In November , 1995, Peter Salus, a member of the Free Software Foundation and author of the 1994 book, A Quarter Century of Unix, issued a call for papers to members of the GNU Project’s “system-discuss” mailing list.
Salus, the conference’s scheduled chairman, wanted to tip off fellow hackers about the upcoming Conference on Freely Redistributable Software in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Slated for February, 1996 and sponsored by the Free Software Foundation, the event promised to be the first engineering conference solely dedicated to free software and, in a show of unity with other free software programmers, welcomed papers on “any aspect of GNU, Linux, NetBSD, 386BSD, FreeBSD, Perl, Tcl/tk, and other tools for which the code is accessible and redistributable.” Salus wrote: Over the past 15 years, free and low-cost software has become ubiquitous. This conference will bring together implementers of several different types of freely redistributable software and publishers of such software (on various media). There will be tutorials and refereed papers, as well as keynotes by Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.
One of the first people to receive Salus’ email was conference committee member Eric S. Raymond. Although not the leader of a project or company like the various other members of the list, Raymond had built a tidy reputation within the hacker community as a major contributor to GNU Emacs and as editor of The New Hacker Dictionary, a book version of the hacking community’s decade-old Jargon File.
For Raymond, the 1996 conference was a welcome event. Active in the GNU Project during the 1980s, Raymond had distanced himself from the project in 1992, citing, like many others before him, Stallman’s “micro-management” style. “Richard kicked up a fuss about my making unauthorized modifications when I was cleaning up the Emacs LISP libraries,” Raymond recalls. “It frustrated me so much that I decided I didn’t want to work with him anymore.”
Despite the falling out, Raymond remained active in the free software community. So much so that when Salus suggested a conference pairing Stallman and Torvalds as keynote speakers, Raymond eagerly seconded the idea. With Stallman representing the older, wiser contingent of ITS/Unix hackers and Torvalds representing the younger, more energetic crop of Linux hackers, the pairing indicated a symbolic show of unity that could only be beneficial, especially to ambitious younger (i.e., below 40) hackers such as Raymond. “I sort of had a foot in both camps,” Raymond says.
