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      6 <title>BYTE Interview with Richard Stallman
      7 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
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     13 <div class="article reduced-width">
     14 <h2>BYTE Interview with Richard Stallman</h2>
     15 
     16 <address class="byline">conducted by David Betz and Jon Edwards</address>
     17 
     18 <div class="introduction">
     19 <p>Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain Unix-compatible
     20 software system with BYTE editors (July 1986).</p>
     21 </div>
     22 <hr class="no-display" />
     23 
     24 <p>Richard Stallman has undertaken probably the most ambitious free
     25 software development project to date, the GNU system.  In his GNU
     26 Manifesto, published in the March 1985 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal,
     27 Stallman described GNU as a &ldquo;complete Unix-compatible software
     28 system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone
     29 who can use it&hellip;  Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to
     30 obtain good system software free, just like air.&rdquo; (GNU is an
     31 acronym for GNU's Not Unix; the <i>g</i> is pronounced.)</p>
     32 
     33 <p>Stallman is widely known as the author of EMACS, a powerful text
     34 editor that he developed at the <abbr title="Massachusetts Institute
     35 of Technology">MIT</abbr> Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.  It is
     36 no coincidence that the first piece of software produced as part of
     37 the GNU project was a new implementation of EMACS.  GNU EMACS has
     38 already achieved a reputation as one of the best implementations of
     39 EMACS currently available at any price.</p>
     40 
     41 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: We read your GNU Manifesto in the March 1985
     42 issue of Dr. Dobb's.  What has happened since?  Was that really the
     43 beginning, and how have you progressed since then?</p>
     44 
     45 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: The publication in Dr. Dobb's wasn't the beginning of the
     46 project.  I wrote the GNU Manifesto when I was getting ready to start the
     47 project, as a proposal to ask computer manufacturers for funding.  They
     48 didn't want to get involved, and I decided that rather than spend my time
     49 trying to pursue funds, I ought to spend it writing code.  The manifesto was
     50 published about a year and a half after I had written it, when I had barely
     51 begun distributing the GNU EMACS.  Since that time, in addition to making
     52 GNU EMACS more complete and making it run on many more computers, I have
     53 nearly finished the optimizing C compiler and all the other software that
     54 is needed for running C programs.  This includes a source-level debugger
     55 that has many features that the other source-level debuggers on Unix don't
     56 have.  For example, it has convenience variables within the debugger so you
     57 can save values, and it also has a history of all the values that you have
     58 printed out, making it tremendously easier to chase around list structures.</p>
     59 
     60 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: You have finished an editor that is now widely distributed and you
     61 are about to finish the compiler.</p>
     62 
     63 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: I expect that it will be finished this October.</p>
     64 
     65 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: What about the kernel?</p>
     66 
     67 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: I'm currently planning to start with the kernel that was written
     68 at MIT and was released to the public recently with the idea that I would
     69 use it.  This kernel is called TRIX; it's based on remote procedure call.  I
     70 still need to add compatibility for a lot of the features of Unix which it
     71 doesn't have currently.  I haven't started to work on that yet.  I'm
     72 finishing the compiler before I go to work on the kernel.  I am also going
     73 to have to rewrite the file system.  I intend to make it failsafe just by
     74 having it write blocks in the proper order so that the disk structure is
     75 always consistent.  Then I want to add version numbers.  I have a complicated
     76 scheme to reconcile version numbers with the way people usually use Unix.
     77 You have to be able to specify filenames without version numbers, but you
     78 also have to be able to specify them with explicit version numbers, and
     79 these both need to work with ordinary Unix programs that have not been
     80 modified in any way to deal with the existence of this feature.  I think I
     81 have a scheme for doing this, and only trying it will show me whether it
     82 really does the job.</p>
     83 
     84 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Do you have a brief description you can give us as to how GNU as a
     85 system will be superior to other systems?  We know that one of your goals is
     86 to produce something that is compatible with Unix.  But at least in the area
     87 of file systems you have already said that you are going to go beyond Unix
     88 and produce something that is better.</p>
     89 
     90 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: The C compiler will produce better code and run faster.  The
     91 debugger is better.  With each piece I may or may not find a way to improve
     92 it.  But there is no one answer to this question.  To some extent I am
     93 getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much
     94 better.  To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long time
     95 and worked on many other systems.  I therefore have many ideas to bring to
     96 bear.  One way in which it will be better is that practically everything in
     97 the system will work on files of any size, on lines of any size, with any
     98 characters appearing in them.  The Unix system is very bad in that regard.
