The Project Gutenberg EBook of Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software, by Sam Williams

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s
Crusade for Free Software, by Sam Williams
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Title: Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software
Author: Sam Williams
Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5768]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on August 31, 2002]
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, FREE AS IN FREEDOM: RICHARD
STALLMAN’S CRUSADE FOR FREE SOFTWARE ***
This eBook was transcribed by Craig Morehouse.
Copyright (C) 2002 by Sam Williams.
Free As in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software.
By Sam Williams
Available on the web at: http://www.faifzilla.org/
Produced under the Free Documentation License
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 For Want of a Printer
Chapter 2 2001: A Hacker’s Odyssey
Chapter 3 A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man
Chapter 4 Impeach God
Chapter 5 Small Puddle of Freedom
Chapter 6 The Emacs Commune
Chapter 7 A Stark Moral Choice
Chapter 8 St. Ignucius
Chapter 9 The GNU General Public License
Chapter 10 GNU/Linux
Chapter 11 Open Source
Chapter 12 A Brief Journey Through Hacker Hell
Chapter 13 Continuing the Fight
Chapter 14 Epilogue:
Chapter 15 Appendix A : Terminology
Chapter 16 Appendix B Hack, Hackers, and Hacking
Chapter 17 Appendix C GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
Preface
The work of Richard M. Stallman literally speaks for
itself. From the documented source code to the
published papers to the recorded speeches, few people
have expressed as much willingness to lay their
thoughts and their work on the line.
Such openness-if one can pardon a momentary un-Stallman
adjective-is refreshing. After all, we live in a
society that treats information, especially personal
information, as a valuable commodity. The question
quickly arises. Why would anybody want to part with so
much information and yet appear to demand nothing in return?
As we shall see in later chapters, Stallman does not
part with his words or his work altruistically. Every
program, speech, and on-the-record bon mot comes with a
price, albeit not the kind of price most people are
used to paying.
I bring this up not as a warning, but as an admission.
As a person who has spent the last year digging up
facts on Stallman’s personal history, it’s more than a
little intimidating going up against the Stallman
oeuvre. “Never pick a fight with a man who buys his ink
by the barrel,” goes the old Mark Twain adage. In the
case of Stallman, never attempt the definitive
biography of a man who trusts his every thought to the
public record.
For the readers who have decided to trust a few hours
of their time to exploring this book, I can confidently
state that there are facts and quotes in here that one
won’t find in any Slashdot story or Google search.
Gaining access to these facts involves paying a price,
however. In the case of the book version, you can pay
for these facts the traditional manner, i.e., by
purchasing the book. In the case of the electronic
versions, you can pay for these facts in the free
software manner. Thanks to the folks at O’Reilly &
Associates, this book is being distributed under the
GNU Free Documentation License, meaning you can help to
improve the work or create a personalized version and
release that version under the same license.
If you are reading an electronic version and prefer to
accept the latter payment option, that is, if you want
to improve or expand this book for future readers, I
welcome your input. Starting in June, 2002, I will be
publishing a bare bones HTML version of the book on the
web site, http://www.faifzilla.org. My aim is to update
it regularly and expand the Free as in Freedom story as
events warrant. If you choose to take the latter
course, please review Appendix C of this book. It
provides a copy of your rights under the GNU Free
Documentation License.
For those who just plan to sit back and read, online or
elsewhere, I consider your attention an equally
valuable form of payment. Don’t be surprised, though,
if you, too, find yourself looking for other ways to
reward the good will that made this work possible.
One final note: this is a work of journalism, but it is
also a work of technical documentation. In the process
of writing and editing this book, the editors and I
have weighed the comments and factual input of various
participants in the story, including Richard Stallman
himself. We realize there are many technical details in
this story that may benefit from additional or refined
information. As this book is released under the GFDL,
we are accepting patches just like we would with any
free software program. Accepted changes will be posted
electronically and will eventually be incorporated into
future printed versions of this work. If you would like
to contribute to the further improvement of this book,
you can reach me at sam@inow.com. Comments and
Questions Please address comments and questions
concerning this book to the publisher: O’Reilly &
Associates, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472 (800) 998-9938 (in the United
States or Canada) (707) 829-0515 (international/local)
(707) 829-0104 (fax) There is a web page for this book,
which lists errata, examples, or any additional
information. The site also includes a link to a forum
where you can discuss the book with the author and
other readers. You can access this site at:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/freedom/ To comment or
ask technical questions about this book, send email to:
bookquestions@oreilly.com For more information about
books, conferences, Resource Centers, and the O’Reilly
Network, see the O’Reilly web site at:
http://www.oreilly.com Acknowledgments Special thanks
to Henning Gutmann for sticking by this book. Special
thanks to Aaron Oas for suggesting the idea to Tracy in
the first place. Thanks to Laurie Petrycki, Jeffrey
Holcomb, and all the others at O’Reilly & Associates.
Thanks to Tim O’Reilly for backing this book. Thanks to
all the first-draft reviewers: Bruce Perens, Eric
Raymond, Eric Allman, Jon Orwant, Julie and Gerald Jay
Sussman, Hal Abelson, and Guy Steele. I hope you enjoy
this typo-free version. Thanks to Alice Lippman for the
interviews, cookies, and photographs. Thanks to my
family, Steve, Jane, Tish, and Dave. And finally, last
but not least: thanks to Richard Stallman for having
the guts and endurance to “show us the code.”
Sam Williams
For Want of a Printer
I fear the Greeks. Even when they bring gifts.
—Virgil The Aeneid
The new printer was jammed, again.
Richard M. Stallman, a staff software programmer at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab), discovered the
malfunction the hard way. An hour after sending off a
50-page file to the office laser printer, Stallman, 27,
broke off a productive work session to retrieve his
documents. Upon arrival, he found only four pages in
the printer’s tray. To make matters even more
frustrating, the four pages belonged to another user,
meaning that Stallman’s print job and the unfinished
portion of somebody else’s print job were still trapped
somewhere within the electrical plumbing of the lab’s
computer network.
Waiting for machines is an occupational hazard when
you’re a software programmer, so Stallman took his
frustration with a grain of salt. Still, the difference
between waiting for a machine and waiting on a machine
is a sizable one. It wasn’t the first time he’d been
forced to stand over the printer, watching pages print
out one by one. As a person who spent the bulk of his
days and nights improving the efficiency of machines
and the software programs that controlled them,
Stallman felt a natural urge to open up the machine,
look at the guts, and seek out the root of the problem.
Unfortunately, Stallman’s skills as a computer
programmer did not extend to the mechanical-engineering
realm. As freshly printed documents poured out of the
machine, Stallman had a chance to reflect on other ways
to circumvent the printing jam problem.
How long ago had it been that the staff members at the
AI Lab had welcomed the new printer with open arms?
Stallman wondered. The machine had been a donation from
the Xerox Corporation. A cutting edge prototype, it was
a modified version of the popular Xerox photocopier.
Only instead of making copies, it relied on software
data piped in over a computer network to turn that data
into professional-looking documents. Created by
engineers at the world-famous Xerox Palo Alto Research
Facility, it was, quite simply, an early taste of the
desktop-printing revolution that would seize the rest
of the computing industry by the end of the decade.
Driven by an instinctual urge to play with the best new
equipment, programmers at the AI Lab promptly
integrated the new machine into the lab’s sophisticated
computing infrastructure. The results had been
immediately pleasing. Unlike the lab’s old laser
printer, the new Xerox machine was fast. Pages came
flying out at a rate of one per second, turning a
20-minute print job into a 2-minute print job. The new
machine was also more precise. Circles came out looking
like circles, not ovals. Straight lines came out
looking like straight lines, not low-amplitude sine waves.
It was, for all intents and purposes, a gift too good
to refuse.
It wasn’t until a few weeks after its arrival that the
machine’s flaws began to surface. Chief among the
drawbacks was the machine’s inherent susceptibility to
paper jams. Engineering-minded programmers quickly
understood the reason behind the flaw. As a
photocopier, the machine generally required the direct
oversight of a human operator. Figuring that these
human operators would always be on hand to fix a paper
jam, if it occurred, Xerox engineers had devoted their
time and energies to eliminating other pesky problems.
In engineering terms, user diligence was built into the system.
In modifying the machine for printer use, Xerox
engineers had changed the user-machine relationship in
a subtle but profound way. Instead of making the
machine subservient to an individual human operator,
they made it subservient to an entire networked
population of human operators. Instead of standing
directly over the machine, a human user on one end of
the network sent his print command through an extended
bucket-brigade of machines, expecting the desired
content to arrive at the targeted destination and in
proper form. It wasn’t until he finally went to check
up on the final output that he realized how little of
the desired content had made it through.
