On 15 July, 23:21, bolega <gnuist...@gmail.com> wrote: > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html > > RMS lecture at KTH (Sweden), 30 October 1986 > > (Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology)) > Stockholm, Sweden > > Arranged by the student society > “Datorföreningen Stacken” > 30 October 1986 > > [Note: This is a slightly edited transcript of the talk. As such it > contains false starts, as well as locutions that are natural in spoken > English but look strange in print. It is not clear how to correct them > to written English style without ‘doing violence to the original > speech’.] > > It seems that there are three things that people would like me to talk > about. On the one hand I thought that the best thing to talk about > here for a club of hackers, was what it was like at the MIT in the old > days. What made the Artificial Intelligence Lab such a special place. > But people tell me also that since these are totally different people > from the ones who were at the conference Monday and Tuesday that I > ought to talk about what's going on in the GNU project and that I > should talk about why software and information can not be owned, which > means three talks in all, and since two of those subjects each took an > hour it means we're in for a rather long time. So I had the idea that > perhaps I could split it in to three parts, and people could go > outside for the parts they are not interested in, and that then when I > come to the end of a part I can say it's the end and people can go out > and I can send Jan Rynning out to bring in the other people. (Someone > else says: “Janne, han trenger ingen mike” (translation: “Janne, he > doesn't need a mike”)). Jan, are you prepared to go running out to > fetch the other people? Jmr: I am looking for a microphone, and > someone tells me it is inside this locked box. Rms: Now in the old > days at the AI lab we would have taken a sledgehammer and cracked it > open, and the broken door would be a lesson to whoever had dared to > lock up something that people needed to use. Luckily however I used to > study Bulgarian singing, so I have no trouble managing without a > microphone. > > Anyway, should I set up this system to notify you about the parts of > the talk, or do you just like to sit through all of it? (Answer: > Yeaaah) > > When I started programming, it was 1969, and I did it in an IBM > laboratory in New York. After that I went to a school with a computer > science department that was probably like most of them. There were > some professors that were in charge of what was supposed to be done, > and there were people who decided who could use what. There was a > shortage of terminals for most people, but a lot of the professors had > terminals of their own in their offices, which was wasteful, but > typical of their attitude. When I visited the Artificial Intelligence > lab at MIT I found a spirit that was refreshingly different from that. > For example: there, the terminals was thought of as belonging to > everyone, and professors locked them up in their offices on pain of > finding their doors broken down. I was actually shown a cart with a > big block of iron on it, that had been used to break down the door of > one professors office, when he had the gall to lock up a terminal. > There were very few terminals in those days, there was probably > something like five display terminals for the system, so if one of > them was locked up, it was a considerable disaster. > > In the years that followed I was inspired by that ideas, and many > times I would climb over ceilings or underneath floors to unlock rooms > that had machines in them that people needed to use, and I would > usually leave behind a note explaining to the people that they > shouldn't be so selfish as to lock the door. The people who locked the > door were basically considering only themselves. They had a reason of > course, there was something they thought might get stolen and they > wanted to lock it up, but they didn't care about the other people they > were affecting by locking up other things in the same room. Almost > every time this happened, once I brought it to their attention, that > it was not up to them alone whether that room should be locked, they > were able to find a compromise solution: some other place to put the > things they were worried about, a desk they could lock, another little > room. But the point is that people usually don't bother to think about > that. They have the idea: “This room is Mine, I can lock it, to hell > with everyone else”, and that is exactly the spirit that we must teach > them not to have. > > But this spirit of unlocking doors wasn't an isolated thing, it was > part of an entire way of life. The hackers at the AI lab were really > enthusiastic about writing good programs, and interesting programs. > And it was because they were so eager to get more work done, that they > wouldn't put up with having the terminals locked up, or lots of other > things that people could do to obstruct useful work. The differences > between people with high morale who really care about what they're > trying to do, and people who think of it as just a job. If it's just a > job, who cares if the people who hired you are so stupid they make you > sit and wait, it's their time, their money but not much gets done in a > place like that, and it's no fun to be in a place like that. > > Another thing that we didn't have at the AI lab was file protection. > There was no security at all on the computer. And we very consciously > wanted it that way. The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing > System decided that file protection was usually used by a self-styled > system manager to get power over everyone else. They didn't want > anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn't > implement that kind of a feature. The result was, that whenever > something in the system was broken, you could always fix it. You never > had to sit there in frustration because there was NO WAY, because you > knew exactly what's wrong, and somebody had decided they didn't trust > you to do it. You don't have to give up and go home, waiting for > someone to come in in the morning and fix the system when you know ten > times as well as he does what needs to be done. > > And we didn't let any professors or bosses decide what work was going > to be done either, because our job was to improve the system! We > talked to the users of course; if you don't do that you can't tell > what's needed. But after doing that, we were the ones best able to see > what kind of improvements were feasible, and we were always talking to > each other about how we'd like to see the system changed, and what > sort of neat ideas we'd seen in other systems and might be able to > use. So the result is that we had a smoothly functioning anarchy, and > after my experience there, I'm convinced that that is the best way for > people to live. > > Unfortunately the AI lab in that form was destroyed. For many years we > were afraid the AI lab would be destroyed by another lab at MIT, the > Lab for Computer Science, whose director was a sort of empire builder > type, doing everything he could to get himself promoted within MIT, > and make his organization bigger, and he kept trying to cause the AI > lab to be made a part of his lab, and nobody wanted to do things his > way because he believed that people should obey orders and things like > that. > > But that danger we managed to defend against, only to be destroyed by > something we had never anticipated, and that was commercialism. Around > the early 80's the hackers suddenly found that there was now > commercial interest in what they were doing. It was possible to get > rich by working at a private company. All that was necessary was to > stop sharing their work with the rest of the world and destroy the MIT- > AI lab, and this is what they did despite all the efforts I could make > to prevent them. > > Essentially all the competent programmers except for me, at the AI lab > were hired away, and this caused more than a momentary change, it > caused a permanent transformation because it broke the continuity of > the culture of hackers. New hackers were always attracted by the old > hackers; there were the most fun computers and the people doing the > most interesting things, and also a spirit which was a great deal of > fun to be part of. Once these things were gone, there is nothing to > recommend the place to anyone new, so new people stopped arriving. > There was no-one they could be inspired by, no-one that they could > learn those traditions from. In addition no-one to learn how to do > good programming from. With just a bunch of professors and graduate > students, who really don't know how to make a program work, you can't > learn to make good programs work. So the MIT AI lab that I loved is > gone and after a couple of years of fighting against the people who > did it to try to punish them for it I decided that I should dedicate > my self to try to create a new community with that spirit. > > But one of the problems I had to face was the problem of proprietary > software. For example one thing that happened at the lab, after the > hackers left, was that the machines and the software that we had > developed could no longer be maintained. The software of course > worked, and it continued to work if nobody changed it, but the > machines did not. The machines would break and there would be no-one > who could fix them and eventually they would be thrown out. In the old > days, yes we had service contracts for the machines, but it was > essentially a joke. That was a way of getting parts after the expert > hackers from the AI lab fixed the problem. Because if you let the > field-service person fix it it would take them days, and you didn't > want to do that, you wanted it to work. So, the people who knew how to > do those things would just go and fix it quickly, and since they were > ten times as competent as any field service person, they could do a > much better job. And then they would have the ruined boards, they > would just leave them there and tell the field service person “take > these back and bring us some new ones”. > > In the real old days our hackers used to modify the > > read more »...
Perhaps as an antidote http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi Mark -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
