788 lines
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788 lines
56 KiB
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START DOKS......
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______________________________
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| An ESLF Republication of.... |
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Original Publication: |______________________________| >Whole Earth Magazine
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Issue: =-------> | | >May 1985
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Pages: =----------> | H A C K E R S ' | >44-55
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| - --------- - |
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| Conference 1984 |
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| |
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| "Keep Designing" |
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Let us now praise | | Story of the Hackers'
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famous hackers" | How the Information Economy | Conference. Famous,
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| is being created and shaped | infamous, and un-
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was the headline in | by the Hacker Ethic | known, they praised
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the Time magazine |______________________________? each other with
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nightlong attention
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=------------------------------------------> exuberance.
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=------------------------------->
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think hackers -- dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers
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- are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ramers of the U.S. Constitution.
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No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and
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ucceeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporate
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merica, their success forced corporate America to adopt their style in the
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nd. In reorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal
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omputers, the hackers may well have saved the American economy. High tech is
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ow something that mass consumers do, rather than just have done to them, and
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hat's a hot item in the world. In 1983 America had 7O percent of the $18
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illion world software market, and growing.
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The quietest of all the '6Os subcultures has emerged as the most
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nnovative and most powerful -- and most suspicious of power.
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Some of the shyer people you'll ever meet, hackers are also some of the
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unniest. The standard memory of the Hackers' Conference is of three days and
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wo long nights of nonstop hilarity.
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These supposed lone wolves, proud artists, in fact collaborate with
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lee. Though famous as an all-male tribe, they have zero separatist jokes in
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heir style; they comfortably welcomed the four female hackers (of 125 total)
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t the conference, and a couple of romances blossomed.
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Like the prose of poets, there is impressive economy in the conversation
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f hackers, whose life work is compressing code, after all. What follows is
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n only-mildly-edited transcript of one morning discussion on The Future of
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he Hacker Ethic, moderated by Steven Levy. Thirty-six voices are heard. Some
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re millionaires, some are quite poor. In how they treat each other, you
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annot tell the difference.
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! -Stewart Brand
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_ _______________________________________________________________________ _
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Some of the most high-powered pioneers in the computer business were
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to reassess their origins. In a now intensely commercial business, they
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ound they still were wanting to keep the faith in what they variously called
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he hacker drive, the hacker instinct, the Hacker Ethic.
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_______________________________________________________________________ _
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DISCUSSIONS FROM THE HACKERS' CONFERENCE, NOVEMBER 1984
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-| ------------------------------------------------- |-
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STEVEN LEVY (author of "Hackers") : The Hacker Ethic, as I think all of you
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now, isn't something which back at MIT in the early '6Os people would raise
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heir hand and say, "I vow to follow the hacker ethic." It's a term I used to
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escribe what I felt was a shared philosophy, not only of the hackers at MIT,
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ut the people in the Homebrew Computer Club who designed the first small
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omputers in the mid-'7Os, and some of the younger people who started hacking
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ith those small computers later on.
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BILL BURNS (Homebrew-era hobbyist) : Steve, can a person be a hacker without
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eing the kind of super-star or wizard that you're talking about in the book?
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an someone be a low-level hacker just because he wants to have fun and an
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ntellectual curiosity about the computer? Even though maybe he's not very
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ood as a coder?
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STEVEN LEVY : One issue that I found at MIT was that some people were
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omplaining for that very reason -- that you had to be a "winner," you had to
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! e rally good to be considered a hacker.
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BRUCE WEBSTER (co-author of SUNDOG, a great capitalists-in-space game) : One
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f the ironies in that is that "hacker" originally denoted someone who wasn't
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ery good. It was someone who was not skilled professionally but tried to
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ake up in volume what they couldn't produce in quality. (laughter) Or at
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east he was using a shotgun rather than a high-powered rifle.
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RICHARD STALLMAN (MIT system hacker, author of EMACS) : You're always gonna
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ind that if there's a community of real wizards they're gonna lose patience
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ith the people who aren't. That doesn't mean that they can't be real
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ackers.
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VOICE : The question is, "Can you hack in BASIC?"
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CHORUS : Nooooo!
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ROBERT WOODHEAD (co-author of WIZARDRY, the classic role-playing adventure
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ame) : Only if you're very very good can you hack in BASIC. (laughter,
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pplause)
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BRIAN HARVEY (former MIT and Atari hacker, now working with kids) : The term
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hack" at MIT predates computer hacking. The way it started out, there were
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wo kinds of people. There were "tools," who were the ones who went to all
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heir classes and when they weren't in class they were in the library. And
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hen there were "hackers," who never went to class and slept all day and did
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omething or other all night. Before it was computers it was model railroads,
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r telephones, or movies, or Chinese food, or anything. Hacking started out
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s not something technical (although it tended to be technical, because this
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s MIT we're talking about), but a sort of approach to what's important in
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ife. It really means being a hobbyist and taking your hobby seriously. If
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rogramming, for example, is something that you do on Sunday afternoons and
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he rest of the time you don't think about it, then you're not a hacker. But
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ou don't necessarily have to be a star to be a hacker.
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Now, if you're at the MIT A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) Lab, at least if you
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ere there when I was there, you did have to be a star in order not to get
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umped on a lot. And that was the problem. It was something that I hated very
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uch.
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DENNIS BROTHERS (author of MACTEP, the first telecommunications program for
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he Macintosh) : It should be pointed out that, at least by the time I got
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here, '64 or so, "hack" meant "a prank," plain and simple, and the better
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he prank the better the hack. Things like the big moon at the Harvard-Yale
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ame was the ultimate hack.
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PHIL AGRE (MIT A.I. Lab) : These days at the A.I. Lab, the word "hack" is
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ery, very diffuse. It is one of the very large number of content-free
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eneric words, like "frob" and "the right thing," that fill the hacker's
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ictionary. I get the impression from the olden days that it once meant
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omething more focused, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it was.
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STEVEN LEVY : Well, without focusing a whole lot on the word, I think there's
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retty much an agreement here that there's a resentment of using the word
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otally to mean breaking into computer systems, and we are talking about it
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n a broader sense. How much of what we see now in programming has that same
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ind of devotion, non-dilettantism, that we saw in the days when people had
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o stay up all night just to get computer time?
