The air in the hacking community has been turning cold lately. The era of "share and share alike" that characterized the early days of labs like MIT's AI Lab is being replaced by non-disclosure agreements and proprietary binary-only software. It feels like we're losing our culture.
But Richard Stallman isn't going down without a fight. His "GNU Manifesto," published this month, is more than just a plan for a new OS; it's a moral argument for the freedom to compute.
What is GNU?
GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix." It’s a recursive acronym, which is exactly the kind of hacker humor we need right now. The goal is to create a complete Unix-compatible software system that is entirely free. Not "free" as in zero cost (though that’s part of it), but free as in "liberty."
Stallman identifies four essential freedoms:
- To run the program for any purpose.
- To study and change the source code.
- To redistribute copies.
- To distribute modified versions.
The Technical Challenge
Writing a whole OS from scratch is a monumental task. Stallman has already given us GNU Emacs, which is hands-down the most powerful editor I've ever used. But an editor isn't a kernel. He's working on a C compiler (GCC) and a debugger (GDB), and he’s looking for contributors.
# The dream is to eventually type this on a fully free system:
$ gcc -o hello hello.c
$ ./hello
Hello, Free World!
Can it Succeed?
A lot of my colleagues think he's crazy. "Who's going to pay for software if it's free?" they ask. But Stallman argues that we can sell services, support, and documentation. The software itself should be part of the human heritage, like science or mathematics.
I don’t know if GNU will ever replace the commercial Unix systems from AT&T or Sun, but the idea of free software is out of the bottle. Even if the OS never gets finished, the tools he's building are already becoming the gold standard for developers. This manifesto is a reminder that as developers, we have a responsibility to the users and to each other.