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

Still, the notion of unrestricted modification intrigued me. In my early negotiations with Tracy, I had pitched the merits of a GPL-style license for the e-book’s content. At worst, I said, the license would guarantee a lot of positive publicity for the e-book. At best, it would encourage readers to participate in the book-writing process. As an author, I was willing to let other people amend my work just so long as my name always got top billing. Besides, it might even be interesting to watch the book evolve. I pictured later editions looking much like online versions of the Talmud, my original text in a central column surrounded by illuminating, third-party commentary in the margins.

My idea drew inspiration from Project Xanadu (http://www.xanadu.com/), the legendary software concept originally conceived by Ted Nelson in 1960. During the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in 1999, I had seen the first demonstration of the project’s open source offshoot Udanax and had been wowed by the result. In one demonstration sequence, Udanax displayed a parent document and a derivative work in a similar two-column, plain-text format. With a click of the button, the program introduced lines linking each sentence in the parent to its conceptual offshoot in the derivative. An e-book biography of Richard M. Stallman didn’t have to be Udanax-enabled, but given such technological possibilities, why not give users a chance to play around?5

When Laurie Petrycki, my editor at O’Reilly, gave me a choice between the OPL or the GFDL, I indulged the fantasy once again. By September of 2001, the month I signed the contract, e-books had become almost a dead topic. Many publishing houses, Tracy’s included, were shutting down their e-book imprints for lack of interest. I had to wonder. If these companies had treated e-books not as a form of publication but as a form of community building, would those imprints have survived?

After I signed the contract, I notified Stallman that the book project was back on. I mentioned the choice O’Reilly was giving me between the Open Publication License and the GNU Free Documentation License. I told him I was leaning toward the OPL, if only for the fact I saw no reason to give O’Reilly’s competitors a chance to print the same book under a different cover. Stallman wrote back, arguing in favor of the GFDL, noting that O’Reilly had already used it several times in the past. Despite the events of the past year, I suggested a deal. I would choose the GFDL if it gave me the possibility to do more interviews and if Stallman agreed to help O’Reilly publicize the book. Stallman agreed to participate in more interviews but said that his participation in publicity-related events would depend on the content of the book. Viewing this as only fair, I set up an interview for December 17, 2001 in Cambridge.

I set up the interview to coincide with a business trip my wife Tracy was taking to Boston. Two days before leaving, Tracy suggested I invite Stallman out to dinner.

“After all”, she said, “he is the one who brought us together”.

I sent an email to Stallman, who promptly sent a return email accepting the offer. When I drove up to Boston the next day, I met Tracy at her hotel and hopped the T to head over to MIT. When we got to Tech Square, I found Stallman in the middle of a conversation just as we knocked on the door.

“I hope you don’t mind”, he said, pulling the door open far enough so that Tracy and I could just barely hear Stallman’s conversational counterpart. It was a youngish woman, mid-20s I’d say, named Sarah.

“I took the liberty of inviting somebody else to have dinner with us”, Stallman said, matter-of-factly, giving me the same cat-like smile he gave me back in that Palo Alto restaurant.

To be honest, I wasn’t too surprised. The news that Stallman had a new female friend had reached me a few weeks before, courtesy of Stallman’s mother. “In fact, they both went to Japan last month when Richard went over to accept the Takeda Award”, Lippman told me at the time.6

On the way over to the restaurant, I learned the circumstances of Sarah and Richard’s first meeting. Interestingly, the circumstances were very familiar. Working on her own fictional book, Sarah said she heard about Stallman and what an interesting character he was. She promptly decided to create a character in her book on Stallman and, in the interests of researching the character, set up an interview with Stallman. Things quickly went from there. The two had been dating since the beginning of 2001, she said.

“I really admired the way Richard built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound personal concern”, Sarah said, explaining her attraction to Stallman.

My wife immediately threw back the question: “What was the issue?”

“Crushing loneliness”.