43BSDReno/contrib/emacs-18.55/etc/INTERVIEW - annotate

Return to INTERVIEW CVS log

Up to [CSRG BSD Unix] / 43BSDReno / contrib / emacs-18.55 / etc

Annotation of 43BSDReno/contrib/emacs-18.55/etc/INTERVIEW, revision 1.1.1.1

1.1 root 1:
2: GNU'S NOT UNIX
3:
4: Conducted by David Betz and Jon Edwards
5:
6: Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain
7: UNIX-compatible software system
8: with BYTE editors
9: (July 1986)
10:
11: Copyright (C) 1986 Richard Stallman. Permission is granted to make and
12: distribute copies of this article as long as the copyright and this notice
13: appear on all copies.
14:
15: Richard Stallman has undertaken probably the most ambitious free software
16: development project to date, the GNU system. In his GNU Manifesto,
17: published in the March 1985 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal, Stallman described
18: GNU as a "complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so
19: that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it... Once GNU is
20: written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just
21: like air." (GNU is an acronym for GNU's Not UNIX; the "G" is pronounced.)
22:
23: Stallman is widely known as the author of EMACS, a powerful text editor
24: that he developed at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It is no
25: coincidence that the first piece of software produced as part of the GNU
26: project was a new implementation of EMACS. GNU EMACS has already achieved a
27: reputation as one of the best implementations of EMACS currently available
28: at any price.
29:
30: BYTE: We read your GNU Manifesto in the March 1985 issue of Dr. Dobb's.
31: What has happened since? Was that really the beginning, and how have you
32: progressed since then?
33:
34: Stallman: The publication in Dr. Dobb's wasn't the beginning of the
35: project. I wrote the GNU Manifesto when I was getting ready to start the
36: project, as a proposal to ask computer manufacturers for funding. They
37: didn't want to get involved, and I decided that rather than spend my time
38: trying to pursue funds, I ought to spend it writing code. The manifesto was
39: published about a year and a half after I had written it, when I had barely
40: begun distributing the GNU EMACS. Since that time, in addition to making
41: GNU EMACS more complete and making it run on many more computers, I have
42: nearly finished the optimizing C compiler and all the other software that
43: is needed for running C programs. This includes a source-level debugger
44: that has many features that the other source-level debuggers on UNIX don't
45: have. For example, it has convenience variables within the debugger so you
46: can save values, and it also has a history of all the values that you have
47: printed out, making it tremendously easier to chase around list structures.
48:
49: BYTE: You have finished an editor that is now widely distributed and you
50: are about to finish the compiler.
51:
52: Stallman: I expect that it will be finished this October.
53:
54: BYTE: What about the kernel?
55:
56: Stallman: I'm currently planning to start with the kernel that was written
57: at MIT and was released to the public recently with the idea that I would
58: use it. This kernel is called TRIX; it's based on remote procedure call. I
59: still need to add compatibility for a lot of the features of UNIX which it
60: doesn't have currently. I haven't started to work on that yet. I'm
61: finishing the compiler before I go to work on the kernel. I am also going
62: to have to rewrite the file system. I intend to make it failsafe just by
63: having it write blocks in the proper order so that the disk structure is
64: always consistent. Then I want to add version numbers. I have a complicated
65: scheme to reconcile version numbers with the way people usually use UNIX.
66: You have to be able to specify filenames without version numbers, but you
67: also have to be able to specify them with explicit version numbers, and
68: these both need to work with ordinary UNIX programs that have not been
69: modified in any way to deal with the existence of this feature. I think I
70: have a scheme for doing this, and only trying it will show me whether it
71: really does the job.
72:
73: BYTE: Do you have a brief description you can give us as to how GNU as a
74: system will be superior to other systems? We know that one of your goals is
75: to produce something that is compatible with UNIX. But at least in the area
76: of file systems you have already said that you are going to go beyond UNIX
77: and produce something that is better.
78:
79: Stallman: The C compiler will produce better code and run faster. The
80: debugger is better. With each piece I may or may not find a way to improve
81: it. But there is no one answer to this question. To some extent I am
82: getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much
83: better. To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long time
84: and worked on many other systems. I therefore have many ideas to bring to
85: bear. One way in which it will be better is that practically everything in
86: the system will work on files of any size, on lines of any size, with any
87: characters appearing in them. The UNIX system is very bad in that regard.
