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-
-			   GNU'S NOT UNIX
-
-		 Conducted by David Betz and Jon Edwards
-
-	      Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain
-		    UNIX-compatible software system
-			   with BYTE editors
-			      (July 1986)
-
-Copyright (C) 1986 Richard Stallman.  Permission is granted to make and
-distribute copies of this article as long as the copyright and this notice
-appear on all copies.
-
-Richard Stallman has undertaken probably the most ambitious free software
-development project to date, the GNU system.  In his GNU Manifesto,
-published in the March 1985 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal, Stallman described
-GNU as a "complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so
-that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it...  Once GNU is
-written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just
-like air."  (GNU is an acronym for GNU's Not UNIX; the "G" is pronounced.)
-
-   Stallman is widely known as the author of EMACS, a powerful text editor
-that he developed at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.  It is no
-coincidence that the first piece of software produced as part of the GNU
-project was a new implementation of EMACS.  GNU EMACS has already achieved a
-reputation as one of the best implementations of EMACS currently available
-at any price.
-
-BYTE: We read your GNU Manifesto in the March 1985 issue of Dr. Dobb's.
-What has happened since?  Was that really the beginning, and how have you
-progressed since then?
-
-Stallman: The publication in Dr. Dobb's wasn't the beginning of the
-project.  I wrote the GNU Manifesto when I was getting ready to start the
-project, as a proposal to ask computer manufacturers for funding.  They
-didn't want to get involved, and I decided that rather than spend my time
-trying to pursue funds, I ought to spend it writing code.  The manifesto was
-published about a year and a half after I had written it, when I had barely
-begun distributing the GNU EMACS.  Since that time, in addition to making
-GNU EMACS more complete and making it run on many more computers, I have
-nearly finished the optimizing C compiler and all the other software that
-is needed for running C programs.  This includes a source-level debugger
-that has many features that the other source-level debuggers on UNIX don't
-have.  For example, it has convenience variables within the debugger so you
-can save values, and it also has a history of all the values that you have
-printed out, making it tremendously easier to chase around list structures.
-
-BYTE: You have finished an editor that is now widely distributed and you
-are about to finish the compiler.
-
-Stallman: I expect that it will be finished this October.
-
-BYTE: What about the kernel?
-
-Stallman: I'm currently planning to start with the kernel that was written
-at MIT and was released to the public recently with the idea that I would
-use it.  This kernel is called TRIX; it's based on remote procedure call.  I
-still need to add compatibility for a lot of the features of UNIX which it
-doesn't have currently.  I haven't started to work on that yet.  I'm
-finishing the compiler before I go to work on the kernel.  I am also going
-to have to rewrite the file system.  I intend to make it failsafe just by
-having it write blocks in the proper order so that the disk structure is
-always consistent.  Then I want to add version numbers.  I have a complicated
-scheme to reconcile version numbers with the way people usually use UNIX.
-You have to be able to specify filenames without version numbers, but you
-also have to be able to specify them with explicit version numbers, and
-these both need to work with ordinary UNIX programs that have not been
-modified in any way to deal with the existence of this feature.  I think I
-have a scheme for doing this, and only trying it will show me whether it
-really does the job.
-
-BYTE: Do you have a brief description you can give us as to how GNU as a
-system will be superior to other systems?  We know that one of your goals is
-to produce something that is compatible with UNIX.  But at least in the area
-of file systems you have already said that you are going to go beyond UNIX
-and produce something that is better.
-
-Stallman: The C compiler will produce better code and run faster.  The
-debugger is better.  With each piece I may or may not find a way to improve
-it.  But there is no one answer to this question.  To some extent I am
-getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much
-better.  To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long time
-and worked on many other systems.  I therefore have many ideas to bring to
-bear.  One way in which it will be better is that practically everything in
-the system will work on files of any size, on lines of any size, with any
-characters appearing in them.  The UNIX system is very bad in that regard.
-It's not anything new as a principle of software engineering that you
-shouldn't have arbitrary limits.  But it just was the standard practice in
-writing UNIX to put those in all the time, possibly just because they were
-writing it for a very small computer.  The only limit in the GNU system is
-when your program runs out of memory because it tried to work on too much
-data and there is no place to keep it all.