Stallman himself had been of the first to identify the
problem and the first to suggest a remedy. Years
before, when the lab was still using its old printer,
Stallman had solved a similar problem by opening up the
software program that regulated the printer on the
lab’s PDP-11 machine. Stallman couldn’t eliminate paper
jams, but he could insert a software command that
ordered the PDP-11 to check the printer periodically
and report back to the PDP-10, the lab’s central
computer. To ensure that one user’s negligence didn’t
bog down an entire line of print jobs, Stallman also
inserted a software command that instructed the PDP-10
to notify every user with a waiting print job that the
printer was jammed. The notice was simple, something
along the lines of “The printer is jammed, please fix
it,” and because it went out to the people with the
most pressing need to fix the problem, chances were
higher that the problem got fixed in due time.
As fixes go, Stallman’s was oblique but elegant. It
didn’t fix the mechanical side of the problem, but it
did the next best thing by closing the information loop
between user and machine. Thanks to a few additional
lines of software code, AI Lab employees could
eliminate the 10 or 15 minutes wasted each week in
running back and forth to check on the printer. In
programming terms, Stallman’s fix took advantage of the
amplified intelligence of the overall network.
“If you got that message, you couldn’t assume somebody
else would fix it,” says Stallman, recalling the logic.
“You had to go to the printer. A minute or two after
the printer got in trouble, the two or three people who
got messages arrive to fix the machine. Of those two or
three people, one of them, at least, would usually know
how to fix the problem.”
Such clever fixes were a trademark of the AI Lab and
its indigenous population of programmers. Indeed, the
best programmers at the AI Lab disdained the term
programmer, preferring the more slangy occupational
title of hacker instead. The job title covered a host
of activities-everything from creative mirth making to
the improvement of existing software and computer
systems. Implicit within the title, however, was the
old-fashioned notion of Yankee ingenuity. To be a
hacker, one had to accept the philosophy that writing a
software program was only the beginning. Improving a
program was the true test of a hacker’s skills.For more on the term “hacker,”
see Appendix B.
Such a philosophy was a major reason why companies like
Xerox made it a policy to donate their machines and
software programs to places where hackers typically
congregated. If hackers improved the software,
companies could borrow back the improvements,
incorporating them into update versions for the
commercial marketplace. In corporate terms, hackers
were a leveragable community asset, an auxiliary
research-and-development division available at minimal cost.
It was because of this give-and-take philosophy that
when Stallman spotted the print-jam defect in the Xerox
laser printer, he didn’t panic. He simply looked for a
way to update the old fix or ” hack” for the new
system. In the course of looking up the Xerox
laser-printer software, however, Stallman made a
troubling discovery. The printer didn’t have any
software, at least nothing Stallman or a fellow
programmer could read. Until then, most companies had
made it a form of courtesy to publish source-code
files-readable text files that documented the
individual software commands that told a machine what
to do. Xerox, in this instance, had provided software
files in precompiled, or binary, form. Programmers were
free to open the files up if they wanted to, but unless
they were an expert in deciphering an endless stream of
ones and zeroes, the resulting text was pure gibberish.
Although Stallman knew plenty about computers, he was
not an expert in translating binary files. As a hacker,
however, he had other resources at his disposal. The
notion of information sharing was so central to the
hacker culture that Stallman knew it was only a matter
of time before some hacker in some university lab or
corporate computer room proffered a version of the
laser-printer source code with the desired source-code files.
After the first few printer jams, Stallman comforted
himself with the memory of a similar situation years
before. The lab had needed a cross-network program to
help the PDP-11 work more efficiently with the PDP-10.
The lab’s hackers were more than up to the task, but
Stallman, a Harvard alumnus, recalled a similar program
written by programmers at the Harvard computer-science
department. The Harvard computer lab used the same
model computer, the PDP-10, albeit with a different
operating system. The Harvard computer lab also had a
policy requiring that all programs installed on the
PDP-10 had to come with published source-code files.
Taking advantage of his access to the Harvard computer
lab, Stallman dropped in, made a copy of the
cross-network source code, and brought it back to the
AI Lab. He then rewrote the source code to make it more
suitable for the AI Lab’s operating system. With no
muss and little fuss, the AI Lab shored up a major gap
in its software infrastructure. Stallman even added a
few features not found in the original Harvard program,
making the program even more useful. “We wound up using
it for several years,” Stallman says.
From the perspective of a 1970s-era programmer, the
transaction was the software equivalent of a neighbor
stopping by to borrow a power tool or a cup of sugar
from a neighbor. The only difference was that in
borrowing a copy of the software for the AI Lab,
Stallman had done nothing to deprive Harvard hackers
the use of their original program. If anything, Harvard
hackers gained in the process, because Stallman had
introduced his own additional features to the program,
features that hackers at Harvard were perfectly free to
borrow in return. Although nobody at Harvard ever came
over to borrow the program back, Stallman does recall a
programmer at the private engineering firm, Bolt,
Beranek & Newman, borrowing the program and adding a
few additional features, which Stallman eventually
reintegrated into the AI Lab’s own source-code archive.
“A program would develop the way a city develops,” says
Stallman, recalling the software infrastructure of the
AI Lab. “Parts would get replaced and rebuilt. New
things would get added on. But you could always look at
a certain part and say, `Hmm, by the style, I see this
part was written back in the early 60s and this part
was written in the mid-1970s.’”
Through this simple system of intellectual accretion,
hackers at the AI Lab and other places built up robust
creations. On the west coast, computer scientists at UC
Berkeley, working in cooperation with a few low-level
engineers at AT&T, had built up an entire operating
system using this system. Dubbed Unix, a play on an
older, more academically respectable operating system
called Multics, the software system was available to
any programmer willing to pay for the cost of copying
the program onto a new magnetic tape and shipping it.
Not every programmer participating in this culture
described himself as a hacker, but most shared the
sentiments of Richard M. Stallman. If a program or
software fix was good enough to solve your problems, it
was good enough to solve somebody else’s problems. Why
not share it out of a simple desire for good karma?
The fact that Xerox had been unwilling to share its
source-code files seemed a minor annoyance at first. In
tracking down a copy of the source-code files, Stallman
says he didn’t even bother contacting Xerox. “They had
already given us the laser printer,” Stallman says.
“Why should I bug them for more?”
When the desired files failed to surface, however,
Stallman began to grow suspicious. The year before,
Stallman had experienced a blow up with a doctoral
student at Carnegie Mellon University. The student,
Brian Reid, was the author of a useful text-formatting
program dubbed Scribe. One of the first programs that
gave a user the power to define fonts and type styles
when sending a document over a computer network, the
program was an early harbinger of HTML, the lingua
franca of the World Wide Web. In 1979, Reid made the
decision to sell Scribe to a Pittsburgh-area software
company called Unilogic. His graduate-student career
ending, Reid says he simply was looking for a way to
unload the program on a set of developers that would
take pains to keep it from slipping into the public
domain. To sweeten the deal, Reid also agreed to insert
a set of time-dependent functions- “time bombs” in
software-programmer parlance-that deactivated freely
copied versions of the program after a 90-day
expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users paid the
software company, which then issued a code that defused
the internal time-bomb feature.
For Reid, the deal was a win-win. Scribe didn’t fall
into the public domain, and Unilogic recouped on its
investment. For Stallman, it was a betrayal of the
programmer ethos, pure and simple. Instead of honoring
the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted
a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for
information access.
As the weeks passed and his attempts to track down
Xerox laser-printer source code hit a brick wall,
Stallman began to sense a similar money-for-code
scenario at work. Before Stallman could do or say
anything about it, however, good news finally trickled
in via the programmer grapevine. Word had it that a
scientist at the computer-science department at
Carnegie Mellon University had just departed a job at
the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Not only had the
scientist worked on the laser printer in question, but
according to rumor, he was still working on it as part
of his research duties at Carnegie Mellon.
Casting aside his initial suspicion, Stallman made a
firm resolution to seek out the person in question
during his next visit to the Carnegie Mellon campus.
He didn’t have to wait long. Carnegie Mellon also had a
lab specializing in artificial-intelligence research,
and within a few months, Stallman had a
business-related reason to visit the Carnegie Mellon
campus. During that visit, he made sure to stop by the
computer-science department. Department employees
directed him to the office of the faculty member
leading the Xerox project. When Stallman reached the
office, he found the professor working there.
In true engineer-to-engineer fashion, the conversation
was cordial but blunt. After briefly introducing
himself as a visitor from MIT, Stallman requested a
copy of the laser-printer source code so that he could
port it to the PDP-11. To his surprise, the professor
refused to grant his request.