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! DOUG CARLSTON (founder and president of Broderbund, publisher of computer
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ames) : May I protest just a little bit? When we were hacking around in the
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id-'6Os at Harvard, it was not the engineering students who were the
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ackers. It was the liberal arts majors whose only computer time available
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as if they gummed up the locks and snuck into the building late at night
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ecause they weren't allowed to sign up for the stuff. You did everything by
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rial and error, because we didn't have any courses, we didn't have access to
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nything other than manuals, and as far as I'm aware the whole group of
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idnight programmers there were people who didn't have any real functional
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se for what they were doing at all. So we called ourselves "hackers."
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BRUCE BAUMGART (early Stanford A.I. hacker) : I was at Harvard in the same
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ears when I found the PDP-I at the Cambridge electron accelerator and to
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tay up all night with it was just incredible. You could roll in at 9 P.M.
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hen the physicists had left and you could stay there till 9 A.M. when they
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olled back in. Do it night after night. I made it to classes but I slept
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hough them.
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STEVE WITHAM (Xanadu, which is a scheme for a worldwide database and writing
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ystem founded by Ted Nelson) : It's not so much a hacker ethic as a hacker
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nstinct. It's sort of like the baby ducks when they see their first moving
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bject. (laughter)
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RICHARD STALLMAN : You see your first computer language and you think, "This
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anguage is perfect." (laughter)
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MARK MILLER (Xanadu) : The computer itself is really the first moving object
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n some sense that any of use have seen. I think that what creates the hacker
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! rive (I won't call it a hacker ethic, and I want to argue about that) is
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hat there's a sense, "There's something terribly important here." It goes
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eyond the effect that this things can have on the world and what I can do
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ith it and all that. "There's something essential here to understand and I
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on't know what it is yet." I still don't know what it is.
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STEVE WOZNIAK (designer of the Apple computer, co-founder of Apple Computer
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nc.) : I think the hacker drive represents the children in us. Children love
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o discover, explore, create something a little beyond what they could
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efore. In school you have the courses that teach you the problem and the
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olution, whereas the hackers tended to be just bright enough to take the
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ittle starting points, the mathematical tools, and build up a solution of
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heir own, and they could discover the optimum solution of the day. The
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acker motivation is what's different. They were intrinsically motivated; the
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hallenge of solving the puzzle was the only reward. The rewards were in
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heir head. It was like a hobby, whereas in the outside world they would have
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job, careers, advancements, salaries -- extrinsic rewards.
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MARK MILLER : The reason I argue against the "hacker ethic": I think that
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teve Levy's book was wonderful and I enjoyed it a lot, but I very much
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esented the way it, I think, tried to shoehorn in this idea that hackers as
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group were necessarily against the idea of intellectual property. I
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onsidered myself a hacker in school, I consider myself a hacker now, and
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've always thought that the idea of intellectual property was a good one.
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RICHARD STALLMAN : There is definitely a tendency for hackers to not put up
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ith someone who wants to deliberately obstruct them from doing something
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! hat's a fun hack. If somebody says, "It's useful for my purposes to prevent
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eople from doing this in-itself-innocent activity, such as prevent people
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rom logging in if I haven't given them accounts, or prevent people from
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unning this program just because I'll get less money if they can run this
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rogram," ...
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VOICE : And use lots of undocumented entry points.
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RICHARD STALLMAN : If the person doesn't see a good reason why he shouldn't
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un that program or why he shouldn't use that computer, if he's a hacker,
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e'll tend to view the bureaucracy that stops him as a challenge rather than
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s an authority that he must respect.
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BILL BURNS : The drive to do it is so strong that it sweeps other things
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side. I think this is one of the big differences between the people that do
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heir hacking on computers that cost a lot and are owned by other people, and
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he people that do their hacking on micros where they own it. If you own the
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icro there's no us and them, nobody's preventing you from doing anything but
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ourself.
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RICHARD STALLMAN : There's still copy-protection, and the fact that you don't
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et the source [codes]; you can't change the program around and learn
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omething.
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STEVEN LEVY : I want to answer Mark's point about intellectual property. I
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ever meant to say that the MIT people were these fantastic people who didn't
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ant to make any money ever. The fact was, for example, in '61, when Steve
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ussell wrote SPACEWAR [the earliest and greatest computer game for 12 years]
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s a hack and some people in the room helped improve it, the improvements
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ame because it was an open program. Of course, Steve couldn't possibly have
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ade any money by releasing SPACEWAR as a product, since I think there were
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nly fifty PDP-Is in total made. Because he had that advantage that no one
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as tempting him, it was very natural to just leave the program in the
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rawer, let anyone look at the code, improve it, and what happened was you
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ot a much better product from it being a universal property. In some more
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serious" things like assemblers and compilers and all sorts of utility
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rograms, the same system benefited everyone there. I think things happened
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hat wouldn't have happened if programs were sequestered away and kept
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roprietary.
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UNIDENTIFIED HACKER : There's one community in which this system does work,
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hat's academe, in particular the community that MIT is. In academia you're
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alued by how much you publish. The whole point is to discover something and
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t the end give it away. And if I could get a reasonable full professorship
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riting software and giving it away, I'd be very happy to do that.
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What I'm doing is something like science but different from science, because
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n science I'm pushing the boundaries discovering new things. But only in
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omputers do those things that I discover wrap around and increase my ability
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o discover the next thing. Computers have this nice feedback, positive
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eedback, that everything I do on my computer makes it better for me doing
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ore things on my computer. No other field works that way.
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VOICE : Organic chemistry works that way. All fields work that way.
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BRUCE BAUMGART : I think we've forgotten something there, which is the bad
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ights at the lab, when the hackers stepped on each other's toes, when you
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ere trying to get a paper done and somebody was hacking the text editor. You
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ere trying to take a television picture, and somebody was running music
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sing up all the disk space. There was anarchy. The big dogs would survive.
