Final Boss Form

CollaborativeFutures (en)

In 1980 MIT researcher Richard Stallman was trying out one of the first laser printers, and decided that because it took so long to print, he would modify the printer driver so that it sent a notice to the user when their print job was finished. Except this software only came in its compiled version, without source code. Stallman got upset – Xerox would not let him have the source code. He founded the GNU project and in 1985 published the GNU Manifesto. One of GNU’s most creative contributions to this movement was a legal license for free software called the GNU Public License or GPL. Software licensed with the GPL is required to maintain that license in all future incarnations; this means that code that starts out freely licensed has to stay freely licensed. You cannot close the source code. This is known as a Copyleft license.

This book is very disjointed and hard to read.  Some of the details are wrong and some of the ideas in it are pure posturing and therefore, complete crap.  However, I know a few of the authors and I consider them good friends and really smart people. I think the Floss Manuals process (get a bunch of people to write and produce a book in just a few days) works well for software manuals but not so well for wider topics like this.

There are some really good moments in here, though, like the retelling of the story of how Stallman came to create the GNU project.