88: It's not anything new as a principle of software engineering that you
89: shouldn't have arbitrary limits. But it just was the standard practice in
90: writing UNIX to put those in all the time, possibly just because they were
91: writing it for a very small computer. The only limit in the GNU system is
92: when your program runs out of memory because it tried to work on too much
93: data and there is no place to keep it all.
94:
95: BYTE: And that isn't likely to be hit if you've got virtual memory. You may
96: just take forever to come up with the solution.
97:
98: Stallman: Actually these limits tend to hit in a time long before you take
99: forever to come up with the solution.
100:
101: BYTE: Can you say something about what types of machines and environments
102: GNU EMACS in particular has been made to run under? It's now running on
103: VAXes; has it migrated in any form to personal computers?
104:
105: Stallman: I'm not sure what you mean by personal computers. For example, is
106: a Sun a personal computer? GNU EMACS requires at least a megabyte of
107: available memory and preferably more. It is normally used on machines that
108: have virtual memory. Except for various technical problems in a few C
109: compilers, almost any machine with virtual memory and running a fairly
110: recent version of UNIX will run GNU EMACS, and most of them currently do.
111:
112: BYTE: Has anyone tried to port it to Ataris or Macintoshes?
113:
114: Stallman: The Atari 1040ST still doesn't have quite enough memory. The next
115: Atari machine, I expect, will run it. I also think that future Ataris will
116: have some forms of memory mapping. Of course, I am not designing the
117: software to run on the kinds of computers that are prevalent today. I knew
118: when I started this project it was going to take a few years. I therefore
119: decided that I didn't want to make a worse system by taking on the
120: additional challenge of making it run in the currently constrained
121: environment. So instead I decided I'm going to write it in the way that
122: seems the most natural and best. I am confident that in a couple of years
123: machines of sufficient size will be prevalent. In fact, increases in memory
124: size are happening so fast it surprises me how slow most of the people are
125: to put in virtual memory; I think it is totally essential.
126:
127: BYTE: I think people don't really view it as being necessary for
128: single-user machines.
129:
130: Stallman: They don't understand that single user doesn't mean single
131: program. Certainly for any UNIX-like system it's important to be able to
132: run lots of different processes at the same time even if there is only one
133: of you. You could run GNU EMACS on a nonvirtual-memory machine with enough
134: memory, but you couldn't run the rest of the GNU system very well or a UNIX
135: system very well.
136:
137: BYTE: How much of LISP is present in GNU EMACS? It occurred to me that it
138: may be useful to use that as a tool for learning LISP.
139:
140: Stallman: You can certainly do that. GNU EMACS contains a complete,
141: although not very powerful, LISP system. It's powerful enough for writing
142: editor commands. It's not comparable with, say, a Common LISP System,
143: something you could really use for system programming, but it has all the
144: things that LISP needs to have.
145:
146: BYTE: Do you have any predictions about when you would be likely to
147: distribute a workable environment in which, if we put it on our machines or
148: workstations, we could actually get reasonable work done without using
149: anything other than code that you distribute?
150:
151: Stallman: It's really hard to say. That could happen in a year, but of
152: course it could take longer. It could also conceivably take less, but
153: that's not too likely anymore. I think I'll have the compiler finished in a
154: month or two. The only other large piece of work I really have to do is in
155: the kernel. I first predicted GNU would take something like two years, but
156: it has now been two and a half years and I'm still not finished. Part of
157: the reason for the delay is that I spent a lot of time working on one
158: compiler that turned out to be a dead end. I had to rewrite it completely.
159: Another reason is that I spent so much time on GNU EMACS. I originally
160: thought I wouldn't have to do that at all.
161:
162: BYTE: Tell us about your distribution scheme.
163:
164: Stallman: I don't put software or manuals in the public domain, and the
165: reason is that I want to make sure that all the users get the freedom to
166: share. I don't want anyone making an improved version of a program I wrote
167: and distributing it as proprietary. I don't want that to ever be able to
168: happen. I want to encourage the free improvements to these programs, and
169: the best way to do that is to take away any temptation for a person to make
170: improvements nonfree. Yes, a few of them will refrain from making
171: improvements, but a lot of others will make the same improvements and
172: they'll make them free.
