Free as in Freedom - Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software
Sam Williams
Copyright (C) Sam Williams 2002.;
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Free as in Freedom - Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software,
1
2
The work of Richard M. Stallman literally speaks for itself. From the
documented source code to the published papers to the recorded
speeches, few people have expressed as much willingness to lay their
thoughts and their work on the line.
3
Such openness-if one can pardon a momentary un-Stallman adjective-is
refreshing. After all, we live in a society that treats information,
especially personal information, as a valuable commodity. The question
quickly arises. Why would anybody want to part with so much information
and yet appear to demand nothing in return?
4
As we shall see in later chapters, Stallman does not part with his
words or his work altruistically. Every program, speech, and
on-the-record bon mot comes with a price, albeit not the kind of price
most people are used to paying.
5
I bring this up not as a warning, but as an admission. As a person who
has spent the last year digging up facts on Stallman's personal
history, it's more than a little intimidating going up against the
Stallman oeuvre. "Never pick a fight with a man who buys his ink by the
barrel," goes the old Mark Twain adage. In the case of Stallman, never
attempt the definitive biography of a man who trusts his every thought
to the public record.
6
For the readers who have decided to trust a few hours of their time to
exploring this book, I can confidently state that there are facts and
quotes in here that one won't find in any Slashdot story or Google
search. Gaining access to these facts involves paying a price, however.
In the case of the book version, you can pay for these facts the
traditional manner, i.e., by purchasing the book. In the case of the
electronic versions, you can pay for these facts in the free software
manner. Thanks to the folks at O'Reilly & Associates, this book is
being distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License, meaning you
can help to improve the work or create a personalized version and
release that version under the same license.
7
If you are reading an electronic version and prefer to accept the
latter payment option, that is, if you want to improve or expand this
book for future readers, I welcome your input. Starting in June, 2002,
I will be publishing a bare bones HTML version of the book on the web
site, <
8
For those who just plan to sit back and read, online or elsewhere, I
consider your attention an equally valuable form of payment. Don't be
surprised, though, if you, too, find yourself looking for other ways to
reward the good will that made this work possible.
9
One final note: this is a work of journalism, but it is also a work of
technical documentation. In the process of writing and editing this
book, the editors and I have weighed the comments and factual input of
various participants in the story, including Richard Stallman himself.
We realize there are many technical details in this story that may
benefit from additional or refined information. As this book is
released under the GFDL, we are accepting patches just like we would
with any free software program. Accepted changes will be posted
electronically and will eventually be incorporated into future printed
versions of this work. If you would like to contribute to the further
improvement of this book, you can reach me at <
10
Comments and Questions
11
Please address comments and questions concerning this book to the
publisher:
12
13
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
There is a web page for this book, which lists errata, examples, or any
additional information. The site also includes a link to a forum where
you can discuss the book with the author and other readers. You can
access this site at:
14
<
15
To comment or ask technical questions about this book, send email to:
16
<
17
For more information about books, conferences, Resource Centers, and
the O'Reilly Network, see the O'Reilly web site at:
18
<
19
Acknowledgments
20
Special thanks to Henning Gutmann for sticking by this book. Special
thanks to Aaron Oas for suggesting the idea to Tracy in the first
place. Thanks to Laurie Petrycki, Jeffrey Holcomb, and all the others
at O'Reilly & Associates. Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for backing this
book. Thanks to all the first-draft reviewers: Bruce Perens, Eric
Raymond, Eric Allman, Jon Orwant, Julie and Gerald Jay Sussman, Hal
Abelson, and Guy Steele. I hope you enjoy this typo-free version.
Thanks to Alice Lippman for the interviews, cookies, and photographs.
Thanks to my family, Steve, Jane, Tish, and Dave. And finally, last but
not least: thanks to Richard Stallman for having the guts and endurance
to "show us the code."
21
Sam Williams
22
Chapter 1 - For Want of a Printer
23
24
I fear the Greeks. Even when they bring gifts.
The new printer was jammed, again.
25
Richard M. Stallman, a staff software programmer at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab),
discovered the malfunction the hard way. An hour after sending off a
50-page file to the office laser printer, Stallman, 27, broke off a
productive work session to retrieve his documents. Upon arrival, he
found only four pages in the printer's tray. To make matters even more
frustrating, the four pages belonged to another user, meaning that
Stallman's print job and the unfinished portion of somebody else's
print job were still trapped somewhere within the electrical plumbing
of the lab's computer network.
26
Waiting for machines is an occupational hazard when you're a software
programmer, so Stallman took his frustration with a grain of salt.
Still, the difference between waiting for a machine and waiting on a
machine is a sizable one. It wasn't the first time he'd been forced to
stand over the printer, watching pages print out one by one. As a
person who spent the bulk of his days and nights improving the
efficiency of machines and the software programs that controlled them,
Stallman felt a natural urge to open up the machine, look at the guts,
and seek out the root of the problem.
27
Unfortunately, Stallman's skills as a computer programmer did not
extend to the mechanical-engineering realm. As freshly printed
documents poured out of the machine, Stallman had a chance to reflect
on other ways to circumvent the printing jam problem.
28
How long ago had it been that the staff members at the AI Lab had
welcomed the new printer with open arms? Stallman wondered. The machine
had been a donation from the Xerox Corporation. A cutting edge
prototype, it was a modified version of the popular Xerox photocopier.
Only instead of making copies, it relied on software data piped in over
a computer network to turn that data into professional-looking
documents. Created by engineers at the world-famous Xerox Palo Alto
Research Facility, it was, quite simply, an early taste of the
desktop-printing revolution that would seize the rest of the computing
industry by the end of the decade.
29
Driven by an instinctual urge to play with the best new equipment,
programmers at the AI Lab promptly integrated the new machine into the
lab's sophisticated computing infrastructure. The results had been
immediately pleasing. Unlike the lab's old laser printer, the new Xerox
machine was fast. Pages came flying out at a rate of one per second,
turning a 20-minute print job into a 2-minute print job. The new
machine was also more precise. Circles came out looking like circles,
not ovals. Straight lines came out looking like straight lines, not
low-amplitude sine waves.
30
It was, for all intents and purposes, a gift too good to refuse.
31
It wasn't until a few weeks after its arrival that the machine's flaws
began to surface. Chief among the drawbacks was the machine's inherent
susceptibility to paper jams. Engineering-minded programmers quickly
understood the reason behind the flaw. As a photocopier, the machine
generally required the direct oversight of a human operator. Figuring
that these human operators would always be on hand to fix a paper jam,
if it occurred, Xerox engineers had devoted their time and energies to
eliminating other pesky problems. In engineering terms, user diligence
was built into the system.
32
In modifying the machine for printer use, Xerox engineers had changed
the user-machine relationship in a subtle but profound way. Instead of
making the machine subservient to an individual human operator, they
made it subservient to an entire networked population of human
operators. Instead of standing directly over the machine, a human user
on one end of the network sent his print command through an extended
bucket-brigade of machines, expecting the desired content to arrive at
the targeted destination and in proper form. It wasn't until he finally
went to check up on the final output that he realized how little of the
desired content had made it through.
33
Stallman himself had been of the first to identify the problem and the
first to suggest a remedy. Years before, when the lab was still using
its old printer, Stallman had solved a similar problem by opening up
the software program that regulated the printer on the lab's PDP-11
machine. Stallman couldn't eliminate paper jams, but he could insert a
software command that ordered the PDP-11 to check the printer
periodically and report back to the PDP-10, the lab's central computer.
To ensure that one user's negligence didn't bog down an entire line of
print jobs, Stallman also inserted a software command that instructed
the PDP-10 to notify every user with a waiting print job that the
printer was jammed. The notice was simple, something along the lines of
"The printer is jammed, please fix it," and because it went out to the
people with the most pressing need to fix the problem, chances were
higher that the problem got fixed in due time.
34
As fixes go, Stallman's was oblique but elegant. It didn't fix the
mechanical side of the problem, but it did the next best thing by
closing the information loop between user and machine. Thanks to a few
additional lines of software code, AI Lab employees could eliminate the
10 or 15 minutes wasted each week in running back and forth to check on
the printer. In programming terms, Stallman's fix took advantage of the
amplified intelligence of the overall network.
35
"If you got that message, you couldn't assume somebody else would fix
it," says Stallman, recalling the logic. "You had to go to the printer.
A minute or two after the printer got in trouble, the two or three
people who got messages arrive to fix the machine. Of those two or
three people, one of them, at least, would usually know how to fix the
problem."
36
Such clever fixes were a trademark of the AI Lab and its indigenous
population of programmers. Indeed, the best programmers at the AI Lab
disdained the term programmer, preferring the more slangy occupational
title of hacker instead. The job title covered a host of
activities-everything from creative mirth making to the improvement of
existing software and computer systems. Implicit within the title,
however, was the old-fashioned notion of Yankee ingenuity. To be a
hacker, one had to accept the philosophy that writing a software
program was only the beginning. Improving a program was the true test
of a hacker's skills.1
1. For more on the term "hacker," see **Appendix B.
37
Such a philosophy was a major reason why companies like Xerox made it a
policy to donate their machines and software programs to places where
hackers typically congregated. If hackers improved the software,
companies could borrow back the improvements, incorporating them into
update versions for the commercial marketplace. In corporate terms,
hackers were a leveragable community asset, an auxiliary
research-and-development division available at minimal cost.
38
It was because of this give-and-take philosophy that when Stallman
spotted the print-jam defect in the Xerox laser printer, he didn't
panic. He simply looked for a way to update the old fix or " hack" for
the new system. In the course of looking up the Xerox laser-printer
software, however, Stallman made a troubling discovery. The printer
didn't have any software, at least nothing Stallman or a fellow
programmer could read. Until then, most companies had made it a form of
courtesy to publish source-code files-readable text files that
documented the individual software commands that told a machine what to
do. Xerox, in this instance, had provided software files in
precompiled, or binary, form. Programmers were free to open the files
up if they wanted to, but unless they were an expert in deciphering an
endless stream of ones and zeroes, the resulting text was pure
gibberish.
39
Although Stallman knew plenty about computers, he was not an expert in
translating binary files. As a hacker, however, he had other resources
at his disposal. The notion of information sharing was so central to
the hacker culture that Stallman knew it was only a matter of time
before some hacker in some university lab or corporate computer room
proffered a version of the laser-printer source code with the desired
source-code files.
40
After the first few printer jams, Stallman comforted himself with the
memory of a similar situation years before. The lab had needed a
cross-network program to help the PDP-11 work more efficiently with the
PDP-10. The lab's hackers were more than up to the task, but Stallman,
a Harvard alumnus, recalled a similar program written by programmers at
the Harvard computer-science department. The Harvard computer lab used
the same model computer, the PDP-10, albeit with a different operating
system. The Harvard computer lab also had a policy requiring that all
programs installed on the PDP-10 had to come with published source-code
files.
41
Taking advantage of his access to the Harvard computer lab, Stallman
dropped in, made a copy of the cross-network source code, and brought
it back to the AI Lab. He then rewrote the source code to make it more
suitable for the AI Lab's operating system. With no muss and little
fuss, the AI Lab shored up a major gap in its software infrastructure.
Stallman even added a few features not found in the original Harvard
program, making the program even more useful. "We wound up using it for
several years," Stallman says.
42
From the perspective of a 1970s-era programmer, the transaction was the
software equivalent of a neighbor stopping by to borrow a power tool or
a cup of sugar from a neighbor. The only difference was that in
borrowing a copy of the software for the AI Lab, Stallman had done
nothing to deprive Harvard hackers the use of their original program.
If anything, Harvard hackers gained in the process, because Stallman
had introduced his own additional features to the program, features
that hackers at Harvard were perfectly free to borrow in return.
Although nobody at Harvard ever came over to borrow the program back,
Stallman does recall a programmer at the private engineering firm,
Bolt, Beranek & Newman, borrowing the program and adding a few
additional features, which Stallman eventually reintegrated into the AI
Lab's own source-code archive.
43
"A program would develop the way a city develops," says Stallman,
recalling the software infrastructure of the AI Lab. "Parts would get
replaced and rebuilt. New things would get added on. But you could
always look at a certain part and say, `Hmm, by the style, I see this
part was written back in the early 60s and this part was written in the
mid-1970s.'"
44
Through this simple system of intellectual accretion, hackers at the AI
Lab and other places built up robust creations. On the west coast,
computer scientists at UC Berkeley, working in cooperation with a few
low-level engineers at AT&T, had built up an entire operating
system using this system. Dubbed Unix, a play on an older, more
academically respectable operating system called Multics, the software
system was available to any programmer willing to pay for the cost of
copying the program onto a new magnetic tape and shipping it. Not every
programmer participating in this culture described himself as a hacker,
but most shared the sentiments of Richard M. Stallman. If a program or
software fix was good enough to solve your problems, it was good enough
to solve somebody else's problems. Why not share it out of a simple
desire for good karma?
45
The fact that Xerox had been unwilling to share its source-code files
seemed a minor annoyance at first. In tracking down a copy of the
source-code files, Stallman says he didn't even bother contacting
Xerox. "They had already given us the laser printer," Stallman says.
"Why should I bug them for more?"
46
When the desired files failed to surface, however, Stallman began to
grow suspicious. The year before, Stallman had experienced a blow up
with a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University. The student,
Brian Reid, was the author of a useful text-formatting program dubbed
Scribe. One of the first programs that gave a user the power to define
fonts and type styles when sending a document over a computer network,
the program was an early harbinger of HTML, the lingua franca of the
World Wide Web. In 1979, Reid made the decision to sell Scribe to a
Pittsburgh-area software company called Unilogic. His graduate-student
career ending, Reid says he simply was looking for a way to unload the
program on a set of developers that would take pains to keep it from
slipping into the public domain. To sweeten the deal, Reid also agreed
to insert a set of time-dependent functions- "time bombs" in
software-programmer parlance-that deactivated freely copied versions of
the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation,
users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused
the internal time-bomb feature.
47
For Reid, the deal was a win-win. Scribe didn't fall into the public
domain, and Unilogic recouped on its investment. For Stallman, it was a
betrayal of the programmer ethos, pure and simple. Instead of honoring
the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for
companies to compel programmers to pay for information access.
48
As the weeks passed and his attempts to track down Xerox laser-printer
source code hit a brick wall, Stallman began to sense a similar
money-for-code scenario at work. Before Stallman could do or say
anything about it, however, good news finally trickled in via the
programmer grapevine. Word had it that a scientist at the
computer-science department at Carnegie Mellon University had just
departed a job at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Not only had the
scientist worked on the laser printer in question, but according to
rumor, he was still working on it as part of his research duties at
Carnegie Mellon.
49
Casting aside his initial suspicion, Stallman made a firm resolution to
seek out the person in question during his next visit to the Carnegie
Mellon campus.
50
He didn't have to wait long. Carnegie Mellon also had a lab
specializing in artificial-intelligence research, and within a few
months, Stallman had a business-related reason to visit the Carnegie
Mellon campus. During that visit, he made sure to stop by the
computer-science department. Department employees directed him to the
office of the faculty member leading the Xerox project. When Stallman
reached the office, he found the professor working there.
51
In true engineer-to-engineer fashion, the conversation was cordial but
blunt. After briefly introducing himself as a visitor from MIT,
Stallman requested a copy of the laser-printer source code so that he
could port it to the PDP-11. To his surprise, the professor refused to
grant his request.
52
"He told me that he had promised not to give me a copy," Stallman says.
53
Memory is a funny thing. Twenty years after the fact, Stallman's mental
history tape is notoriously blank in places. Not only does he not
remember the motivating reason for the trip or even the time of year
during which he took it, he also has no recollection of the professor
or doctoral student on the other end of the conversation. According to
Reid, the person most likely to have fielded Stallman's request is
Robert Sproull, a former Xerox PARC researcher and current director of
Sun Laboratories, a research division of the computer-technology
conglomerate Sun Microsystems. During the 1970s, Sproull had been the
primary developer of the laser-printer software in question while at
Xerox PARC. Around 1980, Sproull took a faculty research position at
Carnegie Mellon where he continued his laser-printer work amid other
projects.
54
"The code that Stallman was asking for was leading-edge
state-of-the-art code that Sproull had written in the year or so before
going to Carnegie Mellon," recalls Reid. "I suspect that Sproull had
been at Carnegie Mellon less than a month before this request came in."
55
When asked directly about the request, however, Sproull draws a blank.
"I can't make a factual comment," writes Sproull via email. "I have
absolutely no recollection of the incident."
56
With both participants in the brief conversation struggling to recall
key details-including whether the conversation even took place-it's
hard to gauge the bluntness of Sproull's refusal, at least as recalled
by Stallman. In talking to audiences, Stallman has made repeated
reference to the incident, noting that Sproull's unwillingness to hand
over the source code stemmed from a nondisclosure agreement, a
contractual agreement between Sproull and the Xerox Corporation giving
Sproull, or any other signatory, access the software source code in
exchange for a promise of secrecy. Now a standard item of business in
the software industry, the nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, was a novel
development at the time, a reflection of both the commercial value of
the laser printer to Xerox and the information needed to run it. "Xerox
was at the time trying to make a commercial product out of the laser
printer," recalls Reid. "They would have been insane to give away the
source code."
57
For Stallman, however, the NDA was something else entirely. It was a
refusal on the part of Xerox and Sproull, or whomever the person was
that turned down his source-code request that day, to participate in a
system that, until then, had encouraged software programmers to regard
programs as communal resources. Like a peasant whose centuries-old
irrigation ditch had grown suddenly dry, Stallman had followed the
ditch to its source only to find a brand-spanking-new hydroelectric dam
bearing the Xerox logo.
58
For Stallman, the realization that Xerox had compelled a fellow
programmer to participate in this newfangled system of compelled
secrecy took a while to sink in. At first, all he could focus on was
the personal nature of the refusal. As a person who felt awkward and
out of sync in most face-to-face encounters, Stallman's attempt to drop
in on a fellow programmer unannounced had been intended as a
demonstration of neighborliness. Now that the request had been refused,
it felt like a major blunder. "I was so angry I couldn't think of a way
to express it. So I just turned away and walked out without another
word," Stallman recalls. "I might have slammed the door. Who knows? All
I remember is wanting to get out of there."
59
Twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers, so much so that
Stallman has elevated the event into a major turning point. Within the
next few months, a series of events would befall both Stallman and the
AI Lab hacker community that would make 30 seconds worth of tension in
a remote Carnegie Mellon office seem trivial by comparison.
Nevertheless, when it comes time to sort out the events that would
transform Stallman from a lone hacker, instinctively suspicious of
centralized authority, to a crusading activist applying traditional
notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the world of software
development, Stallman singles out the Carnegie Mellon encounter for
special attention.
60
"It encouraged me to think about something that I'd already been
thinking about," says Stallman. "I already had an idea that software
should be shared, but I wasn't sure how to think about that. My
thoughts weren't clear and organized to the point where I could express
them in a concise fashion to the rest of the world."
61
Although previous events had raised Stallman's ire, he says it wasn't
until his Carnegie Mellon encounter that he realized the events were
beginning to intrude on a culture he had long considered sacrosanct. As
an elite programmer at one of the world's elite institutions, Stallman
had been perfectly willing to ignore the compromises and bargains of
his fellow programmers just so long as they didn't interfere with his
own work. Until the arrival of the Xerox laser printer, Stallman had
been content to look down on the machines and programs other computer
users grimly tolerated. On the rare occasion that such a program
breached the AI Lab's walls-when the lab replaced its venerable
Incompatible Time Sharing operating system with a commercial variant,
the TOPS 20, for example-Stallman and his hacker colleagues had been
free to rewrite, reshape, and rename the software according to personal
taste.
62
Now that the laser printer had insinuated itself within the AI Lab's
network, however, something had changed. The machine worked fine,
barring the occasional paper jam, but the ability to modify according
to personal taste had disappeared. From the viewpoint of the entire
software industry, the printer was a wake-up call. Software had become
such a valuable asset that companies no longer felt the need to
publicize source code, especially when publication meant giving
potential competitors a chance to duplicate something cheaply. From
Stallman's viewpoint, the printer was a Trojan Horse. After a decade of
failure, privately owned software-future hackers would use the term "
proprietary" software-had gained a foothold inside the AI Lab through
the sneakiest of methods. It had come disguised as a gift.
63
That Xerox had offered some programmers access to additional gifts in
exchange for secrecy was also galling, but Stallman takes pains to note
that, if presented with such a quid pro quo bargain at a younger age,
he just might have taken the Xerox Corporation up on its offer. The
awkwardness of the Carnegie Mellon encounter, however, had a firming
effect on Stallman's own moral lassitude. Not only did it give him the
necessary anger to view all future entreaties with suspicion, it also
forced him to ask the uncomfortable question: what if a fellow hacker
dropped into Stallman's office someday and it suddenly became
Stallman's job to refuse the hacker's request for source code?
64
"It was my first encounter with a nondisclosure agreement, and it
immediately taught me that nondisclosure agreements have victims," says
Stallman, firmly. "In this case I was the victim. [My lab and I] were
victims."
65
It was a lesson Stallman would carry with him through the tumultuous
years of the 1980s, a decade during which many of his MIT colleagues
would depart the AI Lab and sign nondisclosure agreements of their own.
Because most nondisclosure aggreements (NDAs) had expiration dates, few
hackers who did sign them saw little need for personal introspection.
Sooner or later, they reasoned, the software would become public
knowledge. In the meantime, promising to keep the software secret
during its earliest development stages was all a part of the compromise
deal that allowed hackers to work on the best projects. For Stallman,
however, it was the first step down a slippery slope.
66
"When somebody invited me to betray all my colleagues in that way, I
remembered how angry I was when somebody else had done that to me and
my whole lab," Stallman says. "So I said, `Thank you very much for
offering me this nice software package, but I can't accept it on the
conditions that you're asking for, so I'm going to do without it.'"
67
As Stallman would quickly learn, refusing such requests involved more
than personal sacrifice. It involved segregating himself from fellow
hackers who, though sharing a similar distaste for secrecy, tended to
express that distaste in a more morally flexible fashion. It wasn't
long before Stallman, increasingly an outcast even within the AI Lab,
began billing himself as "the last true hacker," isolating himself
further and further from a marketplace dominated by proprietary
software. Refusing another's request for source code, Stallman decided,
was not only a betrayal of the scientific mission that had nurtured
software development since the end of World War II, it was a violation
of the Golden Rule, the baseline moral dictate to do unto others as you
would have them do unto you.
68
Hence the importance of the laser printer and the encounter that
resulted from it. Without it, Stallman says, his life might have
followed a more ordinary path, one balancing the riches of a commercial
programmer with the ultimate frustration of a life spent writing
invisible software code. There would have been no sense of clarity, no
urgency to address a problem others weren't addressing. Most
importantly, there would have been no righteous anger, an emotion that,
as we soon shall see, has propelled Stallman's career as surely as any
political ideology or ethical belief.
69
"From that day forward, I decided this was something I could never
participate in," says Stallman, alluding to the practice of trading
personal liberty for the sake of convenience-Stallman's description of
the NDA bargain-as well as the overall culture that encouraged such
ethically suspect deal-making in the first place. "I decided never to
make other people victims just like I had been a victim."
70
Chapter 2 - 2001: A Hacker's Odyssey
71
The New York University computer-science department sits inside Warren
Weaver Hall, a fortress-like building located two blocks east of
Washington Square Park. Industrial-strength air-conditioning vents
create a surrounding moat of hot air, discouraging loiterers and
solicitors alike. Visitors who breach the moat encounter another
formidable barrier, a security check-in counter immediately inside the
building's single entryway.
72
Beyond the security checkpoint, the atmosphere relaxes somewhat. Still,
numerous signs scattered throughout the first floor preach the dangers
of unsecured doors and propped-open fire exits. Taken as a whole, the
signs offer a reminder: even in the relatively tranquil confines of
pre-September 11, 2001, New York, one can never be too careful or too
suspicious.
73
The signs offer an interesting thematic counterpoint to the growing
number of visitors gathering in the hall's interior atrium. A few look
like NYU students. Most look like shaggy-aired concert-goers milling
outside a music hall in anticipation of the main act. For one brief
morning, the masses have taken over Warren Weaver Hall, leaving the
nearby security attendant with nothing better to do but watch Ricki
Lake on TV and shrug her shoulders toward the nearby auditorium
whenever visitors ask about "the speech."
74
Once inside the auditorium, a visitor finds the person who has forced
this temporary shutdown of building security procedures. The person is
Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, original president of
the Free Software Foundation, winner of the 1990 MacArthur Fellowship,
winner of the Association of Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper
Award (also in 1990), corecipient of the Takeda Foundation's 2001
Takeda Award, and former AI Lab hacker. As announced over a host of
hacker-related web sites, including the GNU Project's own <
75
The subject of Stallman's speech is the history and future of the free
software movement. The location is significant. Less than a month
before, Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie appeared at the
nearby NYU Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting the
General Public License, or GPL, a legal device originally conceived by
Stallman 16 years before. Built to counteract the growing wave of
software secrecy overtaking the computer industry-a wave first noticed
by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox laser printer-the
GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free software community. In
simplest terms, the GPL locks software programs into a form of communal
ownership-what today's legal scholars now call the "digital
commons"-through the legal weight of copyright. Once locked, programs
remain unremovable. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright
protection-even derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of
the original source code. For this reason, some within the software
industry have taken to calling the GPL a "viral" license, because it
spreads itself to every software program it touches.2
2. Actually, the GPL's powers are not quite that potent. According to
section 10 of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 (1991), the
viral nature of the license depends heavily on the Free Software
Foundation's willingness to view a program as a derivative work, not to
mention the existing license the GPL would replace.
76
In an information economy increasingly dependent on software and
increasingly beholden to software standards, the GPL has become the
proverbial "big stick." Even companies that once laughed it off as
software socialism have come around to recognize the benefits. Linux,
the Unix-like kernel developed by Finnish college student Linus
Torvalds in 1991, is licensed under the GPL, as are many of the world's
most popular programming tools: GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger, the GNU C
Compiler, etc. Together, these tools form the components of a free
software operating system developed, nurtured, and owned by the
worldwide hacker community. Instead of viewing this community as a
threat, high-tech companies like IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Sun
Microsystems have come to rely upon it, selling software applications
and services built to ride atop the ever-growing free software
infrastructure.
77
They've also come to rely upon it as a strategic weapon in the hacker
community's perennial war against Microsoft, the Redmond,
Washington-based company that, for better or worse, has dominated the
PC-software marketplace since the late 1980s. As owner of the popular
Windows operating system, Microsoft stands to lose the most in an
industry-wide shift to the GPL license. Almost every line of source
code in the Windows colossus is protected by copyrights reaffirming the
private nature of the underlying source code or, at the very least,
reaffirming Microsoft's legal ability to treat it as such. From the
Microsoft viewpoint, incorporating programs protected by the "viral"
GPL into the Windows colossus would be the software equivalent of
Superman downing a bottle of Kryptonite pills. Rival companies could
suddenly copy, modify, and sell improved versions of Windows, rendering
the company's indomitable position as the No. 1 provider of
consumer-oriented software instantly vulnerable. Hence the company's
growing concern over the GPL's rate of adoption. Hence the recent
Mundie speech blasting the GPL and the "open source" approach to
software development and sales. And hence Stallman's decision to
deliver a public rebuttal to that speech on the same campus here today.
78
20 years is a long time in the software industry. Consider this: in
1980, when Richard Stallman was cursing the AI Lab's Xerox laser
printer, Microsoft, the company modern hackers view as the most
powerful force in the worldwide software industry, was still a
privately held startup. IBM, the company hackers used to regard as the
most powerful force in the worldwide software industry, had yet to to
introduce its first personal computer, thereby igniting the current
low-cost PC market. Many of the technologies we now take for
granted-the World Wide Web, satellite television, 32-bit video-game
consoles-didn't even exist. The same goes for many of the companies
that now fill the upper echelons of the corporate establishment,
companies like AOL, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, Compaq, and Dell. The
list goes on and on.
79
The fact that the high-technology marketplace has come so far in such
little time is fuel for both sides of the GPL debate. GPL-proponents
point to the short lifespan of most computer hardware platforms. Facing
the risk of buying an obsolete product, consumers tend to flock to
companies with the best long-term survival. As a result, the software
marketplace has become a winner-take-all arena.3 The current,
privately owned software environment, GPL-proponents say, leads to
monopoly abuse and stagnation. Strong companies suck all the oxygen out
of the marketplace for rival competitors and innovative startups.
3. See Shubha Ghosh, "Revealing the Microsoft Windows Source Code,"
Gigalaw.com (January, 2000).
80
GPL-opponents argue just the opposite. Selling software is just as
risky, if not more risky, than buying software, they say. Without the
legal guarantees provided by private software licenses, not to mention
the economic prospects of a privately owned "killer app" (i.e., a
breakthrough technology that launches an entirely new
market),4 companies lose the incentive to participate. Once
again, the market stagnates and innovation declines. As Mundie himself
noted in his May 3 address on the same campus, the GPL's "viral" nature
"poses a threat" to any company that relies on the uniqueness of its
software as a competitive asset. Added Mundie:
4. Killer apps don't have to be proprietary. Witness, of course, the
legendary Mosaic browser, a program whose copyright permits
noncommercial derivatives with certain restrictions. Still, I think the
reader gets the point: the software marketplace is like the lottery.
The bigger the potential payoff, the more people want to participate.
For a good summary of the killer-app phenomenon, see Philip Ben-David,
"Whatever Happened to the `Killer App'?" e-Commerce News (December 7,
2000).
81
It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software
sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute
software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than
just the cost of distribution.5
5. See Craig Mundie, "The Commercial Software Model," senior vice
president, Microsoft Corp. Excerpted from an online transcript of
Mundie's May 3, 2001, speech to the New York University Stern School of
Business.
82
The mutual success of GNU/Linux, the amalgamated operating system built
around the GPL-protected Linux kernel, and Windows over the last 10
years reveals the wisdom of both perspectives. Nevertheless, the battle
for momentum is an important one in the software industry. Even
powerful vendors such as Microsoft rely on the support of third-party
software developers whose tools, programs, and computer games make an
underlying software platform such as Windows more attractive to the
mainstream consumer. Citing the rapid evolution of the technology
marketplace over the last 20 years, not to mention his own company's
admirable track record during that period, Mundie advised listeners to
not get too carried away by the free software movement's recent
momentum:
83
Two decades of experience have shown that an economic model that
protects intellectual property and a business model that recoups
research and development costs can create impressive economic benefits
and distribute them very broadly. 5
84
Such admonitions serve as the backdrop for Stallman's speech today.
Less than a month after their utterance, Stallman stands with his back
to one of the chalk boards at the front of the room, edgy to begin.
85
If the last two decades have brought dramatic changes to the software
marketplace, they have brought even more dramatic changes to Stallman
himself. Gone is the skinny, clean-shaven hacker who once spent his
entire days communing with his beloved PDP-10. In his place stands a
heavy-set middle-aged man with long hair and rabbinical beard, a man
who now spends the bulk of his time writing and answering email,
haranguing fellow programmers, and giving speeches like the one today.
Dressed in an aqua-colored T-shirt and brown polyester pants, Stallman
looks like a desert hermit who just stepped out of a Salvation Army
dressing room.
86
The crowd is filled with visitors who share Stallman's fashion and
grooming tastes. Many come bearing laptop computers and cellular
modems, all the better to record and transmit Stallman's words to a
waiting Internet audience. The gender ratio is roughly 15 males to 1
female, and 1 of the 7 or 8 females in the room comes in bearing a
stuffed penguin, the official Linux mascot, while another carries a
stuffed teddy bear.
87
88
Agitated, Stallman leaves his post at the front of the room and takes a
seat in a front-row chair, tapping a few commands into an
already-opened laptop. For the next 10 minutes Stallman is oblivious to
the growing number of students, professors, and fans circulating in
front of him at the foot of the auditorium stage.
89
Before the speech can begin, the baroque rituals of academic formality
must be observed. Stallman's appearance merits not one but two
introductions. Mike Uretsky, codirector of the Stern School's Center
for Advanced Technology, provides the first.
90
"The role of a university is to foster debate and to have interesting
discussions," Uretsky says. "This particular presentation, this seminar
falls right into that mold. I find the discussion of open source
particularly interesting."
91
Before Uretsky can get another sentence out, Stallman is on his feet
waving him down like a stranded motorist.
92
"I do free software," Stallman says to rising laughter. "Open source is
a different movement."
93
The laughter gives way to applause. The room is stocked with Stallman
partisans, people who know of his reputation for verbal exactitude, not
to mention his much publicized 1998 falling out with the open source
software proponents. Most have come to anticipate such outbursts the
same way radio fans once waited for Jack Benny's trademark, "Now cut
that out!" phrase during each radio program.
94
Uretsky hastily finishes his introduction and cedes the stage to Edmond
Schonberg, a professor in the NYU computer-science department. As a
computer programmer and GNU Project contributor, Schonberg knows which
linguistic land mines to avoid. He deftly summarizes Stallman's career
from the perspective of a modern-day programmer.
95
"Richard is the perfect example of somebody who, by acting locally,
started thinking globally [about] problems concerning the
unavailability of source code," says Schonberg. "He has developed a
coherent philosophy that has forced all of us to reexamine our ideas of
how software is produced, of what intellectual property means, and of
what the software community actually represents."
96
Schonberg welcomes Stallman to more applause. Stallman takes a moment
to shut off his laptop, rises out of his chair, and takes the stage.
97
At first, Stallman's address seems more Catskills comedy routine than
political speech. "I'd like to thank Microsoft for providing me the
opportunity to be on this platform," Stallman wisecracks. "For the past
few weeks, I have felt like an author whose book was fortuitously
banned somewhere."
98
For the uninitiated, Stallman dives into a quick free software warm-up
analogy. He likens a software program to a cooking recipe. Both provide
useful step-by-step instructions on how to complete a desired task and
can be easily modified if a user has special desires or circumstances.
"You don't have to follow a recipe exactly," Stallman notes. "You can
leave out some ingredients. Add some mushrooms, 'cause you like
mushrooms. Put in less salt because your doctor said you should cut
down on salt-whatever."
99
Most importantly, Stallman says, software programs and recipes are both
easy to share. In giving a recipe to a dinner guest, a cook loses
little more than time and the cost of the paper the recipe was written
on. Software programs require even less, usually a few mouse-clicks and
a modicum of electricity. In both instances, however, the person giving
the information gains two things: increased friendship and the ability
to borrow interesting recipes in return.
100
"Imagine what it would be like if recipes were packaged inside black
boxes," Stallman says, shifting gears. "You couldn't see what
ingredients they're using, let alone change them, and imagine if you
made a copy for a friend. They would call you a pirate and try to put
you in prison for years. That world would create tremendous outrage
from all the people who are used to sharing recipes. But that is
exactly what the world of proprietary software is like. A world in
which common decency towards other people is prohibited or prevented."
101
With this introductory analogy out of the way, Stallman launches into a
retelling of the Xerox laser-printer episode. Like the recipe analogy,
the laser-printer story is a useful rhetorical device. With its
parable-like structure, it dramatizes just how quickly things can
change in the software world. Drawing listeners back to an era before
Amazon.com one-click shopping, Microsoft Windows, and Oracle databases,
it asks the listener to examine the notion of software ownership free
of its current corporate logos.
102
Stallman delivers the story with all the polish and practice of a local
district attorney conducting a closing argument. When he gets to the
part about the Carnegie Mellon professor refusing to lend him a copy of
the printer source code, Stallman pauses.
103
"He had betrayed us," Stallman says. "But he didn't just do it to us.
Chances are he did it to you."
104
On the word "you," Stallman points his index finger accusingly at an
unsuspecting member of the audience. The targeted audience member's
eyebrows flinch slightly, but Stallman's own eyes have moved on. Slowly
and deliberately, Stallman picks out a second listener to nervous
titters from the crowd. "And I think, mostly likely, he did it to you,
too," he says, pointing at an audience member three rows behind the
first.
105
By the time Stallman has a third audience member picked out, the
titters have given away to general laughter. The gesture seems a bit
staged, because it is. Still, when it comes time to wrap up the Xerox
laser-printer story, Stallman does so with a showman's flourish. "He
probably did it to most of the people here in this room-except a few,
maybe, who weren't born yet in 1980," Stallman says, drawing more
laughs. "[That's] because he had promised to refuse to cooperate with
just about the entire population of the planet Earth."
106
Stallman lets the comment sink in for a half-beat. "He had signed a
nondisclosure agreement," Stallman adds.
107
Richard Matthew Stallman's rise from frustrated academic to political
leader over the last 20 years speaks to many things. It speaks to
Stallman's stubborn nature and prodigious will. It speaks to the
clearly articulated vision and values of the free software movement
Stallman helped build. It speaks to the high-quality software programs
Stallman has built, programs that have cemented Stallman's reputation
as a programming legend. It speaks to the growing momentum of the GPL,
a legal innovation that many Stallman observers see as his most
momentous accomplishment.
108
Most importantly, it speaks to the changing nature of political power
in a world increasingly beholden to computer technology and the
software programs that power that technology.
109
Maybe that's why, even at a time when most high-technology stars are on
the wane, Stallman's star has grown. Since launching the GNU Project in
1984,6 Stallman has been at turns ignored, satirized,
vilified, and attacked-both from within and without the free software
movement. Through it all, the GNU Project has managed to meet its
milestones, albeit with a few notorious delays, and stay relevant in a
software marketplace several orders of magnitude more complex than the
one it entered 18 years ago. So too has the free software ideology, an
ideology meticulously groomed by Stallman himself.
6. The acronym GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix." In another portion of
the May 29, 2001, NYU speech, Stallman summed up the acronym's
origin:
110
To understand the reasons behind this currency, it helps to examine
Richard Stallman both in his own words and in the words of the people
who have collaborated and battled with him along the way. The Richard
Stallman character sketch is not a complicated one. If any person
exemplifies the old adage "what you see is what you get," it's
Stallman.
111
"I think if you want to understand Richard Stallman the human being,
you really need to see all of the parts as a consistent whole," advises
Eben Moglen, legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation and
professor of law at Columbia University Law School. "All those personal
eccentricities that lots of people see as obstacles to getting to know
Stallman really are Stallman: Richard's strong sense of personal
frustration, his enormous sense of principled ethical commitment, his
inability to compromise, especially on issues he considers fundamental.
These are all the very reasons Richard did what he did when he did."
112
Explaining how a journey that started with a laser printer would
eventually lead to a sparring match with the world's richest
corporation is no easy task. It requires a thoughtful examination of
the forces that have made software ownership so important in today's
society. It also requires a thoughtful examination of a man who, like
many political leaders before him, understands the malleability of
human memory. It requires an ability to interpret the myths and
politically laden code words that have built up around Stallman over
time. Finally, it requires an understanding of Stallman's genius as a
programmer and his failures and successes in translating that genius to
other pursuits.
113
When it comes to offering his own summary of the journey, Stallman
acknowledges the fusion of personality and principle observed by
Moglen. "Stubbornness is my strong suit," he says. "Most people who
attempt to do anything of any great difficulty eventually get
discouraged and give up. I never gave up."
114
He also credits blind chance. Had it not been for that run-in over the
Xerox laser printer, had it not been for the personal and political
conflicts that closed out his career as an MIT employee, had it not
been for a half dozen other timely factors, Stallman finds it very easy
to picture his life following a different career path. That being said,
Stallman gives thanks to the forces and circumstances that put him in
the position to make a difference.
115
"I had just the right skills," says Stallman, summing up his decision
for launching the GNU Project to the audience. "Nobody was there but
me, so I felt like, `I'm elected. I have to work on this. If not me ,
who?'"
116
Chapter 3 - A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man
117
Richard Stallman's mother, Alice Lippman, still remembers the moment
she realized her son had a special gift.
118
"I think it was when he was eight," Lippman recalls.
119
The year was 1961, and Lippman, a recently divorced single mother, was
wiling away a weekend afternoon within the family's tiny one-bedroom
apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Leafing through a copy of
Scientific American, Lippman came upon her favorite section, the Martin
Gardner-authored column titled "Mathematical Games." A substitute art
teacher, Lippman always enjoyed Gardner's column for the brain-teasers
it provided. With her son already ensconced in a book on the nearby
sofa, Lippman decided to take a crack at solving the week's feature
puzzle.
120
"I wasn't the best person when it came to solving the puzzles," she
admits. "But as an artist, I found they really helped me work through
conceptual barriers."
121
Lippman says her attempt to solve the puzzle met an immediate brick
wall. About to throw the magazine down in disgust, Lippman was
surprised by a gentle tug on her shirt sleeve.
122
"It was Richard," she recalls, "He wanted to know if I needed any
help."
