> Note that we are talking about a different era and deployment of computer systems. Yeah, this is really important to understand. The machines of this era req

> Note that we are talking about a different era and deployment of computer systems. Yeah, this is really important to understand. The machines of this era required some degree of physical access, they were shared by entire departments, and in some cases even the CPU instruction set might get changed overnight by students with soldering irons. The student ethos around these machines at the MIT AI Lab was that they were essentially run as anarchist collectives. University management didn't always agree. But frequently the OS, the applications and even some of the hardware had been built by the "anarchist collective." This worked because of the small community size, because of the limited physical access, and because of the high knowledge barrier new users needed to climb to do anything. By the time you'd figured things out (or your peers had taught you), you'd become part of the culture. Communities like this can be fantastic, while they last. But they don't scale. When Stallman talks about security, don't imagine a modern world full of millions of computers connected by networks. Imagine instead someone arguing about the right way to run a local non-profit "hacker space". Should it be run by the membership under tacit social rules, or should they elect someone to enforce lots of strict rules? Or imagine Wikipedia, and how it has evolved. Once, you could just fix articles. Now it's often harder. The original offense that set Stallman on his journey involved a new printer. The AI Lab had a printer with a clever feature: When the paper ran out, it sent a message to everyone in the print queue, and someone would come add paper. The AI Lab bought a printer which couldn't do this. So Stallman tried to get the source code and fix the printer, but he was told he couldn't have the code. This fundamentally annoyed him, so he decided to rebuild literally the entire computer industry so that everyone would always have the code. Stallman has a lot of faults. Some of them deserve serious criticism. And his brain does not work like that of most people. But he's essentially a left-libertarian anarchist who prefers self-organizing communities over centralized authority. His opinions on stuff like security are essentially arguments about a very specific world that was disappearing even in the 80s, one where people would think, "Hey, the OS on the shared machine could be better, so let's fix it tonight." His goal was always to keep some version of that alive.