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

Surprised that Stallman, the best student in the class, had passed on the test, Breidbart says he and a fellow classmate cornered him in the dining common and demanded an explanation. “He said he was afraid of not doing well”, Breidbart recalls.

Breidbart and the friend quickly wrote down a few problems from memory and gave them to Stallman. “He solved all of them”, Breidbart says, “leading me to conclude that by not doing well, he either meant coming in second or getting something wrong”.

Stallman remembers the episode a bit differently. “I remember that they did bring me the questions and it’s possible that I solved one of them, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t solve them all”, he says. Nevertheless, Stallman agrees with Breidbart’s recollection that fear was the primary reason for not taking the test. Despite a demonstrated willingness to point out the intellectual weaknesses of his peers and professors in the classroom, Stallman hated the notion of head-to-head competition.

“It’s the same reason I never liked chess”, says Stallman. “Whenever I’d play, I would become so consumed by the fear of making a single mistake that I would start making stupid mistakes very early in the game. The fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy”.

Whether such fears ultimately prompted Stallman to shy away from a mathematical career is a moot issue. By the end of his freshman year at Harvard, Stallman had other interests pulling him away from the field. Computer programming, a latent fascination throughout Stallman’s high-school years, was becoming a full-fledged passion. Where other math students sought occasional refuge in art and history classes, Stallman sought it in the computer-science laboratory.

For Stallman, the first taste of real computer programming at the IBM New York Scientific Center had triggered a desire to learn more. “Toward the end of my first year at Harvard school, I started to have enough courage to go visit computer labs and see what they had. I’d ask them if they had extra copies of any manuals that I could read”.

Taking the manuals home, Stallman would examine machine specifications, compare them with other machines he already knew, and concoct a trial program, which he would then bring back to the lab along with the borrowed manual. Although some labs balked at the notion of a strange kid coming off the street and working on the lab machinery, most recognized competence when they saw it and let Stallman run the programs he had created.

One day, near the end of freshman year, Stallman heard about a special laboratory near MIT. The laboratory was located on the ninth floor an off-campus building in Tech Square, the newly built facility dedicated to advanced research. According to the rumors, the lab itself was dedicated to the cutting-edge science of artificial intelligence and boasted the cutting-edge machines and software programs to match.

Intrigued, Stallman decided to pay a visit.

The trip was short, about 2 miles on foot, 10 minutes by train, but as Stallman would soon find out, MIT and Harvard can feel like opposite poles of the same planet. With its maze-like tangle of interconnected office buildings, the Institute’s campus offered an aesthetic yin to Harvard’s spacious colonial-village yang. The same could be said for the student body, a geeky collection of ex-high school misfits known more for its predilection for pranks than its politically powerful alumni.

The yin-yang relationship extended to the AI Lab as well. Unlike Harvard computer labs, there was no grad-student gatekeeper, no clipboard waiting list for terminal access, no explicit atmosphere of “look but don’t touch”. Instead, Stallman found only a collection of open terminals and robotic arms, presumably the artifacts of some A.I. experiment.

Although the rumors said anybody could sit down at the terminals, Stallman decided to stick with the original plan. When he encountered a lab employee, he asked if the lab had any spare manuals it could loan to an inquisitive student. “They had some, but a lot of things weren’t documented”, Stallman recalls. “They were hackers after all”.

Stallman left with something even better than a manual: a job. Although he doesn’t remember what the first project was, he does remember coming back to the AI Lab the next week, grabbing an open terminal and writing software code.

Looking back, Stallman sees nothing unusual in the AI Lab’s willingness to accept an unproven outsider at first glance. “That’s the way it was back then”, he says. “That’s the way it still is now. I’ll hire somebody when I meet him if I see he’s good. Why wait? Stuffy people who insist on putting bureaucracy into everything really miss the point. If a person is good, he shouldn’t have to go through a long, detailed hiring process; he should be sitting at a computer writing code”.