123
Looking back and forth, between the puzzle and her son, Lippman says
she initially regarded the offer with skepticism. "I asked Richard if
he'd read the magazine," she says. "He told me that, yes, he had and
what's more he'd already solved the puzzle. The next thing I know, he
starts explaining to me how to solve it."
124
Hearing the logic of her son's approach, Lippman's skepticism quickly
gave way to incredulity. "I mean, I always knew he was a bright boy,"
she says, "but this was the first time I'd seen anything that suggested
how advanced he really was."
125
Thirty years after the fact, Lippman punctuates the memory with a
laugh. "To tell you the truth, I don't think I ever figured out how to
solve that puzzle," she says. "All I remember is being amazed he knew
the answer."
126
Seated at the dining-room table of her second Manhattan apartment-the
same spacious three-bedroom complex she and her son moved to following
her 1967 marriage to Maurice Lippman, now deceased-Alice Lippman exudes
a Jewish mother's mixture of pride and bemusement when recalling her
son's early years. The nearby dining-room credenza offers an
eight-by-ten photo of Stallman glowering in full beard and doctoral
robes. The image dwarfs accompanying photos of Lippman's nieces and
nephews, but before a visitor can make too much of it, Lippman makes
sure to balance its prominent placement with an ironic wisecrack.
127
"Richard insisted I have it after he received his honorary doctorate at
the University of Glasgow," says Lippman. "He said to me, `Guess what,
mom? It's the first graduation I ever attended.'"7
7. See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of
Free Software, MacArthur-certified Genius" (1999). This interview is
one of the most candid Stallman interviews on the record. I recommend
it highly.
128
Such comments reflect the sense of humor that comes with raising a
child prodigy. Make no mistake, for every story Lippman hears and reads
about her son's stubbornness and unusual behavior, she can deliver at
least a dozen in return.
129
"He used to be so conservative," she says, throwing up her hands in
mock exasperation. "We used to have the worst arguments right here at
this table. I was part of the first group of public city school
teachers that struck to form a union, and Richard was very angry with
me. He saw unions as corrupt. He was also very opposed to social
security. He thought people could make much more money investing it on
their own. Who knew that within 10 years he would become so idealistic?
All I remember is his stepsister coming to me and saying, `What is he
going to be when he grows up? A fascist?'"
130
As a single parent for nearly a decade-she and Richard's father, Daniel
Stallman, were married in 1948, divorced in 1958, and split custody of
their son afterwards-Lippman can attest to her son's aversion to
authority. She can also attest to her son's lust for knowledge. It was
during the times when the two forces intertwined, Lippman says, that
she and her son experienced their biggest battles.
131
"It was like he never wanted to eat," says Lippman, recalling the
behavior pattern that set in around age eight and didn't let up until
her son's high-school graduation in 1970. "I'd call him for dinner, and
he'd never hear me. I'd have to call him 9 or 10 times just to get his
attention. He was totally immersed."
132
Stallman, for his part, remembers things in a similar fashion, albeit
with a political twist.
133
"I enjoyed reading," he says. "If I wanted to read, and my mother told
me to go to the kitchen and eat or go to sleep, I wasn't going to
listen. I saw no reason why I couldn't read. No reason why she should
be able to tell me what to do, period. Essentially, what I had read
about, ideas such as democracy and individual freedom, I applied to
myself. I didn't see any reason to exclude children from these
principles."
134
The belief in individual freedom over arbitrary authority extended to
school as well. Two years ahead of his classmates by age 11, Stallman
endured all the usual frustrations of a gifted public-school student.
It wasn't long after the puzzle incident that his mother attended the
first in what would become a long string of parent-teacher conferences.
135
"He absolutely refused to write papers," says Lippman, recalling an
early controversy. "I think the last paper he wrote before his senior
year in high school was an essay on the history of the number system in
the west for a fourth-grade teacher."
136
Gifted in anything that required analytical thinking, Stallman
gravitated toward math and science at the expense of his other studies.
What some teachers saw as single-mindedness, however, Lippman saw as
impatience. Math and science offered simply too much opportunity to
learn, especially in comparison to subjects and pursuits for which her
son seemed less naturally inclined. Around age 10 or 11, when the boys
in Stallman's class began playing a regular game of touch football, she
remembers her son coming home in a rage. "He wanted to play so badly,
but he just didn't have the coordination skills," Lippman recalls. "It
made him so angry."
137
The anger eventually drove her son to focus on math and science all the
more. Even in the realm of science, however, her son's impatience could
be problematic. Poring through calculus textbooks by age seven,
Stallman saw little need to dumb down his discourse for adults.
Sometime, during his middle-school years, Lippman hired a student from
nearby Columbia University to play big brother to her son. The student
left the family's apartment after the first session and never came
back. "I think what Richard was talking about went over his head,"
Lippman speculates.
138
Another favorite maternal anecdote dates back to the early 1960s,
shortly after the puzzle incident. Around age seven, two years after
the divorce and relocation from Queens, Richard took up the hobby of
launching model rockets in nearby Riverside Drive Park. What started as
aimless fun soon took on an earnest edge as her son began recording the
data from each launch. Like the interest in mathematical games, the
pursuit drew little attention until one day, just before a major NASA
launch, Lippman checked in on her son to see if he wanted to watch.
139
"He was fuming," Lippman says. "All he could say to me was, `But I'm
not published yet.' Apparently he had something that he really wanted
to show NASA."
140
Such anecdotes offer early evidence of the intensity that would become
Stallman's chief trademark throughout life. When other kids came to the
table, Stallman stayed in his room and read. When other kids played
Johnny Unitas, Stallman played Werner von Braun. "I was weird,"
Stallman says, summing up his early years succinctly in a 1999
interview. "After a certain age, the only friends I had were teachers."
7
141
Although it meant courting more run-ins at school, Lippman decided to
indulge her son's passion. By age 12, Richard was attending science
camps during the summer and private school during the school year. When
a teacher recommended her son enroll in the Columbia Science Honors
Program, a post-Sputnik program designed for gifted middle- and
high-school students in New York City, Stallman added to his
extracurriculars and was soon commuting uptown to the Columbia
University campus on Saturdays.
142
Dan Chess, a fellow classmate in the Columbia Science Honors Program,
recalls Richard Stallman seeming a bit weird even among the students
who shared a similar lust for math and science. "We were all geeks and
nerds, but he was unusually poorly adjusted," recalls Chess, now a
mathematics professor at Hunter College. "He was also smart as shit.
I've known a lot of smart people, but I think he was the smartest
person I've ever known."
143
Seth Breidbart, a fellow Columbia Science Honors Program alumnus,
offers bolstering testimony. A computer programmer who has kept in
touch with Stallman thanks to a shared passion for science fiction and
science-fiction conventions, he recalls the 15-year-old,
buzz-cut-wearing Stallman as "scary," especially to a fellow
15-year-old.
144
"It's hard to describe," Breidbart says. "It wasn't like he was
unapproachable. He was just very intense. [He was] very knowledgeable
but also very hardheaded in some ways."
145
Such descriptions give rise to speculation: are judgment-laden
adjectives like "intense" and "hardheaded" simply a way to describe
traits that today might be categorized under juvenile behavioral
disorder? A December, 2001, Wired magazine article titled "The
Geek Syndrome" paints the portrait of several scientifically gifted
children diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome.
In many ways, the parental recollections recorded in the Wired article
are eerily similar to the ones offered by Lippman. Even Stallman has
indulged in psychiatric revisionism from time to time. During a 2000
profile for the Toronto Star , Stallman described himself to an
interviewer as "borderline autistic,"8 a description that goes
a long way toward explaining a lifelong tendency toward social and
emotional isolation and the equally lifelong effort to overcome it.
8. See Judy Steed, Toronto Star , BUSINESS, (October 9, 2000):
C03.
146
Such speculation benefits from the fast and loose nature of most
so-called "behavioral disorders" nowadays, of course. As Steve
Silberman, author of "The Geek Syndrome," notes, American psychiatrists
have only recently come to accept Asperger Syndrome as a valid umbrella
term covering a wide set of behavioral traits. The traits range from
poor motor skills and poor socialization to high intelligence and an
almost obsessive affinity for numbers, computers, and ordered
systems.9 Reflecting on the broad nature of this umbrella,
Stallman says its possible that, if born 40 years later, he might have
merited just such a diagnosis. Then again, so would many of his
computer-world colleagues.
9. See Steve Silberman, "The Geek Syndrome," Wired (December, 2001).
147
"It's possible I could have had something like that," he says. "On the
other hand, one of the aspects of that syndrome is difficulty following
rhythms. I can dance. In fact, I love following the most complicated
rhythms. It's not clear cut enough to know."
148
Chess, for one, rejects such attempts at back-diagnosis. "I never
thought of him [as] having that sort of thing," he says. "He was just
very unsocialized, but then, we all were."
149
Lippman, on the other hand, entertains the possibility. She recalls a
few stories from her son's infancy, however, that provide fodder for
speculation. A prominent symptom of autism is an oversensitivity to
noises and colors, and Lippman recalls two anecdotes that stand out in
this regard. "When Richard was an infant, we'd take him to the beach,"
she says. "He would start screaming two or three blocks before we
reached the surf. It wasn't until the third time that we figured out
what was going on: the sound of the surf was hurting his ears." She
also recalls a similar screaming reaction in relation to color: "My
mother had bright red hair, and every time she'd stoop down to pick him
up, he'd let out a wail."
150
In recent years, Lippman says she has taken to reading books about
autism and believes that such episodes were more than coincidental. "I
do feel that Richard had some of the qualities of an autistic child,"
she says. "I regret that so little was known about autism back then."
151
Over time, however, Lippman says her son learned to adjust. By age
seven, she says, her son had become fond of standing at the front
window of subway trains, mapping out and memorizing the labyrinthian
system of railroad tracks underneath the city. It was a hobby that
relied on an ability to accommodate the loud noises that accompanied
each train ride. "Only the initial noise seemed to bother him," says
Lippman. "It was as if he got shocked by the sound but his nerves
learned how to make the adjustment."
152
For the most part, Lippman recalls her son exhibiting the excitement,
energy, and social skills of any normal boy. It wasn't until after a
series of traumatic events battered the Stallman household, she says,
that her son became introverted and emotionally distant.
153
The first traumatic event was the divorce of Alice and Daniel Stallman,
Richard's father. Although Lippman says both she and her ex-husband
tried to prepare their son for the blow, she says the blow was
devastating nonetheless. "He sort of didn't pay attention when we first
told him what was happening," Lippman recalls. "But the reality smacked
him in the face when he and I moved into a new apartment. The first
thing he said was, `Where's Dad's furniture?'"
154
For the next decade, Stallman would spend his weekdays at his mother's
apartment in Manhattan and his weekends at his father's home in Queens.
The shuttling back and forth gave him a chance to study a pair of
contrasting parenting styles that, to this day, leaves Stallman firmly
opposed to the idea of raising children himself. Speaking about his
father, a World War II vet who passed away in early 2001, Stallman
balances respect with anger. On one hand, there is the man whose moral
commitment led him to learn French just so he could be more helpful to
Allies when they'd finally come. On the other hand, there was the
parent who always knew how to craft a put-down for cruel
effect.10
10. Regrettably, I did not get a chance to interview Daniel Stallman for
this book. During the early research for this book, Stallman informed
me that his father suffered from Alzheimer's. When I resumed research
in late 2001, I learned, sadly, that Daniel Stallman had died earlier
in the year.
155
"My father had a horrible temper," Stallman says. "He never screamed,
but he always found a way to criticize you in a cold, designed-to-crush
way."
156
As for life in his mother's apartment, Stallman is less equivocal.
"That was war," he says. "I used to say in my misery, `I want to go
home,' meaning to the nonexistent place that I'll never have."
157
For the first few years after the divorce, Stallman found the
tranquility that eluded him in the home of his paternal grandparents.
Then, around age 10 his grandparents passed away in short succession.
For Stallman, the loss was devastating. "I used to go and visit and
feel I was in a loving, gentle environment," Stallman recalls. "It was
the only place I ever found one, until I went away to college."
158
Lippman lists the death of Richard's paternal grandparents as the
second traumatic event. "It really upset him," she says. He was very
close to both his grandparents. Before they died, he was very outgoing,
almost a leader-of-the-pack type with the other kids. After they died,
he became much more emotionally withdrawn."
159
From Stallman's perspective, the emotional withdrawal was merely an
attempt to deal with the agony of adolescence. Labeling his teenage
years a "pure horror," Stallman says he often felt like a deaf person
amid a crowd of chattering music listeners.
160
"I often had the feeling that I couldn't understand what other people
were saying," says Stallman, recalling the emotional bubble that
insulated him from the rest of the adolescent and adult world. "I could
understand the words, but something was going on underneath the
conversations that I didn't understand. I couldn't understand why
people were interested in the things other people said."
161
For all the agony it produced, adolescence would have a encouraging
effect on Stallman's sense of individuality. At a time when most of his
classmates were growing their hair out, Stallman preferred to keep his
short. At a time when the whole teenage world was listening to rock and
roll, Stallman preferred classical music. A devoted fan of science
fiction, Mad magazine, and late-night TV, Stallman cultivated a
distinctly off-the-wall personality that fed off the incomprehension of
parents and peers alike.
162
"Oh, the puns," says Lippman, still exasperated by the memory of her
son's teenage personality. "There wasn't a thing you could say at the
dinner table that he couldn't throw back at you as a pun."
163
Outside the home, Stallman saved the jokes for the adults who tended to
indulge his gifted nature. One of the first was a summer-camp counselor
who handed Stallman a print-out manual for the IBM 7094 computer during
his 12th year. To a preteenager fascinated with numbers and science,
the gift was a godsend.11 By the end of summer, Stallman was
writing out paper programs according to the 7094's internal
specifications, anxiously anticipating getting a chance to try them out
on a real machine.
11. Stallman, an atheist, would probably quibble with this description.
Suffice it to say, it was something Stallman welcomed. See previous
note 1: "As soon as I heard about computers, I wanted to see one and
play with one."
164
With the first personal computer still a decade away, Stallman would be
forced to wait a few years before getting access to his first computer.
His first chance finally came during his junior year of high school.
Hired on at the IBM New York Scientific Center, a now-defunct research
facility in downtown Manhattan, Stallman spent the summer after
high-school graduation writing his first program, a pre-processor for
the 7094 written in the programming language PL/I. "I first wrote it in
PL/I, then started over in assembler language when the PL/I program was
too big to fit in the computer," he recalls.
165
After that job at the IBM Scientific Center, Stallman had held a
laboratory-assistant position in the biology department at Rockefeller
University. Although he was already moving toward a career in math or
physics, Stallman's analytical mind impressed the lab director enough
that a few years after Stallman departed for college, Lippman received
an unexpected phone call. "It was the professor at Rockefeller,"
Lippman says. "He wanted to know how Richard was doing. He was
surprised to learn that he was working in computers. He'd always
thought Richard had a great future ahead of him as a biologist."
166
Stallman's analytical skills impressed faculty members at Columbia as
well, even when Stallman himself became a target of their ire.
"Typically once or twice an hour [Stallman] would catch some mistake in
the lecture," says Breidbart. "And he was not shy about letting the
professors know it immediately. It got him a lot of respect but not
much popularity."
167
Hearing Breidbart's anecdote retold elicits a wry smile from Stallman.
"I may have been a bit of a jerk sometimes," he admits. "But I found
kindred spirits among the teachers, because they, too, liked to learn.
Kids, for the most part, didn't. At least not in the same way."
168
Hanging out with the advanced kids on Saturday nevertheless encouraged
Stallman to think more about the merits of increased socialization.
With college fast approaching, Stallman, like many in his Columbia
Science Honors Program, had narrowed his list of desired schools down
to two choices: Harvard and MIT. Hearing of her son's desire to move on
to the Ivy League, Lippman became concerned. As a 15-year-old
high-school junior, Stallman was still having run-ins with teachers and
administrators. Only the year before, he had pulled straight A's in
American History, Chemistry, French, and Algebra, but a glaring F in
English reflected the ongoing boycott of writing assignments. Such
miscues might draw a knowing chuckle at MIT, but at Harvard, they were
a red flag.
169
During her son's junior year, Lippman says she scheduled an appointment
with a therapist. The therapist expressed instant concern over
Stallman's unwillingness to write papers and his run-ins with teachers.
Her son certainly had the intellectual wherewithal to succeed at
Harvard, but did he have the patience to sit through college classes
that required a term paper? The therapist suggested a trial run. If
Stallman could make it through a full year in New York City public
schools, including an English class that required term papers, he could
probably make it at Harvard. Following the completion of his junior
year, Stallman promptly enrolled in summer school at Louis D. Brandeis
High School, a public school located on 84th Street, and began making
up the mandatory art classes he had shunned earlier in his high-school
career.
170
By fall, Stallman was back within the mainstream population of New York
City high-school students. It wasn't easy sitting through classes that
seemed remedial in comparison with his Saturday studies at Columbia,
but Lippman recalls proudly her son's ability to toe the line.
171
"He was forced to kowtow to a certain degree, but he did it," Lippman
says. "I only got called in once, which was a bit of a miracle. It was
the calculus teacher complaining that Richard was interrupting his
lesson. I asked how he was interrupting. He said Richard was always
accusing the teacher of using a false proof. I said, `Well, is he
right?' The teacher said, `Yeah, but I can't tell that to the class.
They wouldn't understand.'"
172
By the end of his first semester at Brandeis, things were falling into
place. A 96 in English wiped away much of the stigma of the 60 earned 2
years before. For good measure, Stallman backed it up with top marks in
American History, Advanced Placement Calculus, and Microbiology. The
crowning touch was a perfect 100 in Physics. Though still a social
outcast, Stallman finished his 11 months at Brandeis as the
fourth-ranked student in a class of 789.
173
174
Outside the classroom, Stallman pursued his studies with even more
diligence, rushing off to fulfill his laboratory-assistant duties at
Rockefeller University during the week and dodging the Vietnam
protesters on his way to Saturday school at Columbia. It was there,
while the rest of the Science Honors Program students sat around
discussing their college choices, that Stallman finally took a moment
to participate in the preclass bull session.
175
Recalls Breidbart, "Most of the students were going to Harvard and MIT,
of course, but you had a few going to other Ivy League schools. As the
conversation circled the room, it became apparent that Richard hadn't
said anything yet. I don't know who it was, but somebody got up the
courage to ask him what he planned to do."
176
Thirty years later, Breidbart remembers the moment clearly. As soon as
Stallman broke the news that he, too, would be attending Harvard
University in the fall, an awkward silence filled the room. Almost as
if on cue, the corners of Stallman's mouth slowly turned upward into a
self-satisfied smile.
177
Says Breidbart, "It was his silent way of saying, `That's right. You
haven't got rid of me yet.'"
178
Chapter 4 - Impeach God
179
Although their relationship was fraught with tension, Richard Stallman
would inherit one noteworthy trait from his mother: a passion for
progressive politics.
180
It was an inherited trait that would take several decades to emerge,
however. For the first few years of his life, Stallman lived in what he
now admits was a "political vacuum."12 Like most Americans
during the Eisenhower age, the Stallman family spent the 50s trying to
recapture the normalcy lost during the wartime years of the 1940s.
12. See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of
Free Software, MacArthur-certified Genius" (1999).
181
"Richard's father and I were Democrats but happy enough to leave it at
that," says Lippman, recalling the family's years in Queens. "We didn't
get involved much in local or national politics."
182
That all began to change, however, in the late 1950s when Alice
divorced Daniel Stallman. The move back to Manhattan represented more
than a change of address; it represented a new, independent identity
and a jarring loss of tranquility.
183
"I think my first taste of political activism came when I went to the
Queens public library and discovered there was only a single book on
divorce in the whole library," recalls Lippman. "It was very controlled
by the Catholic church, at least in Elmhurst, where we lived. I think
that was the first inkling I had of the forces that quietly control our
lives."
184
Returning to her childhood neighborhood, Manhattan's Upper West Side,
Lippman was shocked by the changes that had taken place since her
departure to Hunter College a decade and a half before. The
skyrocketing demand for postwar housing had turned the neighborhood
into a political battleground. On one side stood the pro-development
city-hall politicians and businessmen hoping to rebuild many of the
neighborhood's blocks to accommodate the growing number of white-collar
workers moving into the city. On the other side stood the poor Irish
and Puerto Rican tenants who had found an affordable haven in the
neighborhood.
185
At first, Lippman didn't know which side to choose. As a new resident,
she felt the need for new housing. As a single mother with minimal
income, however, she shared the poorer tenants' concern over the
growing number of development projects catering mainly to wealthy
residents. Indignant, Lippman began looking for ways to combat the
political machine that was attempting to turn her neighborhood into a
clone of the Upper East Side.
186
Lippman says her first visit to the local Democratic party headquarters
came in 1958. Looking for a day-care center to take care of her son
while she worked, she had been appalled by the conditions encountered
at one of the city-owned centers that catered to low-income residents.
"All I remember is the stench of rotten milk, the dark hallways, the
paucity of supplies. I had been a teacher in private nursery schools.
The contrast was so great. We took one look at that room and left. That
stirred me up."
187
The visit to the party headquarters proved disappointing, however.
Describing it as "the proverbial smoke-filled room," Lippman says she
became aware for the first time that corruption within the party might
actually be the reason behind the city's thinly disguised hostility
toward poor residents. Instead of going back to the headquarters,
Lippman decided to join up with one of the many clubs aimed at
reforming the Democratic party and ousting the last vestiges of the
Tammany Hall machine. Dubbed the Woodrow Wilson/FDR Reform Democratic
Club, Lippman and her club began showing up at planning and
city-council meetings, demanding a greater say.
188
"Our primary goal was to fight Tammany Hall, Carmine DeSapio and his
henchman,"13 says Lippman. "I was the representative to the
city council and was very much involved in creating a viable
urban-renewal plan that went beyond simply adding more luxury housing
to the neighborhood."
13. Carmine DeSapio holds the dubious distinction of being the first
Italian-American boss of Tammany Hall, the New York City political
machine. For more information on DeSapio and the politics of post-war
New York, see John Davenport, "Skinning the Tiger: Carmine DeSapio and
the End of the Tammany Era," New York Affairs (1975): 3:1.
189
Such involvement would blossom into greater political activity during
the 1960s. By 1965, Lippman had become an "outspoken" supporter for
political candidates like William Fitts Ryan, a Democratic elected to
Congress with the help of reform clubs and one of the first U.S.
representatives to speak out against the Vietnam War.
190
It wasn't long before Lippman, too, was an outspoken opponent of U.S.
involvement in Indochina. "I was against the Vietnam war from the time
Kennedy sent troops," she says. "I had read the stories by reporters
and journalists sent to cover the early stages of the conflict. I
really believed their forecast that it would become a quagmire."
191
Such opposition permeated the Stallman-Lippman household. In 1967,
Lippman remarried. Her new husband, Maurice Lippman, a major in the Air
National Guard, resigned his commission to demonstrate his opposition
to the war. Lippman's stepson, Andrew Lippman, was at MIT and
temporarily eligible for a student deferment. Still, the threat of
induction should that deferment disappear, as it eventually did, made
the risk of U.S. escalation all the more immediate. Finally, there was
Richard who, though younger, faced the prospect of choosing between
Vietnam or Canada when the war lasted into the 1970s.
192
"Vietnam was a major issue in our household," says Lippman. "We talked
about it constantly: what would we do if the war continued, what steps
Richard or his stepbrother would take if they got drafted. We were all
opposed to the war and the draft. We really thought it was immoral."
193
For Stallman, the Vietnam War elicited a complex mixture of emotions:
confusion, horror, and, ultimately, a profound sense of political
impotence. As a kid who could barely cope in the mild authoritarian
universe of private school, Stallman experienced a shiver whenever the
thought of Army boot camp presented itself.
194
"I was devastated by the fear, but I couldn't imagine what to do and
didn't have the guts to go demonstrate," recalls Stallman, whose March
18th birthday earned him a dreaded low number in the draft lottery when
the federal government finally eliminated college deferments in 1971.
"I couldn't envision moving to Canada or Sweden. The idea of getting up
by myself and moving somewhere. How could I do that? I didn't know how
to live by myself. I wasn't the kind of person who felt confident in
approaching things like that."
195
Stallman says he was both impressed and shamed by the family members
who did speak out. Recalling a bumper sticker on his father's car
likening the My Lai massacre to similar Nazi atrocities in World War
II, he says he was "excited" by his father's gesture of outrage. "I
admired him for doing it," Stallman says. "But I didn't imagine that I
could do anything. I was afraid that the juggernaut of the draft was
going to destroy me."
196
Although descriptions of his own unwillingness to speak out carry a
tinge of nostalgic regret, Stallman says he was ultimately turned off
by the tone and direction of the anti-war movement. Like other members
of the Science Honors Program, he saw the weekend demonstrations at
Columbia as little more than a distracting spectacle.14
Ultimately, Stallman says, the irrational forces driving the anti-war
movement became indistinguishable from the irrational forces driving
the rest of youth culture. Instead of worshiping the Beatles, girls in
Stallman's age group were suddenly worshiping firebrands like Abbie
Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. To a kid already struggling to comprehend his
teenage peers, escapist slogans like "make love not war" had a taunting
quality. Not only was it a reminder that Stallman, the short-haired
outsider who hated rock 'n' roll, detested drugs, and didn't
participate in campus demonstrations, wasn't getting it politically; he
wasn't "getting it" sexually either.
14. Chess, another Columbia Science Honors Program alum, describes the
protests as "background noise." "We were all political," he says, "but
the SHP was imporant. We would never have skipped it for a
demonstration."
197
"I didn't like the counter culture much," Stallman admits. "I didn't
like the music. I didn't like the drugs. I was scared of the drugs. I
especially didn't like the anti-intellectualism, and I didn't like the
prejudice against technology. After all, I loved a computer. And I
didn't like the mindless anti-Americanism that I often encountered.
There were people whose thinking was so simplistic that if they
disapproved of the conduct of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, they had to
support the North Vietnamese. They couldn't imagine a more complicated
position, I guess."
198
Such comments alleviate feelings of timidity. They also underline a
trait that would become the key to Stallman's own political maturation.
For Stallman, political confidence was directly proportionate to
personal confidence. By 1970, Stallman had become confident in few
things outside the realm of math and science. Nevertheless, confidence
in math gave him enough of a foundation to examine the anti-war
movement in purely logical terms. In the process of doing so, Stallman
had found the logic wanting. Although opposed to the war in Vietnam,
Stallman saw no reason to disavow war as a means for defending liberty
or correcting injustice. Rather than widen the breach between himself
and his peers, however, Stallman elected to keep the analysis to
himself.
199
In 1970, Stallman left behind the nightly dinnertime conversations
about politics and the Vietnam War as he departed for Harvard. Looking
back, Stallman describes the transition from his mother's Manhattan
apartment to life in a Cambridge dorm as an "escape." Peers who watched
Stallman make the transition, however, saw little to suggest a
liberating experience.
200
"He seemed pretty miserable for the first while at Harvard," recalls
Dan Chess, a classmate in the Science Honors Program who also
matriculated at Harvard. "You could tell that human interaction was
really difficult for him, and there was no way of avoiding it at
Harvard. Harvard was an intensely social kind of place."
201
To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his strengths: math and
science. Like most members of the Science Honors Program, Stallman
breezed through the qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary "boot
camp" class for freshman mathematics "concentrators" at Harvard. Within
the class, members of the Science Honors Program formed a durable unit.
"We were the math mafia," says Chess with a laugh. "Harvard was
nothing, at least compared with the SHP."
202
To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP
alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math
in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an
amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and
now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's
probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college
students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to
people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second
semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach
manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people
don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of
graduate school."
203
Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20 by the
end of the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, "only 10 really
knew what they were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future
mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.
204
"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman."
205
Seth Breidbart, a fellow Math 55 classmate, remembers Stallman
distinguishing himself from his peers even then.
206
"He was a stickler in some very strange ways," says Breidbart. There is
a standard technique in math which everybody does wrong. It's an abuse
of notation where you have to define a function for something and what
you do is you define a function and then you prove that it's well
defined. Except the first time he did and presented it, he defined a
relation and proved that it's a function. It's the exact same proof,
but he used the correct terminology, which no one else did. That's just
the way he was."
207
It was in Math 55 that Richard Stallman began to cultivate a reputation
for brilliance. Breidbart agrees, but Chess, whose competitive streak
refused to yield, says the realization that Stallman might be the best
mathematician in the class didn't set in until the next year. "It was
during a class on Real Analysis, which I took with Richard the next
year," says Chess, now a math professor at Hunter College. "I actually
remember in a proof about complex valued measures that Richard came up
with an idea that was basically a metaphor from the calculus of
variations. It was the first time I ever saw somebody solve a problem
in a brilliantly original way."
208
Chess makes no bones about it: watching Stallman's solution unfold on
the chalkboard was a devastating blow. As a kid who'd always taken
pride in being the smartest mathematician the room, it was like
catching a glimpse of his own mortality. Years later, as Chess slowly
came to accept the professional rank of a good-but-not-great
mathematician, he had Stallman's sophomore-year proof to look back on
as a taunting early indicator.
209
"That's the thing about mathematics," says Chess. "You don't have to be
a first-rank mathematician to recognize first-rate mathematical talent.
I could tell I was up there, but I could also tell I wasn't at the
first rank. If Richard had chosen to be a mathematician, he would have
been a first-rank mathematician."
210
For Stallman, success in the classroom was balanced by the same lack of
success in the social arena. Even as other members of the math mafia
gathered to take on the Math 55 problem sets, Stallman preferred to
work alone. The same went for living arrangements. On the housing
application for Harvard, Stallman clearly spelled out his preferences.
"I said I preferred an invisible, inaudible, intangible roommate," he
says. In a rare stroke of bureaucratic foresight, Harvard's housing
office accepted the request, giving Stallman a one-room single for his
freshman year.
211
Breidbart, the only math-mafia member to share a dorm with Stallman
that freshman year, says Stallman slowly but surely learned how to
interact with other students. He recalls how other dorm mates,
impressed by Stallman's logical acumen, began welcoming his input
whenever an intellectual debate broke out in the dining club or dorm
commons.
212
"We had the usual bull sessions about solving the world's problems or
what would be the result of something," recalls Breidbart. "Say
somebody discovers an immortality serum. What do you do? What are the
political results? If you give it to everybody, the world gets
overcrowded and everybody dies. If you limit it, if you say everyone
who's alive now can have it but their children can't, then you end up
with an underclass of people without it. Richard was just better able
than most to see the unforeseen circumstances of any decision."
213
Stallman remembers the discussions vividly. "I was always in favor of
immortality," he says. "I was shocked that most people regarded
immortality as a bad thing. How else would we be able to see what the
world is like 200 years from now?"
214
Although a first-rank mathematician and first-rate debater, Stallman
shied away from clear-cut competitive events that might have sealed his
brilliant reputation. Near the end of freshman year at Harvard,
Breidbart recalls how Stallman conspicuously ducked the Putnam exam, a
prestigious test open to math students throughout the U.S. and Canada.
In addition to giving students a chance to measure their knowledge in
relation to their peers, the Putnam served as a chief recruiting tool
for academic math departments. According to campus legend, the top
scorer automatically qualified for a graduate fellowship at any school
of his choice, including Harvard.
215
Like Math 55, the Putnam was a brutal test of merit. A six-hour exam in
two parts, it seemed explicitly designed to separate the wheat from the
chaff. Breidbart, a veteran of both the Science Honors Program and Math
55, describes it as easily the most difficult test he ever took. "Just
to give you an idea of how difficult it was," says Breidbart, "the top
score was a 120, and my score the first year was in the 30s. That score
was still good enough to place me 101st in the country."
216
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.
217
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."
218
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.
219
"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."
220
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.
221
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."
222
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.
223
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.
224
Intrigued, Stallman decided to pay a visit.
225
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.
226
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.
227
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."
228
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.
229
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."
230
To get a taste of "bureaucratic and stuffy," Stallman need only visit
the computer labs at Harvard. There, access to the terminals was doled
out according to academic rank. As an undergrad, Stallman usually had
to sign up or wait until midnight, about the time most professors and
grad students finished their daily work assignments. The waiting wasn't
difficult, but it was frustrating. Waiting for a public terminal,
knowing all the while that a half dozen equally usable machines were
sitting idle inside professors' locked offices, seemed the height of
illogic. Although Stallman paid the occasional visit to the Harvard
computer labs, he preferred the more egalitarian policies of the AI
Lab. "It was a breath of fresh air," he says. "At the AI Lab, people
seemed more concerned about work than status."
231
Stallman quickly learned that the AI Lab's first-come, first-served
policy owed much to the efforts of a vigilant few. Many were holdovers
from the days of Project MAC, the Department of Defense-funded research
program that had given birth to the first time-share operating systems.
A few were already legends in the computing world. There was Richard
Greenblatt, the lab's in-house Lisp expert and author of MacHack, the
computer chess program that had once humbled A.I. critic Hubert
Dreyfus. There was Gerald Sussman, original author of the robotic
block-stacking program HACKER. And there was Bill Gosper, the in-house
math whiz already in the midst of an 18-month hacking bender triggered
by the philosophical implications of the computer game LIFE.15
15. See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 144.
232
Members of the tight-knit group called themselves "hackers." Over time,
they extended the "hacker" description to Stallman as well. In the
process of doing so, they inculcated Stallman in the ethical traditions
of the "hacker ethic ." To be a hacker meant more than just writing
programs, Stallman learned. It meant writing the best possible
programs. It meant sitting at a terminal for 36 hours straight if
that's what it took to write the best possible programs. Most
importantly, it meant having access to the best possible machines and
the most useful information at all times. Hackers spoke openly about
changing the world through software, and Stallman learned the
instinctual hacker disdain for any obstacle that prevented a hacker
from fulfilling this noble cause. Chief among these obstacles were poor
software, academic bureaucracy, and selfish behavior.
233
Stallman also learned the lore, stories of how hackers, when presented
with an obstacle, had circumvented it in creative ways. Stallman
learned about "lock hacking," the art of breaking into professors'
offices to "liberate" sequestered terminals. Unlike their pampered
Harvard counterparts, MIT faculty members knew better than to treat the
AI Lab's terminal as private property. If a faculty member made the
mistake of locking away a terminal for the night, hackers were quick to
correct the error. Hackers were equally quick to send a message if the
mistake repeated itself. "I was actually shown a cart with a heavy
cylinder of metal on it that had been used to break down the door of
one professor's office,"16 Stallman says.
16. Gerald Sussman, an MIT faculty member and hacker whose work at the
AI Lab predates Stallman's, disputes this memory. According to Sussman,
the hackers never broke any doors to retrieve terminals.
234
Such methods, while lacking in subtlety, served a purpose. Although
professors and administrators outnumbered hackers two-to-one inside the
AI Lab, the hacker ethic prevailed. Indeed, by the time of Stallman's
arrival at the AI Lab, hackers and the AI Lab administration had
coevolved into something of a symbiotic relationship. In exchange for
fixing the machines and keeping the software up and running, hackers
earned the right to work on favorite pet projects. Often, the pet
projects revolved around improving the machines and software programs
even further. Like teenage hot-rodders, most hackers viewed tinkering
with machines as its own form of entertainment.
235
Nowhere was this tinkering impulse better reflected than in the
operating system that powered the lab's central PDP-6 mini-computer.
Dubbed ITS, short for the Incompatible Time Sharing system, the
operating system incorporated the hacking ethic into its very design.
Hackers had built it as a protest to Project MAC's original operating
system, the Compatible Time Sharing System, CTSS, and named it
accordingly. At the time, hackers felt the CTSS design too restrictive,
limiting programmers' power to modify and improve the program's own
internal architecture if needed. According to one legend passed down by
hackers, the decision to build ITS had political overtones as well.
Unlike CTSS, which had been designed for the IBM 7094, ITS was built
specifically for the PDP-6. In letting hackers write the systems
themselves, AI Lab administrators guaranteed that only hackers would
feel comfortable using the PDP-6. In the feudal world of academic
research, the gambit worked. Although the PDP-6 was co-owned in
conjunction with other departments, A.I. researchers soon had it to
themselves.17
17. I apologize for the whirlwind summary of ITS' genesis, an operating
system many hackers still regard as the epitome of the hacker ethos.
For more information on the program's political significance, see
Simson Garfinkel, Architects of the Information Society: Thirty-Five
Years of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT (MIT Press, 1999).
236
ITS boasted features most commercial operating systems wouldn't offer
for years, features such as multitasking, debugging, and full-screen
editing capability. Using it and the PDP-6 as a foundation, the Lab had
been able to declare independence from Project MAC shortly before
Stallman's arrival. 17
237
As an apprentice hacker, Stallman quickly became enamored with ITS.
Although forbidding to most newcomers, the program contained many
built-in features that provided a lesson in software development to
hacker apprentices such as himself.
238
"ITS had a very elegant internal mechanism for one program to examine
another," says Stallman, recalling the program. "You could examine all
sorts of status about another program in a very clean, well-specified
way."
239
Using this feature, Stallman was able to watch how programs written by
hackers processed instructions as they ran. Another favorite feature
would allow the monitoring program to freeze the monitored program's
job between instructions. In other operating systems, such a command
would have resulted in half-computed gibberish or an automatic systems
crash. In ITS, it provided yet another way to monitor the step-by-step
performance.
240
"If you said, `Stop the job,' it would always be stopped in user mode.
It would be stopped between two user-mode instructions, and everything
about the job would be consistent for that point," Stallman says. "If
you said, `Resume the job,' it would continue properly. Not only that,
but if you were to change the status of the job and then change it
back, everything would be consistent. There was no hidden status
anywhere."
241
By the end of 1970, hacking at the AI Lab had become a regular part of
Stallman's weekly schedule. From Monday to Thursday, Stallman devoted
his waking hours to his Harvard classes. As soon as Friday afternoon
arrived, however, he was on the T, heading down to MIT for the weekend.
Stallman usually timed his arrival to coincide with the ritual food
run. Joining five or six other hackers in their nightly quest for
Chinese food, he would jump inside a beat-up car and head across the
Harvard Bridge into nearby Boston. For the next two hours, he and his
hacker colleagues would discuss everything from ITS to the internal
logic of the Chinese language and pictograph system. Following dinner,
the group would return to MIT and hack code until dawn.
242
For the geeky outcast who rarely associated with his high-school peers,
it was a heady experience, suddenly hanging out with people who shared
the same predilection for computers, science fiction, and Chinese food.
"I remember many sunrises seen from a car coming back from Chinatown,"
Stallman would recall nostalgically, 15 years after the fact in a
speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute. "It was actually a
very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, 'cause that's such a calm time
of day. It's a wonderful time of day to get ready to go to bed. It's so
nice to walk home with the light just brightening and the birds
starting to chirp; you can get a real feeling of gentle satisfaction,
of tranquility about the work that you have done that
night."18
18. See Richard Stallman, "RMS lecture at KTH (Sweden)," (October 30,
1986).
243
The more Stallman hung out with the hackers, the more he adopted the
hacker worldview. Already committed to the notion of personal liberty,
Stallman began to infuse his actions with a sense of communal
responsibility. When others violated the communal code, Stallman was
quick to speak out. Within a year of his first visit, Stallman was the
one breaking into locked offices, trying to recover the sequestered
terminals that belonged to the lab community as a whole. In true hacker
fashion, Stallman also sought to make his own personal contribution to
the art of lock hacking. One of the most artful door-opening tricks,
commonly attributed to Greenblatt, involved bending a stiff wire into a
cane and attaching a loop of tape to the long end. Sliding the wire
under the door, a hacker could twist and rotate the wire so that the
long end touched the door knob. Provided the adhesive on the tape held,
a hacker could open the doorknob with a few sharp twists.
244
When Stallman tried the trick, he found it good but wanting in a few
places. Getting the tape to stick wasn't always easy, and twisting the
wire in a way that turned the doorknob was similarly difficult.
Stallman remembered that the hallway ceiling possessed tiles that could
be slid away. Some hackers, in fact, had used the false ceiling as a
way to get around locked doors, an approach that generally covered the
perpetrator in fiberglass but got the job done.
245
Stallman considered an alternative approach. What if, instead of
slipping a wire under the door, a hacker slid away one of the panels
and stood over the door jamb?
246
Stallman took it upon himself to try it out. Instead of using a wire,
Stallman draped out a long U-shaped loop of magnetic tape, fastening a
loop of adhesive tape at the base of the U. Standing over the door
jamb, he dangled the tape until it looped under the doorknob. Lifting
the tape until the adhesive fastened, he then pulled on the left end of
the tape, twisting the doorknob counter-clockwise. Sure enough, the
door opened. Stallman had added a new twist to the art of lock hacking.
247
"Sometimes you had to kick the door after you turned the door knob,"
says Stallman, recalling the lingering bugginess of the new method. "It
took a little bit of balance to pull it off."
