In the early 1980s, Richard Stallman began a movement within the software industry. He
preached (and still does) that software should be free. Note that by free, he doesn’t mean in
terms of price, but rather free in the same sense as freedom. This meant shipping not just a
product, but the entire source code as well.
Stallman’s policy was obviously a wild departure from the early eighties mentality of
selling prepackaged software, but his concept of free software was in line with the initial
distributions of UNIX from Bell Labs. Early UNIX systems did contain full source code. Yet
by the late 1970s, source code was typically removed from UNIX distributions and could be
acquired only by paying large sums of money to AT&T. The Berkeley Software Distribution
(BSD) maintained a free version but had to deal with many lawsuits from AT&T until it could
be proved that nothing in the BSD was from AT&T.
The idea of giving away source code is a simple one: A user of the software should never
be forced to deal with a developer who might or might not support that user’s intentions for the
software. The user should never have to wait for bug fixes to be published. More important,
code developed under the scrutiny of other programmers is typically of higher quality than code
written behind locked doors. The greatest benefit of free software, however, comes from the
users themselves: Should they need a new feature, they can add it to the program and then
contribute it back to the source, so that everyone else can benefit from it.
From this line of thinking has sprung a desire to release a complete UNIX-like system to
the public, free of license restrictions. Of course, before you can build any operating system,
you need to build tools. And this is how the GNU project was born.
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