STALLMAN: Thereis still copy-procection, and the fact that you don't get the source [codesl; you can't change the program araund and learn something, STEVEN LEVY: I want to answer Mark's point about inteilectuat property. I never meant to sey that the MIT people were these fantasšc people who didn't want to make any money ever. The fact vvas, for example. in '61, when Steve Russell wrote SPACEWAR [the eor- liest and greatest computer game for 12 yearsl as a hack ar~d some people in the room helped improve it, the improvements came because it was an open program. Of course, Steve couidn't possibly have made any money by releasing SPACEWAR as a product, since I think there v~ere only fifty PDP-ls in toral made. Because he had tbat advantage that no one waS rempt- ing him, it was very naturat to just leave the program in the drower, let anyone took at the code, improve it, and what happened was you got a much better product from it being a universal property. In some more "senaus" things like assembters and compilers and all sorts of utility prograrns, the same system benefited everyone there. I think things happened that wouidn't hsve hawened if programs were sequestered away and kept proprietary. UNIDENTIFIED HACKER: There's one community in which this system does work' and that's academe, in par~ticular the community that h1IT is. In academia you're velued by how much you publish. The whole point is tO distover something and at the end give it away. And if I couid get a reasonable full pr >fessorship wnting software and giving it away, I'd be very happy to do that What l'm doing is something like science but different from science, because in science l'm pushing the bound- aries discovering new things. But only in computers do those things that I discover wrap around and increase my ability tO discover the next thing. Computers have this nice feedback, positive feedback, tbet everything I do on my computer makes it better for me doing rnore things on my computer. No other field works that way. VOICE: Organic chemistry works that way, All fields work that way BRUCE BAUMGART: I think we've forgatren something there, which is the bad nights at rhe lab, when the hacken stepped on each other's toes, when you were trying to get a paper done and somebody was hacking the text editor. You were trying to rake a telovision picture, and somebody was running music us- ing up all the disk space. There was anarchy. The big dogs wouid survive. You wouid go home, your stuff un- done, because somebody bigger than you and more powerfui than you and knew more codes, whatever~ had stepped on you. or your disks or your pictures or something. Didn't you have bad times? Or were you always the biggest dog on the machine? RICHARD STALLMAN: I atways uled to oppose having it be a society of dog eat dog. I never tried to eat the dogs that were smaller tban me. Whenever a person uied to act toward me as if I were above him, I'd always say, "I'm not above you; do what you think you shouid do; you shouidn't get orders from me." And if somobody thought he was above me, I wouid say, "You can't give me orders. See if you can get rne fired; t want to do what I want.'' BRIAN HARVEY- I think we're uying much too hard for a sort of unanirnity here tbat doesn't exist about what all of us hackers are like. For example. if you want to bring up the word "ethics"ÄI felt very un. comfortable last night with a couple of people who got up and talked about how they made their living by stealing from the telephone company. I think it's one thing to be a high schoot kid wanting to show off tbat you're capable of rnaking a phone call without paying for it, and it's something else to be an adolt being in che career of encouraging people to be ~hieves. STEVE WOZNIAK: I'd like to discuss the telephone topic from a hacker perspective. and it applies to soft- ware piracy. There are some people tbat actually have money and are ethical. Back then vve went out and treated telephone blue boxing and the like as a fun ex- piaration of the phone system. How couid we make every cait in the wor~d, in every nook and cranny and all that, but t'll rell you, my phone bill as a coilege stu- dent at Berkeley was very high because t paid for all the calls t wouid have paid for anyway. I only used the phone system to explore the network. Some pirates copy software and they'll copy everything and put it in their collection. but if they find something that they do like and decide it's a good one, they'll go ous and buy it because the producer deserves the money. BURRELL Sh1ITH (designer of the Macintosh): I think one of the common threads of hacking is tbar alt of us want a very pure rnodel of what we~re working on. Nowedays we're alt Yery compiex, we have stock op- tion~ salaries, and careers and stuff. Back then it was the joy of being absorbed, being inroxicated by being able to solve this problem. You would be able to take the entire wortd with its horrible problems and boil it down to a bunch of microchips or whatever we were hacking. I think another aspect of that is tbet hackers can do almos~ anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenrer. It's not necessarily high tech. I ~hink it has to do with cr~ftsmanship and caring about what you're doing. The