This week felt like connecting between the past and present of open source. We were originally going to have two presentations on open source–one involving banking and the financial world, and one involving the generative AI world, but the former was pushed back to a later time due to childcare duties.

Stallman…oh how chaotic you were

As a substitute for the banking open source presentation, we had a little bit of overview of the different leaders and innovators in the open source space. Funnily enough, Jack (my partner for the in class activity) and I had to look a bit more into Richard Stallman, a character who we had previously discussed as the founding father of the open source space (when he found out that he couldn’t get the source code for new printer at the AI Lab he was working at so that he could extend the driver’s functionality and alert users when a print job was completed or to let everyone know about different printer events that might require someone to take a look at the issue).

Let’s just say….this Stallman guy looks way darker than what our professor, Johanna, made it out to be (as her presentation made him sound like the lord and savior in my mind).

Turns out, he was kind of a stubborn guy, which did help out with getting the GNU Project kickstarted, as he realized that he wanted the source code to extend the functionality of a printer driver, but couldn’t get it, and so this encouraged Stallman to get the ball rolling on creating this movement. This whole open source thing would have worked out way differently if it wasn’t for Stallman really wanting the actual source code to the print driver, or if he was complacent and just wanted that functionality to be implemented by the printer company. But this stubbornness also got him kicked out of the GNU Project that he started up in the first place, as he “alienates a large part of those [the GNU Project] want to reach out to”, which runs counter to the GNU Project goals of empowering all computer users (emphasis copied from their website).

On a lighter and funnier note, Stallman did create a bunch of open source developer tools, like gcc, the GNU Debugger, the GNU make, and everyone’s favorite emacs. This guy was crazy enough to throw himself into the emacs vs. vi war by saying that vi is the editor of the beast (aka calling it unholy), though this might’ve been a joke. What a madlad.

I guess being a stubborn guy really gets you far with kickstarting open source for a field…until you just can’t control your own temper, I guess. Maybe this is all warning signs for me to change my own ways, really.

Open Source in a New Frontier

One interesting overarching theme of my studies this week was the fact that the beginning of open source movement and the Open Source AI Definition were both reactionary, not progressive in terms of why it happened. In our Stallman example, he did it after realizing that corporate companies goals ran counter to his own goals, as the printer company refused to provide the source code to the printer driver. And in the present day, we have similarly been betrayed by corporate companies who try to gain our support by saying that their AI innovations are open source, but hiding the fact that there are massive strings attached with how open source these projects are (and how there are some other commercially licensed components to their open source solutions). This was kind of surprising that a) we need to define what open source AI is because of how our previous definitions got loopholed around and b) the ways that companies can get away with calling things open source when they really aren’t. I do wonder in the future if we have to have a rule for open source saying that if a component that is important for the functionality of the open source project is not licensed as open source, then the whole project get disqualified as open source (which would cover things like big tech generative AI systems, but not things like VSCode, where the open source code is the core component of VSCode and the Microsoft-related code are just extra components that are arguably not core to VSCode).