A Look Back At 40 Years Of GNU And The Free Software Foundation
ZDNET, Thursday, September 28,2023
It's fading from memory, but if it weren't for GNU and the Free Software Foundation, open-source, and Linux, indeed, most of our technology-driven world wouldn't be here.
Would you believe that almost all of the technology you use today is here because of a misbehaving printer? Believe it.
In the early 1980s, an MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory programmer named Richard M. Stallman (RMS) was having trouble with a notoriously unreliable printer, a Xerox 9700. He wanted to modify its software to notify users of its frequent jams. Great idea, but he couldn't get to the source code to make these changes. This ran counter to the Lab's open ethos. So, he decided that software code should be free. Not free in the sense of free beer but free as in free speech.