248
Such activities reflected a growing willingness on Stallman's part to
speak and act out in defense of political beliefs. The AI Lab's spirit
of direct action had proved inspirational enough for Stallman to break
out of the timid impotence of his teenage years. Breaking into an
office to free a terminal wasn't the same as taking part in a protest
march, but it was effective in ways that most protests weren't. It
solved the problem at hand.
249
By the time of his last years at Harvard, Stallman was beginning to
apply the whimsical and irreverent lessons of the AI Lab back at
school.
250
"Did he tell you about the snake?" his mother asks at one point during
an interview. "He and his dorm mates put a snake up for student
election. Apparently it got a considerable number of votes."
251
Stallman verifies the snake candidacy with a few caveats. The snake was
a candidate for election within Currier House, Stallman's dorm, not the
campus-wide student council. Stallman does remember the snake
attracting a fairly significant number of votes, thanks in large part
to the fact that both the snake and its owner both shared the same last
name. "People may have voted for it, because they thought they were
voting for the owner," Stallman says. "Campaign posters said that the
snake was `slithering for' the office. We also said it was an `at
large' candidate, since it had climbed into the wall through the
ventilating unit a few weeks before and nobody knew where it was."
252
Running a snake for dorm council was just one of several
election-related pranks. In a later election, Stallman and his dorm
mates nominated the house master's son. "His platform was mandatory
retirement at age seven," Stallman recalls. Such pranks paled in
comparison to the fake-candidate pranks on the MIT campus, however. One
of the most successful fake-candidate pranks was a cat named Woodstock,
which actually managed to outdraw most of the human candidates in a
campus-wide election. "They never announced how many votes Woodstock
got, and they treated those votes as spoiled ballots," Stallman
recalls. "But the large number of spoiled ballots in that election
suggested that Woodstock had actually won. A couple of years later,
Woodstock was suspiciously run over by a car. Nobody knows if the
driver was working for the MIT administration." Stallman says he had
nothing to do with Woodstock's candidacy, "but I admired
it."19
19. In an email shortly after this book went into its final edit cycle,
Stallman says he drew political inspiration from the Harvard campus as
well. "In my first year of Harvard, in a Chinese History class, I read
the story of the first revolt against the Chin dynasty," he says. "The
story is not reliable history, but it was very moving."
253
At the AI Lab, Stallman's political activities had a sharper-edged
tone. During the 1970s, hackers faced the constant challenge of faculty
members and administrators pulling an end-run around ITS and its
hacker-friendly design. One of the first attempts came in the
mid-1970s, as more and more faculty members began calling for a file
security system to protect research data. Most other computer labs had
installed such systems during late 1960s, but the AI Lab, through the
insistence of Stallman and other hackers, remained a security-free
zone.
254
For Stallman, the opposition to security was both ethical and
practical. On the ethical side, Stallman pointed out that the entire
art of hacking relied on intellectual openness and trust. On the
practical side, he pointed to the internal structure of ITS being built
to foster this spirit of openness, and any attempt to reverse that
design required a major overhaul.
255
"The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System decided that
file protection was usually used by a self-styled system manager to get
power over everyone else," Stallman would later explain. "They didn't
want anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn't
implement that kind of a feature. The result was, that whenever
something in the system was broken, you could always fix
it."20
20. See Richard Stallman (1986).
256
Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI Lab's machines
security-free. Over at the nearby MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences,
however, security-minded faculty members won the day. The LCS installed
its first password-based system in 1977. Once again, Stallman took it
upon himself to correct what he saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access
to the software code that controlled the password system, Stallman
implanted a software command that sent out a message to any LCS user
who attempted to choose a unique password. If a user entered
"starfish," for example, the message came back something like:
257
I see you chose the password "starfish." I suggest that you switch to
the password "carriage return." It's much easier to type, and also it
stands up to the principle that there should be no
passwords.21
21. See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 417. I
have modified this quote, which Levy also uses as an excerpt, to
illustrate more directly how the program might reveal the false
security of the system. Levy uses the placeholder "[such and such]."
258
Users who did enter "carriage return"-that is, users who simply pressed
the Enter or Return button, entering a blank string instead of a unique
password-left their accounts accessible to the world at large. As scary
as that might have been for some users, it reinforced the hacker notion
that Institute computers, and even Institute computer files, belonged
to the public, not private individuals. Stallman, speaking in an
interview for the 1984 book Hackers, proudly noted that one-fifth of
the LCS staff accepted this argument and employed the blank-string
password.22
22. See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 417.
259
Stallman's null-string crusade would prove ultimately futile. By the
early 1980s, even the AI Lab's machines were sporting password-based
security systems. Even so, it represents a major milestone in terms of
Stallman's personal and political maturation. To the objective observer
familiar with Stallman's later career, it offers a convenient
inflection point between the timid teenager afraid to speak out even on
issues of life-threatening importance and the adult activist who would
soon turn needling and cajoling into a full-time occupation.
260
In voicing his opposition to computer security, Stallman drew on many
of the forces that had shaped his early life: hunger for knowledge,
distaste for authority, and frustration over hidden procedures and
rules that rendered some people clueless outcasts. He would also draw
on the ethical concepts that would shape his adult life: communal
responsibility, trust, and the hacker spirit of direct action.
Expressed in software-computing terms, the null string represents the
1.0 version of the Richard Stallman political worldview-incomplete in a
few places but, for the most part, fully mature.
261
Looking back, Stallman hesitates to impart too much significance to an
event so early in his hacking career. "In that early stage there were a
lot of people who shared my feelings," he says. "The large number of
people who adopted the null string as their password was a sign that
many people agreed that it was the proper thing to do. I was simply
inclined to be an activist about it."
262
Stallman does credit the AI Lab for awakening that activist spirit,
however. As a teenager, Stallman had observed political events with
little idea as to how a single individual could do or say anything of
importance. As a young adult, Stallman was speaking out on matters in
which he felt supremely confident, matters such as software design,
communal responsibility, and individual freedom. "I joined this
community which had a way of life which involved respecting each
other's freedom," he says. "It didn't take me long to figure out that
that was a good thing. It took me longer to come to the conclusion that
this was a moral issue."
263
Hacking at the AI Lab wasn't the only activity helping to boost
Stallman's esteem. During the middle of his sophomore year at Harvard,
Stallman had joined up with a dance troupe that specialized in folk
dances . What began as a simple attempt to meet women and expand his
social horizons soon expanded into yet another passion alongside
hacking. Dancing in front of audiences dressed in the native garb of a
Balkan peasant, Stallman no longer felt like the awkward, uncoordinated
10-year-old whose attempts to play football had ended in frustration.
He felt confident, agile, and alive. For a brief moment, he even felt a
hint of emotional connection. He soon found being in front of an
audience fun, and it wasn't long thereafter that he began craving the
performance side of dancing almost as much as the social side.
264
Although the dancing and hacking did little to improve Stallman's
social standing, they helped him overcome the feelings of weirdness
that had clouded his pre-Harvard life. Instead of lamenting his weird
nature, Stallman found ways to celebrate it. In 1977, while attending a
science-fiction convention, he came across a woman selling custom-made
buttons. Excited, Stallman ordered a button with the words "Impeach
God" emblazoned on it.
265
For Stallman, the "Impeach God" message worked on many levels. An
atheist since early childhood, Stallman first saw it as an attempt to
set a "second front" in the ongoing debate on religion. "Back then
everybody was arguing about God being dead or alive," Stallman recalls.
"`Impeach God' approached the subject of God from a completely
different viewpoint. If God was so powerful as to create the world and
yet do nothing to correct the problems in it, why would we ever want to
worship such a God? Wouldn't it be better to put him on trial?"
266
At the same time, "Impeach God" was a satirical take on America and the
American political system. The Watergate scandal of the 1970s affected
Stallman deeply. As a child, Stallman had grown up mistrusting
authority. Now, as an adult, his mistrust had been solidified by the
culture of the AI Lab hacker community. To the hackers, Watergate was
merely a Shakespearean rendition of the daily power struggles that made
life such a hassle for those without privilege. It was an outsized
parable for what happened when people traded liberty and openness for
security and convenience.
267
Buoyed by growing confidence, Stallman wore the button proudly. People
curious enough to ask him about it received the same well-prepared
spiel. "My name is Jehovah," Stallman would say. "I have a special plan
to save the universe, but because of heavenly security reasons I can't
tell you what that plan is. You're just going to have to put your faith
in me, because I see the picture and you don't. You know I'm good
because I told you so. If you don't believe me, I'll throw you on my
enemies list and throw you in a pit where Infernal Revenue Service will
audit your taxes for eternity."
268
Those who interpreted the spiel as a word-for-word parody of the
Watergate hearings only got half the message. For Stallman, the other
half of the message was something only his fellow hackers seemed to be
hearing. One hundred years after Lord Acton warned about absolute power
corrupting absolutely, Americans seemed to have forgotten the first
part of Acton's truism: power, itself, corrupts. Rather than point out
the numerous examples of petty corruption, Stallman felt content
voicing his outrage toward an entire system that trusted power in the
first place.
269
"I figured why stop with the small fry," says Stallman, recalling the
button and its message. "If we went after Nixon, why not going after
Mr. Big. The way I see it, any being that has power and abuses it
deserves to have that power taken away."
270
Chapter 5 - Small Puddle of Freedom
271
Ask anyone who's spent more than a minute in Richard Stallman's
presence, and you'll get the same recollection: forget the long hair.
Forget the quirky demeanor. The first thing you notice is the gaze. One
look into Stallman's green eyes, and you know you're in the presence of
a true believer.
272
To call the Stallman gaze intense is an understatement. Stallman's eyes
don't just look at you; they look through you. Even when your own eyes
momentarily shift away out of simple primate politeness, Stallman's
eyes remain locked-in, sizzling away at the side of your head like twin
photon beams.
273
Maybe that's why most writers, when describing Stallman, tend to go for
the religious angle. In a 1998 Salon.com article titled "The Saint of
Free Software," Andrew Leonard describes Stallman's green eyes as
"radiating the power of an Old Testament prophet."23 A 1999
Wired magazine article describes the Stallman beard as
"Rasputin-like,"24 while a London Guardian profile
describes the Stallman smile as the smile of "a disciple seeing
Jesus."25
23. See Andrew Leonard, "The Saint of Free Software," Salon.com (August
1998).
24. See Leander Kahney, "Linux's Forgotten Man," Wired News (March 5,
1999).
25. See "Programmer on moral high ground; Free software is a moral issue
for Richard Stallman believes in freedom and free software." London
Guardian (November 6, 1999).
274
Such analogies serve a purpose, but they ultimately fall short. That's
because they fail to take into account the vulnerable side of the
Stallman persona. Watch the Stallman gaze for an extended period of
time, and you will begin to notice a subtle change. What appears at
first to be an attempt to intimidate or hypnotize reveals itself upon
second and third viewing as a frustrated attempt to build and maintain
contact. If, as Stallman himself has suspected from time to time, his
personality is the product of autism or Asperger Syndrome, his eyes
certainly confirm the diagnosis. Even at their most high-beam level of
intensity, they have a tendency to grow cloudy and distant, like the
eyes of a wounded animal preparing to give up the ghost.
275
My own first encounter with the legendary Stallman gaze dates back to
the March, 1999, LinuxWorld Convention and Expo in San Jose,
California. Billed as a "coming out party" for the Linux software
community, the convention also stands out as the event that
reintroduced Stallman to the technology media. Determined to push for
his proper share of credit, Stallman used the event to instruct
spectators and reporters alike on the history of the GNU Project and
the project's overt political objectives.
276
As a reporter sent to cover the event, I received my own Stallman
tutorial during a press conference announcing the release of GNOME 1.0,
a free software graphic user interface. Unwittingly, I push an entire
bank of hot buttons when I throw out my very first question to Stallman
himself: do you think GNOME's maturity will affect the commercial
popularity of the Linux operating system?
277
"I ask that you please stop calling the operating system Linux,"
Stallman responds, eyes immediately zeroing in on mine. "The Linux
kernel is just a small part of the operating system. Many of the
software programs that make up the operating system you call Linux were
not developed by Linus Torvalds at all. They were created by GNU
Project volunteers, putting in their own personal time so that users
might have a free operating system like the one we have today. To not
acknowledge the contribution of those programmers is both impolite and
a misrepresentation of history. That's why I ask that when you refer to
the operating system, please call it by its proper name, GNU/Linux."
278
Taking the words down in my reporter's notebook, I notice an eerie
silence in the crowded room. When I finally look up, I find Stallman's
unblinking eyes waiting for me. Timidly, a second reporter throws out a
question, making sure to use the term " GNU/Linux" instead of Linux.
Miguel de Icaza, leader of the GNOME project, fields the question. It
isn't until halfway through de Icaza's answer, however, that Stallman's
eyes finally unlock from mine. As soon as they do, a mild shiver rolls
down my back. When Stallman starts lecturing another reporter over a
perceived error in diction, I feel a guilty tinge of relief. At least
he isn't looking at me, I tell myself.
279
For Stallman, such face-to-face moments would serve their purpose. By
the end of the first LinuxWorld show, most reporters know better than
to use the term "Linux" in his presence, and wired.com is running a
story comparing Stallman to a pre-Stalinist revolutionary erased from
the history books by hackers and entrepreneurs eager to downplay the
GNU Project's overly political objectives. 24 Other articles
follow, and while few reporters call the operating system GNU/Linux in
print, most are quick to credit Stallman for launching the drive to
build a free software operating system 15 years before.
280
I won't meet Stallman again for another 17 months. During the interim,
Stallman will revisit Silicon Valley once more for the August, 1999
LinuxWorld show. Although not invited to speak, Stallman does managed
to deliver the event's best line. Accepting the show's Linus Torvalds
Award for Community Service-an award named after Linux creator Linus
Torvalds-on behalf of the Free Software Foundation, Stallman
wisecracks, "Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software
Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel
Alliance."
281
This time around, however, the comments fail to make much of a media
dent. Midway through the week, Red Hat, Inc., a prominent GNU/Linux
vendor, goes public. The news merely confirms what many reporters such
as myself already suspect: "Linux" has become a Wall Street buzzword,
much like "e-commerce" and "dot-com" before it. With the stock market
approaching the Y2K rollover like a hyperbola approaching its vertical
asymptote, all talk of free software or open source as a political
phenomenon falls by the wayside.
282
Maybe that's why, when LinuxWorld follows up its first two shows with a
third LinuxWorld show in August, 2000, Stallman is conspicuously
absent.
283
My second encounter with Stallman and his trademark gaze comes shortly
after that third LinuxWorld show. Hearing that Stallman is going to be
in Silicon Valley, I set up a lunch interview in Palo Alto, California.
The meeting place seems ironic, not only because of the recent no-show
but also because of the overall backdrop. Outside of Redmond,
Washington, few cities offer a more direct testament to the economic
value of proprietary software. Curious to see how Stallman, a man who
has spent the better part of his life railing against our culture's
predilection toward greed and selfishness, is coping in a city where
even garage-sized bungalows run in the half-million-dollar price range,
I make the drive down from Oakland.
284
I follow the directions Stallman has given me, until I reach the
headquarters of Art.net, a nonprofit "virtual artists collective."
Located in a hedge-shrouded house in the northern corner of the city,
the Art.net headquarters are refreshingly run-down. Suddenly, the idea
of Stallman lurking in the heart of Silicon Valley doesn't seem so
strange after all.
285
I find Stallman sitting in a darkened room, tapping away on his gray
laptop computer. He looks up as soon as I enter the room, giving me a
full blast of his 200-watt gaze. When he offers a soothing "Hello," I
offer a return greeting. Before the words come out, however, his eyes
have already shifted back to the laptop screen.
286
"I'm just finishing an article on the spirit of hacking," Stallman
says, fingers still tapping. "Take a look."
287
I take a look. The room is dimly lit, and the text appears as
greenish-white letters on a black background, a reversal of the color
scheme used by most desktop word-processing programs, so it takes my
eyes a moment to adjust. When they do, I find myself reading Stallman's
account of a recent meal at a Korean restaurant. Before the meal,
Stallman makes an interesting discovery: the person setting the table
has left six chopsticks instead of the usual two in front of Stallman's
place setting. Where most restaurant goers would have ignored the
redundant pairs, Stallman takes it as challenge: find a way to use all
six chopsticks at once. Like many software hacks, the successful
solution is both clever and silly at the same time. Hence Stallman's
decision to use it as an illustration.
288
As I read the story, I feel Stallman watching me intently. I look over
to notice a proud but child-like half smile on his face. When I praise
the essay, my comment barely merits a raised eyebrow.
289
"I'll be ready to go in a moment," he says.
290
Stallman goes back to tapping away at his laptop. The laptop is gray
and boxy, not like the sleek, modern laptops that seemed to be a
programmer favorite at the recent LinuxWorld show. Above the keyboard
rides a smaller, lighter keyboard, a testament to Stallman's aging
hands. During the late 1980s, when Stallman was putting in 70- and
80-hour work weeks writing the first free software tools and programs
for the GNU Project, the pain in Stallman's hands became so unbearable
that he had to hire a typist. Today, Stallman relies on a keyboard
whose keys require less pressure than a typical computer keyboard.
291
Stallman has a tendency to block out all external stimuli while
working. Watching his eyes lock onto the screen and his fingers dance,
one quickly gets the sense of two old friends locked in deep
conversation.
292
The session ends with a few loud keystrokes and the slow disassembly of
the laptop.
293
"Ready for lunch?" Stallman asks.
294
We walk to my car. Pleading a sore ankle, Stallman limps along slowly.
Stallman blames the injury on a tendon in his left foot. The injury is
three years old and has gotten so bad that Stallman, a huge fan of folk
dancing, has been forced to give up all dancing activities. "I love
folk dancing inherently," Stallman laments. "Not being able to dance
has been a tragedy for me."
295
Stallman's body bears witness to the tragedy. Lack of exercise has left
Stallman with swollen cheeks and a pot belly that was much less visible
the year before. You can tell the weight gain has been dramatic,
because when Stallman walks, he arches his back like a pregnant woman
trying to accommodate an unfamiliar load.
296
The walk is further slowed by Stallman's willingness to stop and smell
the roses, literally. Spotting a particularly beautiful blossom, he
tickles the innermost petals with his prodigious nose, takes a deep
sniff and steps back with a contented sigh.
297
"Mmm, rhinophytophilia,"26 he says, rubbing his back.
26. At the time, I thought Stallman was referring to the flower's
scientific name. Months later, I would learn that rhinophytophilia was
in fact a humorous reference to the activity, i.e., Stallman sticking
his nose into a flower and enjoying the moment. For another humorous
Stallman flower incident, visit:
298
The drive to the restaurant takes less than three minutes. Upon
recommendation from Tim Ney, former executive director of the Free
Software Foundation, I have let Stallman choose the restaurant. While
some reporters zero in on Stallman's monk-like lifestyle, the truth is,
Stallman is a committed epicure when it comes to food. One of the
fringe benefits of being a traveling missionary for the free software
cause is the ability to sample delicious food from around the world.
"Visit almost any major city in the world, and chances are Richard
knows the best restaurant in town," says Ney. "Richard also takes great
pride in knowing what's on the menu and ordering for the entire table."
299
For today's meal, Stallman has chosen a Cantonese-style dim sum
restaurant two blocks off University Avenue, Palo Alto's main drag. The
choice is partially inspired by Stallman's recent visit to China,
including a lecture stop in Guangdong province, in addition to
Stallman's personal aversion to spicier Hunanese and Szechuan cuisine.
"I'm not a big fan of spicy," Stallman admits.
300
We arrive a few minutes after 11 a.m. and find ourselves already
subject to a 20-minute wait. Given the hacker aversion to lost time, I
hold my breath momentarily, fearing an outburst. Stallman, contrary to
expectations, takes the news in stride.
301
"It's too bad we couldn't have found somebody else to join us," he
tells me. "It's always more fun to eat with a group of people."
302
During the wait, Stallman practices a few dance steps. His moves are
tentative but skilled. We discuss current events. Stallman says his
only regret about not attending LinuxWorld was missing out on a press
conference announcing the launch of the GNOME Foundation. Backed by Sun
Microsystems and IBM, the foundation is in many ways a vindication for
Stallman, who has long championed that free software and free-market
economics need not be mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, Stallman
remains dissatisfied by the message that came out.
303
"The way it was presented, the companies were talking about Linux with
no mention of the GNU Project at all," Stallman says.
304
Such disappointments merely contrast the warm response coming from
overseas, especially Asia, Stallman notes. A quick glance at the
Stallman 2000 travel itinerary bespeaks the growing popularity of the
free software message. Between recent visits to India, China, and
Brazil, Stallman has spent 12 of the last 115 days on United States
soil. His travels have given him an opportunity to see how the free
software concept translates into different languages of cultures.
305
"In India many people are interested in free software, because they see
it as a way to build their computing infrastructure without spending a
lot of money," Stallman says. "In China, the concept has been much
slower to catch on. Comparing free software to free speech is harder to
do when you don't have any free speech. Still, the level of interest in
free software during my last visit was profound."
306
The conversation shifts to Napster, the San Mateo, California software
company, which has become something of a media cause cÈlËbre
in recent months. The company markets a controversial software tool
that lets music fans browse and copy the music files of other music
fans. Thanks to the magnifying powers of the Internet, this so-called
"peer-to-peer" program has evolved into a de facto online juke box,
giving ordinary music fans a way to listen to MP3 music files over the
computer without paying a royalty or fee, much to record companies'
chagrin.
307
Although based on proprietary software, the Napster system draws
inspiration from the long-held Stallman contention that once a work
enters the digital realm-in other words, once making a copy is less a
matter of duplicating sounds or duplicating atoms and more a matter of
duplicating information-the natural human impulse to share a work
becomes harder to restrict. Rather than impose additional restrictions,
Napster execs have decided to take advantage of the impulse. Giving
music listeners a central place to trade music files, the company has
gambled on its ability to steer the resulting user traffic toward other
commercial opportunities.
308
The sudden success of the Napster model has put the fear in traditional
record companies, with good reason. Just days before my Palo Alto
meeting with Stallman, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel granted
a request filed by the Recording Industry Association of America for an
injunction against the file-sharing service. The injunction was
subsequently suspended by the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals, but
by early 2001, the Court of Appeals, too, would find the San
Mateo-based company in breach of copyright law,27 a decision
RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later proclaim proclaim a "clear
victory for the creative content community and the legitimate online
marketplace."28
27. See Cecily Barnes and Scott Ard, "Court Grants Stay of Napster
Injunction," News.com (July 28, 2000).
28. See "A Clear Victory for Recording Industry in Napster Case," RIAA
press release (February 12, 2001).
309
For hackers such as Stallman, the Napster business model is scary in
different ways. The company's eagerness to appropriate time-worn hacker
principles such as file sharing and communal information ownership,
while at the same time selling a service based on proprietary software,
sends a distressing mixed message. As a person who already has a hard
enough time getting his own carefully articulated message into the
media stream, Stallman is understandably reticent when it comes to
speaking out about the company. Still, Stallman does admit to learning
a thing or two from the social side of the Napster phenomenon.
310
"Before Napster, I thought it might be OK for people to privately
redistribute works of entertainment," Stallman says. "The number of
people who find Napster useful, however, tells me that the right to
redistribute copies not only on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis, but to
the public at large, is essential and therefore may not be taken away."
311
No sooner does Stallman say this than the door to the restaurant swings
open and we are invited back inside by the host. Within a few seconds,
we are seated in a side corner of the restaurant next to a large
mirrored wall.
312
The restaurant's menu doubles as an order form, and Stallman is quickly
checking off boxes before the host has even brought water to the table.
"Deep-fried shrimp roll wrapped in bean-curd skin," Stallman reads.
"Bean-curd skin. It offers such an interesting texture. I think we
should get it."
313
This comment leads to an impromptu discussion of Chinese food and
Stallman's recent visit to China. "The food in China is utterly
exquisite," Stallman says, his voice gaining an edge of emotion for the
first time this morning. "So many different things that I've never seen
in the U.S., local things made from local mushrooms and local
vegetables. It got to the point where I started keeping a journal just
to keep track of every wonderful meal."
314
The conversation segues into a discussion of Korean cuisine. During the
same June, 2000, Asian tour, Stallman paid a visit to South Korea. His
arrival ignited a mini-firestorm in the local media thanks to a Korean
software conference attended by Microsoft founder and chairman Bill
Gates that same week. Next to getting his photo above Gates's photo on
the front page of the top Seoul newspaper, Stallman says the best thing
about the trip was the food. "I had a bowl of naeng myun, which is cold
noodles," says Stallman. "These were a very interesting feeling noodle.
Most places don't use quite the same kind of noodles for your naeng
myun, so I can say with complete certainty that this was the most
exquisite naeng myun I ever had."
315
The term "exquisite" is high praise coming from Stallman. I know this,
because a few moments after listening to Stallman rhapsodize about
naeng myun, I feel his laser-beam eyes singeing the top of my right
shoulder.
316
"There is the most exquisite woman sitting just behind you," Stallman
says.
317
I turn to look, catching a glimpse of a woman's back. The woman is
young, somewhere in her mid-20s, and is wearing a white sequinned
dress. She and her male lunch companion are in the final stages of
paying the check. When both get up from the table to leave the
restaurant, I can tell without looking, because Stallman's eyes
suddenly dim in intensity.
318
"Oh, no," he says. "They're gone. And to think, I'll probably never
even get to see her again."
319
After a brief sigh, Stallman recovers. The moment gives me a chance to
discuss Stallman's reputation vis-ý-vis the fairer sex. The reputation
is a bit contradictory at times. A number of hackers report Stallman's
predilection for greeting females with a kiss on the back of the
hand.29 A May 26, 2000 Salon.com article, meanwhile, portrays
Stallman as a bit of a hacker lothario. Documenting the free
software-free love connection, reporter Annalee Newitz presents
Stallman as rejecting traditional family values, telling her, "I
believe in love, but not monogamy."30
29. See Mae Ling Mak, "Mae Ling's Story" (December 17, 1998).
30. See Annalee Newitz, "If Code is Free Why Not Me?" Salon.com (May 26,
2000).
320
Stallman lets his menu drop a little when I bring this up. "Well, most
men seem to want sex and seem to have a rather contemptuous attitude
towards women," he says. "Even women they're involved with. I can't
understand it at all."
321
I mention a passage from the 1999 book Open Sources in which Stallman
confesses to wanting to name the ill-fated GNU kernel after a
girlfriend at the time. The girlfriend's name was Alix, a name that fit
perfectly with the Unix developer convention of putting an "x" at the
end of any new kernel name-e.g., "Linux." Because the woman was a Unix
system administrator, Stallman says it would have been an even more
touching tribute. Unfortunately, Stallman notes, the kernel project's
eventual main developer renamed the kernel HURD.31 Although
Stallman and the girlfriend later broke up, the story triggers an
automatic question: for all the media imagery depicting him as a
wild-eyed fanatic, is Richard Stallman really just a hopeless romantic,
a wandering Quixote tilting at corporate windmills in an effort to
impress some as-yet-unidentified Dulcinea?
31. See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Operating System and the Free
Software Movement," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.,
1999): 65.
322
"I wasn't really trying to be romantic," Stallman says, recalling the
Alix story. "It was more of a teasing thing. I mean, it was romantic,
but it was also teasing, you know? It would have been a delightful
surprise."
323
For the first time all morning, Stallman smiles. I bring up the hand
kissing. "Yes, I do do that," Stallman says. "I've found it's a way of
offering some affection that a lot of women will enjoy. It's a chance
to give some affection and to be appreciated for it."
324
Affection is a thread that runs clear through Richard Stallman's life,
and he is painfully candid about it when questions arise. "There really
hasn't been much affection in my life, except in my mind," he says.
Still, the discussion quickly grows awkward. After a few one-word
replies, Stallman finally lifts up his menu, cutting off the inquiry.
325
"Would you like some shimai?" he asks.
326
When the food comes out, the conversation slaloms between the arriving
courses. We discuss the oft-noted hacker affection for Chinese food,
the weekly dinner runs into Boston's Chinatown district during
Stallman's days as a staff programmer at the AI Lab, and the underlying
logic of the Chinese language and its associated writing system. Each
thrust on my part elicits a well-informed parry on Stallman's part.
327
"I heard some people speaking Shanghainese the last time I was in
China," Stallman says. "It was interesting to hear. It sounded quite
different [from Mandarin]. I had them tell me some cognate words in
Mandarin and Shanghainese. In some cases you can see the resemblance,
but one question I was wondering about was whether tones would be
similar. They're not. That's interesting to me, because there's a
theory that the tones evolved from additional syllables that got lost
and replaced. Their effect survives in the tone. If that's true, and
I've seen claims that that happened within historic times, the dialects
must have diverged before the loss of these final syllables."
328
The first dish, a plate of pan-fried turnip cakes, has arrived. Both
Stallman and I take a moment to carve up the large rectangular cakes,
which smell like boiled cabbage but taste like potato latkes fried in
bacon.
329
I decide to bring up the outcast issue again, wondering if Stallman's
teenage years conditioned him to take unpopular stands, most notably
his uphill battle since 1994 to get computer users and the media to
replace the popular term "Linux" with "GNU/Linux."
330
"I believe it did help me," Stallman says, chewing on a dumpling. "I
have never understood what peer pressure does to other people. I think
the reason is that I was so hopelessly rejected that for me, there
wasn't anything to gain by trying to follow any of the fads. It
wouldn't have made any difference. I'd still be just as rejected, so I
didn't try."
331
Stallman points to his taste in music as a key example of his
contrarian tendencies. As a teenager, when most of his high school
classmates were listening to Motown and acid rock, Stallman preferred
classical music. The memory leads to a rare humorous episode from
Stallman's middle-school years. Following the Beatles' 1964 appearance
on the Ed Sullivan Show, most of Stallman's classmates rushed out to
purchase the latest Beatles albums and singles. Right then and there,
Stallman says, he made a decision to boycott the Fab Four.
332
"I liked some of the pre-Beatles popular music," Stallman says. "But I
didn't like the Beatles. I especially disliked the wild way people
reacted to them. It was like: who was going to have a Beatles assembly
to adulate the Beatles the most?"
333
When his Beatles boycott failed to take hold, Stallman looked for other
ways to point out the herd-mentality of his peers. Stallman says he
briefly considered putting together a rock band himself dedicated to
satirizing the Liverpool group.
334
"I wanted to call it Tokyo Rose and the Japanese Beetles."
335
Given his current love for international folk music, I ask Stallman if
he had a similar affinity for Bob Dylan and the other folk musicians of
the early 1960s. Stallman shakes his head. "I did like Peter, Paul and
Mary," he says. "That reminds me of a great filk."
336
When I ask for a definition of "filk," Stallman explains the concept. A
filk, he says, is a popular song whose lyrics have been replaced with
parody lyrics. The process of writing a filk is called filking, and it
is a popular activity among hackers and science-fiction aficionados.
Classic filks include "On Top of Spaghetti," a rewrite of "On Top of
Old Smokey," and "Yoda," filk-master "Weird" Al Yankovic's Star
Wars-oriented rendition of the Kinks tune, "Lola."
337
Stallman asks me if I would be interested in hearing the folk filk. As
soon as I say yes, Stallman's voice begins singing in an unexpectedly
clear tone:
338
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck,If a woodchuck could chuck wood?
How many poles could a polak lock,If a polak could lock poles? How many
knees could a negro grow, If a negro could grow knees? The answer, my
dear, is stick it in your ear.The answer is to stick it in your ear.
339
The singing ends, and Stallman's lips curl into another child-like half
smile. I glance around at the nearby tables. The Asian families
enjoying their Sunday lunch pay little attention to the bearded alto in
their midst.32 After a few moments of hesitation, I finally
smile too.
32. For more Stallman filks, visit
340
"Do you want that last cornball?" Stallman asks, eyes twinkling. Before
I can screw up the punch line, Stallman grabs the corn-encrusted
dumpling with his two chopsticks and lifts it proudly. "Maybe I'm the
one who should get the cornball," he says.
341
The food gone, our conversation assumes the dynamics of a normal
interview. Stallman reclines in his chair and cradles a cup of tea in
his hands. We resume talking about Napster and its relation to the free
software movement. Should the principles of free software be extended
to similar arenas such as music publishing? I ask.
342
"It's a mistake to transfer answers from one thing to another," says
Stallman, contrasting songs with software programs. "The right approach
is to look at each type of work and see what conclusion you get."
343
When it comes to copyrighted works, Stallman says he divides the world
into three categories. The first category involves "functional"
works-e.g., software programs, dictionaries, and textbooks. The second
category involves works that might best be described as
"testimonial"-e.g., scientific papers and historical documents. Such
works serve a purpose that would be undermined if subsequent readers or
authors were free to modify the work at will. The final category
involves works of personal expression-e.g., diaries, journals, and
autobiographies. To modify such documents would be to alter a person's
recollections or point of view-action Stallman considers ethically
unjustifiable.
344
Of the three categories, the first should give users the unlimited
right to make modified versions, while the second and third should
regulate that right according to the will of the original author.
Regardless of category, however, the freedom to copy and redistribute
noncommercially should remain unabridged at all times, Stallman
insists. If that means giving Internet users the right to generate a
hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and then email the
copies to a hundred strangers, so be it. "It's clear that private
occasional redistribution must be permitted, because only a police
state can stop that," Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between
people and their friends. Napster has convinced me that we also need to
permit, must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public
for the fun of it. Because so many people want to do that and find it
so useful."
345
When I ask whether the courts would accept such a permissive outlook,
Stallman cuts me off.
346
"That's the wrong question," he says. "I mean now you've changed the
subject entirely from one of ethics to one of interpreting laws. And
those are two totally different questions in the same field. It's
useless to jump from one to the other. How the courts would interpret
the existing laws is mainly in a harsh way, because that's the way
these laws have been bought by publishers."
347
The comment provides an insight into Stallman's political philosophy:
just because the legal system currently backs up businesses' ability to
treat copyright as the software equivalent of land title doesn't mean
computer users have to play the game according to those rules. Freedom
is an ethical issue, not a legal issue. "I'm looking beyond what the
existing laws are to what they should be," Stallman says. "I'm not
trying to draft legislation. I'm thinking about what should the law do?
I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend
the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect."
348
The invocation of Jim Crow prompts another question. How much influence
or inspiration does Stallman draw from past political leaders? Like the
civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, his attempt to drive
social change is based on an appeal to timeless values: freedom,
justice, and fair play.
349
Stallman divides his attention between my analogy and a particularly
tangled strand of hair. When I stretch the analogy to the point where
I'm comparing Stallman with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stallman,
after breaking off a split end and popping it into his mouth, cuts me
off.
350
"I'm not in his league, but I do play the same game," he says, chewing.
351
I suggest Malcolm X as another point of comparison. Like the former
Nation of Islam spokesperson, Stallman has built up a reputation for
courting controversy, alienating potential allies, and preaching a
message favoring self-sufficiency over cultural integration.
352
Chewing on another split end, Stallman rejects the comparison. "My
message is closer to King's message," he says. "It's a universal
message. It's a message of firm condemnation of certain practices that
mistreat others. It's not a message of hatred for anyone. And it's not
aimed at a narrow group of people. I invite anyone to value freedom and
to have freedom."
353
Even so, a suspicious attitude toward political alliances remains a
fundamental Stallman character trait. In the case of his
well-publicized distaste for the term "open source," the unwillingness
to participate in recent coalition-building projects seems
understandable. As a man who has spent the last two decades stumping on
the behalf of free software, Stallman's political capital is deeply
invested in the term. Still, comments such as the "Han Solo" wisecrack
at the 1999 LinuxWorld have only reinforced the Stallman's reputation
in the software industry as a disgrunted mossback unwilling to roll
with political or marketing trends.
354
"I admire and respect Richard for all the work he's done," says Red Hat
president Robert Young, summing up Stallman's paradoxical political
nature. "My only critique is that sometimes Richard treats his friends
worse than his enemies."
355
Stallman's unwillingness to seek alliances seems equally perplexing
when you consider his political interests outside of the free software
movement. Visit Stallman's offices at MIT, and you instantly find a
clearinghouse of left-leaning news articles covering civil-rights
abuses around the globe. Visit his web site, and you'll find diatribes
on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the War on Drugs, and the
World Trade Organization.
356
Given his activist tendencies, I ask, why hasn't Stallman sought a
larger voice? Why hasn't he used his visibility in the hacker world as
a platform to boost rather than reduce his political voice.
357
Stallman lets his tangled hair drop and contemplates the question for a
moment.
358
"I hesitate to exaggerate the importance of this little puddle of
freedom," he says. "Because the more well-known and conventional areas
of working for freedom and a better society are tremendously important.
I wouldn't say that free software is as important as they are. It's the
responsibility I undertook, because it dropped in my lap and I saw a
way I could do something about it. But, for example, to end police
brutality, to end the war on drugs, to end the kinds of racism we still
have, to help everyone have a comfortable life, to protect the rights
of people who do abortions, to protect us from theocracy, these are
tremendously important issues, far more important than what I do. I
just wish I knew how to do something about them."
359
Once again, Stallman presents his political activity as a function of
personal confidence. Given the amount of time it has taken him to
develop and hone the free software movement's core tenets, Stallman is
hesitant to jump aboard any issues or trends that might transport him
into uncharted territory.
360
"I wish I knew I how to make a major difference on those bigger issues,
because I would be tremendously proud if I could, but they're very hard
and lots of people who are probably better than I am have been working
on them and have gotten only so far," he says. "But as I see it, while
other people were defending against these big visible threats, I saw
another threat that was unguarded. And so I went to defend against that
threat. It may not be as big a threat, but I was the only one there."
361
Chewing a final split end, Stallman suggests paying the check. Before
the waiter can take it away, however, Stallman pulls out a
white-colored dollar bill and throws it on the pile. The bill looks so
clearly counterfeit, I can't help but pick it up and read it. Sure
enough, it is counterfeit. Instead of bearing the image of a George
Washington or Abe Lincoln, the bill's front side bears the image of a
cartoon pig. Instead of the United States of America, the banner above
the pig reads "United Swines of Avarice." The bill is for zero dollars,
and when the waiter picks up the money, Stallman makes sure to tug on
his sleeve.
362
"I added an extra zero to your tip," Stallman says, yet another half
smile creeping across his lips.
363
The waiter, uncomprehending or fooled by the look of the bill, smiles
and scurries away.
364
"I think that means we're free to go," Stallman says.
365
Chapter 6 - The Emacs Commune
366
The AI Lab of the 1970s was by all accounts a special place.
Cutting-edge projects and top-flight researchers gave it an esteemed
position in the world of computer science. The internal hacker culture
and its anarchic policies lent a rebellious mystique as well. Only
later, when many of the lab's scientists and software superstars had
departed, would hackers fully realize the unique and ephemeral world
they had once inhabited.
367
"It was a bit like the Garden of Eden," says Stallman, summing up the
lab and its software-sharing ethos in a 1998 Forbes article. "It hadn't
occurred to us not to cooperate."33
33. See Josh McHugh, "For the Love of Hacking," Forbes (August 10,
1998).
368
Such mythological descriptions, while extreme, underline an important
fact. The ninth floor of 545 Tech Square was more than a workplace for
many. For hackers such as Stallman, it was home.
369
The word "home" is a weighted term in the Stallman lexicon. In a
pointed swipe at his parents, Stallman, to this day, refuses to
acknowledge any home before Currier House, the dorm he lived in during
his days at Harvard. He has also been known to describe leaving that
home in tragicomic terms. Once, while describing his years at Harvard,
Stallman said his only regret was getting kicked out. It wasn't until I
asked Stallman what precipitated his ouster, that I realized I had
walked into a classic Stallman setup line.
370
"At Harvard they have this policy where if you pass too many classes
they ask you to leave," Stallman says.
371
With no dorm and no desire to return to New York, Stallman followed a
path blazed by Greenblatt, Gosper, Sussman, and the many other hackers
before him. Enrolling at MIT as a grad student, Stallman rented an
apartment in nearby Cambridge but soon viewed the AI Lab itself as his
de facto home. In a 1986 speech, Stallman recalled his memories of the
AI Lab during this period:
372
I may have done a little bit more living at the lab than most people,
because every year or two for some reason or other I'd have no
apartment and I would spend a few months living at the lab. And I've
always found it very comfortable, as well as nice and cool in the
summer. But it was not at all uncommon to find people falling asleep at
the lab, again because of their enthusiasm; you stay up as long as you
possibly can hacking, because you just don't want to stop. And then
when you're completely exhausted, you climb over to the nearest soft
horizontal surface. A very informal atmosphere.34
34. See Stallman (1986).
373
The lab's home-like atmosphere could be a problem at times. What some
saw as a dorm, others viewed as an electronic opium den. In the 1976
book Computer Power and Human Reason, MIT researcher Joseph Weizenbaum
offered a withering critique of the " computer bum," Weizenbaum's term
for the hackers who populated computer rooms such as the AI Lab. "Their
rumpled clothes, their unwashed hair and unshaved faces, and their
uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and
to the world in which they move," Weizenbaum wrote. "[Computer bums]
exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the
computers."35
35. See Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From
Judgment to Calculation (W. H. Freeman, 1976): 116.
