16 START DOKS...... ______________________________ | | | An ESLF Republication of.... | Original Publication: |______________________________| >Whole Earth Magazine Issue: =-------> | | >May 1985 Pages: =----------> | H A C K E R S ' | >44-55 | - --------- - | | Conference 1984 | | | | "Keep Designing" | Let us now praise | | Story of the Hackers' famous hackers" | How the Information Economy | Conference. Famous, | is being created and shaped | infamous, and un- was the headline in | by the Hacker Ethic | known, they praised the Time magazine |______________________________? each other with nightlong attention =------------------------------------------> exuberance. =-------------------------------> think hackers -- dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers - are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ramers of the U.S. Constitution. No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and ucceeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporate merica, their success forced corporate America to adopt their style in the nd. In reorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal omputers, the hackers may well have saved the American economy. High tech is ow something that mass consumers do, rather than just have done to them, and hat's a hot item in the world. In 1983 America had 7O percent of the $18 illion world software market, and growing. The quietest of all the '6Os subcultures has emerged as the most nnovative and most powerful -- and most suspicious of power. Some of the shyer people you'll ever meet, hackers are also some of the unniest. The standard memory of the Hackers' Conference is of three days and wo long nights of nonstop hilarity. These supposed lone wolves, proud artists, in fact collaborate with lee. Though famous as an all-male tribe, they have zero separatist jokes in heir style; they comfortably welcomed the four female hackers (of 125 total) t the conference, and a couple of romances blossomed. Like the prose of poets, there is impressive economy in the conversation f hackers, whose life work is compressing code, after all. What follows is n only-mildly-edited transcript of one morning discussion on The Future of he Hacker Ethic, moderated by Steven Levy. Thirty-six voices are heard. Some re millionaires, some are quite poor. In how they treat each other, you annot tell the difference. Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! -Stewart Brand _ _______________________________________________________________________ _ Some of the most high-powered pioneers in the computer business were to reassess their origins. In a now intensely commercial business, they ound they still were wanting to keep the faith in what they variously called he hacker drive, the hacker instinct, the Hacker Ethic. _______________________________________________________________________ _ DISCUSSIONS FROM THE HACKERS' CONFERENCE, NOVEMBER 1984 -| ------------------------------------------------- |- STEVEN LEVY (author of "Hackers") : The Hacker Ethic, as I think all of you now, isn't something which back at MIT in the early '6Os people would raise heir hand and say, "I vow to follow the hacker ethic." It's a term I used to escribe what I felt was a shared philosophy, not only of the hackers at MIT, ut the people in the Homebrew Computer Club who designed the first small omputers in the mid-'7Os, and some of the younger people who started hacking ith those small computers later on. BILL BURNS (Homebrew-era hobbyist) : Steve, can a person be a hacker without eing the kind of super-star or wizard that you're talking about in the book? an someone be a low-level hacker just because he wants to have fun and an ntellectual curiosity about the computer? Even though maybe he's not very ood as a coder? STEVEN LEVY : One issue that I found at MIT was that some people were omplaining for that very reason -- that you had to be a "winner," you had to Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! e rally good to be considered a hacker. BRUCE WEBSTER (co-author of SUNDOG, a great capitalists-in-space game) : One f the ironies in that is that "hacker" originally denoted someone who wasn't ery good. It was someone who was not skilled professionally but tried to ake up in volume what they couldn't produce in quality. (laughter) Or at east he was using a shotgun rather than a high-powered rifle. RICHARD STALLMAN (MIT system hacker, author of EMACS) : You're always gonna ind that if there's a community of real wizards they're gonna lose patience ith the people who aren't. That doesn't mean that they can't be real ackers. VOICE : The question is, "Can you hack in BASIC?" CHORUS : Nooooo! ROBERT WOODHEAD (co-author of WIZARDRY, the classic role-playing adventure ame) : Only if you're very very good can you hack in BASIC. (laughter, pplause) BRIAN HARVEY (former MIT and Atari hacker, now working with kids) : The term hack" at MIT predates computer hacking. The way it started out, there were wo kinds of people. There were "tools," who were the ones who