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+Foreword to the First Edition {#foreword-to-the-first-edition .unnumbered}
+=============================
+
+@firstcopyingnotice{{Copyright © 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.\
+ {This foreword was originally published, in 2002, as the introduction
+to the first edition. This, the original version, is part of
+@fsfsthreecite} Every generation has its philosopher—a writer or an
+artist who captures the imagination of a time. Sometimes these
+philosophers are recognized as such; often it takes generations before
+the connection is made real. But recognized or not, a time gets marked
+by the people who speak its ideals, whether in the whisper of a poem, or
+the blast of a political movement.
+
+Our generation has a philosopher. He is not an artist, or a professional
+writer. He is a programmer. Richard Stallman began his work in the labs
+of MIT, as a programmer and architect building operating system
+software. He has built his career on a stage of public life, as a
+programmer and an architect founding a movement for freedom in a world
+increasingly defined by “code.”
+
+“Code” is the technology that makes computers run. Whether inscribed in
+software or burned in hardware, it is the collection of instructions,
+first written in words, that directs the functionality of machines.
+These machines—computers—increasingly define and control our life. They
+determine how phones connect, and what runs on TV. They decide whether
+video can be streamed across a broadband link to a computer. They
+control what a computer reports back to its manufacturer. These machines
+run us. Code runs these machines.
+
+What control should we have over this code? What understanding? What
+freedom should there be to match the control it enables? What power?
+
+These questions have been the challenge of Stallman’s life. Through his
+works and his words, he has pushed us to see the importance of keeping
+code “free.” Not free in the sense that code writers don’t get paid, but
+free in the sense that the control coders build be transparent to all,
+and that anyone have the right to take that control, and modify it as he
+or she sees fit. This is “free software”; “free software” is one answer
+to a world built in code.
+
+“Free.” Stallman laments the ambiguity in his own term. There’s nothing
+to lament. Puzzles force people to think, and this term “free” does this
+puzzling work quite well. To modern American ears, “free software”
+sounds utopian, impossible. Nothing, not even lunch, is free. How could
+the most important words running the most critical machines running the
+world be “free.” How could a sane society aspire to such an ideal?
+
+Yet the odd clink of the word “free” is a function of us, not of the
+term. “Free” has different senses, only one of which refers to “price.”
+A much more fundamental sense of “free” is the “free,” Stallman says, in
+the term “free speech,” or perhaps better in the term “free labor.” Not
+free as in costless, but free as in limited in its control by others.
+Free software is control that is transparent, and open to change, just
+as free laws, or the laws of a “free society,” are free when they make
+their control knowable, and open to change. The aim of Stallman’s “free
+software movement” is to make as much code as it can transparent, and
+subject to change, by rendering it “free.”
+
+The mechanism of this rendering is an extraordinarily clever device
+called “copyleft” implemented through a license called GPL. Using the
+power of copyright law, “free software” not only assures that it remains
+open, and subject to change, but that other software that takes and uses
+“free software” (and that technically counts as a “derivative”) must
+also itself be free. If you use and adapt a free software program, and
+then release that adapted version to the public, the released version
+must be as free as the version it was adapted from. It must, or the law
+of copyright will be violated.
+
+“Free software,” like free societies, has its enemies. Microsoft has
+waged a war against the GPL, warning whoever will listen that the GPL is
+a “dangerous” license. The dangers it names, however, are largely
+illusory. Others object to the “coercion” in GPL’s insistence that
+modified versions are also free. But a condition is not coercion. If it
+is not coercion for Microsoft to refuse to permit users to distribute
+modified versions of its product Office without paying it (presumably)
+millions, then it is not coercion when the GPL insists that modified
+versions of free software be free too.
+
+And then there are those who call Stallman’s message too extreme. But
+extreme it is not. Indeed, in an obvious sense, Stallman’s work is a
+simple translation of the freedoms that our tradition crafted in the
+world before code. “Free software” would assure that the world governed
+by code is as “free” as our tradition that built the world before code.
