Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Sabotage

Author:William Crim
Posted:8/24/2000; 9:58:29 PM
Topic:Next survey: Are you an open source developer?
Msg #:20158 (In response to 20146)
Prev/Next:20157 / 20159

And here is Stallman's reply:

If Forbes did say that

[Stallman] retaliated [against the computer scientists who left the MIT AI Lab to form Symbolics] by sabotaging his former colleagues' sophisticated commercial programs for powerful computers, singlehandedly hacking up his own versions and giving them away. "They accused me of costing them millions of dollars," he says. "I hope it's true."

then it was mistaken.

I worked hard to thwart the plans of Symbolics, but I did not do this with sabotage. I wrote programs for MIT to do the same jobs as the Symbolics software. This thwarted their plans to cut off system development at MIT and crush their competition, but it was entirely legitimate (whereas sabotage would have been a sort of violence).

For an accurate description of these events, see the book Hackers by Steve Levy.

As I read it, Symbolics started a business to do things MIT was doing. They hired MIT people to get expertise and to remove their competition(MIT itself). So Stallman retaliated by writting a free version to preserve system development at MIT. I don't see where Stallman did anything wrong. If you piss off your competition, they bite back. In Symbolics case, their competition was a zealot who had no financial motive.

Here is an interesting piece of history giving some of Stallman's versions of events. It was written for a magazine back in 1987.

http://www.lysator.liu.se/history/garb/txt/87-2-rms.txt

It was written fairly close to the dates of the events.

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