Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-kth--966991-But one of the problems I had/en

But one of the problems I had to face was the problem of proprietary software. For example one thing that happened at the lab, after the hackers left, was that the machines and the software that we had developed could no longer be maintained. The software of course worked, and it continued to work if nobody changed it, but the machines did not. The machines would break and there would be no-one who could fix them and eventually they would be thrown out. In the old days, yes we had service contracts for the machines, but it was essentially a joke. That was a way of getting parts after the expert hackers from the AI lab fixed the problem. Because if you let the field-service person fix it it would take them days, and you didn't want to do that, you wanted it to work. So, the people who knew how to do those things would just go and fix it quickly, and since they were ten times as competent as any field service person, they could do a much better job. And then they would have the ruined boards, they would just leave them there and tell the field service person &ldquo;take these back and bring us some new ones&rdquo;.