Richard Stallman page 4

MG: And that's not where you go. What do you do next?
RS: The AI Lab was acquiring new Symbolics machines, it was becoming harder and harder for me to keep the users that I needed in order to test the system. But beyond that, I felt, I don't want to spend the rest of my life punishing one act of aggression. They destroyed the community I love. Can I build a new one? So I looked for what I could do. So during the spring or summer of 1983, I started looking and I realized that if I developed a free operating system for modern computers, that is, not specialized, unusual ones like the LISP machine but commonplace modern computers, then I could create a new community in which people could share.
MG: What you work on is Unix?
RS: Well, no, it's not Unix. It's GNU: GNU's Not Unix. It's compatible to Unix, but it isn't Unix. Unix existed already. It was a particular body of code. If you printed it out, you'd get a gigantic stack of sheets of paper with lines of code written on them. We couldn't use any of those lines of code. Because they were copyrighted, and most of them were trade secrets as well.
MG: Belonging to?
RS: AT&T. It made no difference who they belonged to. That's irrelevant.
MG: And Unix ran on what? Mainframes?
RS: No. It ran on various things like the PDP-11 and the Vax and some other kinds of computers as well. The home computer that you would get today is a lot more powerful than the PDP-10 that I was working on in the 1970s. And the PDP-11 was even smaller. They were pitifully weak.
I decided that I was going to target 32-bit computers. At the time, PCs were 16-bit computers, which meant that they were not "real" computers. They were too small and too hard to program, and I realized that they were going to be replaced over the course of the next few years by 32-bit computers. Therefore I said, "It's going to take a few years to write this system anyway, so rather than wasting any time to cater to today's 16-bit machines, I'm going to aim for where ordinary computers are going to be when I get there."
MG: Were you doing open-source software?
RS: It's not open-source software. It's the free software movement Please don't use the term "open source" in describing me. Open source software and free software describe the same category of software, but they say very different things about it. Open source is a technical movement; the free software movement is a social and political movement. People who talk about "open source" focus on how that makes it possible to improve the technology faster. Implicitly, what they're saying is that improving the technology is the most important thing. Well, I don't think so. For me, creating a community in which people have freedom is the most important thing. So the people who talk about open source say that it will enable you to make better software. But when it doesn't, what are you going to do? Well, they will use the proprietary software. But I will stick with free software, because I am more concerned with freedom than with having a better program.
MG: So your idea in '83 is that you're going to create an operating system that will be a free operating system--
RS: Entirely free.
MG: --that will work on 32-bit machines.
RS: Mmm-hmm. And by the time it was done, 32-bit machines would be affordable, which indeed happened. The 386 was the first 32-bit PC design.

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