     99 It's not anything new as a principle of software engineering that you
    100 shouldn't have arbitrary limits.  But it just was the standard practice in
    101 writing Unix to put those in all the time, possibly just because they were
    102 writing it for a very small computer.  The only limit in the GNU system is
    103 when your program runs out of memory because it tried to work on too much
    104 data and there is no place to keep it all.</p>
    105 
    106 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: And that isn't likely to be hit if you've got virtual memory.  You may
    107 just take forever to come up with the solution.</p>
    108 
    109 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: Actually these limits tend to hit in a time long before you take
    110 forever to come up with the solution.</p>
    111 
    112 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Can you say something about what types of machines and environments
    113 GNU EMACS in particular has been made to run under?  It's now running on
    114 VAXes; has it migrated in any form to personal computers?</p>
    115 
    116 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: I'm not sure what you mean by personal computers.  For example, is
    117 a Sun a personal computer?  GNU EMACS requires at least a megabyte of
    118 available memory and preferably more.  It is normally used on machines that
    119 have virtual memory.  Except for various technical problems in a few C
    120 compilers, almost any machine with virtual memory and running a fairly
    121 recent version of Unix will run GNU EMACS, and most of them currently do.</p>
    122 
    123 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Has anyone tried to port it to Ataris or Macintoshes?</p>
    124 
    125 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: The Atari 1040ST still doesn't have quite enough memory.  The next
    126 Atari machine, I expect, will run it.  I also think that future Ataris will
    127 have some forms of memory mapping.  Of course, I am not designing the
    128 software to run on the kinds of computers that are prevalent today.  I knew
    129 when I started this project it was going to take a few years.  I therefore
    130 decided that I didn't want to make a worse system by taking on the
    131 additional challenge of making it run in the currently constrained
    132 environment.  So instead I decided I'm going to write it in the way that
    133 seems the most natural and best.  I am confident that in a couple of years
    134 machines of sufficient size will be prevalent.  In fact, increases in memory
    135 size are happening so fast it surprises me how slow most of the people are
    136 to put in virtual memory; I think it is totally essential.</p>
    137 
    138 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: I think people don't really view it as being necessary for
    139 single-user machines.</p>
    140 
    141 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: They don't understand that single user doesn't mean single
    142 program.  Certainly for any Unix-like system it's important to be able to
    143 run lots of different processes at the same time even if there is only one
    144 of you.  You could run GNU EMACS on a nonvirtual-memory machine with enough
    145 memory, but you couldn't run the rest of the GNU system very well or a Unix
    146 system very well.</p>
    147 
    148 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: How much of LISP is present in GNU EMACS?  It occurred to me that it
    149 may be useful to use that as a tool for learning LISP.</p>
    150 
    151 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: You can certainly do that.  GNU EMACS contains a complete,
    152 although not very powerful, LISP system.  It's powerful enough for writing
    153 editor commands.  It's not comparable with, say, a Common LISP System,
    154 something you could really use for system programming, but it has all the
    155 things that LISP needs to have.</p>
    156 
    157 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Do you have any predictions about when you would be likely to
    158 distribute a workable environment in which, if we put it on our machines or
    159 workstations, we could actually get reasonable work done without using
    160 anything other than code that you distribute?</p>
    161 
    162 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: It's really hard to say.  That could happen in a year, but of
    163 course it could take longer.  It could also conceivably take less, but
    164 that's not too likely anymore.  I think I'll have the compiler finished in a
    165 month or two.  The only other large piece of work I really have to do is in
    166 the kernel.  I first predicted GNU would take something like two years, but
    167 it has now been two and a half years and I'm still not finished.  Part of
    168 the reason for the delay is that I spent a lot of time working on one
    169 compiler that turned out to be a dead end.  I had to rewrite it completely.
