6 ms·

Richard Stallman on the Painful Birth of GNU

137 points by Tsiolkovsky 13y ago

mjolk 13y ago
"And one of the ideas was that they wouldn't get outside investors, because outside investors would insist on imposing all the usual ways of doing things that would make it ugly." To me, this is really amusing to read on hacker news, given the rosy lenses we put on when it comes to getting a startup running from venture capital. I would go as far to say that most of us are building the business and enabling this kind of management/carrot-holding types to continue their behaviors.
- stelonix 13y ago
  Although this is true, I believe HN has two audiences: the startup people and tech people. The former are the guys posting about VC, "How (not) to fire someone", "How to choose a cofounder", postmortems, etc. The other group are more like tech people who use HN as a tech/programming hub, much like Slashdot or /r/programming. That second group is probably more aligned with RMS's world view, while the startup guys are mostly interested in the business side of things. So basically, there are both people who enjoy this kind of thought and people who vehemently oppose it on HN. We can see it easily in HN's comments.
  - mjolk 13y ago
    >Although this is true, I believe HN has two audiences: the startup people and tech people. That's fair. I have this romantic view that there's a brand of ethical/hacker startup, but that's, of course, without data to back up that not everything goes to shit when you have demands for meteoric growth.
    - generj 13y ago
      "meteoric growth" sounds about right for most startups, since they fail. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/meteoric.html http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/meteoric.html
  - zeckalpha 13y ago
    There's also the bootstrappers, who would also be aligned with this aspect of RMS' world view, though not likely other aspects.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    There's a third audience, those people who think capitalism and socialism each have their pros and cons. It's larger than you think: since we find the for/against VC/RMS debates rather tiresome and fruitless, except for the purpose of clarifying our own world views, we don't end up saying much.
    - pfraze 13y ago
      The Hacker ethos isn't socialist by the modern definition (government-run/public services). It's more about keeping business decisions from affecting quality of engineering and user rights. That doesn't mean capitalism can't happen - or socialism for that matter - it just means there's ethical requirements which take priority.
      - foobarbazqux 13y ago
        Copyleft seeks to ensure public ownership of the means of production.
        spacelizard 13y ago
        No, copyleft is fairly neutral and just seeks to mitigate some of the damage done by copyright. Copyright is what has the serious political agenda, not copyleft.
        foobarbazqux 13y ago
        ownership : means of production :: source code : binaries
        spacelizard 13y ago
        That analogy doesn't make any sense because computer software is not produced in factories. Plus, the idea of copyleft is that software shouldn't have owners, period.
- oo 13y ago
  Who are GNU's competitors? I don't see one. If all you want to do is charity work, you may not need to borrow money from investors. But if you need to build something fast/good enough to compete with fierce competitors, you do need the money. If you don't, your competitors will.
peter303 13y ago
Ah the the unethical 80s. I remember Stanford had post new rules of professorial entrepreneurship. Some were caught commercializing students' work and/or forcing students to delay publication of the their thesis work. It wasnt all computers; some of the biochemists did the same thing with drug research.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > Some were caught commercializing students' work and/or forcing students to delay publication of the their thesis work I would just like to point out that comparably unethical behavior is, unfortunately, still commonplace at some schools (and again, not limited to computer science).
joeblau 13y ago
I like the story the way @fat tells it.
- jpmattia 13y ago
  Link? (That wouldn't be tfat? who was a grad student at the time iirc.)
  - joeblau 13y ago
    Sorry for the late delay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os
bayesianhorse 13y ago
In nature, GNUs are born rapidly and have to run with the hurd within hours.
fsck--off 13y ago
