interview

windows版本的emacs

software feels that he is stuck and has no alternative except not to use a
computer.  Well, I am going to give him a comfortable alternative.
    Other people may use the GNU system simply because it is technically
superior.  For example, my C compiler is producing about as good a code as I
have seen from any C compiler.  And GNU EMACS is generally regarded as being
far superior to the commercial competition.  And GNU EMACS was not funded by
anyone either, but everyone is using it.  I therefore think that many people
will use the rest of the GNU system because of its technical advantages.
But I would be doing a GNU system even if I didn't know how to make it
technically better because I want it to be socially better.  The GNU project
is really a social project.  It uses technical means to make a change in
society.

BYTE: Then it is fairly important to you that people adopt GNU.  It is not
just an academic exercise to produce this software to give it away to
people.  You hope it will change the way the software industry operates.

Stallman: Yes.  Some people say no one will ever use it because it doesn't
have some attractive corporate logo on it, and other people say that they
think it is tremendously important and everyone's going to want to use it.
I have no way of knowing what is really going to happen.  I don't know any
other way to try to change the ugliness of the field that I find myself in,
so this is what I have to do.

BYTE: Can you address the implications?  You obviously feel that this is an
important political and social statement.

Stallman: It is a change.  I'm trying to change the way people approach
knowledge and information in general.  I think that to try to own knowledge,
to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop
other people from sharing it, is sabotage.  It is an activity that benefits
the person that does it at the cost of impoverishing all of society.  One
person gains one dollar by destroying two dollars' worth of wealth.  I think
a person with a conscience wouldn't do that sort of thing except perhaps if
he would otherwise die.  And of course the people who do this are fairly
rich; I can only conclude that they are unscrupulous.  I would like to see
people get rewards for writing free software and for encouraging other
people to use it.  I don't want to see people get rewards for writing
proprietary software because that is not really a contribution to society.
The principle of capitalism is the idea that people manage to make money by
producing things and thereby are encouraged to do what is useful,
automatically, so to speak.  But that doesn't work when it comes to owning
knowledge.  They are encouraged to do not really what's useful, and what
really is useful is not encouraged.  I think it is important to say that
information is different from material objects like cars and loaves of
bread because people can copy it and share it on their own and, if nobody
attempts to stop them, they can change it and make it better for
themselves.  That is a useful thing for people to do.  This isn't true of
loaves of bread.  If you have one loaf of bread and you want another, you
can't just put your loaf of bread into a bread copier.  you can't make
another one except by going through all the steps that were used to make
the first one.  It therefore is irrelevant whether people are permitted to
copy it--it's impossible.
   Books were printed only on printing presses until recently.  It was
possible to make a copy yourself by hand, but it wasn't practical because
it took so much more work than using a printing press.  And it produced
something so much less attractive that, for all intents and purposes, you
could act as if it were impossible to make books except by mass producing
them.  And therefore copyright didn't really take any freedom away from the
reading public.  There wasn't anything that a book purchaser could do that
was forbidden by copyright.
   But this isn't true for computer programs.  It's also not true for tape
cassettes.  It's partly false now for books, but it is still true that for
most books it is more expensive and certainly a lot more work to Xerox them
than to buy a copy, and the result is still less attractive.  Right now we
are in a period where the situation that made copyright harmless and
acceptable is changing to a situation where copyright will become
destructive and intolerable.  So the people who are slandered as "pirates"
are in fact the people who are trying to do something useful that they have
been forbidden to do.   The copyright laws are entirely designed to help
people take complete control over the use of some information for their own
good.  But they aren't designed to help people who want to make sure that
the information is accessible to the public and stop others from depriving
the public.  I think that the law should recognize a class of works that are
owned by the public, which is different from public domain in the same
sense that a public park is different from something found in a garbage
can.  It's not there for anybody to take away, it's there for everyone to
use but for no one to impede.  Anybody in the public who finds himself being
deprived of the derivative work of something owned by the public should be
able to sue about it.

BYTE: But aren't pirates interested in getting copies of programs because
they want to use those programs, not because they want to use that
knowledge to produce something better?

Stallman: I don't see that that's the important distinction.  More people
using a program means that the program contributes more to society.  You
have a loaf of bread that could be eaten either once or a million times.

BYTE: Some users buy commercial software to obtain support.  How does your
distribution scheme provide support?

Stallman: I suspect that those users are misled and are not thinking
clearly.  It is certainly useful to have support, but when they start
thinking about how that has something to do with selling software or with
the software being proprietary, at that point they are confusing
themselves.  There is no guarantee that proprietary software will receive
good support.  Simply because sellers say that they provide support, that
doesn't mean it will be any good.  And they may go out of business.  In fact,
people think that GNU EMACS has better support than commercial EMACSes.  One
of the reasons is that I'm probably a better hacker than the people who
wrote the other EMACSes, but the other reason is that everyone has sources
and there are so many people interested in figuring out how to do things
with it that you don't have to get your support from me.  Even just the free
support that consists of my fixing bugs people report to me and
incorporating that in the next release has given people a good level of
support.  You can always hire somebody to solve a problem for you, and when
the software is free you have a competitive market for the support.  You can
hire anybody.  I distribute a service list with EMACS, a list of people's
names and phone numbers and what they charge to provide support.