173:
174: BYTE: And how do you go about guaranteeing that?
175:
176: Stallman: I do this by copyrighting the programs and putting on a notice
177: giving people explicit permission to copy the programs and change them but
178: only on the condition that they distribute under the same terms that I
179: used, if at all. You don't have to distribute the changes you make to any
180: of my programs--you can just do it for yourself, and you don't have to give
181: it to anyone or tell anyone. But if you do give it to someone else, you
182: have to do it under the same terms that I use.
183:
184: BYTE: Do you obtain any rights over the executable code derived from the C
185: compiler?
186:
187: Stallman: The copyright law doesn't give me copyright on output from the
188: compiler, so it doesn't give me a way to say anything about that, and in
189: fact I don't try to. I don't sympathize with people developing proprietary
190: products with any compiler, but it doesn't seem especially useful to try to
191: stop them from developing them with this compiler, so I am not going to.
192:
193: BYTE: Do your restrictions apply if people take pieces of your code to
194: produce other things as well?
195:
196: Stallman: Yes, if they incorporate with changes any sizable piece. If it
197: were two lines of code, that's nothing; copyright doesn't apply to that.
198: Essentially, I have chosen these conditions so that first there is a
199: copyright, which is what all the software hoarders use to stop everybody
200: from doing anything, and then I add a notice giving up part of those
201: rights. So the conditions talk only about the things that copyright applies
202: to. I don't believe that the reason you should obey these conditions is
203: because of the law. The reason you should obey is because an upright person
204: when he distributes software encourages other people to share it further.
205:
206: BYTE: In a sense you are enticing people into this mode of thinking by
207: providing all of these interesting tools that they can use but only if they
208: buy into your philosophy.
209:
210: Stallman: Yes. You could also see it as using the legal system that
211: software hoarders have set up against them. I'm using it to protect the
212: public from them.
213:
214: BYTE: Given that manufacturers haven't wanted to fund the project, who do
215: you think will use the GNU system when it is done?
216:
217: Stallman: I have no idea, but it is not an important question. My purpose
218: is to make it possible for people to reject the chains that come with
219: proprietary software. I know that there are people who want to do that.
220: Now, there may be others who don't care, but they are not my concern. I
221: feel a bit sad for them and for the people that they influence. Right now a
222: person who perceives the unpleasantness of the terms of proprietary
223: software feels that he is stuck and has no alternative except not to use a
224: computer. Well, I am going to give him a comfortable alternative.
225: Other people may use the GNU system simply because it is technically
226: superior. For example, my C compiler is producing about as good a code as I
227: have seen from any C compiler. And GNU EMACS is generally regarded as being
228: far superior to the commercial competition. And GNU EMACS was not funded by
229: anyone either, but everyone is using it. I therefore think that many people
230: will use the rest of the GNU system because of its technical advantages.
231: But I would be doing a GNU system even if I didn't know how to make it
232: technically better because I want it to be socially better. The GNU project
233: is really a social project. It uses technical means to make a change in
234: society.
235:
236: BYTE: Then it is fairly important to you that people adopt GNU. It is not
237: just an academic exercise to produce this software to give it away to
238: people. You hope it will change the way the software industry operates.
239:
240: Stallman: Yes. Some people say no one will ever use it because it doesn't
241: have some attractive corporate logo on it, and other people say that they
242: think it is tremendously important and everyone's going to want to use it.
243: I have no way of knowing what is really going to happen. I don't know any
244: other way to try to change the ugliness of the field that I find myself in,
245: so this is what I have to do.
246:
247: BYTE: Can you address the implications? You obviously feel that this is an
248: important political and social statement.
249:
250: Stallman: It is a change. I'm trying to change the way people approach
251: knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge,
252: to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop
253: other people from sharing it, is sabotage. It is an activity that benefits
254: the person that does it at the cost of impoverishing all of society. One
255: person gains one dollar by destroying two dollars' worth of wealth. I think
256: a person with a conscience wouldn't do that sort of thing except perhaps if
257: he would otherwise die. And of course the people who do this are fairly
258: rich; I can only conclude that they are unscrupulous. I would like to see
259: people get rewards for writing free software and for encouraging other
260: people to use it. I don't want to see people get rewards for writing
261: proprietary software because that is not really a contribution to society.
