Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software

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Title: Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software

Author: Sam Williams

Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5768]
Most recently updated: August 21, 2012

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FREE AS IN FREEDOM: RICHARD STALLMAN'S CRUSADE FOR FREE SOFTWARE ***

Produced by Craig Morehouse

Free As in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software.

By Sam Williams

Available on the web at: http://www.faifzilla.org/

Produced under the Free Documentation License

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 For Want of a Printer
Chapter 2 2001: A Hacker's Odyssey
Chapter 3 A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man
Chapter 4 Impeach God
Chapter 5 Small Puddle of Freedom
Chapter 6 The Emacs Commune
Chapter 7 A Stark Moral Choice
Chapter 8 St. Ignucius
Chapter 9 The GNU General Public License
Chapter 10 GNU/Linux
Chapter 11 Open Source
Chapter 12 A Brief Journey Through Hacker Hell
Chapter 13 Continuing the Fight
Chapter 14 Epilogue:
Chapter 15 Appendix A : Terminology
Chapter 16 Appendix B Hack, Hackers, and Hacking
Chapter 17 Appendix C GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)

Preface

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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, http://www.faifzilla.org. My aim is to update
it regularly and expand the Free as in Freedom story as
events warrant. If you choose to take the latter
course, please review Appendix C of this book. It
provides a copy of your rights under the GNU Free
Documentation License.

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.

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 sam@inow.com. Comments and
Questions Please address comments and questions
concerning this book to the publisher: O'Reilly &
Associates, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472 (800) 998-9938 (in the United
States or Canada) (707) 829-0515 (international/local)
(707) 829-0104 (fax) 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:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/freedom/ To comment or
ask technical questions about this book, send email to:
bookquestions@oreilly.com For more information about
books, conferences, Resource Centers, and the O'Reilly
Network, see the O'Reilly web site at:
http://www.oreilly.com Acknowledgments 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."

Sam Williams

For Want of a Printer

I fear the Greeks. Even when they bring gifts.
---Virgil The Aeneid

The new printer was jammed, again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a gift too good
to refuse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.For more on the term "hacker,"
see Appendix B.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.'"

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?

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"He told me that he had promised not to give me a
copy," Stallman says.

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.

"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."

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."

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."

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.

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."

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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?

"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."

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.

"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.'"

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.

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.

"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."

2001: A Hacker's Odyssey

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.

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.

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."

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 http://www.gnu.org site, Stallman is in
Manhattan, his former hometown, to deliver a much
anticipated speech in rebuttal to the Microsoft
Corporation's recent campaign against the GNU General
Public License.

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. 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.

If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into
other free programs whose distribution conditions are
different, write to the author to ask for permission.
For software that is copyrighted by the Free Software
Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we
sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will
be guided by the two goals of preserving the free
status of all derivatives of our free software and of
promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.

"To compare something to a virus is very harsh," says
Stallman. "A spider plant is a more accurate
comparison; it goes to another place if you actively
take a cutting."

For more information on the GNU General Public License,
visit [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.]

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.

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.

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.

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.See Shubha Ghosh, "Revealing the Microsoft Windows
Source Code," Gigalaw.com (January, 2000).
http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/ghosh-2000-01-p1.html
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.

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),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).
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: 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 distributionSee Craig Mundie, "The Commercial Software Model,"
senior vice president, Microsoft Corp. Excerpted from
an online transcript of Mundie's May 3,speech to the
New York University Stern School of Business.

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/5893.html 001,

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp
The mutual success of GNU/ LinuxThe 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: We hackers always look
for a funny or naughty name for a program, because
naming a program is half the fun of writing the
program. We also had a tradition of recursive acronyms,
to say that the program that you're writing is similar
to some existing program . . . I looked for a recursive
acronym for Something Is Not UNIX. And I tried all 26
letters and discovered that none of them was a word. I
decided to make it a contraction. That way I could have
a three-letter acronym, for Something's Not UNIX. And I
tried letters, and I came across the word "GNU." That
was it. Although a fan of puns, Stallman recommends
that software users pronounce the "g" at the beginning
of the acronym (i.e., "gah-new"). Not only does this
avoid confusion with the word "gnu," the name of the
African antelope, Connochaetes gnou , it also avoids
confusion with the adjective "new." "We've been working
on it for 17 years now, so it is not exactly new any
more," Stallman says. Source: author notes and online
transcript of "Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation,"
Richard Stallman's May 29, 2001, speech at New York University.

http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
, 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:
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. 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.

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.

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.

Richard Stallman, circa 2000. "I decided I would
develop a free software operating system or die trying
. . of old age of course." Photo courtesy of
http://www.stallman.org.

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.

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.

"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."

Before Uretsky can get another sentence out, Stallman
is on his feet waving him down like a stranded motorist.

"I do free software," Stallman says to rising laughter.
"Open source is a different movement."

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.

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.

"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."

Schonberg welcomes Stallman to more applause. Stallman
takes a moment to shut off his laptop, rises out of his
chair, and takes the stage.

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."

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."

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.

"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."

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.

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.

