Free as in Freedom. Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software

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”.