AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

This was similar in feeling, if not in details, to Richard Stallman 's rage at what commercialization and IP did to his world and led to founding of the Free Software Foundation. But our claim was narrower, we weren't claiming that software should not be owned at all, only that software developed through the process of academic research shouldn't be.

Aside from Blake, the other obstinate man that comes to mind is Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement, recently cancelled, a Macarthur Fellow and completely socially unacceptable person. I had some personal dealings with him back in the day, including having to rescue a few female friends from his attentions.

I was actually around when the free software movement was getting started, and I asked Richard Stallman how, if software was free, would programmers get money to buy food and other non-free goods? The world has come up with a number of answers to that, but it's still a tough question. Roughly similar issues are devouring the newspaper business, which had a model for extracting payment for informational goods that no longer works.

The grand-daddy of spiteware is the entire Gnu project. Not to recap that whole history, but Stallman was very hurt by the fact that most of his peers had gone off to a commercial company (Symbolics) and left him behind. The whole Free Software Movement and GNU project stemmed from that hurt.

Sorry to be so negative, but you can't talk about politics without dealing with this kind of stuff. I like that you mention Stewart Brand, who (while not a software person) I think of an avatar of nobility in the sense of hacking systems for the greater good. Who are some software engineers who exhibit nobility? Terry Winograd comes to mind. A weirder example: Richard Stallman . Not a particularly pleasant or attractive person, but he actually did lead a major software policy hack with great positive (IMO) social implications.

Stallman

11 Nov 2026 - 11 Nov 2026

I am not a big fan of Stallman personally, but I think his promulgation of the idea of Free Software was a great blow against the capitalist mindset, despite whatever libertarianism was in the roots of the movement. Thanks to him, most infrastructure software is an economic commons instead of the private property of a single company. This is a huge benefit for society at large (a mixed benefit for programmers, but mostly positive and its their world now). A socialist should applaud the fact that the means of production are basically held by the public. And of course capitalism is doing its best effort to re-enclose this commons, that's to be expected.

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