:12:03
you would have to get a proprietory
operating system.
:12:07
The developers of those systems
didn't share with other people,
:12:10
Instead they tried to control the users,
:12:13
dominate the users, restrict them.
:12:15
Say, if to get the system,
:12:18
you have to sign a promise you won't
share with anybody else.
:12:22
And to me that was essentially a promise
to be a bad person,
:12:27
to betray the rest of the world,
:12:29
cut myself off from society
from a cooperating community.
:12:35
And I had already experienced what happened
when other people did that to us,
:12:40
when they refused to share with us.
:12:42
because they had signed these contracts.
:12:45
And it hurt the whole lab,
:12:47
it kept us from doing useful things before.
:12:51
So I just wasn't going to do that.
:12:54
I thought,"This is wrong!
I am not going to live this way"
:12:59
And from experiences like this
he developed a profound hostility
:13:04
to the idea of
intellectual property and software.
:13:07
He eventually acted this out
by founding the Free Software Foundation.
:13:11
So, I looked for another alternative
and I realized:
:13:17
I was an operating system developer.
:13:19
If I were to develop another operating system.
:13:23
And then as the author,
encourage everyone to share it.
:13:28
Say, everyone, " You come and get it,
use this, form a new community"
:13:33
Not only could I gave myself a way
to keep using computers without
:13:39
betraying other people,
but I'd give it to everybody else, too.
:13:43
Everybody would have a
way out of that moral dilemma
:13:48
And so I realized this was
what I had to do with my life.
:13:52
I actually began the project in January of 1984.
:13:57
That's when I resigned for my job at MIT