GNU Emacs, GDB, and GCC were the "big three" of developer-oriented tools, but they weren't the only ones developed by Stallman during the GNU Project's first half decade. By 1990, Stallman had also generated GNU versions of the Bourne Shell (rechristened the Bourne Again Shell, or BASH), YACC (rechristened Bison), and awk (rechristened gawk). Like GCC , every GNU program had to be designed to run on multiple systems, not just a single vendor's platform. In the process of making programs more flexible, Stallman and his collaborators often made them more useful as well.
Recalling the GNU universalist approach, Prime Time Freeware's Morin points to a critical, albeit mundane, software package called hello. "It's the hello world program which is five lines of C, packaged up as if it were a GNU distribution," Morin says. "And so it's got the Texinfo stuff and the configure stuff. It's got all the other software engineering goo that the GNU Project has come up with to allow packages to port to all these different environments smoothly. That's tremendously important work, and it affects not only all of [Stallman's] software, but also all of the other GNU Project software."
According to Stallman, improving software programs was secondary to building them in the first place. "With each piece I may or may not find a way to improve it," said Stallman to Byte. "To some extent I am getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much better. To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long time and worked on many other systems. I therefore have many ideas to bring to bear."See Richard Stallman, BYTE (1986).
Nevertheless, as GNU tools made their mark in the late 1980s, Stallman's AI Lab-honed reputation for design fastidiousness soon became legendary throughout the entire software-development community.
Jeremy Allison, a Sun user during the late 1980s and programmer destined to run his own free software project, Samba, in the 1990s, recalls that reputation with a laugh. During the late 1980s, Allison began using Emacs. Inspired by the program's community-development model, Allison says he sent in a snippet of source code only to have it rejected by Stallman.
"It was like the Onion headline," Allison says.
"`Child's prayers to God answered: No.'"
Stallman's growing stature as a software programmer, however, was balanced by his struggles as a project manager. Although the GNU Project moved from success to success in creation of developer-oriented tools, its inability to generate a working kernel-the central "traffic cop" program in all Unix systems that determines which devices and applications get access to the microprocessor and when-was starting to elicit grumbles as the 1980s came to a close. As with most GNU Project efforts, Stallman had started kernel development by looking for an existing program to modify. According to a January 1987 "Gnusletter," Stallman was already working to overhaul TRIX, a Unix kernel developed at MIT.
A review of GNU Project "GNUsletters" of the late 1980s reflects the management tension. In January, 1987, Stallman announced to the world that the GNU Project was working to overhaul TRIX, a Unix kernel developed at MIT. A year later, in February of 1988, the GNU Project announced that it had shifted its attentions to Mach, a lightweight "micro-kernel" developed at Carnegie Mellon. All told, however, official GNU Project kernel development wouldn't commence until 1990.See "HURD History." http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history.html
The delays in kernel development were just one of many concerns weighing on Stallman during this period. In 1989, Lotus Development Corporation filed suit against rival software company, Paperback Software International, for copying menu commands in Lotus' popular 1-2-3 Spreadsheet program. Lotus' suit, coupled with the Apple -Microsoft "look and feel" battle, provided a troublesome backdrop for the GNU Project. Although both suits fell outside the scope of the GNU Project, both revolved around operating systems and software applications developed for the personal computer, not Unix-compatible hardware systems-they threatened to impose a chilling effect on the entire culture of software development. Determined to do something, Stallman recruited a few programmer friends and composed a magazine ad blasting the lawsuits. He then followed up the ad by helping to organize a group to protest the corporations filing the suit. Calling itself the League of Programming Freedom, the group held protests outside the offices of Lotus, Inc. and the Boston courtroom hosting the Lotus trial.
The protests were notable.According to a League of Programming Freedom Press, the protests were notable for featuring the first hexadecimal protest chant: 1-2-3-4, toss the lawyers out the door; 5-6-7-8, innovate don't litigate; 9-A-B-C, 1-2-3 is not for me; D-E-F-O, look and feel have got to go