Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2008/09/02/gnu-birthday.html
Twenty-five years ago this month, I had just gotten my first computer,
a Commodore 64, and was learning the very basics (quite literally) of
programming. Unfortunately for my education, it would be a full eight
years before I’d be permitted to see any source code to a computer
program that I didn’t write myself. I often look back at those eight
years and consider that my most formative years of programming learning were
wasted, since I was not permitted to study the programs written by the
greatest minds.
Fortunately for all the young programmers to come after me, something
else was happening in an office at an MIT building in September 1983
that would make sure everyone would have the freedom to study code, and
the freedom to improve it and contribute to the global library of
software development knowledge. Richard
Stallman announced
that he would start the GNU project, a complete operating system
that would give all its users freedom.
I got involved with Free Software in 1992. At the time, I was the one
student in my university who had ever heard of GNU and the recently
released kernel named Linux. My professors knew of “that Stallman
guy” but were focused primarily on academic research. Fortunately
for me, they nevertheless gave me free reign over the systems to turn
them into what might have been, in late 1992, one of the first Computer
Science labs running entirely Free Software.
Much more has happened since even then. To commemorate all that has
come since Stallman’s announcement, my colleagues at the FSF, home of
the GNU project, released a video for
this historic 25 year anniversary. It took twenty-five years, and a
fight at the BBC over DRM, but now even a famous, accomplished actor
like Stephen Fry
is interested in the work that Stallman began way back in a year when
Michael Jackson was a musical phenomenon and not merely a punchline of a
joke.
These days, I have almost weekly moments of surprise that people
outside of the Software Freedom Movement have actually heard of what I
do for a living. When Matt Lee (whom I got to know when he came up through the
ranks in the 2000’s as I did in the 1990’s as a new FSF volunteer) told
me a few months ago that Stephen Fry had enthusiastically and
immediately agreed to make this video, it was yet another moment of
surprise. We now live in a movement that impacts everyone in the
industrialized world, because nearly everyone who has access to
electricity also must use a computer to interact with daily life. So
many people are impacted by the problems of proprietary software that
Stallman noticed in 1983 impacting his small developer community.
Thanks to the work of thousands, we now have the opportunity to welcome
new groups into a computing world that can give them freedom. I’m happy
that the friendly face of a talented and accomplished entertainer and
world-class actor is here to welcome them.