374
Almost a quarter century after its publication, Stallman still bristles
when hearing Weizenbaum's "computer bum" description, discussing it in
the present tense as if Weizenbaum himself was still in the room. "He
wants people to be just professionals, doing it for the money and
wanting to get away from it and forget about it as soon as possible,"
Stallman says. "What he sees as a normal state of affairs, I see as a
tragedy."
375
Hacker life, however, was not without tragedy. Stallman characterizes
his transition from weekend hacker to full-time AI Lab denizen as a
series of painful misfortunes that could only be eased through the
euphoria of hacking. As Stallman himself has said, the first misfortune
was his graduation from Harvard. Eager to continue his studies in
physics, Stallman enrolled as a graduate student at MIT. The choice of
schools was a natural one. Not only did it give Stallman the chance to
follow the footsteps of great MIT alumni: William Shockley ('36),
Richard P. Feynman ('39), and Murray Gell-Mann ('51), it also put him
two miles closer to the AI Lab and its new PDP-10 computer. "My
attention was going toward programming, but I still thought, well,
maybe I can do both," Stallman says.
376
Toiling in the fields of graduate-level science by day and programming
in the monastic confines of the AI Lab by night, Stallman tried to
achieve a perfect balance. The fulcrum of this geek teeter-totter was
his weekly outing with the folk-dance troupe, his one social outlet
that guaranteed at least a modicum of interaction with the opposite
sex. Near the end of that first year at MIT, however, disaster struck.
A knee injury forced Stallman to drop out of the troupe. At first,
Stallman viewed the injury as a temporary problem, devoting the spare
time he would have spent dancing to working at the AI Lab even more. By
the end of the summer, when the knee still ached and classes
reconvened, Stallman began to worry. "My knee wasn't getting any
better," Stallman recalls, "which meant I had to stop dancing
completely. I was heartbroken."
377
With no dorm and no dancing, Stallman's social universe imploded. Like
an astronaut experiencing the aftereffects of zero-gravity, Stallman
found that his ability to interact with nonhackers, especially female
nonhackers, had atrophied significantly. After 16 weeks in the AI Lab,
the self confidence he'd been quietly accumulating during his 4 years
at Harvard was virtually gone.
378
"I felt basically that I'd lost all my energy," Stallman recalls. "I'd
lost my energy to do anything but what was most immediately tempting.
The energy to do something else was gone. I was in total despair."
379
Stallman retreated from the world even further, focusing entirely on
his work at the AI Lab. By October, 1975, he dropped out of MIT, never
to go back. Software hacking, once a hobby, had become his calling.
380
Looking back on that period, Stallman sees the transition from
full-time student to full-time hacker as inevitable. Sooner or later,
he believes, the siren's call of computer hacking would have
overpowered his interest in other professional pursuits. "With physics
and math, I could never figure out a way to contribute," says Stallman,
recalling his struggles prior to the knee injury. "I would have been
proud to advance either one of those fields, but I could never see a
way to do that. I didn't know where to start. With software, I saw
right away how to write things that would run and be useful. The
pleasure of that knowledge led me to want to do it more."
381
Stallman wasn't the first to equate hacking with pleasure. Many of the
hackers who staffed the AI Lab boasted similar, incomplete academic
rÈsumÈs. Most had come in pursuing degrees in math or
electrical engineering only to surrender their academic careers and
professional ambitions to the sheer exhilaration that came with solving
problems never before addressed. Like St. Thomas Aquinas, the
scholastic known for working so long on his theological summae that he
sometimes achieved spiritual visions, hackers reached transcendent
internal states through sheer mental focus and physical exhaustion.
Although Stallman shunned drugs, like most hackers, he enjoyed the
"high" that came near the end of a 20-hour coding bender.
382
Perhaps the most enjoyable emotion, however, was the sense of personal
fulfillment. When it came to hacking, Stallman was a natural. A
childhood's worth of late-night study sessions gave him the ability to
work long hours with little sleep. As a social outcast since age 10, he
had little difficulty working alone. And as a mathematician with
built-in gift for logic and foresight, Stallman possessed the ability
to circumvent design barriers that left most hackers spinning their
wheels.
383
"He was special," recalls Gerald Sussman, an MIT faculty member and
former AI Lab researcher. Describing Stallman as a "clear thinker and a
clear designer," Sussman employed Stallman as a research-project
assistant beginning in 1975. The project was complex, involving the
creation of an AI program that could analyze circuit diagrams. Not only
did it involve an expert's command of Lisp, a programming language
built specifically for AI applications, but it also required an
understanding of how a human might approach the same task.
384
When he wasn't working on official projects such as Sussman's automated
circuit-analysis program, Stallman devoted his time to pet projects. It
was in a hacker's best interest to improve the lab's software
infrastructure, and one of Stallman's biggest pet projects during this
period was the lab's editor program TECO.
385
The story of Stallman's work on TECO during the 1970s is inextricably
linked with Stallman's later leadership of the free software movement.
It is also a significant stage in the history of computer evolution, so
much so that a brief recapitulation of that evolution is necessary.
During the 1950s and 1960s, when computers were first appearing at
universities, computer programming was an incredibly abstract pursuit.
To communicate with the machine, programmers created a series of punch
cards, with each card representing an individual software command.
Programmers would then hand the cards over to a central system
administrator who would then insert them, one by one, into the machine,
waiting for the machine to spit out a new set of punch cards, which the
programmer would then decipher as output. This process, known as "batch
processing," was cumbersome and time consuming. It was also prone to
abuses of authority. One of the motivating factors behind hackers'
inbred aversion to centralization was the power held by early system
operators in dictating which jobs held top priority.
386
In 1962, computer scientists and hackers involved in MIT's Project MAC,
an early forerunner of the AI Lab, took steps to alleviate this
frustration. Time-sharing, originally known as "time stealing," made it
possible for multiple programs to take advantage of a machine's
operational capabilities. Teletype interfaces also made it possible to
communicate with a machine not through a series of punched holes but
through actual text. A programmer typed in commands and read the
line-by-line output generated by the machine.
387
During the late 1960s, interface design made additional leaps. In a
famous 1968 lecture, Doug Engelbart, a scientist then working at the
Stanford Research Institute, unveiled a prototype of the modern
graphical interface. Rigging up a television set to the computer and
adding a pointer device which Engelbart dubbed a "mouse," the scientist
created a system even more interactive than the time-sharing system
developed a MIT. Treating the video display like a high-speed printer,
Engelbart's system gave a user the ability to move the cursor around
the screen and see the cursor position updated by the computer in real
time. The user suddenly had the ability to position text anywhere on
the screen.
388
Such innovations would take another two decades to make their way into
the commercial marketplace. Still, by the 1970s, video screens had
started to replace teletypes as display terminals, creating the
potential for full-screen-as opposed to line-by-line-editing
capabilities.
389
One of the first programs to take advantage of this full-screen
capability was the MIT AI Lab's TECO. Short for Text Editor and
COrrector, the program had been upgraded by hackers from an old
teletype line editor for the lab's PDP-6 machine.36
36. According to the Jargon File, TECO's name originally stood for Tape
Editor and Corrector.
390
TECO was a substantial improvement over old editors, but it still had
its drawbacks. To create and edit a document, a programmer had to enter
a series of software commands specifying each edit. It was an abstract
process. Unlike modern word processors, which update text with each
keystroke, TECO demanded that the user enter an extended series of
editing instructions followed by an "end of command" sequence just to
change the text.Over time, a hacker grew proficient enough to write
entire documents in edit mode, but as Stallman himself would later
point out, the process required "a mental skill like that of blindfold
chess."37
37. See Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Display
Editor," AI Lab Memo (1979). An updated HTML version of this memo, from
which I am quoting, is available at
391
To facilitate the process, AI Lab hackers had built a system that
displayed both the "source" and "display" modes on a split screen.
Despite this innovative hack, switching from mode to mode was still a
nuisance.
392
TECO wasn't the only full-screen editor floating around the computer
world at this time. During a visit to the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Lab in 1976, Stallman encountered an edit program named E.
The program contained an internal feature, which allowed a user to
update display text after each command keystroke. In the language of
1970s programming, E was one of the first rudimentary WYSIWYG editors.
Short for "what you see is what you get," WYSIWYG meant that a user
could manipulate the file by moving through the displayed text, as
opposed to working through a back-end editor program."38
38. See Richard Stallman, "Emacs the Full Screen Editor" (1987).
393
Impressed by the hack, Stallman looked for ways to expand TECO's
functionality in similar fashion upon his return to MIT. He found a
TECO feature called Control-R, written by Carl Mikkelson and named
after the two-key combination that triggered it. Mikkelson's hack
switched TECO from its usual abstract command-execution mode to a more
intuitive keystroke-by-keystroke mode. Stallman revised the feature in
a subtle but significant way. He made it possible to trigger other TECO
command strings, or "macros," using other, two-key combinations. Where
users had once entered command strings and discarded them after
entering then, Stallman's hack made it possible to save macro tricks on
file and call them up at will. Mikkelson's hack had raised TECO to the
level of a WYSIWYG editor. Stallman's hack had raised it to the level
of a user-programmable WYSIWYG editor. "That was the real
breakthrough," says Guy Steele, a fellow AI Lab hacker at the time.
39
394
By Stallman's own recollection, the macro hack touched off an explosion
of further innovation. "Everybody and his brother was writing his own
collection of redefined screen-editor commands, a command for
everything he typically liked to do," Stallman would later recall.
"People would pass them around and improve them, making them more
powerful and more general. The collections of redefinitions gradually
became system programs in their own right." 39
395
So many people found the macro innovations useful and had incorporated
it into their own TECO programs that the TECO editor had become
secondary to the macro mania it inspired. "We started to categorize it
mentally as a programming language rather than as an editor," Stallman
says. Users were experiencing their own pleasure tweaking the software
and trading new ideas. 39
396
Two years after the explosion, the rate of innovation began to exhibit
dangerous side effects. The explosive growth had provided an exciting
validation of the collaborative hacker approach, but it had also led to
over-complexity. "We had a Tower of Babel effect," says Guy Steele.
397
The effect threatened to kill the spirit that had created it, Steele
says. Hackers had designed ITS to facilitate programmers' ability to
share knowledge and improve each other's work. That meant being able to
sit down at another programmer's desk, open up a programmer's work and
make comments and modifications directly within the software.
"Sometimes the easiest way to show somebody how to program or debug
something was simply to sit down at the terminal and do it for them,"
explains Steele.
398
The macro feature, after its second year, began to foil this
capability. In their eagerness to embrace the new full-screen
capabilities, hackers had customized their versions of TECO to the
point where a hacker sitting down at another hacker's terminal usually
had to spend the first hour just figuring out what macro commands did
what.
399
Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to the solve the problem. He
gathered together the four different macro packages and began
assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. In the
course of implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele says
he attracted Stallman's attention.
400
"He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I was doing,"
recalls Steele.
401
For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with Stallman
infrequently, the memory still sticks out. Looking over another
hacker's shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the AI Lab.
Stallman, the TECO maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele's work
"interesting" and quickly set off to complete it.
402
"As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the implementation,
and Stallman did the rest," says Steele with a laugh.
403
The project's new name, Emacs, came courtesy of Stallman. Short for
"editing macros," it signified the evolutionary transcendence that had
taken place during the macros explosion two years before. It also took
advantage of a gap in the software programming lexicon. Noting a lack
of programs on ITS starting with the letter "E," Stallman chose Emacs,
making it possible to reference the program with a single letter. Once
again, the hacker lust for efficiency had left its mark. 39
404
In the course of developing a standard system of macro commands,
Stallman and Steele had to traverse a political tightrope. In creating
a standard program, Stallman was in clear violation of the fundamental
hacker tenet-"promote decentralization." He was also threatening to
hobble the very flexibility that had fueled TECO's explosive innovation
in the first place.
405
"On the one hand, we were trying to make a uniform command set again;
on the other hand, we wanted to keep it open ended, because the
programmability was important," recalls Steele.
406
To solve the problem, Stallman, Steele, and fellow hackers David Moon
and Dan Weinreib limited their standardization effort to the WYSIWYG
commands that controlled how text appeared on-screen. The rest of the
Emacs effort would be devoted to retaining the program's Tinker
Toy-style extensibility.
407
Stallman now faced another conundrum: if users made changes but didn't
communicate those changes back to the rest of the community, the Tower
of Babel effect would simply emerge in other places. Falling back on
the hacker doctrine of sharing innovation, Stallman embedded a
statement within the source code that set the terms of use. Users were
free to modify and redistribute the code on the condition that they
gave back all the extensions they made. Stallman dubbed it the " Emacs
Commune." Just as TECO had become more than a simple editor, Emacs had
become more than a simple software program. To Stallman, it was a
social contract. In an early memo documenting the project, Stallman
spelled out the contract terms. "EMACS," he wrote, "was distributed on
a basis of communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be
given back to me to be incorporated and distributed."39
39. See Stallman (1979): #SEC34.
408
Not everybody accepted the contract. The explosive innovation continued
throughout the decade, resulting in a host of Emacs-like programs with
varying degrees of cross-compatibility. A few cited their relation to
Stallman's original Emacs with humorously recursive names: Sine (Sine
is not Emacs), Eine (Eine is not Emacs), and Zwei (Zwei was Eine
initially). As a devoted exponent of the hacker ethic, Stallman saw no
reason to halt this innovation through legal harassment. Still, the
fact that some people would so eagerly take software from the community
chest, alter it, and slap a new name on the resulting software
displayed a stunning lack of courtesy.
409
Such rude behavior was reflected against other, unsettling developments
in the hacker community. Brian Reid's 1979 decision to embed "time
bombs" in Scribe, making it possible for Unilogic to limit unpaid user
access to the software, was a dark omen to Stallman. "He considered it
the most Nazi thing he ever saw in his life," recalls Reid. Despite
going on to later Internet fame as the cocreator of the Usenet alt
heirarchy, Reid says he still has yet to live down that 1979 decision,
at least in Stallman's eyes. "He said that all software should be free
and the prospect of charging money for software was a crime against
humanity."40
40. In a 1996 interview with online magazine MEME, Stallman cited
Scribe's sale as irksome, but hesitated to mention Reid by name. "The
problem was nobody censured or punished this student for what he did,"
Stallman said. "The result was other people got tempted to follow his
example." See MEME 2.04.
410
Although Stallman had been powerless to head off Reid's sale, he did
possess the ability to curtail other forms of behavior deemed contrary
to the hacker ethos. As central source-code maintainer for the Emacs
"commune," Stallman began to wield his power for political effect.
During his final stages of conflict with the administrators at the
Laboratory for Computer Science over password systems, Stallman
initiated a software "strike,"41 refusing to send lab members
the latest version of Emacs until they rejected the security system on
the lab's computers. The move did little to improve Stallman's growing
reputation as an extremist, but it got the point across: commune
members were expected to speak up for basic hacker values.
41. See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 419.
411
"A lot of people were angry with me, saying I was trying to hold them
hostage or blackmail them, which in a sense I was," Stallman would
later tell author Steven Levy. "I was engaging in violence against them
because I thought they were engaging in violence to everyone at large."
42
412
Over time, Emacs became a sales tool for the hacker ethic. The
flexibility Stallman and built into the software not only encouraged
collaboration, it demanded it. Users who didn't keep abreast of the
latest developments in Emacs evolution or didn't contribute their
contributions back to Stallman ran the risk of missing out on the
latest breakthroughs. And the breakthroughs were many. Twenty years
later, users had modified Emacs for so many different uses-using it as
a spreadsheet, calculator, database, and web browser-that later Emacs
developers adopted an overflowing sink to represent its versatile
functionality. "That's the idea that we wanted to convey," says
Stallman. "The amount of stuff it has contained within it is both
wonderful and awful at the same time."
413
Stallman's AI Lab contemporaries are more charitable. Hal Abelson, an
MIT grad student who worked with Stallman during the 1970s and would
later assist Stallman as a charter boardmember of the Free Software
Foundation, describes Emacs as "an absolutely brilliant creation." In
giving programmers a way to add new software libraries and features
without messing up the system, Abelson says, Stallman paved the way for
future large-scale collaborative software projects. "Its structure was
robust enough that you'd have people all over the world who were
loosely collaborating [and] contributing to it," Abelson says. "I don't
know if that had been done before."42
42. In writing this chapter, I've elected to focus more on the social
significance of Emacs than the software significance. To read more
about the software side, I recommend Stallman's 1979 memo. I
particularly recommend the section titled "Research Through Development
of Installed Tools" (#SEC27). Not only is it accessible to the
nontechnical reader, it also sheds light on how closely intertwined
Stallman's political philosophies are with his software-design
philosophies. A sample excerpt follows:
414
Guy Steele expresses similar admiration. Currently a research scientist
for Sun Microsystems, he remembers Stallman primarily as a "brilliant
programmer with the ability to generate large quantities of relatively
bug-free code." Although their personalities didn't exactly mesh,
Steele and Stallman collaborated long enough for Steele to get a
glimpse of Stallman's intense coding style. He recalls a notable
episode in the late 1970s when the two programmers banded together to
write the editor's "pretty print" feature. Originally conceived by
Steele, pretty print was another keystroke-triggerd feature that
reformatted Emacs' source code so that it was both more readable and
took up less space, further bolstering the program's WYSIWIG qualities.
The feature was strategic enough to attract Stallman's active interest,
and it wasn't long before Steele wrote that he and Stallman were
planning an improved version.
415
"We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and
he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me
type, but he was also telling me what to type.
416
The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time,
Steele says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small
talk. By the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty
print source code to just under 100 lines. "My fingers were on the
keyboard the whole time," Steele recalls, "but it felt like both of our
ideas were flowing onto the screen. He told me what to type, and I
typed it."
417
The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the
AI Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was
surprised to find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a
programmer, Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still,
something about this session was different. Working with Stallman had
forced Steele to block out all external stimuli and focus his entire
mental energies on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found
the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same time.
"My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very
intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."
418
Chapter 7 - A Stark Moral Choice
419
On September 27, 1983, computer programmers logging on to the Usenet
newsgroup net.unix-wizards encountered an unusual message. Posted in
the small hours of the morning, 12:30 a.m. to be exact, and signed by
rms@mit-oz, the message's subject line was terse but
attention-grabbing. "New UNIX implementation," it read. Instead of
introducing a newly released version of Unix, however, the message's
opening paragraph issued a call to arms:
420
Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete
Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and
give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time,
money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.43
43. See Richard Stallman, "Initial GNU Announcement" (September
1983).
421
To an experienced Unix developer, the message was a mixture of idealism
and hubris. Not only did the author pledge to rebuild the already
mature Unix operating system from the ground up, he also proposed to
improve it in places. The new GNU system, the author predicted, would
carry all the usual components-a text editor, a shell program to run
Unix-compatible applications, a compiler, "and a few other things."
44 It would also contain many enticing features that other
Unix systems didn't yet offer: a graphic user interface based on the
Lisp programming language, a crash-proof file system, and networking
protocols built according to MIT's internal networking system.
422
"GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to
Unix," the author wrote. "We will make all improvements that are
convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems."
423
Anticipating a skeptical response on some readers' part, the author
made sure to follow up his operating-system outline with a brief
biographical sketch titled, "Who am I?":
424
I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS
editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked
extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the
Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system.
I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I
have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for
Lisp machines. 44
425
As fate would have it, Stallman's fanciful GNU Project missed its
Thanksgiving launch date. By January, 1984, however, Stallman made good
on his promise and fully immersed himself in the world of Unix software
development. For a software architect raised on ITS, it was like
designing suburban shopping malls instead of Moorish palaces. Even so,
building a Unix-like operating system had its hidden advantages. ITS
had been powerful, but it also possessed an Achilles' heel: MIT hackers
had designed it to take specific advantage of the DEC-built PDP line.
When AI Lab administrators elected to phase out the lab's powerful
PDP-10 machine in the early 1980s, the operating system that hackers
once likened to a vibrant city became an instant ghost town. Unix, on
the other hand, was designed for mobility and long-term survival.
Originally developed by junior scientists at AT&T, the program had
slipped out under corporate-management radar, finding a happy home in
the cash-strapped world of academic computer systems. With fewer
resources than their MIT brethren, Unix developers had customized the
software to ride atop a motley assortment of hardware systems:
everything from the 16-bit PDP-11-a machine considered fit for only
small tasks by most AI Lab hackers-to 32-bit mainframes such as the VAX
11/780. By 1983, a few companies, most notably Sun Microsystems, were
even going so far as to develop a new generation of microcomputers,
dubbed "workstations," to take advantage of the increasingly ubiquitous
operating system.
426
To facilitate this process, the developers in charge of designing the
dominant Unix strains made sure to keep an extra layer of abstraction
between the software and the machine. Instead of tailoring the
operating system to take advantage of a specific machine's resources-as
the AI Lab hackers had done with ITS and the PDP-10-Unix developers
favored a more generic, off-the-rack approach. Focusing more on the
interlocking standards and specifications that held the operating
system's many subcomponents together, rather than the actual components
themselves, they created a system that could be quickly modified to
suit the tastes of any machine. If a user quibbled with a certain
portion, the standards made it possible to pull out an individual
subcomponent and either fix it or replace it with something better.
Simply put, what the Unix approach lacked in terms of style or
aesthetics, it more than made up for in terms of flexibility and
economy, hence its rapid adoption.44
44. See Marshall Kirk McKusick, "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix," Open
Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 38.
427
Stallman's decision to start developing the GNU system was triggered by
the end of the ITS system that the AI Lab hackers had nurtured for so
long. The demise of ITS had been a traumatic blow to Stallman. Coming
on the heels of the Xerox laser printer episode, it offered further
evidence that the AI Lab hacker culture was losing its immunity to
business practices in the outside world.
428
Like the software code that composed it, the roots of ITS' demise
stretched way back. Defense spending, long a major font for
computer-science research, had dried up during the post-Vietnam years.
In a desperate quest for new funds, laboratories and universities
turned to the private sector. In the case of the AI Lab, winning over
private investors was an easy sell. Home to some of the most ambitious
computer-science projects of the post-war era, the lab became a quick
incubator of technology. Indeed, by 1980, most of the lab's staff,
including many hackers, were dividing its time between Institute and
commercial projects.
429
What at first seemed like a win-win deal-hackers got to work on the
best projects, giving the lab first look at many of the newest computer
technologies coming down the pike-soon revealed itself as a Faustian
bargain. The more time hackers devoted to cutting-edge commercial
projects, the less time they had to devote to general maintenance on
the lab's baroque software infrastructure. Soon, companies began hiring
away hackers outright in an attempt to monopolize their time and
attention. With fewer hackers to mind the shop, programs and machines
took longer to fix. Even worse, Stallman says, the lab began to undergo
a "demographic change." The hackers who had once formed a vocal
minority within the AI Lab were losing membership while "the professors
and the students who didn't really love the [PDP-10] were just as
numerous as before."3
430
The breaking point came in 1982. That was the year the lab's
administration decided to upgrade its main computer, the PDP-10.
Digital, the corporation that manufactured the PDP-10, had discontinued
the line. Although the company still offered a high-powered mainframe,
dubbed the KL-10, the new machine required a drastic rewrite or "port"
of ITS if hackers wanted to continue running the same operating system.
Fearful that the lab had lost its critical mass of in-house programming
talent, AI Lab faculty members pressed for Twenex, a commercial
operating system developed by Digital. Outnumbered, the hackers had no
choice but to comply.
431
"Without hackers to maintain the system, [faculty members] said, `We're
going to have a disaster; we must have commercial software,'" Stallman
would recall a few years later. "They said, `We can expect the company
to maintain it.' It proved that they were utterly wrong, but that's
what they did."45
45. See Richard Stallman (1986).
432
At first, hackers viewed the Twenex system as yet another authoritarian
symbol begging to be subverted. The system's name itself was a protest.
Officially dubbed TOPS-20 by DEC, it was a successor to TOPS-10, a
commercial operating system DEC marketed for the PDP-10. Bolt Beranek
Newman had deveoped an improved version, dubbed Tenex, which TOPS-20
drew upon.46 Stallman, the hacker who coined the Twenex term,
says he came up with the name as a way to avoid using the TOPS-20 name.
"The system was far from tops, so there was no way I was going to call
it that," Stallman recalls. "So I decided to insert a `w' in the Tenex
name and call it Twenex."
46. Multiple sources: see Richard Stallman interview, Gerald Sussman
email, and Jargon File 3.0.0.
433
The machine that ran the Twenex/TOPS-20 system had its own derisive
nickname: Oz. According to one hacker legend, the machine got its
nickname because it required a smaller PDP-11 machine to power its
terminal. One hacker, upon viewing the KL-10-PDP-11 setup for the first
time, likened it to the wizard's bombastic onscreen introduction in the
Wizard of Oz. "I am the great and powerful Oz," the hacker intoned.
"Pay no attention to the PDP-11 behind that console."47
47. See <
434
If hackers laughed when they first encountered the KL-10, their
laughter quickly died when they encountered Twenex. Not only did Twenex
boast built-in security, but the system's software engineers had
designed the tools and applications with the security system in mind.
What once had been a cat-and-mouse game over passwords in the case of
the Laboratory for Computer Science's security system, now became an
out-and-out battle over system management. System administrators argued
that without security, the Oz system was more prone to accidental
crashes. Hackers argued that crashes could be better prevented by
overhauling the source code. Unfortunately, the number of hackers with
the time and inclination to perform this sort of overhaul had dwindled
to the point that the system-administrator argument prevailed.
435
Cadging passwords and deliberately crashing the system in order to
glean evidence from the resulting wreckage, Stallman successfully
foiled the system administrators' attempt to assert control. After one
foiled "coup d'etat," Stallman issued an alert to the entire AI staff.
46
436
"There has been another attempt to seize power," Stallman wrote. "So
far, the aristocratic forces have been defeated." To protect his
identity, Stallman signed the message "Radio Free OZ."
437
The disguise was a thin one at best. By 1982, Stallman's aversion to
passwords and secrecy had become so well known that users outside the
AI Laboratory were using his account as a stepping stone to the
ARPAnet, the research-funded computer network that would serve as a
foundation for today's Internet. One such "tourist" during the early
1980s was Don Hopkins, a California programmer who learned through the
hacking grapevine that all an outsider needed to do to gain access to
MIT's vaunted ITS system was to log in under the initials RMS and enter
the same three-letter monogram when the system requested a password.
438
"I'm eternally grateful that MIT let me and many other people use their
computers for free," says Hopkins. "It meant a lot to many people."
439
This so-called "tourist" policy, which had been openly tolerated by MIT
management during the ITS years,48 fell by the wayside when Oz
became the lab's primary link to the ARPAnet. At first, Stallman
continued his policy of repeating his login ID as a password so outside
users could follow in his footsteps. Over time, however, the Oz's
fragility prompted administrators to bar outsiders who, through sheer
accident or malicious intent, might bring down the system. When those
same administrators eventually demanded that Stallman stop publishing
his password, Stallman, citing personal ethics, refused to do so and
ceased using the Oz system altogether. 46
48. See "MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy."
440
"[When] passwords first appeared at the MIT AI Lab I [decided] to
follow my belief that there should be no passwords," Stallman would
later say. "Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have
security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the
security regime." 46
441
Stallman's refusal to bow before the great and powerful Oz symbolized
the growing tension between hackers and AI Lab management during the
early 1980s. This tension paled in comparison to the conflict that
raged within the hacker community itself. By the time the KL-10
arrived, the hacker community had already divided into two camps. The
first centered around a software company called Symbolics, Inc. The
second centered around Symbolics chief rival, Lisp Machines, Inc.
(LMI). Both companies were in a race to market the Lisp Machine, a
device built to take full advantage of the Lisp programming language.
442
Created by artificial-intelligence research pioneer John McCarthy, a
MIT artificial-intelligence researcher during the late 1950s, Lisp is
an elegant language well-suited for programs charged with heavy-duty
sorting and processing. The language's name is a shortened version of
LISt Processing. Following McCarthy's departure to the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT hackers refined the language
into a local dialect dubbed MACLISP. The "MAC" stood for Project MAC,
the DARPA-funded research project that gave birth to the AI Lab and the
Laboratory for Computer Science. Led by AI Lab arch-hacker Richard
Greenblatt, AI Lab programmers during the 1970s built up an entire
Lisp-based operating system, dubbed the Lisp Machine operating system.
By 1980, the Lisp Machine project had generated two commercial
spin-offs. Symbolics was headed by Russell Noftsker, a former AI Lab
administrator, and Lisp Machines, Inc., was headed by Greenblatt.
443
The Lisp Machine software was hacker-built, meaning it was owned by MIT
but available for anyone to copy as per hacker custom. Such a system
limited the marketing advantage of any company hoping to license the
software from MIT and market it as unique. To secure an advantage, and
to bolster the aspects of the operating system that customers might
consider attractive, the companies recruited various AI Lab hackers and
set them working on various components of the Lisp Machine operating
system outside the auspices of the AI Lab.
444
The most aggressive in this strategy was Symbolics. By the end of 1980,
the company had hired 14 AI Lab staffers as part-time consultants to
develop its version of the Lisp Machine. Apart from Stallman, the rest
signed on to help LMI.49
49. See H. P. Newquist, The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego, and Greed in the
Quest for Machines that Think (Sams Publishing, 1994): 172.
445
At first, Stallman accepted both companies' attempt to commercialize
the Lisp machine, even though it meant more work for him. Both licensed
the Lisp Machine OS source code from MIT, and it was Stallman's job to
update the lab's own Lisp Machine to keep pace with the latest
innovations. Although Symbolics' license with MIT gave Stallman the
right to review, but not copy, Symbolics' source code, Stallman says a
"gentleman's agreement" between Symbolics management and the AI Lab
made it possible to borrow attractive snippets in traditional hacker
fashion.
446
On March 16, 1982, a date Stallman remembers well because it was his
birthday, Symbolics executives decided to end this gentlemen's
agreement. The move was largely strategic. LMI, the primary competition
in the Lisp Machine marketplace, was essentially using a copy of the AI
Lab Lisp Machine. Rather than subsidize the development of a market
rival, Symbolics executives elected to enforce the letter of the
license. If the AI Lab wanted its operating system to stay current with
the Symbolics operating system, the lab would have to switch over to a
Symbolics machine and sever its connection to LMI.
447
As the person responsible for keeping up the lab's Lisp Machine,
Stallman was incensed. Viewing this announcement as an "ultimatum," he
retaliated by disconnecting Symbolics' microwave communications link to
the laboratory. He then vowed never to work on a Symbolics machine and
pledged his immediate allegiance to LMI. "The way I saw it, the AI Lab
was a neutral country, like Belgium in World War I," Stallman says. "If
Germany invades Belgium, Belgium declares war on Germany and sides with
Britain and France."
448
The circumstances of the so-called "Symbolics War" of 1982-1983 depend
heavily on the source doing the telling. When Symbolics executives
noticed that their latest features were still appearing in the AI Lab
Lisp Machine and, by extension, the LMI Lisp machine, they installed a
"spy" program on Stallman's computer terminal. Stallman says he was
rewriting the features from scratch, taking advantage of the license's
review clause but also taking pains to make the source code as
different as possible. Symbolics executives argued otherwise and took
their case to MIT administration. According to 1994 book, The Brain
Makers: Genius, Ego, and Greed, and the Quest for Machines That Think,
written by Harvey Newquist, the administration responded with a warning
to Stallman to "stay away" from the Lisp Machine project.50
According to Stallman, MIT administrators backed Stallman up. "I was
never threatened," he says. "I did make changes in my practices,
though. Just to be ultra safe, I no longer read their source code. I
used only the documentation and wrote the code from that."
50. Ibid.: 196.
449
Whatever the outcome, the bickering solidified Stallman's resolve. With
no source code to review, Stallman filled in the software gaps
according to his own tastes and enlisted members of the AI Lab to
provide a continuous stream of bug reports. He also made sure LMI
programmers had direct access to the changes. "I was going to punish
Symbolics if it was the last thing I did," Stallman says.
450
Such statements are revealing. Not only do they shed light on
Stallman's nonpacifist nature, they also reflect the intense level of
emotion triggered by the conflict. According to another
Newquist-related story, Stallman became so irate at one point that he
issued an email threatening to "wrap myself in dynamite and walk into
Symbolics' offices."51 Although Stallman would deny any memory
of the email and still describes its existence as a "vicious rumor," he
acknowledges that such thoughts did enter his head. "I definitely did
have fantasies of killing myself and destroying their building in the
process," Stallman says. "I thought my life was over." 48
51. Ibid. Newquist, who says this anecdote was confirmed by several
Symbolics executives, writes, "The message caused a brief flurry of
excitement and speculation on the part of Symbolics' employees, but
ultimately, no one took Stallman's outburst that seriously."
451
The level of despair owed much to what Stallman viewed as the
"destruction" of his "home"-i.e., the demise of the AI Lab's close-knit
hacker subculture. In a later email interview with Levy, Stallman would
liken himself to the historical figure Ishi, the last surviving member
of the Yahi, a Pacific Northwest tribe wiped out during the Indian wars
of the 1860s and 1870s. The analogy casts Stallman's survival in epic,
almost mythical, terms. In reality, however, it glosses over the
tension between Stallman and his fellow AI Lab hackers prior to the
Symbolics-LMI schism. Instead of seeing Symbolics as an exterminating
force, many of Stallman's colleagues saw it as a belated bid for
relevance. In commercializing the Lisp Machine, the company pushed
hacker principles of engineer-driven software design out of the
ivory-tower confines of the AI Lab and into the corporate marketplace
where manager-driven design principles held sway. Rather than viewing
Stallman as a holdout, many hackers saw him as a troubling anachronism.
452
Stallman does not dispute this alternate view of historical events. In
fact, he says it was yet another reason for the hostility triggered by
the Symbolics "ultimatum." Even before Symbolics hired away most of the
AI Lab's hacker staff, Stallman says many of the hackers who later
joined Symbolics were shunning him. "I was no longer getting invited to
go to Chinatown," Stallman recalls. "The custom started by Greenblatt
was that if you went out to dinner, you went around or sent a message
asking anybody at the lab if they also wanted to go. Sometime around
1980-1981, I stopped getting asked. They were not only not inviting me,
but one person later confessed that he had been pressured to lie to me
to keep their going away to dinner without me a secret."
453
Although Stallman felt anger toward the hackers who orchestrated this
petty form of ostracism, the Symbolics controversy dredged up a new
kind of anger, the anger of a person about to lose his home. When
Symbolics stopped sending over its source-code changes, Stallman
responded by holing up in his MIT offices and rewriting each new
software feature and tool from scratch. Frustrating as it may have
been, it guaranteed that future Lisp Machine users had unfettered
access to the same features as Symbolics users.
454
It also guaranteed Stallman's legendary status within the hacker
community. Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability
to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics programmers-a team
that included more than a few legendary hackers itself-still stands has
one of the major human accomplishments of the Information Age, or of
any age for that matter. Dubbing it a "master hack" and Stallman
himself a "virtual John Henry of computer code," author Steven Levy
notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals had no choice but to
pay their idealistic former comrade grudging respect. Levy quotes Bill
Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the
company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over Stallman's output
during this period:
455
I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad
(probably not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and I would
still say, "But wait a minute-Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue
with all night over there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone
could do this alone!"52
52. See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 426.
456
For Stallman, the months spent playing catch up with Symbolics evoke a
mixture of pride and profound sadness. As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal
whose father had served in World War II, Stallman is no pacifist. In
many ways, the Symbolics war offered the rite of passage toward which
Stallman had been careening ever since joining the AI Lab staff a
decade before. At the same time, however, it coincided with the
traumatic destruction of the AI Lab hacker culture that had nurtured
Stallman since his teenage years. One day, while taking a break from
writing code, Stallman experienced a traumatic moment passing through
the lab's equipment room. There, Stallman encountered the hulking,
unused frame of the PDP-10 machine. Startled by the dormant lights,
lights that once actively blinked out a silent code indicating the
status of the internal program, Stallman says the emotional impact was
not unlike coming across a beloved family member's well-preserved
corpse.
457
"I started crying right there in the equipment room," he says. "Seeing
the machine there, dead, with nobody left to fix it, it all drove home
how completely my community had been destroyed."
458
Stallman would have little opportunity to mourn. The Lisp Machine,
despite all the furor it invoked and all the labor that had gone into
making it, was merely a sideshow to the large battles in the technology
marketplace. The relentless pace of computer miniaturization was
bringing in newer, more powerful microprocessors that would soon
incorporate the machine's hardware and software capabilities like a
modern metropolis swallowing up an ancient desert village.
459
Riding atop this microprocessor wave were hundreds-thousands-of
commercial software programs, each protected by a patchwork of user
licenses and nondisclosure agreements that made it impossible for
hackers to review or share source code. The licenses were crude and
ill-fitting, but by 1983 they had become strong enough to satisfy the
courts and scare away would-be interlopers. Software, once a form of
garnish most hardware companies gave away to make their expensive
computer systems more flavorful, was quickly becoming the main dish. In
their increasing hunger for new games and features, users were putting
aside the traditional demand to review the recipe after every meal.
460
Nowhere was this state of affairs more evident than in the realm of
personal computer systems. Companies such as Apple Computer and
Commodore were minting fresh millionaires selling machines with
built-in operating systems. Unaware of the hacker culture and its
distaste for binary-only software, many of these users saw little need
to protest when these companies failed to attach the accompanying
source-code files. A few anarchic adherents of the hacker ethic helped
propel that ethic into this new marketplace, but for the most part, the
marketplace rewarded the programmers speedy enough to write new
programs and savvy enough to copyright them as legally protected works.
461
One of the most notorious of these programmers was Bill Gates, a
Harvard dropout two years Stallman's junior. Although Stallman didn't
know it at the time, seven years before sending out his message to the
net.unix-wizards newsgroup, Gates, a budding entrepreneur and general
partner with the Albuquerque-based software firm Micro-Soft, later
spelled as Microsoft, had sent out his own open letter to the
software-developer community. Written in response to the PC users
copying Micro-Soft's software programs, Gates' " Open Letter to
Hobbyists" had excoriated the notion of communal software development.
462
"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" asked Gates.
"What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all
bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for
free?"53
53. See Bill Gates, "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" (February 3, 1976).
463
Although few hackers at the AI Lab saw the missive, Gates' 1976 letter
nevertheless represented the changing attitude toward software both
among commercial software companies and commercial software developers.
Why treat software as a zero-cost commodity when the market said
otherwise? As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, selling software became
more than a way to recoup costs; it became a political statement. At a
time when the Reagan Administration was rushing to dismantle many of
the federal regulations and spending programs that had been built up
during the half century following the Great Depression, more than a few
software programmers saw the hacker ethic as anticompetitive and, by
extension, un-American. At best, it was a throwback to the
anticorporate attitudes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like a Wall
Street banker discovering an old tie-dyed shirt hiding between
French-cuffed shirts and double-breasted suits, many computer
programmers treated the hacker ethic as an embarrassing reminder of an
idealistic age.
464
For a man who had spent the entire 1960s as an embarrassing throwback
to the 1950s, Stallman didn't mind living out of step with his peers.
As a programmer used to working with the best machines and the best
software, however, Stallman faced what he could only describe as a
"stark moral choice": either get over his ethical objection for "
proprietary" software-the term Stallman and his fellow hackers used to
describe any program that carried private copyright or end-user license
that restricted copying and modification-or dedicate his life to
building an alternate, nonproprietary system of software programs.
Given his recent months-long ordeal with Symbolics, Stallman felt more
comfortable with the latter option. "I suppose I could have stopped
working on computers altogether," Stallman says. "I had no special
skills, but I'm sure I could have become a waiter. Not at a fancy
restaurant, probably, but I could've been a waiter somewhere."
465
Being a waiter-i.e., dropping out of programming altogether-would have
meant completely giving up an activity, computer programming, that had
given him so much pleasure. Looking back on his life since moving to
Cambridge, Stallman finds it easy to identify lengthy periods when
software programming provided the only pleasure. Rather than drop out,
Stallman decided to stick it out.
