Jury-Law books

When he encountered a lab employee, he asked if
the lab had any spare manuals it could loan to an
inquisitive student. "They had some, but a lot of
things weren't documented," Stallman recalls. "They
were hackers after all."
Stallman left with something even better than a manual:
a job. Although he doesn't remember what the first
project was, he does remember coming back to the AI Lab
the next week, grabbing an open terminal and writing
software code.
Looking back, Stallman sees nothing unusual in the AI
Lab's willingness to accept an unproven outsider at
first glance. "That's the way it was back then," he
says. "That's the way it still is now. I'll hire
somebody when I meet him if I see he's good. Why wait?
Stuffy people who insist on putting bureaucracy into
everything really miss the point. If a person is good,
he shouldn't have to go through a long, detailed hiring
process; he should be sitting at a computer writing code."
To get a taste of "bureaucratic and stuffy," Stallman
need only visit the computer labs at Harvard.


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