History of Free Software: From the Xerox Printer to the GNU/Linux Revolution

Every developer has been asked, at least once in their life, to fix a printer. It is almost a cliché in the industry. In the early 1980s, a brilliant MIT programmer named Richard Stallman was also asked to fix one. However, his response to this everyday problem was what triggered the most important technological revolution of recent decades.

That simple act of trying to fix a paper jam resulted in what is now Windows’ primary global competitor and the engine powering almost all of the world’s web infrastructure. Thus, out of frustration with closed technology, Free Software emerged.

The spark: A black box that refused to be fixed

The laboratory where Stallman worked had received a modern Xerox printer that had a constant flaw: it jammed far too frequently. Stallman wanted to write a small snippet of code so the machine would send an automatic alert to users’ computers when this occurred. To do so, he needed access to the printer driver’s source code.

In the past, when facing similar problems with other printers, Stallman simply accessed the driver’s source code and modified it so the machine would send an automatic alert to affected users. It was a practical and collaborative solution. However, with the new equipment, he hit a wall: Xerox had not provided the driver source code.

When Stallman requested the code from the company to implement his jam alert, Xerox flatly refused, arguing that it was an important trade secret. For Stallman, this refusal was much more than a technical obstacle; it was an offense. He understood that software should be a tool at the service of people. Preventing someone from improving a tool due to legal or commercial restrictions seemed to him a direct attack on the collaborative culture that had characterized the early years of computing.

The GNU Project and the institutionalization of freedom

That jammed Xerox printer changed history. Out of frustration grew action. On September 27, 1983, Stallman formally announced his intention to found the GNU Project, with the ambitious goal of building a complete and free operating system that was not under the control of any corporation.

To provide legal, economic, and institutional backing to this burgeoning movement, in October 1985 Stallman took a step further and founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The movement was no longer just the complaint of an MIT programmer; it had become a global crusade for technological sovereignty.

The rules of the game: The 4 essential freedoms

The Free Software movement was not based solely on writing lines of open-source code, but on a strict ethical framework designed to protect user autonomy against proprietary monopolies. For a program to be considered truly free, the community established that it must guarantee the 4 essential freedoms of software:

• The freedom to run the program (freedom 0), for any purpose and in any environment.

• The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1).

• The freedom to redistribute copies, encouraging community help (freedom 2).

• The freedom to improve the code and make those improvements public so the entire community benefits (freedom 3).

As is evident, for the freedoms of study and improvement to be technically and legally possible, unrestricted access to the source code is a non-negotiable requirement.

The semantic problem: “Free as in freedom, not as in free beer”

As the ecosystem grew in the 1980s and early 1990s, the movement encountered an unexpected obstacle: the English language. The word free means both “libre” and “gratis”. This generated huge panic in the corporate sector, as companies thought that adopting “Free Software” meant the impossibility of doing business, billing for services, or having profitable commercial models.

To unblock this semantic confusion and make clear that the focus of the philosophy was on strategic autonomy and not on the product’s selling price, Stallman was forced to coin a phrase that is today an absolute dogma within the industry: “Free as in freedom, not as in free beer” (Free as in freedom of speech, not as in free beer).

It was not about giving away developers’ work; it was about ensuring that companies and users were not hostages of their vendors.

The missing piece: Linus Torvalds and the birth of a giant

Around 1990, the GNU Project had managed to develop almost all the tools, libraries, and compilers necessary for a complete operating system. However, they were missing the central piece of the puzzle: the kernel.

History took its definitive turn in 1991, when a young Finnish student named Linus Torvalds, dissatisfied with available options and restrictive licenses, began developing his own kernel on his personal computer. On August 25, 1991, Torvalds sent a historic email announcing to the community that he was working on a free operating system.

By combining the kernel created by Torvalds (later named Linux) with all the mature ecosystem of tools created by the GNU Project, the complete operating system GNU/Linux was finally born. This synergy was the final blow that proved to the world that collaborative software could be superior, safer, and more stable than impenetrable corporate black boxes.