262: The principle of capitalism is the idea that people manage to make money by
263: producing things and thereby are encouraged to do what is useful,
264: automatically, so to speak. But that doesn't work when it comes to owning
265: knowledge. They are encouraged to do not really what's useful, and what
266: really is useful is not encouraged. I think it is important to say that
267: information is different from material objects like cars and loaves of
268: bread because people can copy it and share it on their own and, if nobody
269: attempts to stop them, they can change it and make it better for
270: themselves. That is a useful thing for people to do. This isn't true of
271: loaves of bread. If you have one loaf of bread and you want another, you
272: can't just put your loaf of bread into a bread copier. you can't make
273: another one except by going through all the steps that were used to make
274: the first one. It therefore is irrelevant whether people are permitted to
275: copy it--it's impossible.
276: Books were printed only on printing presses until recently. It was
277: possible to make a copy yourself by hand, but it wasn't practical because
278: it took so much more work than using a printing press. And it produced
279: something so much less attractive that, for all intents and purposes, you
280: could act as if it were impossible to make books except by mass producing
281: them. And therefore copyright didn't really take any freedom away from the
282: reading public. There wasn't anything that a book purchaser could do that
283: was forbidden by copyright.
284: But this isn't true for computer programs. It's also not true for tape
285: cassettes. It's partly false now for books, but it is still true that for
286: most books it is more expensive and certainly a lot more work to Xerox them
287: than to buy a copy, and the result is still less attractive. Right now we
288: are in a period where the situation that made copyright harmless and
289: acceptable is changing to a situation where copyright will become
290: destructive and intolerable. So the people who are slandered as "pirates"
291: are in fact the people who are trying to do something useful that they have
292: been forbidden to do. The copyright laws are entirely designed to help
293: people take complete control over the use of some information for their own
294: good. But they aren't designed to help people who want to make sure that
295: the information is accessible to the public and stop others from depriving
296: the public. I think that the law should recognize a class of works that are
297: owned by the public, which is different from public domain in the same
298: sense that a public park is different from something found in a garbage
299: can. It's not there for anybody to take away, it's there for everyone to
300: use but for no one to impede. Anybody in the public who finds himself being
301: deprived of the derivative work of something owned by the public should be
302: able to sue about it.
303:
304: BYTE: But aren't pirates interested in getting copies of programs because
305: they want to use those programs, not because they want to use that
306: knowledge to produce something better?
307:
308: Stallman: I don't see that that's the important distinction. More people
309: using a program means that the program contributes more to society. You
310: have a loaf of bread that could be eaten either once or a million times.
311:
312: BYTE: Some users buy commercial software to obtain support. How does your
313: distribution scheme provide support?
314:
315: Stallman: I suspect that those users are misled and are not thinking
316: clearly. It is certainly useful to have support, but when they start
317: thinking about how that has something to do with selling software or with
318: the software being proprietary, at that point they are confusing
319: themselves. There is no guarantee that proprietary software will receive
320: good support. Simply because sellers say that they provide support, that
321: doesn't mean it will be any good. And they may go out of business. In fact,
322: people think that GNU EMACS has better support than commercial EMACSes. One
323: of the reasons is that I'm probably a better hacker than the people who
324: wrote the other EMACSes, but the other reason is that everyone has sources
325: and there are so many people interested in figuring out how to do things
326: with it that you don't have to get your support from me. Even just the free
327: support that consists of my fixing bugs people report to me and
328: incorporating that in the next release has given people a good level of
329: support. You can always hire somebody to solve a problem for you, and when
330: the software is free you have a competitive market for the support. You can
331: hire anybody. I distribute a service list with EMACS, a list of people's
332: names and phone numbers and what they charge to provide support.
333:
334: BYTE: Do you collect their bug fixes?
335:
336: Stallman: Well, they send them to me. I asked all the people who wanted to
337: be listed to promise that they would never ask any of their customers to
338: keep secret whatever they were told or any changes they were given to the
339: GNU software as part of that support.
340:
341: BYTE: So you can't have people competing to provide support based on their
342: knowing the solution to some problem that somebody else doesn't know.
343:
344: Stallman: No. They can compete based on their being clever and more likely
345: to find the solution to your problem, or their already understanding more
346: of the common problems, or knowing better how to explain to you what you
347: should do. These are all ways they can compete. They can try to do better,
348: but they cannot actively impede their competitors.