“He told me that he had promised not to give me a
copy,” Stallman says.
Memory is a funny thing. Twenty years after the fact,
Stallman’s mental history tape is notoriously blank in
places. Not only does he not remember the motivating
reason for the trip or even the time of year during
which he took it, he also has no recollection of the
professor or doctoral student on the other end of the
conversation. According to Reid, the person most likely
to have fielded Stallman’s request is Robert Sproull, a
former Xerox PARC researcher and current director of
Sun Laboratories, a research division of the
computer-technology conglomerate Sun Microsystems.
During the 1970s, Sproull had been the primary
developer of the laser-printer software in question
while at Xerox PARC. Around 1980, Sproull took a
faculty research position at Carnegie Mellon where he
continued his laser-printer work amid other projects.
“The code that Stallman was asking for was leading-edge
state-of-the-art code that Sproull had written in the
year or so before going to Carnegie Mellon,” recalls
Reid. “I suspect that Sproull had been at Carnegie
Mellon less than a month before this request came in.”
When asked directly about the request, however, Sproull
draws a blank. “I can’t make a factual comment,” writes
Sproull via email. “I have absolutely no recollection
of the incident.”
With both participants in the brief conversation
struggling to recall key details-including whether the
conversation even took place-it’s hard to gauge the
bluntness of Sproull’s refusal, at least as recalled by
Stallman. In talking to audiences, Stallman has made
repeated reference to the incident, noting that
Sproull’s unwillingness to hand over the source code
stemmed from a nondisclosure agreement, a contractual
agreement between Sproull and the Xerox Corporation
giving Sproull, or any other signatory, access the
software source code in exchange for a promise of
secrecy. Now a standard item of business in the
software industry, the nondisclosure agreement, or NDA,
was a novel development at the time, a reflection of
both the commercial value of the laser printer to Xerox
and the information needed to run it. “Xerox was at the
time trying to make a commercial product out of the
laser printer,” recalls Reid. “They would have been
insane to give away the source code.”
For Stallman, however, the NDA was something else
entirely. It was a refusal on the part of Xerox and
Sproull, or whomever the person was that turned down
his source-code request that day, to participate in a
system that, until then, had encouraged software
programmers to regard programs as communal resources.
Like a peasant whose centuries-old irrigation ditch had
grown suddenly dry, Stallman had followed the ditch to
its source only to find a brand-spanking-new
hydroelectric dam bearing the Xerox logo.
For Stallman, the realization that Xerox had compelled
a fellow programmer to participate in this newfangled
system of compelled secrecy took a while to sink in. At
first, all he could focus on was the personal nature of
the refusal. As a person who felt awkward and out of
sync in most face-to-face encounters, Stallman’s
attempt to drop in on a fellow programmer unannounced
had been intended as a demonstration of neighborliness.
Now that the request had been refused, it felt like a
major blunder. “I was so angry I couldn’t think of a
way to express it. So I just turned away and walked out
without another word,” Stallman recalls. “I might have
slammed the door. Who knows? All I remember is wanting
to get out of there.”
Twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers,
so much so that Stallman has elevated the event into a
major turning point. Within the next few months, a
series of events would befall both Stallman and the AI
Lab hacker community that would make 30 seconds worth
of tension in a remote Carnegie Mellon office seem
trivial by comparison. Nevertheless, when it comes time
to sort out the events that would transform Stallman
from a lone hacker, instinctively suspicious of
centralized authority, to a crusading activist applying
traditional notions of liberty, equality, and
fraternity to the world of software development,
Stallman singles out the Carnegie Mellon encounter for
special attention.
“It encouraged me to think about something that I’d
already been thinking about,” says Stallman. “I already
had an idea that software should be shared, but I
wasn’t sure how to think about that. My thoughts
weren’t clear and organized to the point where I could
express them in a concise fashion to the rest of the world.”
Although previous events had raised Stallman’s ire, he
says it wasn’t until his Carnegie Mellon encounter that
he realized the events were beginning to intrude on a
culture he had long considered sacrosanct. As an elite
programmer at one of the world’s elite institutions,
Stallman had been perfectly willing to ignore the
compromises and bargains of his fellow programmers just
so long as they didn’t interfere with his own work.
Until the arrival of the Xerox laser printer, Stallman
had been content to look down on the machines and
programs other computer users grimly tolerated. On the
rare occasion that such a program breached the AI Lab’s
walls-when the lab replaced its venerable Incompatible
Time Sharing operating system with a commercial
variant, the TOPS 20, for example-Stallman and his
hacker colleagues had been free to rewrite, reshape,
and rename the software according to personal taste.
Now that the laser printer had insinuated itself within
the AI Lab’s network, however, something had changed.
The machine worked fine, barring the occasional paper
jam, but the ability to modify according to personal
taste had disappeared. From the viewpoint of the entire
software industry, the printer was a wake-up call.
Software had become such a valuable asset that
companies no longer felt the need to publicize source
code, especially when publication meant giving
potential competitors a chance to duplicate something
cheaply. From Stallman’s viewpoint, the printer was a
Trojan Horse. After a decade of failure, privately
owned software-future hackers would use the term “
proprietary” software-had gained a foothold inside the
AI Lab through the sneakiest of methods. It had come
disguised as a gift.
That Xerox had offered some programmers access to
additional gifts in exchange for secrecy was also
galling, but Stallman takes pains to note that, if
presented with such a quid pro quo bargain at a younger
age, he just might have taken the Xerox Corporation up
on its offer. The awkwardness of the Carnegie Mellon
encounter, however, had a firming effect on Stallman’s
own moral lassitude. Not only did it give him the
necessary anger to view all future entreaties with
suspicion, it also forced him to ask the uncomfortable
question: what if a fellow hacker dropped into
Stallman’s office someday and it suddenly became
Stallman’s job to refuse the hacker’s request for
source code?
“It was my first encounter with a nondisclosure
agreement, and it immediately taught me that
nondisclosure agreements have victims,” says Stallman,
firmly. “In this case I was the victim. [My lab and I]
were victims.”
It was a lesson Stallman would carry with him through
the tumultuous years of the 1980s, a decade during
which many of his MIT colleagues would depart the AI
Lab and sign nondisclosure agreements of their own.
Because most nondisclosure aggreements (NDAs) had
expiration dates, few hackers who did sign them saw
little need for personal introspection. Sooner or
later, they reasoned, the software would become public
knowledge. In the meantime, promising to keep the
software secret during its earliest development stages
was all a part of the compromise deal that allowed
hackers to work on the best projects. For Stallman,
however, it was the first step down a slippery slope.
“When somebody invited me to betray all my colleagues
in that way, I remembered how angry I was when somebody
else had done that to me and my whole lab,” Stallman
says. “So I said, `Thank you very much for offering me
this nice software package, but I can’t accept it on
the conditions that you’re asking for, so I’m going to
do without it.’”
As Stallman would quickly learn, refusing such requests
involved more than personal sacrifice. It involved
segregating himself from fellow hackers who, though
sharing a similar distaste for secrecy, tended to
express that distaste in a more morally flexible
fashion. It wasn’t long before Stallman, increasingly
an outcast even within the AI Lab, began billing
himself as “the last true hacker,” isolating himself
further and further from a marketplace dominated by
proprietary software. Refusing another’s request for
source code, Stallman decided, was not only a betrayal
of the scientific mission that had nurtured software
development since the end of World War II, it was a
violation of the Golden Rule, the baseline moral
dictate to do unto others as you would have them do
unto you.
Hence the importance of the laser printer and the
encounter that resulted from it. Without it, Stallman
says, his life might have followed a more ordinary
path, one balancing the riches of a commercial
programmer with the ultimate frustration of a life
spent writing invisible software code. There would have
been no sense of clarity, no urgency to address a
problem others weren’t addressing. Most importantly,
there would have been no righteous anger, an emotion
that, as we soon shall see, has propelled Stallman’s
career as surely as any political ideology or ethical belief.
“From that day forward, I decided this was something I
could never participate in,” says Stallman, alluding to
the practice of trading personal liberty for the sake
of convenience-Stallman’s description of the NDA
bargain-as well as the overall culture that encouraged
such ethically suspect deal-making in the first place.
“I decided never to make other people victims just like
I had been a victim.”
2001: A Hacker’s Odyssey
The New York University computer-science department
sits inside Warren Weaver Hall, a fortress-like
building located two blocks east of Washington Square
Park. Industrial-strength air-conditioning vents create
a surrounding moat of hot air, discouraging loiterers
and solicitors alike. Visitors who breach the moat
encounter another formidable barrier, a security
check-in counter immediately inside the building’s
single entryway.