went to all heir classes and when they weren't in class they were in the library. And hen there were "hackers," who never went to class and slept all day and did omething or other all night. Before it was computers it was model railroads, r telephones, or movies, or Chinese food, or anything. Hacking started out s not something technical (although it tended to be technical, because this s MIT we're talking about), but a sort of approach to what's important in Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ife. It really means being a hobbyist and taking your hobby seriously. If rogramming, for example, is something that you do on Sunday afternoons and he rest of the time you don't think about it, then you're not a hacker. But ou don't necessarily have to be a star to be a hacker. Now, if you're at the MIT A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) Lab, at least if you ere there when I was there, you did have to be a star in order not to get umped on a lot. And that was the problem. It was something that I hated very uch. DENNIS BROTHERS (author of MACTEP, the first telecommunications program for he Macintosh) : It should be pointed out that, at least by the time I got here, '64 or so, "hack" meant "a prank," plain and simple, and the better he prank the better the hack. Things like the big moon at the Harvard-Yale ame was the ultimate hack. PHIL AGRE (MIT A.I. Lab) : These days at the A.I. Lab, the word "hack" is ery, very diffuse. It is one of the very large number of content-free eneric words, like "frob" and "the right thing," that fill the hacker's ictionary. I get the impression from the olden days that it once meant omething more focused, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it was. STEVEN LEVY : Well, without focusing a whole lot on the word, I think there's retty much an agreement here that there's a resentment of using the word otally to mean breaking into computer systems, and we are talking about it n a broader sense. How much of what we see now in programming has that same ind of devotion, non-dilettantism, that we saw in the days when people had o stay up all night just to get computer time? Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! DOUG CARLSTON (founder and president of Broderbund, publisher of computer ames) : May I protest just a little bit? When we were hacking around in the id-'6Os at Harvard, it was not the engineering students who were the ackers. It was the liberal arts majors whose only computer time available as if they gummed up the locks and snuck into the building late at night ecause they weren't allowed to sign up for the stuff. You did everything by rial and error, because we didn't have any courses, we didn't have access to nything other than manuals, and as far as I'm aware the whole group of idnight programmers there were people who didn't have any real functional se for what they were doing at all. So we called ourselves "hackers." BRUCE BAUMGART (early Stanford A.I. hacker) : I was at Harvard in the same ears when I found the PDP-I at the Cambridge electron accelerator and to tay up all night with it was just incredible. You could roll in at 9 P.M. hen the physicists had left and you could stay there till 9 A.M. when they olled back in. Do it night after night. I made it to classes but I slept hough them. STEVE WITHAM (Xanadu, which is a scheme for a worldwide database and writing ystem founded by Ted Nelson) : It's not so much a hacker ethic as a hacker nstinct. It's sort of like the baby ducks when they see their first moving bject. (laughter) RICHARD STALLMAN : You see your first computer language and you think, "This anguage is perfect." (laughter) MARK MILLER (Xanadu) : The computer itself is really the first moving object n some sense that any of use have seen. I think that what creates the hacker Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! rive (I won't call it a hacker ethic, and I want to argue about that) is hat there's a sense, "There's something terribly important here." It goes eyond the effect that this things can have on the world and what I can do ith it and all that. "There's something essential here to understand and I on't know what it is yet." I still don't know what it is. STEVE WOZNIAK (designer of the Apple computer, co-founder of Apple Computer nc.) : I think the hacker drive represents the children in us. Children love o discover, explore, create something a little beyond what they could efore. In school you have the courses that teach you the problem and the olution, whereas the hackers tended to be just bright enough to take the ittle starting points, the mathematical tools, and build up a solution of heir own, and they could discover the optimum solution of the day. The acker motivation is what's different. They were intrinsically motivated; the hallenge of solving the puzzle was the only reward. The rewards were in heir head. It was like a hobby, whereas in the outside world they would have job, careers, advancements, salaries -- extrinsic rewards. MARK MILLER : The reason