When you click the title of this article from Circle of Friends, you are already using a service provided by open source software. The server operating system of the web page is GNU/Linux, your mobile phone is Android, and your App is written by Swift/Java programming language…
Like oxygen in the air, open source software is part of the air, and a very important part of it. Without oxygen in the air, life would not exist. Without open source software, the computer industry would not develop so rapidly.
So what is open source software? What is the FOSS movement? What are the men behind open source software?
And again, I want to start with Richard Stallman.
So in this open Source biography, we tell the story of Richard Stallman, the father of free software. If you reply “So Free” in the background of the open source youth account, you will get a link to the web version of “So Free: The Biography of Richard Stallman, the father of Free Software”.
If you are a student or want to be a software developer in the future, or are already studying in a software major. Please make sure to read on. It won’t improve your programming skills, but it will give you the story behind each of the men who fell to earth.
By the time I was eight, I was already reading calculus
Stallman was born in New York in March 1953 to His mother Alice Lipman, an art teacher, and father Daniel Stallman, a printer dealer.
“Stallman showed a strong aptitude for mathematics from an early age.” Stallman’s mother recalled.
It was 1961, and Stallman’s mother, Lippmann, had recently divorced and become a single parent.
“I was at home flipping through an issue of Scientific American.”
Scientific American magazine has a column called The Numbers Game, and there are all kinds of math games.
“Actually, I’m not very good at these topics, but as an artist, I find that they help me relieve stress and inspire inspiration.”
“As SOON as I started, I hit a snag. I was about to throw away the magazine and give up on the solution when I realized Stallman was tugging at my sleeve.”
“He told me that he already knew how to solve the problem. I knew he was smart when he was eight, but this really showed me how smart he really is.”
“By the age of eight, Stallman had already read calculus through.”
Stallman’s mathematical talents were beginning to show.
I’m going to Harvard
When Stallman was 12 years old and in high school, his teacher suggested that he join the Columbia Science Star Program.
The Columbia Stars in Science program aims to expand learning opportunities for gifted New York high school students.
Stallman followed his teacher’s advice.
He rushed off to Columbia every Saturday, and as he hung out with the top students in the program every week, Stallman was like them, thinking about what to do with his life.
Most of the Columbia Science Star students target their future universities at the two Ivy League schools: Harvard and MIT.
Lippmann knew he wanted to go to an Ivy League school, but stallman was having “a million problems.”
He confronts his teacher at school every day.
Stallman got A’s in American history, chemistry, French, and algebra, but he refused to write essays, so he got an F in English.
This kind of maverick personality might be laughed off at MIT, but it’s a serious problem at Harvard.
So Stallman could go to college, His mother, Lippmann, moved him to another school and asked him to improve his English.
Then, in her final semester before graduation, Stallman scored 96 out of 100 in English, still far ahead in other subjects and ranked fourth in her age.
He was accepted to the mathematics department at Harvard University.
Become attached to software
When stallman was 12 years old, a counselor at a science camp gave him a manual for the IBM7090.
By the end of the summer, Stallman had written his own program on paper from the manual. He couldn’t wait to run his program on a real machine.
But it was the 1960s, 15 years before the first personal computer, and he didn’t have access to the IBM7090.
The IBM 7090 was the first transistorized computer, using punched cards, made by IBM. There is 32K of memory, 5K for the system and 27K for the user, and user data is switched between memory and a magnetic drum. Runs IBSYS, the best-known batch processing system. An IBM 7090 costs about $3 million.
There was no access to the IBM 7090, but the software seed was planted.
Stallman first used a computer the summer after 11th grade, the Chinese equivalent of a sophomore. Stallman joined IBM’s New York Scientific research center that summer, and he wrote the first program he’d ever run on a computer — a preprocessor in PL/I.
But it grew too big for the computer, so Stallman wrote it all over again in assembly language.
Go to MIT
While Harvard math majors take art and history classes to relax, Stallman relieves stress by heading to harvard’s computer LABS.
The experience of programming for the first time at IBM’s New York Science center lured Stallman to learn more.
“About my first year at Harvard, I started going to harvard computer LABS to see what was new there. As soon as I got there, I asked if THEY could give me a manual.”
At the time, many LABS didn’t allow children like Stallman to work on computers, but stallman was allowed to run his own program.
At the end of his first year at Harvard, Stallman heard about a special lab at MIT.
That’s right, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. It contains all kinds of advanced computers and software.
Stallman was intrigued by the lab and decided to check it out.
Walking around the MIT campus, Stallman says that MIT and Harvard are two very different universities. MIT is “five steps, ten steps, one pavilion.” Harvard appears capacious and bright, two universities one zhang Yi chi, one Yin Yang.