Beyond the security checkpoint, the atmosphere relaxes
somewhat. Still, numerous signs scattered throughout
the first floor preach the dangers of unsecured doors
and propped-open fire exits. Taken as a whole, the
signs offer a reminder: even in the relatively tranquil
confines of pre-September 11, 2001, New York, one can
never be too careful or too suspicious.
The signs offer an interesting thematic counterpoint to
the growing number of visitors gathering in the hall’s
interior atrium. A few look like NYU students. Most
look like shaggy-aired concert-goers milling outside a
music hall in anticipation of the main act. For one
brief morning, the masses have taken over Warren Weaver
Hall, leaving the nearby security attendant with
nothing better to do but watch Ricki Lake on TV and
shrug her shoulders toward the nearby auditorium
whenever visitors ask about “the speech.”
Once inside the auditorium, a visitor finds the person
who has forced this temporary shutdown of building
security procedures. The person is Richard M. Stallman,
founder of the GNU Project, original president of the
Free Software Foundation, winner of the 1990 MacArthur
Fellowship, winner of the Association of Computing
Machinery’s Grace Murray Hopper Award (also in 1990),
corecipient of the Takeda Foundation’s 2001 Takeda
Award, and former AI Lab hacker. As announced over a
host of hacker-related web sites, including the GNU
Project’s own http://www.gnu.org site, Stallman is in
Manhattan, his former hometown, to deliver a much
anticipated speech in rebuttal to the Microsoft
Corporation’s recent campaign against the GNU General
Public License.
The subject of Stallman’s speech is the history and
future of the free software movement. The location is
significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior
vice president Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU
Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting
the General Public License, or GPL, a legal device
originally conceived by Stallman 16 years before. Built
to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy
overtaking the computer industry-a wave first noticed
by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox
laser printer-the GPL has evolved into a central tool
of the free software community. In simplest terms, the
GPL locks software programs into a form of communal
ownership-what today’s legal scholars now call the
“digital commons”-through the legal weight of
copyright. Once locked, programs remain unremovable.
Derivative versions must carry the same copyright
protection-even derivative versions that bear only a
small snippet of the original source code. For this
reason, some within the software industry have taken to
calling the GPL a “viral” license, because it spreads
itself to every software program it touches. Actually, the GPL’s powers are not
quite that potent.
According to section 10 of the GNU General Public
License, Version 2 (1991), the viral nature of the
license depends heavily on the Free Software
Foundation’s willingness to view a program as a
derivative work, not to mention the existing license
the GPL would replace.
If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into
other free programs whose distribution conditions are
different, write to the author to ask for permission.
For software that is copyrighted by the Free Software
Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we
sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will
be guided by the two goals of preserving the free
status of all derivatives of our free software and of
promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.
“To compare something to a virus is very harsh,” says
Stallman. “A spider plant is a more accurate
comparison; it goes to another place if you actively
take a cutting.”
For more information on the GNU General Public License,
visit [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.]
In an information economy increasingly dependent on
software and increasingly beholden to software
standards, the GPL has become the proverbial “big
stick.” Even companies that once laughed it off as
software socialism have come around to recognize the
benefits. Linux, the Unix-like kernel developed by
Finnish college student Linus Torvalds in 1991, is
licensed under the GPL, as are many of the world’s most
popular programming tools: GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger,
the GNU C Compiler, etc. Together, these tools form the
components of a free software operating system
developed, nurtured, and owned by the worldwide hacker
community. Instead of viewing this community as a
threat, high-tech companies like IBM, Hewlett Packard,
and Sun Microsystems have come to rely upon it, selling
software applications and services built to ride atop
the ever-growing free software infrastructure.
They’ve also come to rely upon it as a strategic weapon
in the hacker community’s perennial war against
Microsoft, the Redmond, Washington-based company that,
for better or worse, has dominated the PC-software
marketplace since the late 1980s. As owner of the
popular Windows operating system, Microsoft stands to
lose the most in an industry-wide shift to the GPL
license. Almost every line of source code in the
Windows colossus is protected by copyrights reaffirming
the private nature of the underlying source code or, at
the very least, reaffirming Microsoft’s legal ability
to treat it as such. From the Microsoft viewpoint,
incorporating programs protected by the “viral” GPL
into the Windows colossus would be the software
equivalent of Superman downing a bottle of Kryptonite
pills. Rival companies could suddenly copy, modify, and
sell improved versions of Windows, rendering the
company’s indomitable position as the No. 1 provider of
consumer-oriented software instantly vulnerable. Hence
the company’s growing concern over the GPL’s rate of
adoption. Hence the recent Mundie speech blasting the
GPL and the ” open source” approach to software
development and sales. And hence Stallman’s decision to
deliver a public rebuttal to that speech on the same
campus here today.
20 years is a long time in the software industry.
Consider this: in 1980, when Richard Stallman was
cursing the AI Lab’s Xerox laser printer, Microsoft,
the company modern hackers view as the most powerful
force in the worldwide software industry, was still a
privately held startup. IBM, the company hackers used
to regard as the most powerful force in the worldwide
software industry, had yet to to introduce its first
personal computer, thereby igniting the current
low-cost PC market. Many of the technologies we now
take for granted-the World Wide Web, satellite
television, 32-bit video-game consoles-didn’t even
exist. The same goes for many of the companies that now
fill the upper echelons of the corporate establishment,
companies like AOL, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com,
Compaq, and Dell. The list goes on and on.
The fact that the high-technology marketplace has come
so far in such little time is fuel for both sides of
the GPL debate. GPL-proponents point to the short
lifespan of most computer hardware platforms. Facing
the risk of buying an obsolete product, consumers tend
to flock to companies with the best long-term survival.
As a result, the software marketplace has become a
winner-take-all arena.See Shubha Ghosh, “Revealing the Microsoft Windows
Source Code,” Gigalaw.com (January, 2000).
http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/ghosh-2000-01-p1.html
The current, privately owned software environment,
GPL-proponents say, leads to monopoly abuse and
stagnation. Strong companies suck all the oxygen out of
the marketplace for rival competitors and innovative startups.
GPL-opponents argue just the opposite. Selling software
is just as risky, if not more risky, than buying
software, they say. Without the legal guarantees
provided by private software licenses, not to mention
the economic prospects of a privately owned “killer
app” (i.e., a breakthrough technology that launches an
entirely new market),Killer apps don’t have to be proprietary. Witness, of
course, the legendary Mosaic browser, a program whose
copyright permits noncommercial derivatives with
certain restrictions. Still, I think the reader gets
the point: the software marketplace is like the
lottery. The bigger the potential payoff, the more
people want to participate. For a good summary of the
killer-app phenomenon, see Philip Ben-David, “Whatever
Happened to the `Killer App’?” e-Commerce News
(December 7, 2000).
companies lose the incentive to participate. Once
again, the market stagnates and innovation declines. As
Mundie himself noted in his May 3 address on the same
campus, the GPL’s “viral” nature “poses a threat” to
any company that relies on the uniqueness of its
software as a competitive asset. Added Mundie: It also
fundamentally undermines the independent commercial
software sector because it effectively makes it
impossible to distribute software on a basis where
recipients pay for the product rather than just the
cost of distributionSee Craig Mundie, “The Commercial Software Model,”
senior vice president, Microsoft Corp. Excerpted from
an online transcript of Mundie’s May 3,speech to the
New York University Stern School of Business.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/5893.html 001,
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp
The mutual success of GNU/ LinuxThe acronym GNU stands for “GNU’s not Unix.”
In another
portion of the May 29, 2001, NYU speech, Stallman
summed up the acronym’s origin: We hackers always look
for a funny or naughty name for a program, because
naming a program is half the fun of writing the
program. We also had a tradition of recursive acronyms,
to say that the program that you’re writing is similar
to some existing program . . . I looked for a recursive
acronym for Something Is Not UNIX. And I tried all 26
letters and discovered that none of them was a word. I
decided to make it a contraction. That way I could have
a three-letter acronym, for Something’s Not UNIX. And I
tried letters, and I came across the word “GNU.” That
was it. Although a fan of puns, Stallman recommends
that software users pronounce the “g” at the beginning
of the acronym (i.e., “gah-new”). Not only does this
avoid confusion with the word “gnu,” the name of the
African antelope, Connochaetes gnou , it also avoids
confusion with the adjective “new.” “We’ve been working
on it for 17 years now, so it is not exactly new any
more,” Stallman says. Source: author notes and online
transcript of “Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation,”
Richard Stallman’s May 29, 2001, speech at New York University.
http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
, the amalgamated operating system built around the
GPL-protected Linux kernel, and Windows over the last
10 years reveals the wisdom of both perspectives.
