Member-only story
I Grew Out Of Free Software
Reflections on the ethics of software freedom
When I was young, I read a lot about computers. I did this years before actually having access to one. I learned to program on pen and paper, imagining what a computer would do with my code.
Eventually, of course, I got my hands on actual computers. That, however, was not the big turning point in my computing life. No, that title belongs to a period of my high school days when I spent my afternoons in the library browsing the Internet.
In those days, software for home computers was bought in expensive cardboard boxes that contained a couple of floppy disks and a fat hardcopy manual. Alternatively, you could copy your friend’s disks, making you criminal that just had not been caught yet — and in the early 1990s home computers were rare enough that most friends did not have much to copy in any case. Thus, software was a scarce resource, and I was hungry for more.
The whammy moment was discovering prep.ai.mit.edu and its treasure trove of software, freely available in both source and binary. This was the GNU project of Richard Stallman, copying an alien thing called Unix. I spent many weeks at the library reading — without a Unix system, I could not actually run those programs.
