> I would have him not view people on the other side as advisaries. A big part of the impetus for the FSF was an early instance where they were adversaries, at

> I would have him not view people on the other side as advisaries. A big part of the impetus for the FSF was an early instance where they were adversaries, at least in RMS's eyes. The MIT AI lab had an open culture of sharing code, which was "taken proprietary" by several spinoffs in the early 1980s, who hired away some of the AI-lab hackers and stopped sharing improvements with the remaining not-hired-away AI-lab hackers. Stallman saw that as a bit of a betrayal of trust, not to mention damaging to the open development of software, and users' ability to have the source to & freedom to modify their software. His solution was twofold: 1) start his own competing spinoff (the Free Software Foundation) which would employ its own set of hackers to develop the "public", non-proprietary codebase; and 2) license their contributions under a new license, the GPL, which would ensure that extensions to their code couldn't be taken proprietary.