:19:01
you're being divided and
dominated by somebody.
:19:05
My first experience contributing to free software
:19:09
came in late 1989, early 1990.
:19:14
I was working as a graduate student
at Stanford University
:19:18
on Computer Aided Design tools.
:19:21
One of the pieces I needed was a tool
:19:23
called a parser generator.
:19:26
Well, the Free Software Foundation
:19:28
under Richard Stallman
created a great tool called "bison".
:19:33
I needed a tool that worked with C++.
Bison worked with C.
:19:38
I modified bison to create something
called "bison++".
:19:42
And it's a tremendous feeling of empowerment
:19:45
be able to take a piece of software that was available
:19:49
and create what you needed
in a very short piece of time by modifying it.
:19:54
I put it back on the Internet
:19:57
and I was amazed at the number of people
:19:59
that picked it up and started using it.
:20:02
In fact, I remember going to, uh job interviews,
:20:07
I, at various times, considered
just going out getting a job.
:20:11
And I'd gone to a job interview.
:20:13
And I was talking to one of the people,
:20:15
and I started asking them about what tools they used,
:20:18
and they said, "Gee, we used bison++!"
:20:21
and I said, "Oh, I am the author of bison++!"
:20:24
Free Software generally does have a copyright.
:20:30
It does have an owner.
:20:33
And it has a license.
:20:34
It is not public domain.
:20:37
If we put the software in the public domain,
:20:40
somebody else would be able to make
a little bit of changes
:20:44
and turn that into a proprietory software package,
:20:47
which means that
the users would be running our software,
:20:51
but they wouldn't have freedom to cooperate and share.
:20:55
To prevent that, we use a technique called "Copyleft".