"He had betrayed us," Stallman says. "But he didn't
just do it to us. Chances are he did it to you."

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.

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."

Stallman lets the comment sink in for a half-beat. "He
had signed a nondisclosure agreement," Stallman adds.

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.

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.

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 1984,5
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.

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.

"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."

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.

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."

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.

"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?'" Endnotes

1. 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.

"To compare something to a virus is very harsh," says
Stallman. "A spider plant is a more accurate
comparison; it goes to another place if you actively
take a cutting."

For more information on the GNU General Public License,
visit

[http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.]

A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man

Richard Stallman's mother, Alice Lippman, still
remembers the moment she realized her son had a special gift.

"I think it was when he was eight," Lippman recalls.

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.

"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."

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.

"It was Richard," she recalls, "He wanted to know if I
needed any help."

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."

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."

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."

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.

"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.'"1

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.

"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?'"

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.

"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."

Stallman, for his part, remembers things in a similar
fashion, albeit with a political twist.

"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."

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.

"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."

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."

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.

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.

"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."

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."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.

http://www.mgross.com/interviews/stallman1.html

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.

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."

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.

"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."

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,"See Judy Steed, Toronto Star, BUSINESS,
(October 9,
2000): C03. His vision of free software and social
cooperation stands in stark contrast to the isolated
nature of his private life. A Glenn Gould-like
eccentric, the Canadian pianist was similarly
brilliant, articulate, and lonely. Stallman considers
himself afflicted, to some degree, by autism: a
condition that, he says, makes it difficult for him to
interact with people.
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.

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.See Steve
Silberman, "The Geek Syndrome," Wired
(December, 2001).
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.

"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."

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."

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."

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."

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."

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.

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?'"

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.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.

"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."

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."

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."

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."

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.

"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."

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.

"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."

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.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."
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.

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.

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."

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

"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.'"

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.

Stallman's senior-year transcript at Louis D. Brandeis
H.S., November, 1969. Note turnaround in English class
performance. "He was forced to kowtow to a certain
degree," says his mother, "but he did it."

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.

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."

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.

Says Breidbart, "It was his silent way of saying,
`That's right. You haven't got rid of me yet.'"

Impeach God

Although their relationship was fraught with tension,
Richard Stallman would inherit one noteworthy trait
from his mother: a passion for progressive politics.

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."See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School
Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified
Genius" (1999).
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.

"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."

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

"Our primary goal was to fight Tammany Hall, Carmine
DeSapio and his henchman,"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.
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."

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.

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."

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.

"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."

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.

"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."

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."

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.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."
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.

"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."

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.

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.

"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."

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."

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."

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.

"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman."

Seth Breidbart, a fellow Math 55 classmate, remembers
Stallman distinguishing himself from his peers even then.

"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."

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."

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.

"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."

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.

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.

"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."

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?"

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

"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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

Intrigued, Stallman decided to pay a visit.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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."

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.See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback],
1984): 144. Levy devotes about five pages to describing
Gosper's fascination with LIFE, a math-based software
game first created by British mathematician John
Conway. I heartily recommend this book as a supplement,
perhaps even a prerequisite, to this one.

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.

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,"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.
Stallman says.

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.

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.

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.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).

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.

"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."

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.

"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."

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.

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."See Richard Stallman, "RMS lecture at KTH (Sweden),"
(October 30, 1986).

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html

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.

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.

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?

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.

"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."

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.

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.

"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."

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."

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."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."

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.

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.

"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."See Richard Stallman (1986).

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: 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.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]."
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.See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback],
1984): 417.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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."

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.

"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."

Small Puddle of Freedom

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.

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.

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."See Andrew Leonard, "The
Saint of Free Software,"
Salon.com (August 1998).

http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/08/cov_31feature.html
A 1999 Wired magazine article describes the Stallman
beard as "Rasputin-like,"See Leander Kahney, "Linux's Forgotten Man," Wired
News
(March 5, 1999).
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,18291,00.html
while a London Guardian profile describes the Stallman
smile as the smile of "a disciple seeing Jesus."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).
These are just a small sampling of the religious
comparisons. To date, the most extreme comparison has
to go to Linus Torvalds, who, in his autobiography-see
Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The
Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins
Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-writes "Richard Stallman is
the God of Free Software." Honorable mention goes to
Larry Lessig, who, in a footnote description of
Stallman in his book-see Larry Lessig, The Future of
Ideas (Random House, 2001): 270-likens Stallman to
Moses: . . . as with Moses, it was another leader,
Linus Torvalds, who finally carried the movement into
the promised land by facilitating the development of
the final part of the OS puzzle. Like Moses, too,
Stallman is both respected and reviled by allies within
the movement. He is [an] unforgiving, and hence for
many inspiring, leader of a critically important aspect
of modern culture. I have deep respect for the
principle and commitment of this extraordinary
individual, though I also have great respect for those
who are courageous enough to question his thinking and
then sustain his wrath. In a final interview with
Stallman, I asked him his thoughts about the religious
comparisons. "Some people do compare me with an Old
Testament prophent, and the reason is Old Testament
prophets said certain social practices were wrong. They
wouldn't compromise on moral issues. They couldn't be
bought off, and they were usually treated with contempt."