466
An atheist, Stallman rejects notions such as fate, dharma, or a divine
calling in life. Nevertheless, he does feel that the decision to shun
proprietary software and build an operating system to help others do
the same was a natural one. After all, it was Stallman's own personal
combination of stubbornness, foresight, and coding virtuosity that led
him to consider a fork in the road most others didn't know existed. In
describing the decision in a chapter for the 1999 book, Open Sources,
Stallman cites the spirit encapsulated in the words of the Jewish sage
Hillel:
467
468
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
Speaking to audiences, Stallman avoids the religious route and
expresses the decision in pragmatic terms. "I asked myself: what could
I, an operating-system developer, do to improve the situation? It
wasn't until I examined the question for a while that I realized an
operating-system developer was exactly what was needed to solve the
problem."
469
Once he reached that decision, Stallman says, everything else "fell
into place." He would abstain from using software programs that forced
him to compromise his ethical beliefs, while at the same time devoting
his life to the creation of software that would make it easier for
others to follow the same path. Pledging to build a free software
operating system "or die trying-of old age, of course," Stallman quips,
he resigned from the MIT staff in January, 1984, to build GNU.
470
The resignation distanced Stallman's work from the legal auspices of
MIT. Still, Stallman had enough friends and allies within the AI Lab to
retain rent-free access to his MIT office. He also had the ability to
secure outside consulting gigs to underwrite the early stages of the
GNU Project. In resigning from MIT, however, Stallman negated any
debate about conflict of interest or Institute ownership of the
software. The man whose early adulthood fear of social isolation had
driven him deeper and deeper into the AI Lab's embrace was now building
a legal firewall between himself and that environment.
471
For the first few months, Stallman operated in isolation from the Unix
community as well. Although his announcement to the net.unix-wizards
group had attracted sympathetic responses, few volunteers signed on to
join the crusade in its early stages.
472
"The community reaction was pretty much uniform," recalls Rich Morin,
leader of a Unix user group at the time. "People said, `Oh, that's a
great idea. Show us your code. Show us it can be done.'"
473
In true hacker fashion, Stallman began looking for existing programs
and tools that could be converted into GNU programs and tools. One of
the first was a compiler named VUCK, which converted programs written
in the popular C programming language into machine-readable code.
Translated from the Dutch, the program's acronym stood for the Free
University Compiler Kit. Optimistic, Stallman asked the program's
author if the program was free. When the author informed him that the
words "Free University" were a reference to the Vrije Universiteit in
Amsterdam, Stallman was chagrined.
474
"He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the
compiler was not," recalls Stallman. "I therefore decided that my first
program for the GNU Project would be a multi-language, multi-platform
compiler." 46
475
Eventually Stallman found a Pastel language compiler written by
programmers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. According to Stallman's
knowledge at the time, the compiler was free to copy and modify.
Unfortunately, the program possessed a sizable design flaw: it saved
each program into core memory, tying up precious space for other
software activities. On mainframe systems this design flaw had been
forgivable. On Unix systems it was a crippling barrier, since the
machines that ran Unix were too small to handle the large files
generated. Stallman made substantial progress at first, building a
C-compatible frontend to the compiler. By summer, however, he had come
to the conclusion that he would have to build a totally new compiler
from scratch.
476
In September of 1984, Stallman shelved compiler development for the
near term and began searching for lower-lying fruit. He began
development of a GNU version of Emacs, the program he himself had been
supervising for a decade. The decision was strategic. Within the Unix
community, the two native editor programs were vi, written by Sun
Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, and ed, written by Bell Labs scientist
(and Unix cocreator) Ken Thompson. Both were useful and popular, but
neither offered the endlessly expandable nature of Emacs. In rewriting
Emacs for the Unix audience, Stallman stood a better chance of showing
off his skills. It also stood to reason that Emacs users might be more
attuned to the Stallman mentality.
477
Looking back, Stallman says he didn't view the decision in strategic
terms. "I wanted an Emacs, and I had a good opportunity to develop
one."
478
Once again, the notion of reinventing the wheel grated on Stallman's
efficient hacker sensibilities. In writing a Unix version of Emacs,
Stallman was soon following the footsteps of Carnegie Mellon graduate
student James Gosling, author of a C-based version dubbed Gosling Emacs
or GOSMACS. Gosling's version of Emacs included an interpreter that
exploited a simplified offshoot of the Lisp language called MOCKLISP.
Determined to build GNU Emacs on a similar Lisp foundation, Stallman
borrowed copiously from Gosling's innovations. Although Gosling had put
GOSMACS under copyright and had sold the rights to UniPress, a
privately held software company, Stallman cited the assurances of a
fellow developer who had participated in the early MOCKLISP
interpreter. According to the developer, Gosling, while a Ph.D. student
at Carnegie Mellon, had assured early collaborators that their work
would remain accessible. When UniPress caught wind of Stallman's
project, however, the company threatened to enforce the copyright. Once
again, Stallman faced the prospect of building from the ground up.
479
In the course of reverse-engineering Gosling's interpreter, Stallman
would create a fully functional Lisp interpreter, rendering the need
for Gosling's original interpreter moot. Nevertheless, the notion of
developers selling off software rights-indeed, the very notion of
developers having software rights to sell in the first place-rankled
Stallman. In a 1986 speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute,
Stallman cited the UniPress incident as yet another example of the
dangers associated with proprietary software.
480
"Sometimes I think that perhaps one of the best things I could do with
my life is find a gigantic pile of proprietary software that was a
trade secret, and start handing out copies on a street corner so it
wouldn't be a trade secret any more," said Stallman. "Perhaps that
would be a much more efficient way for me to give people new free
software than actually writing it myself; but everyone is too cowardly
to even take it."3
481
Despite the stress it generated, the dispute over Gosling's innovations
would assist both Stallman and the free software movement in the long
term. It would force Stallman to address the weaknesses of the Emacs
Commune and the informal trust system that had allowed problematic
offshoots to emerge. It would also force Stallman to sharpen the free
software movement's political objectives. Following the release of GNU
Emacs in 1985, Stallman issued " The GNU Manifesto," an expansion of
the original announcement posted in September, 1983. Stallman included
within the document a lengthy section devoted to the many arguments
used by commercial and academic programmers to justify the
proliferation of proprietary software programs. One argument, "Don't
programmers deserve a reward for their creativity," earned a response
encapsulating Stallman's anger over the recent Gosling Emacs episode:
482
"If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution," Stallman
wrote. "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far
[sic] as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to
be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they
deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these
programs."54
54. See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Manifesto" (1985).
483
With the release of GNU Emacs, the GNU Project finally had code to
show. It also had the burdens of any software-based enterprise. As more
and more Unix developers began playing with the software, money, gifts,
and requests for tapes began to pour in. To address the business side
of the GNU Project, Stallman drafted a few of his colleagues and formed
the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a nonprofit organization dedicated
to speeding the GNU Project towards its goal. With Stallman as
president and various hacker allies as board members, the FSF helped
provide a corporate face for the GNU Project.
484
Robert Chassell, a programmer then working at Lisp Machines, Inc.,
became one of five charter board members at the Free Software
Foundation following a dinner conversation with Stallman. Chassell also
served as the organization's treasurer, a role that started small but
quickly grew.
485
"I think in '85 our total expenses and revenue were something in the
order of $23,000, give or take," Chassell recalls. "Richard had his
office, and we borrowed space. I put all the stuff, especially the
tapes, under my desk. It wasn't until sometime later LMI loaned us some
space where we could store tapes and things of that sort."
486
In addition to providing a face, the Free Software Foundation provided
a center of gravity for other disenchanted programmers. The Unix market
that had seemed so collegial even at the time of Stallman's initial GNU
announcement was becoming increasingly competitive. In an attempt to
tighten their hold on customers, companies were starting to close off
access to Unix source code, a trend that only speeded the number of
inquiries into ongoing GNU software projects. The Unix wizards who once
regarded Stallman as a noisy kook were now beginning to see him as a
software Cassandra.
487
"A lot of people don't realize, until they've had it happen to them,
how frustrating it can be to spend a few years working on a software
program only to have it taken away," says Chassell, summarizing the
feelings and opinions of the correspondents writing in to the FSF
during the early years. "After that happens a couple of times, you
start to say to yourself, `Hey, wait a minute.'"
488
For Chassell, the decision to participate in the Free Software
Foundation came down to his own personal feelings of loss. Prior to
LMI, Chassell had been working for hire, writing an introductory book
on Unix for Cadmus, Inc., a Cambridge-area software company. When
Cadmus folded, taking the rights to the book down with it, Chassell
says he attempted to buy the rights back with no success.
489
"As far as I know, that book is still sitting on shelf somewhere,
unusable, uncopyable, just taken out of the system," Chassell says. "It
was quite a good introduction if I may say so myself. It would have
taken maybe three or four months to convert [the book] into a perfectly
usable introduction to GNU/Linux today. The whole experience, aside
from what I have in my memory, was lost."
490
Forced to watch his work sink into the mire while his erstwhile
employer struggled through bankruptcy, Chassell says he felt a hint of
the anger that drove Stallman to fits of apoplexy. "The main clarity,
for me, was the sense that if you want to have a decent life, you don't
want to have bits of it closed off," Chassell says. "This whole idea of
having the freedom to go in and to fix something and modify it,
whatever it may be, it really makes a difference. It makes one think
happily that after you've lived a few years that what you've done is
worthwhile. Because otherwise it just gets taken away and thrown out or
abandoned or, at the very least, you no longer have any relation to it.
It's like losing a bit of your life."
491
Chapter 8 - St. Ignucius
492
The Maui High Performance Computing Center is located in a single-story
building in the dusty red hills just above the town of Kihei. Framed by
million-dollar views and the multimillion dollar real estate of the
Silversword Golf Course, the center seems like the ultimate scientific
boondoggle. Far from the boxy, sterile confines of Tech Square or even
the sprawling research metropolises of Argonne, Illinois and Los
Alamos, New Mexico, the MHPCC seems like the kind of place where
scientists spend more time on their tans than their post-doctoral
research projects.
493
The image is only half true. Although researchers at the MHPCC do take
advantage of the local recreational opportunities, they also take their
work seriously. According to Top500.org, a web site that tracks the
most powerful supercomputers in the world, the IBM SP Power3
supercomputer housed within the MHPCC clocks in at 837 billion
floating-point operations per second, making it one of 25 most powerful
computers in the world. Co-owned and operated by the University of
Hawaii and the U.S. Air Force, the machine divides its computer cycles
between the number crunching tasks associated with military logistics
and high-temperature physics research.
494
Simply put, the MHPCC is a unique place, a place where the brainy
culture of science and engineering and the laid-back culture of the
Hawaiian islands coexist in peaceful equilibrium. A slogan on the lab's
2000 web site sums it up: "Computing in paradise."
495
It's not exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find Richard
Stallman, a man who, when taking in the beautiful view of the nearby
Maui Channel through the picture windows of a staffer's office, mutters
a terse critique: "Too much sun." Still, as an emissary from one
computing paradise to another, Stallman has a message to deliver, even
if it means subjecting his pale hacker skin to the hazards of tropical
exposure.
496
The conference room is already full by the time I arrive to catch
Stallman's speech. The gender breakdown is a little better than at the
New York speech, 85% male, 15% female, but not by much. About half of
the audience members wear khaki pants and logo-encrusted golf shirts.
The other half seems to have gone native. Dressed in the gaudy
flower-print shirts so popular in this corner of the world, their faces
are a deep shade of ochre. The only residual indication of geek status
are the gadgets: Nokia cell phones, Palm Pilots, and Sony VAIO laptops.
497
Needless to say, Stallman, who stands in front of the room dressed in
plain blue T-shirt, brown polyester slacks, and white socks, sticks out
like a sore thumb. The fluorescent lights of the conference room help
bring out the unhealthy color of his sun-starved skin. His beard and
hair are enough to trigger beads of sweat on even the coolest Hawaiian
neck. Short of having the words "mainlander" tattooed on his forehead,
Stallman couldn't look more alien if he tried.
498
As Stallman putters around the front of the room, a few audience
members wearing T-shirts with the logo of the Maui FreeBSD Users Group
(MFUG) race to set up camera and audio equipment. FreeBSD, a free
software offshoot of the Berkeley Software Distribution, the venerable
1970s academic version of Unix, is technically a competitor to the
GNU/Linux operating system. Still, in the hacking world, Stallman
speeches are documented with a fervor reminiscent of the Grateful Dead
and its legendary army of amateur archivists. As the local free
software heads, it's up to the MFUG members to make sure fellow
programmers in Hamburg, Mumbai, and Novosibirsk don't miss out on the
latest pearls of RMS wisdom.
499
The analogy to the Grateful Dead is apt. Often, when describing the
business opportunities inherent within the free software model,
Stallman has held up the Grateful Dead as an example. In refusing to
restrict fans' ability to record live concerts, the Grateful Dead
became more than a rock group. They became the center of a tribal
community dedicated to Grateful Dead music. Over time, that tribal
community became so large and so devoted that the band shunned record
contracts and supported itself solely through musical tours and live
appearances. In 1994, the band's last year as a touring act, the
Grateful Dead drew $52 million in gate receipts alone.55
55. See "Grateful Dead Time Capsule: 1985-1995 North American Tour
Grosses."
500
While few software companies have been able to match that success, the
tribal aspect of the free software community is one reason many in the
latter half of the 1990s started to accept the notion that publishing
software source code might be a good thing. Hoping to build their own
loyal followings, companies such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett
Packard have come to accept the letter, if not the spirit, of the
Stallman free software message. Describing the GPL as the
information-technology industry's "Magna Carta," ZDNet software
columnist Evan Leibovitch sees the growing affection for all things GNU
as more than just a trend. "This societal shift is letting users take
back control of their futures," Leibovitch writes. "Just as the Magna
Carta gave rights to British subjects, the GPL enforces consumer rights
and freedoms on behalf of the users of computer software."56
56. See Evan Leibovitch, "Who's Afraid of Big Bad Wolves," ZDNet Tech
Update (December 15, 2000).
501
The tribal aspect of the free software community also helps explain why
40-odd programmers, who might otherwise be working on physics projects
or surfing the Web for windsurfing buoy reports, have packed into a
conference room to hear Stallman speak.
502
Unlike the New York speech, Stallman gets no introduction. He also
offers no self-introduction. When the FreeBSD people finally get their
equipment up and running, Stallman simply steps forward, starts
speaking, and steamrolls over every other voice in the room.
503
"Most of the time when people consider the question of what rules
society should have for using software, the people considering it are
from software companies, and they consider the question from a
self-serving perspective," says Stallman, opening his speech. "What
rules can we impose on everybody else so they have to pay us lots of
money? I had the good fortune in the 1970s to be part of a community of
programmers who shared software. And because of this I always like to
look at the same issue from a different direction to ask: what kind of
rules make possible a good society that is good for the people who are
in it? And therefore I reach completely different answers."
504
Once again, Stallman quickly segues into the parable of the Xerox laser
printer, taking a moment to deliver the same dramatic finger-pointing
gestures to the crowd. He also devotes a minute or two to the GNU/Linux
name.
505
"Some people say to me, `Why make such a fuss about getting credit for
this system? After all, the important thing is the job is done, not
whether you get recognition for it.' Well, this would be wise advice if
it were true. But the job wasn't to build an operating system; the job
is to spread freedom to the users of computers. And to do that we have
to make it possible to do everything with computers in
freedom."57
57. For narrative purposes, I have hesitated to go in-depth when
describing Stallman's full definition of software "freedom." The GNU
Project web site lists four fundamental components:
506
Adds Stallman, "There's a lot more work to do."
507
For some in the audience, this is old material. For others, it's a
little arcane. When a member of the golf-shirt contingent starts dozing
off, Stallman stops the speech and asks somebody to wake the person up.
508
"Somebody once said my voice was so soothing, he asked if I was some
kind of healer," says Stallman, drawing a quick laugh from the crowd.
"I guess that probably means I can help you drift gently into a
blissful, relaxing sleep. And some of you might need that. I guess I
shouldn't object if you do. If you need to sleep, by all means do."
509
The speech ends with a brief discussion of software patents, a growing
issue of concern both within the software industry and within the free
software community. Like Napster, software patents reflect the awkward
nature of applying laws and concepts written for the physical world to
the frictionless universe of information technology. The difference
between protecting a program under copyright and protecting a program
under software patents is subtle but significant. In the case of
copyright, a software creator can restrict duplication of the source
code but not duplication of the idea or functionality that the source
code addresses. In other words, if a developer chooses not to use a
software program under the original developer's terms, that second
developer is still free to reverse-engineer the program-i.e., duplicate
the software program's functionality by rewriting the source code from
scratch. Such duplication of ideas is common within the commercial
software industry, where companies often isolate reverse-engineering
teams to head off accusations of corporate espionage or developer
hanky-panky. In the jargon of modern software development, companies
refer to this technique as "clean room" engineering.
510
Software patents work differently. According to the U.S. Patent Office,
companies and individuals may secure patents for innovative algorithms
provided they submit their claims to a public review. In theory, this
allows the patent-holder to trade off disclosure of their invention for
a limited monopoly of a minimum of 20 years after the patent filing. In
practice, the disclosure is of limited value, since the operation of
the program is often self-evident. Unlike copyright, a patent gives its
holder the ability to head off the independent development of software
programs with the same or similar functionality.
511
In the software industry, where 20 years can cover the entire life
cycle of a marketplace, patents take on a strategic weight. Where
companies such as Microsoft and Apple once battled over copyright and
the "look and feel" of various technologies, today's Internet companies
use patents as a way to stake out individual applications and business
models, the most notorious example being Amazon.com's 2000 attempt to
patent the company's "one-click" online shopping process. For most
companies, however, software patents have become a defensive tool, with
cross-licensing deals balancing one set of corporate patents against
another in a tense form of corporate detente. Still, in a few notable
cases of computer encryption and graphic imaging algorithms, software
vendors have successfully stifled rival technologies.
512
For Stallman, the software-patent issue dramatizes the need for eternal
hacker vigilance. It also underlines the importance of stressing the
political benefits of free software programs over the competitive
benefits. Pointing to software patents' ability to create sheltered
regions in the marketplace, Stallman says competitive performance and
price, two areas where free software operating systems such as
GNU/Linux and FreeBSD already hold a distinct advantage over their
proprietary counterparts, are red herrings compared to the large issues
of user and developer freedom.
513
"It's not because we don't have the talent to make better software,"
says Stallman. "It's because we don't have the right. Somebody has
prohibited us from serving the public. So what's going to happen when
users encounter these gaps in free software? Well, if they have been
persuaded by the open source movement that these freedoms are good
because they lead to more-powerful reliable software, they're likely to
say, `You didn't deliver what you promised. This software's not more
powerful. It's missing this feature. You lied to me.' But if they have
come to agree with the free software movement, that the freedom is
important in itself, then they will say, `How dare those people stop me
from having this feature and my freedom too.' And with that kind of
response, we may survive the hits that we're going to take as these
patents explode."
514
Such comments involve a hefty dose of spin, of course. Most open source
advocates are equally, if not more, vociferous as Stallman when it
comes to opposing software patents. Still, the underlying logic of
Stallman's argument-that open source advocates emphasize the
utilitarian advantages of free software over the political
advantages-remains uncontested. Rather than stress the political
significance of free software programs, open source advocates have
chosen to stress the engineering integrity of the hacker development
model. Citing the power of peer review, the open source argument paints
programs such as GNU/Linux or FreeBSD as better built, better inspected
and, by extension, more trushworthy to the average user.
515
That's not to say the term "open source" doesn't have its political
implications. For open source advocates, the term open source serves
two purposes. First, it eliminates the confusion associated with the
word "free," a word many businesses interpret as meaning "zero cost."
Second, it allows companies to examine the free software phenomenon on
a technological, rather than ethical, basis. Eric Raymond, cofounder of
the Open Source Initiative and one of the leading hackers to endorse
the term, effectively summed up the frustration of following Stallman
down the political path in a 1999 essay, titled "Shut Up and Show Them
the Code":
516
RMS's rhetoric is very seductive to the kind of people we are. We
hackers are thinkers and idealists who readily resonate with appeals to
"principle" and "freedom" and "rights." Even when we disagree with bits
of his program, we want RMS's rhetorical style to work; we think it
ought to work; we tend to be puzzled and disbelieving when it fails on
the 95% of people who aren't wired like we are.58
58. See Eric Raymond, "Shut Up and Show Them the Code," online essay,
(June 28, 1999).
517
Included among that 95%, Raymond writes, are the bulk of business
managers, investors, and nonhacker computer users who, through sheer
weight of numbers, tend to decide the overall direction of the
commercial software marketplace. Without a way to win these people
over, Raymond argues, programmers are doomed to pursue their ideology
on the periphery of society:
518
When RMS insists that we talk about "computer users' rights," he's
issuing a dangerously attractive invitation to us to repeat old
failures. It's one we should reject-not because his principles are
wrong, but because that kind of language, applied to software, simply
does not persuade anybody but us. In fact, it confuses and repels most
people outside our culture. 60
519
Watching Stallman deliver his political message in person, it is hard
to see anything confusing or repellent. Stallman's appearance may seem
off-putting, but his message is logical. When an audience member asks
if, in shunning proprietary software, free software proponents lose the
ability to keep up with the latest technological advancements, Stallman
answers the question in terms of his own personal beliefs. "I think
that freedom is more important than mere technical advance," he says.
"I would always choose a less advanced free program rather than a more
advanced nonfree program, because I won't give up my freedom for
something like that. My rule is, if I can't share it with you, I won't
take it."
520
Such answers, however, reinforce the quasi-religious nature of the
Stallman message. Like a Jew keeping kosher or a Mormon refusing to
drink alcohol, Stallman paints his decision to use free software in the
place of proprietary in the color of tradition and personal belief. As
software evangelists go, Stallman avoids forcing those beliefs down
listeners' throats. Then again, a listener rarely leaves a Stallman
speech not knowing where the true path to software righteousness lies.
521
As if to drive home this message, Stallman punctuates his speech with
an unusual ritual. Pulling a black robe out of a plastic grocery bag,
Stallman puts it on. Out of a second bag, he pulls a reflective yellow
computer disk and places it on his head. The crowd lets out a startled
laugh.
522
"I am St. Ignucius of the Church of Emacs," says Stallman, raising his
right hand in mock-blessing. "I bless your computer, my child."
523
524
The laughter turns into full-blown applause after a few seconds. As
audience members clap, the computer disk on Stallman's head catches the
glare of an overhead light, eliciting a perfect halo effect. In the
blink of an eye, Stallman goes from awkward haole to Russian religious
icon.
525
"Emacs was initially a text editor," says Stallman, explaining the
getup. "Eventually it became a way of life for many and a religion for
some. We call this religion the Church of Emacs."
526
The skit is a lighthearted moment of self-pardoy, a humorous return-jab
at the many people who might see Stallman's form of software asceticism
as religious fanaticism in disguise. It is also the sound of the other
shoe dropping-loudly. It's as if, in donning his robe and halo,
Stallman is finally letting listeners of the hook, saying, "It's OK to
laugh. I know I'm weird."
527
Discussing the St. Ignucius persona afterward, Stallman says he first
came up with it in 1996, long after the creation of Emacs but well
before the emergence of the "open source" term and the struggle for
hacker-community leadership that precipitated it. At the time, Stallman
says, he wanted a way to "poke fun at himself," to remind listeners
that, though stubborn, Stallman was not the fanatic some made him out
to be. It was only later, Stallman adds, that others seized the persona
as a convenient way to play up his reputation as software ideologue, as
Eric Raymond did in an 1999 interview with the linux.com web site:
528
When I say RMS calibrates what he does, I'm not belittling or accusing
him of insincerity. I'm saying that like all good communicators he's
got a theatrical streak. Sometimes it's conscious-have you ever seen
him in his St. Ignucius drag, blessing software with a disk platter on
his head? Mostly it's unconscious; he's just learned the degree of
irritating stimulus that works, that holds attention without (usually)
freaking people out.59
59. See "Guest Interview: Eric S. Raymond," Linux.com (May 18, 1999).
529
Stallman takes issue with the Raymond analysis. "It's simply my way of
making fun of myself," he says. "The fact that others see it as
anything more than that is a reflection of their agenda, not mine."
530
That said, Stallman does admit to being a ham. "Are you kidding?" he
says at one point. "I love being the center of attention." To
facilitate that process, Stallman says he once enrolled in
Toastmasters, an organization that helps members bolster their
public-speaking skills and one Stallman recommends highly to others. He
possesses a stage presence that would be the envy of most theatrical
performers and feels a link to vaudevillians of years past. A few days
after the Maui High Performance Computing Center speech, I allude to
the 1999 LinuxWorld performace and ask Stallman if he has a Groucho
Marx complex-i.e., the unwillingness to belong to any club that would
have him as a member. Stallman's response is immediate: "No, but I
admire Groucho Marx in a lot of ways and certainly have been in some
things I say inspired by him. But then I've also been inspired in some
ways by Harpo."
531
The Groucho Marx influence is certainly evident in Stallman's lifelong
fondness for punning. Then again, punning and wordplay are common
hacker traits. Perhaps the most Groucho-like aspect of Stallman's
personality, however, is the deadpan manner in which the puns are
delivered. Most come so stealthily-without even the hint of a raised
eyebrow or upturned smile-you almost have to wonder if Stallman's
laughing at his audience more than the audience is laughing at him.
532
Watching members of the Maui High Performance Computer Center laugh at
the St. Ignucius parody, such concerns evaporate. While not exactly a
standup act, Stallman certainly possesses the chops to keep a roomful
of engineers in stitches. "To be a saint in the Church of Emacs does
not require celibacy, but it does require making a commitment to living
a life of moral purity," he tells the Maui audience. "You must exorcise
the evil proprietary operating system from all your computer and then
install a wholly [holy] free operating system. And then you must
install only free software on top of that. If you make this commitment
and live by it, then you too will be a saint in the Church of Emacs,
and you too may have a halo."
533
The St. Ignucius skit ends with a brief inside joke. On most Unix
systems and Unix-related offshoots, the primary competitor program to
Emacs is vi, a text-editing program developed by former UC Berkeley
student and current Sun Microsystems chief scientist, Bill Joy. Before
doffing his "halo," Stallman pokes fun at the rival program. "People
sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi," he
says. "Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So
happy hacking."
534
After a brief question-and-answer session, audience members gather
around Stallman. A few ask for autographs. "I'll sign this," says
Stallman, holding up one woman's print out of the GNU General Public
License, "but only if you promise me to use the term GNU/Linux instead
of Linux and tell all your friends to do likewise."
535
The comment merely confirms a private observation. Unlike other stage
performers and political figures, Stallman has no "off" mode. Aside
from the St. Ignucius character, the ideologue you see onstage is the
ideologue you meet backstage. Later that evening, during a dinner
conversation in which a programmer mentions his affinity for "open
source" programs, Stallman, between bites, upbraids his tablemate: "You
mean free software. That's the proper way to refer to it."
536
During the question-and-answer session, Stallman admits to playing the
pedagogue at times. "There are many people who say, `Well, first let's
invite people to join the community, and then let's teach them about
freedom.' And that could be a reasonable strategy, but what we have is
almost everybody's inviting people to join the community, and hardly
anybody's teaching them about freedom once they come in."
537
The result, Stallman says, is something akin to a third-world city.
People move in, hoping to strike it rich or at the very least to take
part in a vibrant, open culture, and yet those who hold the true power
keep evolving new tricks and strategies-i.e., software patents-to keep
the masses out. "You have millions of people moving in and building
shantytowns, but nobody's working on step two: getting them out of
those shantytowns. If you think talking about software freedom is a
good strategy, please join in doing step two. There are plenty working
on step one. We need more people working on step two."
538
Working on "step two" means driving home the issue that freedom, not
acceptance, is the root issue of the free software movement. Those who
hope to reform the proprietary software industry from the inside are on
a fool's errand. "Change from the inside is risky," Stallman stays.
"Unless you're working at the level of a Gorbachev, you're going to be
neutralized."
539
Hands pop up. Stallman points to a member of the golf shirt-wearing
contingent. "Without patents, how would you suggest dealing with
commercial espionage?"
540
"Well, those two questions have nothing to do with each other, really,"
says Stallman.
541
"But I mean if someone wants to steal another company's piece of
software."
542
Stallman's recoils as if hit by a poisonous spray. "Wait a second,"
Stallman says. "Steal? I'm sorry, there's so much prejudice in that
statement that the only thing I can say is that I reject that
prejudice. Companies that develop nonfree software and other things
keep lots and lots of trade secrets, and so that's not really likely to
change. In the old days-even in the 1980s-for the most part programmers
were not aware that there were even software patents and were paying no
attention to them. What happened was that people published the
interesting ideas, and if they were not in the free software movement,
they kept secret the little details. And now they patent those broad
ideas and keep secret the little details. So as far as what you're
describing, patents really make no difference to it one way or
another."
543
"But if it doesn't affect their publication," a new audience member
jumps in, his voice trailing off almost as soon as he starts speaking.
544
"But it does," Stallman says. "Their publication is telling you that
this is an idea that's off limits to the rest of the community for 20
years. And what the hell good is that? Besides, they've written it in
such a hard way to read, both to obfuscate the idea and to make the
patent as broad as possible, that it's basically useless looking at the
published information to learn anything anyway. The only reason to look
at patents is to see the bad news of what you can't do."
545
The audience falls silent. The speech, which began at 3:15, is now
nearing the 5:00 whistle, and most listeners are already squirming in
their seats, antsy to get a jump start on the weekend. Sensing the
fatigue, Stallman glances around the room and hastily shuts things
down. "So it looks like we're done," he says, following the observation
with an auctioneer's "going, going, gone" to flush out any last-minute
questioners. When nobody throws their hand up, Stallman signs off with
a traditional exit line.
546
"Happy hacking," he says.
547
Chapter 9 - The GNU General Public License
548
By the spring of 1985, Richard Stallman had settled on the GNU
Project's first milestone-a Lisp-based free software version of Emacs.
To meet this goal, however, he faced two challenges. First, he had to
rebuild Emacs in a way that made it platform independent. Second, he
had to rebuild the Emacs Commune in a similar fashion.
549
The dispute with UniPress had highlighted a flaw in the Emacs Commune
social contract. Where users relied on Stallman's expert insight, the
Commune's rules held. In areas where Stallman no longer held the
position of alpha hacker-pre-1984 Unix systems, for example-individuals
and companies were free to make their own rules.
550
The tension between the freedom to modify and the freedom to exert
authorial privilege had been building before GOSMACS. The Copyright Act
of 1976 had overhauled U.S. copyright law, extending the legal
protection of copyright to software programs. According to Section
102(b) of the Act, individuals and companies now possessed the ability
to copyright the "expression" of a software program but not the "actual
processes or methods embodied in the program."60 Translated,
programmers and companies had the ability to treat software programs
like a story or song. Other programmers could take inspiration from the
work, but to make a direct copy or nonsatirical derivative, they first
had to secure permission from the original creator. Although the new
law guaranteed that even programs without copyright notices carried
copyright protection, programmers quickly asserted their rights,
attaching coypright notices to their software programs.
60. See Hal Abelson, Mike Fischer, and Joanne Costello, "Software and
Copyright Law," updated version (1998).
551
At first, Stallman viewed these notices with alarm. Rare was the
software program that didn't borrow source code from past programs, and
yet, with a single stroke of the president's pen, Congress had given
programmers and companies the power to assert individual authorship
over communally built programs. It also injected a dose of formality
into what had otherwise been an informal system. Even if hackers could
demonstrate how a given program's source-code bloodlines stretched back
years, if not decades, the resources and money that went into battling
each copyright notice were beyond most hackers' means. Simply put,
disputes that had once been settled hacker-to-hacker were now settled
lawyer-to-lawyer. In such a system, companies, not hackers, held the
automatic advantage.
552
Proponents of software copyright had their counter-arguments: without
copyright, works might otherwise slip into the public domain. Putting a
copyright notice on a work also served as a statement of quality.
Programmers or companies who attached their name to the copyright
attached their reputations as well. Finally, it was a contract, as well
as a statement of ownership. Using copyright as a flexible form of
license, an author could give away certain rights in exchange for
certain forms of behavior on the part of the user. For example, an
author could give away the right to suppress unauthorized copies just
so long as the end user agreed not to create a commercial offshoot.
553
It was this last argument that eventually softened Stallman's
resistance to software copyright notices. Looking back on the years
leading up to the GNU Project, Stallman says he began to sense the
beneficial nature of copyright sometime around the release of Emacs
15.0, the last significant pre-GNU Project upgrade of Emacs. "I had
seen email messages with copyright notices plus simple `verbatim
copying permitted' licenses," Stallman recalls. "Those definitely were
[an] inspiration."
554
For Emacs 15, Stallman drafted a copyright that gave users the right to
make and distribute copies. It also gave users the right to make
modified versions, but not the right to claim sole ownership of those
modified versions, as in the case of GOSMACS.
555
Although helpful in codifying the social contract of the Emacs Commune,
the Emacs 15 license remained too "informal" for the purposes of the
GNU Project, Stallman says. Soon after starting work on a GNU version
of Emacs, Stallman began consulting with the other members of the Free
Software Foundation on how to shore up the license's language. He also
consulted with the attorneys who had helped him set up the Free
Software Foundation.
556
Mark Fischer, a Boston attorney specializing in intellectual-property
law, recalls discussing the license with Stallman during this period.
"Richard had very strong views about how it should work," Fischer says,
"He had two principles. The first was to make the software absolutely
as open as possible. The second was to encourage others to adopt the
same licensing practices."
557
Encouraging others to adopt the same licensing practices meant closing
off the escape hatch that had allowed privately owned versions of Emacs
to emerge. To close that escape hatch, Stallman and his free software
colleagues came up with a solution: users would be free to modify GNU
Emacs just so long as they published their modifications. In addition,
the resulting "derivative" works would also have carry the same GNU
Emacs License.
558
The revolutionary nature of this final condition would take a while to
sink in. At the time, Fischer says, he simply viewed the GNU Emacs
License as a simple contract. It put a price tag on GNU Emacs' use.
Instead of money, Stallman was charging users access to their own later
modifications. That said, Fischer does remember the contract terms as
unique.
559
"I think asking other people to accept the price was, if not unique,
highly unusual at that time," he says.
560
The GNU Emacs License made its debut when Stallman finally released GNU
Emacs in 1985. Following the release, Stallman welcomed input from the
general hacker community on how to improve the license's language. One
hacker to take up the offer was future software activist John Gilmore,
then working as a consultant to Sun Microsystems. As part of his
consulting work, Gilmore had ported Emacs over to SunOS, the company's
in-house version of Unix. In the process of doing so, Gilmore had
published the changes as per the demands of the GNU Emacs License.
Instead of viewing the license as a liability, Gilmore saw it as clear
and concise expression of the hacker ethos. "Up until then, most
licenses were very informal," Gilmore recalls.
561
As an example of this informality, Gilmore cites a copyright notice for
trn, a Unix utility. Written by Larry Wall, future creator of the Perl
programming language, patch made it simple for Unix programmers to
insert source-code fixes - "patches" in hacker jargon-into any large
program. Recognizing the utility of this feature, Wall put the
following copyright notice in the program's accompanying README file:
562
Copyright (c) 1985, Larry Wall61
61. See Trn Kit README.
563
Such statements, while reflective of the hacker ethic, also reflected
the difficulty of translating the loose, informal nature of that ethic
into the rigid, legal language of copyright. In writing the GNU Emacs
License, Stallman had done more than close up the escape hatch that
permitted proprietary offshoots. He had expressed the hacker ethic in a
manner understandable to both lawyer and hacker alike.
564
It wasn't long, Gilmore says, before other hackers began discussing
ways to "port" the GNU Emacs License over to their own programs.
Prompted by a conversation on Usenet, Gilmore sent an email to Stallman
in November, 1986, suggesting modification:
565
You should probably remove "EMACS" from the license and replace it with
"SOFTWARE" or something. Soon, we hope, Emacs will not be the biggest
part of the GNU system, and the license applies to all of
it.62
62. See John Gilmore, quoted from email to author.
566
Gilmore wasn't the only person suggesting a more general approach. By
the end of 1986, Stallman himself was at work with GNU Project's next
major milestone, a source-code debugger, and was looking for ways to
revamp the Emacs license so that it might apply to both programs.
Stallman's solution: remove all specific references to Emacs and
convert the license into a generic copyright umbrella for GNU Project
software. The GNU General Public License, GPL for short, was born.
567
In fashioning the GPL, Stallman followed the software convention of
using decimal numbers to indicate prototype versions and whole numbers
to indicate mature versions. Stallman published Version 1.0 of the GPL
in 1989 (a project Stallman was developing in 1985), almost a full year
after the release of the GNU Debugger, Stallman's second major foray
into the realm of Unix programming. The license contained a preamble
spelling out its political intentions:
568
569
The General Public License is designed to make sure that you have
570
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid
In fashioning the GPL, Stallman had been forced to make an additional
adjustment to the informal tenets of the old Emacs Commune. Where he
had once demanded that Commune members publish any and all changes,
Stallman now demanded publication only in instances when programmers
circulated their derivative versions in the same public manner as
Stallman. In other words, programmers who simply modified Emacs for
private use no longer needed to send the source-code changes back to
Stallman. In what would become a rare compromise of free software
doctrine, Stallman slashed the price tag for free software. Users could
innovate without Stallman looking over their shoulders just so long as
they didn't bar Stallman and the rest of the hacker community from
future exchanges of the same program.
571
Looking back, Stallman says the GPL compromise was fueled by his own
dissatisfaction with the Big Brother aspect of the original Emacs
Commune social contract. As much as he liked peering into other
hackers' systems, the knowledge that some future source-code maintainer
might use that power to ill effect forced him to temper the GPL.
572
"It was wrong to require people to publish all changes," says Stallman.
"It was wrong to require them to be sent to one privileged developer.
That kind of centralization and privilege for one was not consistent
with a society in which all had equal rights."
573
As hacks go, the GPL stands as one of Stallman's best. It created a
system of communal ownership within the normally proprietary confines
of copyright law. More importantly, it demonstrated the intellectual
similarity between legal code and software code. Implicit within the
GPL's preamble was a profound message: instead of viewing copyright law
with suspicion, hackers should view it as yet another system begging to
be hacked.
574
"The GPL developed much like any piece of free software with a large
community discussing its structure, its respect or the opposite in
their observation, needs for tweaking and even to compromise it mildly
for greater acceptance," says Jerry Cohen, another attorney who helped
Stallman with the creation of the license. "The process worked very
well and GPL in its several versions has gone from widespread skeptical
and at times hostile response to widespread acceptance."
575
In a 1986 interview with Byte magazine, Stallman summed up the GPL in
colorful terms. In addition to proclaiming hacker values, Stallman
said, readers should also "see it as a form of intellectual jujitsu,
using the legal system that software hoarders have set up against
them."63 Years later, Stallman would describe the GPL's
creation in less hostile terms. "I was thinking about issues that were
in a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal," he
says. "I had to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system
that we're in. In spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for
a new society, but since I wasn't a government, I couldn't actually
change any laws. I had to try to do this by building on top of the
existing legal system, which had not been designed for anything like
this."
63. See David Betz and Jon Edwards, "Richard Stallman discusses his
public-domain [sic] Unix-compatible software system with BYTE editors,"
BYTE (July, 1996). (Reprinted on the GNU Project web site: <
576
About the time Stallman was pondering the ethical, political, and legal
issues associated with free software, a California hacker named Don
Hopkins mailed him a manual for the 68000 microprocessor. Hopkins, a
Unix hacker and fellow science-fiction buff, had borrowed the manual
from Stallman a while earlier. As a display of gratitude, Hopkins
decorated the return envelope with a number of stickers obtained at a
local science-fiction convention. One sticker in particular caught
Stallman's eye. It read, "Copyleft (L), All Rights Reversed." Following
the release of the first version of GPL, Stallman paid tribute to the
sticker, nicknaming the free software license "Copyleft." Over time,
the nickname and its shorthand symbol, a backwards "C," would become an
official Free Software Foundation synonym for the GPL.
577
The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all great religions
are built upon the "routinization" or "institutionalization" of
charisma. Every successful religion, Weber argued, converts the
charisma or message of the original religious leader into a social,
political, and ethical apparatus more easily translatable across
cultures and time.
578
While not religious per se, the GNU GPL certainly qualifies as an
interesting example of this "routinization" process at work in the
modern, decentralized world of software development. Since its
unveiling, programmers and companies who have otherwise expressed
little loyalty or allegiance to Stallman have willingly accepted the
GPL bargain at face value. A few have even accepted the GPL as a
preemptive protective mechanism for their own software programs. Even
those who reject the GPL contract as too compulsory, still credit it as
influential.
579
One hacker falling into this latter group was Keith Bostic, a
University of California employee at the time of the GPL 1.0 release.
