Richard Stallman sends fifty pages to a printer on another floor and finds four sheets in the tray, none of them his. The program that runs the printer is one he may use and may not read. From that refusal come a free operating system missing its heart, a licence that turns copyright against itself, and, in Helsinki, a student with a hobby. With Christine Peterson, who coined the phrase open source and kept quiet about it, and the unpaid maintainers on whom the whole arrangement rests.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Andrew Tanenbaum, Brian Behlendorf, Eric Raymond, Christine Peterson, Andrew Tridgell, Lasse Collin, Andres Freund
- The idea it builds
- Source code is the recipe and the binary is the cake; a patch is one corrected line of the recipe; copyleft uses copyright to require sharing.