-
-BYTE: And that isn't likely to be hit if you've got virtual memory.  You may
-just take forever to come up with the solution.
-
-Stallman: Actually these limits tend to hit in a time long before you take
-forever to come up with the solution.
-
-BYTE: Can you say something about what types of machines and environments
-GNU EMACS in particular has been made to run under?  It's now running on
-VAXes; has it migrated in any form to personal computers?
-
-Stallman: I'm not sure what you mean by personal computers.  For example, is
-a Sun a personal computer?  GNU EMACS requires at least a megabyte of
-available memory and preferably more.  It is normally used on machines that
-have virtual memory.  Except for various technical problems in a few C
-compilers, almost any machine with virtual memory and running a fairly
-recent version of UNIX will run GNU EMACS, and most of them currently do.
-
-BYTE: Has anyone tried to port it to Ataris or Macintoshes?
-
-Stallman: The Atari 1040ST still doesn't have quite enough memory.  The next
-Atari machine, I expect, will run it.  I also think that future Ataris will
-have some forms of memory mapping.  Of course, I am not designing the
-software to run on the kinds of computers that are prevalent today.  I knew
-when I started this project it was going to take a few years.  I therefore
-decided that I didn't want to make a worse system by taking on the
-additional challenge of making it run in the currently constrained
-environment.  So instead I decided I'm going to write it in the way that
-seems the most natural and best.  I am confident that in a couple of years
-machines of sufficient size will be prevalent.  In fact, increases in memory
-size are happening so fast it surprises me how slow most of the people are
-to put in virtual memory; I think it is totally essential.
-
-BYTE: I think people don't really view it as being necessary for
-single-user machines.
-
-Stallman: They don't understand that single user doesn't mean single
-program.  Certainly for any UNIX-like system it's important to be able to
-run lots of different processes at the same time even if there is only one
-of you.  You could run GNU EMACS on a nonvirtual-memory machine with enough
-memory, but you couldn't run the rest of the GNU system very well or a UNIX
-system very well.
-
-BYTE: How much of LISP is present in GNU EMACS?  It occurred to me that it
-may be useful to use that as a tool for learning LISP.
-
-Stallman: You can certainly do that.  GNU EMACS contains a complete,
-although not very powerful, LISP system.  It's powerful enough for writing
-editor commands.  It's not comparable with, say, a Common LISP System,
-something you could really use for system programming, but it has all the
-things that LISP needs to have.
-
-BYTE: Do you have any predictions about when you would be likely to
-distribute a workable environment in which, if we put it on our machines or
-workstations, we could actually get reasonable work done without using
-anything other than code that you distribute?
-
-Stallman: It's really hard to say.  That could happen in a year, but of
-course it could take longer.  It could also conceivably take less, but
-that's not too likely anymore.  I think I'll have the compiler finished in a
-month or two.  The only other large piece of work I really have to do is in
-the kernel.  I first predicted GNU would take something like two years, but
-it has now been two and a half years and I'm still not finished.  Part of
-the reason for the delay is that I spent a lot of time working on one
-compiler that turned out to be a dead end.  I had to rewrite it completely.
-Another reason is that I spent so much time on GNU EMACS.  I originally
-thought I wouldn't have to do that at all.
-
-BYTE: Tell us about your distribution scheme.
-
-Stallman: I don't put software or manuals in the public domain, and the
-reason is that I want to make sure that all the users get the freedom to
-share.  I don't want anyone making an improved version of a program I wrote
-and distributing it as proprietary.  I don't want that to ever be able to
-happen.  I want to encourage the free improvements to these programs, and
-the best way to do that is to take away any temptation for a person to make
-improvements nonfree.  Yes, a few of them will refrain from making
-improvements, but a lot of others will make the same improvements and
-they'll make them free.
-
-BYTE: And how do you go about guaranteeing that?