Bostic's department, the Computer Systems Research Group (SRG), had
been involved in Unix development since the late 1970s and was
responsible for many key parts of Unix, including the TCP/IP networking
protocol, the cornerstone of modern Internet communications. By the
late 1980s, AT&T, the original owner of the Unix brand name, began
to focus on commercializing Unix and began looking to the Berkeley
Software Distribution, or BSD, the academic version of Unix developed
by Bostic and his Berkeley peers, as a key source of commercial
technology.
580
Although the Berkeley BSD source code was shared among researchers and
commercial programmers with a source-code license, this
commercialization presented a problem. The Berkeley code was intermixed
with proprietary AT&T code. As a result, Berkeley distributions
were available only to institutions that already had a Unix source
license from AT&T. As AT&T raised its license fees, this
arrangement, which had at first seemed innocuous, became increasingly
burdensome.
581
Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project of porting BSD
over to the Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 computer. It was
during this period, Bostic says, that he came into close interaction
with Stallman during Stallman's occasional forays out to the west
coast. "I remember vividly arguing copyright with Stallman while he sat
at borrowed workstations at CSRG," says Bostic. "We'd go to dinner
afterward and continue arguing about copyright over dinner."
582
The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman
would have liked. In June, 1989, Berkeley separated its networking code
from the rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and distributed it
under a University of California license. The contract terms were
liberal. All a licensee had to do was give credit to the university in
advertisements touting derivative programs.64 In contrast to
the GPL, proprietary offshoots were permissible. Only one problem
hampered the license's rapid adoption: the BSD Networking release
wasn't a complete operating system. People could study the code, but it
could only be run in conjunction with other proprietary-licensed code.
64. The University of California's "obnoxious advertising clause" would
later prove to be a problem. Looking for a less restrictive alternative
to the GPL, some hackers used the University of California, replacing
"University of California" with the name of their own instution. The
result: free software programs that borrowed from dozens of other
programs would have to cite dozens of institutions in advertisements.
In 1999, after a decade of lobbying on Stallman's part, the University
of California agreed to drop this clause.
583
Over the next few years, Bostic and other University of California
employees worked to replace the missing components and turn BSD into a
complete, freely redistributable operating system. Although delayed by
a legal challenge from Unix Systems Laboratories-the AT&T spin-off
that retained ownership of the Unix brand name-the effort would finally
bear fruit in the early 1990s. Even before then, however, many of the
Berkeley utilities would make their way into Stallman's GNU Project.
584
"I think it's highly unlikely that we ever would have gone as strongly
as we did without the GNU influence," says Bostic, looking back. "It
was clearly something where they were pushing hard and we liked the
idea."
585
By the end of the 1980s, the GPL was beginning to exert a gravitational
effect on the free software community. A program didn't have to carry
the GPL to qualify as free software-witness the case of the BSD
utilities-but putting a program under the GPL sent a definite message.
"I think the very existence of the GPL inspired people to think through
whether they were making free software, and how they would license it,"
says Bruce Perens, creator of Electric Fence, a popular Unix utility,
and future leader of the Debian GNU/Linux development team. A few years
after the release of the GPL, Perens says he decided to discard
Electric Fence's homegrown license in favor of Stallman's lawyer-vetted
copyright. "It was actually pretty easy to do," Perens recalls.
586
Rich Morin, the programmer who had viewed Stallman's initial GNU
announcement with a degree of skepticism, recalls being impressed by
the software that began to gather under the GPL umbrella. As the leader
of a SunOS user group, one of Morin's primary duties during the 1980s
had been to send out distribution tapes containing the best freeware or
free software utilities. The job often mandated calling up original
program authors to verify whether their programs were copyright
protected or whether they had been consigned to the public domain.
Around 1989, Morin says, he began to notice that the best software
programs typically fell under the GPL license. "As a software
distributor, as soon as I saw the word GPL, I knew I was home free,"
recalls Morin.
587
To compensate for the prior hassles that went into compiling
distribution tapes to the Sun User Group, Morin had charged recipients
a convenience fee. Now, with programs moving over to the GPL, Morin was
suddenly getting his tapes put together in half the time, turning a
tidy profit in the process. Sensing a commercial opportunity, Morin
rechristened his hobby as a business: Prime Time Freeware.
588
Such commercial exploitation was completely within the confines of the
free software agenda. "When we speak of free software, we are referring
to freedom, not price," advised Stallman in the GPL's preamble. By the
late 1980s, Stallman had refined it to a more simple mnemonic: "Don't
think free as in free beer; think free as in free speech."
589
For the most part, businesses ignored Stallman's entreaties. Still, for
a few entrepreneurs, the freedom associated with free software was the
same freedom associated with free markets. Take software ownership out
of the commercial equation, and you had a situation where even the
smallest software company was free to compete against the IBMs and DECs
of the world.
590
One of the first entrepreneurs to grasp this concept was Michael
Tiemann, a software programmer and graduate student at Stanford
University. During the 1980s, Tiemann had followed the GNU Project like
an aspiring jazz musician following a favorite artist. It wasn't until
the release of the GNU C Compiler in 1987, however, that he began to
grasp the full potential of free software. Dubbing GCC a "bombshell,"
Tiemann says the program's own existence underlined Stallman's
determination as a programmer.
591
"Just as every writer dreams of writing the great American novel, every
programmer back in the 1980s talked about writing the great American
compiler," Tiemman recalls. "Suddenly Stallman had done it. It was very
humbling."
592
"You talk about single points of failure, GCC was it," echoes Bostic.
"Nobody had a compiler back then, until GCC came along."
593
Rather than compete with Stallman, Tiemann decided to build on top of
his work. The original version of GCC weighed in at 110,000 lines of
code, but Tiemann recalls the program as surprisingly easy to
understand. So easy in fact that Tiemann says it took less than five
days to master and another week to port the software to a new hardware
platform, National Semiconductor's 32032 microchip. Over the next year,
Tiemann began playing around with the source code, creating a native
compiler for the C+ programming language. One day, while delivering a
lecture on the program at Bell Labs, Tiemann ran into some AT&T
developers struggling to pull off the same thing.
594
"There were about 40 or 50 people in the room, and I asked how many
people were working on the native code compiler," Tiemann recalls. "My
host said the information was confidential but added that if I took a
look around the room I might get a good general idea."
595
It wasn't long after, Tiemann says, that the light bulb went off in his
head. "I had been working on that project for six months," Tiemann
says. I just thought to myself, whether it's me or the code this is a
level of efficiency that the free market should be ready to reward."
596
Tiemann found added inspiration in the GNU Manifesto, which, while
excoriating the greed of some software vendors, encourages other
vendors to consider the advantages of free software from a consumer
point of view. By removing the power of monopoly from the commerical
software question, the GPL makes it possible for the smartest vendors
to compete on the basis of service and consulting, the two most
profit-rich corners of the software marketplace.
597
In a 1999 essay, Tiemann recalls the impact of Stallman's Manifesto.
"It read like a socialist polemic, but I saw something different. I saw
a business plan in disguise."65
65. See Michael Tiemann, "Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's
Account," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 139.
598
Teaming up with John Gilmore, another GNU Project fan, Tiemann launched
a software consulting service dedicated to customizing GNU programs.
Dubbed Cygnus Support, the company signed its first development
contract in February, 1990. By the end of the year, the company had
$725,000 worth of support and development contracts.
599
GNU Emacs, GDB, and GCC were the "big three" of developer-oriented
tools, but they weren't the only ones developed by Stallman during the
GNU Project's first half decade. By 1990, Stallman had also generated
GNU versions of the Bourne Shell (rechristened the Bourne Again Shell,
or BASH), YACC (rechristened Bison), and awk (rechristened gawk). Like
GCC , every GNU program had to be designed to run on multiple systems,
not just a single vendor's platform. In the process of making programs
more flexible, Stallman and his collaborators often made them more
useful as well.
600
Recalling the GNU universalist approach, Prime Time Freeware's Morin
points to a critical, albeit mundane, software package called hello.
"It's the hello world program which is five lines of C, packaged up as
if it were a GNU distribution," Morin says. "And so it's got the
Texinfo stuff and the configure stuff. It's got all the other software
engineering goo that the GNU Project has come up with to allow packages
to port to all these different environments smoothly. That's
tremendously important work, and it affects not only all of
[Stallman's] software, but also all of the other GNU Project software."
601
According to Stallman, improving software programs was secondary to
building them in the first place. "With each piece I may or may not
find a way to improve it," said Stallman to Byte. "To some extent I am
getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much
better. To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long
time and worked on many other systems. I therefore have many ideas to
bring to bear."66
66. See Richard Stallman, BYTE (1986).
602
Nevertheless, as GNU tools made their mark in the late 1980s,
Stallman's AI Lab-honed reputation for design fastidiousness soon
became legendary throughout the entire software-development community.
603
Jeremy Allison, a Sun user during the late 1980s and programmer
destined to run his own free software project, Samba, in the 1990s,
recalls that reputation with a laugh. During the late 1980s, Allison
began using Emacs. Inspired by the program's community-development
model, Allison says he sent in a snippet of source code only to have it
rejected by Stallman.
604
"It was like the Onion headline," Allison says. "`Child's prayers to
God answered: No.'"
605
Stallman's growing stature as a software programmer, however, was
balanced by his struggles as a project manager. Although the GNU
Project moved from success to success in creation of developer-oriented
tools, its inability to generate a working kernel-the central "traffic
cop" program in all Unix systems that determines which devices and
applications get access to the microprocessor and when-was starting to
elicit grumbles as the 1980s came to a close. As with most GNU Project
efforts, Stallman had started kernel development by looking for an
existing program to modify. According to a January 1987 "Gnusletter,"
Stallman was already working to overhaul TRIX, a Unix kernel developed
at MIT.
606
A review of GNU Project "GNUsletters" of the late 1980s reflects the
management tension. In January, 1987, Stallman announced to the world
that the GNU Project was working to overhaul TRIX, a Unix kernel
developed at MIT. A year later, in February of 1988, the GNU Project
announced that it had shifted its attentions to Mach, a lightweight
"micro-kernel" developed at Carnegie Mellon. All told, however,
official GNU Project kernel development wouldn't commence until
1990.67
67. See "HURD History."
607
The delays in kernel development were just one of many concerns
weighing on Stallman during this period. In 1989, Lotus Development
Corporation filed suit against rival software company, Paperback
Software International, for copying menu commands in Lotus' popular
1-2-3 Spreadsheet program. Lotus' suit, coupled with the
Apple-Microsoft "look and feel" battle, provided a troublesome backdrop
for the GNU Project. Although both suits fell outside the scope of the
GNU Project, both revolved around operating systems and software
applications developed for the personal computer, not Unix-compatible
hardware systems-they threatened to impose a chilling effect on the
entire culture of software development. Determined to do something,
Stallman recruited a few programmer friends and composed a magazine ad
blasting the lawsuits. He then followed up the ad by helping to
organize a group to protest the corporations filing the suit. Calling
itself the League of Programming Freedom, the group held protests
outside the offices of Lotus, Inc. and the Boston courtroom hosting the
Lotus trial.
608
The protests were notable.68 They document the evolving nature
of software industry. Applications had quietly replaced operating
systems as the primary corporate battleground. In its unfulfilled quest
to build a free software operating system, the GNU Project seemed
hopelessly behind the times. Indeed, the very fact that Stallman had
felt it necessary to put together an entirely new group dedicated to
battling the "look and feel" lawsuits reinforced that obsolescence in
the eyes of some observers.
68. According to a League of Programming Freedom Press, the protests
were notable for featuring the first hexadecimal protest chant:
609
In 1990, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation cerified
Stallman's genius status when it granted Stallman a MacArthur
fellowship, therefore making him a recipient for the organization's
so-called "genius grant." The grant, a $240,000 reward for launching
the GNU Project and giving voice to the free software philosophy,
relieved a number of short-term concerns. First and foremost, it gave
Stallman, a nonsalaried employee of the FSF who had been supporting
himself through consulting contracts, the ability to devote more time
to writing GNU code.69
69. I use the term "writing" here loosely. About the time of the
MacArthur award, Stallman began suffering chronic pain in his hands and
was dictating his work to FSF-employed typists. Although some have
speculated that the hand pain was the result of repetitive stress
injury, or RSI, an injury common among software programmers, Stallman
is not 100% sure. "It was NOT carpal tunnel syndrome," he writes. "My
hand problem was in the hands themselves, not in the wrists." Stallman
has since learned to work without typists after switching to a keyboard
with a lighter touch.
610
Ironically, the award also made it possible for Stallman to vote.
Months before the award, a fire in Stallman's apartment house had
consumed his few earthly possessions. By the time of the award,
Stallman was listing himself as a "squatter"70 at 545
Technology Square. "[The registrar of voters] didn't want to accept
that as my address," Stallman would later recall. "A newspaper article
about the MacArthur grant said that and then they let me
register."71
70. See Reuven Lerner, "Stallman wins $240,000 MacArthur award," MIT,
The Tech (July 18, 1990). <
71. See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of
Free Software, MacArthur-certified Genius" (1999).
611
Most importantly, the MacArthur money gave Stallman more freedom.
Already dedicated to the issue of software freedom, Stallman chose to
use the additional freedom to increase his travels in support of the
GNU Project mission.
612
Interestingly, the ultimate success of the GNU Project and the free
software movement in general would stem from one of these trips. In
1990, Stallman paid a visit to the Polytechnic University in Helsinki,
Finland. Among the audience members was 21-year-old Linus Torvalds,
future developer of the Linux kernel-the free software kernel destined
to fill the GNU Project's most sizable gap.
613
A student at the nearby University of Helsinki at the time, Torvalds
regarded Stallman with bemusement. "I saw, for the first time in my
life, the stereotypical long-haired, bearded hacker type," recalls
Torvalds in his 2001 autobiography Just for Fun. "We don't have much of
them in Helsinki."72
72. See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an
Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001):
58-59.
614
While not exactly attuned to the "sociopolitical" side of the Stallman
agenda, Torvalds nevertheless appreciated the agenda's underlying
logic: no programmer writes error-free code. By sharing software,
hackers put a program's improvement ahead of individual motivations
such as greed or ego protection.
615
Like many programmers of his generation, Torvalds had cut his teeth not
on mainframe computers like the IBM 7094, but on a motley assortment of
home-built computer systems. As university student, Torvalds had made
the step up from C programming to Unix, using the university's
MicroVAX. This ladder-like progression had given Torvalds a different
perspective on the barriers to machine access. For Stallman, the chief
barriers were bureaucracy and privilege. For Torvalds, the chief
barriers were geography and the harsh Helsinki winter. Forced to trek
across the University of Helsinki just to log in to his Unix account,
Torvalds quickly began looking for a way to log in from the warm
confines of his off-campus apartment.
616
The search led Torvalds to the operating system Minix, a lightweight
version of Unix developed for instructional purposes by Dutch
university professor Andrew Tanenbaum. The program fit within the
memory confines of a 386 PC, the most powerful machine Torvalds could
afford, but still lacked a few necessary features. It most notably
lacked terminal emulation, the feature that allowed Torvalds' machine
to mimic a university terminal, making it possible to log in to the
MicroVAX from home.
617
During the summer of 1991, Torvalds rewrote Minix from the ground up,
adding other features as he did so. By the end of the summer, Torvalds
was referring to his evolving work as the "GNU/Emacs of terminal
emulation programs."73 Feeling confident, he solicited a Minix
newsgroup for copies of the POSIX standards, the software blue prints
that determined whether a program was Unix compatible. A few weeks
later, Torvalds was posting a message eerily reminiscent of Stallman's
original 1983 GNU posting:
73. See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an
Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 78.
618
619
Hello everybody out there using minix-
620
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
The posting drew a smattering of responses and within a month, Torvalds
had posted a 0.01 version of the operating system-i.e., the earliest
possible version fit for outside review-on an Internet FTP site. In the
course of doing so, Torvalds had to come up with a name for the new
system. On his own PC hard drive, Torvalds had saved the program as
Linux, a name that paid its respects to the software convention of
giving each Unix variant a name that ended with the letter X. Deeming
the name too "egotistical," Torvalds changed it to Freax, only to have
the FTP site manager change it back.
621
Although Torvalds had set out build a full operating system, both he
and other developers knew at the time that most of the functional tools
needed to do so were already available, thanks to the work of GNU, BSD,
and other free software developers. One of the first tools the Linux
development team took advantage of was the GNU C Compiler, a tool that
made it possible to process programs written in the C programming
language.
622
Integrating GCC improved the performance of Linux. It also raised
issues. Although the GPL's "viral" powers didn't apply to the Linux
kernel, Torvald's willingness to borrow GCC for the purposes of his own
free software operating system indicated a certain obligation to let
other users borrow back. As Torvalds would later put it: "I had hoisted
myself up on the shoulders of giants."74 Not surprisingly, he
began to think about what would happen when other people looked to him
for similar support. A decade after the decision, Torvalds echoes the
Free Software Foundation's Robert Chassel when he sums up his thoughts
at the time:
74. See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an
Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001):
96-97.
623
You put six months of your life into this thing and you want to make it
available and you want to get something out of it, but you don't want
people to take advantage of it. I wanted people to be able to see
[Linux], and to make changes and improvements to their hearts' content.
But I also wanted to make sure that what I got out of it was to see
what they were doing. I wanted to always have access to the sources so
that if they made improvements, I could make those improvements
myself.75
75. See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an
Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001):
94-95.
624
When it was time to release the 0.12 version of Linux, the first to
include a fully integrated version of GCC, Torvalds decided to voice
his allegiance with the free software movement. He discarded the old
kernel license and replaced it with the GPL. The decision triggered a
porting spree, as Torvalds and his collaborators looked to other GNU
programs to fold into the growing Linux stew. Within three years, Linux
developers were offering their first production release, Linux 1.0,
including fully modified versions of GCC, GDB, and a host of BSD tools.
625
By 1994, the amalgamated operating system had earned enough respect in
the hacker world to make some observers wonder if Torvalds hadn't given
away the farm by switching to the GPL in the project's initial months.
In the first issue of Linux Journal, publisher Robert Young sat down
with Torvalds for an interview. When Young asked the Finnish programmer
if he felt regret at giving up private ownership of the Linux source
code, Torvalds said no. "Even with 20/20 hindsight," Torvalds said, he
considered the GPL "one of the very best design decisions" made during
the early stages of the Linux project.76
76. See Robert Young, "Interview with Linus, the Author of Linux," Linux
Journal (March 1, 1994).
626
That the decision had been made with zero appeal or deference to
Stallman and the Free Software Foundation speaks to the GPL's growing
portability. Although it would take a few years to be recognized by
Stallman, the explosiveness of Linux development conjured flashbacks of
Emacs. This time around, however, the innovation triggering the
explosion wasn't a software hack like Control-R but the novelty of
running a Unix-like system on the PC architecture. The motives may have
been different, but the end result certainly fit the ethical
specifications: a fully functional operating system composed entirely
of free software.
627
As his initial email message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup indicates,
it would take a few months before Torvalds saw Linux as anything less
than a holdover until the GNU developers delivered on the HURD kernel.
This initial unwillingness to see Linux in political terms would
represent a major blow to the Free Software Foundation.
628
As far as Torvalds was concerned, he was simply the latest in a long
line of kids taking apart and reassembling things just for fun.
Nevertheless, when summing up the runaway success of a project that
could have just as easily spent the rest of its days on an abandoned
computer hard drive, Torvalds credits his younger self for having the
wisdom to give up control and accept the GPL bargain.
629
"I may not have seen the light," writes Torvalds, reflecting on
Stallman's 1991 Polytechnic University speech and his subsequent
decision to switch to the GPL. "But I guess something from his speech
sunk in ."77
77. See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an
Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 59.
630
Chapter 10 - GNU/Linux
631
By 1993, the free software movement was at a crossroads. To the
optimistically inclined, all signs pointed toward success for the
hacker culture. Wired magazine, a funky, new publication offering
stories on data encryption, Usenet, and software freedom, was flying
off magazine racks. The Internet, once a slang term used only by
hackers and research scientists, had found its way into mainstream
lexicon. Even President Clinton was using it. The personal computer,
once a hobbyist's toy, had grown to full-scale respectability, giving a
whole new generation of computer users access to hacker-built software.
And while the GNU Project had not yet reached its goal of a fully
intact, free software operating system, curious users could still try
Linux in the interim.
632
Any way you sliced it, the news was good, or so it seemed. After a
decade of struggle, hackers and hacker values were finally gaining
acceptance in mainstream society. People were getting it.
633
Or were they? To the pessimistically inclined, each sign of acceptance
carried its own troubling countersign. Sure, being a hacker was
suddenly cool, but was cool good for a community that thrived on
alienation? Sure, the White House was saying all the right things about
the Internet, even going so far as to register its own domain name,
whitehouse.gov, but it was also meeting with the companies, censorship
advocates, and law-enforcement officials looking to tame the Internet's
Wild West culture. Sure, PCs were more powerful, but in commoditizing
the PC marketplace with its chips, Intel had created a situation in
which proprietary software vendors now held the power. For every new
user won over to the free software cause via Linux, hundreds, perhaps
thousands, were booting up Microsoft Windows for the first time.
634
Finally, there was the curious nature of Linux itself. Unrestricted by
design bugs (like GNU) and legal disputes (like BSD), Linux' high-speed
evolution had been so unplanned, its success so accidental, that
programmers closest to the software code itself didn't know what to
make of it. More compilation album than operating system, it was
comprised of a hacker medley of greatest hits: everything from GCC,
GDB, and glibc (the GNU Project's newly developed C Library) to X (a
Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT's Laboratory for
Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools such as BIND (the Berkeley
Internet Naming Daemon, which lets users substitute easy-to-remember
Internet domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. The arch's
capstone, of course, was the Linux kernel-itself a bored-out,
super-charged version of Minix. Rather than building their operating
system from scratch, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux
development team had followed the old Picasso adage, "good artists
borrow; great artists steal." Or as Torvalds himself would later
translate it when describing the secret of his success: "I'm basically
a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people
actually do."78
78. Torvalds has offered this quote in many different settings. To date,
however, the quote's most notable appearance is in the Eric Raymond
essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (May, 1997).
635
Such laziness, while admirable from an efficiency perspective, was
troubling from a political perspective. For one thing, it underlined
the lack of an ideological agenda on Torvalds' part. Unlike the GNU
developers, Torvalds hadn't built an operating system out of a desire
to give his fellow hackers something to work with; he'd built it to
have something he himself could play with. Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing
a fence, Torvalds' genius lay less in the overall vision and more in
his ability to recruit other hackers to speed the process.
636
That Torvalds and his recruits had succeeded where others had not
raised its own troubling question: what, exactly, was Linux? Was it a
manifestation of the free software philosophy first articulated by
Stallman in the GNU Manifesto? Or was it simply an amalgamation of
nifty software tools that any user, similarly motivated, could assemble
on his own home system?
637
By late 1993, a growing number of Linux users had begun to lean toward
the latter definition and began brewing private variations on the Linux
theme. They even became bold enough to bottle and sell their
variations-or "distributions"-to fellow Unix aficionados. The results
were spotty at best.
638
"This was back before Red Hat and the other commercial distributions,"
remembers Ian Murdock, then a computer science student at Purdue
University. "You'd flip through Unix magazines and find all these
business card-sized ads proclaiming `Linux.' Most of the companies were
fly-by-night operations that saw nothing wrong with slipping a little
of their own source code into the mix."
639
Murdock, a Unix programmer, remembers being "swept away" by Linux when
he first downloaded and installed it on his home PC system. "It was
just a lot of fun," he says. "It made me want to get involved." The
explosion of poorly built distributions began to dampen his early
enthusiasm, however. Deciding that the best way to get involved was to
build a version of Linux free of additives, Murdock set about putting a
list of the best free software tools available with the intention of
folding them into his own distribution. "I wanted something that would
live up to the Linux name," Murdock says.
640
In a bid to "stir up some interest," Murdock posted his intentions on
the Internet, including Usenet's comp.os.linux newsgroup. One of the
first responding email messages was from <
641
Murdock opened the message.
642
"He said the Free Software Foundation was starting to look closely at
Linux and that the FSF was interested in possibly doing a Linux system,
too. Basically, it looked to Stallman like our goals were in line with
their philosophy."
643
The message represented a dramatic about-face on Stallman's part. Until
1993, Stallman had been content to keep his nose out of the Linux
community's affairs. In fact, he had all but shunned the renegade
operating system when it first appeared on the Unix programming
landscape in 1991. After receiving the first notification of a
Unix-like operating system that ran on PCs, Stallman says he delegated
the task of examining the new operating system to a friend. Recalls
Stallman, "He reported back that the software was modeled after System
V, which was the inferior version of Unix. He also told me it wasn't
portable."
644
The friend's report was correct. Built to run on 386-based machines,
Linux was firmly rooted to its low-cost hardware platform. What the
friend failed to report, however, was the sizable advantage Linux
enjoyed as the only freely modifiable operating system in the
marketplace. In other words, while Stallman spent the next three years
listening to bug reports from his HURD team, Torvalds was winning over
the programmers who would later uproot and replant the operating system
onto new platforms.
645
By 1993, the GNU Project's inability to deliver a working kernel was
leading to problems both within the GNU Project and within the free
software movement at large. A March, 1993, a Wired magazine article by
Simson Garfinkel described the GNU Project as "bogged down" despite the
success of the project's many tools.79 Those within the
project and its nonprofit adjunct, the Free Software Foundation,
remember the mood as being even worse than Garfinkel's article let on.
"It was very clear, at least to me at the time, that there was a window
of opportunity to introduce a new operating system," says Chassell.
"And once that window was closed, people would become less interested.
Which is in fact exactly what happened."80
79. See Simson Garfinkel, "Is Stallman Stalled?" Wired (March, 1993).
80. Chassel's concern about there being a 36-month "window" for a new
operating system is not unique to the GNU Project. During the early
1990s, free software versions of the Berkeley Software Distribution
were held up by Unix System Laboratories' lawsuit restricting the
release of BSD-derived software. While many users consider BSD
offshoots such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD to be demonstrably superior to
GNU/Linux both in terms of performance and security, the number of
FreeBSD and OpenBSD users remains a fraction of the total GNU/Linux
user population.
646
Much has been made about the GNU Project's struggles during the
1990-1993 period. While some place the blame on Stallman for those
struggles, Eric Raymond, an early member of the GNU Emacs team and
later Stallman critic, says the problem was largely institutional. "The
FSF got arrogant," Raymond says. "They moved away from the goal of
doing a production-ready operating system to doing operating-system
research." Even worse, "They thought nothing outside the FSF could
affect them."
647
Murdock, a person less privy to the inner dealings of the GNU Project,
adopts a more charitable view. "I think part of the problem is they
were a little too ambitious and they threw good money after bad," he
says. "Micro-kernels in the late 80s and early 90s were a hot topic.
Unfortunately, that was about the time that the GNU Project started to
design their kernel. They ended up with alot of baggage and it would
have taken a lot of backpedaling to lose it."
648
Stallman cites a number of issues when explaining the delay. The Lotus
and Apple lawsuits had provided political distractions, which, coupled
with Stallman's inability to type, made it difficult for Stallman to
lend a helping hand to the HURD team. Stallman also cites poor
communication between various portions of the GNU Project. "We had to
do a lot of work to get the debugging environment to work," he recalls.
"And the people maintaining GDB at the time were not that cooperative."
Mostly, however, Stallman says he and the other members of the GNU
Project team underestimated the difficulty of expanding the Mach
microkernal into a full-fledged Unix kernel.
649
"I figured, OK, the [Mach] part that has to talk to the machine has
already been debugged," Stallman says, recalling the HURD team's
troubles in a 2000 speech. "With that head start, we should be able to
get it done faster. But instead, it turned out that debugging these
asynchronous multithreaded programs was really hard. There were timing
books that would clobber the files, and that's no fun. The end result
was that it took many, many years to produce a test
version."81
81. See Maui High Performance Computing Center Speech.
650
Whatever the excuse, or excuses, the concurrent success of the
Linux-kernel team created a tense situation. Sure, the Linux kernel had
been licensed under the GPL, but as Murdock himself had noted, the
desire to treat Linux as a purely free software operating system was
far from uniform. By late 1993, the total Linux user population had
grown from a dozen or so Minix enthusiasts to somewhere between 20,000
and 100,000.82 What had once been a hobby was now a
marketplace ripe for exploitation. Like Winston Churchill watching
Soviet troops sweep into Berlin, Stallman felt an understandable set of
mixed emotions when it came time to celebrate the Linux
"victory."83
82. GNU/Linux user-population numbers are sketchy at best, which is why
I've provided such a broad range. The 100,000 total comes from the Red
Hat "Milestones" site,
83. I wrote this Winston Churchill analogy before Stallman himself sent
me his own unsolicited comment on Churchill:
651
Although late to the party, Stallman still had clout. As soon as the
FSF announced that it would lend its money and moral support to
Murdock's software project, other offers of support began rolling in.
Murdock dubbed the new project Debian-a compression of his and his
wife, Deborah's, names-and within a few weeks was rolling out the first
distribution. "[Richard's support] catapulted Debian almost overnight
from this interesting little project to something people within the
community had to pay attention to," Murdock says.
652
In January of 1994, Murdock issued the " Debian Manifesto." Written in
the spirit of Stallman's "GNU Manifesto" from a decade before, it
explained the importance of working closely with the Free Software
Foundation. Murdock wrote:
653
The Free Software Foundation plays an extremely important role in the
future of Debian. By the simple fact that they will be distributing it,
a message is sent to the world that Linux is not a commercial product
and that it never should be, but that this does not mean that Linux
will never be able to compete commercially. For those of you who
disagree, I challenge you to rationalize the success of GNU Emacs and
GCC, which are not commercial software but which have had quite an
impact on the commercial market regardless of that fact.
654
The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux rather than on
the destructive goal of enriching oneself at the expense of the entire
Linux community and its future. The development and distribution of
Debian may not be the answer to the problems that I have outlined in
the Manifesto, but I hope that it will at least attract enough
attention to these problems to allow them to be solved.84
84. See Ian Murdock, "A Brief History of Debian," (January 6, 1994):
Appendix A, "The Debian Manifesto."
655
Shortly after the Manifesto's release, the Free Software Foundation
made its first major request. Stallman wanted Murdock to call its
distribution "GNU/Linux." At first, Murdock says, Stallman had wanted
to use the term " Lignux"-"as in Linux with GNU at the heart of it"-but
a sample testing of the term on Usenet and in various impromptu hacker
focus groups had merited enough catcalls to convince Stallman to go
with the less awkward GNU/Linux.
656
Although some would dismiss Stallman's attempt to add the "GNU" prefix
as a belated quest for credit, Murdock saw it differently. Looking
back, Murdock saw it as an attempt to counteract the growing tension
between GNU Project and Linux-kernel developers. "There was a split
emerging," Murdock recalls. "Richard was concerned."
657
The deepest split, Murdock says, was over glibc. Short for GNU C
Library, glibc is the package that lets programmers make "system calls"
directed at the kernel. Over the course of 1993-1994, glibc emerged as
a troublesome bottleneck in Linux development. Because so many new
users were adding new functions to the Linux kernel, the GNU Project's
glibc maintainers were soon overwhelmed with suggested changes.
Frustrated by delays and the GNU Project's growing reputation for
foot-dragging, some Linux developers suggested creating a " fork"-i.e.,
a Linux-specific C Library parallel to glibc.
658
In the hacker world, forks are an interesting phenomenon. Although the
hacker ethic permits a programmer to do anything he wants with a given
program's source code, most hackers prefer to pour their innovations
into a central source-code file or "tree" to ensure compatibility with
other people's programs. To fork glibc this early in the development of
Linux would have meant losing the potential input of hundreds, even
thousands, of Linux developers. It would also mean growing
incompatibility between Linux and the GNU system that Stallman and the
GNU team still hoped to develop.
659
As leader of the GNU Project, Stallman had already experienced the
negative effects of a software fork in 1991. A group of Emacs
developers working for a software company named Lucid had a falling out
over Stallman's unwillingness to fold changes back into the GNU Emacs
code base. The fork had given birth to a parallel version, Lucid Emacs,
and hard feelings all around.85
85. Jamie Zawinski, a former Lucid programmer who would go on to head
the Mozilla development team, has a web site that documents the
Lucid/GNU Emacs fork, titled, "The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism."
660
Murdock says Debian was mounting work on a similar fork in glibc source
code that motivated Stallman to insist on adding the GNU prefix when
Debian rolled out its software distribution. "The fork has since
converged. Still, at the time, there was a concern that if the Linux
community saw itself as a different thing as the GNU community, it
might be a force for disunity."
661
Stallman seconds Murdock's recollection. In fact, he says there were
nascent forks appearing in relation to every major GNU component. At
first, Stallman says he considered the forks to be a product of sour
grapes. In contrast to the fast and informal dynamics of the
Linux-kernel team, GNU source-code maintainers tended to be slower and
more circumspect in making changes that might affect a program's
long-term viability. They also were unafraid of harshly critiquing
other people's code. Over time, however, Stallman began to sense that
there was an underlying lack of awareness of the GNU Project and its
objectives when reading Linux developers' emails.
662
"We discovered that the people who considered themselves Linux users
didn't care about the GNU Project," Stallman says. "They said, `Why
should I bother doing these things? I don't care about the GNU Project.
It's working for me. It's working for us Linux users, and nothing else
matters to us.' And that was quite surprising given that people were
essentially using a variant of the GNU system, and they cared so
little. They cared less than anybody else about GNU."
663
While some viewed descriptions of Linux as a "variant" of the GNU
Project as politically grasping, Murdock, already sympathetic to the
free software cause, saw Stallman's request to call Debian's version
GNU/Linux as reasonable. "It was more for unity than for credit," he
says.
664
Requests of a more technical nature quickly followed. Although Murdock
had been accommodating on political issues, he struck a firmer pose
when it came to the design and development model of the actual
software. What had begun as a show of solidarity soon became of model
of other GNU projects.
665
"I can tell you that I've had my share of disagreements with him," says
Murdock with a laugh. "In all honesty Richard can be a fairly difficult
person to work with."
666
In 1996, Murdock, following his graduation from Purdue, decided to hand
over the reins of the growing Debian project. He had already been
ceding management duties to Bruce Perens, the hacker best known for his
work on Electric Fence, a Unix utility released under the GPL. Perens,
like Murdock, was a Unix programmer who had become enamored of
GNU/Linux as soon as the program's Unix-like abilities became manifest.
Like Murdock, Perens sympathized with the political agenda of Stallman
and the Free Software Foundation, albeit from afar.
667
"I remember after Stallman had already come out with the GNU Manifesto,
GNU Emacs, and GCC, I read an article that said he was working as a
consultant for Intel," says Perens, recalling his first brush with
Stallman in the late 1980s. "I wrote him asking how he could be
advocating free software on the one hand and working for Intel on the
other. He wrote back saying, `I work as a consultant to produce free
software.' He was perfectly polite about it, and I thought his answer
made perfect sense."
668
As a prominent Debian developer, however, Perens regarded Murdock's
design battles with Stallman with dismay. Upon assuming leadership of
the development team, Perens says he made the command decision to
distance Debian from the Free Software Foundation. "I decided we did
not want Richard's style of micro-management," he says.
669
According to Perens, Stallman was taken aback by the decision but had
the wisdom to roll with it. "He gave it some time to cool off and sent
a message that we really needed a relationship. He requested that we
call it GNU/Linux and left it at that. I decided that was fine. I made
the decision unilaterally. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief."
670
Over time, Debian would develop a reputation as the hacker's version of
Linux, alongside Slackware, another popular distribution founded during
the same 1993-1994 period. Outside the realm of hacker-oriented
systems, however, Linux was picking up steam in the commercial Unix
marketplace. In North Carolina, a Unix company billing itself as Red
Hat was revamping its business to focus on Linux. The chief executive
officer was Robert Young, the former Linux Journal editor who in 1994
had put the question to Linus Torvalds, asking whether he had any
regrets about putting the kernel under the GPL. To Young, Torvalds'
response had a "profound" impact on his own view toward Linux. Instead
of looking for a way to corner the GNU/Linux market via traditional
software tactics, Young began to consider what might happen if a
company adopted the same approach as Debian-i.e., building an operating
system completely out of free software parts. Cygnus Solutions, the
company founded by Michael Tiemann and John Gilmore in 1990, was
already demonstrating the ability to sell free software based on
quality and customizability. What if Red Hat took the same approach
with GNU/Linux?
671
"In the western scientific tradition we stand on the shoulders of
giants," says Young, echoing both Torvalds and Sir Isaac Newton before
him. "In business, this translates to not having to reinvent wheels as
we go along. The beauty of [the GPL] model is you put your code into
the public domain.86 If you're an independent software vendor
and you're trying to build some application and you need a
modem-dialer, well, why reinvent modem dialers? You can just steal PPP
off of Red Hat Linux and use that as the core of your modem-dialing
tool. If you need a graphic tool set, you don't have to write your own
graphic library. Just download GTK. Suddenly you have the ability to
reuse the best of what went before. And suddenly your focus as an
application vendor is less on software management and more on writing
the applications specific to your customer's needs."
86. Young uses the term "public domain" incorrectly here. Public domain
means not protected by copyright. GPL-protected programs are by
definition protected by copyright.
672
Young wasn't the only software executive intrigued by the business
efficiencies of free software. By late 1996, most Unix companies were
starting to wake up and smell the brewing source code. The Linux sector
was still a good year or two away from full commercial breakout mode,
but those close enough to the hacker community could feel it: something
big was happening. The Intel 386 chip, the Internet, and the World Wide
Web had hit the marketplace like a set of monster waves, and Linux-and
the host of software programs that echoed it in terms of source-code
accessibility and permissive licensing-seemed like the largest wave
yet.
673
For Ian Murdock, the programmer courted by Stallman and then later
turned off by Stallman's micromanagement style, the wave seemed both a
fitting tribute and a fitting punishment for the man who had spent so
much time giving the free software movement an identity. Like many
Linux aficionados, Murdock had seen the original postings. He'd seen
Torvalds's original admonition that Linux was "just a hobby." He'd also
seen Torvalds's admission to Minix creator Andrew Tanenbaum: "If the
GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even
start my project."87 Like many, Murdock knew the opportunities
that had been squandered. He also knew the excitement of watching new
opportunities come seeping out of the very fabric of the Internet.
87. This quote is taken from the much-publicized Torvalds-Tanenbaum
"flame war" following the initial release of Linux. In the process of
defending his choice of a nonportable monolithic kernel design,
Torvalds says he started working on Linux as a way to learn more about
his new 386 PC. "If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not
have bothered to even start my project." See Chris DiBona et al., Open
Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 224.
674
"Being involved with Linux in those early days was fun," recalls
Murdock. "At the same time, it was something to do, something to pass
the time. If you go back and read those old [comp.os.minix] exchanges,
you'll see the sentiment: this is something we can play with until the
HURD is ready. People were anxious. It's funny, but in a lot of ways, I
suspect that Linux would never have happened if the HURD had come along
more quickly."
675
By the end of 1996, however, such "what if" questions were already
moot. Call it Linux, call it GNU/Linux; the users had spoken. The
36-month window had closed, meaning that even if the GNU Project had
rolled out its HURD kernel, chances were slim anybody outside the
hard-core hacker community would have noticed. The first Unix-like free
software operating system was here, and it had momentum. All hackers
had left to do was sit back and wait for the next major wave to come
crashing down on their heads. Even the shaggy-haired head of one
Richard M. Stallman.
676
Ready or not.
677
Chapter 11 - Open Source
678
In November , 1995, Peter Salus, a member of the Free Software
Foundation and author of the 1994 book, A Quarter Century of Unix,
issued a call for papers to members of the GNU Project's
"system-discuss" mailing list. Salus, the conference's scheduled
chairman, wanted to tip off fellow hackers about the upcoming
Conference on Freely Redistributable Software in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Slated for February, 1996 and sponsored by the Free
Software Foundation, the event promised to be the first engineering
conference solely dedicated to free software and, in a show of unity
with other free software programmers, welcomed papers on "any aspect of
GNU, Linux, NetBSD, 386BSD, FreeBSD, Perl, Tcl/tk, and other tools for
which the code is accessible and redistributable." Salus wrote:
679
Over the past 15 years, free and low-cost software has become
ubiquitous. This conference will bring together implementers of several
different types of freely redistributable software and publishers of
such software (on various media). There will be tutorials and refereed
papers, as well as keynotes by Linus Torvalds and Richard
Stallman.88
88. See Peter Salus, "FYI-Conference on Freely Redistributable Software,
2/2, Cambridge" (1995) (archived by Terry Winograd).
680
One of the first people to receive Salus' email was conference
committee member Eric S. Raymond. Although not the leader of a project
or company like the various other members of the list, Raymond had
built a tidy reputation within the hacker community as a major
contributor to GNU Emacs and as editor of The New Hacker
Dictionary , a book version of the hacking community's decade-old
Jargon File.
