Not every programmer participating in this culture
described himself as a hacker, but most shared the
sentiments of Richard M. Stallman. If a program or
software fix was good enough to solve your problems, it
was good enough to solve somebody else's problems. Why
not share it out of a simple desire for good karma?
The fact that Xerox had been unwilling to share its
source-code files seemed a minor annoyance at first. In
tracking down a copy of the source-code files, Stallman
says he didn't even bother contacting Xerox. "They had
already given us the laser printer," Stallman says.
"Why should I bug them for more?"
When the desired files failed to surface, however,
Stallman began to grow suspicious. The year before,
Stallman had experienced a blow up with a doctoral
student at Carnegie Mellon University. The student,
Brian Reid, was the author of a useful text-formatting
program dubbed Scribe. One of the first programs that
gave a user the power to define fonts and type styles
when sending a document over a computer network, the
program was an early harbinger of HTML, the lingua
franca of the World Wide Web.
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