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Richard Stallman at the First Hackers Conference in 1984 [video]

155 points by schmuckonwheels ago | 38 comments

neilv |next [-]

Funny: maybe it's my ad blocker, but if go to https://old.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ (old-school Reddit UI), the right sidebar says:

> "With software there are only two possibilities: either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power. " -- Richard M Stallman

> Essential reading [...] People with similar ideas: [...] Vaguely related: [...]

> Rules:

> 1. Memes and shitposts allowed only on Mondays

> 2. Try to flair your posts

> 3. WWRMSD?

But if I go to https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ (new-style Reddit UI), the right sidebar says:

> Stallman was Right

> Nobody listens to him. But he was right all along.*

> r/StallmanWasRight Rules

> 1 Memes only on Mondays

> 2 no-spam-brigading

Is the first UI for hackers, and the second one for mindless doomscrolling?

howenterprisey |root |parent [-]

Two different systems; on the mod side there are two different UIs (one to set each) as well. Yeah it's weird.

neilv |root |parent [-]

I'd guess nobody sat down and said "Here's the target demographic profile for the new UI, so let's rework our messaging, people!" It's just a funny accident of maintenance over time that the result looks like that.

zahlman |root |parent [-]

Each subreddit's mod team gets to style the subreddit (within some limitations). There's presumably a separate set of style rules for the main and "old" sites; and the latter is legacy that most mods (and most users) have not even thought about for years. (Probably most current users have joined the site after the switch and never seen the "old" domain. I'm honestly surprised it still works at all.)

neilv |root |parent [-]

Pretty much. And that seems to reflect changing sentiment of the mods over time (e.g., no information, no inspiration, no trying to emulate, only emoting).

But what I thought was funny was, if you didn't know that, it would look like the two "experiences" were tailored separately: OG redditors get the constructive messaging in the spirit of RMS's mission, but modern social media redditors get the modern social media simplified passive consumption.

zahlman |root |parent [-]

It is funny.

I suppose it's a consequence of the current mods having been immersed in that modern social media environment for longer.

ViktorRay |next |previous [-]

Seeing Wozniak and the Macintosh team in the same room as Stallman is kind of like the beginning of Game of Thrones.

When the Starks and the Lannisters are eating and drinking in the room together. Before they go their seperate ways and fight and all that.

neilv |root |parent [-]

Interesting thought.

On RMS and Woz specifically, how much have they ever been opposed?

I only know a little about them, but I think of both as good-natured, high-impact, little-bit weird hackers, with substantial common ground in philosophies or thinking.

They went very different life directions, with pretty young career decisions. But I could imagine Woz today supporting what RMS has done, while not seeing a need for all the philosophy and seriousness.

RMS is certainly critical of Apple. But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.

userbinator |root |parent [-]

But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.

Apple has always been patronising and thought of users as exploitables to be controlled and herded; the Macintosh, and even more so the Lisa that came before it, were far more closed systems in comparison to the IBM PC.

neilv |root |parent |next [-]

That would be a cynical '84 TV ad. (Like the extremely common revolutionary leader who pretends to want to free the people, but actually just wants to be the dictator instead.)

I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications. And they also just wanted to build what they thought of as a nice machine. But definitely not a hacker machine, but they wanted to empower everyone who wasn't a computer nerd.

I don't know whether impression is accurate, but if it is, then I'd say they are closer -- in terms of intentions -- to RMS, than to contemporary Apple.

tomcam |root |parent |next [-]

> I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications.

One could say exactly the same for the original IBM PC, which had infinitely more tech pubs at introduction than the Mac.

pjmlp |root |parent |previous [-]

Apple was definitely not into sharing code with users.

Their vision after Lisa and Macintosh has always been computing as an appliance.

The only thing open about them were the great Macintosh Internals books, that Apple documentation team has forgotten how to write.

microtherion |root |parent [-]

Inside Macintosh was great documentation (I’d argue that the second generation in the 1990s, split up by topics, was the peak of Apple’s documentation writing), but I would not classify it as “Internals” in the sense of how a 1970s computer would be documented. There was a clearly delineated API boundary beyond which it was discouraged to venture.

