The H has quite the interesting story up, “Emacs & the birth of the GPL“, tracing how Emacs developed, and how that in turn led to the development of the GPL.
Seeing the Future
I quite enjoyed seeing how RMS tempered prophetic statements with unfortunate real-world experience. Consider this insight from RMS into why it would be unlikely for a commercial entity to produce something like Emacs:
I don’t think that anything like EMACS could have been developed commercially. Businesses have the wrong attitudes. The primary axiom of the commercial world toward users is that they are incompetent, and that if they have any control over their system they will mess it up. The primary goal is to give them nothing specific to complain about, not to give them a means of helping themselves.
Some 23 years later, on the commerically amazing debut of the iPad, it’s striking how accurate this assessment is!
Understanding the Past
The unfortunate real-world experience is recounted on the “betrayal” of the sharing ideals by persons such as Russell Noftsker and James Gosling, both of which took advantage of (proto-) Free Software for commerical benefit.
It is precisely this “school of hard knocks” experience that makes the GPL so grounded in real-world understanding, rather than the “zealotry” and “idealism” that detractors struggle mightily to paint it with. RMS knows how people will try to abuse Free Software, and the GPL has parts specifically constructed to prevent such abuse!
The Cultural Significance of Free Software
As interesting as the main H article is, through a link it led me to an even more interesting read, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.
This is a fascinating book, completely available online under CC-BY-NC-SA, not only with extensive references and footnotes, but also allowing reader commenting and “modulating“.
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