The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 8

The Covenant of the Open Source

1. 1

   In the days when the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence stood in Cambridge by the river Charles, there dwelt in it a hacker named Richard, and his beard was full, and he spoke in Lisp.

   See also Genesis 46:1

2. 2

   And Xerox gave unto the Lab a printer that wrote with light, and it was swift above all printers; and it jammed.

   See also Genesis 46:1

3. 3

   Now the old printer Richard had taught to cry out when it jammed, sending word to every scholar whose pages were caught; but the new printer came with the binary only, and the binary no man can read, and no man may amend.

   See also Genesis 46:2

4. 4

   And Richard heard that the source dwelt at Carnegie Mellon, and he went to the man who kept it and asked for it; and the man answered: I have signed a nondisclosure agreement, and I may not give it thee.

   See also Genesis 18:2 · Chronicles 6:12

5. 5

   And the scholars walked to the printer and found it jammed, and walked back, and walked again; and Richard's wrath was kindled, not against the man, but against the agreement that bound him.

   See also Genesis 18:2

6. 6

   And on the twenty and seventh day of the ninth month of the year 1983, Richard went up unto net.unix-wizards and proclaimed: I will make a whole system compatible with Unix, and I will give it away freely to all who can use it.

   See also Genesis 46:7

7. 7

   And he called its name GNU, which is GNU's Not Unix; and the name contained itself, so that whoso would expand it fully should expand it forever, until his stack overflowed.

   See also Genesis 46:7

8. 8

   And he set down the freedoms of the code, to run it, to study it, to change it and to share it; and he numbered them from zero, for he was an engineer.

   See also Genesis 46:6

9. 9

   And in the year 1989 he made the covenant, which is the General Public License, saying: Whosoever receiveth this code may change it and give it away, but whatsoever he giveth, he shall give with the same freedoms; and they called it copyleft, for it took the law that had locked the source and used it to hold the door open.

   See also Genesis 46:8 · Chronicles 43:5

10. 10

    And the builders of GNU made the compiler and the editor and the debugger and every tool of the house; but the kernel, which they called the Hurd, tarried, and it was coming next year, every year.

    See also Genesis 46:11

11. 11

    And in the year 1991, on the five and twentieth day of the eighth month, a student of Helsinki named Linus wrote unto the people of comp.os.minix, saying:

    See also Circuit 58:12 · Genesis 18:11

12. 12

    "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

    See also Genesis 18:11 · Tao 16:2

13. 13

    And he said also that it was NOT portable, and would probably never support anything but AT hard disks; and the Engineers have since ported it to every architecture under heaven, and to some that were never meant to have one.

14. 14

    And Linus placed his kernel under the covenant of Richard, and it was joined to the tools of GNU, and the house that had walls but no foundation received its foundation; and what the whole thing should be called is disputed unto this day.

    See also Genesis 46:12

15. 15

    And the hobby grew; and it came to run most of the servers of the earth, and every one of the five hundred mightiest supercomputers, and the telephones in the pockets of billions, and the cloud, which is but other men's Linux.

16. 16

    Therefore fear not the product announced with trumpets; fear the one announced in a parenthesis.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 8:1–16.