If you hear somebody saying something about
intellectual property, without quotes, then he's not
thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join."
Years later, Stallman would describe the GPL's creation
in less hostile terms. "I was thinking about issues
that were in a sense ethical and in a sense political
and in a sense legal," he says. "I had to try to do
what could be sustained by the legal system that we're
in. In spirit the job was that of legislating the basis
for a new society, but since I wasn't a government, I
couldn't actually change any laws. I had to try to do
this by building on top of the existing legal system,
which had not been designed for anything like this."
About the time Stallman was pondering the ethical,
political, and legal issues associated with free
software, a California hacker named Don Hopkins mailed
him a manual for the 68000 microprocessor. Hopkins, a
Unix hacker and fellow science-fiction buff, had
borrowed the manual from Stallman a while earlier. As a
display of gratitude, Hopkins decorated the return
envelope with a number of stickers obtained at a local
science-fiction convention.
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