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Williams, Sam

"Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software"

Despite going on to later
Internet fame as the cocreator of the Usenet alt
heirarchy, Reid says he still has yet to live down that
1979 decision, at least in Stallman's eyes. "He said
that all software should be free and the prospect of
charging money for software was a crime against humanity."In a 1996 interview
with online magazine MEME ,
Stallman cited Scribe's sale as irksome, but hesitated
to mention Reid by name. "The problem was nobody
censured or punished this student for what he did,"
Stallman said. "The result was other people got tempted
to follow his example." See MEME 2.04.
http://memex.org/meme2-04.html
Although Stallman had been powerless to head off Reid's
sale, he did possess the ability to curtail other forms
of behavior deemed contrary to the hacker ethos. As
central source-code maintainer for the Emacs "commune,"
Stallman began to wield his power for political effect.
During his final stages of conflict with the
administrators at the Laboratory for Computer Science
over password systems, Stallman initiated a software " strike,"See Steven Levy,
Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback],
1984): 419.


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