Yes, Apple was/is mostly about computing as an appliance (realized fully in iOS), but there was occasional dabbling with User computing, especially with HyperCard, and to some extent with AppleScript. It seems that ultimately these did not have enough uptake to warrant investing more into them.

The more time I spend getting elderly people’s entertainment systems back into a state where they can watch their 3 favorite TV channels in peace without getting lured into the paywalls of their Android TVs or cable providers, the more sympathetic I’m getting to the “appliance” view.

pjmlp |root |parent [-]

I used that name because I did not recall exactly the naming and was too lazy to search for the actual one. :)

Something like Hypercard naturally allowed for experimentation and playground, and if anything, a proof how to balance programming in the context of appliances.

You can find something more recent like Dreams for the PlayStation, which is also no longer.

userbinator |root |parent [-]

The difference is that even environments like HyperCard and now all the sandboxed stuff create a clear division between mere "power users" and "developers", while the PC had a ROM BASIC in the beginning that effectively gave you full access to the hardware. DOS came with DEBUG that you could write short binaries in, and PC magazines would often publish source code for such utilities. These were no less lacking in power than any other software. With a PC, there was no sharp division between user and developer.

pjmlp |root |parent [-]

Kind of agree, which is why we are discussing Apple was always about appliances, starting with Lisa and Mac models.

As someone that started using PCs on MS-DOS 3.3, having BASIC and DEBUG around wasn't much help without having the required books, and they were not that easy to get.

There was still a divide between user and having the means to become a developer.

cmrdporcupine |root |parent |previous [-]

That's not how the Apple II -- Woz's machine -- was. It was a very open and pro-hacker device.

If we're talking about Woz specifically, it's just a different generation of Apple than after the Macintosh.

pjmlp |root |parent [-]

Yeah, but then Steve Jobs took over the vision how Apple was supposed to be.

AlexeyBrin |next |previous [-]

If you want to see the full documentary search for "Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age".

conradev |root |parent [-]

This was a great watch with my family - thank you!

runjake |next |previous [-]

Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOP1LNr70aU

The bushy eyed fellow is Bill Budge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Budge

Wozniak and the Macintosh team in there, as well.

geremiiah |next |previous [-]

In a parallel universe RMS read Ayn Rand, joined her cult of selfish greed and the world is running a closed source UNIX clone developed by JLU (Just Like Unix), the $5T corporation funded by him.

All of this to say, it's amazing how this man's personality had such a profoundly positive effect on the computing landscape of today and how different things might have been otherwise, especially because he's more the exception than the rule in terms of personalities in the hacker space.

dangus |root |parent |next [-]

Well, a UNIX clone that was proprietary wouldn’t have become popular like GNU did. If you have to pay for it why not just use the real one?

pjmlp |root |parent |next [-]

UNIX originally wasn't closed source anyway, and most people like nowadays, only cared about the freebeer parts.

GNU only took off when Sun created the split between user and developer UNIX SKUs, which other UNIX vendors were quick to follow as well.

Suddenly having access to UNIX no longer meant having development tools around, if the server wasn't to be used by developers themselves.

Thus installing GNU became a common workaround to pay for a UNIX developer license.

linguae |root |parent |previous [-]

I think if Richard Stallman had no qualms about proprietary software, he would have remained in the Lisp machine world, either working for Symbolics or Lisp Machines, Inc., or perhaps starting his own thing. Stallman was a Lisp hacker before starting GNU, and even when deciding on cloning Unix instead of creating a free Lisp-based OS, one of his first projects was GNU Emacs.

An interesting thought experiment is what Stallman would’ve done in that alternate timeline in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Lisp machines were killed off by advances in commodity hardware and compiler technology, the end of the Cold War (the US military was a large customer of Lisp machines), and the AI winter (Lisp used to be synonymous with AI).

b112 |root |parent |next [-]

So you're saying time travelers came back in time, and caused the end of lisp architecture, solely to prevent an AI singularity years before we could possibly cope with it.

__patchbit__ |root |parent |previous [-]

The `metadot' idea lives on in emacs and future AI should amp that to the max behind magical design.

neilv |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Point taken, but as an aside, I'm just guessing that RMS was way too smart and knowledgeable to fall for Ayn Rand, for long.

