> This came over the strenuous objections of Richard Stallman who famously tried to resist the introduction of passwords at MIT in the 1970s (Levy, 1984).
Out of curiosity, what was his competing proposal?
Background to his desire for open (non locked down) systems (covers the period when the MIT AI lab went from the completely open in-house developed ITS to a proprietary Digital system):
"...But that machine wasn't designed also to support the phenomenon called “tourism.” Now “tourism” is a very old tradition at the AI lab, that went along with our other forms of anarchy, and that was that we'd let outsiders come and use the machine. Now in the days where anybody could walk up to the machine and log in as anything he pleased this was automatic: if you came and visited, you could log in and you could work. Later on we formalized this a little bit, as an accepted tradition specially when the Arpanet began and people started connecting to our machines from all over the country. Now what we'd hope for was that these people would actually learn to program and they would start changing the operating system. If you say this to the system manager anywhere else he'd be horrified. If you'd suggest that any outsider might use the machine, he'll say “But what if he starts changing our system programs?” But for us, when an outsider started to change the system programs, that meant he was showing a real interest in becoming a contributing member of the community. We would always encourage them to do this..."
It's naïve in our system where problems are not solved as a group, but as a sum of individuals. If you don't trust someone to do something on your computer, then you also probably don't trust them to do much more outside; how can they be a part of the community if they aren't to be trusted ? We have abandoned all community-building to the state, and the state decides collective rules even though the state cannot manage a group this size with the best intents, especially considering the political-economic system we're in; it must assume everyone is problematic by default, and everyone's interest is at odds with the state interest.
Stallman talks about anarchy, a system that seems to have been in place there at the time; one of the central tenet of anarchism is conviviality and building a community together. Everyone who is part of the community is trusted. In this system, you don't need passwords.
> Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password, with a suggestion to change it to the empty string (that is, no password) instead, to re-enable anonymous access to the systems.
Equal rights for everyone, anyone can use any account.
Later on, and still today as default in GNU software, he also objected to the 'wheel' group that would restrict the ability to call 'su' to just the members of 'wheel'. He wanted everyone who somehow obtained the root password to be able to become root.
In OpenBSD at least, if there are users in the wheel group then this is enforced. If there are no users in the wheel group then anyone who knows the password can become root.
Out of curiosity, what was his competing proposal?