Nevertheless, the battle for momentum is an important
one in the software industry. Even powerful vendors
such as Microsoft rely on the support of third-party
software developers whose tools, programs, and computer
games make an underlying software platform such as
Windows more attractive to the mainstream consumer.
Citing the rapid evolution of the technology
marketplace over the last 20 years, not to mention his
own company’s admirable track record during that
period, Mundie advised listeners to not get too carried
away by the free software movement’s recent momentum:
Two decades of experience have shown that an economic
model that protects intellectual property and a
business model that recoups research and development
costs can create impressive economic benefits and
distribute them very broadly. Such admonitions serve as
the backdrop for Stallman’s speech today. Less than a
month after their utterance, Stallman stands with his
back to one of the chalk boards at the front of the
room, edgy to begin.
If the last two decades have brought dramatic changes
to the software marketplace, they have brought even
more dramatic changes to Stallman himself. Gone is the
skinny, clean-shaven hacker who once spent his entire
days communing with his beloved PDP-10. In his place
stands a heavy-set middle-aged man with long hair and
rabbinical beard, a man who now spends the bulk of his
time writing and answering email, haranguing fellow
programmers, and giving speeches like the one today.
Dressed in an aqua-colored T-shirt and brown polyester
pants, Stallman looks like a desert hermit who just
stepped out of a Salvation Army dressing room.
The crowd is filled with visitors who share Stallman’s
fashion and grooming tastes. Many come bearing laptop
computers and cellular modems, all the better to record
and transmit Stallman’s words to a waiting Internet
audience. The gender ratio is roughly 15 males to 1
female, and 1 of the 7 or 8 females in the room comes
in bearing a stuffed penguin, the official Linux
mascot, while another carries a stuffed teddy bear.
Richard Stallman, circa 2000. “I decided I would
develop a free software operating system or die trying
. . of old age of course.” Photo courtesy of
http://www.stallman.org.
Agitated, Stallman leaves his post at the front of the
room and takes a seat in a front-row chair, tapping a
few commands into an already-opened laptop. For the
next 10 minutes Stallman is oblivious to the growing
number of students, professors, and fans circulating in
front of him at the foot of the auditorium stage.
Before the speech can begin, the baroque rituals of
academic formality must be observed. Stallman’s
appearance merits not one but two introductions. Mike
Uretsky, codirector of the Stern School’s Center for
Advanced Technology, provides the first.
“The role of a university is to foster debate and to
have interesting discussions,” Uretsky says. “This
particular presentation, this seminar falls right into
that mold. I find the discussion of open source
particularly interesting.”
Before Uretsky can get another sentence out, Stallman
is on his feet waving him down like a stranded motorist.
“I do free software,” Stallman says to rising laughter.
“Open source is a different movement.”
The laughter gives way to applause. The room is stocked
with Stallman partisans, people who know of his
reputation for verbal exactitude, not to mention his
much publicized 1998 falling out with the open source
software proponents. Most have come to anticipate such
outbursts the same way radio fans once waited for Jack
Benny’s trademark, “Now cut that out!” phrase during
each radio program.
Uretsky hastily finishes his introduction and cedes the
stage to Edmond Schonberg, a professor in the NYU
computer-science department. As a computer programmer
and GNU Project contributor, Schonberg knows which
linguistic land mines to avoid. He deftly summarizes
Stallman’s career from the perspective of a modern-day
programmer.
“Richard is the perfect example of somebody who, by
acting locally, started thinking globally [about]
problems concerning the unavailability of source code,”
says Schonberg. “He has developed a coherent philosophy
that has forced all of us to reexamine our ideas of how
software is produced, of what intellectual property
means, and of what the software community actually represents.”
Schonberg welcomes Stallman to more applause. Stallman
takes a moment to shut off his laptop, rises out of his
chair, and takes the stage.
At first, Stallman’s address seems more Catskills
comedy routine than political speech. “I’d like to
thank Microsoft for providing me the opportunity to be
on this platform,” Stallman wisecracks. “For the past
few weeks, I have felt like an author whose book was
fortuitously banned somewhere.”
For the uninitiated, Stallman dives into a quick free
software warm-up analogy. He likens a software program
to a cooking recipe. Both provide useful step-by-step
instructions on how to complete a desired task and can
be easily modified if a user has special desires or
circumstances. “You don’t have to follow a recipe
exactly,” Stallman notes. “You can leave out some
ingredients. Add some mushrooms, ’cause you like
mushrooms. Put in less salt because your doctor said
you should cut down on salt-whatever.”
Most importantly, Stallman says, software programs and
recipes are both easy to share. In giving a recipe to a
dinner guest, a cook loses little more than time and
the cost of the paper the recipe was written on.
Software programs require even less, usually a few
mouse-clicks and a modicum of electricity. In both
instances, however, the person giving the information
gains two things: increased friendship and the ability
to borrow interesting recipes in return.
“Imagine what it would be like if recipes were packaged
inside black boxes,” Stallman says, shifting gears.
“You couldn’t see what ingredients they’re using, let
alone change them, and imagine if you made a copy for a
friend. They would call you a pirate and try to put you
in prison for years. That world would create tremendous
outrage from all the people who are used to sharing
recipes. But that is exactly what the world of
proprietary software is like. A world in which common
decency towards other people is prohibited or prevented.”
With this introductory analogy out of the way, Stallman
launches into a retelling of the Xerox laser-printer
episode. Like the recipe analogy, the laser-printer
story is a useful rhetorical device. With its
parable-like structure, it dramatizes just how quickly
things can change in the software world. Drawing
listeners back to an era before Amazon.com one-click
shopping, Microsoft Windows, and Oracle databases, it
asks the listener to examine the notion of software
ownership free of its current corporate logos.
Stallman delivers the story with all the polish and
practice of a local district attorney conducting a
closing argument. When he gets to the part about the
Carnegie Mellon professor refusing to lend him a copy
of the printer source code, Stallman pauses.
“He had betrayed us,” Stallman says. “But he didn’t
just do it to us. Chances are he did it to you.”
On the word “you,” Stallman points his index finger
accusingly at an unsuspecting member of the audience.
The targeted audience member’s eyebrows flinch
slightly, but Stallman’s own eyes have moved on. Slowly
and deliberately, Stallman picks out a second listener
to nervous titters from the crowd. “And I think, mostly
likely, he did it to you, too,” he says, pointing at an
audience member three rows behind the first.
By the time Stallman has a third audience member picked
out, the titters have given away to general laughter.
The gesture seems a bit staged, because it is. Still,
when it comes time to wrap up the Xerox laser-printer
story, Stallman does so with a showman’s flourish. “He
probably did it to most of the people here in this
room-except a few, maybe, who weren’t born yet in
1980,” Stallman says, drawing more laughs. “[That's]
because he had promised to refuse to cooperate with
just about the entire population of the planet Earth.”
Stallman lets the comment sink in for a half-beat. “He
had signed a nondisclosure agreement,” Stallman adds.
Richard Matthew Stallman’s rise from frustrated
academic to political leader over the last 20 years
speaks to many things. It speaks to Stallman’s stubborn
nature and prodigious will. It speaks to the clearly
articulated vision and values of the free software
movement Stallman helped build. It speaks to the
high-quality software programs Stallman has built,
programs that have cemented Stallman’s reputation as a
programming legend. It speaks to the growing momentum
of the GPL, a legal innovation that many Stallman
observers see as his most momentous accomplishment.
Most importantly, it speaks to the changing nature of
political power in a world increasingly beholden to
computer technology and the software programs that
power that technology.
Maybe that’s why, even at a time when most
high-technology stars are on the wane, Stallman’s star
has grown. Since launching the GNU Project in 1984,5
Stallman has been at turns ignored, satirized,
vilified, and attacked-both from within and without the
free software movement. Through it all, the GNU Project
has managed to meet its milestones, albeit with a few
notorious delays, and stay relevant in a software
marketplace several orders of magnitude more complex
than the one it entered 18 years ago. So too has the
free software ideology, an ideology meticulously
groomed by Stallman himself.
To understand the reasons behind this currency, it
helps to examine Richard Stallman both in his own words
and in the words of the people who have collaborated
and battled with him along the way. The Richard
Stallman character sketch is not a complicated one. If
any person exemplifies the old adage “what you see is
what you get,” it’s Stallman.
“I think if you want to understand Richard Stallman the
human being, you really need to see all of the parts as
a consistent whole,” advises Eben Moglen, legal counsel
to the Free Software Foundation and professor of law at
Columbia University Law School. “All those personal
eccentricities that lots of people see as obstacles to
getting to know Stallman really are Stallman: Richard’s
strong sense of personal frustration, his enormous
sense of principled ethical commitment, his inability
to compromise, especially on issues he considers
fundamental. These are all the very reasons Richard did
what he did when he did.”
