Why do we hack?

#109 · ✸ 59 · 💬 48 · one year ago · curious.galthub.com · tgvaughan · 📷
Once again EmacsConf went to fountainhead of free software and gave us a chance to hear from and interact with rms. People in the public eye often get on a soapbox repeating the same lines. Stallman even chose to open by playing an 8 year old TED talk he did extolling software freedom. As someone who's been around computers and Emacs long enough to have started using the TECO based emacs something like 3 years after RMS created it, I look back fondly on some of the tech I've used: TOPS20, TOPS10, Multics, VMS, BSD Unix, SunOS, Solaris, etc and thanks to places like SDF and friends I can still log in and tinker in those environments once in a while. In this context GNU Emacs itself is now 40 years old and was at the time a re-implementation of a then 7 or 8 year old system targeted to run on a re-implementation of a system created in 1969. I appreciate the desire to have one's software used widely, but I think its equally valid for people to do their own thing, possibly in nitch areas or on obsolete platforms, just because they want to. I'd even say these are prime examples of people exercising software freedom on their own hardware and, at least to them, this is "Useful computing".
Why do we hack?



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