working title: History of Software Freedom: Free Software and Open Source hackers will explain first hacker values permeate and give context to the history of software freedom definitions: RFC 1392 hacker A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular. The term is often misused in a pejorative context, where "cracker" would be the correct term. See also: cracker. [RFC1392, 21] RMS It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value". [RMS-hacking] Jargon file 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in ‘a Unix hacker’. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) [Jargon-hacker] MIT Tech Model Railroad Club 1950s and 1960s members sought to learn how things worked members disliked authority information wants to be free vocabulary foo, frob, cruft, hack, etc. TODO: continue history, describe hacker ethic examples of hacks MIT campus police car on the Great Dome [IHTFP-CP-Car] RFC 1149 A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers CPIP (Carrier Pidgeon IP) Bergen Linux User's Group 2001-04-28: Bergen, Norway — 10.0.3.1 ping statistics — 9 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 55% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 3211900.8/5222806.6/6388671.9 ms [RFC1149] [Jargon-meaning] [BLUG-CPIP-WG] in the beginning, there was freedom - ~02:00 DEC PDP-1 became the favorite machine of the budding hacker culture after its donation to MIT in 1962 [WP-PDP-1] DECUS Digital Equipment Computer Users Society users had to write software for PDP-1 founded in 1961 facilitated free exchange of info and sw between customers and DEC [CHM-DECUS] Spacewar! space shooter with realistic physics that showed power of PDP-1 written by Steve Russel in 1961-1962 MIT hackers freely shared game [Quinn, 316] [CHM-Spacewar!] Unix originally written in 1969 to run on PDP-7 by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna to be "a system around which a fellowship could form" AT&T was required to license non-telephone tech. to anyone who asked under a 1958 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case AT&T licensed Unix with source code to univs, corps, U.S. gov't Lion's Commentary, 1976, documented Unix source code Unix hackers of the early 1970s enjoyed largely unrestricted access to Unix sys at univs and corps throughout the 1970s, univs worldwide contributed greatly to Unix dev [DMR-Hist] [ESR-TAOUP-2.1] [WP-Unix] proprietarization IBM unbundling 1969 IBM stopped providing software in source form with hardware instead began selling binary copies of software at a high cost pioneered the "software industry" [WP-IBM] "Open Letter to Hobbyists" written by Bill Gates, General Partner, Micro-Soft published between January and May, 1976 in Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter, Computer Notes, et al accused hobbyists of stealing claimed that sharing software is unfair and prevents writing of good sw [WP-Open-Letter] [DB-Gates] copyright Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) established in 1974 to study and make recommends on legislation Copyright Act of 1976 added 17 U.S.C. §117 Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980 added defn of "computer program" to 17 U.S.C. §101 explicitly made software copyrightable rewrote 17 U.S.C. §117 "it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or to authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful." GNU RFC1392 http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1392.txt RMS-hacking http://www.stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html Jargon-hacker http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html RFC1149 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 Jargon-meaning http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html BLUG-CPIP-WG http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ WP-PDP-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1 CHM-DECUS http://pdp-1.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/index.php?f=theme&s=4&ss=7 Quinn Quinn, Michael J. _Ethics for the Information Age_. Fourth Edition. Addison-Wesley, 2011. 316. CHM-Spacewar! http://pdp-1.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/index.php?f=theme&s=4&ss=3 DMR-Hist http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html ESR-TAOUP-2.1 http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch02s01.html WP-Unix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix WP-IBM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM #1969:_Antitrust.2C_the_Unbundling_of_software_and_services WP-Open-Letter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists DB-Gates http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/ homebrew_V2_01_p2.jpg