I argue against the "hacker ethic": I think that teve Levy's book was wonderful and I enjoyed it a lot, but I very much esented the way it, I think, tried to shoehorn in this idea that hackers as group were necessarily against the idea of intellectual property. I onsidered myself a hacker in school, I consider myself a hacker now, and 've always thought that the idea of intellectual property was a good one. RICHARD STALLMAN : There is definitely a tendency for hackers to not put up ith someone who wants to deliberately obstruct them from doing something Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! hat's a fun hack. If somebody says, "It's useful for my purposes to prevent eople from doing this in-itself-innocent activity, such as prevent people rom logging in if I haven't given them accounts, or prevent people from unning this program just because I'll get less money if they can run this rogram," ... VOICE : And use lots of undocumented entry points. RICHARD STALLMAN : If the person doesn't see a good reason why he shouldn't un that program or why he shouldn't use that computer, if he's a hacker, e'll tend to view the bureaucracy that stops him as a challenge rather than s an authority that he must respect. BILL BURNS : The drive to do it is so strong that it sweeps other things side. I think this is one of the big differences between the people that do heir hacking on computers that cost a lot and are owned by other people, and he people that do their hacking on micros where they own it. If you own the icro there's no us and them, nobody's preventing you from doing anything but ourself. RICHARD STALLMAN : There's still copy-protection, and the fact that you don't et the source [codes]; you can't change the program around and learn omething. STEVEN LEVY : I want to answer Mark's point about intellectual property. I ever meant to say that the MIT people were these fantastic people who didn't ant to make any money ever. The fact was, for example, in '61, when Steve ussell wrote SPACEWAR [the earliest and greatest computer game for 12 years] s a hack and some people in the room helped improve it, the improvements Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ame because it was an open program. Of course, Steve couldn't possibly have ade any money by releasing SPACEWAR as a product, since I think there were nly fifty PDP-Is in total made. Because he had that advantage that no one as tempting him, it was very natural to just leave the program in the rawer, let anyone look at the code, improve it, and what happened was you ot a much better product from it being a universal property. In some more serious" things like assemblers and compilers and all sorts of utility rograms, the same system benefited everyone there. I think things happened hat wouldn't have happened if programs were sequestered away and kept roprietary. UNIDENTIFIED HACKER : There's one community in which this system does work, hat's academe, in particular the community that MIT is. In academia you're alued by how much you publish. The whole point is to discover something and t the end give it away. And if I could get a reasonable full professorship riting software and giving it away, I'd be very happy to do that. What I'm doing is something like science but different from science, because n science I'm pushing the boundaries discovering new things. But only in omputers do those things that I discover wrap around and increase my ability o discover the next thing. Computers have this nice feedback, positive eedback, that everything I do on my computer makes it better for me doing ore things on my computer. No other field works that way. VOICE : Organic chemistry works that way. All fields work that way. BRUCE BAUMGART : I think we've forgotten something there, which is the bad ights at the lab, when the hackers stepped on each other's toes, when you Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ere trying to get a paper done and somebody was hacking the text editor. You ere trying to take a television picture, and somebody was running music sing up all the disk space. There was anarchy. The big dogs would survive. ou would go home, your stuff undone, because somebody bigger than you and ore powerful than you and knew more codes, whatever, had stepped on you, or our disks or your pictures or something. Didn't you have bad times? Or were ou always the biggest dog on the machine. RICHARD STALLMAN : I always tried to oppose having it be a society of dog eat og. I never tried to eat the dogs that were smaller than me. Whenever a erson tried to act toward me as if I were above him, I'd always say, "I'm ot above you; do what you think you should do; you shouldn't get orders from e." And if somebody thought he was above me, I would say, "You can't give me rders. See if you can get me fired; I want to do what I want." BRIAN HARVEY : I think we're trying much too hard for a sort of unanimity ere that doesn't exist about what all of us hackers are like. For example, f you want to bring up the word "ethics" -- I