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

As the words “signal victory” echoed in my head, I felt my attention wander momentarily to the passing foot traffic on the sidewalk. Coming into the bar, I had been pleased to notice that the location was less than half a block away from the street corner memorialized in the 1976 Ramones song, “53rd and 3rd”, a song I always enjoyed playing in my days as a musician. Like the perpetually frustrated street hustler depicted in that song, I could feel things falling apart as quickly as they had come together. The irony was palpable. After weeks of gleefully recording other people’s laments, I found myself in the position of trying to pull off the rarest of feats: a Richard Stallman compromise.

When I continued hemming and hawing, pleading the publisher’s position and revealing my growing sympathy for it, Stallman, like an animal smelling blood, attacked.

“So that’s it? You’re just going to screw me? You’re just going to bend to their will?”

I brought up the issue of a dual-copyright again.

“You mean license”, Stallman said curtly.

“Yeah, license. Copyright. Whatever”, I said, feeling suddenly like a wounded tuna trailing a rich plume of plasma in the water.

“Aw, why didn’t you just fucking do what I told you to do!” he shouted.

I must have been arguing on behalf of the publisher to the very end, because in my notes I managed to save a final Stallman chestnut: “I don’t care. What they’re doing is evil. I can’t support evil. Good-bye”.

As soon as I put the phone down, my agent slid a freshly poured Guinness to me. “I figured you might need this”, he said with a laugh. “I could see you shaking there towards the end”.

I was indeed shaking. The shaking wouldn’t stop until the Guinness was more than halfway gone. It felt weird, hearing myself characterized as an emissary of “evil”. It felt weirder still, knowing that three months before, I was sitting in an Oakland apartment trying to come up with my next story idea. Now, I was sitting in a part of the world I’d only known through rock songs, taking meetings with publishing executives and drinking beer with an agent I’d never even laid eyes on until the day before. It was all too surreal, like watching my life reflected back as a movie montage.

About that time, my internal absurdity meter kicked in. The initial shaking gave way to convulsions of laughter. To my agent, I must have looked like a another fragile author undergoing an untimely emotional breakdown. To me, I was just starting to appreciate the cynical beauty of my situation. Deal or no deal, I already had the makings of a pretty good story. It was only a matter of finding a place to tell it. When my laughing convulsions finally subsided, I held up my drink in a toast.

“Welcome to the front lines, my friend”, I said, clinking pints with my agent. “Might as well enjoy it”.

If this story really were a play, here’s where it would take a momentary, romantic interlude. Disheartened by the tense nature of our meeting, Tracy invited Henning and I to go out for drinks with her and some of her coworkers. We left the bar on Third Ave., headed down to the East Village, and caught up with Tracy and her friends.

Once there, I spoke with Tracy, careful to avoid shop talk. Our conversation was pleasant, relaxed. Before parting, we agreed to meet the next night. Once again, the conversation was pleasant, so pleasant that the Stallman e-book became almost a distant memory.

When I got back to Oakland, I called around to various journalist friends and acquaintances. I recounted my predicament. Most upbraided me for giving up too much ground to Stallman in the preinterview negotiation. A former j-school professor suggested I ignore Stallman’s “hypocrite” comment and just write the story. Reporters who knew of Stallman’s media-savviness expressed sympathy but uniformly offered the same response: it’s your call.

I decided to put the book on the back burner. Even with the interviews, I wasn’t making much progress. Besides, it gave me a chance to speak with Tracy without running things past Henning first. By Christmas we had traded visits: she flying out to the west coast once, me flying out to New York a second time. The day before New Year’s Eve, I proposed. Deciding which coast to live on, I picked New York. By February, I packed up my laptop computer and all my research notes related to the Stallman biography, and we winged our way to JFK Airport. Tracy and I were married on May 11. So much for failed book deals.