    170 Another reason is that I spent so much time on GNU EMACS.  I originally
    171 thought I wouldn't have to do that at all.</p>
    172 
    173 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Tell us about your distribution scheme.</p>
    174 
    175 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: I don't put software or manuals in the public domain, and the
    176 reason is that I want to make sure that all the users get the freedom to
    177 share.  I don't want anyone making an improved version of a program I wrote
    178 and distributing it as proprietary.  I don't want that to ever be able to
    179 happen.  I want to encourage the free improvements to these programs, and
    180 the best way to do that is to take away any temptation for a person to make
    181 improvements nonfree.  Yes, a few of them will refrain from making
    182 improvements, but a lot of others will make the same improvements and
    183 they'll make them free.</p>
    184 
    185 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: And how do you go about guaranteeing that?</p>
    186 
    187 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: I do this by copyrighting the programs and putting on a notice
    188 giving people explicit permission to copy the programs and change them but
    189 only on the condition that they distribute under the same terms that I
    190 used, if at all.  You don't have to distribute the changes you make to any
    191 of my programs&mdash;you can just do it for yourself, and you don't have to give
    192 it to anyone or tell anyone.  But if you do give it to someone else, you
    193 have to do it under the same terms that I use.</p>
    194 
    195 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Do you obtain any rights over the executable code derived from the C
    196 compiler?</p>
    197 
    198 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: The copyright law doesn't give me copyright on output from the
    199 compiler, so it doesn't give me a way to say anything about that, and in
    200 fact I don't try to.  I don't sympathize with people developing proprietary
    201 products with any compiler, but it doesn't seem especially useful to try to
    202 stop them from developing them with this compiler, so I am not going to.</p>
    203 
    204 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Do your restrictions apply if people take pieces of your code to
    205 produce other things as well?</p>
    206 
    207 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: Yes, if they incorporate with changes any sizable piece.  If it
    208 were two lines of code, that's nothing; copyright doesn't apply to that.
    209 Essentially, I have chosen these conditions so that first there is a
    210 copyright, which is what all the software hoarders use to stop everybody
    211 from doing anything, and then I add a notice giving up part of those
    212 rights.  So the conditions talk only about the things that copyright applies
    213 to.  I don't believe that the reason you should obey these conditions is
    214 because of the law.  The reason you should obey is because an upright person
    215 when he distributes software encourages other people to share it further.</p>
    216 
    217 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: In a sense you are enticing people into this mode of thinking by
    218 providing all of these interesting tools that they can use but only if they
    219 buy into your philosophy.</p>
    220 
    221 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: Yes.  You could also see it as using the legal system that
    222 software hoarders have set up against them.  I'm using it to protect the
    223 public from them.</p>
    224 
    225 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Given that manufacturers haven't wanted to fund the project, who do
    226 you think will use the GNU system when it is done?</p>
    227 
    228 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: I have no idea, but it is not an important question.  My purpose
    229 is to make it possible for people to reject the chains that come with
    230 proprietary software.  I know that there are people who want to do that.
    231 Now, there may be others who don't care, but they are not my concern.  I
    232 feel a bit sad for them and for the people that they influence.  Right now a
    233 person who perceives the unpleasantness of the terms of proprietary
    234 software feels that he is stuck and has no alternative except not to use a
    235 computer.  Well, I am going to give him a comfortable alternative.</p>
    236 
    237 <p>Other people may use the GNU system simply because it is technically
    238 superior.  For example, my C compiler is producing about as good a code as I
    239 have seen from any C compiler.  And GNU EMACS is generally regarded as being
    240 far superior to the commercial competition.  And GNU EMACS was not funded by
    241 anyone either, but everyone is using it.  I therefore think that many people
    242 will use the rest of the GNU system because of its technical advantages.
    243 But I would be doing a GNU system even if I didn't know how to make it
    244 technically better because I want it to be socially better.  The GNU project
    245 is really a social project.  It uses technical means to make a change in
    246 society.</p>
    247 
    248 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Then it is fairly important to you that people adopt GNU.  It is not
    249 just an academic exercise to produce this software to give it away to
    250 people.  You hope it will change the way the software industry operates.</p>
    251 
    252 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: Yes.  Some people say no one will ever use it because it doesn't
    253 have some attractive corporate logo on it, and other people say that they
    254 think it is tremendously important and everyone's going to want to use it.
    255 I have no way of knowing what is really going to happen.  I don't know any
    256 other way to try to change the ugliness of the field that I find myself in,
    257 so this is what I have to do.</p>
    258 
    259 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Can you address the implications?  You obviously feel that this is an
    260 important political and social statement.</p>
    261 
    262 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: It is a change.  I'm trying to change the way people approach
    263 knowledge and information in general.  I think that to try to own knowledge,
    264 to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop
    265 other people from sharing it, is sabotage.  It is an activity that benefits
    266 the person that does it at the cost of impoverishing all of society.  One
    267 person gains one dollar by destroying two dollars' worth of wealth.  I think
    268 a person with a conscience wouldn't do that sort of thing except perhaps if
    269 he would otherwise die.  And of course the people who do this are fairly
    270 rich; I can only conclude that they are unscrupulous.  I would like to see
    271 people get rewards for writing free software and for encouraging other
    272 people to use it.  I don't want to see people get rewards for writing
    273 proprietary software because that is not really a contribution to society.
