Ryan Caplet’s Reviews > Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution > Status Update

Open source becomes a saying to be more attractive to businesses. Eventually in the dot com boom a lot of Linux based companies got very rich and some even sold out versus sticking to their principles.

Ian Murdoch adapts GNU/Linux into his distro but then later includes some nonfree software. Eric Raymond becomes the hacker analyst of what is going on in the world of free software and he tests Linus Torvalds method of project management coming up with the paper/book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The Bazaar method is tested on fetchmail one of Raymond’s projects which proves to be a success.

Read about Linus Torvalds and him releasing Linux on GPL. Stallman thought Linux was going to be the operating system it but everyone despite using GNU software didn’t know how much.

Sam goes on to talk about Ian Murdock the creator of Debian and partnering with Stallman to create a GNU/Linux.

Richard Stallman creates Bash, GCC and other iconic tools but the Kernel GNU Hurd (Alix) is behind on development. GNU once again falls behind but one of the best things Richard Stallman does is to create GPL to keep software free.

Eventually Richard Stallman gives a talk at Helsinki Polytechnic University where a student and hacker Linus Torvalds sees a hacker with long hair and beard for the first time.

Richard Stallman talks more about the importance of software being free and the importance of sharing it and tweaking it to your needs. He plays a character named St. IGNUsius who pretends to bless someone who can run a fully free computer system.

Up until now Stallman was involved in developing systems. Lisp machines became popular and he talks about the war between LMI and Symbolics and the rise of proprietary software. There is even a blurb from Bill Gates early on. Stallman stuck to his guns about keeping software free but angry at the fall of hacker culture at this time.

Went through the back story of how punch card systems evolved into monitor and mouse systems. Then text editors were invented. The first well developed one TECO was developed with macros for what did what. Stallman’s fork EMACS helped make using macros easier.

Richard has trouble with people not calling Linux GNU/Linux among other things. Most of this part of the book he is eating Chinese food with the author taking about how he was going to name the GNU kernel after a girl, how he didn’t like popular music and Napster and sharing stuff. Napster makes a good point that you should be able to share stuff.

Stallman’s political and religious beliefs come into prominence. First he discovers how much he loves the MIT AI lab and he gets involved in hacking there mostly to prevent computer terminals from being locked behind locked doors. The people in the AI lab (the hackers) shape his worldview and goals with computers.

It is also revealed that Stallman is an atheist and is generally against perceived injustice.

Richard Stallman decides to go to Harvard after getting his Writing grade up. He also had a hard time with his parent’s relationship falling apart.

He gets to Harvard and realizes how annoying and bureaucratic the computer lab is favoring academic rank. He visits MIT and realizes that MIT is a better place for him and has a policy in the computer lab that less restrictive to academic rank.