Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

by Symbolics, and then offered the altered version to its competitor, Lisp Machine Incorporated. 9 Stallman’s incarnation as a revenge programmer, during which time he matched “the work of over a dozen world-class hackers” (Levy 1984, 426), is now recognized as legendary—indeed, nothing short of one of the greatest feats in programming history.
    In 1984, Stallman radically switched strategies. Devising a more personally sustainable response with a far broader scope than revenge, he focused on the politics of cultural survival (Coleman 1999). He resigned from the MIT lab (in order to prevent MIT from claiming any proprietary rights over his work) and began developing what he called “free software,” which for a couple of years was not attached to any alternative licensing.
    In 1985, Stallman founded the nonprofit FSF, and along with a handful of volunteers, concentrated on developing important technical tools and assembling the components of a free OS. He chose to model it on the design of Unix, which at the time was the most portable OS, meaning it could run on the widest range of hardware. Stallman named his version of Unix GNU—a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix.” This acronym cleverly designates the difference between the FSF version and Unix, the popular AT&T proprietary version. Unix was growing increasingly popular among geeks all over the world, and as Kelty (2008) has shown, was already binding geeks together in what he identifies as a recursive public—a public formed bydiscussion, debate, and the ability to modify the conditions of its formation, which in this case entailed creating and modifying software.
    Stallman (1985, 30) formulated and presented his politics of resistance along with his philosophical vision in “The GNU Manifesto,” originally published in the then-popular electronics magazine
Dr. Dobb’s Journal
:
    I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. For years I worked within the Artificial Intelligence Lab to resist such tendencies and other inhospitalities, but eventually they had gone too far: I could not remain in an institution where such things are done for me against my will. So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.
    During this period, Stallman and the FSF stayed financially afloat by selling FSF/GNU software on tape as well as informal in-kind support from the MIT artificial intelligence lab. Unlike proprietary software, the FSF gave its software users the permission to share, modify, and redistribute its source code (the FSF also often sold applications at cheaper prices than its proprietary competitors), but this was based on an informal agreement instead of a formal legal code. For Stallman, an early pressing concern was how to release software in a way that future, modified versions of FSF software (that is, modified from the original piece of software) would remain open and accessible—a guarantee not necessarily provided by releasing software into the public domain. It would take a major dispute over copyright and his Emacs program (a text editor) for Stallman to actually turn to the law for a solution.
    Due to a fairly complicated multiyear controversy unfolding between 1983 and 1985 (whose details need not concern us here, but in which Stallman was accused of illegally copying source code into the version of Emacs he was working on), the legal issues concerning patents, copyrights, and public domain first and palpably became clear to software developers. 10 Catalyzed by this controversy, Stallman started to use more formal legal language in 1985 to protect free software, and by 1989, had crafted a clear legal framework for free software in order to prevent the type of controversy that had erupted over his Emacs work from recurring plus add a layer of protection for free software and, crucially, user freedoms.
    Stallman approached the law much like a hacker treats technology: as a system that by virtue of being systemic and logical, is hackable. In other words, he relied