349:
350: BYTE: I suppose it's like buying a car. You're not forced to go back to the
351: original manufacturer for support or continued maintenance.
352:
353: Stallman: Or buying a house--what would it be like if the only person who
354: could ever fix problems with your house was the contractor who built it
355: originally? That is the kind of imposition that's involved in proprietary
356: software. People tell me about a problem that happens in UNIX. Because
357: manufacturers sell improved versions of UNIX, they tend to collect fixes
358: and not give them out except in binaries. The result is that the bugs don't
359: really get fixed.
360:
361: BYTE: They're all duplicating effort trying to solve bugs independently.
362:
363: Stallman: Yes. Here is another point that helps put the problem of
364: proprietary information in a social perspective. Think about the liability
365: insurance crisis. In order to get any compensation from society, an injured
366: person has to hire a lawyer and split the money with that lawyer. This is a
367: stupid and inefficient way of helping out people who are victims of
368: accidents. And consider all the time that people put into hustling to take
369: business away from their competition. Think of the pens that are packaged
370: in large cardboard packages that cost more than the pen--just to make sure
371: that the pen isn't stolen. Wouldn't it be better if we just put free pens
372: on every street corner? And think of all the toll booths that impede the
373: flow of traffic. It's a gigantic social phenomenon. People find ways of
374: getting money by impeding society. Once they can impede society, they can
375: be paid to leave people alone. The waste inherent in owning information
376: will become more and more important and will ultimately make the difference
377: between the utopia in which nobody really has to work for a living because
378: it's all done by robots and a world just like ours where everyone spends
379: much time replicating what the next fellow is doing.
380:
381: BYTE: Like typing in copyright notices on the software.
382:
383: Stallman: More like policing everyone to make sure that they don't have
384: forbidden copies of anything and duplicating all the work people have
385: already done because it is proprietary.
386:
387: BYTE: A cynic might wonder how you earn your living.
388:
389: Stallman: From consulting. When I do consulting, I always reserve the right
390: to give away what I wrote for the consulting job. Also, I could be making
391: my living by mailing copies of the free software that I wrote and some that
392: other people wrote. Lots of people send in $150 for GNU EMACS, but now this
393: money goes to the Free Software Foundation that I started. The foundation
394: doesn't pay me a salary because it would be a conflict of interest.
395: Instead, it hires other people to work on GNU. As long as I can go on
396: making a living by consulting I think that's the best way.
397:
398: BYTE: What is currently included in the official GNU distribution tape?
399:
400: Stallman: Right now the tape contains GNU EMACS (one version fits all
401: computers); Bison, a program that replaces YACC; MIT Scheme, which is
402: Professor Sussman's super-simplified dialect of LISP; and Hack, a
403: dungeon-exploring game similar to Rogue.
404:
405: BYTE: Does the printed manual come with the tape as well?
406:
407: Stallman: No. Printed manuals cost $15 each or copy them yourself. Copy
408: this interview and share it, too.
409:
410: BYTE: How can you get a copy of that?
411:
412: Stallman: Write to the Free Software Foundation, 675 Massachusetts Ave.,
413: Cambridge, MA 02139.
414:
415: BYTE: What are you going to do when you are done with the GNU system?
416:
417: Stallman: I'm not sure. Sometimes I think that what I'll go on to do is the
418: same thing in other areas of software.
419:
420: BYTE: So this is just the first of a whole series of assaults on the
421: software industry?
422:
423: Stallman: I hope so. But perhaps what I'll do is just live a life of ease
424: working a little bit of the time just to live. I don't have to live
425: expensively. The rest of the time I can find interesting people to hang
426: around with or learn to do things that I don't know how to do.
427:
428: Editorial Note: BYTE holds the right to provide this interview on BIX but
429: will not interfere with its distribution.
430:
431: Richard Stallman, 545 Technology Square, Room 703, Cambridge, MA 02139.
432: Copyright (C) 1986 Richard Stallman. Permission is granted to make and
433: distribute copies of this article as long as the copyright and this notice
434: appear on all copies.

unix.superglobalmegacorp.com

This archive runs on limited infrastructure. Preserving old code on modern bandwidth. Automated agents are requested to crawl responsibly.