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ou would go home, your stuff undone, because somebody bigger than you and
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ore powerful than you and knew more codes, whatever, had stepped on you, or
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our disks or your pictures or something. Didn't you have bad times? Or were
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ou always the biggest dog on the machine.
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RICHARD STALLMAN : I always tried to oppose having it be a society of dog eat
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og. I never tried to eat the dogs that were smaller than me. Whenever a
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erson tried to act toward me as if I were above him, I'd always say, "I'm
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ot above you; do what you think you should do; you shouldn't get orders from
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e." And if somebody thought he was above me, I would say, "You can't give me
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rders. See if you can get me fired; I want to do what I want."
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BRIAN HARVEY : I think we're trying much too hard for a sort of unanimity
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ere that doesn't exist about what all of us hackers are like. For example,
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f you want to bring up the word "ethics" -- I felt very uncomfortable last
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ight with a couple of people who got up and talked about how they made their
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iving by stealing from the telephone company. I think it's one thing to be a
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igh school kid wanting to show off that you're capable of making a phone
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all without paying for it, and it's something else to be an adult being in
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he career of encouraging people to be thieves.
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STEVE WOZNIAK : I'd like to discuss the telephone topic from a hacker
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erspective, and it applies to software piracy. There are some people that
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ctually have money and are ethical. Back then we went out and treated
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! elephone blue boxing and the like as a fun exploration of the phone system.
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ow could we make every call in the world, in every nook and cranny and all
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hat, but I'll tell you, my phone bill as a college student at Berkeley was
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ery high because I paid for all the calls I would have paid for anyway. I
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nly used the phone system to explore the network. Some pirates copy software
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nd they'll copy everything and put it in their collection, but if they find
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omething that they do like and decide it's a good one, they'll go out an buy
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t because the producer deserves the money.
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BURRELL SMITH (designer of the Macintosh) : I think one of the common threads
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f hacking is that all of us want a very pure model of what we're working on.
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owadays we're all very complex, we have stock options, salaries, and careers
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nd stuff. Back then it was the joy of being absorbed, being intoxicated by
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eing able to solve this problem. You would be able to take the entire world
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ith its horrible problems and boil it down to a bunch of microchips or
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hatever we were hacking.
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I think another aspect of that is that hackers can do almost anything and be
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hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It's not necessarily high tech. I
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hink it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you're doing. The
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oy of seeing your stuff work is the excitement.
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STEVEN LEVY : Yeah, but aren't there contradictions you have to deal with
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hen those stock options and things like that get in the way? Homebrew had a
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eriod before there was a whole lot of money, when people would come in and
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ay, "Here's the plans to this computer we're coming out with." Then there
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tarted to be secrets kept. How do you keep things going forward as much as
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ossible when you have to keep those secrets, when you have allegiance to
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our company and its proprietary stuff?
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BRUCE BAUMGART : You just graduated from the academic to the commercial.
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here's many worlds, and I think the worlds overlap.
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RICHARD STALLMAN : The question is, does one of them eat up the other so that
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t goes away? That's what seems to happen.
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TED NELSON (author of Computer Lib/Dream Machines, founder of Xanadu) : A
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erspective that hasn't been mentioned is that like the Homebrew Club, people
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ad jobs. As Thomas Jefferson said, "I make war so that my grandchildren can
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tudy philosophy." The person who is studying philosophy is at the top of a
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ood chain. (laughter, applause) The problem when the philosophers find they
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an sell philosophy is that suddenly it's the bottom of a food chain again.
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nly as long as it wasn't something that was commercially available could it
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ave this pure aspect.
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JOHN JAMES (FORTH hacker) : There's a certain kind of contradiction that
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e're still dealing with in the world of FORTH, where the public domain is
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he soul of it and it's also the curse. The advantage of a programming
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anguage is that you can do anything you want to do, so you need complete
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ccess to the source code, of course, and they you need to be able to use the
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roducts in any way you want without having to let somebody look at your
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ooks in the future time. If that's not available, then the advantages of
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ORTH really aren't there. But the problem is that if everything is public
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omain, then how do you support elaborate systems development and so on?
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hat's what we really haven't dealt with.
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! RICHARD GREENBLATT (from MIT days "the archetypal hacker...the hacker's
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acker" --Hackers) : I think it's very fundamental that source codes be made
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vailable. I don't equate that with giving them away necessarily. I think it
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ight be possible to work out some means by which a source code was available
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nd yet it was licensed, on a basis that didn't involve a great deal of
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ureaucrat overhead to the proceedings. If that could be done then you would
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et the best of both worlds. The people who had written something originally
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ould have the benefit of some royalties; they would also have somewhere in
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here "copyright so-and-so" and it would be recorded that they were
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esponsible for a particular piece of code.
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Having thought about this a lot, I've come up with only a few ideas to try to
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ake it practical. One of them I think is that any such arrangement should
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ave an exponential tailoff. In the first year the royalties should be such
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nd such percent; after another year the royalty goes down one-half of what
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s was previous, or something like that -- so that the royalty pie doesn't
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ust get bigger and bigger, but the people who did it originally eventually
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ecay out, and the people who've contributed more recently get the benefits.
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STEVE WOZNIAK : Hackers frequently want to look at code, like operating
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ystems, listings, and the like, to learn how it was done before them. Source
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hould be made available reasonably to those sort of people. Not to copy, not
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o sell, but to explore and learn from and extend.
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ROBERT WOODHEAD : Well, as a dedicated capitalist exploiter of the masses and
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unning dog lackey of the bourgeois, I find that the software that I write
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sually falls into two different categories. There are finished products like
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! IZARDRY that I sell and make a living on, and then there are the tools that
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wrote to build those products. The tools I will give away to anybody. But
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he product, that's my soul in the product. I don't want anyone fooling with
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hat. I don't want anyone hacking into that product and changing it, because
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hen it won't be mine. It's like somebody looking at a painting and saying,
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Well, I don't like that color over there, so I'll just take a can of paint
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nd change it."
