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Software freedom

Filed under
GNU

Richard Stallman, a 27-year-old programmer at the time with MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, wanted to modify the software that drove the new Xerox 9700 laser printer to get it to send out an electronic alert over the network every time the paper jammed so that somebody could walk over to it and fix the problem. When he was denied access to the source code, Stallman recalls, this set him thinking about how software should be shared freely so that users could modify it to suit their needs.

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