You call letting tourists use precious, delicate, expensive computers during off hours for free, and spending many hours of unpaid free time guiding and teaching them, "keeping a good thing to themselves"?

You think the only people who built the internet were "military guys"?

You think the ARPANET and MIT AI Lab should have been opened up to all of Byte Magazine's users, instead of Byte starting their own private commercial BIX network, and that MIT AI Lab staff should have supported all of those clueless newbies as well as the drunk and belligerent POURNE himself, instead of performing the research and development that was their day job?

You're totally off base, entitled, and have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. So educate yourself with the facts:

Read the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy [1], which POURNE clearly violated.

[1] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html

Then read POURNE's own gushing flattering words about how RMS took his own time to suffer him by teaching him about TECO and EMACS, and actually wrote him free software on demand to his specifications [2].

[2] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html

>"I first met Richard Stallman (he called himself RMS in those days) when he was a graduate student at MIT and I was just learning about the ARPANET. He was immensely helpful to me in those days, patiently showing me things about emacs — his full-screen editor that he wrote in TECO, and the less said about TECO the better — as well as adding some special code to take care of things I wanted to accomplish. I learned then that RMS and I have a common failing: We don't suffer fools gladly or indeed at all, and we are sometimes wrong about who is a fool. But that's another story for another time."

And finally, read the words [3] of an anonymous MIT-AI Lab member who spent much of their own time helping POURNE and I as well as many other tourists. Even though POURNE isn't around to defend himself, I feel obligated to post this in response to the crass misunderstandings and misstatements of the facts in your attempt to smear the MIT AI Lab and its members (your own words: "Fuck them."), and because I agree with the point that "If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends. And the offensive acts were not private ones.", and also with the points about asymmetric audience and the responsibility to do well by one's celebrity:

[3]

>We definitely had seen a great many "tourist" users, and it seemed to me that they would come away enriched. People spent a lot of time with Niven, Fuzzy (his wife, as I recall), and Pourne, showing them around the place, including them in the social aspects. ____ and I had him use the Lisp-teaching program. He used mailing lists to engage an interested audience.

>Then later, as I recall, he wrote publicly in negative terms about the whole of society that had welcomed him in, as if these were all abuses. As if he had a secret he was compelled to share, but not really a secret since so many knew. As if any community shared was just grist for the mill if it could be turned to buy celebrity.

>But the entire justification of tourist use was that the machines would otherwise sit idle. Any time I spent, and I suspect others spent, talking to him were unpaid. They made better use of resources than if those resources were used strictly as planned. But he didn't see it that way.

>That's his right. But it's my right to see him as neither courteous to his former hosts nor visionary about how the world works and should work, at least from those experiences. (I never got to reading his books, in part because of these other experiences. It soured me to the need.)

>But our public personas, the places we take a stand, are are our enduring legacies. It is our afterlife. I am not religious, and so what I do in life is a preparation for how I will be perceived when I am not around. I hold him to a like standard.

>If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends. And the offensive acts were not private ones. They were ones he used his stature in the community to magnify in a way that those of us who were implicated had no similar way to respond.

>This, by the way, is the underlying basis of things like libel that make them differ from slander. I'm not alleging either slander or libel here, but I am saying that the key issue in libel is not just untruth, it's about the access one has to broad audience. If you say something in print and the person who needs to respond has no similar access to print, then your words have asymmetric effect in public conversation. The core issue is not print vs non-print, not paper vs word, in case you get confused about whether the internet is print. The core issue is audience. And even on the internet there is the issue of asymmetric audience.

>Asymmetric audience is prone to variations on the Peter Principle, where a good writer can gain audience that allows them to speak on other topics. There is considerable value in that, but also considerable responsibility to do well by one's celebrity.