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JERRY POURNELLE (science fiction writer, columnist in Byte magazine) : You
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ever had to deal with editors. (laughter)
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ROBERT WOODHEAD : You I do. I'll tell 'em to got to hell. On the other hand,
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f somebody sees something I did and says to me, "How did you do that?" I'll
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ell 'em in a minute. I'll give them all the information they need so that
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hey can go out and do something better, because what I want to see is really
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reat stuff. That's why all the tools I've developed when I've been working
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n the Lisa, I regularly send them off to Apple so that they can get them out
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here, because I know they're gonna help somebody. Then something really
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reat's gonna come out and take away all the market sales of my product. Then
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'm gonna have to go out and write a better one.
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BOB WALLACE (author and distributor of PC-WRITE', an outstanding word
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rocessing program for IBM PCs and compatibles) : We give away source with
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ur product, and we haven't found it to be a problem. We do what we call
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Shareware." We give away PC-WRITE, and it seems to be supporting use, you
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now.
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When I started, I wanted to do product and I wanted it to be self-supporting.
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! didn't want to do it for another company and have somebody else have
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ontrol over it. I wanted to have control over it and I wanted to make a
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iving. Not having a lot of money for advertising, I figured the way to
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istribute it was, you know, word of disk. Diskettes are a new medium that I
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on't think people have realized how easy they are to copy and what that
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eans, but it gives us a distribution channel.
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It's very hard to get shelf space in stores. But most people choose their
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oftware based on recommendations by other people -- 4O percent, I think.
|
|
ext comes product reviews and next comes advertising. With PC-WRITE, people
|
|
an not only recommend it by they can give it to somebody. People want to
|
|
eel like they can use the software for a month or two and see, "Is this my
|
|
oftware?" How many people here have bought a $5OO package and discovered,
|
|
Well, it isn't quite what I need," and you're out $5OO?
|
|
STEVEN LEVY : You do get royalties?
|
|
BOB WALLACE : Yeah, people do send me money. People after they're using it
|
|
ant to feel safe, they want to feel like there's support, they want to feel
|
|
espectable and part of a larger process, and they want to support companies
|
|
hey like. So they send us money. Support includes a newsletter and updates
|
|
nd phone support and the source code. We've done fairly well. We've sold
|
|
,4OO $1O diskettes, and about 1,7OO people then registered for $75. Then we
|
|
lso sold some on an OEM basis [Original Equipment Manufacturer, where a
|
|
ardware maker or distributor includes software with the machine purchase], a
|
|
ouple thousand that way, because once you're out, and people have heard of
|
|
ou, then you can start working quantity deals where people'll buy your
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ource and modify it and send you royalties.
|
|
STEVEN LEVY : Was all that solely a marketing decision?
|
|
BOB WALLACE : It was a way to do what I wanted to do without getting involved
|
|
ither in another company or with venture capital. And giving software away
|
|
s a lot of fun. You get great letters and great phone calls, people are very
|
|
ppreciative, and they give you some great ideas. At the same time we'll
|
|
ross about $225,OOO this year. It's supporting two of us; we're adding a
|
|
hird person. So you can start a small company that way. I don't know how far
|
|
e can get, I don't know how many people would send in voluntary registration
|
|
oney to Microsoft or something like that.
|
|
STEVE WOZNIAK : In a company sometimes a product gets developed and the
|
|
ompany decides it doesn't fit a market, it won't sell. In that case like
|
|
hat the company should be very free to quickly give it to the engineer,
|
|
egal release; "It's yours, take it out and start your own company." But
|
|
ometimes the companies, because they own the product, will squash it and
|
|
ay, "You cannot have it, even though we're not gonna put it out, and nobody
|
|
lse in the world's gonna get it." That's a hiding of information, and that
|
|
s wrong.
|
|
STEWART BRAND (author of "Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the
|
|
omputer Bums," 1972) : It seems like there's a couple of interesting
|
|
aradoxes that we're working here. That's why I'm especially interested in
|
|
hat Bob Wallace has done with PC-WRITE and what Andrew Fluegelman did before
|
|
hat with PC-TALK. On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because
|
|
t's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ife. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of
|
|
etting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two
|
|
ighting against each other.
|
|
STEVE WOZNIAK : Information should be free but your time should not.
|
|
STEWART BRAND : But then, at what point of amplification is your time being
|
|
o well rewarded that it's getting strange or so under-rewarded that it's
|
|
trange? There's problems there with the market.
|
|
Then there's another paradox which is especially visible here. This
|
|
onference is primarily programmers, almost no one who is primarily
|
|
arketing. In the last year or so the marketing people drove the business,
|
|
nd they're having a touch year. (laughter) And nobody's really sorry about
|
|
hat. There's an opportunity now for the programmers, the creators, the
|
|
ountainhead to reestablish where the initiation of this stuff comes from.
|
|
here it begins.
|
|
STEVE WOZNIAK : You get a lot of problems when you get engineers who are
|
|
nterested just in the technical solution, the right solution. It's got an
|
|
ncredible value to them because it was an incredible discovery, it took a
|
|
ot of work to find it, and they pay no attention to marketing
|
|
onsiderations. Somebody has to use this thing eventually. It has to make
|
|
ense as a product. Sometimes engineers are in control and cause the most
|
|
isastrous consequences for the companies in this business, because they did
|
|
ot act as one person with marketing.
|
|
STEWART BRAND : One of the problems with all that brilliant research at Xerox
|
|
ARC -- which was wasted at Xerox and later at Apple turned into the
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! acintosh -- is that they never got to cycle their stuff through product.
|
|
hey never got to really deal with customers the way Wallace does or
|
|
luegelman does, where they have a direct pipe between themselves and the
|
|
eople who are using their stuff. And since the Shareware guys are not
|
|
ighting their own inventory (because they don't have to have any), they can
|
|
espond with new improvements, new versions all the time. What they're doing
|
|
trikes me as the best solution so far to these paradoxes. One of the things
|
|
'd like to see shared here is the economics of how to be in business for
|
|
ourself or in cahoots with other designers, and have the marketing guys
|
|
orking for you.
|
|
STEVE WOZNIAK : Frequently you have the engineering here and marketing there,
|
|
artitioned. It's much better when the engineers have a lot of marking
|
|
ontent and marketing people have a lot of engineering content. It's much
|
|
ore motivating and more productive.
