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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 [In June 1995, this address changed to:
416 Free Software Foundation
417 59 Temple Place - Suite 330
418 Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
419 Voice: +1-617-542-5942
420 Fax: +1-617-542-2652
421 -gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu
422 ]
423
424 BYTE: What are you going to do when you are done with the GNU system?
425
426 Stallman: I'm not sure. Sometimes I think that what I'll go on to do is the
427 same thing in other areas of software.
428
429 BYTE: So this is just the first of a whole series of assaults on the
430 software industry?
431
432 Stallman: I hope so. But perhaps what I'll do is just live a life of ease
433 working a little bit of the time just to live. I don't have to live
434 expensively. The rest of the time I can find interesting people to hang
435 around with or learn to do things that I don't know how to do.
436
437 Editorial Note: BYTE holds the right to provide this interview on BIX but
438 will not interfere with its distribution.
439
440 Richard Stallman, 545 Technology Square, Room 703, Cambridge, MA 02139.
441 Copyright (C) 1986 Richard Stallman. Permission is granted to make and
442 distribute copies of this article as long as the copyright and this notice
443 appear on all copies.