Summary
One engineer’s frustration with a jammed printer ignited the Free & Open-Source movement, reshaping modern computing and securing your right to control the technology you use!
Imagine this – you’re a brilliant late-20s engineer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1980 – a couple years out of Harvard with a reputation as the go-to problem solver when critical systems fail. Your colleagues rely on you to keep the lab’s complex machinery running smoothly, and you’ve earned their trust through countless late-night debugging sessions and hardware modifications.
One particularly troublesome piece of equipment has dominated your attention – a massive printer, roughly the size of a walk-in closet. While frustratingly prone to jams, you’ve managed to breathe new life into it by modifying both its hardware and software to better serve the lab’s unique needs. The collaborative culture of University has always encouraged this kind of innovation, where sharing improvements was standard practice and source code was treated as a communal resource.
One day, everything changes. Not just for you and the lab, but the entire world.
The lab administration, hoping to improve productivity, replaces your modified workhorse with what appears to be a technological marvel – a sleek new Xerox laser printer representing the cutting edge of 1980s printing technology. At first, this seems like a welcome upgrade. But soon, the familiar frustration returns. The new printer jams constantly (just as much as the old one) causing disrupting critical research workflows – and its software refuses to integrate properly with the lab’s existing systems.
Determined to solve the problem as you had with the previous printer, you reach out to Xerox for the source code to modify the printer’s software. To your astonishment, the company refuses your request outright, telling you to stop “poking around” their proprietary systems. Suddenly, your lab has invested thousands of dollars in what has effectively become a costly paperweight – solving none of the original problems while introducing entirely new ones.
Why This Story Matters
You don’t need to imagine this scenario, because this is precisely what happened to Dr. Richard Stallman at the MIT AI Lab in 1980. What might seem like a simple printer jam became the catalyst for one of the most significant movements in computing history. Stallman’s frustration wasn’t merely about fixing a malfunctioning device – it was a fundamental realization about the changing nature of software ownership and user freedom.
At the time, the MIT AI Lab operated under a hacker ethic that valued collaboration, transparency, and the free exchange of software improvements. When Stallman discovered he couldn’t modify the Xerox printer’s software because the company withheld its source code, he recognized a dangerous shift in the industry’s direction.
Proprietary software wasn’t just inconvenient – it represented a philosophical betrayal of the collaborative spirit that had driven computing innovation. This seemingly mundane office equipment crisis ignited Stallman’s determination to create an alternative.
In 1983, Dr. Stallman publicly announced the GNU Project – a revolutionary initiative to develop a complete Unix-like operating system composed entirely of free software. The following year, he left MIT to dedicate himself fully to this mission, establishing the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to support the growing movement.
If you’ve ever taken a Computer Science or Engineering course at Georgia Tech, you’ve likely used tools created by Dr. Stallman without knowing it, decades after their initial release. On nearly every workstation across campus, you’ll find GCC, GDB, and Emacs – foundational programs originally written by Dr. Stallman himself alone, now evolved far beyond their origins through global collaboration. Even languages that don’t directly depend on them often rest upon their infrastructure: Python, for instance, relies heavily on high-performance C++ libraries for machine learning, which are almost universally compiled with GCC.
The Legacy of a Printer Jam
What began as a quest to fix a jammed printer evolved into a profound philosophical stance, captured in Stallman’s Four Essential Freedoms of free software:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish
- The freedom to study how the program works and change it
- The freedom to redistribute copies
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions
These principles, born from printer-related frustration, would eventually reshape the technological landscape. The GNU General Public License (GPL), created to protect these freedoms, became the legal foundation for open-source software development. Without this pivotal moment, the software ecosystem we take for granted today – including the Linux operating system, which combined with GNU utilities created a fully free OS – might never have emerged.
Stallman’s printer story serves as a powerful reminder that technological progress isn’t just about faster processors or sleeker designs – it’s about who controls the technology and whose interests it serves. What seemed like a simple equipment failure in 1980 ultimately sparked a movement that democratized software development, empowered users worldwide, and created the collaborative foundation for modern computing innovation.
What About Open Source?
Dr. Richard Stallman – whose printer-fueled awakening launched this entire movement – consistently identifies only as a Free Software advocate, deliberately rejecting the “Open Source” label. And for good reason. While the Open Source Initiative (founded in 1998 as a fork of Dr. Stallman’s work) champions similar practical benefits – collaborative development, cost efficiency, and Linus Torvalds’ famous “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” principle. Stallman’s Free Software Foundation anchors itself in something far more fundamental: human freedom.
The distinction isn’t semantic – it’s ethical. As the Four Freedoms established decades before “open source” entered the lexicon make clear, access to source code alone is necessary but insufficient. Hence why we chose to name ourselves after the Spanish word “libre” – meaning “fundamentally free.”
A printer driver might be “open-sourced” by a corporation tomorrow – allowing engineers to view its code – but if users remain legally barred from modifying it, redistributing it, or using it in ways the vendor disapproves, it fails Stallman’s core test. True freedom requires not just transparency, but sovereignty: the unassailable right to control the technology you depend on.
This is why Stallman calls Open Source a “seductive distraction.” While corporations embrace open-source models to accelerate development or reduce costs, they often stop short of granting users the freedoms that matter most. Consider today’s “open-washed” ecosystems: devices running Linux kernels but locked down by proprietary firmware, apps built on open frameworks yet shackled by restrictive licenses, or “free” services that monetize user data while denying users control. These exploit open-source practices while violating Free Software’s principles.
Our stance aligns unequivocally with Stallman’s vision. We don’t champion Free Software because it’s pragmatically useful (though it often is), but because it’s morally imperative. We’re not seeking to redefine “open source” – we’re building a movement to make “free software” the unquestioned standard. This isn’t about semantics – it’s about shifting cultural consciousness until “free software” ceases to be a niche ideal and becomes the baseline expectation of an “open source” project. When you install an app, boot a device, or interact with AI, you shouldn’t ask whether your freedoms are protected – you should know they are.
Today, as algorithms shape our lives – from healthcare to democracy – this philosophy transcends code. It’s about ensuring technology serves humanity, not the other way around. Free Software isn’t a development methodology – It’s a covenant. Your freedom to control your tools is non-negotiable. And that covenant began not in a boardroom at a megacorporation, but with one engineer’s refusal to accept a jammed printer as destiny.
Materials for this article were drawn from Dr. Stallman’s Free Software, Free Society, which is freely available to read, download, and distribute.
Want More?
Hear it directly from Dr. Stallman in the video below from the 1980s — and notice Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak voicing his agreement just moments later!