felt very uncomfortable last ight with a couple of people who got up and talked about how they made their iving by stealing from the telephone company. I think it's one thing to be a igh school kid wanting to show off that you're capable of making a phone all without paying for it, and it's something else to be an adult being in he career of encouraging people to be thieves. STEVE WOZNIAK : I'd like to discuss the telephone topic from a hacker erspective, and it applies to software piracy. There are some people that ctually have money and are ethical. Back then we went out and treated Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! elephone blue boxing and the like as a fun exploration of the phone system. ow could we make every call in the world, in every nook and cranny and all hat, but I'll tell you, my phone bill as a college student at Berkeley was ery high because I paid for all the calls I would have paid for anyway. I nly used the phone system to explore the network. Some pirates copy software nd they'll copy everything and put it in their collection, but if they find omething that they do like and decide it's a good one, they'll go out an buy t because the producer deserves the money. BURRELL SMITH (designer of the Macintosh) : I think one of the common threads f hacking is that all of us want a very pure model of what we're working on. owadays we're all very complex, we have stock options, salaries, and careers nd stuff. Back then it was the joy of being absorbed, being intoxicated by eing able to solve this problem. You would be able to take the entire world ith its horrible problems and boil it down to a bunch of microchips or hatever we were hacking. I think another aspect of that is that hackers can do almost anything and be hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It's not necessarily high tech. I hink it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you're doing. The oy of seeing your stuff work is the excitement. STEVEN LEVY : Yeah, but aren't there contradictions you have to deal with hen those stock options and things like that get in the way? Homebrew had a eriod before there was a whole lot of money, when people would come in and ay, "Here's the plans to this computer we're coming out with." Then there tarted to be secrets kept. How do you keep things going forward as much as Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! ossible when you have to keep those secrets, when you have allegiance to our company and its proprietary stuff? BRUCE BAUMGART : You just graduated from the academic to the commercial. here's many worlds, and I think the worlds overlap. RICHARD STALLMAN : The question is, does one of them eat up the other so that t goes away? That's what seems to happen. TED NELSON (author of Computer Lib/Dream Machines, founder of Xanadu) : A erspective that hasn't been mentioned is that like the Homebrew Club, people ad jobs. As Thomas Jefferson said, "I make war so that my grandchildren can tudy philosophy." The person who is studying philosophy is at the top of a ood chain. (laughter, applause) The problem when the philosophers find they an sell philosophy is that suddenly it's the bottom of a food chain again. nly as long as it wasn't something that was commercially available could it ave this pure aspect. JOHN JAMES (FORTH hacker) : There's a certain kind of contradiction that e're still dealing with in the world of FORTH, where the public domain is he soul of it and it's also the curse. The advantage of a programming anguage is that you can do anything you want to do, so you need complete ccess to the source code, of course, and they you need to be able to use the roducts in any way you want without having to let somebody look at your ooks in the future time. If that's not available, then the advantages of ORTH really aren't there. But the problem is that if everything is public omain, then how do you support elaborate systems development and so on? hat's what we really haven't dealt with. Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! RICHARD GREENBLATT (from MIT days "the archetypal hacker...the hacker's acker" --Hackers) : I think it's very fundamental that source codes be made vailable. I don't equate that with giving them away necessarily. I think it ight be possible to work out some means by which a source code was available nd yet it was licensed, on a basis that didn't involve a great deal of ureaucrat overhead to the proceedings. If that could be done then you would et the best of both worlds. The people who had written something originally ould have the benefit of some royalties; they would also have somewhere in here "copyright so-and-so" and it would be recorded that they were esponsible for a particular piece of code. Having thought about this a lot, I've come up with only a few ideas to try to ake it practical. One of them I think is that any such arrangement should ave an exponential tailoff. In the first year the royalties should be such nd such percent; after another year the royalty goes down one-half of