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

During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had softened Stallman in any significant way. I didn’t see anything to suggest they had. Although more flirtatious than I remembered-a flirtatiousness spoiled somewhat by the number of times Stallman’s eyes seemed to fixate on my wife’s chest-Stallman retained the same general level of prickliness. At one point, my wife uttered an emphatic “God forbid” only to receive a typical Stallman rebuke.

“I hate to break it to you, but there is no God”, Stallman said.

Afterwards, when the dinner was complete and Sarah had departed, Stallman seemed to let his guard down a little. As we walked to a nearby bookstore, he admitted that the last 12 months had dramatically changed his outlook on life. “I thought I was going to be alone forever”, he said. “I’m glad I was wrong”.

Before parting, Stallman handed me his “pleasure card”, a business card listing Stallman’s address, phone number, and favorite pastimes (“sharing good books, good food and exotic music and dance”) so that I might set up a final interview.

Stallman’s “pleasure” card, handed to me the night of our dinner.

The next day, over another meal of dim sum, Stallman seemed even more lovestruck than the night before. Recalling his debates with Currier House dorm maters over the benefits and drawbacks of an immortality serum, Stallman expressed hope that scientists might some day come up with the key to immortality. “Now that I’m finally starting to have happiness in my life, I want to have more”, he said.

When I mentioned Sarah’s “crushing loneliness” comment, Stallman failed to see a connection between loneliness on a physical or spiritual level and loneliness on a hacker level. “The impulse to share code is about friendship but friendship at a much lower level”, he said. Later, however, when the subject came up again, Stallman did admit that loneliness, or the fear of perpetual loneliness, had played a major role in fueling his determination during the earliest days of the GNU Project.

“My fascination with computers was not a consequence of anything else”, he said. “I wouldn’t have been less fascinated with computers if I had been popular and all the women flocked to me. However, it’s certainly true the experience of feeling I didn’t have a home, finding one and losing it, finding another and having it destroyed, affected me deeply. The one I lost was the dorm. The one that was destroyed was the AI Lab. The precariousness of not having any kind of home or community was very powerful. It made me want to fight to get it back”.

After the interview, I couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of emotional symmetry. Hearing Sarah describe what attracted her to Stallman and hearing Stallman himself describe the emotions that prompted him to take up the free software cause, I was reminded of my own reasons for writing this book. Since July, 2000, I have learned to appreciate both the seductive and the repellent sides of the Richard Stallman persona. Like Eben Moglen before me, I feel that dismissing that persona as epiphenomenal or distracting in relation to the overall free software movement would be a grievous mistake. In many ways the two are so mutually defining as to be indistinguishable.

While I’m sure not every reader feels the same level of affinity for Stallman-indeed, after reading this book, some might feel zero affinity-I’m sure most will agree. Few individuals offer as singular a human portrait as Richard M. Stallman. It is my sincere hope that, with this initial portrait complete and with the help of the GFDL, others will feel a similar urge to add their own perspective to that portrait.

Appendix A. Terminology

For the most part, I have chosen to use the term GNU/Linux in reference to the free software operating system and Linux when referring specifically to the kernel that drives the operating system. The most notable exception to this rule comes in Chapter 9. In the final part of that chapter, I describe the early evolution of Linux as an offshoot of Minix. It is safe to say that during the first two years of the project’s development, the operating system Torvalds and his colleagues were working on bore little similarity to the GNU system envisioned by Stallman, even though it gradually began to share key components, such as the GNU C Compiler and the GNU Debugger.

This decision further benefits from the fact that, prior to 1993, Stallman saw little need to insist on credit.