Richard Stallman arrived at the mit-ai-lab in 1971 as a programmer, entering what he would later describe as the closest thing to a functioning anarchist community he had ever encountered. The lab's culture, documented in Steven Levy's hackers-levy, operated on a set of informal norms that Stallman absorbed and later systematized into the hacker-ethic-mit: information should be free, computers should be accessible, and programs should be shared and improved collectively.
The mit-ai-lab was a world of open source code before the term existed. Programmers shared tools freely, modified each other's work, and regarded barriers to accessing source code as obstructions to legitimate intellectual work. Stallman thrived in this environment, contributing to Emacs (then a set of macros for the TECO editor), ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System), and other lab software.
The first crack in this world came with what Stallman later called the "printer incident." When the lab received a new Xerox laser printer, Stallman attempted to obtain the source code to modify its driver — as he had successfully done with an earlier printer — so he could add useful features. Xerox refused, and the lab obtained software under a nondisclosure agreement. For Stallman, this was a crystallizing moment: the experience of being unable to fix a tool because the knowledge was legally withheld felt like a fundamental violation. The printer incident is recounted in free-as-in-freedom-williams as the first concrete encounter with what would become the central problem of his career.
The decisive rupture came in the early 1980s, when a Massachusetts company called Symbolics hired away most of the AI Lab's hacker staff. Symbolics was commercializing Lisp machine technology developed at the lab and needed programmers. The remaining hackers — including Stallman — watched the community they had built dissolve as colleagues signed nondisclosure agreements and moved to proprietary development. Simultaneously, MIT began licensing lab software under restrictive terms. The open cooperative culture that had shaped Stallman's identity was being dismantled by the same intellectual property mechanisms that had blocked him from the printer.
This period set the conditions for everything that followed. Stallman's response to the collapse of the hacker community was not merely nostalgic but political: he concluded that the problem was structural, that without explicit legal protections for software sharing, the default trajectory of software development would always trend toward proprietary restriction. The GNU project, announced in 1983 and documented in the gnu-manifesto, was his attempt to reconstruct the hacker community's values on a legally durable foundation. The founding-gnu-and-fsf-1983-1991 era follows directly from the lessons of this period.