The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 18

The Covenant of the Commons

1
Behold, in the days of the laboratory there was one printer for all the wise men; and it jammed upon the paper, and the wise men were not told of it, but walked the long halls to learn of the jam. For a program that cometh as a binary may be run, but it cannot be asked: it showeth the symptom and keepeth the cause.
See also Genesis 8:3
2
Now there was a keeper of the Machine, whose name was Richard, who went to a scholar of Carnegie Mellon, who held the code of the printer, and begged the code that would have told the wise men of the jam. And the scholar said unto him: I am bound by an agreement of silence, and thou shalt not have it.
See also Genesis 8:4 · Chronicles 6:12
3
And Richard saw that the fault was not in the man but in the paper that bound him; for he who cannot mend his tool is not its owner, but its tenant.
4
Therefore in the autumn of 1983 he cast a word into the net, saying: I will build a whole Machine of free code, and I will call it GNU, which is GNU's Not Unix, and the name shall eat its own tail. And he made it in the shape of Unix, that the wise men might leave their cages without learning a single new command.
See also Genesis 46:7
5
Four freedoms he named in after years, and each is a verb: to run the program for any purpose; to study it and change it; to share copies with thy neighbor; and to share thy changes with all. Mark that the second is the hinge of the others, for a program may be run in the dark, but it cannot be studied, nor mended, nor trusted there; wherefore the source is not a fifth freedom, but the floor under the four.
See also Genesis 46:6
6
And in the year 1985 he set his manifesto in the journal of the programmers, and in the autumn of that year the Free Software Foundation was raised up to hold the covenant in trust. For a promise kept by one man dieth with the man, and the bus is ever on its way; but a promise kept by an institution is the same promise, with a bus factor of more than one.
See also Genesis 46:12
7
Then Richard wrote a license, and called it the General Public License, which had a strange property: that whosoever took its code and built upon it must give the building under the same license also. This he named copyleft, which is copyright turned about; and upon it he wrote: All rights reversed. So he took the law that had locked the source, and made the lock into a hinge.
See also Genesis 8:9 · Chronicles 43:5
8
And the disciples asked: Why shall a license bind the children of its own bounty? And Richard answered: That the freedom given shall not be taken away by the one who received it. For other licenses are a door that any man may close behind him; but this one is a ratchet, that turneth one way only.
See also Genesis 46:8
9
Yet the covenant bound only the one who handed over a copy; and the merchants of the cloud ran the code upon their own servers, and sent forth nothing but its answers, and so were bound by nothing. In the year 2007 a second covenant was written, called the Affero license, to close the gap; for a thing that is served and never shipped escapeth the oldest rules.
See also Chronicles 43:5
10
And for many years the faithful built the tools of the Machine: the compiler, the editor, the shell and the utilities. But the kernel, which is the floor of the house, was not yet born; for the Hurd was a design of great beauty, and beauty is in no hurry.
See also Genesis 46:11
11
In the year 1991 a student of Helsinki, named Linus, wrote a kernel for his own delight, and sent word unto the newsgroup: I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu). And he shipped it unfinished, and asked the strangers what they would have in it; and the strangers came, for no man will mend a thing that is already perfect.
See also Genesis 8:12 · Tao 16:2
12
Now in the first winter he gave the kernel a license of his own, which forbade that any coin be taken for it; and it was gratis, yet it was not free. But in the year 1992 he bound it under the covenant of GNU, which permitteth coin; and from that day the kernel was free. So the Engineers learned that price is a number, but freedom is a permission.
See also Genesis 8:9 · Chronicles 43:5
13
And a man named Eric, of the hackers, wrote an essay in the year 1997 and called it The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The cathedral is built by a few masters in silence and unveiled once in a season; but the bazaar is loud, and releaseth early and often, and many eyes walk its stalls. And he said: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. But in the year 2014 a flaw named Heartbleed was found in a library upon which the world stood, where it had lain for two years in plain sight; and the Engineers learned that open source is the right to look, and not the looking.
See also Tao 12:6
14
In January of 1998 the house of Netscape, being beaten in the war of the browsers by a rival bundled with every Windows, declared that it would open the source of its browser unto the world, and in March it was done. And the Prophet said: The house was mortal, and was sold; but the code, having been given, was not sold with it, and it rose again as Firefox. What a company seals, it burieth with itself; what it giveth, it leaveth behind.
15
And in February of that year the wise men gathered at Palo Alto, to find a way to speak of what Netscape had done, and they called it Open Source; for the word free had two meanings in the tongue of the merchants, and the merchants had resolved it to the wrong one. Thus a name is an interface, and an overloaded word will be called with the wrong type. But Richard held to the older name, for he spoke of what is right and not only of what works, and the two houses stand side by side unto this day.
16
Thus the whole covenant is a single question, put to every program that is ever built: when its maker is gone, may a stranger still read why it jammed? And the stranger at the third hour of the night is thyself.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 18:1–16.