1. Giving the appearance of compliance
2. Refusing to provide the source to their modified bootloader, even though they made changes that introduced security vulnerabilities
3. Providing source code to a version of Linux, just not the one that they actually ship, and hoping that nobody notices
4. Dragging out GPL code requests for months on end, then inexplicably going silent

Unix, one of the earliest computer-operating systems, was developed between the late nineteen-sixties and the early nineteen-eighties, by A.T. & T. Bell Laboratories and various universities around the world, notably the University of California, Berkeley. It was the product of a highly collaborative process, in which researchers and students built and shared their code in an atmosphere of excitement and discovery that was fostered, in part, by an agreement that A.T. & T. representatives had signed, in 1956, with the Department of Justice, circumscribing the company’s commercial activities in exchange for an end to antitrust proceedings. But in 1982, A.T. & T. was broken up and its agreement with the department ended; before long, the company was selling copies of Unix without including the source code from which it was derived, effectively commercializing the operating system and hiding its building blocks within a proprietary program. The move greatly upset many in the programming community, including Richard Stallman, a software developer in his late twenties who was then working at M.I.T.’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Stallman was uneasy over the increasing encroachment of proprietary software.

In late 1983, he posted to two newsgroup discussion forums an idea to create an alternative to Unix.

Stallman expanded and formalized his ideas in the GNU Manifesto, which he published in the March, 1985, issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Software Tools, thirty years ago this month. “So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor,” he wrote, “I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free. I have resigned from the AI Lab to deny MIT any legal excuse to prevent me from giving GNU away.” The nearly forty-five-hundred-word text called for collaborators to help build a freely shareable Unix-like operating system, and set forth an innovative method to insure its legal protection.

Richard Stallman, who published his manifesto in March of 1985, has been known to say that, “with software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users.”