|
|
TERRY NIKSCH (Homebrew hacker) : Yeah, but I think you're almost getting into
|
|
definition there. I think a hacker works to please himself first and to
|
|
mpress his peers, but as soon as you go for institutional approval, which
|
|
ncludes the institution of the marketplace, I don't think you're hacking
|
|
nymore.
|
|
BOB WALLACE : No, no, no. Shareware is a marketing hack. (laughter, applause)
|
|
STEVE WOZNIAK : Somebody who's designing something for himself has at least
|
|
ot a market of one that he's very close to.
|
|
ANDREW FLUEGELMAN (author and distributor of PC-TALK, and excellent
|
|
elecommunications program for IBM PCs and compatibles; founding editor of PC
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ORLD and Macworld) : That's what got me started. I originally wrote PC_TALK
|
|
s a pure hack. I won't confess what language I wrote it in, but the fact is
|
|
hat I had owned my computer for about a month and I was trying to send my
|
|
iles to someone using a completely different computer, and there was not one
|
|
iece of software in the entire world that would let me do that. I stayed up
|
|
or a lot of nights to figure out a way to do it, and I consider that to be
|
|
ery much within the hacker ethic or spirit.
|
|
What got me away from being a hacker was when I figured out, "How can I get
|
|
his out to people?" Although I'm known for giving away software for free, I
|
|
id it purely to figure out how I could make some money with what I had done.
|
|
he reason it's been successful is very strange. On the one hand, what people
|
|
uy is not really access to the program, or the information. What they're
|
|
ainly buying is the support, the stability, and the fact that it works
|
|
eliably. And the reason for that is because I've had the opportunity to get
|
|
lot of feedback from a lot of people who were pissed off when they got
|
|
ersion 1.6 of the program, found that it didn't work with their modem, and
|
|
hey called me and said, "Hey, I've got this strange situation and here's
|
|
hat you can do to fix it."
|
|
I call that "freeback," and that's really what made the program successful.
|
|
ight now my highest cost is user support. More than half of all the money I
|
|
pend is to have people on the phone telling, not programmer types, but just
|
|
egular people, how to use the program. In that respect my business looks
|
|
imilar to very commercial ventures. The difference is that it's been made
|
|
ccessible to people in a very unconditional way, and that's what people have
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! esponded to.
|
|
DAVID LUBAR (games designer for Activision) : You don't have to say that you
|
|
ither give it away or sell it. For example, a while back, just for the fun
|
|
f it, I tried to see if I could compress Apple pictures and I came up with
|
|
ome code that required less disk space, so I published the listing in a
|
|
agazine and as a result other people looked at it and said, "Hey, here's a
|
|
etter way," and it evolved through a whole bunch of people coming up with
|
|
ore and more compression. At the same time I gave the code itself to a
|
|
ublisher who put it out as part of a package and I get nice royalties from
|
|
t. So it's not one world or the other.
|
|
DOUG CARLSTON : I think that there's a certain level of naivete here about
|
|
he commercial world as a whole. All you have to do is take a look at the
|
|
apanese Ministry of Industry and Trade, MITI. Japan certainly has gotta be
|
|
ne of the most commercial nations on Earth. With software they essentially
|
|
ant to require anybody who owned any proprietary product to license it to
|
|
nybody who felt that they had a need for it, and if they refused such a
|
|
icense, it would then be stripped of its copyright protection. That's
|
|
ecause Japan feels that it has a strong competitive advantage in the
|
|
anufacture and sale of hardware, but they feel like they're years behind in
|
|
he development of software, and frankly what they really wanted to do was
|
|
trip the advantage that other nations had in the development of software
|
|
rom them so that they could take it if they wanted to use it.
|
|
The dissemination of information as a free object is a worthy goal, it's the
|
|
ay most of us learned in the first place. But the truth of the matter is,
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! hat people are going has more and more commercial value and if there's any
|
|
ay for people to make money of it, somebody's gonna try to get an angle on
|
|
t. So I think that it ought to be up to the people who design the product
|
|
hether or not they want to give it away or sell it. It's their product and
|
|
t should be a personal decision.
|
|
BILL ATKINSON (author of MACPAINT, the landmark graphics program on the
|
|
acintosh) : Sometimes it's not even money. When I was working on QUICKDRAW I
|
|
ame across some improvements, real good algorithms, that I'd never seen
|
|
efore that I would love to tell lots of people about, because I think
|
|
hey're really neat hacks. and yet, I want to see Apple around in twenty
|
|
ears. It's not money for me; they're not paying me money to not talk about
|
|
UICKDRAW. I just know there's something there that gives Mac and advantage
|
|
ver and IBM PC and I don't really want to see IBM rip off QUICKDRAW. I
|
|
on't. (applause)
|
|
ANDREW FLUEGELMAN : The problem is just distribution. There's been no thing
|
|
n Earth so easy to distribute to people as software. The reason that we go
|
|
ut and pay five to ten or twenty thousand dollars for a car is because you
|
|
eed a key to drive it and it's usually sitting behind a fence at the
|
|
ealer's showroom. The fact is that no matter how hard we work on something,
|
|
ow much inspiration or insight we put into it, once it's completed, in the
|
|
edium which we work, it's a trivial matter to make a perfect copy and give
|
|
t to anybody in the world, instantly. That's what's been challenging us. It
|
|
as nothing to do with whether it's easier or harder to make cars or write
|
|
rograms.