Oh no, not this again. This account is highly biased and inaccurate in many places. Please read Dan Weinreb's rebuttal to this. http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.... Edit (a partial summary of the above link but not a direct quote): It is really hard to bootstrap a top of the line computer company, especially when you need capital to pay for your own fab. Greenblatt insisted on bootstrapping and being CEO too, and many hackers at the Lab did not think he would be a good CEO. It had nothing to do with "backstabbing". Symbolics hired AI Lab hackers full time because other AI spinoff companies were inappropriately using AI Lab resources, so Symbolics wanted to make sure this didn't happen. Hiring workers full time wasn't an "evil plan" to destroy the AI Lab, it was actually a well thought out ethical course of action. Since MIT owned the source code to Lisp Machines (read: it was copyrighted and not free in any way), they licensed the software to several companies under the conditions that all proprietary changes could not be distributed to anyone else except MIT. AI Lab hackers got all the changes that came from a private company, so they didn't need to leave the lab to work on Lisp Machines. The AI Lab hackers had free will, too. No one forced them to leave, and Stallman's suggestion otherwise is actually really offensive. In fact, if LMI had been the only company, the same people would have left the lab. Stallman thought that Symbolics's compliance with MIT's licensing agreement was actually an evil plot. His essentially wanted Symbolics to support LMI by giving them proprietary changes. If Symbolics had actually done this, they would have been shut down by MIT for breaking their licensing agreement. The same was true for LMI, which also had to make any changes proprietary. Stallman should have been angry at MIT, not Symbolics. Stallman completely misunderstood this and his offensive (and quite possibly libelous) slander against honest and ethical Symbolics employees is a very off putting. Symbolics was a huge company and developed an entire OS, architecture, and many programs for their platform that Stallman did not and could not copy. Stallman mainly copied some features from Zmacs (the text editor). Symbolics made high end machines that sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Nobody would have ditched an expensive Symbolics machine, one of the leading CG platforms of the 80s, because some other platform also an editor that sort of looked like Zmacs. Stallman had pretty much no impact on Symbolics's revenue.
- hga 13y ago
hga 13y ago
"Greenblatt wasn't daunted by this, he went ahead and formed a company too. So there were two companies to make Lisp machines. And Greenblatt's plan was successful enough even without the help of all the other old Lab hackers, that it's clear they were mistaken in thinking that it was a hopeless idea...." Ummm, no, not even close. Speaking as a LMI employee during this critical period who then became for a few months one of RMS's roommates after leaving the company, right when he formally started the GNU project: Yeah, LMI was with some angel investment able to build a run of CADR Lisp Machines just like the AI Lab did (25 vs. 75 or so that Symbolics did of its repackaged LM-2 version), but the company came to a dead end long before its next generation machine was ready. And went to Texas Instruments for money (TI even ended up buying Western Digital's engineering workstation unit, which LMI's processor was designed to work in). For a couple of months the management said "We've cut your paychecks and put them in the safe, working is of course optional", we all continued to work and TI then made their investment (a loan followed by buying a 25% stake exactly 30 years and 1 month ago). But even then the company would have failed, for the hardware talent consisted of Greenblatt and a physics student who'd learned the basics of digital design on the job and they couldn't get the wirewrapped prototype(s) to work. I even considered doing that (I was also a scientist type, could program and do system administration, was hired as the only person in the community with a foot in both Lisp Machine and UNIX(TM)), but I managed to recruit a graduating classmate who'd in his digital design class made a baby Lisp Machine (and I then left the company in frustration after about 9 months of never being in a position to do what I'd be hired to do and ran out of "make work" like sending a software update to our existing clients). He then put in many "100 hours weeks" and with Greenblatt and the physics student (and perhaps some help from a couple of other friends I'd recruited) got the LMI-LAMBA processor working. See http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.... as fsck--off linked to for the viewpoint of a Symbolics founder, although not from the AI-Lab (he took a detour to a LLL Navy supercomputer project), a very honest guy who's name was also on the Lisp Machine manual like RMS's.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
xradionut 13y ago
"Well, Symbolics with its investors had more money and hired several of the best hackers from the Lab, and a year later they hired the rest of the hackers except for me and Greenblatt. And the result was that my community was wiped out. It felt like a ghost town. It was desolate, and I was grief-stricken." "By then, Symbolics had given everyone at the AI Lab an ultimatum. They said: We demand that you choose a side. I had been neutral, I had been more favourable towards Greenblatt's company, but not particularly involved with it in any way. But at that point they demanded that I, like everyone else in the Lab, choose a side. And I said, in that case, my choice is obvious, I'm against you. " Wow! It's interesting that arrogant actions by various corporations are still pushing people towards OSS and away from closed source.
16s 13y ago
God bless Gnu. Best thing that ever happened to Free Software,

