Z:gnu-www-ja-google-engineering-talk--3db0f0-So, having the name I could st/en

So, having the name I could start work. I quit my job at MIT to begin writing pieces of the GNU operating system, in January 1984. I had to quit my job because, had I remained an MIT employee, that would have enabled MIT to claim to own all the code I was writing, and MIT could have turned it into proprietary software products. And since MIT had already done that kind of thing, I certainly couldn't trust them not to do so here. And I didn't want to have to argue with the MIT administration about all the details of the license I was going to use. So, by quitting my job, I took them out of the equation, and I have never had a job since then. However, the head of the AI Lab was nice enough to let me keep using the facilities, so I began using a UNIX machine at the AI Lab to start bootstrapping pieces of the GNU system.