-copyleft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/silicon-tanks-richard-stallman-father-of-copyleft\/","title":{"rendered":"Silicon Tanks: Richard Stallman, Father of the Copyleft Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the late 1970s the programming community faced an unexpected threat as corporations began to monetise software that had previously been shared for free. Many talented engineers eventually capitulated in the uneven contest between enthusiasts and tech giants\u2014but not hacker Richard Stallman.<\/p>\n

How he managed to spark a revolution in software freedom is the subject of a new instalment in the Silicon Tanks series, in which ForkLog revisits the most influential visionaries in IT.<\/p>\n

Hackers, corporations and a faulty printer<\/h2>\n

Richard Matthew Stallman, who gained early notoriety in the hacker community as RMS, was born on March 16, 1953, in New York. He graduated from Harvard University in 1974 and entered graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He soon left the programme, but kept his job as a programmer at MIT\u2019s Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, where he had worked since 1971.<\/p>\n

At the time Stallman joined a community whose members actively shared experience and software needed to create new programs. The free exchange of information became more difficult with the advent of commercial software.<\/p>\n

In the early 1980s Digital Equipment Corporation stopped supplying hardware for the PDP-10 machines used by the lab\u2019s team. And in 1981 almost all of Stallman\u2019s colleagues left for Symbolics.<\/p>\n

Computers of the day had their own operating systems, but none was \u201cfree\u201d. At the new companies, employees were required to sign non-disclosure agreements before receiving executables. Participation in the hacker community was forbidden.<\/p>\n

The last straw for Stallman was a faulty printer he used in the lab. When he requested the machine\u2019s source code to upgrade it, he was refused.<\/p>\n

This seemingly minor incident led RMS to conceive a wholly new paradigm for sharing information. On September 27, 1983, Stallman announced the start of development of a free, Unix-like and completely free operating system, GNU. In January 1984 he left MIT and devoted himself entirely to the ambitious project.<\/p>\n

From GNU to GNU\/Linux<\/h2>\n

The project name followed hacker tradition\u2014as a recursive acronym for \u201cGNU\u2019s Not Unix\u201d. The step was needed to head off potential claims of authorship.<\/p>\n

In 1985, to support GNU and the free-software movement, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF). That same year the text editor GNU Emacs appeared, displaying changes in real time\u2014a technical breakthrough at the time. It was based on the commercial programme Gosling Emacs, from which Stallman stripped the proprietary taint.<\/p>\n

Control over modified versions was not entirely free. Stallman consulted intellectual-property lawyers Mark Fischer and Jerry Cohen. They helped find a loophole that allowed replacing the word Emacs with \u201csoftware\u201d in documents and using copyright as the basis for a new kind of licence.<\/p>\n

The software proved popular and was distributed by post on physical media for $150. Thus GNU Emacs became the first program to receive the copyleft GNU GPL licence.<\/p>\n

The next milestone was the development of the GNU C Compiler (GCC) in 1987. GCC was not only free but outperformed many contemporaries, which ensured rapid adoption.<\/p>\n

By 1990 the GNU system was almost complete; the only major missing component was the kernel. That problem remains unresolved to this day. When Linus Torvalds introduced Linux in 1991, the GNU team moved to the Finnish developer\u2019s operating system.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWe call this version of the system \u2018GNU\/Linux\u2019 to show that it is assembled from the GNU system with Linux as the kernel. Please do not get into the habit of calling the entire system Linux, because that means crediting our work to someone else. Please mention us equally, too,\u201d \u2014 <\/em>ask<\/em><\/a> at the FSF.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Copyleft<\/h2>\n

Copyleft is a concept that makes a program or work of art free. Its observance requires that all modified and extended versions also remain free.<\/p>\n

In the original description<\/a> of GNU licences, \u201cfreedom\u201d does not mean devaluing the product, but its open transfer along the entire chain of users. Selling copies of software does not contradict Stallman\u2019s concept; on the contrary, it helps a project exist and develop.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201c[Copyleft] relies on copyright law but turns it around, turning it into the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means of restricting a program, it becomes a means of preserving its freedom,\u201d \u2014 <\/em>noted<\/em><\/a> RMS, describing the aims of copyleft.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"image\"
List of free distributions to download. Source: GNU<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Stallman also defined four key freedoms of software:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • to run the program for any purpose;<\/li>\n
  • to modify the code to suit your needs, with access to the source;<\/li>\n
  • to distribute copies\u2014free of charge or for money;<\/li>\n
  • to improve and promote versions of the software for the benefit of the community.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n