Explaining how a journey that started with a laser
printer would eventually lead to a sparring match with
the world’s richest corporation is no easy task. It
requires a thoughtful examination of the forces that
have made software ownership so important in today’s
society. It also requires a thoughtful examination of a
man who, like many political leaders before him,
understands the malleability of human memory. It
requires an ability to interpret the myths and
politically laden code words that have built up around
Stallman over time. Finally, it requires an
understanding of Stallman’s genius as a programmer and
his failures and successes in translating that genius
to other pursuits.
When it comes to offering his own summary of the
journey, Stallman acknowledges the fusion of
personality and principle observed by Moglen.
“Stubbornness is my strong suit,” he says. “Most people
who attempt to do anything of any great difficulty
eventually get discouraged and give up. I never gave up.”
He also credits blind chance. Had it not been for that
run-in over the Xerox laser printer, had it not been
for the personal and political conflicts that closed
out his career as an MIT employee, had it not been for
a half dozen other timely factors, Stallman finds it
very easy to picture his life following a different
career path. That being said, Stallman gives thanks to
the forces and circumstances that put him in the
position to make a difference.
“I had just the right skills,” says Stallman, summing
up his decision for launching the GNU Project to the
audience. “Nobody was there but me, so I felt like,
`I’m elected. I have to work on this. If not me ,
who?’” Endnotes
1. Actually, the GPL’s powers are not quite that
potent. According to section 10 of the GNU General
Public License, Version 2 (1991), the viral nature of
the license depends heavily on the Free Software
Foundation’s willingness to view a program as a
derivative work, not to mention the existing license
the GPL would replace.
If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into
other free programs whose distribution conditions are
different, write to the author to ask for permission.
For software that is copyrighted by the Free Software
Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we
sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will
be guided by the two goals of preserving the free
status of all derivatives of our free software and of
promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.
“To compare something to a virus is very harsh,” says
Stallman. “A spider plant is a more accurate
comparison; it goes to another place if you actively
take a cutting.”
For more information on the GNU General Public License,
visit
[http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.]
A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man
Richard Stallman’s mother, Alice Lippman, still
remembers the moment she realized her son had a special gift.
“I think it was when he was eight,” Lippman recalls.
The year was 1961, and Lippman, a recently divorced
single mother, was wiling away a weekend afternoon
within the family’s tiny one-bedroom apartment on
Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Leafing through a copy of
Scientific American, Lippman came upon her favorite
section, the Martin Gardner-authored column titled
“Mathematical Games.” A substitute art teacher, Lippman
always enjoyed Gardner’s column for the brain-teasers
it provided. With her son already ensconced in a book
on the nearby sofa, Lippman decided to take a crack at
solving the week’s feature puzzle.
“I wasn’t the best person when it came to solving the
puzzles,” she admits. “But as an artist, I found they
really helped me work through conceptual barriers.”
Lippman says her attempt to solve the puzzle met an
immediate brick wall. About to throw the magazine down
in disgust, Lippman was surprised by a gentle tug on
her shirt sleeve.
“It was Richard,” she recalls, “He wanted to know if I
needed any help.”
Looking back and forth, between the puzzle and her son,
Lippman says she initially regarded the offer with
skepticism. “I asked Richard if he’d read the
magazine,” she says. “He told me that, yes, he had and
what’s more he’d already solved the puzzle. The next
thing I know, he starts explaining to me how to solve it.”
Hearing the logic of her son’s approach, Lippman’s
skepticism quickly gave way to incredulity. “I mean, I
always knew he was a bright boy,” she says, “but this
was the first time I’d seen anything that suggested how
advanced he really was.”
Thirty years after the fact, Lippman punctuates the
memory with a laugh. “To tell you the truth, I don’t
think I ever figured out how to solve that puzzle,” she
says. “All I remember is being amazed he knew the answer.”
Seated at the dining-room table of her second Manhattan
apartment-the same spacious three-bedroom complex she
and her son moved to following her 1967 marriage to
Maurice Lippman, now deceased-Alice Lippman exudes a
Jewish mother’s mixture of pride and bemusement when
recalling her son’s early years. The nearby dining-room
credenza offers an eight-by-ten photo of Stallman
glowering in full beard and doctoral robes. The image
dwarfs accompanying photos of Lippman’s nieces and
nephews, but before a visitor can make too much of it,
Lippman makes sure to balance its prominent placement
with an ironic wisecrack.
“Richard insisted I have it after he received his
honorary doctorate at the University of Glasgow,” says
Lippman. “He said to me, `Guess what, mom? It’s the
first graduation I ever attended.’”1
Such comments reflect the sense of humor that comes
with raising a child prodigy. Make no mistake, for
every story Lippman hears and reads about her son’s
stubbornness and unusual behavior, she can deliver at
least a dozen in return.
“He used to be so conservative,” she says, throwing up
her hands in mock exasperation. “We used to have the
worst arguments right here at this table. I was part of
the first group of public city school teachers that
struck to form a union, and Richard was very angry with
me. He saw unions as corrupt. He was also very opposed
to social security. He thought people could make much
more money investing it on their own. Who knew that
within 10 years he would become so idealistic? All I
remember is his stepsister coming to me and saying,
`What is he going to be when he grows up? A fascist?’”
As a single parent for nearly a decade-she and
Richard’s father, Daniel Stallman, were married in
1948, divorced in 1958, and split custody of their son
afterwards-Lippman can attest to her son’s aversion to
authority. She can also attest to her son’s lust for
knowledge. It was during the times when the two forces
intertwined, Lippman says, that she and her son
experienced their biggest battles.
“It was like he never wanted to eat,” says Lippman,
recalling the behavior pattern that set in around age
eight and didn’t let up until her son’s high-school
graduation in 1970. “I’d call him for dinner, and he’d
never hear me. I’d have to call him 9 or 10 times just
to get his attention. He was totally immersed.”
Stallman, for his part, remembers things in a similar
fashion, albeit with a political twist.
“I enjoyed reading,” he says. “If I wanted to read, and
my mother told me to go to the kitchen and eat or go to
sleep, I wasn’t going to listen. I saw no reason why I
couldn’t read. No reason why she should be able to tell
me what to do, period. Essentially, what I had read
about, ideas such as democracy and individual freedom,
I applied to myself. I didn’t see any reason to exclude
children from these principles.”
The belief in individual freedom over arbitrary
authority extended to school as well. Two years ahead
of his classmates by age 11, Stallman endured all the
usual frustrations of a gifted public-school student.
It wasn’t long after the puzzle incident that his
mother attended the first in what would become a long
string of parent-teacher conferences.
“He absolutely refused to write papers,” says Lippman,
recalling an early controversy. “I think the last paper
he wrote before his senior year in high school was an
essay on the history of the number system in the west
for a fourth-grade teacher.”
Gifted in anything that required analytical thinking,
Stallman gravitated toward math and science at the
expense of his other studies. What some teachers saw as
single-mindedness, however, Lippman saw as impatience.
Math and science offered simply too much opportunity to
learn, especially in comparison to subjects and
pursuits for which her son seemed less naturally
inclined. Around age 10 or 11, when the boys in
Stallman’s class began playing a regular game of touch
football, she remembers her son coming home in a rage.
“He wanted to play so badly, but he just didn’t have
the coordination skills,” Lippman recalls. “It made him
so angry.”
The anger eventually drove her son to focus on math and
science all the more. Even in the realm of science,
however, her son’s impatience could be problematic.
Poring through calculus textbooks by age seven,
Stallman saw little need to dumb down his discourse for
adults. Sometime, during his middle-school years,
Lippman hired a student from nearby Columbia University
to play big brother to her son. The student left the
family’s apartment after the first session and never
came back. “I think what Richard was talking about went
over his head,” Lippman speculates.
Another favorite maternal anecdote dates back to the
early 1960s, shortly after the puzzle incident. Around
age seven, two years after the divorce and relocation
from Queens, Richard took up the hobby of launching
model rockets in nearby Riverside Drive Park. What
started as aimless fun soon took on an earnest edge as
her son began recording the data from each launch. Like
the interest in mathematical games, the pursuit drew
little attention until one day, just before a major
NASA launch, Lippman checked in on her son to see if he
wanted to watch.
“He was fuming,” Lippman says. “All he could say to me
was, `But I’m not published yet.’ Apparently he had
something that he really wanted to show NASA.”