681
For Raymond, the 1996 conference was a welcome event. Active in the GNU
Project during the 1980s, Raymond had distanced himself from the
project in 1992, citing, like many others before him, Stallman's
"micro-management" style. "Richard kicked up a fuss about my making
unauthorized modifications when I was cleaning up the Emacs LISP
libraries," Raymond recalls. "It frustrated me so much that I decided I
didn't want to work with him anymore."
682
Despite the falling out, Raymond remained active in the free software
community. So much so that when Salus suggested a conference pairing
Stallman and Torvalds as keynote speakers, Raymond eagerly seconded the
idea. With Stallman representing the older, wiser contingent of
ITS/Unix hackers and Torvalds representing the younger, more energetic
crop of Linux hackers, the pairing indicated a symbolic show of unity
that could only be beneficial, especially to ambitious younger (i.e.,
below 40) hackers such as Raymond. "I sort of had a foot in both
camps," Raymond says.
683
By the time of the conference, the tension between those two camps had
become palpable. Both groups had one thing in common, though: the
conference was their first chance to meet the Finnish wunderkind in the
flesh. Surprisingly, Torvalds proved himself to be a charming, affable
speaker. Possessing only a slight Swedish accent, Torvalds surprised
audience members with his quick, self-effacing wit.89 Even
more surprising, says Raymond, was Torvalds' equal willingness to take
potshots at other prominent hackers, including the most prominent
hacker of all, Richard Stallman. By the end of the conference,
Torvalds' half-hacker, half-slacker manner was winning over older and
younger conference-goers alike.
89. Although Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his mother tongue is Swedish.
"The Rampantly Unofficial Linus FAQ" offers a brief explanation:
684
"It was a pivotal moment," recalls Raymond. "Before 1996, Richard was
the only credible claimant to being the ideological leader of the
entire culture. People who dissented didn't do so in public. The person
who broke that taboo was Torvalds."
685
The ultimate breach of taboo would come near the end of the show.
During a discussion on the growing market dominance of Microsoft
Windows or some similar topic, Torvalds admitted to being a fan of
Microsoft's PowerPoint slideshow software program. From the perspective
of old-line software purists, it was like a Mormon bragging in church
about his fondness of whiskey. From the perspective of Torvalds and his
growing band of followers, it was simply common sense. Why shun worthy
proprietary software programs just to make a point? Being a hacker
wasn't about suffering, it was about getting the job done.
686
"That was a pretty shocking thing to say," Raymond remembers. "Then
again, he was able to do that, because by 1995 and 1996, he was rapidly
acquiring clout."
687
Stallman, for his part, doesn't remember any tension at the 1996
conference, but he does remember later feeling the sting of Torvalds'
celebrated cheekiness. "There was a thing in the Linux documentation
which says print out the GNU coding standards and then tear them up,"
says Stallman, recalling one example. "OK, so he disagrees with some of
our conventions. That's fine, but he picked a singularly nasty way of
saying so. He could have just said `Here's the way I think you should
indent your code.' Fine. There should be no hostility there."
688
For Raymond, the warm reception other hackers gave to Torvalds'
comments merely confirmed his suspicions. The dividing line separating
Linux developers from GNU/Linux developers was largely generational.
Many Linux hackers, like Torvalds, had grown up in a world of
proprietary software. Unless a program was clearly inferior, most saw
little reason to rail against a program on licensing issues alone.
Somewhere in the universe of free software systems lurked a program
that hackers might someday turn into a free software alternative to
PowerPoint. Until then, why begrudge Microsoft the initiative of
developing the program and reserving the rights to it?
689
As a former GNU Project member, Raymond sensed an added dynamic to the
tension between Stallman and Torvalds. In the decade since launching
the GNU Project, Stallman had built up a fearsome reputation as a
programmer. He had also built up a reputation for intransigence both in
terms of software design and people management. Shortly before the 1996
conference, the Free Software Foundation would experience a full-scale
staff defection, blamed in large part on Stallman. Brian Youmans, a
current FSF staffer hired by Salus in the wake of the resignations,
recalls the scene: "At one point, Peter [Salus] was the only staff
member working in the office."
690
For Raymond, the defection merely confirmed a growing suspicion: recent
delays such as the HURD and recent troubles such as the Lucid-Emacs
schism reflected problems normally associated with software project
management, not software code development. Shortly after the Freely
Redistributable Software Conference, Raymond began working on his own
pet software project, a popmail utility called "fetchmail." Taking a
cue from Torvalds, Raymond issued his program with a tacked-on promise
to update the source code as early and as often as possible. When users
began sending in bug reports and feature suggestions, Raymond, at first
anticipating a tangled mess, found the resulting software surprisingly
sturdy. Analyzing the success of the Torvalds approach, Raymond issued
a quick analysis: using the Internet as his "petri dish" and the harsh
scrutiny of the hacker community as a form of natural selection,
Torvalds had created an evolutionary model free of central planning.
691
What's more, Raymond decided, Torvalds had found a way around Brooks'
Law. First articulated by Fred P. Brooks, manager of IBM's OS/360
project and author of the 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks'
Law held that adding developers to a project only resulted in further
project delays. Believing as most hackers that software, like soup,
benefits from a limited number of cooks, Raymond sensed something
revolutionary at work. In inviting more and more cooks into the
kitchen, Torvalds had actually found away to make the resulting
software better.90
90. Brooks' Law is the shorthand summary of the following quote taken
from Brooks' book:
692
Raymond put his observations on paper. He crafted them into a speech,
which he promptly delivered before a group of friends and neighbors in
Chester County, Pennsylvania. Dubbed " The Cathedral and the Bazaar,"
the speech contrasted the management styles of the GNU Project with the
management style of Torvalds and the kernel hackers. Raymond says the
response was enthusiastic, but not nearly as enthusiastic as the one he
received during the 1997 Linux Kongress, a gathering of Linux users in
Germany the next spring.
693
"At the Kongress, they gave me a standing ovation at the end of the
speech," Raymond recalls. "I took that as significant for two reasons.
For one thing, it meant they were excited by what they were hearing.
For another thing, it meant they were excited even after hearing the
speech delivered through a language barrier."
694
Eventually, Raymond would convert the speech into a paper, also titled
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar." The paper drew its name from Raymond's
central analogy. GNU programs were "cathedrals," impressive, centrally
planned monuments to the hacker ethic, built to stand the test of time.
Linux, on the other hand, was more like "a great babbling bazaar," a
software program developed through the loose decentralizing dynamics of
the Internet.
695
Implicit within each analogy was a comparison of Stallman and Torvalds.
Where Stallman served as the classic model of the cathedral
architect-i.e., a programming "wizard" who could disappear for 18
months and return with something like the GNU C Compiler-Torvalds was
more like a genial dinner-party host. In letting others lead the Linux
design discussion and stepping in only when the entire table needed a
referee, Torvalds had created a development model very much reflective
of his own laid-back personality. From the Torvalds' perspective, the
most important managerial task was not imposing control but keeping the
ideas flowing.
696
Summarized Raymond, "I think Linus's cleverest and most consequential
hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather
his invention of the Linux development model."91
91. See Eric Raymond, "The Cathredral and the Bazaar" (1997).
697
In summarizing the secrets of Torvalds' managerial success, Raymond
himself had pulled off a coup. One of the audience members at the Linux
Kongress was Tim O'Reilly, publisher of O'Reilly & Associates, a
company specializing in software manuals and software-related books
(and the publisher of this book). After hearing Raymond's Kongress
speech, O'Reilly promptly invited Raymond to deliver it again at the
company's inaugural Perl Conference later that year in Monterey,
California.
698
Although the conference was supposed to focus on Perl, a scripting
language created by Unix hacker Larry Wall, O'Reilly assured Raymond
that the conference would address other free software technologies.
Given the growing commercial interest in Linux and Apache, a popular
free software web server, O'Reilly hoped to use the event to publicize
the role of free software in creating the entire infrastructure of the
Internet. From web-friendly languages such as Perl and Python to
back-room programs such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon),
a software tool that lets users replace arcane IP numbers with the
easy-to-remember domain-name addresses (e.g., amazon.com), and
sendmail, the most popular mail program on the Internet, free software
had become an emergent phenomenon. Like a colony of ants creating a
beautiful nest one grain of sand at a time, the only thing missing was
the communal self-awareness. O'Reilly saw Raymond's speech as a good
way to inspire that self-awareness, to drive home the point that free
software development didn't start and end with the GNU Project.
Programming languages, such as Perl and Python, and Internet software,
such as BIND, sendmail, and Apache, demonstrated that free software was
already ubiquitous and influential. He also assured Raymond an even
warmer reception than the one at Linux Kongress.
699
O'Reilly was right. "This time, I got the standing ovation before the
speech," says Raymond, laughing.
700
As predicted, the audience was stocked not only with hackers, but with
other people interested in the growing power of the free software
movement. One contingent included a group from Netscape, the Mountain
View, California startup then nearing the end game of its three-year
battle with Microsoft for control of the web-browser market.
701
Intrigued by Raymond's speech and anxious to win back lost market
share, Netscape executives took the message back to corporate
headquarters. A few months later, in January, 1998, the company
announced its plan to publish the source code of its flagship Navigator
web browser in the hopes of enlisting hacker support in future
development.
702
When Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's "Cathedral and the
Bazaar" essay as a major influence upon the company's decision, the
company instantly elevated Raymond to the level of hacker celebrity.
Determined not to squander the opportunity, Raymond traveled west to
deliver interviews, advise Netscape executives, and take part in the
eventual party celebrating the publication of Netscape Navigator's
source code. The code name for Navigator's source code was "Mozilla": a
reference both to the program's gargantuan size-30 million lines of
code-and to its heritage. Developed as a proprietary offshoot of
Mosaic, the web browser created by Marc Andreessen at the University of
Illinois, Mozilla was proof, yet again, that when it came to building
new programs, most programmers preferred to borrow on older, modifiable
programs.
703
While in California, Raymond also managed to squeeze in a visit to VA
Research, a Santa Clara-based company selling workstations with the
GNU/Linux operating system preinstalled. Convened by Raymond, the
meeting was small. The invite list included VA founder Larry Augustin,
a few VA employees, and Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight
Institute, a Silicon Valley think tank specializing in nanotechnology.
704
"The meeting's agenda boiled down to one item: how to take advantage of
Netscape's decision so that other companies might follow suit?" Raymond
doesn't recall the conversation that took place, but he does remember
the first complaint addressed. Despite the best efforts of Stallman and
other hackers to remind people that the word "free" in free software
stood for freedom and not price, the message still wasn't getting
through. Most business executives, upon hearing the term for the first
time, interpreted the word as synonymous with "zero cost," tuning out
any follow up messages in short order. Until hackers found a way to get
past this cognitive dissonance, the free software movement faced an
uphill climb, even after Netscape.
705
Peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing
the free software cause, offered an alternative: open source.
706
Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the open source term while
discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations
industry. She doesn't remember where she came upon the term or if she
borrowed it from another field, but she does remember her friend
disliking the term.92
92. See Malcolm Maclachlan, "Profit Motive Splits Open Source Movement,"
TechWeb News (August 26, 1998).
707
At the meeting, Peterson says, the response was dramatically different.
"I was hesitant about suggesting it," Peterson recalls. "I had no
standing with the group, so started using it casually, not highlighting
it as a new term." To Peterson's surprise, the term caught on. By the
end of the meeting, most of the attendees, including Raymond, seemed
pleased by it.
708
Raymond says he didn't publicly use the term "open source" as a
substitute for free software until a day or two after the Mozilla
launch party, when O'Reilly had scheduled a meeting to talk about free
software. Calling his meeting "the Freeware Summit," O'Reilly says he
wanted to direct media and community attention to the other deserving
projects that had also encouraged Netscape to release Mozilla. "All
these guys had so much in common, and I was surprised they didn't all
know each other," says O'Reilly. "I also wanted to let the world know
just how great an impact the free software culture had already made.
People were missing out on a large part of the free software
tradition."
709
In putting together the invite list, however, O'Reilly made a decision
that would have long-term political consequences. He decided to limit
the list to west-coast developers such as Wall, Eric Allman, creator of
sendmail, and Paul Vixie, creator of BIND. There were exceptions, of
course: Pennsylvania-resident Raymond, who was already in town thanks
to the Mozilla launch, earned a quick invite. So did Virginia-resident
Guido van Rossum, creator of Python. "Frank Willison, my editor in
chief and champion of Python within the company, invited him without
first checking in with me," O'Reilly recalls. "I was happy to have him
there, but when I started, it really was just a local gathering."
710
For some observers, the unwillingness to include Stallman's name on the
list qualified as a snub. "I decided not to go to the event because of
it," says Perens, remembering the summit. Raymond, who did go, says he
argued for Stallman's inclusion to no avail. The snub rumor gained
additional strength from the fact that O'Reilly, the event's host, had
feuded publicly with Stallman over the issue of software-manual
copyrights. Prior to the meeting, Stallman had argued that free
software manuals should be as freely copyable and modifiable as free
software programs. O'Reilly, meanwhile, argued that a value-added
market for nonfree books increased the utility of free software by
making it more accessible to a wider community. The two had also
disputed the title of the event, with Stallman insisting on "Free
Software" over the less politically laden "Freeware."
711
Looking back, O'Reilly doesn't see the decision to leave Stallman's
name off the invite list as a snub. "At that time, I had never met
Richard in person, but in our email interactions, he'd been inflexible
and unwilling to engage in dialogue. I wanted to make sure the GNU
tradition was represented at the meeting, so I invited John Gilmore and
Michael Tiemann, whom I knew personally, and whom I knew were
passionate about the value of the GPL but seemed more willing to engage
in a frank back-and-forth about the strengths and weaknesses of the
various free software projects and traditions. Given all the later
brouhaha, I do wish I'd invited Richard as well, but I certainly don't
think that my failure to do so should be interpreted as a lack of
respect for the GNU Project or for Richard personally."
712
Snub or no snub, both O'Reilly and Raymond say the term "open source"
won over just enough summit-goers to qualify as a success. The
attendees shared ideas and experiences and brainstormed on how to
improve free software's image. Of key concern was how to point out the
successes of free software, particularly in the realm of Internet
infrastructure, as opposed to playing up the GNU/Linux challenge to
Microsoft Windows. But like the earlier meeting at VA, the discussion
soon turned to the problems associated with the term "free software."
O'Reilly, the summit host, remembers a particularly insightful comment
from Torvalds, a summit attendee.
713
"Linus had just moved to Silicon Valley at that point, and he explained
how only recently that he had learned that the word `free' had two
meanings-free as in `libre' and free as in `gratis'-in English."
714
Michael Tiemann, founder of Cygnus, proposed an alternative to the
troublesome "free software" term: sourceware. "Nobody got too excited
about it," O'Reilly recalls. "That's when Eric threw out the term `open
source.'"
715
Although the term appealed to some, support for a change in official
terminology was far from unanimous. At the end of the one-day
conference, attendees put the three terms-free software, open source,
or sourceware-to a vote. According to O'Reilly, 9 out of the 15
attendees voted for "open source." Although some still quibbled with
the term, all attendees agreed to use it in future discussions with the
press. "We wanted to go out with a solidarity message," O'Reilly says.
716
The term didn't take long to enter the national lexicon. Shortly after
the summit, O'Reilly shepherded summit attendees to a press conference
attended by reporters from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,
and other prominent publications. Within a few months, Torvalds' face
was appearing on the cover of Forbes magazine, with the faces of
Stallman, Perl creator Larry Wall, and Apache team leader Brian
Behlendorf featured in the interior spread. Open source was open for
business.
717
For summit attendees such as Tiemann, the solidarity message was the
most important thing. Although his company had achieved a fair amount
of success selling free software tools and services, he sensed the
difficulty other programmers and entrepreneurs faced.
718
"There's no question that the use of the word free was confusing in a
lot of situations," Tiemann says. "Open source positioned itself as
being business friendly and business sensible. Free software positioned
itself as morally righteous. For better or worse we figured it was more
advantageous to align with the open source crowd.
719
For Stallman, the response to the new "open source" term was slow in
coming. Raymond says Stallman briefly considered adopting the term,
only to discard it. "I know because I had direct personal conversations
about it," Raymond says.
720
By the end of 1998, Stallman had formulated a position: open source,
while helpful in communicating the technical advantages of free
software, also encouraged speakers to soft-pedal the issue of software
freedom. Given this drawback, Stallman would stick with the term free
software.
721
Summing up his position at the 1999 LinuxWorld Convention and Expo, an
event billed by Torvalds himself as a "coming out party" for the Linux
community, Stallman implored his fellow hackers to resist the lure of
easy compromise.
722
"Because we've shown how much we can do, we don't have to be desperate
to work with companies or compromise our goals," Stallman said during a
panel discussion. "Let them offer and we'll accept. We don't have to
change what we're doing to get them to help us. You can take a single
step towards a goal, then another and then more and more and you'll
actually reach your goal. Or, you can take a half measure that means
you don't ever take another step and you'll never get there."
723
Even before the LinuxWorld show, however, Stallman was showing an
increased willingness to alienate his more conciliatory peers. A few
months after the Freeware Summit, O'Reilly hosted its second annual
Perl Conference. This time around, Stallman was in attendance. During a
panel discussion lauding IBM's decision to employ the free software
Apache web server in its commercial offerings, Stallman, taking
advantage of an audience microphone, disrupted the proceedings with a
tirade against panelist John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting
language. Stallman branded Ousterhout a "parasite" on the free software
community for marketing a proprietary version of Tcl via Ousterhout's
startup company, Scriptics. "I don't think Scriptics is necessary for
the continued existence of Tcl," Stallman said to hisses from the
fellow audience members. 98
724
"It was a pretty ugly scene," recalls Prime Time Freeware's Rich Morin.
"John's done some pretty respectable things: Tcl, Tk, Sprite. He's a
real contributor."
725
Despite his sympathies for Stallman and Stallman's position, Morin felt
empathy for those troubled by Stallman's discordant behavior.
726
Stallman's Perl Conference outburst would momentarily chase off another
potential sympathizer, Bruce Perens. In 1998, Eric Raymond proposed
launching the Open Source Initiative, or OSI, an organization that
would police the use of the term "open source" and provide a definition
for companies interested in making their own programs. Raymond
recruited Perens to draft the definition.93
93. See Bruce Perens et al., "The Open Source Definition," The Open
Source Initiative (1998). <
727
Perens would later resign from the OSI, expressing regret that the
organization had set itself up in opposition to Stallman and the FSF.
Still, looking back on the need for a free software definition outside
the Free Software Foundation's auspices, Perens understands why other
hackers might still feel the need for distance. "I really like and
admire Richard," says Perens. "I do think Richard would do his job
better if Richard had more balance. That includes going away from free
software for a couple of months."
728
Stallman's monomaniacal energies would do little to counteract the
public-relations momentum of open source proponents. In August of 1998,
when chip-maker Intel purchased a stake in GNU/Linux vendor Red Hat, an
accompanying New York Times article described the company as the
product of a movement "known alternatively as free software and open
source."94 Six months later, a John Markoff article on Apple
Computer was proclaiming the company's adoption of the "open source"
Apache server in the article headline.95
94. See Amy Harmon, "For Sale: Free Operating System," New York Times
(September 28, 1998).
95. See John Markoff, "Apple Adopts `Open Source' for its Server
Computers," New York Times (March 17, 1999).
729
Such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies
that actively embraced the "open source" term. By August of 1999, Red
Hat, a company that now eagerly billed itself as "open source," was
selling shares on Nasdaq. In December, VA Linux-formerly VA
Research-was floating its own IPO to historical effect. Opening at $30
per share, the company's stock price exploded past the $300 mark in
initial trading only to settle back down to the $239 level.
Shareholders lucky enough to get in at the bottom and stay until the
end experienced a 698% increase in paper wealth, a Nasdaq record.
730
Among those lucky shareholders was Eric Raymond, who, as a company
board member since the Mozilla launch, had received 150,000 shares of
VA Linux stock. Stunned by the realization that his essay contrasting
the Stallman-Torvalds managerial styles had netted him $36 million in
potential wealth, Raymond penned a follow-up essay. In it, Raymond
mused on the relationship between the hacker ethic and monetary wealth:
731
Reporters often ask me these days if I think the open-source community
will be corrupted by the influx of big money. I tell them what I
believe, which is this: commercial demand for programmers has been so
intense for so long that anyone who can be seriously distracted by
money is already gone. Our community has been self-selected for caring
about other things-accomplishment, pride, artistic passion, and each
other.96
96. See Eric Raymond, "Surprised by Wealth," Linux Today (December 10,
1999).
732
Whether or not such comments allayed suspicions that Raymond and other
open source proponents had simply been in it for the money, they drove
home the open source community's ultimate message: all you needed to
sell the free software concept is a friendly face and a sensible
message. Instead of fighting the marketplace head-on as Stallman had
done, Raymond, Torvalds, and other new leaders of the hacker community
had adopted a more relaxed approach-ignoring the marketplace in some
areas, leveraging it in others. Instead of playing the role of
high-school outcasts, they had played the game of celebrity, magnifying
their power in the process.
733
"On his worst days Richard believes that Linus Torvalds and I conspired
to hijack his revolution," Raymond says. "Richard's rejection of the
term open source and his deliberate creation of an ideological fissure
in my view comes from an odd mix of idealism and territoriality. There
are people out there who think it's all Richard's personal ego. I don't
believe that. It's more that he so personally associates himself with
the free software idea that he sees any threat to that as a threat to
himself."
734
Ironically, the success of open source and open source advocates such
as Raymond would not diminish Stallman's role as a leader. If anything,
it gave Stallman new followers to convert. Still, the Raymond
territoriality charge is a damning one. There are numerous instances of
Stallman sticking to his guns more out of habit than out of principle:
his initial dismissal of the Linux kernel, for example, and his current
unwillingness as a political figure to venture outside the realm of
software issues.
735
Then again, as the recent debate over open source also shows, in
instances when Stallman has stuck to his guns, he's usually found a way
to gain ground because of it. "One of Stallman's primary character
traits is the fact he doesn't budge," says Ian Murdock. "He'll wait up
to a decade for people to come around to his point of view if that's
what it takes."
736
Murdock, for one, finds that unbudgeable nature both refreshing and
valuable. Stallman may no longer be the solitary leader of the free
software movement, but he is still the polestar of the free software
community. "You always know that he's going to be consistent in his
views," Murdock says. "Most people aren't like that. Whether you agree
with him or not, you really have to respect that."
737
Chapter 12 - A Brief Journey Through Hacker Hell
738
Richard Stallman stares, unblinking, through the windshield of a rental
car, waiting for the light to change as we make our way through
downtown Kihei.
739
The two of us are headed to the nearby town of Pa'ia, where we are
scheduled to meet up with some software programmers and their wives for
dinner in about an hour or so.
740
It's about two hours after Stallman's speech at the Maui High
Performance Center, and Kihei, a town that seemed so inviting before
the speech, now seems profoundly uncooperative. Like most beach cities,
Kihei is a one-dimensional exercise in suburban sprawl. Driving down
its main drag, with its endless succession of burger stands, realty
agencies, and bikini shops, it's hard not to feel like a steel-coated
morsel passing through the alimentary canal of a giant commercial
tapeworm. The feeling is exacerbated by the lack of side roads. With
nowhere to go but forward, traffic moves in spring-like lurches. 200
yards ahead, a light turns green. By the time we are moving, the light
is yellow again.
741
For Stallman, a lifetime resident of the east coast, the prospect of
spending the better part of a sunny Hawaiian afternoon trapped in slow
traffic is enough to trigger an embolism. Even worse is the knowledge
that, with just a few quick right turns a quarter mile back, this whole
situation easily could have been avoided. Unfortunately, we are at the
mercy of the driver ahead of us, a programmer from the lab who knows
the way and who has decided to take us to Pa'ia via the scenic route
instead of via the nearby Pilani Highway.
742
"This is terrible," says Stallman between frustrated sighs. "Why didn't
we take the other route?"
743
Again, the light a quarter mile ahead of us turns green. Again, we
creep forward a few more car lengths. This process continues for
another 10 minutes, until we finally reach a major crossroad promising
access to the adjacent highway.
744
The driver ahead of us ignores it and continues through the
intersection.
745
"Why isn't he turning?" moans Stallman, throwing up his hands in
frustration. "Can you believe this?"
746
I decide not to answer either. I find the fact that I am sitting in a
car with Stallman in the driver seat, in Maui no less, unbelievable
enough. Until two hours ago, I didn't even know Stallman knew how to
drive. Now, listening to Yo-Yo Ma's cello playing the mournful bass
notes of "Appalachian Journey" on the car stereo and watching the
sunset pass by on our left, I do my best to fade into the upholstery.
747
When the next opportunity to turn finally comes up, Stallman hits his
right turn signal in an attempt to cue the driver ahead of us. No such
luck. Once again, we creep slowly through the intersection, coming to a
stop a good 200 yards before the next light. By now, Stallman is livid.
748
"It's like he's deliberately ignoring us," he says, gesturing and
pantomiming like an air craft carrier landing-signals officer in a
futile attempt to catch our guide's eye. The guide appears unfazed, and
for the next five minutes all we see is a small portion of his head in
the rearview mirror.
749
I look out Stallman's window. Nearby Kahoolawe and Lanai Islands
provide an ideal frame for the setting sun. It's a breathtaking view,
the kind that makes moments like this a bit more bearable if you're a
Hawaiian native, I suppose. I try to direct Stallman's attention to it,
but Stallman, by now obsessed by the inattentiveness of the driver
ahead of us, blows me off.
750
When the driver passes through another green light, completely ignoring
a "Pilani Highway Next Right," I grit my teeth. I remember an early
warning relayed to me by BSD programmer Keith Bostic. "Stallman does
not suffer fools gladly," Bostic warned me. "If somebody says or does
something stupid, he'll look them in the eye and say, `That's stupid.'"
751
Looking at the oblivious driver ahead of us, I realize that it's the
stupidity, not the inconvenience, that's killing Stallman right now.
752
"It's as if he picked this route with absolutely no thought on how to
get there efficiently," Stallman says.
753
The word "efficiently" hangs in the air like a bad odor. Few things
irritate the hacker mind more than inefficiency. It was the
inefficiency of checking the Xerox laser printer two or three times a
day that triggered Stallman's initial inquiry into the printer source
code. It was the inefficiency of rewriting software tools hijacked by
commercial software vendors that led Stallman to battle Symbolics and
to launch the GNU Project. If, as Jean Paul Sartre once opined, hell is
other people, hacker hell is duplicating other people's stupid
mistakes, and it's no exaggeration to say that Stallman's entire life
has been an attempt to save mankind from these fiery depths.
754
This hell metaphor becomes all the more apparent as we take in the
slowly passing scenery. With its multitude of shops, parking lots, and
poorly timed street lights, Kihei seems less like a city and more like
a poorly designed software program writ large. Instead of rerouting
traffic and distributing vehicles through side streets and expressways,
city planners have elected to run everything through a single main
drag. From a hacker perspective, sitting in a car amidst all this mess
is like listening to a CD rendition of nails on a chalkboard at full
volume.
755
"Imperfect systems infuriate hackers," observes Steven Levy, another
warning I should have listened to before climbing into the car with
Stallman. "This is one reason why hackers generally hate driving
cars-the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out
one-way streets causes delays which are so goddamn unnecessary [Levy's
emphasis] that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light
control boxes . . . redesign the entire system."97
97. See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 40.
756
More frustrating, however, is the duplicity of our trusted guide.
Instead of searching out a clever shortcut-as any true hacker would do
on instinct-the driver ahead of us has instead chosen to play along
with the city planners' game. Like Virgil in Dante's Inferno, our guide
is determined to give us the full guided tour of this hacker hell
whether we want it or not.
757
Before I can make this observation to Stallman, the driver finally hits
his right turn signal. Stallman's hunched shoulders relax slightly, and
for a moment the air of tension within the car dissipates. The tension
comes back, however, as the driver in front of us slows down.
"Construction Ahead" signs line both sides of the street, and even
though the Pilani Highway lies less than a quarter mile off in the
distance, the two-lane road between us and the highway is blocked by a
dormant bulldozer and two large mounds of dirt.
758
It takes Stallman a few seconds to register what's going on as our
guide begins executing a clumsy five-point U-turn in front of us. When
he catches a glimpse of the bulldozer and the "No Through Access" signs
just beyond, Stallman finally boils over.
759
"Why, why, why?" he whines, throwing his head back. "You should have
known the road was blocked. You should have known this way wouldn't
work. You did this deliberately."
760
The driver finishes the turn and passes us on the way back toward the
main drag. As he does so, he shakes his head and gives us an apologetic
shrug. Coupled with a toothy grin, the driver's gesture reveals a touch
of mainlander frustration but is tempered with a protective dose of
islander fatalism. Coming through the sealed windows of our rental car,
it spells out a succinct message: "Hey, it's Maui; what are you gonna
do?"
761
Stallman can take it no longer.
762
"Don't you fucking smile!" he shouts, fogging up the glass as he does
so. "It's your fucking fault. This all could have been so much easier
if we had just done it my way."
763
Stallman accents the words "my way" by gripping the steering wheel and
pulling himself towards it twice. The image of Stallman's lurching
frame is like that of a child throwing a temper tantrum in a car seat,
an image further underlined by the tone of Stallman's voice. Halfway
between anger and anguish, Stallman seems to be on the verge of tears.
764
Fortunately, the tears do not arrive. Like a summer cloudburst, the
tantrum ends almost as soon as it begins. After a few whiny gasps,
Stallman shifts the car into reverse and begins executing his own
U-turn. By the time we are back on the main drag, his face is as
impassive as it was when we left the hotel 30 minutes earlier.
765
It takes less than five minutes to reach the next cross-street. This
one offers easy highway access, and within seconds, we are soon
speeding off toward Pa'ia at a relaxing rate of speed. The sun that
once loomed bright and yellow over Stallman's left shoulder is now
burning a cool orange-red in our rearview mirror. It lends its color to
the gauntlet wili wili trees flying past us on both sides of the
highway.
766
For the next 20 minutes, the only sound in our vehicle, aside from the
ambient hum of the car's engine and tires, is the sound of a cello and
a violin trio playing the mournful strains of an Appalachian folk tune.
767
Chapter 13 - Continuing the Fight
768
For Richard Stallman, time may not heal all wounds, but it does provide
a convenient ally.
769
Four years after " The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Stallman still chafes
over the Raymond critique. He also grumbles over Linus Torvalds'
elevation to the role of world's most famous hacker. He recalls a
popular T-shirt that began showing at Linux tradeshows around 1999.
Designed to mimic the original promotional poster for Star Wars, the
shirt depicted Torvalds brandishing a lightsaber like Luke Skywalker,
while Stallman's face rides atop R2D2. The shirt still grates on
Stallmans nerves not only because it depicts him as a Torvalds'
sidekick, but also because it elevates Torvalds to the leadership role
in the free software/open source community, a role even Torvalds
himself is loath to accept. "It's ironic," says Stallman mournfully.
"Picking up that sword is exactly what Linus refuses to do. He gets
everybody focusing on him as the symbol of the movement, and then he
won't fight. What good is it?"
770
Then again, it is that same unwillingness to "pick up the sword," on
Torvalds part, that has left the door open for Stallman to bolster his
reputation as the hacker community's ethical arbiter. Despite his
grievances, Stallman has to admit that the last few years have been
quite good, both to himself and to his organization. Relegated to the
periphery by the unforeseen success of GNU/Linux, Stallman has
nonetheless successfully recaptured the initiative. His speaking
schedule between January 2000 and December 2001 included stops on six
continents and visits to countries where the notion of software freedom
carries heavy overtones-China and India, for example.
771
Outside the bully pulpit, Stallman has also learned how to leverage his
power as costeward of the GNU General Public License (GPL). During the
summer of 2000, while the air was rapidly leaking out of the 1999 Linux
IPO bubble, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation scored two major
victories. In July, 2000, Troll Tech, a Norwegian software company and
developer of Qt, a valuable suite of graphics tools for the GNU/Linux
operating system, announced it was licensing its software under the
GPL. A few weeks later, Sun Microsystems, a company that, until then,
had been warily trying to ride the open source bandwagon without giving
up total control of its software properties, finally relented and
announced that it, too, was dual licensing its new OpenOffice
application suite under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) and the
Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL).
772
Underlining each victory was the fact that Stallman had done little to
fight for them. In the case of Troll Tech, Stallman had simply played
the role of free software pontiff. In 1999, the company had come up
with a license that met the conditions laid out by the Free Software
Foundation, but in examining the license further, Stallman detected
legal incompatibles that would make it impossible to bundle Qt with
GPL-protected software programs. Tired of battling Stallman, Troll Tech
management finally decided to split the Qt into two versions, one
GPL-protected and one QPL-protected, giving developers a way around the
compatibility issues cited by Stallman.
773
In the case of Sun, they desired to play according to the Free Software
Foundation's conditions. At the 1999 O'Reilly Open Source Conference,
Sun Microsystems cofounder and chief scientist Bill Joy defended his
company's "community source" license, essentially a watered-down
compromise letting users copy and modify Sun-owned software but not
charge a fee for said software without negotiating a royalty agreement
with Sun. A year after Joy's speech, Sun Microsystems vice president
Marco Boerries was appearing on the same stage spelling out the
company's new licensing compromise in the case of OpenOffice, an
office-application suite designed specifically for the GNU/Linux
operating system.
774
"I can spell it out in three letters," said Boerries. "GPL."
775
At the time, Boerries said his company's decision had little to do with
Stallman and more to do with the momentum of GPL-protected programs.
"What basically happened was the recognition that different products
attracted different communities, and the license you use depends on
what type of community you want to attract," said Boerries. "With
[OpenOffice], it was clear we had the highest correlation with the GPL
community."98
98. See Marco Boerries, interview with author (July, 2000).
776
Such comments point out the under-recognized strength of the GPL and,
indirectly, the political genius of man who played the largest role in
creating it. "There isn't a lawyer on earth who would have drafted the
GPL the way it is," says Eben Moglen, Columbia University law professor
and Free Software Foundation general counsel. "But it works. And it
works because of Richard's philosophy of design."
777
A former professional programmer, Moglen traces his pro bono work with
Stallman back to 1990 when Stallman requested Moglen's legal assistance
on a private affair. Moglen, then working with encryption expert
Phillip Zimmerman during Zimmerman's legal battles with the National
Security Administration, says he was honored by the request. "I told
him I used Emacs every day of my life, and it would take an awful lot
of lawyering on my part to pay off the debt."
778
Since then, Moglen, perhaps more than any other individual, has had the
best chance to observe the crossover of Stallman's hacker philosophies
into the legal realm. Moglen says the difference between Stallman's
approach to legal code and software code are largely the same. "I have
to say, as a lawyer, the idea that what you should do with a legal
document is to take out all the bugs doesn't make much sense," Moglen
says. "There is uncertainty in every legal process, and what most
lawyers want to do is to capture the benefits of uncertainty for their
client. Richard's goal is the complete opposite. His goal is to remove
uncertainty, which is inherently impossible. It is inherently
impossible to draft one license to control all circumstances in all
legal systems all over the world. But if you were to go at it, you
would have to go at it his way. And the resulting elegance, the
resulting simplicity in design almost achieves what it has to achieve.
And from there a little lawyering will carry you quite far."
779
As the person charged with pushing the Stallman agenda, Moglen
understands the frustration of would-be allies. "Richard is a man who
does not want to compromise over matters that he thinks of as
fundamental," Moglen says, "and he does not take easily the twisting of
words or even just the seeking of artful ambiguity, which human society
often requires from a lot of people."
780
Because of the Free Software Foundation's unwillingness to weigh in on
issues outside the purview of GNU development and GPL enforcement,
Moglen has taken to devoting his excess energies to assisting the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, the organization providing legal aid to
recent copyright defendants such as Dmitri Skylarov. In 2000, Moglen
also served as direct counsel to a collection of hackers that were
joined together from circulating the DVD decryption program deCSS.
Despite the silence of his main client in both cases, Moglen has
learned to appreciate the value of Stallman's stubbornness. "There have
been times over the years where I've gone to Richard and said, `We have
to do this. We have to do that. Here's the strategic situation. Here's
the next move. Here's what he have to do.' And Richard's response has
always been, `We don't have to do anything.' Just wait. What needs
doing will get done."
781
"And you know what?" Moglen adds. "Generally, he's been right."
782
Such comments disavow Stallman's own self-assessment: "I'm not good at
playing games," Stallman says, addressing the many unseen critics who
see him as a shrewd strategist. "I'm not good at looking ahead and
anticipating what somebody else might do. My approach has always been
to focus on the foundation, to say `Let's make the foundation as strong
as we can make it.'"
783
The GPL's expanding popularity and continuing gravitational strength
are the best tributes to the foundation laid by Stallman and his GNU
colleagues. While no longer capable of billing himself as the "last
true hacker," Stallman nevertheless can take sole credit for building
the free software movement's ethical framework. Whether or not other
modern programmers feel comfortable working inside that framework is
immaterial. The fact that they even have a choice at all is Stallman's
greatest legacy.
784
Discussing Stallman's legacy at this point seems a bit premature.
Stallman, 48 at the time of this writing, still has a few years left to
add to or subtract from that legacy. Still, the autopilot nature of the
free software movement makes it tempting to examine Stallman's life
outside the day-to-day battles of the software industry and within a
more august, historical setting.
785
To his credit, Stallman refuses all opportunities to speculate. "I've
never been able to work out detailed plans of what the future was going
to be like," says Stallman, offering his own premature epitaph. "I just
said `I'm going to fight. Who knows where I'll get?'"
786
There's no question that in picking his fights, Stallman has alienated
the very people who might otherwise have been his greatest champions.
It is also a testament to his forthright, ethical nature that many of
Stallman's erstwhile political opponents still manage to put in a few
good words for him when pressed. The tension between Stallman the
ideologue and Stallman the hacker genius, however, leads a biographer
to wonder: how will people view Stallman when Stallman's own
personality is no longer there to get in the way?
787
In early drafts of this book, I dubbed this question the "100 year"
question. Hoping to stimulate an objective view of Stallman and his
work, I asked various software-industry luminaries to take themselves
out of the current timeframe and put themselves in a position of a
historian looking back on the free software movement 100 years in the
future. From the current vantage point, it is easy to see similarities
between Stallman and past Americans who, while somewhat marginal during
their lifetime, have attained heightened historical importance in
relation to their age. Easy comparisons include Henry David Thoreau,
transcendentalist philosopher and author of On Civil Disobedience, and
John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and progenitor of the modern
environmental movement. It is also easy to see similarities in men like
William Jennings Bryan, a.k.a. "The Great Commoner," leader of the
populist movement, enemy of monopolies, and a man who, though powerful,
seems to have faded into historical insignificance.
788
Although not the first person to view software as public property,
Stallman is guaranteed a footnote in future history books thanks to the
GPL. Given that fact, it seems worthwhile to step back and examine
Richard Stallman's legacy outside the current time frame. Will the GPL
still be something software programmers use in the year 2102, or will
it have long since fallen by the wayside? Will the term "free software"
seem as politically quaint as "free silver" does today, or will it seem
eerily prescient in light of later political events?
789
Predicting the future is risky sport, but most people, when presented
with the question, seemed eager to bite. "One hundred years from now,
Richard and a couple of other people are going to deserve more than a
footnote," says Moglen. "They're going to be viewed as the main line of
the story."
790
The "couple other people" Moglen nominates for future textbook chapters
include John Gilmore, Stallman's GPL advisor and future founder of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Theodor Holm Nelson, a.k.a. Ted
Nelson, author of the 1982 book, Literary Machines. Moglen says
Stallman, Nelson, and Gilmore each stand out in historically
significant, nonoverlapping ways. He credits Nelson, commonly
considered to have coined the term "hypertext," for identifying the
predicament of information ownership in the digital age. Gilmore and
Stallman, meanwhile, earn notable credit for identifying the negative
political effects of information control and building organizations-the
Electronic Frontier Foundation in the case of Gilmore and the Free
Software Foundation in the case of Stallman-to counteract those
effects. Of the two, however, Moglen sees Stallman's activities as more
personal and less political in nature.
791
"Richard was unique in that the ethical implications of unfree software
were particularly clear to him at an early moment," says Moglen. "This
has a lot to do with Richard's personality, which lots of people will,
when writing about him, try to depict as epiphenomenal or even a
drawback in Richard Stallman's own life work."
792
Gilmore, who describes his inclusion between the erratic Nelson and the
irascible Stallman as something of a "mixed honor," nevertheless
seconds the Moglen argument. Writes Gilmore:
793
My guess is that Stallman's writings will stand up as well as Thomas
Jefferson's have; he's a pretty clear writer and also clear on his
principles . . . Whether Richard will be as influential as Jefferson
will depend on whether the abstractions we call "civil rights" end up
more important a hundred years from now than the abstractions that we
call "software" or "technically imposed restrictions."