-
-Stallman: I do this by copyrighting the programs and putting on a notice
-giving people explicit permission to copy the programs and change them but
-only on the condition that they distribute under the same terms that I
-used, if at all.  You don't have to distribute the changes you make to any
-of my programs--you can just do it for yourself, and you don't have to give
-it to anyone or tell anyone.  But if you do give it to someone else, you
-have to do it under the same terms that I use.
-
-BYTE: Do you obtain any rights over the executable code derived from the C
-compiler?
-
-Stallman: The copyright law doesn't give me copyright on output from the
-compiler, so it doesn't give me a way to say anything about that, and in
-fact I don't try to.  I don't sympathize with people developing proprietary
-products with any compiler, but it doesn't seem especially useful to try to
-stop them from developing them with this compiler, so I am not going to.
-
-BYTE: Do your restrictions apply if people take pieces of your code to
-produce other things as well?
-
-Stallman: Yes, if they incorporate with changes any sizable piece.  If it
-were two lines of code, that's nothing; copyright doesn't apply to that.
-Essentially, I have chosen these conditions so that first there is a
-copyright, which is what all the software hoarders use to stop everybody
-from doing anything, and then I add a notice giving up part of those
-rights.  So the conditions talk only about the things that copyright applies
-to.  I don't believe that the reason you should obey these conditions is
-because of the law.  The reason you should obey is because an upright person
-when he distributes software encourages other people to share it further.
-
-BYTE: In a sense you are enticing people into this mode of thinking by
-providing all of these interesting tools that they can use but only if they
-buy into your philosophy.
-
-Stallman: Yes.  You could also see it as using the legal system that
-software hoarders have set up against them.  I'm using it to protect the
-public from them.
-
-BYTE: Given that manufacturers haven't wanted to fund the project, who do
-you think will use the GNU system when it is done?
-
-Stallman: I have no idea, but it is not an important question.  My purpose
-is to make it possible for people to reject the chains that come with
-proprietary software.  I know that there are people who want to do that.
-Now, there may be others who don't care, but they are not my concern.  I
-feel a bit sad for them and for the people that they influence.  Right now a
-person who perceives the unpleasantness of the terms of proprietary
-software feels that he is stuck and has no alternative except not to use a
-computer.  Well, I am going to give him a comfortable alternative.
-    Other people may use the GNU system simply because it is technically
-superior.  For example, my C compiler is producing about as good a code as I
-have seen from any C compiler.  And GNU EMACS is generally regarded as being
-far superior to the commercial competition.  And GNU EMACS was not funded by
-anyone either, but everyone is using it.  I therefore think that many people
-will use the rest of the GNU system because of its technical advantages.
-But I would be doing a GNU system even if I didn't know how to make it
-technically better because I want it to be socially better.  The GNU project
-is really a social project.  It uses technical means to make a change in
-society.
-
-BYTE: Then it is fairly important to you that people adopt GNU.  It is not
-just an academic exercise to produce this software to give it away to
-people.  You hope it will change the way the software industry operates.
-
-Stallman: Yes.  Some people say no one will ever use it because it doesn't
-have some attractive corporate logo on it, and other people say that they
-think it is tremendously important and everyone's going to want to use it.
-I have no way of knowing what is really going to happen.  I don't know any
-other way to try to change the ugliness of the field that I find myself in,
-so this is what I have to do.
-
-BYTE: Can you address the implications?  You obviously feel that this is an
-important political and social statement.
-
-Stallman: It is a change.  I'm trying to change the way people approach
-knowledge and information in general.  I think that to try to own knowledge,
-to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop
-other people from sharing it, is sabotage.  It is an activity that benefits
-the person that does it at the cost of impoverishing all of society.  One
-person gains one dollar by destroying two dollars' worth of wealth.  I think
-a person with a conscience wouldn't do that sort of thing except perhaps if
-he would otherwise die.  And of course the people who do this are fairly
-rich; I can only conclude that they are unscrupulous.  I would like to see
-people get rewards for writing free software and for encouraging other
-people to use it.  I don't want to see people get rewards for writing
-proprietary software because that is not really a contribution to society.