+
+For example: A “free society” is regulated by law. But there are limits
+that any free society places on this regulation through law: No society
+that kept its laws secret could ever be called free. No government that
+hid its regulations from the regulated could ever stand in our
+tradition. Law controls. But it does so justly only when visibly. And
+law is visible only when its terms are knowable and controllable by
+those it regulates, or by the agents of those it regulates (lawyers,
+legislatures).
+
+This condition on law extends beyond the work of a legislature. Think
+about the practice of law in American courts. Lawyers are hired by their
+clients to advance their clients’ interests. Sometimes that interest is
+advanced through litigation. In the course of this litigation, lawyers
+write briefs. These briefs in turn affect opinions written by judges.
+These opinions decide who wins a particular case, or whether a certain
+law can stand consistently with a constitution.
+
+All the material in this process is free in the sense that Stallman
+means. Legal briefs are open and free for others to use. The arguments
+are transparent (which is different from saying they are good) and the
+reasoning can be taken without the permission of the original lawyers.
+The opinions they produce can be quoted in later briefs. They can be
+copied and integrated into another brief or opinion. The “source code”
+for American law is by design, and by principle, open and free for
+anyone to take. And take lawyers do—for it is a measure of a great brief
+that it achieves its creativity through the reuse of what happened
+before. The source is free; creativity and an economy is built upon it.
+
+This economy of free code (and here I mean free legal code) doesn’t
+starve lawyers. Law firms have enough incentive to produce great briefs
+even though the stuff they build can be taken and copied by anyone else.
+The lawyer is a craftsman; his or her product is public. Yet the
+crafting is not charity. Lawyers get paid; the public doesn’t demand
+such work without price. Instead this economy flourishes, with later
+work added to the earlier.
+
+We could imagine a legal practice that was different—briefs and
+arguments that were kept secret; rulings that announced a result but not
+the reasoning. Laws that were kept by the police but published to no one
+else. Regulation that operated without explaining its rule.
+
+We could imagine this society, but we could not imagine calling it
+“free.” Whether or not the incentives in such a society would be better
+or more efficiently allocated, such a society could not be known as
+free. The ideals of freedom, of life within a free society, demand more
+than efficient application. Instead, openness and transparency are the
+constraints within which a legal system gets built, not options to be
+added if convenient to the leaders. Life governed by software code
+should be no less.
+
+Code writing is not litigation. It is better, richer, more productive.
+But the law is an obvious instance of how creativity and incentives do
+not depend upon perfect control over the products created. Like jazz, or
+novels, or architecture, the law gets built upon the work that went
+before. This adding and changing is what creativity always is. And a
+free society is one that assures that its most important resources
+remain free in just this sense.
+
+This book collects the writing and lectures of Richard Stallman in a
+manner that will make their subtlety and power clear. The essays span a
+wide range, from copyright to the history of the free software movement.
+They include many arguments not well known, and among these, an
+especially insightful account of the changed circumstances that render
+copyright in the digital world suspect. They will serve as a resource
+for those who seek to understand the thought of this most powerful
+man—powerful in his ideas, his passion, and his integrity, even if
+powerless in every other way. They will inspire others who would take
+these ideas, and build upon them.
+
+I don’t know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard
+man to like. He is driven, often impatient. His anger can flare at
+friend as easily as foe. He is uncompromising and persistent; patient in
+both.
+
+Yet when our world finally comes to understand the power and danger of
+code—when it finally sees that code, like laws, or like government, must
+be transparent to be free—then we will look back at this uncompromising
+and persistent programmer and recognize the vision he has fought to make
+real: the vision of a world where freedom and knowledge survives the
+compiler. And we will come to see that no man, through his deeds or
+words, has done as much to make possible the freedom that this next
+society could have.
+
+We have not earned that freedom yet. We may well fail in securing it.
+But whether we succeed or fail, in these essays is a picture of what
+that freedom could be. And in the life that produced these words and
+works, there is inspiration for anyone who would, like Stallman, fight
+to create this freedom.
+
+LAWRENCE LESSIG
+
+@lessigbio
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+This document was generated by *tonghuix* on *March 25, 2016* using
+[*texi2html 1.82*](http://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/).\