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When Xerox donated a brand new laser printer to MIT in 1980, the corporate couldn’t have recognized that the machine would ignite a revolution.
Whereas the early a long time of software program improvement usually ran on a tradition of open entry, this new printer ran on inaccessible proprietary software program, a lot to the horror of Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer on the college.
Just a few years later, Stallman launched GNU, an working system designed to be a free various to one of many dominant working programs on the time: Unix. The free-software motion was born, with a easy premise: for the nice of the world, all code ought to be open, with out restriction or business intervention.
Forty years later, tech firms are making billions on proprietary software program, and far of the know-how round us is inscrutable. However whereas Stallman’s motion might seem like a failed experiment, the free and open-source software program motion shouldn’t be solely alive and nicely; it has turn into a keystone of the tech business. Learn the total story.
—Rebecca Ackermann
Rebecca’s story is from the following upcoming problem of our print journal, which is all about ethics. For those who don’t subscribe already, enroll to obtain a duplicate when it publishes.
What we are able to be taught from the most cancers drug scarcity
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