Such anecdotes offer early evidence of the intensity
that would become Stallman’s chief trademark throughout
life. When other kids came to the table, Stallman
stayed in his room and read. When other kids played
Johnny Unitas, Stallman played Werner von Braun. “I was
weird,” Stallman says, summing up his early years
succinctly in a 1999 interview. “After a certain age,
the only friends I had were teachers.”See Michael Gross, “Richard Stallman:
High School
Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified
Genius” (1999). This interview is one of the most
candid Stallman interviews on the record. I recommend
it highly.
http://www.mgross.com/interviews/stallman1.html
Although it meant courting more run-ins at school,
Lippman decided to indulge her son’s passion. By age
12, Richard was attending science camps during the
summer and private school during the school year. When
a teacher recommended her son enroll in the Columbia
Science Honors Program, a post-Sputnik program designed
for gifted middle- and high-school students in New York
City, Stallman added to his extracurriculars and was
soon commuting uptown to the Columbia University campus
on Saturdays.
Dan Chess, a fellow classmate in the Columbia Science
Honors Program, recalls Richard Stallman seeming a bit
weird even among the students who shared a similar lust
for math and science. “We were all geeks and nerds, but
he was unusually poorly adjusted,” recalls Chess, now a
mathematics professor at Hunter College. “He was also
smart as shit. I’ve known a lot of smart people, but I
think he was the smartest person I’ve ever known.”
Seth Breidbart, a fellow Columbia Science Honors
Program alumnus, offers bolstering testimony. A
computer programmer who has kept in touch with Stallman
thanks to a shared passion for science fiction and
science-fiction conventions, he recalls the
15-year-old, buzz-cut-wearing Stallman as “scary,”
especially to a fellow 15-year-old.
“It’s hard to describe,” Breidbart says. “It wasn’t
like he was unapproachable. He was just very intense.
[He was] very knowledgeable but also very hardheaded in
some ways.”
Such descriptions give rise to speculation: are
judgment-laden adjectives like “intense” and
“hardheaded” simply a way to describe traits that today
might be categorized under juvenile behavioral
disorder? A December, 2001, Wired magazine article
titled “The Geek Syndrome” paints the portrait of
several scientifically gifted children diagnosed with
high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome. In many
ways, the parental recollections recorded in the Wired
article are eerily similar to the ones offered by
Lippman. Even Stallman has indulged in psychiatric
revisionism from time to time. During a 2000 profile
for the Toronto Star, Stallman described himself to an
interviewer as “borderline autistic,”See Judy Steed, Toronto Star, BUSINESS,
(October 9,
2000): C03. His vision of free software and social
cooperation stands in stark contrast to the isolated
nature of his private life. A Glenn Gould-like
eccentric, the Canadian pianist was similarly
brilliant, articulate, and lonely. Stallman considers
himself afflicted, to some degree, by autism: a
condition that, he says, makes it difficult for him to
interact with people.
a description that goes a long way toward explaining a
lifelong tendency toward social and emotional isolation
and the equally lifelong effort to overcome it.
Such speculation benefits from the fast and loose
nature of most so-called ” behavioral disorders”
nowadays, of course. As Steve Silberman, author of “
The Geek Syndrome,” notes, American psychiatrists have
only recently come to accept Asperger Syndrome as a
valid umbrella term covering a wide set of behavioral
traits. The traits range from poor motor skills and
poor socialization to high intelligence and an almost
obsessive affinity for numbers, computers, and ordered systems.See Steve
Silberman, “The Geek Syndrome,” Wired
(December, 2001).
Reflecting on the broad nature of this umbrella,
Stallman says its possible that, if born 40 years
later, he might have merited just such a diagnosis.
Then again, so would many of his computer-world colleagues.
“It’s possible I could have had something like that,”
he says. “On the other hand, one of the aspects of that
syndrome is difficulty following rhythms. I can dance.
In fact, I love following the most complicated rhythms.
It’s not clear cut enough to know.”
Chess, for one, rejects such attempts at
back-diagnosis. “I never thought of him [as] having
that sort of thing,” he says. “He was just very
unsocialized, but then, we all were.”
Lippman, on the other hand, entertains the possibility.
She recalls a few stories from her son’s infancy,
however, that provide fodder for speculation. A
prominent symptom of autism is an oversensitivity to
noises and colors, and Lippman recalls two anecdotes
that stand out in this regard. “When Richard was an
infant, we’d take him to the beach,” she says. “He
would start screaming two or three blocks before we
reached the surf. It wasn’t until the third time that
we figured out what was going on: the sound of the surf
was hurting his ears.” She also recalls a similar
screaming reaction in relation to color: “My mother had
bright red hair, and every time she’d stoop down to
pick him up, he’d let out a wail.”
In recent years, Lippman says she has taken to reading
books about autism and believes that such episodes were
more than coincidental. “I do feel that Richard had
some of the qualities of an autistic child,” she says.
“I regret that so little was known about autism back then.”
Over time, however, Lippman says her son learned to
adjust. By age seven, she says, her son had become fond
of standing at the front window of subway trains,
mapping out and memorizing the labyrinthian system of
railroad tracks underneath the city. It was a hobby
that relied on an ability to accommodate the loud
noises that accompanied each train ride. “Only the
initial noise seemed to bother him,” says Lippman. “It
was as if he got shocked by the sound but his nerves
learned how to make the adjustment.”
For the most part, Lippman recalls her son exhibiting
the excitement, energy, and social skills of any normal
boy. It wasn’t until after a series of traumatic events
battered the Stallman household, she says, that her son
became introverted and emotionally distant.
The first traumatic event was the divorce of Alice and
Daniel Stallman, Richard’s father. Although Lippman
says both she and her ex-husband tried to prepare their
son for the blow, she says the blow was devastating
nonetheless. “He sort of didn’t pay attention when we
first told him what was happening,” Lippman recalls.
“But the reality smacked him in the face when he and I
moved into a new apartment. The first thing he said
was, `Where’s Dad’s furniture?’”
For the next decade, Stallman would spend his weekdays
at his mother’s apartment in Manhattan and his weekends
at his father’s home in Queens. The shuttling back and
forth gave him a chance to study a pair of contrasting
parenting styles that, to this day, leaves Stallman
firmly opposed to the idea of raising children himself.
Speaking about his father, a World War II vet who
passed away in early 2001, Stallman balances respect
with anger. On one hand, there is the man whose moral
commitment led him to learn French just so he could be
more helpful to Allies when they’d finally come. On the
other hand, there was the parent who always knew how to
craft a put-down for cruel effect.Regrettably, I did not get a chance to
interview Daniel
Stallman for this book. During the early research for
this book, Stallman informed me that his father
suffered from Alzheimer’s. When I resumed research in
late 2001, I learned, sadly, that Daniel Stallman had
died earlier in the year.
“My father had a horrible temper,” Stallman says. “He
never screamed, but he always found a way to criticize
you in a cold, designed-to-crush way.”
As for life in his mother’s apartment, Stallman is less
equivocal. “That was war,” he says. “I used to say in
my misery, `I want to go home,’ meaning to the
nonexistent place that I’ll never have.”
For the first few years after the divorce, Stallman
found the tranquility that eluded him in the home of
his paternal grandparents. Then, around age 10 his
grandparents passed away in short succession. For
Stallman, the loss was devastating. “I used to go and
visit and feel I was in a loving, gentle environment,”
Stallman recalls. “It was the only place I ever found
one, until I went away to college.”
Lippman lists the death of Richard’s paternal
grandparents as the second traumatic event. “It really
upset him,” she says. He was very close to both his
grandparents. Before they died, he was very outgoing,
almost a leader-of-the-pack type with the other kids.
After they died, he became much more emotionally withdrawn.”
From Stallman’s perspective, the emotional withdrawal
was merely an attempt to deal with the agony of
adolescence. Labeling his teenage years a “pure
horror,” Stallman says he often felt like a deaf person
amid a crowd of chattering music listeners.
“I often had the feeling that I couldn’t understand
what other people were saying,” says Stallman,
recalling the emotional bubble that insulated him from
the rest of the adolescent and adult world. “I could
understand the words, but something was going on
underneath the conversations that I didn’t understand.
I couldn’t understand why people were interested in the
things other people said.”
For all the agony it produced, adolescence would have a
encouraging effect on Stallman’s sense of
individuality. At a time when most of his classmates
were growing their hair out, Stallman preferred to keep
his short. At a time when the whole teenage world was
listening to rock and roll, Stallman preferred
classical music. A devoted fan of science fiction, Mad
magazine, and late-night TV, Stallman cultivated a
distinctly off-the-wall personality that fed off the
incomprehension of parents and peers alike.