what s was previous, or something like that -- so that the royalty pie doesn't ust get bigger and bigger, but the people who did it originally eventually ecay out, and the people who've contributed more recently get the benefits. STEVE WOZNIAK : Hackers frequently want to look at code, like operating ystems, listings, and the like, to learn how it was done before them. Source hould be made available reasonably to those sort of people. Not to copy, not o sell, but to explore and learn from and extend. ROBERT WOODHEAD : Well, as a dedicated capitalist exploiter of the masses and unning dog lackey of the bourgeois, I find that the software that I write sually falls into two different categories. There are finished products like Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! IZARDRY that I sell and make a living on, and then there are the tools that wrote to build those products. The tools I will give away to anybody. But he product, that's my soul in the product. I don't want anyone fooling with hat. I don't want anyone hacking into that product and changing it, because hen it won't be mine. It's like somebody looking at a painting and saying, Well, I don't like that color over there, so I'll just take a can of paint nd change it." JERRY POURNELLE (science fiction writer, columnist in Byte magazine) : You ever had to deal with editors. (laughter) ROBERT WOODHEAD : You I do. I'll tell 'em to got to hell. On the other hand, f somebody sees something I did and says to me, "How did you do that?" I'll ell 'em in a minute. I'll give them all the information they need so that hey can go out and do something better, because what I want to see is really reat stuff. That's why all the tools I've developed when I've been working n the Lisa, I regularly send them off to Apple so that they can get them out here, because I know they're gonna help somebody. Then something really reat's gonna come out and take away all the market sales of my product. Then 'm gonna have to go out and write a better one. BOB WALLACE (author and distributor of PC-WRITE', an outstanding word rocessing program for IBM PCs and compatibles) : We give away source with ur product, and we haven't found it to be a problem. We do what we call Shareware." We give away PC-WRITE, and it seems to be supporting use, you now. When I started, I wanted to do product and I wanted it to be self-supporting. Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! didn't want to do it for another company and have somebody else have ontrol over it. I wanted to have control over it and I wanted to make a iving. Not having a lot of money for advertising, I figured the way to istribute it was, you know, word of disk. Diskettes are a new medium that I on't think people have realized how easy they are to copy and what that eans, but it gives us a distribution channel. It's very hard to get shelf space in stores. But most people choose their 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 ulture values team effort very much; it does not value ego trips. BILL BURNES: I think Les is right, and I also agree with what Woz said, and I ould like to propose that we separate two things. I think the "hacker drive" s individual, it's a drive within us. It's what happens when we're doing omething absolutely useless; we just decide to tickle a line of code and see here it went at some weird 3 A.M. on a Saturday morning. But then what appens to the product of that is a whole 'nother set of questions. I think f we can separate the hacker drive from the products of hacking, which can ither have no economic value or tremendous economic value but still have the ame hacker value, then I think the discussion will get a little father. LEE FELSENSTEIN (designer of Osborne I, co-founder of Community Memory) : If ou're only dealing with one of those two things in your life, if you define ourself in only one area, you are crippled, I say. I've seen a lot of ripples on the other side, too. If you're only taking stuff that other eople make, and playing games with it somehow get money out of it -- I elieve that people like that (of course, I'm not one of them) (laughter) ... eople like that know that they're the ones that are playing the win/lose ame. "If I give it to you I must take it from him." And that results in what and other call the "production of scarcity." Come on... Ain't Got All Day!! We have a responsibility to know about and live to a certain extent on the ther side of the fence and find out what happens with these things once hey're produced. And we should also expect the people who live most of their ives over there to come onto our side and learn to play a little bit, learn o express some of their own creativity. Concentrating on one thing alone akes you into a deformed person. DICK HEISER (owner and proprietor of the original Computer Store in 1975, now 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. ONFERENCE BACKGROUND - -----------------------------------> 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...... [16] Tfiles: (1-29,?,Q) :