Seventh reading

Free as in freedom – Crusade for free software
By: Sam Williams

Ch. 1 - For want of a printer

This chapter is set as a historical novel of Richard Stallmans early days at MIT and explains the early days of hackers. At this time hackers where considered as people who manipulated programs to improve them and Stallman was one of them. The golden rule hackers as he explains it was to always help another out with programming in sharing the code they worked on. This was seen as a community of helping one another out.

The history continues on as Stallman encounters problems with the printer at work and sets of to find the code for it so that he could improve it. When he finally finds himself at the source of the code he needs at Xerox labs he is rejected it. At this point he starts to unravel the truth about how code is starting to gain value and that company’s are starting to harvest this knowledge and people for their private gain and locking it up. This can be seen as starting point of what nowadays is the economical software industry, and its counterpart the open source software which follow the ideology of the hackers.

Ch.2 – 2001: A hacker’s odyssey

The following up chapter takes place 20 years after the incidents at MIT and sums up what the open software community has accomplished until now (well until 2001). The chapter mainly focuses on a speech that Stallman had at the New York university computer-science department discussing the software industry. The main focus is on the GPL and how it works as insurance that software code is made into a communal ownership and copyrighted. This is meant to work as evolving copyright that follows the original source code in whatever it evolves into, thus reassuring that it could never fall into commercial lockup. Even if just a little bit of the source code is used it still falls under the same copyright protection.


I found these readings to be quite fun and interesting and gave me a better insight of the history of open source community. This book seems to be a very relaxed and skips out on the theoretical parts. Just read it if you want some historical facts and easy reading.