Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--0d2ea6-But, meanwhile my community ha/en

But, meanwhile my community had collapsed, and that was collapsing, and that left me in a bad situation. You see, the whole Incompatible Timesharing System was obsolete, because the PDP-10 was obsolete, and so there was no way that I could continue working as an operating system developer the way that I had been doing it. That depended on being part of the community using the community software and improving it. That no longer was a possibility, and that gave me a moral dilemma. What was I going to do? Because the most obvious possibility meant to go against that decision I had made. The most obvious possibility was to adapt myself to the change in the world. To accept that things were different, and that I'd just have to give up those principles and start signing non-disclosure agreements for proprietary operating systems, and most likely writing proprietary software as well. But I realized that that way I could have fun coding, and I could make money &mdash; especially if I did it other than at MIT &mdash; but at the end, I'd have to look back at my career and say, &ldquo;I've spent my life building walls to divide people,&rdquo; and I would have been ashamed of my life.