:Stallman: If You Want Freedom Don't Follow Linus Torvalds
Stallman: If You Want Freedom Don't Follow Linus Torvalds Sep 12, 2007, 13 :30 UTC (21 Talkback[s]) (9452 reads) (Other stories by Peter Moon)
"On Feb. 3, 1976, Bill Gates wrote his famous 'open letter to hobbyists' where he stated that software should be paid [for] just like hardware. Did you read that manifesto at the time? What was your impression back then?
"Stallman: I never heard of it at the time. I was not a hobbyist, I was a system developer employed at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. I had little interest in 16-bit microcomputers, because the lab's PDP-10, with a memory equivalent to 2.5 megabytes, was much more fun. Pascal is both weak and inelegant compared with Lisp, our high-level language, and for things that had to be fast, assembler language was more flexible..."
