Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-kth--f7b94c-One thing was that that softwa/en

One thing was that that software was much more poorly written, and harder to understand; therefore making it harder for people to make the changes that were in fact needed. Another was, that that software came with security, which had the inevitable effect of causing people to cooperate with each other less. In the old days on ITS it was considered desirable that everyone could look at any file, change any file, because we had reasons to. I remember one interesting scandal where somebody sent a request for help in using Macsyma. Macsyma is a symbolic algebra program that was developed at MIT. He sent to one of the people working on it a request for some help, and he got an answer a few hours later from somebody else. He was horrified, he sent a message &ldquo;so-and-so must be reading your mail, can it be that mail files aren't properly protected on your system?&rdquo; &ldquo;Of course, no file is protected on our system. What's the problem? You got your answer sooner; why are you unhappy? Of course we read each other's mail so we can find people like you and help them&rdquo;. Some people just don't know when they're well off.