When Xerox donated a brand new laser printer to MIT in 1980, the corporate couldn’t have recognized that the machine would ignite a revolution.
Whereas the early many years of software program growth usually ran on a tradition of open entry, this new printer ran on inaccessible proprietary software program, a lot to the horror of Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer on the college.
Just a few years later, Stallman launched GNU, an working system designed to be a free different to one of many dominant working programs on the time: Unix. The free-software motion was born, with a easy premise: for the nice of the world, all code needs to be open, with out restriction or industrial intervention.
Forty years later, tech corporations are making billions on proprietary software program, and far of the know-how round us is inscrutable. However whereas Stallman’s motion might seem like a failed experiment, the free and open-source software program motion just isn’t solely alive and nicely; it has change into a keystone of the tech trade. Learn the total story.
—Rebecca Ackermann
Rebecca’s story is from the following upcoming challenge of our print journal, which is all about ethics. When you don’t subscribe already, enroll to obtain a duplicate when it publishes.
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