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The future of open source is still very much in flux | MIT Technology Review

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Free and open software have transformed the tech industry. But we still have a lot to work out to make them healthy, equitable enterprises. When Xerox donated a new laser printer to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1980, the company couldn’t have known that the machine would ignite a revolution. The printer jammed. And according to the 2002 book Free as in Freedom, Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer at MIT, tried to dig into the code to fix it. He expected to be able to: he’d done it with previous printers. The early decades of software development generally ran on a culture of open access and free exchange, where engineers could dive into each other’s code across time zones and institutions to make it their own or squash a few bugs. But this new printer ran on inaccessible proprietary software. Stallman was locked out—and enraged that Xerox had violated the open code-sharing system he’d come to rely on. A few years later, in September 1983, Stallman released GNU,

The future of open source is still very much in flux | MIT Technology Review Skip to Content When Xerox donated a new laser printer to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1980, the company couldn’t have known that the machine would ignite a revolution. The printer jammed. And according to the 2002 book Free as in Freedom , Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer at MIT, tried to dig into the code to fix it. He expected to be able to: he’d done it with previous printers. The early decades of software development generally ran on a culture of open access and free exchange , where e

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