“Oh, the puns,” says Lippman, still exasperated by the
memory of her son’s teenage personality. “There wasn’t
a thing you could say at the dinner table that he
couldn’t throw back at you as a pun.”
Outside the home, Stallman saved the jokes for the
adults who tended to indulge his gifted nature. One of
the first was a summer-camp counselor who handed
Stallman a print-out manual for the IBM 7094 computer
during his 12th year. To a preteenager fascinated with
numbers and science, the gift was a godsend.Stallman, an atheist, would
probably quibble with this
description. Suffice it to say, it was something
Stallman welcomed. See previous note 1: “As soon as I
heard about computers, I wanted to see one and play
with one.”
By the end of summer, Stallman was writing out paper
programs according to the 7094′s internal
specifications, anxiously anticipating getting a chance
to try them out on a real machine.
With the first personal computer still a decade away,
Stallman would be forced to wait a few years before
getting access to his first computer. His first chance
finally came during his junior year of high school.
Hired on at the IBM New York Scientific Center, a
now-defunct research facility in downtown Manhattan,
Stallman spent the summer after high-school graduation
writing his first program, a pre-processor for the 7094
written in the programming language PL/I. “I first
wrote it in PL/I, then started over in assembler
language when the PL/I program was too big to fit in
the computer,” he recalls.
After that job at the IBM Scientific Center, Stallman
had held a laboratory-assistant position in the biology
department at Rockefeller University. Although he was
already moving toward a career in math or physics,
Stallman’s analytical mind impressed the lab director
enough that a few years after Stallman departed for
college, Lippman received an unexpected phone call. “It
was the professor at Rockefeller,” Lippman says. “He
wanted to know how Richard was doing. He was surprised
to learn that he was working in computers. He’d always
thought Richard had a great future ahead of him as a biologist.”
Stallman’s analytical skills impressed faculty members
at Columbia as well, even when Stallman himself became
a target of their ire. “Typically once or twice an hour
[Stallman] would catch some mistake in the lecture,”
says Breidbart. “And he was not shy about letting the
professors know it immediately. It got him a lot of
respect but not much popularity.”
Hearing Breidbart’s anecdote retold elicits a wry smile
from Stallman. “I may have been a bit of a jerk
sometimes,” he admits. “But I found kindred spirits
among the teachers, because they, too, liked to learn.
Kids, for the most part, didn’t. At least not in the
same way.”
Hanging out with the advanced kids on Saturday
nevertheless encouraged Stallman to think more about
the merits of increased socialization. With college
fast approaching, Stallman, like many in his Columbia
Science Honors Program, had narrowed his list of
desired schools down to two choices: Harvard and MIT.
Hearing of her son’s desire to move on to the Ivy
League, Lippman became concerned. As a 15-year-old
high-school junior, Stallman was still having run-ins
with teachers and administrators. Only the year before,
he had pulled straight A’s in American History,
Chemistry, French, and Algebra, but a glaring F in
English reflected the ongoing boycott of writing
assignments. Such miscues might draw a knowing chuckle
at MIT, but at Harvard, they were a red flag.
During her son’s junior year, Lippman says she
scheduled an appointment with a therapist. The
therapist expressed instant concern over Stallman’s
unwillingness to write papers and his run-ins with
teachers. Her son certainly had the intellectual
wherewithal to succeed at Harvard, but did he have the
patience to sit through college classes that required a
term paper? The therapist suggested a trial run. If
Stallman could make it through a full year in New York
City public schools, including an English class that
required term papers, he could probably make it at
Harvard. Following the completion of his junior year,
Stallman promptly enrolled in summer school at Louis D.
Brandeis High School, a public school located on 84th
Street, and began making up the mandatory art classes
he had shunned earlier in his high-school career.
By fall, Stallman was back within the mainstream
population of New York City high-school students. It
wasn’t easy sitting through classes that seemed
remedial in comparison with his Saturday studies at
Columbia, but Lippman recalls proudly her son’s ability
to toe the line.
“He was forced to kowtow to a certain degree, but he
did it,” Lippman says. “I only got called in once,
which was a bit of a miracle. It was the calculus
teacher complaining that Richard was interrupting his
lesson. I asked how he was interrupting. He said
Richard was always accusing the teacher of using a
false proof. I said, `Well, is he right?’ The teacher
said, `Yeah, but I can’t tell that to the class. They
wouldn’t understand.’”
By the end of his first semester at Brandeis, things
were falling into place. A 96 in English wiped away
much of the stigma of the 60 earned 2 years before. For
good measure, Stallman backed it up with top marks in
American History, Advanced Placement Calculus, and
Microbiology. The crowning touch was a perfect 100 in
Physics. Though still a social outcast, Stallman
finished his 11 months at Brandeis as the fourth-ranked
student in a class of 789.
Stallman’s senior-year transcript at Louis D. Brandeis
H.S., November, 1969. Note turnaround in English class
performance. “He was forced to kowtow to a certain
degree,” says his mother, “but he did it.”
Outside the classroom, Stallman pursued his studies
with even more diligence, rushing off to fulfill his
laboratory-assistant duties at Rockefeller University
during the week and dodging the Vietnam protesters on
his way to Saturday school at Columbia. It was there,
while the rest of the Science Honors Program students
sat around discussing their college choices, that
Stallman finally took a moment to participate in the
preclass bull session.
Recalls Breidbart, “Most of the students were going to
Harvard and MIT, of course, but you had a few going to
other Ivy League schools. As the conversation circled
the room, it became apparent that Richard hadn’t said
anything yet. I don’t know who it was, but somebody got
up the courage to ask him what he planned to do.”
Thirty years later, Breidbart remembers the moment
clearly. As soon as Stallman broke the news that he,
too, would be attending Harvard University in the fall,
an awkward silence filled the room. Almost as if on
cue, the corners of Stallman’s mouth slowly turned
upward into a self-satisfied smile.
Says Breidbart, “It was his silent way of saying,
`That’s right. You haven’t got rid of me yet.’”
Impeach God
Although their relationship was fraught with tension,
Richard Stallman would inherit one noteworthy trait
from his mother: a passion for progressive politics.
It was an inherited trait that would take several
decades to emerge, however. For the first few years of
his life, Stallman lived in what he now admits was a
“political vacuum.”See Michael Gross, “Richard Stallman: High School
Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified
Genius” (1999).
Like most Americans during the Eisenhower age, the
Stallman family spent the 50s trying to recapture the
normalcy lost during the wartime years of the 1940s.
“Richard’s father and I were Democrats but happy enough
to leave it at that,” says Lippman, recalling the
family’s years in Queens. “We didn’t get involved much
in local or national politics.”
That all began to change, however, in the late 1950s
when Alice divorced Daniel Stallman. The move back to
Manhattan represented more than a change of address; it
represented a new, independent identity and a jarring
loss of tranquility.
“I think my first taste of political activism came when
I went to the Queens public library and discovered
there was only a single book on divorce in the whole
library,” recalls Lippman. “It was very controlled by
the Catholic church, at least in Elmhurst, where we
lived. I think that was the first inkling I had of the
forces that quietly control our lives.”
Returning to her childhood neighborhood, Manhattan’s
Upper West Side, Lippman was shocked by the changes
that had taken place since her departure to Hunter
College a decade and a half before. The skyrocketing
demand for postwar housing had turned the neighborhood
into a political battleground. On one side stood the
pro-development city-hall politicians and businessmen
hoping to rebuild many of the neighborhood’s blocks to
accommodate the growing number of white-collar workers
moving into the city. On the other side stood the poor
Irish and Puerto Rican tenants who had found an
affordable haven in the neighborhood.
At first, Lippman didn’t know which side to choose. As
a new resident, she felt the need for new housing. As a
single mother with minimal income, however, she shared
the poorer tenants’ concern over the growing number of
development projects catering mainly to wealthy
residents. Indignant, Lippman began looking for ways to
combat the political machine that was attempting to
turn her neighborhood into a clone of the Upper East Side.
Lippman says her first visit to the local Democratic
party headquarters came in 1958. Looking for a day-care
center to take care of her son while she worked, she
had been appalled by the conditions encountered at one
of the city-owned centers that catered to low-income
residents. “All I remember is the stench of rotten
milk, the dark hallways, the paucity of supplies. I had
been a teacher in private nursery schools. The contrast
was so great. We took one look at that room and left.
That stirred me up.”
The visit to the party headquarters proved
disappointing, however. Describing it as “the
proverbial smoke-filled room,” Lippman says she became
aware for the first time that corruption within the
party might actually be the reason behind the city’s
thinly disguised hostility toward poor residents.
Instead of going back to the headquarters, Lippman
decided to join up with one of the many clubs aime