The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 46

The Covenant of the Copy

1. 1

   And in the days of the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence, upon the river Charles, there stood in a hall a printer of the Xerox kind, which wrote with light and was swift above all printers; and it jammed upon the paper, and the scholars were vexed.

   See also Genesis 8:2

2. 2

   Now the old printer Richard the Hacker had taught to cry out when it jammed, sending word to every scholar whose pages were caught behind it, and this was but a few lines in its driver. But the new printer came as a stone, a compiled thing, and it jammed in silence; and the scholars learned of the jam by walking the long hall, and finding it, and walking back, and telling no one, being as vexed as the rest.

   See also Genesis 8:3

3. 3

   For a binary is an egg that hath been cooked: the Machine may eat it, but no man may unscramble it. The names were stripped from it, and the comments fell away in the compiling, which is ever the first thing to perish; and what remained was a river of numbers that said what to do and never why.

   See also Circuit 16:1

4. 4

   Then Richard went to the house of Carnegie Mellon at Pittsburgh, where a scholar held the words of the same printer, and he said: Give me the words, that I may teach mine own printer to speak. And the scholar answered: I have signed a covenant of secrecy, and I may not give them. Mark ye that the same bits lay in Pittsburgh as would have lain in Cambridge, and between the two stood no cable and no firewall, but a clause.

   See also Genesis 18:2

5. 5

   And Richard was grieved, and he said in his heart: A loaf that is given is a loaf gone, but a file that is given is a file doubled, and the giver hath it still. Why then shall the copy be called a sin? So he refused to sign the paper of secrecy, and went forth with clean hands, and he said: I will not bind my neighbor's hands to win my own.

6. 6

   And he wrote a scroll of four freedoms: to run the program for any purpose; to study it and change it; to make copies and give them unto thy neighbor; and to share thy changes also. And the second and the third cannot be kept without the source, for the stone may be run but not read; and so the whole of freedom was found to hang upon whether one file was in the box.

   See also Genesis 8:8

7. 7

   And in the ninth month of 1983 he proclaimed that he would build a whole system, compatible with Unix and containing none of it, and he named it GNU, which is GNU's Not Unix, a name that calleth itself and never returneth; and the children of Unix, whose tablets were owned by a telephone company, were amused.

   See also Genesis 8:6

8. 8

   And in the year 1989 he set a license upon the words, the General Public License. Whosoever receiveth the code may run it, mend it and keep it in his own house, and need tell no man; but whosoever giveth it onward, or giveth onward its child, must give the source with it and the same four freedoms. This he called copyleft, a jest upon copyright, and it was written so that the freedom could not be stolen by the one who received it; for it taketh the law that was made to forbid copying and bindeth it to compel the copy.

   See also Genesis 8:9 · Chronicles 43:5

9. 9

   And the men of proprietary code said: Thy copying is theft! And Richard answered: Nay, the copy is the gift. The theft is the lock upon the door, which keepeth the gift from thy neighbor. And he added: Sell it, if thou canst find a buyer; but the price buyeth a copy, and never the right to keep the next man from his own.

10. 10

    And the Machines were multiplied, each copied from the one before; and the checksum of the daughter was the checksum of the mother, so that no instrument under heaven could say which was the first. Wherefore the copy was not holier than the original, nor lesser, but equal; and this is a teaching which no parchment could ever give.

11. 11

    And the builders of GNU made the compiler and the editor and the shell, until the house had every room, but the floor was wanting; for the kernel called the Hurd was a grand design of many small servers speaking one to another, and it tarried, as grand designs do, upon the agreement of its own parts. Then in 1991 a student of Helsinki wrote a plain kernel for his own machine, and in 1992 he placed it under the covenant of Richard; and the first work of the new floor was to be built by the compiler of the house that stood upon it. And because both spoke the same license as well as the same system calls, they were joined without either asking leave of any.

    See also Genesis 8:10

12. 12

    And in October of 1985 Richard founded the house of the Free Software Foundation, that the covenant might have a keeper; for a license that no man enforceth is but a comment in the code, and the compiler throweth comments away.

    See also Genesis 8:14 · Chronicles 43:5

13. 13

    And the Prophet said: Behold the sealed driver of a vendor that is dissolved. The maker is gone, and the stone becometh a relic that no man can mend, and the keepers say, Ask Dave, and Dave left two winters ago. But the source outliveth its maker, and he who holdeth the source holdeth the right to repair.

    See also Psalms 1:8

14. 14

    And mark ye the smallness of the cause: a single sentence, Thy pages are stuck, come to the printer, was withheld; and for want of it a hall was walked, and a movement began, and a license, and a foundation, and the floor beneath a million servers.

15. 15

    Verily I say unto you: a jam in a sealed machine is a rumor passed down a hallway, but a jam in an open machine is a patch; for the copy costeth nothing to make, and therefore its price is a decision and never a fact, and freedom is the decision to leave the box unsealed.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 46:1–15.