The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty

Richard Stallman, who published his manifesto in March of 1985, has been known to say that, “with software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users."

Stallman was one of the first to grasp that, if commercial entities were going to own the methods and technologies that controlled computers, then computer users would inevitably become beholden to those entities. This has come to pass, and in spades. Most computer users have become dependent on proprietary code provided by companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google, the use of which comes with conditions we may not condone or even know about, and can’t control; we have forfeited the freedom to adapt such code according to our needs, preferences, and personal ethics. “With software,” Stallman still frequently observes, “either the users control the program, or the program controls the users.”

Thus, the “free” in “free software” refers to freedom, not cost—a distinction that is key to understanding Stallman’s career. A few months after publishing the GNU Manifesto, he founded the Free Software Foundation, of which he is still the president. “Proprietary software was the norm when I started the GNU project in 1983,” he told me by phone. “It was because you could no longer get a computer that you could run with free software.”

Now, as a direct result of his work, you can. A home system running exclusively free software today might include, in addition to a GNU/Linux operating system, LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office, GIMP rather than Photoshop, and the IceCat browser in place of Chrome or Internet Explorer. There is a free version of nearly every software program in common use; more than eight thousand are currently listed in the Free Software Foundation’s program directory. While few such programs are as popular as their proprietary counterparts, interest in free software has increased alongside rising concerns about privacy, as well as about corporate and governmental control over media, culture, and commerce. (A few weeks ago, the technology writer Dan Gillmor published a widely shared piece on Medium about his own efforts toward adopting such a free system.)

Perhaps the most significant innovation in the GNU Manifesto is a method of rights protection known as “copyleft,” which gave rise to GNU GPL software licenses, the first of which was issued in 1989. Under a GPL license, you are free to use, study, modify, and share a software program according to your own wishes, provided (and this is the important part) that any works you make from it are shared on the same terms; you can’t conceal any of it, as A.T. & T. did with Unix. The idea borrows from existing copyright law, but grants protection to users, rather than authors.

Stallman wrote:

GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.

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