The architectural differences are also reflected in the ethos of MIT, which is populated by middle-school geeks who love to joke and play pranks. Harvard students are more likely to come from family backgrounds or have political ambitions from childhood.
The difference in ethos extends to the computer lab. There is no doorman in the MIT computer lab, no one holding a notebook to keep track of who is waiting for the terminal, and no “No touching” sign. Harvard is the opposite.
At MIT’s ARTIFICIAL intelligence lab, he saw only a few terminals and robotic arms that no one was using.
Stallman got to know employees at MIT’s ARTIFICIAL Intelligence Lab, who helped him get a job at the lab.
By the end of 1970, Stallman was teaching Monday through Thursday at Harvard and taking the subway to the MIT artificial Intelligence Lab on Friday afternoons.
Printer events
Fast forward to 1980, and Stallman is a 27-year-old programmer at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab.
The year 1980 was very different for Stallman, as the “printer incident” only tied him to the free software movement.
At that time, Xerox would donate its latest products to the MIT ARTIFICIAL Intelligence Lab, and the MIT ARTIFICIAL Intelligence Lab received a new laser printer, the first generation of laser printing. It works very fast and has very small pixels, which is really good. But the downside is that it’s not reliable, sometimes it freezes several times an hour. It was born at the prestigious Xerox Palo Alto Research Facility.
Ethernet, mouse, graphical user interface all come from here.
No one could have imagined that in a decade or so, the world would see a printer revolution, and many computer manufacturers would jump on board. This printer was the forerunner of that revolution.
The reason this laser printer is not reliable is that it is a modification of the previous generation of copiers, and the mode of human-machine interaction between copiers and printers is different, most obviously the human is always beside the machine when copying, but not when printing.
The paper jam problem is not new to Stallman. Their solution was to change the driver.
This is very different from now, when the purchase of hardware products, most of the driver will be attached to the source code, note is the source code, and can be modified and re-released at will.
Why is the source code included? Because the revenue then came from the hardware being sold, software didn’t make any money. Second, there were many types of hardware at that time, and manufacturers could not adapt every piece of hardware, so publish the source code and let “hackers” do their own adaptation. Software doesn’t make money, does it? Stallman was able to use some “special connections” to copy the source code from harvard’s computer room, even if it wasn’t included.
So this is not a problem for programmers like Stallman.
For programmers in the 1970s, copying and copying software was as common as borrowing a bowl of soy sauce from a neighbor. The difference is that the amount of soy sauce you take from your neighbor’s house will reduce the amount of soy sauce your neighbor’s house will lose. Copying a program does not affect others to continue to use that program.
Stallman’s change was as simple as reminding the printer on the computer if the paper jammed:
The machine has paper jam, please go to repair it.
But this laser printer is very different because there is only one machine. Because Xerox had not released the source code this time, Stallman thought, “Well, why would we need the source code for the driver when they’ve sent us the machine for nothing?”
Stallman had a chance to visit a professor at Carnegie Mellon university’s ARTIFICIAL Intelligence Lab who was responsible for developing xerox’s printer. Stallman wanted to contact the professor for the source code, but the professor said:
“I signed a confidentiality agreement. I promised the company I wouldn’t leak the code.”
That era was set against a backdrop of dwindling state funding from the United States, and LABS and universities were turning to the private sector in search of more funding. By 1980, most members of the lab, including many hackers, were involved in both research and commercial projects.
The source code is protected by intellectual property laws, and the developers involved in the project will sign non-disclosure agreements with the company.
Stallman was furious. A visit in person would have been a good-faith gesture, but he was rebuffed
“I was so angry, I don’t know how to express it.”
Stallman called the event a turning point in his life. After this incident, something even more unpleasant happened in the lab:
The company that created a “Symbolics” in the lab hired almost all of the lab’s hackers, leaving programs and machines unrepaired.
The LISP computer in the lab started out as part of artificial intelligence, and someone in the lab decided that the project was doing so well that it was time to start a company, bring it to market, and make a profit from it. That company was Symbolics.
When Symbolics was formed, Stallman suddenly disappeared from the project.
The “personnel changes” at the office got Stallman thinking about the age-old question on his mind.
“Software should be shared.”
“I had some initial ideas that software should be shared,” Stallman says. But I didn’t know how to say it. The idea was not clear enough to be introduced in a few sentences.”
Stallman decided to do something about it…
Refer to the reference
- zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Richard Stowe…
- Zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_70…
- www.infosophy.net/wenxian/spe…
- If We Are Free: The Biography of Richard Stallman, Father of Free Software. By SAM WILLIAMS. Translated by Nan Deng and Fanxi Li
- Open Source Software Anthology: Voices of the Open Source Revolution. Edited by Chris DiBona,Sam Ockman,Mark Stone. Translated by Hong Feng