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.

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.

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?

"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."

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.

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.2 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.

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."

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.

Maybe that's why, when LinuxWorld follows up its first
two shows with a third LinuxWorld show in August, 2000,
Stallman is conspicuously absent.

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.

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.

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.

"I'm just finishing an article on the spirit of
hacking," Stallman says, fingers still tapping. "Take a look."

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.

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.

"I'll be ready to go in a moment," he says.

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.

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.

The session ends with a few loud keystrokes and the
slow disassembly of the laptop.

"Ready for lunch?" Stallman asks.

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."

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.

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.

"Mmm, rhinophytophilia,"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:
http://www.stallman.org/texas.html
he says, rubbing his back.

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."

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.

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.

"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."

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.

"The way it was presented, the companies were talking
about Linux with no mention of the GNU Project at all,"
Stallman says.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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,5 a
decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later
proclaim proclaim a "clear victory for the creative
content community and the legitimate online marketplace."See "A Clear Victory
for Recording Industry in Napster
Case," RIAA press release (February 12, 2001).
http://www.riaa.com/PR_story.cfm?id=372

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.

"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."

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.

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."

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."

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."

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.

"There is the most exquisite woman sitting just behind
you," Stallman says.

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.

"Oh, no," he says. "They're gone. And to think, I'll
probably never even get to see her again."

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.See Mae Ling Mak, "Mae Ling's Story" (December 17,
1998).

http://www.crackmonkey.org/pipermail/crackmonkey/1998q4/003006.htm
So far, Mak is the only person I've found willing to
speak on the record in regard to this practice,
although I've heard this from a few other female
sources. Mak, despite expressing initial revulsion at
it, later managed to put aside her misgivings and dance
with Stallman at a 1999 LinuxWorld show.
http://www.linux.com/interact/potd.phtml?potd_id=44
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."See Annalee Newitz, "If Code is Free Why Not Me?"
Salon.com (May 26, 2000).

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."

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.See Richard Stallman,
"The GNU Operating System and the
Free Software Movement," Open Sources (O'Reilly &
Associates, Inc., 1999): 65.
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?

"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."

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."

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.

"Would you like some shimai?" he asks.

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.

"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."

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.

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."

"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."

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.

"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?"

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.

"I wanted to call it Tokyo Rose and the Japanese Beetles."

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."

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."

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: 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. 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.For more Stallman
filks, visit
http://www.stallman.org/doggerel.html. To hear Stallman
singing "The Free Software Song," visit
http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html.
After a few moments of hesitation, I finally smile too.

"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.

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.

"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."

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.

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."

When I ask whether the courts would accept such a
permissive outlook, Stallman cuts me off.

"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."

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."

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.

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.

"I'm not in his league, but I do play the same game,"
he says, chewing.

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.

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."

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.

"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."

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.

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.

Stallman lets his tangled hair drop and contemplates
the question for a moment.

"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."

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.

"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."

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.

"I added an extra zero to your tip," Stallman says, yet
another half smile creeping across his lips.

The waiter, uncomprehending or fooled by the look of
the bill, smiles and scurries away.

"I think that means we're free to go," Stallman says.

The Emacs Commune

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.

"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."See Josh
McHugh, "For the Love of Hacking," Forbes
(August 10, 1998).
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1998/0810/6203094a.html

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.

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.

"At Harvard they have this policy where if you pass too
many classes they ask you to leave," Stallman says.

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: 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.See Stallman (1986). 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."See Joseph
Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason:
From Judgment to Calculation (W. H. Freeman, 1976): 116.

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."

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.

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."

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.

"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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.ccording to the Jargon File, TECO's name originally
stood for Tape Editor and Corrector.

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."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
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html.

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.

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."See Richard
Stallman, "Emacs the Full Screen Editor"
(1987).
http://www.lysator.liu.se/history/garb/txt/87-1-emacs.txt

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I
was doing," recalls Steele.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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."See Stallman (1979): #SEC34.

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.

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."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.
http://memex.org/meme2-04.html

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,"See Steven Levy,
Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback],
1984): 419.
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.

"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."

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."

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."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: EMACS could not have been
reached by a process of careful design, because such
processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the
outset, and whose desirability is established on the
bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else
visualized an extensible editor until I had made one,
nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it.
EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually
useful small improvements on a path whose end was not
in sight.

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.

"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.

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."

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."

A Stark Moral Choice

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: 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.1 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."See Richard Stallman, "Initial GNU
Announcement"
(September 1983).
http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/gnu/initial-announcement.html
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.

"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."

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?": 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. 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.

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.See Marshall Kirk McKusick, "Twenty Years of
Berkeley
Unix," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.,
1999): 38.

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.

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.

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."See Richard Stallman (1986).

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.

"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."

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.Multiple sources: see Richard
Stallman interview,
Gerald Sussman email, and Jargon File 3.0.0.
http://www.clueless.com/jargon3.0.0/TWENEX.html
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."

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."See
http://www.as.cmu.edu/~geek/humor/See_Figure_1.txt

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

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