    274 The principle of capitalism is the idea that people manage to make money by
    275 producing things and thereby are encouraged to do what is useful,
    276 automatically, so to speak.  But that doesn't work when it comes to owning
    277 knowledge.  They are encouraged to do not really what's useful, and what
    278 really is useful is not encouraged.  I think it is important to say that
    279 information is different from material objects like cars and loaves of
    280 bread because people can copy it and share it on their own and, if nobody
    281 attempts to stop them, they can change it and make it better for
    282 themselves.  That is a useful thing for people to do.  This isn't true of
    283 loaves of bread.  If you have one loaf of bread and you want another, you
    284 can't just put your loaf of bread into a bread copier.  You can't make
    285 another one except by going through all the steps that were used to make
    286 the first one.  It therefore is irrelevant whether people are permitted to
    287 copy it&mdash;it's impossible.</p>
    288 
    289 <p>Books were printed only on printing presses until recently.  It was
    290 possible to make a copy yourself by hand, but it wasn't practical because
    291 it took so much more work than using a printing press.  And it produced
    292 something so much less attractive that, for all intents and purposes, you
    293 could act as if it were impossible to make books except by mass producing
    294 them.  And therefore copyright didn't really take any freedom away from the
    295 reading public.  There wasn't anything that a book purchaser could do that
    296 was forbidden by copyright.</p>
    297 
    298 <p>But this isn't true for computer programs.  It's also not true for
    299 tape cassettes.  It's partly false now for books, but it is still true
    300 that for most books it is more expensive and certainly a lot more work
    301 to Xerox them than to buy a copy, and the result is still less
    302 attractive.  Right now we are in a period where the situation that
    303 made copyright harmless and acceptable is changing to a situation
    304 where copyright will become destructive and intolerable.  So the
    305 people who are slandered as &ldquo;pirates&rdquo; are in fact the
    306 people who are trying to do something useful that they have been
    307 forbidden to do.  The copyright laws are entirely designed to help
    308 people take complete control over the use of some information for
    309 their own good.  But they aren't designed to help people who want to
    310 make sure that the information is accessible to the public and stop
    311 others from depriving the public.  I think that the law should
    312 recognize a class of works that are owned by the public, which is
    313 different from public domain in the same sense that a public park is
    314 different from something found in a garbage can.  It's not there for
    315 anybody to take away, it's there for everyone to use but for no one to
    316 impede.  Anybody in the public who finds himself being deprived of the
    317 derivative work of something owned by the public should be able to sue
    318 about it.</p>
    319 
    320 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: But aren't pirates interested in getting copies of programs because
    321 they want to use those programs, not because they want to use that
    322 knowledge to produce something better?</p>
    323 
    324 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: I don't see that that's the important distinction.  More people
    325 using a program means that the program contributes more to society.  You
    326 have a loaf of bread that could be eaten either once or a million times.</p>
    327 
    328 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Some users buy commercial software to obtain support.  How does your
    329 distribution scheme provide support?</p>
    330 
    331 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: I suspect that those users are misled and are not thinking
    332 clearly.  It is certainly useful to have support, but when they start
    333 thinking about how that has something to do with selling software or with
    334 the software being proprietary, at that point they are confusing
    335 themselves.  There is no guarantee that proprietary software will receive
    336 good support.  Simply because sellers say that they provide support, that
    337 doesn't mean it will be any good.  And they may go out of business.  In fact,
    338 people think that GNU EMACS has better support than commercial EMACSes.  One
    339 of the reasons is that I'm probably a better hacker than the people who
    340 wrote the other EMACSes, but the other reason is that everyone has sources
    341 and there are so many people interested in figuring out how to do things
    342 with it that you don't have to get your support from me.  Even just the free
    343 support that consists of my fixing bugs people report to me and
    344 incorporating that in the next release has given people a good level of
    345 support.  You can always hire somebody to solve a problem for you, and when
    346 the software is free you have a competitive market for the support.  You can
    347 hire anybody.  I distribute a service list with EMACS, a list of people's
    348 names and phone numbers and what they charge to provide support.</p>
    349 
    350 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Do you collect their bug fixes?</p>
    351 
    352 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: Well, they send them to me.  I asked all the people who wanted to
    353 be listed to promise that they would never ask any of their customers to
    354 keep secret whatever they were told or any changes they were given to the
    355 GNU software as part of that support.</p>
    356 
    357 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: So you can't have people competing to provide support based on their
    358 knowing the solution to some problem that somebody else doesn't know.</p>
    359 
    360 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: No.  They can compete based on their being clever and more likely
    361 to find the solution to your problem, or their already understanding more
