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

Writing the biography of a living person is a bit like producing a play. The drama in front of the curtain often pales in comparison to the drama backstage.

In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley gives readers a rare glimpse of that backstage drama. Stepping out of the ghostwriter role, Haley delivers the book’s epilogue in his own voice. The epilogue explains how a freelance reporter originally dismissed as a “tool” and “spy” by the Nation of Islam spokesperson managed to work through personal and political barriers to get Malcolm X’s life story on paper.

While I hesitate to compare this book with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I do owe a debt of gratitude to Haley for his candid epilogue. Over the last 12 months, it has served as a sort of instruction manual on how to deal with a biographical subject who has built an entire career on being disagreeable. From the outset, I envisioned closing this biography with a similar epilogue, both as an homage to Haley and as a way to let readers know how this book came to be.

The story behind this story starts in an Oakland apartment, winding its way through the various locales mentioned in the book-Silicon Valley, Maui, Boston, and Cambridge. Ultimately, however, it is a tale of two cities: New York, New York, the book-publishing capital of the world, and Sebastopol, California, the book-publishing capital of Sonoma County.

The story starts in April, 2000. At the time, I was writing stories for the ill-fated BeOpen web site (http://www.beopen.com/). One of my first assignments was a phone interview with Richard M. Stallman. The interview went well, so well that Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org/), the popular “news for nerds” site owned by VA Software, Inc. (formerly VA Linux Systems and before that, VA Research), gave it a link in its daily list of feature stories. Within hours, the web servers at BeOpen were heating up as readers clicked over to the site.

For all intents and purposes, the story should have ended there. Three months after the interview, while attending the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey, California, I received the following email message from Tracy Pattison, foreign-rights manager at a large New York publishing house:

To: sam@BeOpen.com

Subject: RMS Interview

Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 15:56:37 -0400

Dear Mr. Williams,

I read your interview with Richard Stallman on BeOpen with great

interest. I’ve been intrigued by RMS and his work for some time now

and was delighted to find your piece which I really think you did a

great job of capturing some of the spirit of what Stallman is trying

to do with GNU-Linux and the Free Software Foundation.

What I’d love to do, however, is read more - and I don’t think I’m

alone. Do you think there is more information and/or sources out there

to expand and update your interview and adapt it into more of a

profile of Stallman? Perhaps including some more anecdotal information

about his personality and background that might really interest and

enlighten readers outside the more hardcore programming scene?

The email asked that I give Tracy a call to discuss the idea further. I did just that. Tracy told me her company was launching a new electronic book line, and it wanted stories that appealed to an early-adopter audience. The e-book format was 30,000 words, about 100 pages, and she had pitched her bosses on the idea of profiling a major figure in the hacker community. Her bosses liked the idea, and in the process of searching for interesting people to profile, she had come across my BeOpen interview with Stallman. Hence her email to me.

That’s when Tracy asked me: would I be willing to expand the interview into a full-length feature profile?

My answer was instant: yes. Before accepting it, Tracy suggested I put together a story proposal she could show her superiors. Two days later, I sent her a polished proposal. A week later, Tracy sent me a follow up email. Her bosses had given it the green light.