BYTE: Do you collect their bug fixes?

Stallman: Well, they send them to me.  I asked all the people who wanted to
be listed to promise that they would never ask any of their customers to
keep secret whatever they were told or any changes they were given to the
GNU software as part of that support.

BYTE: So you can't have people competing to provide support based on their
knowing the solution to some problem that somebody else doesn't know.

Stallman: No.  They can compete based on their being clever and more likely
to find the solution to your problem, or their already understanding more
of the common problems, or knowing better how to explain to you what you
should do.  These are all ways they can compete.  They can try to do better,
but they cannot actively impede their competitors.

BYTE: I suppose it's like buying a car.  You're not forced to go back to the
original manufacturer for support or continued maintenance.

Stallman: Or buying a house--what would it be like if the only person who
could ever fix problems with your house was the contractor who built it
originally?  That is the kind of imposition that's involved in proprietary
software.  People tell me about a problem that happens in UNIX.  Because
manufacturers sell improved versions of UNIX, they tend to collect fixes
and not give them out except in binaries.  The result is that the bugs don't
really get fixed.

BYTE: They're all duplicating effort trying to solve bugs independently.

Stallman: Yes.  Here is another point that helps put the problem of
proprietary information in a social perspective.  Think about the liability
insurance crisis.  In order to get any compensation from society, an injured
person has to hire a lawyer and split the money with that lawyer.  This is a
stupid and inefficient way of helping out people who are victims of
accidents.  And consider all the time that people put into hustling to take
business away from their competition.  Think of the pens that are packaged
in large cardboard packages that cost more than the pen--just to make sure
that the pen isn't stolen.  Wouldn't it be better if we just put free pens
on every street corner?  And think of all the toll booths that impede the
flow of traffic.  It's a gigantic social phenomenon.  People find ways of
getting money by impeding society.  Once they can impede society, they can
be paid to leave people alone.  The waste inherent in owning information
will become more and more important and will ultimately make the difference
between the utopia in which nobody really has to work for a living because
it's all done by robots and a world just like ours where everyone spends
much time replicating what the next fellow is doing.

BYTE: Like typing in copyright notices on the software.

Stallman: More like policing everyone to make sure that they don't have
forbidden copies of anything and duplicating all the work people have
already done because it is proprietary.

BYTE: A cynic might wonder how you earn your living.

Stallman: From consulting.  When I do consulting, I always reserve the right
to give away what I wrote for the consulting job.  Also, I could be making
my living by mailing copies of the free software that I wrote and some that
other people wrote.  Lots of people send in $150 for GNU EMACS, but now this
money goes to the Free Software Foundation that I started.  The foundation
doesn't pay me a salary because it would be a conflict of interest.
Instead, it hires other people to work on GNU.  As long as I can go on
making a living by consulting I think that's the best way.

BYTE: What is currently included in the official GNU distribution tape?

Stallman: Right now the tape contains GNU EMACS (one version fits all
computers); Bison, a program that replaces YACC; MIT Scheme, which is
Professor Sussman's super-simplified dialect of LISP; and Hack, a
dungeon-exploring game similar to Rogue.

BYTE: Does the printed manual come with the tape as well?

Stallman: No.  Printed manuals cost $15 each or copy them yourself.  Copy
this interview and share it, too.

BYTE: How can you get a copy of that?

Stallman: Write to the Free Software Foundation, 675 Massachusetts Ave.,
Cambridge, MA 02139.

[In June 1995, this address changed to:
     Free Software Foundation
     59 Temple Place - Suite 330
     Boston, MA  02111-1307,  USA
     Voice:  [phone]
     Fax:    [phone]
[e-mail]
]

BYTE: What are you going to do when you are done with the GNU system?

Stallman: I'm not sure.  Sometimes I think that what I'll go on to do is the
same thing in other areas of software.

BYTE: So this is just the first of a whole series of assaults on the
software industry?

Stallman: I hope so.  But perhaps what I'll do is just live a life of ease
working a little bit of the time just to live.  I don't have to live
expensively.  The rest of the time I can find interesting people to hang
around with or learn to do things that I don't know how to do.

Editorial Note: BYTE holds the right to provide this interview on BIX but
will not interfere with its distribution.

Richard Stallman, 545 Technology Square, Room 703, Cambridge, MA 02139.
Copyright (C) 1986 Richard Stallman.  Permission is granted to make and
distribute copies of this article as long as the copyright and this notice
appear on all copies.