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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 growth typically 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 corporations are making billions on proprietary software program, and far of the know-how round us is inscrutable. However whereas Stallman’s motion could appear to be a failed experiment, the free and open-source software program motion shouldn’t be solely alive and nicely; it has grow to be a keystone of the tech trade. Learn the total story.
—Rebecca Ackermann Rebecca’s story is from the subsequent upcoming challenge of our print journal, which is all about ethics. In the event you don’t subscribe already, signal as much as obtain a duplicate when it publishes. What we are able to study from the most cancers drug scarcity
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