Richard Stallman was a member of the legendary group of hackers at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. In the lab, all of the programs and source code were freely available to the whole group, reifying the vision of J.C.R. Licklider. Around 1984 many changes occurred that made the environment much less free. Stallman left MIT and began working to create his own free software, called GNU (“GNU’s Not Unix”). Stallman uses copyright to guarantee users’ freedom, calling it “copyleft.” The program that Stallman worked on is not called Linux. Stallman’s manifesto calls for participation and support for GNU. The part of this essay that I found to be the most interesting was the discussion called “Competition makes things get done better.” I think that this is very true.
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