Richard Stallman page 5

MG: What did you do? Did you form a company? Did you gather some code people around you?
RS: I started inviting people to join and help. But I didn't start a company; I started a project, a movement. I mean, it's a funny thing. That's the time that I started growing my hair. Because you see, although there were many things about the Counterculture that I didn't agree with, one thing I did agree with was rejecting the idea that profit and success is the highest goal in life; making a just society is the higher goal. So I started a movement. To create a new community. Because I had lost my community. Users, developers, whoever. Because anyone is welcome to be a developer. Just as in the AI Lab, if people came over the 'net or came to visit personally and started hanging around and liked our machines and they learned to program and they wanted to help, we invited them to start doing jobs.
MG: How do you do this?
RS: Well, first I wrote an announcement about the goals of the project, and posted it on the Net. Then I just started writing.
MG: How could you afford this?
RS: I don't understand the question. It didn't cost me anything.
MG: When you were at the AI Lab, I assume you were using their machines.
RS: Right. They let me keep using their machines after I quit. I wasn't going to buy a computer. If I couldn't have used the AI Lab's computers, I'm sure I could have found somebody who would let me use a computer. I had enough of a reputation even at that time, if I showed up in a computer science department around the country, there would probably be somebody there who knew who I was and would say, "Oh, you want to log in? Come here."
MG: And what happens?
RS: Well, immediately, not much. Because people said, "Oh, this is an infinitely hard job; you can't possibly write a whole system like Unix. How can we possibly do that much? It would be nice, but it's just hopeless." That's what they said. And I said, "I'm going to do it anyway." This is where I am great. I am great at being very, very stubborn and ignoring all sorts of reasons why you should change your goal, reasons that many other people will be susceptible to. Many people want to be on the winning side. I didn't give a damn about that. I wanted to be on the side that was right, and even if I didn't win, at least I was going to give it a good try. I had a tremendous amount of self-confidence, because I had been equaling the output of a whole team of hackers, and I knew that, and I also realized that following the design of Unix would give me the same kind of advantage that I had when I was following in the footsteps of the people at Symbolics.
MG: So Unix was proprietary software, developed by AT&T. The way it has been explained to me is, Unix is the Good Guy versus Windows...
RS: No.
MG: ...because Unix is an open system. Can you explain?
RS: I don't know what they mean by "open system," but it has nothing to do with anything I'm concerned about.
Unix does not give the user any more legal freedom than Windows does. What they mean by "open systems" is that you can mix and match components, so you can decide to have, say, a Sun chain on your right leg and some other company's chain on your left leg, and maybe some third company's chain on your right arm, and this is supposed to be better than having to choose to have Sun chains on all of your limbs, or Microsoft chains on all of your limbs. You know, I don't care whose chains are on each limb. What I want is not to be chained by anyone.

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