July 23, 1989

NO, GNU IS GOOD NEWS: If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, Richard Stallman is living example of what happens when industry — the software industry, in this case — gets greedy. I met Stallman, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation in Cambridge, Mass., last week while he was in town at Intel Corp.’s behest, adapting a (free) programming language to work with Intel’s new i860 RISC chip.

As computer software gets more expensive and companies get more lawsuit happy about “protecting” it, Stallman has received lots of publicity (most recently in the July 15-21 issue of The Economist) for his radical theory that all software should be free. Dubbed “the last of the true hackers,” Stallman holds that no less than all information should be free, that sharing information leads to more knowledge.

“The usual justification for hoarding information is to reward people for generating it,” says Stallman. “Generating or compiling information and then hoarding it does not deserve as much reward as … letting people use it.” He believes that hoarding software — not freely letting anyone use it who needs it — is a crime, not the other way around.

To thwart the software industry’s proprietary bent, Stallman’s foundation is developing a complete Unix-compatible operating system, to be freely copied and distributed. It’s called GNU — for GNU’s Not Unix — the kind of recursive acronym that he says is popular among computerati at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his group is based.

Most GNU product names bear the mark of Stallman’s incessant punsterism. GNU’s version of what’s known in Unix land as a Bourne shell is, of course, the Bourne-again shell. He’s also working on a spreadsheet called Oleo: “It’s better for you than the more expensive spreadsheet.”

Though Stallman’s “free software” concept makes many a software vendor blanch (AT&T, which makes a lot of money licensing Unix, is an obvious example, though Stallman says the folks at AT&T’s research arm, Bell Labs, love him), his attitude is provocative.

“There is no social imperative for everyone who (writes) software to make a living at it,” says Stallman. “We don’t say it’s a musician’s right to make money at music. If you can’t do it, do something else. We shouldn’t structure society so anyone can make a living doing anything, not if it means bolloxing up the rest of society.”
GREAT, NORM. THANKS: Speaking of proprietary vs. public information, I’d like to personally thank NoCopi International of Montreal, makers of the uncopyable, unfaxable paper used by Apple Computer Inc., Broderbund Software, Sierra On-Line and others to stem the flow of proprietary data. NoCopi’s got a new product combo that’s going to make my job a lot more creative.

Norm Gardner, president and CEO of NoCopi, says the two products are the first to come out of its new Canadian research center — a clear-ink highlighter and white, chemically treated paper. You can type or print onto the paper with plain old ink, just like usual. But if you highlight text on the paper using the marker and try to photocopy or fax the page, the highlighted material is blocked out as completely as if you used a black marker.
He says the products will be ready to ship by year end, and thinks the U.S. government, which regularly “sanitizes” documents under the Freedom of Information Act, will go crazy for them. Corporate applications are obvious. So I guess you guys are just going to have to send me originals of those confidential memos and source-code documents.

THE SOUND OF JAWS DROPPING: I hate to spoil the shock value, but if you’re going to the Siggraph graphics show in Boston some 10 days hence, you’re going to see a color version of the Next Computer System. Now don’t drop your teeth: it’s kind of a smoke-and-mirrors thing. I hear the folks at Siggraph wanted a color Next machine really bad (there is no such thing at the moment), so they found a way to rig one up.

From what I hear, the Next will be interacting with a Macintosh which will be interacting with a RasterOps circuit board that colorizes images on the Mac. The Next machine captures images from an on-site camera, sends them to the Mac, which sends them to the RasterOps board for colorizing, then send them back to the Next, which shoots them up to the 19-inch, high-resolution color monitor on display in the registration area — catching all those show attendees as they step up with their checkbooks.