-The principle of capitalism is the idea that people manage to make money by
-producing things and thereby are encouraged to do what is useful,
-automatically, so to speak.  But that doesn't work when it comes to owning
-knowledge.  They are encouraged to do not really what's useful, and what
-really is useful is not encouraged.  I think it is important to say that
-information is different from material objects like cars and loaves of
-bread because people can copy it and share it on their own and, if nobody
-attempts to stop them, they can change it and make it better for
-themselves.  That is a useful thing for people to do.  This isn't true of
-loaves of bread.  If you have one loaf of bread and you want another, you
-can't just put your loaf of bread into a bread copier.  you can't make
-another one except by going through all the steps that were used to make
-the first one.  It therefore is irrelevant whether people are permitted to
-copy it--it's impossible.
-   Books were printed only on printing presses until recently.  It was
-possible to make a copy yourself by hand, but it wasn't practical because
-it took so much more work than using a printing press.  And it produced
-something so much less attractive that, for all intents and purposes, you
-could act as if it were impossible to make books except by mass producing
-them.  And therefore copyright didn't really take any freedom away from the
-reading public.  There wasn't anything that a book purchaser could do that
-was forbidden by copyright.
-   But this isn't true for computer programs.  It's also not true for tape
-cassettes.  It's partly false now for books, but it is still true that for
-most books it is more expensive and certainly a lot more work to Xerox them
-than to buy a copy, and the result is still less attractive.  Right now we
-are in a period where the situation that made copyright harmless and
-acceptable is changing to a situation where copyright will become
-destructive and intolerable.  So the people who are slandered as "pirates"
-are in fact the people who are trying to do something useful that they have
-been forbidden to do.   The copyright laws are entirely designed to help
-people take complete control over the use of some information for their own
-good.  But they aren't designed to help people who want to make sure that
-the information is accessible to the public and stop others from depriving
-the public.  I think that the law should recognize a class of works that are
-owned by the public, which is different from public domain in the same
-sense that a public park is different from something found in a garbage
-can.  It's not there for anybody to take away, it's there for everyone to
-use but for no one to impede.  Anybody in the public who finds himself being
-deprived of the derivative work of something owned by the public should be
-able to sue about it.
-
-BYTE: But aren't pirates interested in getting copies of programs because
-they want to use those programs, not because they want to use that
-knowledge to produce something better?
-
-Stallman: I don't see that that's the important distinction.  More people
-using a program means that the program contributes more to society.  You
-have a loaf of bread that could be eaten either once or a million times.
-
-BYTE: Some users buy commercial software to obtain support.  How does your
-distribution scheme provide support?
-
-Stallman: I suspect that those users are misled and are not thinking
-clearly.  It is certainly useful to have support, but when they start
-thinking about how that has something to do with selling software or with
-the software being proprietary, at that point they are confusing
-themselves.  There is no guarantee that proprietary software will receive
-good support.  Simply because sellers say that they provide support, that
-doesn't mean it will be any good.  And they may go out of business.  In fact,
-people think that GNU EMACS has better support than commercial EMACSes.  One
-of the reasons is that I'm probably a better hacker than the people who
-wrote the other EMACSes, but the other reason is that everyone has sources
-and there are so many people interested in figuring out how to do things
-with it that you don't have to get your support from me.  Even just the free
-support that consists of my fixing bugs people report to me and
-incorporating that in the next release has given people a good level of
-support.  You can always hire somebody to solve a problem for you, and when
-the software is free you have a competitive market for the support.  You can
-hire anybody.  I distribute a service list with EMACS, a list of people's
-names and phone numbers and what they charge to provide support.
-
-BYTE: Do you collect their bug fixes?
-
-Stallman: Well, they send them to me.  I asked all the people who wanted to
-be listed to promise that they would never ask any of their customers to
-keep secret whatever they were told or any changes they were given to the
-GNU software as part of that support.
-
-BYTE: So you can't have people competing to provide support based on their
-knowing the solution to some problem that somebody else doesn't know.
-
-Stallman: No.  They can compete based on their being clever and more likely
-to find the solution to your problem, or their already understanding more
-of the common problems, or knowing better how to explain to you what you
-should do.  These are all ways they can compete.  They can try to do better,
-but they cannot actively impede their competitors.