794
Another element of the Stallman legacy not to be overlooked, Gilmore
writes, is the collaborative software-development model pioneered by
the GNU Project. Although flawed at times, the model has nevertheless
evolved into a standard within the software-development industry. All
told, Gilmore says, this collaborative software-development model may
end up being even more influential than the GNU Project, the GPL
License, or any particular software program developed by Stallman:
795
Before the Internet, it was quite hard to collaborate over distance on
software, even among teams that know and trust each other. Richard
pioneered collaborative development of software, particularly by
disorganized volunteers who seldom meet each other. Richard didn't
build any of the basic tools for doing this (the TCP protocol, email
lists, diff and patch, tar files, RCS or CVS or remote-CVS), but he
used the ones that were available to form social groups of programmers
who could effectively collaborate.
796
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of the 2001 book,
The Future of Ideas, is similarly bullish. Like many legal scholars,
Lessig sees the GPL as a major bulwark of the current so-called
"digital commons," the vast agglomeration of community-owned software
programs, network and telecommunication standards that have triggered
the Internet's exponential growth over the last three decades. Rather
than connect Stallman with other Internet pioneers, men such as
Vannevar Bush, Vinton Cerf, and J. C. R. Licklider who convinced others
to see computer technology on a wider scale, Lessig sees Stallman's
impact as more personal, introspective, and, ultimately, unique:
797
[Stallman] changed the debate from is to ought. He made people see how
much was at stake, and he built a device to carry these ideals forward
. . . That said, I don't quite know how to place him in the context of
Cerf or Licklider. The innovation is different. It is not just about a
certain kind of code, or enabling the Internet. [It's] much more about
getting people to see the value in a certain kind of Internet. I don't
think there is anyone else in that class, before or after.
798
Not everybody sees the Stallman legacy as set in stone, of course. Eric
Raymond, the open source proponent who feels that Stallman's leadership
role has diminished significantly since 1996, sees mixed signals when
looking into the 2102 crystal ball:
799
I think Stallman's artifacts (GPL, Emacs, GCC) will be seen as
revolutionary works, as foundation-stones of the information world. I
think history will be less kind to some of the theories from which RMS
operated, and not kind at all to his personal tendency towards
territorial, cult-leader behavior.
800
As for Stallman himself, he, too, sees mixed signals:
801
What history says about the GNU Project, twenty years from now, will
depend on who wins the battle of freedom to use public knowledge. If we
lose, we will be just a footnote. If we win, it is uncertain whether
people will know the role of the GNU operating system-if they think the
system is "Linux," they will build a false picture of what happened and
why.
802
But even if we win, what history people learn a hundred years from now
is likely to depend on who dominates politically.
803
Searching for his own 19th-century historical analogy, Stallman summons
the figure of John Brown, the militant abolitionist regarded as a hero
on one side of the Mason Dixon line and a madman on the other.
804
John Brown's slave revolt never got going, but during his subsequent
trial he effectively roused national demand for abolition. During the
Civil War, John Brown was a hero; 100 years after, and for much of the
1900s, history textbooks taught that he was crazy. During the era of
legal segregation, while bigotry was shameless, the US partly accepted
the story that the South wanted to tell about itself, and history
textbooks said many untrue things about the Civil War and related
events.
805
Such comparisons document both the self-perceived peripheral nature of
Stallman's current work and the binary nature of his current
reputation. Although it's hard to see Stallman's reputation falling to
the level of infamy as Brown's did during the post-Reconstruction
period-Stallman, despite his occasional war-like analogies, has done
little to inspire violence-it's easy to envision a future in which
Stallman's ideas wind up on the ash-heap. In fashioning the free
software cause not as a mass movement but as a collection of private
battles against the forces of proprietary temptation, Stallman seems to
have created a unwinnable situation, especially for the many acolytes
with the same stubborn will.
806
Then again, it is that very will that may someday prove to be
Stallman's greatest lasting legacy. Moglen, a close observer over the
last decade, warns those who mistake the Stallman personality as
counter-productive or epiphenomenal to the "artifacts" of Stallman's
life. Without that personality, Moglen says, there would be precious
few artifiacts to discuss. Says Moglen, a former Supreme Court clerk:
807
Look, the greatest man I ever worked for was Thurgood Marshall. I knew
what made him a great man. I knew why he had been able to change the
world in his possible way. I would be going out on a limb a little bit
if I were to make a comparison, because they could not be more
different. Thurgood Marshall was a man in society, representing an
outcast society to the society that enclosed it, but still a man in
society. His skill was social skills. But he was all of a piece, too.
Different as they were in every other respect, that the person I most
now compare him to in that sense, all of a piece, compact, made of the
substance that makes stars, all the way through, is Stallman.
808
In an effort to drive that image home, Moglen reflects on a shared
moment in the spring of 2000. The success of the VA Linux IPO was still
resonating in the business media, and a half dozen free
software-related issues were swimming through the news. Surrounded by a
swirling hurricane of issues and stories each begging for comment,
Moglen recalls sitting down for lunch with Stallman and feeling like a
castaway dropped into the eye of the storm. For the next hour, he says,
the conversation calmly revolved around a single topic: strengthening
the GPL.
809
"We were sitting there talking about what we were going to do about
some problems in Eastern Europe and what we were going to do when the
problem of the ownership of content began to threaten free software,"
Moglen recalls. "As we were talking, I briefly thought about how we
must have looked to people passing by. Here we are, these two little
bearded anarchists, plotting and planning the next steps. And, of
course, Richard is plucking the knots from his hair and dropping them
in the soup and behaving in his usual way. Anybody listening in on our
conversation would have thought we were crazy, but I knew: I knew the
revolution's right here at this table. This is what's making it happen.
And this man is the person making it happen."
810
Moglen says that moment, more than any other, drove home the elemental
simplicity of the Stallman style.
811
"It was funny," recalls Moglen. "I said to him, `Richard, you know, you
and I are the two guys who didn't make any money out of this
revolution.' And then I paid for the lunch, because I knew he didn't
have the money to pay for it .'"
812
Chapter 14 - Epilogue: Crushing Loneliness
813
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.
814
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.
815
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.
816
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.
817
The story starts in April, 2000. At the time, I was writing stories for
the ill-fated BeOpen web site ( <
818
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:
819
820
To: <
821
RMS InterviewDate: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 15:56:37 -0400Dear Mr. Williams,
822
I read your interview with Richard Stallman on BeOpen with great
823
What I'd love to do, however, is read more - and I don't think I'm
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.
824
That's when Tracy asked me: would I be willing to expand the interview
into a full-length feature profile?
825
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.
826
I have to admit, getting Stallman to participate in an e-book project
was an afterthought on my part. As a reporter who covered the open
source beat, I knew Stallman was a stickler. I'd already received a
half dozen emails at that point upbraiding me for the use of "Linux"
instead of "GNU/Linux."
827
Then again, I also knew Stallman was looking for ways to get his
message out to the general public. Perhaps if I presented the project
to him that way, he would be more receptive. If not, I could always
rely upon the copious amounts of documents, interviews, and recorded
online conversations Stallman had left lying around the Internet and do
an unauthorized biography.
828
During my research, I came across an essay titled "Freedom-Or
Copyright?" Written by Stallman and published in the June, 2000,
edition of the MIT Technology Review, the essay blasted e-books for an
assortment of software sins. Not only did readers have to use
proprietary software programs to read them, Stallman lamented, but the
methods used to prevent unauthorized copying were overly harsh. Instead
of downloading a transferable HTML or PDF file, readers downloaded an
encrypted file. In essence, purchasing an e-book meant purchasing a
nontransferable key to unscramble the encrypted content. Any attempt to
open a book's content without an authorized key constituted a criminal
violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law
designed to bolster copyright enforcement on the Internet. Similar
penalties held for readers who converted a book's content into an open
file format, even if their only intention was to read the book on a
different computer in their home. Unlike a normal book, the reader no
longer held the right to lend, copy, or resell an e-book. They only had
the right to read it on an authorized machine, warned Stallman:
829
We still have the same old freedoms in using paper books. But if
e-books replace printed books, that exception will do little good. With
"electronic ink," which makes it possible to download new text onto an
apparently printed piece of paper, even newspapers could become
ephemeral. Imagine: no more used book stores; no more lending a book to
your friend; no more borrowing one from the public library-no more
"leaks" that might give someone a chance to read without paying. (And
judging from the ads for Microsoft Reader, no more anonymous purchasing
of books either.) This is the world publishers have in mind for
us.99
99. See "Safari Tech Books Online; Subscriber Agreement: Terms of
Service."
830
Needless to say, the essay caused some concern. Neither Tracy nor I had
discussed the software her company would use nor had we discussed the
type of copyright that would govern the e-book's usage. I mentioned the
Technology Review article and asked if she could give me information on
her company's e-book policies. Tracy promised to get back to me.
831
Eager to get started, I decided to call Stallman anyway and mention the
book idea to him. When I did, he expressed immediate interest and
immediate concern. "Did you read my essay on e-books?" he asked.
832
When I told him, yes, I had read the essay and was waiting to hear back
from the publisher, Stallman laid out two conditions: he didn't want to
lend support to an e-book licensing mechanism he fundamentally opposed,
and he didn't want to come off as lending support. "I don't want to
participate in anything that makes me look like a hypocrite," he said.
833
For Stallman, the software issue was secondary to the copyright issue.
He said he was willing to ignore whatever software the publisher or its
third-party vendors employed just so long as the company specified
within the copyright that readers were free to make and distribute
verbatim copies of the e-book's content. Stallman pointed to Stephen
King's The Plant as a possible model. In June, 2000, King
announced on his official web site that he was self-publishing The
Plant in serial form. According to the announcement, the book's
total cost would be $13, spread out over a series of $1 installments.
As long as at least 75% of the readers paid for each chapter, King
promised to continue releasing new installments. By August, the plan
seemed to be working, as King had published the first two chapters with
a third on the way.
834
"I'd be willing to accept something like that," Stallman said. "As long
as it also permitted verbatim copying."
835
I forwarded the information to Tracy. Feeling confident that she and I
might be able to work out an equitable arrangement, I called up
Stallman and set up the first interview for the book. Stallman agreed
to the interview without making a second inquiry into the status issue.
Shortly after the first interview, I raced to set up a second interview
(this one in Kihei), squeezing it in before Stallman headed off on a
14-day vacation to Tahiti.
836
It was during Stallman's vacation that the bad news came from Tracy.
Her company's legal department didn't want to adjust its copyright
notice on the e-books. Readers who wanted to make their books
transferable would either have to crack the encryption code or convert
the book to an open format such as HTML. Either way, the would be
breaking the law and facing criminal penalties.
837
With two fresh interviews under my belt, I didn't see any way to write
the book without resorting to the new material. I quickly set up a trip
to New York to meet with my agent and with Tracy to see if there was a
compromise solution.
838
When I flew to New York, I met my agent, Henning Guttman. It was our
first face-to-face meeting, and Henning seemed pessimistic about our
chances of forcing a compromise, at least on the publisher's end. The
large, established publishing houses already viewed the e-book format
with enough suspicion and weren't in the mood to experiment with
copyright language that made it easier for readers to avoid payment. As
an agent who specialized in technology books, however, Henning was
intrigued by the novel nature of my predicament. I told him about the
two interviews I'd already gathered and the promise not to publish the
book in a way that made Stallman "look like a hypocrite." Agreeing that
I was in an ethical bind, Henning suggested we make that our
negotiating point.
839
Barring that, Henning said, we could always take the carrot-and-stick
approach. The carrot would be the publicity that came with publishing
an e-book that honored the hacker community's internal ethics. The
stick would be the risks associated with publishing an e-book that
didn't. Nine months before Dmitri Skylarov became an Internet cause
cÈlËbre, we knew it was only a matter of time before an
enterprising programmer revealed how to hack e-books. We also knew that
a major publishing house releasing an encryption-protected e-book on
Richard M. Stallman was the software equivalent of putting "Steal This
E-Book" on the cover.
840
After my meeting with Henning, I put a call into Stallman. Hoping to
make the carrot more enticing, I discussed a number of potential
compromises. What if the publisher released the book's content under a
split license, something similar to what Sun Microsystems had done with
Open Office, the free software desktop applications suite? The
publisher could then release commercial versions of the e-book under a
normal format, taking advantage of all the bells and whistles that went
with the e-book software, while releasing the copyable version under a
less aesthetically pleasing HTML format.
841
Stallman told me he didn't mind the split-license idea, but he did
dislike the idea of making the freely copyable version inferior to the
restricted version. Besides, he said, the idea was too cumbersome.
Split licenses worked in the case of Sun's Open Office only because he
had no control over the decision making. In this case, Stallman said,
he did have a way to control the outcome. He could refuse to cooperate.
842
I made a few more suggestions with little effect. About the only thing
I could get out of Stallman was a concession that the e-book's
copyright restrict all forms of file sharing to "noncommercial
redistribution."
843
Before I signed off, Stallman suggested I tell the publisher that I'd
promised Stallman that the work would be free. I told Stallman I
couldn't agree to that statement but that I did view the book as
unfinishable without his cooperation. Seemingly satisfied, Stallman
hung up with his usual sign-off line: "Happy hacking."
844
Henning and I met with Tracy the next day. Tracy said her company was
willing to publish copyable excerpts in a unencrypted format but would
limit the excerpts to 500 words. Henning informed her that this
wouldn't be enough for me to get around my ethical obligation to
Stallman. Tracy mentioned her own company's contractual obligation to
online vendors such as Amazon.com. Even if the company decided to open
up its e-book content this one time, it faced the risk of its partners
calling it a breach of contract. Barring a change of heart in the
executive suite or on the part of Stallman, the decision was up to me.
I could use the interviews and go against my earlier agreement with
Stallman, or I could plead journalistic ethics and back out of the
verbal agreement to do the book.
845
Following the meeting, my agent and I relocated to a pub on Third Ave.
I used his cell phone to call Stallman, leaving a message when nobody
answered. Henning left for a moment, giving me time to collect my
thoughts. When he returned, he was holding up the cell phone.
846
"It's Stallman," Henning said.
847
The conversation got off badly from the start. I relayed Tracy's
comment about the publisher's contractual obligations.
848
"So," Stallman said bluntly. "Why should I give a damn about their
contractual obligations?"
849
Because asking a major publishing house to risk a legal battle with its
vendors over a 30,000 word e-book is a tall order, I suggested.
850
"Don't you see?" Stallman said. "That's exactly why I'm doing this. I
want a signal victory. I want them to make a choice between freedom and
business as usual."
851
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.
852
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.
853
"So that's it? You're just going to screw me? You're just going to bend
to their will?"
854
I brought up the issue of a dual-copyright again.
855
"You mean license," Stallman said curtly.
856
"Yeah, license. Copyright. Whatever," I said, feeling suddenly like a
wounded tuna trailing a rich plume of plasma in the water.
857
"Aw, why didn't you just fucking do what I told you to do!" he shouted.
858
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."
859
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."
860
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.
861
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.
862
"Welcome to the front lines, my friend," I said, clinking pints with my
agent. "Might as well enjoy it."
863
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.
864
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.
865
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.
866
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.
867
During the summer, I began to contemplate turning my interview notes
into a magazine article. Ethically, I felt in the clear doing so, since
the original interview terms said nothing about traditional print
media. To be honest, I also felt a bit more comfortable writing about
Stallman after eight months of radio silence. Since our telephone
conversation in September, I'd only received two emails from Stallman.
Both chastised me for using "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" in a pair of
articles for the web magazine Upside Today . Aside from that, I
had enjoyed the silence. In June, about a week after the New York
University speech, I took a crack at writing a 5,000-word
magazine-length story about Stallman. This time, the words flowed. The
distance had helped restore my lost sense of emotional perspective, I
suppose.
868
In July, a full year after the original email from Tracy, I got a call
from Henning. He told me that O'Reilly & Associates, a publishing
house out of Sebastopol, California, was interested in the running the
Stallman story as a biography. The news pleased me. Of all the
publishing houses in the world, O'Reilly, the same company that had
published Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, seemed the most
sensitive to the issues that had killed the earlier e-book. As a
reporter, I had relied heavily on the O'Reilly book Open Sources as a
historical reference. I also knew that various chapters of the book,
including a chapter written by Stallman, had been published with
copyright notices that permitted redistribution. Such knowledge would
come in handy if the issue of electronic publication ever came up
again.
869
Sure enough, the issue did come up. I learned through Henning that
O'Reilly intended to publish the biography both as a book and as part
of its new Safari Tech Books Online subscription service. The Safari
user license would involve special restrictions,1 Henning warned, but
O'Reilly was willing to allow for a copyright that permitted users to
copy and share and the book's text regardless of medium. Basically, as
author, I had the choice between two licenses: the Open Publication
License or the GNU Free Documentation License.
870
I checked out the contents and background of each license. The Open
Publication License (OPL)100 gives readers the right to
reproduce and distribute a work, in whole or in part, in any medium
"physical or electronic," provided the copied work retains the Open
Publication License. It also permits modification of a work, provided
certain conditions are met. Finally, the Open Publication License
includes a number of options, which, if selected by the author, can
limit the creation of "substantively modified" versions or book-form
derivatives without prior author approval.
100. See "The Open Publication License: Draft v1.0" (June 8, 1999).
871
The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL),101 meanwhile,
permits the copying and distribution of a document in any medium,
provided the resulting work carries the same license. It also permits
the modification of a document provided certain conditions. Unlike the
OPL, however, it does not give authors the option to restrict certain
modifications. It also does not give authors the right to reject
modifications that might result in a competitive book product. It does
require certain forms of front- and back-cover information if a party
other than the copyright holder wishes to publish more than 100 copies
of a protected work, however.
101. See "The GNU Free Documentation License: Version 1.1" (March,
2000).
872
In the course of researching the licenses, I also made sure to visit
the GNU Project web page titled "Various Licenses and Comments About
Them."102 On that page, I found a Stallman critique of the
Open Publication License. Stallman's critique related to the creation
of modified works and the ability of an author to select either one of
the OPL's options to restrict modification. If an author didn't want to
select either option, it was better to use the GFDL instead, Stallman
noted, since it minimized the risk of the nonselected options popping
up in modified versions of a document.
102. See <
873
The importance of modification in both licenses was a reflection of
their original purpose-namely, to give software-manual owners a chance
to improve their manuals and publicize those improvements to the rest
of the community. Since my book wasn't a manual, I had little concern
about the modification clause in either license. My only concern was
giving users the freedom to exchange copies of the book or make copies
of the content, the same freedom they would have enjoyed if they
purchased a hardcover book. Deeming either license suitable for this
purpose, I signed the O'Reilly contract when it came to me.
874
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.
875
My idea drew inspiration from Project Xanadu ( <103
103. Anybody willing to "port" this book over to Udanax, the free
software version of Xanadu, will receive enthusiastic support from me.
To find out more about this intriguing technology, visit <
876
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?
877
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.
878
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.
879
"After all," she said, "he is the one who brought us together."
880
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.
881
"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.
882
"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.
883
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.104
104. Alas, I didn't find out about the Takeda Foundation's decision to
award Stallman, along with Linus Torvalds and Ken Sakamura, with its
first-ever award for "Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for
Social/Economic Well-Being" until after Stallman had made the trip to
Japan to accept the award. For more information about the award and its
accompanying $1 million prize, visit the Takeda site, <
884
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.
885
"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.
886
My wife immediately threw back the question: "What was the issue?"
887
"Crushing loneliness."
888
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.
889
"I hate to break it to you, but there is no God," Stallman said.
890
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."
891
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.
892
893
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.
894
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.
895
"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."
896
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.
897
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.
898
899
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.
900
This decision further benefits from the fact that, prior to 1993,
Stallman saw little need to insist on credit.
901
Some might view the decision to use GNU/Linux for later versions of the
same operating system as arbitrary. I would like to point out that it
was in no way a prerequisite for gaining Stallman's cooperation in the
making of this book. I came to it of my own accord, partly because of
the operating system's modular nature and the community surrounding it,
and partly because of the apolitical nature of the Linux name. Given
that this is a biography of Richard Stallman, it seemed inappropriate
to define the operating system in apolitical terms.
902
In the final phases of the book, when it became clear that O'Reilly
& Associates would be the book's publisher, Stallman did make it a
condition that I use "GNU/Linux" instead of Linux if O'Reilly expected
him to provide promotional support for the book after publication. When
informed of this, I relayed my earlier decision and left it up to
Stallman to judge whether the resulting book met this condition or not.
At the time of this writing, I have no idea what Stallman's judgment
will be.
903
A similar situation surrounds the terms "free software" and "open
source." Again, I have opted for the more politically laden "free
software" term when describing software programs that come with freely
copyable and freely modifiable source code. Although more popular, I
have chosen to use the term "open source" only when referring to groups
and businesses that have championed its usage. But for a few instances,
the terms are completely interchangeable, and in making this decision I
have followed the advice of Christine Peterson, the person generally
credited with coining the term. "The `free software' term should still
be used in circumstances where it works better," Peterson writes.
"[`Open source'] caught on mainly because a new term was greatly
needed, not because it's ideal."
904
905
To understand the full meaning of the word " hacker," it helps to
examine the word's etymology over the years.
906
The New Hacker Dictionary , an online compendium of
software-programmer jargon, officially lists nine different
connotations of the word "hack" and a similar number for "hacker." Then
again, the same publication also includes an accompanying essay that
quotes Phil Agre, an MIT hacker who warns readers not to be fooled by
the word's perceived flexibility. "Hack has only one meaning," argues
Agre. "An extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation."
907
Regardless of the width or narrowness of the definition, most modern
hackers trace the word back to MIT, where the term bubbled up as
popular item of student jargon in the early 1950s. In 1990 the MIT
Museum put together a journal documenting the hacking phenomenon.
According to the journal, students who attended the institute during
the fifties used the word "hack" the way a modern student might use the
word "goof." Hanging a jalopy out a dormitory window was a "hack," but
anything harsh or malicious-e.g., egging a rival dorm's windows or
defacing a campus statue-fell outside the bounds. Implicit within the
definition of "hack" was a spirit of harmless, creative fun.
908
This spirit would inspire the word's gerund form: "hacking." A 1950s
student who spent the better part of the afternoon talking on the phone
or dismantling a radio might describe the activity as "hacking." Again,
a modern speaker would substitute the verb form of "goof"-"goofing" or
"goofing off"-to describe the same activity.
909
As the 1950s progressed, the word "hack" acquired a sharper, more
rebellious edge. The MIT of the 1950s was overly competitive, and
hacking emerged as both a reaction to and extension of that competitive
culture. Goofs and pranks suddenly became a way to blow off steam,
thumb one's nose at campus administration, and indulge creative
thinking and behavior stifled by the Institute's rigorous undergraduate
curriculum. With its myriad hallways and underground steam tunnels, the
Institute offered plenty of exploration opportunities for the student
undaunted by locked doors and "No Trespassing" signs. Students began to
refer to their off-limits explorations as "tunnel hacking." Above
ground, the campus phone system offered similar opportunities. Through
casual experimentation and due diligence, students learned how to
perform humorous tricks. Drawing inspiration from the more traditional
pursuit of tunnel hacking, students quickly dubbed this new activity
"phone hacking."
910
The combined emphasis on creative play and restriction-free exploration
would serve as the basis for the future mutations of the hacking term.
The first self-described computer hackers of the 1960s MIT campus
originated from a late 1950s student group called the Tech Model
Railroad Club. A tight clique within the club was the Signals and Power
(S&P) Committee-the group behind the railroad club's electrical
circuitry system. The system was a sophisticated assortment of relays
and switches similar to the kind that controlled the local campus phone
system. To control it, a member of the group simply dialed in commands
via a connected phone and watched the trains do his bidding.
911
The nascent electrical engineers responsible for building and
maintaining this system saw their activity as similar in spirit to
phone hacking. Adopting the hacking term, they began refining it even
further. From the S&P hacker point of view, using one less relay to
operate a particular stretch of track meant having one more relay for
future play. Hacking subtly shifted from a synonym for idle play to a
synonym for idle play that improved the overall performance or
efficiency of the club's railroad system at the same time. Soon S&P
committee members proudly referred to the entire activity of improving
and reshaping the track's underlying circuitry as "hacking" and to the
people who did it as "hackers."
912
Given their affinity for sophisticated electronics-not to mention the
traditional MIT-student disregard for closed doors and "No Trespassing"
signs-it didn't take long before the hackers caught wind of a new
machine on campus. Dubbed the TX-0, the machine was one of the first
commercially marketed computers. By the end of the 1950s, the entire
S&P clique had migrated en masse over to the TX-0 control room,
bringing the spirit of creative play with them. The wide-open realm of
computer programming would encourage yet another mutation in etymology.
"To hack" no longer meant soldering unusual looking circuits, but
cobbling together software programs with little regard to "official"
methods or software-writing procedures. It also meant improving the
efficiency and speed of already-existing programs that tended to hog up
machine resources. True to the word's roots, it also meant writing
programs that served no other purpose than to amuse or entertain.
913
A classic example of this expanded hacking definition is the game
Spacewar, the first interactive video game. Developed by MIT hackers in
the early 1960s, Spacewar had all the traditional hacking definitions:
it was goofy and random, serving little useful purpose other than
providing a nightly distraction for the dozen or so hackers who
delighted in playing it. From a software perspective, however, it was a
monumental testament to innovation of programming skill. It was also
completely free. Because hackers had built it for fun, they saw no
reason to guard their creation, sharing it extensively with other
programmers. By the end of the 1960s, Spacewar had become a favorite
diversion for mainframe programmers around the world.
914
This notion of collective innovation and communal software ownership
distanced the act of computer hacking in the 1960s from the tunnel
hacking and phone hacking of the 1950s. The latter pursuits tended to
be solo or small-group activities. Tunnel and phone hackers relied
heavily on campus lore, but the off-limits nature of their activity
discouraged the open circulation of new discoveries. Computer hackers,
on the other hand, did their work amid a scientific field biased toward
collaboration and the rewarding of innovation. Hackers and "official"
computer scientists weren't always the best of allies, but in the rapid
evolution of the field, the two species of computer programmer evolved
a cooperative-some might say symbiotic-relationship.
915
It is a testament to the original computer hackers' prodigious skill
that later programmers, including Richard M. Stallman, aspired to wear
the same hacker mantle. By the mid to late 1970s, the term "hacker" had
acquired elite connotations. In a general sense, a computer hacker was
any person who wrote software code for the sake of writing software
code. In the particular sense, however, it was a testament to
programming skill. Like the term "artist," the meaning carried tribal
overtones. To describe a fellow programmer as hacker was a sign of
respect. To describe oneself as a hacker was a sign of immense personal
confidence. Either way, the original looseness of the computer-hacker
appellation diminished as computers became more common.
916
As the definition tightened, "computer" hacking acquired additional
semantic overtones. To be a hacker, a person had to do more than write
interesting software; a person had to belong to the hacker "culture"
and honor its traditions the same way a medieval wine maker might
pledge membership to a vintners' guild. The social structure wasn't as
rigidly outlined as that of a guild, but hackers at elite institutions
such as MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon began to speak openly of a
"hacker ethic": the yet-unwritten rules that governed a hacker's
day-to-day behavior. In the 1984 book Hackers, author Steven Levy,
after much research and consultation, codified the hacker ethic as five
core hacker tenets.
917
In many ways, the core tenets listed by Levy continue to define the
culture of computer hacking. Still, the guild-like image of the hacker
community was undermined by the overwhelmingly populist bias of the
software industry. By the early 1980s, computers were popping up
everywhere, and programmers who once would have had to travel to
top-rank institutions or businesses just to gain access to a machine
suddenly had the ability to rub elbows with major-league hackers via
the ARPAnet. The more these programmers rubbed elbows, the more they
began to appropriate the anarchic philosophies of the hacker culture in
places like MIT. Lost within the cultural transfer, however, was the
native MIT cultural taboo against malicious behavior. As younger
programmers began employing their computer skills to harmful
ends-creating and disseminating computer viruses, breaking into
military computer systems, deliberately causing machines such as MIT
Oz, a popular ARPAnet gateway, to crash-the term "hacker" acquired a
punk, nihilistic edge. When police and businesses began tracing
computer-related crimes back to a few renegade programmers who cited
convenient portions of the hacking ethic in defense of their
activities, the word "hacker" began appearing in newspapers and
magazine stories in a negative light. Although books like Hackers did
much to document the original spirit of exploration that gave rise to
the hacking culture, for most news reporters, "computer hacker" became
a synonym for "electronic burglar."
918
Although hackers have railed against this perceived misusage for nearly
two decades, the term's rebellious connotations dating back to the
1950s make it hard to discern the 15-year-old writing software programs
that circumvent modern encryption programs from the 1960s college
student, picking locks and battering down doors to gain access to the
lone, office computer terminal. One person's creative subversion of
authority is another person's security headache, after all. Even so,
the central taboo against malicious or deliberately harmful behavior
remains strong enough that most hackers prefer to use the term
"cracker"-i.e., a person who deliberately cracks a computer security
system to steal or vandalize data-to describe the subset of hackers who
apply their computing skills maliciously.
919
This central taboo against maliciousness remains the primary cultural
link between the notion of hacking in the early 21st century and
hacking in the 1950s. It is important to note that, as the idea of
computer hacking has evolved over the last four decades, the original
notion of hacking-i.e., performing pranks or exploring underground
tunnels-remains intact. In the fall of 2000, the MIT Museum paid
tradition to the Institute's age-old hacking tradition with a dedicated
exhibit, the Hall of Hacks. The exhibit includes a number of
photographs dating back to the 1920s, including one involving a mock
police cruiser. In 1993, students paid homage to the original MIT
notion of hacking by placing the same police cruiser, lights flashing,
atop the Institute's main dome. The cruiser's vanity license plate read
IHTFP, a popular MIT acronym with many meanings. The most noteworthy
version, itself dating back to the pressure-filled world of MIT student
life in the 1950s, is "I hate this fucking place." In 1990, however,
the Museum used the acronym as a basis for a journal on the history of
hacks. Titled, The Institute for Hacks Tomfoolery and Pranks, the
journal offers an adept summary of the hacking.
920
"In the culture of hacking, an elegant, simple creation is as highly
valued as it is in pure science," writes Boston Globe reporter
Randolph Ryan in a 1993 article attached to the police car exhibit. "A
Hack differs from the ordinary college prank in that the event usually
requires careful planning, engineering and finesse, and has an
underlying wit and inventiveness," Ryan writes. "The unwritten rule
holds that a hack should be good-natured, non-destructive and safe. In
fact, hackers sometimes assist in dismantling their own handiwork."
921
The urge to confine the culture of computer hacking within the same
ethical boundaries is well-meaning but impossible. Although most
software hacks aspire to the same spirit of elegance and simplicity,
the software medium offers less chance for reversibility. Dismantling a
police cruiser is easy compared with dismantling an idea, especially an
idea whose time has come. Hence the growing distinction between "black
hat" and "white hat"-i.e., hackers who turn new ideas toward
destructive, malicious ends versus hackers who turn new ideas toward
positive or, at the very least, informative ends.
922
Once a vague item of obscure student jargon, the word "hacker" has
become a linguistic billiard ball, subject to political spin and
ethical nuances. Perhaps this is why so many hackers and journalists
enjoy using it. Where that ball bounces next, however, is anybody's
guess.
923
924
GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.1, March 2000 Copyright (C)
2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
Boston, MA 02110-1301,105 USA Everyone is permitted to copy
and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing
it is not allowed.
105. FSF address changed from: 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA
02111-1307 USA
925
PREAMBLE
926
The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other
written document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the
effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without
modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this
License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for
their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications
made by others.
927
This License is a kind of "copyleft," which means that derivative works
of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It
complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license
designed for free software.
928
We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free
software, because free software needs free documentation: a free
program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the
software does. But this License is not limited to software manuals; it
can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or
whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License
principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.
929
APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
930
This License applies to any manual or other work that contains a notice
placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the
terms of this License. The "Document", below, refers to any such manual
or work. Any member of the public is a licensee, and is addressed as
"you."
931
A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work containing the
Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with
modifications and/or translated into another language.
932
A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section of
the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the
publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject
(or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly
within that overall subject. (For example, if the Document is in part a
textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any
mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical
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commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding
them.
933
The "Invariant Sections" are certain Secondary Sections whose titles
are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice
that says that the Document is released under this License.
934
The "Cover Texts" are certain short passages of text that are listed,
as Front-Cover Texts or Back-Cover Texts, in the notice that says that
the Document is released under this License.
935
A "Transparent" copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy,
represented in a format whose specification is available to the general
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whose markup has been designed to thwart or discourage subsequent
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"Transparent" is called "Opaque."
936
Examples of suitable formats for Transparent copies include plain ASCII
without markup, Texinfo input format, LaTeX input format, SGML or XML
using a publicly available DTD, and standard-conforming simple HTML
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937
The "Title Page" means, for a printed book, the title page itself, plus
such following pages as are needed to hold, legibly, the material this
License requires to appear in the title page. For works in formats
which do not have any title page as such, "Title Page" means the text
near the most prominent appearance of the work's title, preceding the
beginning of the body of the text.
938
VERBATIM COPYING
939
You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either
commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the
copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies
to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other
conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use
technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further
copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept
compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough
number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3.
940
You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and
you may publicly display copies.
941
COPYING IN QUANTITY
942
If you publish printed copies of the Document numbering more than 100,
and the Document's license notice requires Cover Texts, you must
enclose the copies in covers that carry, clearly and legibly, all these
Cover Texts: Front-Cover Texts on the front cover, and Back-Cover Texts
on the back cover. Both covers must also clearly and legibly identify
you as the publisher of these copies. The front cover must present the
full title with all words of the title equally prominent and visible.
You may add other material on the covers in addition. Copying with
changes limited to the covers, as long as they preserve the title of
the Document and satisfy these conditions, can be treated as verbatim
copying in other respects.
943
If the required texts for either cover are too voluminous to fit
legibly, you should put the first ones listed (as many as fit
reasonably) on the actual cover, and continue the rest onto adjacent
pages.
944
If you publish or distribute Opaque copies of the Document numbering
more than 100, you must either include a machine-readable Transparent
copy along with each Opaque copy, or state in or with each Opaque copy
a publicly-accessible computer-network location containing a complete
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Transparent copy will remain thus accessible at the stated location
until at least one year after the last time you distribute an Opaque
copy (directly or through your agents or retailers) of that edition to
the public.
945
It is requested, but not required, that you contact the authors of the
Document well before redistributing any large number of copies, to give
them a chance to provide you with an updated version of the Document.
946
MODIFICATIONS
947
You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under
the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the
Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified
Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution
and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of
it. In addition, you must do these things in the Modified Version:
948
1. Use in the Title Page (and on the covers, if any) a title distinct
from that of the Document, and from those of previous versions (which
should, if there were any, be listed in the History section of the
Document). You may use the same title as a previous version if the
original publisher of that version gives permission.
949
2. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities
responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified
Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the
Document (all of its principal authors, if it has less than five).
950
3. State on the Title page the name of the publisher of the Modified
Version, as the publisher.
951
4. Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document.
952
5. Add an appropriate copyright notice for your modifications adjacent
to the other copyright notices.
953
6. Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a license notice
giving the public permission to use the Modified Version under the
terms of this License, in the form shown in the Addendum below.
954
7. Preserve in that license notice the full lists of Invariant Sections
and required Cover Texts given in the Document's license notice.
955
8. Include an unaltered copy of this License.
956
9. Preserve the section entitled "History," and its title, and add to
it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and publisher
of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If there is no
section entitled "History" in the Document, create one stating the
title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on its
Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated
in the previous sentence.
957
10. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for
public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise the
network locations given in the Document for previous versions it was
based on. These may be placed in the "History" section. You may omit a
network location for a work that was published at least four years
before the Document itself, or if the original publisher of the version
it refers to gives permission.
958
11. In any section entitled "Acknowledgements" or "Dedications,"
preserve the section's title, and preserve in the section all the
substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or
dedications given therein.
959
12. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in
their text and in their titles. Section numbers or the equivalent are
not considered part of the section titles.
960
13. Delete any section entitled "Endorsements." Such a section may not
be included in the Modified Version.
961
14. Do not retitle any existing section as "Endorsements" or to
conflict in title with any Invariant Section.
962
If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections or
appendices that qualify as Secondary Sections and contain no material
copied from the Document, you may at your option designate some or all
of these sections as invariant. To do this, add their titles to the
list of Invariant Sections in the Modified Version's license notice.
These titles must be distinct from any other section titles.
963
You may add a section entitled "Endorsements," provided it contains
nothing but endorsements of your Modified Version by various
parties-for example, statements of peer review or that the text has
been approved by an organization as the authoritative definition of a
standard.
964
You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text, and a
passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end of the list
of Cover Texts in the Modified Version. Only one passage of Front-Cover
Text and one of Back-Cover Text may be added by (or through
arrangements made by) any one entity. If the Document already includes
a cover text for the same cover, previously added by you or by
arrangement made by the same entity you are acting on behalf of, you
may not add another; but you may replace the old one, on explicit
permission from the previous publisher that added the old one.
965
The author(s) and publisher(s) of the Document do not by this License
give permission to use their names for publicity for or to assert or
imply endorsement of any Modified Version.
966
COMBINING DOCUMENTS
967
You may combine the Document with other documents released under this
License, under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified
versions, provided that you include in the combination all of the
Invariant Sections of all of the original documents, unmodified, and
list them all as Invariant Sections of your combined work in its
license notice.
968
The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and
multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single
copy. If there are multiple Invariant Sections with the same name but
different contents, make the title of each such section unique by
adding at the end of it, in parentheses, the name of the original
author or publisher of that section if known, or else a unique number.
Make the same adjustment to the section titles in the list of Invariant
Sections in the license notice of the combined work.
969
In the combination, you must combine any sections entitled "History" in
the various original documents, forming one section entitled "History";
likewise combine any sections entitled "Acknowledgements," and any
sections entitled "Dedications." You must delete all sections entitled
"Endorsements."
970
COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
971
You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other
documents released under this License, and replace the individual
copies of this License in the various documents with a single copy that
is included in the collection, provided that you follow the rules of
this License for verbatim copying of each of the documents in all other
respects.
972
You may extract a single document from such a collection, and
distribute it individually under this License, provided you insert a
copy of this License into the extracted document, and follow this
License in all other respects regarding verbatim copying of that
document.
973
AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
974
A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate
and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or
distribution medium, does not as a whole count as a Modified Version of
the Document, provided no compilation copyright is claimed for the
compilation. Such a compilation is called an "aggregate," and this
License does not apply to the other self-contained works thus compiled
with the Document, on account of their being thus compiled, if they are
not themselves derivative works of the Document.
975
If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these
copies of the Document, then if the Document is less than one quarter
of the entire aggregate, the Document's Cover Texts may be placed on
covers that surround only the Document within the aggregate. Otherwise
they must appear on covers around the whole aggregate.
976
TRANSLATION
977
Translation is considered a kind of modification, so you may distribute
translations of the Document under the terms of section 4. Replacing
Invariant Sections with translations requires special permission from
their copyright holders, but you may include translations of some or
all Invariant Sections in addition to the original versions of these
Invariant Sections. You may include a translation of this License
provided that you also include the original English version of this
License. In case of a disagreement between the translation and the
original English version of this License, the original English version
will prevail.
978
TERMINATION
979
You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document except
as expressly provided for under this License. Any other attempt to
copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Document is void, and will
automatically terminate your rights under this License. However,
parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this
License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties
remain in full compliance.
980
FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
981
The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the
GNU Free Documentation License from time to time. Such new versions
will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in
detail to address new problems or concerns. See <
982
Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number.
If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this
License "or any later version" applies to it, you have the option of
following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or
of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the
Free Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version
number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not
as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation.
983
ADDENDUM: How to Use This License for Your Documents
984
To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of
the License in the document and put the following copyright and license
notices just after the title page:
985
Copyright (C) YEAR YOUR NAME.Permission is granted to copy, distribute
and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free
Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by
the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being LIST
THEIR TITLES, with the Front-Cover Texts being LIST, and with the
Back-Cover Texts being LIST. A copy of the license is included in the
section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
986
If you have no Invariant Sections, write "with no Invariant Sections"
instead of saying which ones are invariant. If you have no Front-Cover
Texts, write "no Front-Cover Texts" instead of "Front-Cover Texts being
LIST"; likewise for Back-Cover Texts.
987
If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we
recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of
free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to
permit their use in free software.
988
Endnotes
989
990
Index
991
992
Metadata
Manifest