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! TED KAEHLER (programmer at Xerox PARC -- Palo Alto Research Center) : Do you
|
|
hink it's reasonable, through the scheme you're using to support Freeware,
|
|
hat everyone in this room could be making a living that way?
|
|
ANDREW FLUEGELMAN : I really don't know. I did it just as a giggle. The
|
|
eason I started was because I'd finished this program, I was gonna send it
|
|
ut, and I knew that I didn't have a prayer of coming up with a
|
|
opy-protection scheme that some kid in San Diego wasn't gonna break the
|
|
irst night, so I figured I've gotta work with the system somehow.
|
|
TED KAEHLER : You must know something about whether or not this many people
|
|
ould be doing that.
|
|
ANDREW FLUEGELMAN : I think maybe, if a lot of people were willing to put out
|
|
hat I would call fully supported programs. That means not just something
|
|
hat gets the job done for you, which is what I did in the first round, but
|
|
ne that is error-trapped, that is documented, that is supported, that looks
|
|
ike it's been given all those trappings of value. Then maybe you can appeal
|
|
o people's sense of value. It's worked for me, I know it's worked for Bob
|
|
nd for a few others.
|
|
DOUG GARR (journalist from Omni) : Could you tell us how the economics of
|
|
reeware works?
|
|
ANDREW FLUEGELMAN : I send out the program and I ask for a $35 contribution,
|
|
hich for a program of its type many people say is one-fifth the cost of what
|
|
hey'd expect to spend commercially. So it's a bargain to begin with. I
|
|
ncourage people to make copies. I try and discourage people from re-selling
|
|
he program and large corporations from making thousands of copies. I tell
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! eople that whether they liked it or not, give it to a friend and if their
|
|
riend likes it then maybe they'll send me some money. I would guess that
|
|
bout one-tenth of the people who are using the program now have paid for it,
|
|
nd there are a lot of commercial software companies that can't make that
|
|
laim. (laughter)
|
|
STEVEN LEVY : There's someone here who's supporting a program that doesn't
|
|
sk for money. Dennis Brothers, do you want to tell us about MACTEP and what
|
|
ou've done there?
|
|
DENNIS BROTHERS : It's kind of a strange situation. I wrote it for my own
|
|
se. I needed a communications program for the Macintosh, so I wrote it, and
|
|
t turned out to be something that a lot of other people wanted as well. It's
|
|
ery primitive, very crude, compared to PC-TALK, but it was the right place
|
|
nd the right time, and there was tremendous response for it. I'm kicking
|
|
yself a little now; maybe I should have put a little message in there:
|
|
Please send 35 bucks." (laughter)
|
|
ANDREW FLUEGELMAN : I just want to know: How many people in this room are
|
|
sing Dennis's program and would send him money for it? I would.
|
|
VOICE : Why don't you ask it as two questions? (laughter)
|
|
ANDREW FLUEGELMAN : No, it's a compound question.
|
|
DENNIS BROTHERS : It is not a high enough quality program, in my estimation,
|
|
o warrant that. And I don't have to time to put into it to bring it up to
|
|
he level of PC-TALK where I believe it would be worth that kind of
|
|
ontribution.
|
|
ART KLEINER (telecommunications editor for Whole Earth Software Catalog and
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! hole Earth Review) : You had time to hang out on Compuserve [network] and
|
|
nswer people's questions, though.
|
|
DENNIS BROTHERS : Yeah, but that's more for the fun of it. I don't have any
|
|
etter luck explaining this to my wife than explaining it to you guys.
|
|
laughter) Someday I may make most of my income off that program and its
|
|
erivatives and related things, but today my primary business is completely
|
|
nrelated to that, and I just don't have the time. I give what support I can,
|
|
or much the same reason that I'm at this conference, for the interaction
|
|
ith other hackers over the network. I don't know, I'm having a little
|
|
rouble in my own mind figuring out just why I did it the way I did it
|
|
RICHARD STALLMAN : What would you think if someone else wanted to work on
|
|
mproving it, say, and then distributing it as freeware and split the results
|
|
ith you?
|
|
DENNIS BROTHERS : It has happened and they are not splitting (laughter) and I
|
|
on't know how to handle that.
|
|
BRIAN HARVEY: I'd like to argue against the idea of intellectual property in
|
|
oftware. And here's why. I have a version of LOGO for UNIX that I worked on,
|
|
hat I wrote. So it's my intellectual property, right? I started with
|
|
omething that somebody else did and improved it. I improved it a lot; it's
|
|
bout 9O percent me. But I started with somebody else's structure. Now,
|
|
efore that he started with some terrific intellectual work done by Seymour
|
|
apert and Wally Fertzog and the gang at BBN [Bolt, Beranek & Newman, a
|
|
ambridge research institute] and MIT. I also started from the work done by
|
|
en Thompson and Dennis Ritchey and Brian Kernighan to give me the
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! rogramming tools that I needed to write that thing. I also started with a
|
|
hole basis of material support from the guys who built the hardware and
|
|
esigned the hardware. Okay? That's not to say that I didn't do anything.
|
|
VOICE : Don't forget your mother and father. (laughter)
|
|
BRIAN HARVEY : Damn straight. And the people who were paying my salary while
|
|
was doing it -- they weren't paying me exactly to do that (laughter), but
|
|
ang on, the truth is I was a teacher in a high school and I needed this
|
|
rogram to teach my kids. They weren't paying me to be a programmer, but I
|
|
id it because it was something I needed to support my work. The point is
|
|
hat I did was based on the work of a hell of a lot of other people, all
|
|
ight? I think that's true of anything that anybody does. If I say fuck the
|
|
orld this is my thing and I'm in it for what I can get, then I'm a son of a
|
|
itch.
|
|
STEVE WOZNIAK : Philosophically you go higher and higher and higher and the
|
|
hole world is the best thing. If the world gains, that's better than if your
|
|
ittle country gains, or your little company gains. But then we don't want
|
|
he others to get it, because "If IBM gets it it's gonna be a bad outcome for
|
|
he People." It turns out that that's either bullshit or something else, but
|
|
t's bullshit. It turns out if IBM got it the rest of the world would really
|
|
ave more and do more. We really just want to make as much money as we can
|
|
ff of what we put our time in. Now you take that one level further and ... I
|
|
orget what I was gonna say. (laughter, applause)
|
|
JERRY JEWELL (founder of Sirius Software, publisher of computer games) : I
|
|
hink in most cases the programmers here who are wanting to make money at
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! his are a lot like witchdoctors. As long as they can keep a secret how they
|
|
o things, it appears to be magic to John Q. Public, and they're gonna make
|
|
iving, but as soon as everybody has a computer and knows how to program and
|
|
e have languages that don't require any special knowledge, your income's
|
|
onna go away.