joy of seeing your stufl work is the excitement. STEVEN LEVY: Yeah, but aren't there contradictions you have to deal with when those stock options and things like that get in the way? Homebrow had a perlad before there was a whole lot of money, when poople wouid come in and ssy. "Here's the plans tO this com- puter we're coming out with.'' Then ehere started to be secrets kept. How do you keep things going for- ward as much as possible when you have to keep those secrets, when you hsve allegiance to your company and its proprietary stuff? BRUCE BAUMGART: You iast graduated from the acedemic to the commercial. There's many worlds, and I think the worlds overlap. RICHARD STALLFtAN: The question is, does one of them eat up the other so chat it goes away? That's vvhat seems to happen. TED NElSON (ainhor of Computer Lib/Dream P1achines, fiounder of Xona~u): A perspactive that hasn't been mentioned is tbat in times like the Hornebrow Club, people had jobs. As Thomas Jefferson said, `'1 make war so that my grandchildren cen study philo- sophy." The person who is studying philosophy is at the top of a food chain. (laughter, appbu#j The prob- lem when the philosophers find they cen sell philosophy is that suddenly it's the bottom of a food chain again. Oniy as long as it wasn't something that vvas commer- cially avallable couid it have this pure aspart. JOHN JAMES (FORTH hacker): There's a certain kind of contradiction that we're still dealing with in ehe vvorld of FORTH, where the public domain is the soul of it and it's also the curse. The advantage of a programming language i5 tbat you can do anything you want to do, so you nead compiete access to the source code, of course, and then you nead to be able to use the products in any way you want without having to let som”body look at your books in all furure time. If tbat's not avall- able, then the advantages of FORTH really aren't there. But the problem is that if ever,vthing i5 public dornain, then how do you support elaborate systems development and so on? That's what we really haven't dezit with RICHARD GREENBLATT (tram MtT days "~e archetypal hacker, . . the hocker's hacker"ÄHackers): I think it's very fundamental tbat source codes be made available. I don'e equate that with giving them away necessarily. I think it might be possible to work out some means by which a source code was available and yet it was licensod, on a basis that didn't involve a great deal of bureaucrat overhead to the proceedings. If that couid be done then you vveuid get the best of both worlds. The people who had written something originally wouid have the benefit of some royalties; they wouid aiso have some- vvhere in ehere "copyright so-and-so,' and it wouid be recorded that they were responsible for a particular piece of code. Having thought about this a lot, I've come up with only a few ideas to tr7 eo make it practical. One of them I think is that any such arrangement shouid hsve an exponential tailoff. In the first year the royalties shouid be such and such percent; after another year the royalty goes down one-half of what it was previous, or somethin' like thatÄso that the royalty pie deesn't just get bigger and bigger, but the people who did it originally eventually decay out, and the people who've contributed more recendy get the benefits. STEVE WOZNIAK: Hackers frequently want to look at code. Iike operating systems, listings, and the iike. to learn how it was done before them. Source shouid be made avallable reasonably to those sor~ of people. Not to copy, not to seD, but to expiore and learn from and extend. ROBERT WOODHEAD: Well, as a dedicated capital- ist explc~iter of the masses and running dog lackey of the bourgeois. I find chat Ehe software rhat I write usually falls into two different categories. There are finished prodocts like WIZARDRY that 1 seli and make a living on, and chen there are ~e tools that I wrote ro build those products. The tools I will give away tO anybody. But the product. that's my soul in tbst product. I don't wane anyone fooling with that. I don't want any- one hacking into tbet product and changing it. because then it won t be mine. It's like somebody looking ae a painting and ssying. 'Well, I don't like that color over there, so 1'11 jost ~ke a cen of paint and change it.'' 3ERRY POURNELLE (srience fichon writer, columaist in Byte mogszine) You never had eo deal with editers. (hughterj WOODHEAD: Yes I do. I tell 'em to go to hell. On the other hand, if somebody sees something I did and says tO me, "l~ow did you do that?'' 1'11 tell 'em in a minute. 1'11 give them all che information chey need so that they can 8ø out and do something better, because what I vvant to see i5 really great stuff. That's why all the tools 1tve developed when 1've been working on the Lisa, I regularly send them off to Apple so tbat they can get them out there, because I know they're ganna help somobody. Then something really great's gonna come out and take away all the market sales of my prodact. Then l'm gonna have to go out and write a Above, Richord Sta/lman ~IT) "You see your prst computer langunge, and you think, 'This language is perfiect!'" Far right, Les Eomest (Imagen): "There are very few team hacks tbot one con tAlnk of that went anywhere.',