    362 of the common problems, or knowing better how to explain to you what you
    363 should do.  These are all ways they can compete.  They can try to do better,
    364 but they cannot actively impede their competitors.</p>
    365 
    366 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: I suppose it's like buying a car.  You're not forced to go back to the
    367 original manufacturer for support or continued maintenance.</p>
    368 
    369 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: Or buying a house&mdash;what would it be like if the only person who
    370 could ever fix problems with your house was the contractor who built it
    371 originally?  That is the kind of imposition that's involved in proprietary
    372 software.  People tell me about a problem that happens in Unix.  Because
    373 manufacturers sell improved versions of Unix, they tend to collect fixes
    374 and not give them out except in binaries.  The result is that the bugs don't
    375 really get fixed.</p>
    376 
    377 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: They're all duplicating effort trying to solve bugs independently.</p>
    378 
    379 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: Yes.  Here is another point that helps put the problem of
    380 proprietary information in a social perspective.  Think about the liability
    381 insurance crisis.  In order to get any compensation from society, an injured
    382 person has to hire a lawyer and split the money with that lawyer.  This is a
    383 stupid and inefficient way of helping out people who are victims of
    384 accidents.  And consider all the time that people put into hustling to take
    385 business away from their competition.  Think of the pens that are packaged
    386 in large cardboard packages that cost more than the pen&mdash;just to make sure
    387 that the pen isn't stolen.  Wouldn't it be better if we just put free pens
    388 on every street corner?  And think of all the toll booths that impede the
    389 flow of traffic.  It's a gigantic social phenomenon.  People find ways of
    390 getting money by impeding society.  Once they can impede society, they can
    391 be paid to leave people alone.  The waste inherent in owning information
    392 will become more and more important and will ultimately make the difference
    393 between the utopia in which nobody really has to work for a living because
    394 it's all done by robots and a world just like ours where everyone spends
    395 much time replicating what the next fellow is doing.</p>
    396 
    397 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Like typing in copyright notices on the software.</p>
    398 
    399 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: More like policing everyone to make sure that they don't have
    400 forbidden copies of anything and duplicating all the work people have
    401 already done because it is proprietary.</p>
    402 
    403 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: A cynic might wonder how you earn your living.</p>
    404 
    405 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: From consulting.  When I do consulting, I always reserve the right
    406 to give away what I wrote for the consulting job.  Also, I could be making
    407 my living by mailing copies of the free software that I wrote and some that
    408 other people wrote.  Lots of people send in $150 for GNU EMACS, but now this
    409 money goes to the Free Software Foundation that I started.  The foundation
    410 doesn't pay me a salary because it would be a conflict of interest.
    411 Instead, it hires other people to work on GNU.  As long as I can go on
    412 making a living by consulting I think that's the best way.</p>
    413 
    414 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: What is currently included in the official GNU distribution tape?</p>
    415 
    416 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: Right now the tape contains GNU EMACS
    417 (one version fits all computers); Bison, a program that
    418 replaces <abbr title="Yet Another Compiler
    419 Compiler">YACC</abbr>; MIT Scheme, which is Professor
    420 Sussman's super-simplified dialect of LISP; and Hack, a
    421 dungeon-exploring game similar to Rogue.</p>
    422 
    423 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: Does the printed manual come with the tape as well?</p>
    424 
    425 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: No.  Printed manuals cost $15 each or copy them yourself.  Copy
    426 this interview and share it, too.</p>
    427 
    428 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: How can you get a copy of that?</p>
    429 
    430 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: Write to the Free Software Foundation, 675 Massachusetts Ave.,
    431 Cambridge, MA 02139.</p>
    432 
    433 <address>[The current address (since 2005) is:<br />
    434      Free Software Foundation,
    435      51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor,
    436      Boston, MA  02110-1301,  USA.<br />
    437      Voice:  +1-617-542-5942<br />
    438      Fax:    +1-617-542-2652]
    439 </address>
    440 
    441 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: What are you going to do when you are done with the GNU system?</p>
    442 
    443 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: I'm not sure.  Sometimes I think that what I'll go on to do is the
    444 same thing in other areas of software.</p>
    445 
    446 <p><strong>BYTE</strong>: So this is just the first of a whole series of assaults on the
    447 software industry?</p>
    448 
    449 <p><strong>Stallman</strong>: I hope so.  But perhaps what I'll do is just live a life of ease
    450 working a little bit of the time just to live.  I don't have to live
    451 expensively.  The rest of the time I can find interesting people to hang
    452 around with or learn to do things that I don't know how to do.</p>
    453 </div>
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    509 
    510 <p class="unprintable">Updated:
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    512 $Date: 2021/11/02 11:26:31 $
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