|
|
DAVID LUBAR : But there are more people willing to buy games and play them
|
|
han are willing to write them.
|
|
JERRY JEWELL : Right. Because they don't know how to write them.
|
|
STEVE WOZNIAK : I remember what I was gonna say. The company wants to keep it
|
|
ecret to make as much money as they can, but here's how we get beyond that
|
|
evel. We say that the whole world wins because other people are more
|
|
nspired to go write their own programs and design their own hardware because
|
|
hey're gonna make money. They're gonna make so much product and do so well
|
|
ff it that they'll go out and do the most incredible things. They're
|
|
nspired. That's the American way.
|
|
RICHARD GREENBLATT : There is a force in this world for standardization. It
|
|
here's a knowledgeable marketplace people will say, "Gee, we want to do
|
|
hings a standard way." That's what IBM really did right. They said, "We're
|
|
onna have an open architecture on the PCs," and they advertised that and it
|
|
as the one thing they did right, and look where it got 'em. In software that
|
|
ame thing can happen. If you have something done right and it's standardized
|
|
nd it's public, people will want that as opposed to the proprietary thing.
|
|
nd itas not necessarily because it's better today than the proprietary
|
|
hing, but they realize that it is building a foundation and over the long
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! erm maybe it will get to be better than the proprietary thing.
|
|
STEVE WOZNIAK : Customers set the standards.
|
|
RICHARD GREENBLATT : Customers inevitably will set the standards, no matter
|
|
hat.
|
|
DAVE HUGHES ("Sourcevoid Dave," system operator of pace-setting bulletin
|
|
oard system -- 3O3/632-3391) : Hackers are doomed, and you just better
|
|
ccept that. (Hsssss) Not doomed to extinction, you're doomed to live a life
|
|
n which you're on the frontier. Nobody pays for my WORD-DANCE, nobody paid
|
|
or your early stuff, nobody paid for T.S. Eliot's first goddamn poems. When
|
|
e got commercial, then the ethic meant when he made it he damn well better
|
|
ycle back, and al least Apple and a few companies try to give it back, and
|
|
he Shareware and Freeware is an attempt to try to reconcile that boundary
|
|
oward an ethic and a commitment.
|
|
HENRY LIEBERMAN (MIT A.I. Lab) : How does the frontier get supported? How do
|
|
he centers of research and the centers of education get supported? I think
|
|
here is another kind of software piracy going on that's not discussed very
|
|
uch, and the villains are not high school kids who copy discs and break
|
|
ecret codes. They're executives in three-piece suits that work for large
|
|
orporations and drive Mercedes. They make money off the results of research
|
|
nd education, and they don't kick very much back to support the next
|
|
eneration.
|
|
VOICE : They will argue that they paid the taxes that funded the MIT A.I. Lab
|
|
HENRY LIEBERMAN : That's true, and that is only reason that place like MIT
|
|
nd Stanford don't disappear entirely off the face of the Earth. We have this
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! aradoxical situation where the computer industry is booming and yet places
|
|
ike MIT and Stanforl do['t Aave secure support. It's very likely that I will
|
|
e out of a job in a year. Place like the MIT A.I. Lab get no direct benefit
|
|
rom places like IBM or Apple. Well, that's not true, that's not true. They
|
|
ive us discounts on their machines, and that's very helpful.
|
|
And they contribute some cash, but the amount they contribute is piddling in
|
|
he sense that when it comes time to pay my salary, the people I work for
|
|
ave to go begging to people like ARPA and they have to promise to build
|
|
ombs (murmuring) [ARPA is Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the
|
|
efense Department] and that disturbs me deeply. I and my colleagues come up
|
|
ith important ideas which people acknowledge helps support the industry and
|
|
akes money for people. I would like to be able to pursue my work without
|
|
aving to go to the Defense Department.
|
|
RICHARD STALLMAN : It's worse that even, because at a university paid for by
|
|
veryone in the country an idea will be developed almost to the point where
|
|
ou can use it, but then the last bit of work will be done by some company
|
|
nd the company will get lots of money, and those of us who already paid for
|
|
ost of the work won't be able to get the sources even though we paid for
|
|
hose sources to be written.
|
|
LES ERNEST (founder of Imagen Systems, former head of Stanford A.I. Lab) :
|
|
arious ideas have been given about what is the essence of hacking. Is it
|
|
ltruism or is it financial motive? My view is that it's primarily an ego
|
|
rip, by most people. All good hacks are done by somebody who thinks he can
|
|
o it a lot better than anybody else, and he goes off and does it. There are
|
|
ery few team hacks that one can think of that went anywhere. (murmuring) Of
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ourse commercial development is intrinsically a team effort, and therefore
|
|
here is always some tugging going on when you change over from being a
|
|
acker to trying to do some commercial development. It was mentioned a little
|
|
hile ago that Japan, while they have good hardware, don't seem to have good
|
|
oftware for the most part. My view is, that's a cultural problem; Japanese
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ulture values team effort very much; it does not value ego trips.
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BILL BURNES: I think Les is right, and I also agree with what Woz said, and I
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ould like to propose that we separate two things. I think the "hacker drive"
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s individual, it's a drive within us. It's what happens when we're doing
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omething absolutely useless; we just decide to tickle a line of code and see
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here it went at some weird 3 A.M. on a Saturday morning. But then what
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appens to the product of that is a whole 'nother set of questions. I think
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f we can separate the hacker drive from the products of hacking, which can
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ither have no economic value or tremendous economic value but still have the
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ame hacker value, then I think the discussion will get a little father.
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LEE FELSENSTEIN (designer of Osborne I, co-founder of Community Memory) : If
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ou're only dealing with one of those two things in your life, if you define
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ourself in only one area, you are crippled, I say. I've seen a lot of
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ripples on the other side, too. If you're only taking stuff that other
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eople make, and playing games with it somehow get money out of it -- I
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elieve that people like that (of course, I'm not one of them) (laughter) ...
