Re: [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019, 10:39 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com wrote: I'm going to refrain from either praising or disparaging the man. I think the book Hackers by Steven Levy does a good job of describing him and how the idea for the GNU project came about. I'm going to paraphrase what I remember from it, but it's been a long time since I read it. If I recall correctly, stallman graduated summa cum laude with a physics degree from Harvard. He spent many of his undergrad days and nights working at the MIT AI lab. Among his character defects, I've never heard anyone accuse him of being a dumb guy. Awkward, yes, strange, perhaps, but not dumb. At the AI lab he found a place where he fit in. The systems ran ITS, an MIT homegrown operating system. It was an open environment where people debated technical issues over Chinese take-out, an intellectual society in which Stallman felt at home as a rightful citizen. The camaraderie he knew there dissolved as its members struck out to become entrepreneurs. My memory is fuzzy here, but I believe his main nemesis was Symbolics, marketers of a proprietary version of MIT's CADR Lisp machine and operating system. As they released system updates, Stallman would would reverse engineer the changes and add the new features to the MIT system. Around the same time, ITS was being replaced on the computers by proprietary operating systems. Stallman began running into roadblocks, bugs in the OS where the code was not available to fix. To access the code he would have to sign an NDA, which he refused to do. In short, his little utopia collapsed. The lab as he knew it was gone. He wondered to himself whether he could rebuild it somehow, and this was the inception of the GNU project. He chose to re-implement Unix, not because he considered it an ideal operating system but because he considered it adequate. (I am among those on this list who would beg to differ.) He has said many times that he does not agree with the Unix philosophy, but I don't know specifically what he means by this. Building an operating system in and of itself was not so much his goal as building the friendships and community surrounding it.