-
-BYTE: I suppose it's like buying a car.  You're not forced to go back to the
-original manufacturer for support or continued maintenance.
-
-Stallman: Or buying a house--what would it be like if the only person who
-could ever fix problems with your house was the contractor who built it
-originally?  That is the kind of imposition that's involved in proprietary
-software.  People tell me about a problem that happens in UNIX.  Because
-manufacturers sell improved versions of UNIX, they tend to collect fixes
-and not give them out except in binaries.  The result is that the bugs don't
-really get fixed.
-
-BYTE: They're all duplicating effort trying to solve bugs independently.
-
-Stallman: Yes.  Here is another point that helps put the problem of
-proprietary information in a social perspective.  Think about the liability
-insurance crisis.  In order to get any compensation from society, an injured
-person has to hire a lawyer and split the money with that lawyer.  This is a
-stupid and inefficient way of helping out people who are victims of
-accidents.  And consider all the time that people put into hustling to take
-business away from their competition.  Think of the pens that are packaged
-in large cardboard packages that cost more than the pen--just to make sure
-that the pen isn't stolen.  Wouldn't it be better if we just put free pens
-on every street corner?  And think of all the toll booths that impede the
-flow of traffic.  It's a gigantic social phenomenon.  People find ways of
-getting money by impeding society.  Once they can impede society, they can
-be paid to leave people alone.  The waste inherent in owning information
-will become more and more important and will ultimately make the difference
-between the utopia in which nobody really has to work for a living because
-it's all done by robots and a world just like ours where everyone spends
-much time replicating what the next fellow is doing.
-
-BYTE: Like typing in copyright notices on the software.
-
-Stallman: More like policing everyone to make sure that they don't have
-forbidden copies of anything and duplicating all the work people have
-already done because it is proprietary.
-
-BYTE: A cynic might wonder how you earn your living.
-
-Stallman: From consulting.  When I do consulting, I always reserve the right
-to give away what I wrote for the consulting job.  Also, I could be making
-my living by mailing copies of the free software that I wrote and some that
-other people wrote.  Lots of people send in $150 for GNU EMACS, but now this
-money goes to the Free Software Foundation that I started.  The foundation
-doesn't pay me a salary because it would be a conflict of interest.
-Instead, it hires other people to work on GNU.  As long as I can go on
-making a living by consulting I think that's the best way.
-
-BYTE: What is currently included in the official GNU distribution tape?
-
-Stallman: Right now the tape contains GNU EMACS (one version fits all
-computers); Bison, a program that replaces YACC; MIT Scheme, which is
-Professor Sussman's super-simplified dialect of LISP; and Hack, a
-dungeon-exploring game similar to Rogue.
-
-BYTE: Does the printed manual come with the tape as well?
-
-Stallman: No.  Printed manuals cost $15 each or copy them yourself.  Copy
-this interview and share it, too.
-
-BYTE: How can you get a copy of that?
-
-Stallman: Write to the Free Software Foundation, 675 Massachusetts Ave.,
-Cambridge, MA 02139.
-
-[As of April 2005, this address is:
-     Free Software Foundation
-     51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor
-     Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA
-     Voice:  +1-617-542-5942
-     Fax:    +1-617-542-2652
-]
-
-BYTE: What are you going to do when you are done with the GNU system?
-
-Stallman: I'm not sure.  Sometimes I think that what I'll go on to do is the
-same thing in other areas of software.
-
-BYTE: So this is just the first of a whole series of assaults on the
-software industry?
-
-Stallman: I hope so.  But perhaps what I'll do is just live a life of ease
-working a little bit of the time just to live.  I don't have to live
-expensively.  The rest of the time I can find interesting people to hang
-around with or learn to do things that I don't know how to do.
-
-Editorial Note: BYTE holds the right to provide this interview on BIX but
-will not interfere with its distribution.
-
-Richard Stallman, 545 Technology Square, Room 703, Cambridge, MA 02139.
-Copyright (C) 1986 Richard Stallman.  Permission is granted to make and
-distribute copies of this article as long as the copyright and this notice
-appear on all copies.