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

Stallman says he was both impressed and shamed by the family members who did speak out. Recalling a bumper sticker on his father’s car likening the My Lai massacre to similar Nazi atrocities in World War II, he says he was “excited” by his father’s gesture of outrage. “I admired him for doing it”, Stallman says. “But I didn’t imagine that I could do anything. I was afraid that the juggernaut of the draft was going to destroy me”.

Although descriptions of his own unwillingness to speak out carry a tinge of nostalgic regret, Stallman says he was ultimately turned off by the tone and direction of the anti-war movement. Like other members of the Science Honors Program, he saw the weekend demonstrations at Columbia as little more than a distracting spectacle.3 Ultimately, Stallman says, the irrational forces driving the anti-war movement became indistinguishable from the irrational forces driving the rest of youth culture. Instead of worshiping the Beatles, girls in Stallman’s age group were suddenly worshiping firebrands like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. To a kid already struggling to comprehend his teenage peers, escapist slogans like “make love not war” had a taunting quality. Not only was it a reminder that Stallman, the short-haired outsider who hated rock ’n’ roll, detested drugs, and didn’t participate in campus demonstrations, wasn’t getting it politically; he wasn’t “getting it” sexually either.

“I didn’t like the counter culture much”, Stallman admits. “I didn’t like the music. I didn’t like the drugs. I was scared of the drugs. I especially didn’t like the anti-intellectualism, and I didn’t like the prejudice against technology. After all, I loved a computer. And I didn’t like the mindless anti-Americanism that I often encountered. There were people whose thinking was so simplistic that if they disapproved of the conduct of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, they had to support the North Vietnamese. They couldn’t imagine a more complicated position, I guess”.

Such comments alleviate feelings of timidity. They also underline a trait that would become the key to Stallman’s own political maturation. For Stallman, political confidence was directly proportionate to personal confidence. By 1970, Stallman had become confident in few things outside the realm of math and science. Nevertheless, confidence in math gave him enough of a foundation to examine the anti-war movement in purely logical terms. In the process of doing so, Stallman had found the logic wanting. Although opposed to the war in Vietnam, Stallman saw no reason to disavow war as a means for defending liberty or correcting injustice. Rather than widen the breach between himself and his peers, however, Stallman elected to keep the analysis to himself.

In 1970, Stallman left behind the nightly dinnertime conversations about politics and the Vietnam War as he departed for Harvard. Looking back, Stallman describes the transition from his mother’s Manhattan apartment to life in a Cambridge dorm as an “escape”. Peers who watched Stallman make the transition, however, saw little to suggest a liberating experience.

“He seemed pretty miserable for the first while at Harvard”, recalls Dan Chess, a classmate in the Science Honors Program who also matriculated at Harvard. “You could tell that human interaction was really difficult for him, and there was no way of avoiding it at Harvard. Harvard was an intensely social kind of place”.

To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his strengths: math and science. Like most members of the Science Honors Program, Stallman breezed through the qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary “boot camp” class for freshman mathematics “concentrators” at Harvard. Within the class, members of the Science Honors Program formed a durable unit. “We were the math mafia”, says Chess with a laugh. “Harvard was nothing, at least compared with the SHP”.

To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. “It was an amazing class”, says David Harbater, a former “math mafia” member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That’s usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don’t start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school”.

Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20 by the end of the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, “only 10 really knew what they were doing”. Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.