137 points by Tsiolkovsky 13y ago

mjolk 13y ago

"And one of the ideas was that they wouldn't get outside investors, because outside investors would insist on imposing all the usual ways of doing things that would make it ugly." To me, this is really amusing to read on hacker news, given the rosy lenses we put on when it comes to getting a startup running from venture capital. I would go as far to say that most of us are building the business and enabling this kind of management/carrot-holding types to continue their behaviors.

stelonix 13y ago
Although this is true, I believe HN has two audiences: the startup people and tech people. The former are the guys posting about VC, "How (not) to fire someone", "How to choose a cofounder", postmortems, etc. The other group are more like tech people who use HN as a tech/programming hub, much like Slashdot or /r/programming. That second group is probably more aligned with RMS's world view, while the startup guys are mostly interested in the business side of things. So basically, there are both people who enjoy this kind of thought and people who vehemently oppose it on HN. We can see it easily in HN's comments.
- mjolk 13y ago
  >Although this is true, I believe HN has two audiences: the startup people and tech people. That's fair. I have this romantic view that there's a brand of ethical/hacker startup, but that's, of course, without data to back up that not everything goes to shit when you have demands for meteoric growth.
  - generj 13y ago
    "meteoric growth" sounds about right for most startups, since they fail. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/meteoric.html http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/meteoric.html
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  There's also the bootstrappers, who would also be aligned with this aspect of RMS' world view, though not likely other aspects.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  There's a third audience, those people who think capitalism and socialism each have their pros and cons. It's larger than you think: since we find the for/against VC/RMS debates rather tiresome and fruitless, except for the purpose of clarifying our own world views, we don't end up saying much.
  - pfraze 13y ago
    The Hacker ethos isn't socialist by the modern definition (government-run/public services). It's more about keeping business decisions from affecting quality of engineering and user rights. That doesn't mean capitalism can't happen - or socialism for that matter - it just means there's ethical requirements which take priority.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      Copyleft seeks to ensure public ownership of the means of production.
      - spacelizard 13y ago
        No, copyleft is fairly neutral and just seeks to mitigate some of the damage done by copyright. Copyright is what has the serious political agenda, not copyleft.
        foobarbazqux 13y ago
        ownership : means of production :: source code : binaries
        spacelizard 13y ago
        That analogy doesn't make any sense because computer software is not produced in factories. Plus, the idea of copyleft is that software shouldn't have owners, period.
oo 13y ago
Who are GNU's competitors? I don't see one. If all you want to do is charity work, you may not need to borrow money from investors. But if you need to build something fast/good enough to compete with fierce competitors, you do need the money. If you don't, your competitors will.

peter303 13y ago

Ah the the unethical 80s. I remember Stanford had post new rules of professorial entrepreneurship. Some were caught commercializing students' work and/or forcing students to delay publication of the their thesis work. It wasnt all computers; some of the biochemists did the same thing with drug research.

chimeracoder 13y ago
> Some were caught commercializing students' work and/or forcing students to delay publication of the their thesis work I would just like to point out that comparably unethical behavior is, unfortunately, still commonplace at some schools (and again, not limited to computer science).

joeblau 13y ago

I like the story the way @fat tells it.

jpmattia 13y ago
Link? (That wouldn't be tfat? who was a grad student at the time iirc.)
- joeblau 13y ago
  Sorry for the late delay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os

bayesianhorse 13y ago

In nature, GNUs are born rapidly and have to run with the hurd within hours.