Some people with no other frame (e.g., very insulated teenagers) might accept the given values she proposes (because, why not), but if you read when she tries to make a direct argument, it's clearly shoddy and manipulative, with confident big leaps of logic that she's trying to sneak past the listener.

randallsquared |root |parent |next [-]

I don't think the point was taken. Whether someone found Rand illuminating and convincing is more about path dependence than intelligence.

DANmode |root |parent |previous [-]

This would be a better comment with an example.

positron26 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

1984 was published in 1949. GNU and the FSF are contemporary with Neuromancer. The BSD license predates the GPL and the idea of copyleft by several years. It takes a village to raise a child.

throwaway81523 |root |parent [-]

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses the 4-clause (GPL incompatible) BSD license was 1988, 3-clause (the one everyone uses now) was 1990. It got rid of the advertising clause at RMS's behest. RMS spent a long time wrangling for that change.

GPL1 was 1989. I'm not sure if RMS was involved with BSD3. The MIT license as used in MIT Athena and X windows was somewhat earlier, like 1986, and is similar to BSD3.

GNU Emacs as released around 1984 had its own license similar to GPL1, called the Emacs General Public License (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft). The term "copyleft" per that article originated in 1984 or 1985.

I semi-remember that GPL1 was mostly ported from the Emacs GPL, basically substituting "The Program" for "Emacs". I don't remember if the Emacs GPL used the term "Copyleft".

The informal distribution terms for PDP-10 Emacs in the 1970's were an antecedent of copyleft that RMS called the "Emacs Commune". Distribute freely but you were (informally) required to send in changes and improvements. See: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom_(2002)/Cha... The GPL's were somewhat a codification of the Emacs Commune.

It wasn't like the MIT and BSD stuff happened with with RMS in a state of ignorance either. He obviously wasn't in control of anything outside the GNU project, but he was involved in lots of discussions with MIT and Berkeley about licensing and other issues.

throwaway81523 |root |parent |next [-]

Correction to above, "I'm not sure if RMS was involved with BSD3" should have said BSD4. He was definitely involved with BSD3, as described.

positron26 |root |parent |previous [-]

It is as if BSD developers were not also getting out from under the AT&T license the whole time, the reason the BSD license probably developed.

throwaway81523 |root |parent [-]

That was sort of complicated and I'm not sure whether the BSD4 license development was related. It's possible (I don't know) that BSD4 was developed for some other reason like the VLSI tools Berkeley was releasing at the time.

Regarding BSD itself, there was a lawsuit between AT&T (or some successor) and UC, that was settled by UC having to delete some files from the BSD distro but then being off the hook with regard to the rest. That made it possible to freely distribute the BSD distro. The BSD distro existed long before the lawsuit, but you originally had to be a Unix licensee to get it. Then I think Berkeley tried to get rid of the AT&T files and release the rest under BSD4 but there was still some FUD. They got sued and in the settlement they agreed to delete a few more files, which removed any remaining legal clouds.

Fwiw the legal doubts about BSD during that period (pre-settlement) are basically why the Linux kernel became popular despite being far less mature than the BSD kernel at the time. People were afraid to run BSD because of the potential for AT&T lawsuits. The basic Unix userspace utilities were presumably long gone since they were full of AT&T code, but the GNU counterparts mostly existed by then.

I don't think the specifics matter much by now, but I didn't like the misstated history that I responded to.

positron26 |root |parent [-]

In the broad strokes, the inaccuracy is to suggest that nobody besides the FSF and RMS were converging to many of the same conclusions at the same time. The FSF did a good job of tying their ideas to a ratchet (GPL and copyright assignment) that would continue to pull in influence. That influence and recognition did not bring any benefit to open source (one of their childish "can't words"). Instead, it merely brought donations into the FSF and starved oxygen from a generation of others.

german_dong |root |parent |previous [-]

In any timeline, software, as a frictionlessly distributable commodity, would have become effectively free just as music did.

KwisatzHaderack |next |previous [-]

I was pleasantly surprised to see my former CS professor Brian Harvey at 0:18. What a cool dude!

scratchyone |previous [-]

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