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eople like that know that they're the ones that are playing the win/lose
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ame. "If I give it to you I must take it from him." And that results in what
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and other call the "production of scarcity."
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Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! We have a responsibility to know about and live to a certain extent on the
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ther side of the fence and find out what happens with these things once
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hey're produced. And we should also expect the people who live most of their
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ives over there to come onto our side and learn to play a little bit, learn
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o express some of their own creativity. Concentrating on one thing alone
|
|
akes you into a deformed person.
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|
DICK HEISER (owner and proprietor of the original Computer Store in 1975, now
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|
ith Xanadu) : It seems like you can have a variable amount of your own
|
|
ontent in something. As a computer retailer I found myself turning over
|
|
ther people's goods. I wanted to distinguish the quality of my service, but
|
|
found that hard. Don Lancaster, who wrote the book called 'The Incredible
|
|
ecret Money Machine' (applause), talked about the fact that if your are
|
|
aximizing the added value, rather than trying to leverage other people's
|
|
oney or other people's work, then a miracle can go on.
|
|
You have to be committed, and you don't know how it's gonna work out, but the
|
|
mount of power factor that's going on in this technology is so astounding
|
|
hat you ought to be encouraged to try. In this miraculous environment, we
|
|
ind people like Bob Wallace doing things that succeed very much beyond the
|
|
xpectations that he probably had. Similarly my store started out as kind of
|
|
hacker-type thing that became much too commercial. You keep deciding, "Is
|
|
hat what I want?"
|
|
You keep designing, you keep adding personal value, and the miracle keeps
|
|
appening. It doesn't happen for everybody, unfortunately, and it doesn't
|
|
appen automatically, but if you're willing to experiment, and if you beware
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! f too much money and too many other people getting involved, so that you can
|
|
ake your own decisions, then you're free to try these wonderful things and
|
|
ee if they work. And sometimes they do.
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|
ONFERENCE BACKGROUND - ----------------------------------->
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|
Organizing the Hacker's Conference was like some of the early hacking at
|
|
IT, so collaborative and rapid you couldn't keep track of who did what. It
|
|
ractically fell together around the strength of character and curiosity of
|
|
he participant.
|
|
Kevin Kelly imagined such a conference after reading Hackers, I instigated
|
|
he thing, and Patty Phelan was loaned half-time by John Brochman Associates
|
|
o organize it in two months. Designing to conference itself were four
|
|
ackers: Lee Felsenstein, famed as the master of ceremonies of the Homebrew
|
|
omputer Club at its height, designer of the Osborne I and of Community
|
|
emory; Bill Budge, author of PINBALL CONSTRUCTION SET; Andy Hertzfeld,
|
|
rominent on the Macintosh Development Team, co-designer of the
|
|
hunderscanner; and Doug Carlston, found and president of Broderbund
|
|
oftware, Inc. Steven Levy, along with Whole Earth's Art Kleiner, Matthew
|
|
cClure, and Kevin Kelly, played essential roles in continuity and
|
|
ollow-through. Office Manager Lyn Gray handled relations with the site,
|
|
osemite Institute at Fort Cronkhite, where she used to work.
|
|
It was set up as an invitational conference, no featured speakers, minimal
|
|
udget; all participant paid the same $9O for food and lodging and conference
|
|
o matter how much or little they used. With $5,OOO donated by Doubleday
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! publishers of Hackers and The Whole Earth Software Catalog) the event broke
|
|
moothly even at a modest total of $16,5OO.
|
|
Knowing we had facilities for 15O, over 4OO hackers were invited in three
|
|
aves. That became a saga of its own -- identifying the right 4OO, getting
|
|
urrent addresses and phones of a slippery crowd, getting them to respond
|
|
many are beleaguered; many ignore mail and phone). But once they were one
|
|
he scene, they were the world's easiest group to work with. If anything went
|
|
rong, 1) they didn't care. 2) they could fix it. Staff, volunteers,
|
|
articipants, and press [20 knowledgeable computer reporters were invited]
|
|
lended into on energetic population. As PC Week headlined the following
|
|
eek, "HACKERS FIND WONDER, EACH OTHER AT CONFERENCE."
|
|
Thanks to a $5,OOO donation by Steve Wozniak, the entire amazing weekend
|
|
as videotaped -- making this article possible, as well as a segment on PBS's
|
|
igh Tech Times. Videoist Fabrice Florin (624 Cabrillo, San Francisco, CA
|
|
4119; 415/751-8888) is seeking modest financial assistance to edit together
|
|
half-hour broadcast version of the historic occasion.
|
|
-SB
|
|
|
|
TEVEN LEVY's BOOK - -------------------------------------->
|
|
The founding text for the Hackers' Conference was Steven Levy's 'Hackers -
|
|
eros of the Computer Revolution' (1984; 458 pp.; $17.95 from Doubleday and
|
|
ompany, 5O1 Franklin Ave., Garden City, NY 1153O, or Computer Literacy).
|
|
Levy does for computers what Tom Wolfe did for space with The Right Stuff.
|
|
oth are behind-the-scenes tales of elite athletes pursuing potent new
|
|
Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! echnologies; both are vividly written; both are inspiring.
|
|
The very structure of the book was the occasion for the Conference. Levy
|
|
hronicles three generations of hackers -- the mini-computer all-night coders
|
|
t MIT and Stanford in the '6Os, the hardware hackers around the Homebrew
|
|
omputer Club who made the first personal computers in the mid-7Os, and the
|
|
yriad home-grown programmers on those computers as soon as they hit the
|
|
arket, who gave us the galaxy of consumer software from VISICALC to
|
|
HOPLIFTER. In the succession of generations Levy portrays a gradual
|
|
egrading, commercializing of the Hacker Ethic.
|
|
The Hackers' Conference was called to join the three generations for the
|
|
irst time to see if they had anything to say to each other, and to see where
|
|
he Hacker Ethic really was after years of stress in the boom-and-bust
|
|
omputer business. "Each generation," remarked conference co-designer Lee
|
|
elsenstein, "has suffered an infusion of Big Money. It may be interesting
|
|
or them to compare how they've dealt with that."
|
|
-SB
|
|
END DOKS......
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