fsck--off 13y ago

Oh no, not this again. This account is highly biased and inaccurate in many places. Please read Dan Weinreb's rebuttal to this. http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.... Edit (a partial summary of the above link but not a direct quote): It is really hard to bootstrap a top of the line computer company, especially when you need capital to pay for your own fab. Greenblatt insisted on bootstrapping and being CEO too, and many hackers at the Lab did not think he would be a good CEO. It had nothing to do with "backstabbing". Symbolics hired AI Lab hackers full time because other AI spinoff companies were inappropriately using AI Lab resources, so Symbolics wanted to make sure this didn't happen. Hiring workers full time wasn't an "evil plan" to destroy the AI Lab, it was actually a well thought out ethical course of action. Since MIT owned the source code to Lisp Machines (read: it was copyrighted and not free in any way), they licensed the software to several companies under the conditions that all proprietary changes could not be distributed to anyone else except MIT. AI Lab hackers got all the changes that came from a private company, so they didn't need to leave the lab to work on Lisp Machines. The AI Lab hackers had free will, too. No one forced them to leave, and Stallman's suggestion otherwise is actually really offensive. In fact, if LMI had been the only company, the same people would have left the lab. Stallman thought that Symbolics's compliance with MIT's licensing agreement was actually an evil plot. His essentially wanted Symbolics to support LMI by giving them proprietary changes. If Symbolics had actually done this, they would have been shut down by MIT for breaking their licensing agreement. The same was true for LMI, which also had to make any changes proprietary. Stallman should have been angry at MIT, not Symbolics. Stallman completely misunderstood this and his offensive (and quite possibly libelous) slander against honest and ethical Symbolics employees is a very off putting. Symbolics was a huge company and developed an entire OS, architecture, and many programs for their platform that Stallman did not and could not copy. Stallman mainly copied some features from Zmacs (the text editor). Symbolics made high end machines that sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Nobody would have ditched an expensive Symbolics machine, one of the leading CG platforms of the 80s, because some other platform also an editor that sort of looked like Zmacs. Stallman had pretty much no impact on Symbolics's revenue.

hga 13y ago

hga 13y ago

"Greenblatt wasn't daunted by this, he went ahead and formed a company too. So there were two companies to make Lisp machines. And Greenblatt's plan was successful enough even without the help of all the other old Lab hackers, that it's clear they were mistaken in thinking that it was a hopeless idea...." Ummm, no, not even close. Speaking as a LMI employee during this critical period who then became for a few months one of RMS's roommates after leaving the company, right when he formally started the GNU project: Yeah, LMI was with some angel investment able to build a run of CADR Lisp Machines just like the AI Lab did (25 vs. 75 or so that Symbolics did of its repackaged LM-2 version), but the company came to a dead end long before its next generation machine was ready. And went to Texas Instruments for money (TI even ended up buying Western Digital's engineering workstation unit, which LMI's processor was designed to work in). For a couple of months the management said "We've cut your paychecks and put them in the safe, working is of course optional", we all continued to work and TI then made their investment (a loan followed by buying a 25% stake exactly 30 years and 1 month ago). But even then the company would have failed, for the hardware talent consisted of Greenblatt and a physics student who'd learned the basics of digital design on the job and they couldn't get the wirewrapped prototype(s) to work. I even considered doing that (I was also a scientist type, could program and do system administration, was hired as the only person in the community with a foot in both Lisp Machine and UNIX(TM)), but I managed to recruit a graduating classmate who'd in his digital design class made a baby Lisp Machine (and I then left the company in frustration after about 9 months of never being in a position to do what I'd be hired to do and ran out of "make work" like sending a software update to our existing clients). He then put in many "100 hours weeks" and with Greenblatt and the physics student (and perhaps some help from a couple of other friends I'd recruited) got the LMI-LAMBA processor working. See http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.... as fsck--off linked to for the viewpoint of a Symbolics founder, although not from the AI-Lab (he took a detour to a LLL Navy supercomputer project), a very honest guy who's name was also on the Lisp Machine manual like RMS's.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

xradionut 13y ago

"Well, Symbolics with its investors had more money and hired several of the best hackers from the Lab, and a year later they hired the rest of the hackers except for me and Greenblatt. And the result was that my community was wiped out. It felt like a ghost town. It was desolate, and I was grief-stricken." "By then, Symbolics had given everyone at the AI Lab an ultimatum. They said: We demand that you choose a side. I had been neutral, I had been more favourable towards Greenblatt's company, but not particularly involved with it in any way. But at that point they demanded that I, like everyone else in the Lab, choose a side. And I said, in that case, my choice is obvious, I'm against you. " Wow! It's interesting that arrogant actions by various corporations are still pushing people towards OSS and away from closed source.

16s 13y ago

God bless Gnu. Best thing that ever happened to Free Software,