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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
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